Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis 9781474494243

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ImageThinking

Refractions At the borders of art history and philosophy Series editor: Kamini Vellodi, University of Edinburgh Poised at the threshold of art history and philosophy, Refractions offers a space for intellectually adventurous work that engages the theorisation of art and image as a persistent provocation for our times. The series captures the character of inquiry as refractive, forging resonances and oblique intersections between diverse zones of thought, while fostering breakaway strands of thinking. Editorial Board Andrew Benjamin, Kingston University Adi Efal, University of Lille 3 Jae Emerling, University of North Carolina Vlad Ionescu, University of Hasselt Sjoerd Van Tuinen, Erasmus University Sugata Ray, UC Berkeley Aron Vinegar, University of Oslo Hanneke Grootenboer, Radboud University Books available Mieke Bal, Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis Books forthcoming Bart Verschaffel, What Artistry Can Do: Essays on Art and Beauty Ian Verstegen, The New Vienna School of Art History: Fulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar (eds), Grey on Grey: On the Threshold of Philosophy and Art Charlotte de Mille, Bergson in Britain: Philosophy and Modernist Painting, c. 1890–1914 Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, Ravaisson’s Method: Edification as Therapy Visit the series website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/ series-refractions

ImageThinking Artmaking as Cultural Analysis Mieke Bal With a prologue by W. J. T. Mitchell

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Mieke Bal, 2022 © Prologue, W. J. T. Mitchell, 2022 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Cover design: www.emilybentonbookdesigner.co.uk Typeset in Constantia by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 4744 9422 9 (hardback) ISBN  978 1 4744 9424 3 (webready PDF) ISBN  978 1 4744 9423 6 (paperback) ISBN  978 1 4744 9425 0 (epub) The right of Mieke Bal to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents List of Figures Series Editor’s Preface Author’s Preface Acknowledgements  Prologue by W. J. T. Mitchell: Iconomania – On the Thinking-Image and Madness 1.  Introduction: Making as Thinking, and vice versa Material Image-Thinking Searching for a Term Image-Thinking for Thought-Images Thresholds: The Merging of Thinking, Imagining   and Imaging Overview of Chapters Part I:  Keys to Intermediality 2.  Time-Space: Spatialising Film  A Long History of Madness

x xv xviii xxii xxv 1 2 8 13 24 32 41 43

Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Mad Meg Introduction: Beginning Becomes Entrance Political Spacetime: Film in the Gallery Social Relevance: Madness to Learn From Forms of Madness  Beginning Storybook Picture Book Working Through and Overcoming Iconography ‘Schizophrenia’: Two Sides to Every Story,   Two Figures in Every Life A Sense of an Ending 3.  Who Speaks the Film, in Documentaries? A Thousand and One Voices  Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain Introduction: Subject, Source, Speaker Migratory Aesthetics and the Trouble with Voice Voice and the Documentary Tradition Murmuring Voices: Intimacy and Hybridity Within Phantom Sentences Dispersal of Voice The ‘Other’ Tradition and Cultural Belonging Beyond Aristotelian Time Travelling Forking Paths 4.  Multi-tentacled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Pre-posterous History 2MOVE (the exhibition) Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled Marclay, The Clock It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency Introducing Time’s Thought-Image: An Octopus

43 46 50 54 59 62 68 72 81 84 90

90 94 98 103 107 114 117 122 128 131

131

Togetherness in Time Heterochrony Caught in the Act Heterochrony versus Clock Time From Anachronism to Pre-posterous History It’s About Time!  5.  Making Up, Making As: Fiction and/in/with Reality  Becoming Vera, Reasonable Doubt Various works of contemporary art Introduction: Think Again! Becoming Vera in Free Indirect Discourse Thinking in Film Why Imaging and/or Thinking Move Mastery, in Doubt From Impatience as Lifestyle to Mis-Encounters After-Effects and Pre-Figurations Part II:  Special Issues, Special Pleading 6.  Showing Trauma? Difficulty and Necessity Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, A Long History of Madness Looking at Photographs Trauma Predicaments Alone Within Himself: Drama versus Narrative Impossible Storytelling: Towards the Cinematic A Way Out? 7.  Agency, Facing Nothing is Missing (the installation) Bertien van Manen Introduction: Facing Migration  Abandoning Control  The Triple Act of Facing Ideologies of the Face Intercultural Ethics: Relationality across Gaps Pre-posterous Time Facing Restraint

137 145 152 159 167 175

175 181 186 191 198 203 210 221 223 224 226 231 239 244 252

252 257 260 266 270 273 276

Facing Speech For Critical Freedom 8.  Cultural Citizenship vs Identity  Becoming Vera State of Suspension, Separations Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugeni Onegin Introduction: Citizenship Political, Colonial, Cultural Becoming French in Cameroon and African in Russia Becoming Pushkin Pre-posterous Encounters of the Third Kind Reality in Fiction Memory, Nostalgia, Exile Encounters of Cultural Citizenships Impossible Cultural Citizenship 9. Affect as an Artistic-Political Strategy Madame B (the film, various installations) Doris Salcedo: Palimpsesto Introduction: The Point of Affect From ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi’ to ‘Emma Is Us’ Ambiguous Focalisation: Suspending Judgement What Is Focalisation? An Illness We All Have: Emotional Capitalism Empathy: Siding with the Dying  Affective Things? The Experience of Feeling-Looking The Anthropomorphic Imagination Affect, Medium and Mood 10.  By Way of Conclusion – For Memory: Dis-remembered, Mis-remembered Access Denied, A Long History of Madness, Reasonable Doubt Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where? Introduction: Meandering Through Memory Thought Making Acts of Memory: Responsibility in the Present

280 282 286

286 289 295 298 302 304 310 312 321

321 325 329 333 337 342 348 351 357 361

367

367 372

Reunion, Resilience, Resistance What Kinds of Memory Matter? Failing the Past is Failing the Present For a Different Mode of Thinking Author’s Filmography References Selective Index of Names and Titles Selective Index of Terms and Concepts

383 388 394 397 403 408 435 441

List of Figures

0.1 Emma (Marja Skaffari) looks back at her life. Photo: Thijs Vissia ​(p. xxx) 1.1 Sancho (Viviana Moin) holds Don Quijote (Mathieu Montanier) in order to comfort him at the end of the episode ‘Narrative Stuttering’. Photo: Mar Sáez ​(p. 1) 1.2 Don Quijote tries to tell about his experience in ‘Narrative Stuttering’. Photo: Mar Sáez ​(p. 11) 1.3 T he traumatised young man, Cardenio, attacks Don Quijote when the latter interrupts Cardenio’s story. Sancho tries to help. Photo: José Martínez Izquierdo (​ p.15) 1.4 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Indian Ink, colour chalk and brown wash on paper, 318 × 242 mm. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. ​(p. 18) 1.5 Emma reading. Photo: Thijs Vissia (​ p. 26) 1.6 Is he hyper-rational or mad? Photo: Prezmo Wojciechowski ​(p. 27) 2.1 Crossroads in landscapes of madness. Photo: Jari Nieminen (​ p. 49) 2.2 Lessons from madness. Photo: Jari Nieminen ​(p. 51)



2.3 Three different moments in a small space. Photo: Jari Nieminen (​ p. 55) 2.4 Middle Ages meet today. Medieval festival in Turku. Video still (​ p. 56) 2.5 Musical nurse (Leticia Bal) calms down the mad. Video still (​ p. 56) 2.6 The Man (Richard Wank) reads his poem to the children. Video still​ (p. 58) 2.7  Françoise enacting Davoine in the scene ‘Office Hours’. Photo: Markus Karjalainen (​ p. 60) 2.8 Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Dulle Griet / Mad Meg, ca. 1562. Oil on panel, 117 × 162 cm. Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp / Bridgeman Images ​(p. 73) 2.9 Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg, 2007/11. Three-channel video/ shadow play, stop motion animation, eight reverse-painted Lexan cylinders, spotlights, sound, 6’. Collection Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (​ p. 75) 2.10 Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Dulle Griet / Mad Meg (detail) (​ p. 77) 2.11 Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Dulle Griet / Mad Meg (detail) ​(p. 77) 2.12 Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg (detail) (​ p. 79) 2.13 The two-screen installation ‘Herlat’s Treatment’. Photo: Jari Nieminen​ (p. 83) 2.14 Mieke and Michelle setting up the camera. Photo: Markus Karjalainen​ (p. 88) 2.15 Mieke and Michelle editing. On the monitor screen is Françoise Davoine. Photo: Margreet Vermeulen (​ p. 88) 3.1 Who is speaking? Video still (​ p. 101) 3.2 An intercultural wedding cake. Video still (​ p. 101) 3.3 Chamkha speaking about her daughter. Video still ​(p. 101) 3.4 Tarek cannot believe the cops looked for him at his fiancée’s house. Video still (​ p. 101) 3.5 The student pretending to be a journalist. Video still (​ p. 105) 3.6 The official speaking about ‘love’. Video still (​ p. 105) 3. 7 The after-meal and the self-evidence of tradition. Video still (​ p. 118) 3.8 Tarek always feels the hot breath of time. Video still (​ p. 127) 4.1 Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled, 2011, 41 × 33 × 23.5 cm, ceramic (​ p. 134) 4.2 Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled, 2011, detail (​ p. 134) 4.3 Don Quijote in Växjö. Photo: Ebba Sund ​(p. 139)

4.4 Don Quijote in Murcia. Photo: Luz Bañón ​(p. 139) 4.5 Don Quijote in the Leeds Art Gallery. Photo: Memory Potifa ​(p. 139) 4.6 Don Quijote reading. Photo: Lena Verhoeff (​ p. 140) 4.7 Don Quijote reading. Photo: Lena Verhoeff (​ p. 141) 4.8 Don Quijote and Sancho-to-be arguing. Photo: Lena Verhoeff (​ p. 143) 4.9 Roos Theuws, Gausian Blur, 2005–6. Video still (​ p. 149) 4.10 Aeneas-Adrian impersonating Caravaggio’s John the Baptist. Video still​ (p. 170) 4. 11 Collective directing in a multitemporal space. Photo: Alicia Devaux​ (p. 172) 4.12 Cassandra and Aeneas discussing ‘preposterous history’. Video still, with a painting by David Reed ​(p. 173) 5.1 Vera on Daddy’s knee, telling her story. Video still ​(p. 176) 5.2 Descartes’ doubt, or his madness? Photo: Przemo Wojciechowski​ (p. 190) 5.3 René learning from his sister Jeanne. Photo: Neal Markage (​ p. 192) 5.4 Meeting Beeckman. Photo: Margreet Vermeulen ​(p. 194) 5.5 Meeting Spinoza. Photo: Margreet Vermeulen ​(p. 195) 5.6 Spinoza visits Descartes. Video still ​(p. 198) 5.7  Descartes in, and inventing, psychoanalysis. Photo: Margreet Vermeulen (​ p. 201) 5.8  K ristina looking at herself, or/and Descartes? Photo: Przemo Wojciechowski ​(p. 204) 5.9 Descartes’ ghost appears to Kristina. Photo: Przemo Wojciechowski​ (p. 212) 5.10 K ristina and Elisabeth discussing in Kristina’s palace. Photo: Thijs Vissia (​ p. 212) 6.1 Zoraida (Nafiseh Mousavi) looks out with frustrated longing, or in catatonic stupor. Location: Teleborg Slott, Växjö. Photo: Ebba Sund​ (p. 223) 6.2 The Captive alone within himself. Photo: Ebba Sund ​(p. 234) 6.3 Trauma imaged. Photo: Ebba Sund ​(p. 235) 6.4 Escape. Photo: Ebba Sund ​(p. 238) 6.5 The happiest day of their lives? Photo: Mar Sáez ​(p. 241) 6.6 Cardenio attacks – but whom? Photo: Mar Sáez (​ p. 243)

6.7 Homeless, Cardenio (Theor Román) roams the woods, perhaps in search of someone to talk to. Photo: José María Martínez Izquierdo​ (p. 245) 6.8 Sissi enters the analyst’s office for the decisive session. Photo: Olli Heinola (​ p. 248) 6.9 Sissi begins to talk. Photo: Olli Heinola ​(p. 250) 6.10 Sissi responds to the narrative painting. Photo: Olli Heinola ​(p. 250) 7.1  Nothing is Missing, Massaouda. Video still (​ p. 253) 7.2 Installation, Tampere Art Museum, Finland. Photo: Mia Hannula​ (p. 256) 7.3 Installation, Ministry of Justice, The Hague. Photo: Mieke Bal ​(p. 258) 7.4 Installation in the exhibition 2MOVE, Enkhuizen, Netherlands. Photo: Astrid van Weijenerg ​(p. 261) 7.5 Installation, Freemantle Fibonacci Centre, Freemantle, Australia. Photo: Nanna Verhoeff (​ p. 278) 7.6 Alham; Khartoum, Sudan. Video still (​ p. 278) 7.7 Massaouda; Remada, Tunisia. Video still (​ p. 278) 7.8 Ilhem seeks her mother-in-law’s approval. Video still (​ p. 278) 7.9 Guilhermina; Cuernavaca, Mexico. Video still (​ p. 283) 7.10 Hamdiah; Gaza, Palestine. Video still (​ p. 283) 7.11 Elena; Bucovina, Romania. Video still (​ p. 283) 8.1 Vera looks down. Bored? Photo: Nanna Verhoeff (​ p. 291) 8.2 Vera looks up, connecting to someone outside the group. Photo: Mieke Bal ​(p. 291) 8.3 Vera during the hair-cutting and burying ceremony. Photo: Nanna Verhoeff (​ p. 291) 8.4 Vera smiles at her cousin. Video still (​ p. 292) 8.5 Vera points at a black man in the background of the painting. Video still​ (p. 292) 8.6 Vera comments to filmmaker Michelle on Pushkin’s hair. Video still​ (p. 292) 8.7 Vera horrified by the story of racism. Video still ​(p. 299) 8.8 Vera horrified by the story of racism. Video still ​(p. 299) 8.9 Telling about the encounter with the phantom. Video still (​ p. 299) 9.1 Emma in precarity, opening image. Photo: Thijs Vissia (​ p. 328)

9.2 Emotional capitalism in practice. Photo: Thijs Vissia (​ p. 338) 9.3 Emma caught in emotional-capitalist madness. Photo: Thijs Vissia​ (p. 338) 9.4 T homas Germaine as Emma’s three men: Léon, Charles, Rodolphe. Photos: Thijs Vissia; collage: Margreet Vermeulen ​(p. 341) 9.5 Emma dead. Video still (​ p. 343) 9.6 Emma dying. Video still (​ p. 347) 9.7 Doris Salcedo, Palimpsesto (detail) (​ p. 353) 9.8 The installation in the space. Photo: Mieke Bal ​(p. 355) 10.1 A visual discussion with Freud. Photo: Michelle Williams Gamaker​ (p. 371) 10.2 Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where? 2008 HD installation for six pro­ jections with sound ​ Close-up of Adel. Photo: Marja-Leena Hukkanen (​ p. 375) 10.3 W here is Where? Priest/Angel guides the boys. Photo: Photo: MarjaLeena Hukkanen ​(p. 375) 10.4 W here is Where? The Poet talks with Death over breakfast. Photo: Marja-Leena Hukkanen ​(p. 378) 10.5 W here is Where? The prison doctors interviewing Adel. Photo: MarjaLeena Hukkanen ​(p. 378) 10.6 Ent[e]ry denied . . . Video still (​ p. 384) 10.7 A beautiful image in a different quality. Video still ​(p. 384) 10.8 Ihab as a beginning teacher. Video still (​ p. 384) 10.9 Installation Anacronismos, Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, for exhibition ‘The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish Painting from the Städel Museum’, curated by Jochen Sander 7 October 2010 – 23 January 2011. Photo: Neal Markage (​ p. 394) 10.10 Doubt, deception, duality. Reasonable Doubt installed in the Luca School of Arts, Brussels, 2018. Photo: Mieke Bal ​(p. 398)

Series Editor’s Preface Kamini Vellodi

The relation between philosophy and art history gestures towards a rich and complex intellectual lineage with ongoing relevance for the contemporary thinking of art and image. Yet it is rarely directly addressed or named. The writing and thinking that inhabits or implicates this relation is instead most often reclaimed by one or other of these disciplines, or subsumed into other terrains: aesthetics, philosophy of art, art theory, art criticism or visual culture. A long-standing misunderstanding in part accounts for such deflection: the judgement of the inadequacy or absence of the philosophical in art historical thinking, and of the ahistoricity in philosophical thinking on art. Refractions challenges this outlook, constructing a zone for inquiry that examines, tests and renews modes of address too often reductively separated. Fostering unexpected synergies, volumes in the Series reveal how it is in the encounter of the conceptual, speculative and theoretical with the empirical, material and concrete that some of the most vital

problems about art and image are posed. In the transhistorical zones where concepts and experience meet, and across borderlines of theory, criticism, historiography and practice, philosophy and art history are brought together in remarkable and creative ways. Deflections of light or waves across media of different densities, refractions are passages that fracture whilst continuing. Refractions of thought may entail diversions and deflections from a previous course, oblique crossings of zones, splinterings into differentiated nuances, and the unsettling that sustains thinking’s character as query. The title of the series is intended to evoke not only the moments when disciplines are brought into collision through the complexity and multidimensionality of their objects and problems, but also the indisciplined events of thought provoked when a discourse is made to explore the blind spots within its own histories and practices. Volumes in the Series explore ways in which problems, concepts and objects are refracted across epistemic thresholds and discursive contexts, cultural traditions, historical periods and languages, and how they change in meaning and the effects they generate through this passage. The Series casts its net wide, to capture the horizon where philosophy and art history meet, juxtaposing emerging, established, alongside overlooked or forgotten writers to offer provisional groupings that mobilise intellectual history. I am delighted to present Mieke Bal’s Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis as the inaugural book in this Series. Building on her pioneering polymathic inquiries across the spectrum of what constitutes culture, the book offers a long-awaited overview of Bal’s dual practice as theorist and filmmaker. It presents a rigorous investigation of what Bal calls ‘material image thinking’ – the material ‘refraction’ of thought through image, and reciprocally, of image through thought. Through ten case studies, Bal takes us through her twenty-year film and video corpus, elucidating how cinematic practice elaborates ‘theor­ etical fictions’ that mobilise conceptions of key issues of culture such as identity, migration, memory and trauma. Integrating personal reflect­ ions on her many years of research and her abiding commitment to the humanities as an ethos of interdisciplinary inquiry, the book offers a

fascinating insight into the genesis of her methods through theoris­ ation, experimentation and collaboration. In its practice of a materialised interdisciplinarity, Image-Thinking offers a timely new model of syn­ thesis of creative and intellectual practice, and a compelling instantiation of what thinking and making across and beyond disciplines can produce.

Author’s Preface

This book emerged from a practice of intellectual restlessness; of always, as I phrase it, ‘looking around the corner’. The title of this book series, ‘Refractions’, is, therefore, very apt for my temperament as well as my writing style. With persistent curiosity and a reluctance to obey boundaries, my work is interdisciplinary. For the past twenty years, it has also been intermedial. Making video art is not changing fields. I will explain what it is instead: a practice I have termed image-thinking. True: something changed when I was compelled – for personal/social reasons – to buy a camera and start making videos. But that change was not an abandonment of my previous interests. On the contrary; these became enriched and deepened by the addition of – refractions through – audiovisual sources for my thinking to the printed materials in libraries; the indispensable collaboration with others; the liveness and contempor­ aneity of what I studied. The fact that I never stopped writing, lecturing and publishing proves my case. The present book is motivated by the

aspiration to put my experience of the process of mak­ing and thinking as inextricably intertwined at the disposal of others. Not for imitation, but for inspiration. Many people have had a great impact on this book, and I cannot possibly mention them all. Rather than risking forgetting some of them, I refrain from writing the traditional list, which would bore my readers anyway. Moreover, it is simply impossible, for I would have to include my students, of all academic levels, who have always inspired, challenged and triggered my thinking; all the artists whose work has been an ongoing stimulation and motivation; and the colleagues whose kind support and invitations all over the world have kept me going – including literally. As I have frequently argued, writing, only seemingly an isolated activity, is as social as thinking is. And so is artmaking, hence, the making about which this book reflects. Just think of the many participants, mostly volunteers, in all the projects discussed. And the few professional actors and cinematographers who were so crucial for the fiction films deserve huge gratitude not only for their terrific, brilliant work but also for their unpretentious, collaborative attitudes that helped the volunteering participants to learn and surpass themselves. Without the innumerable people who have been there for me when I needed them, this book would not exist. I just mention a few very crucial persons, without whom not only this book but also the artworks would have been unthinkable. First, I owe a huge acknowledgement to British artist Michelle Williams Gamaker, co-maker of many of the films discussed in this book. Without her artistic and humane talents, dedication and good cheer, I would never have been able to (co-)make the films and installations that triggered the ideas developed in this book. She has also been a great inspiration in understanding and enjoying the value of collaboration on an equal footing, with different expertise and skills. This created a free place for a truly open discussion. Second, without Françoise Davoine, I don’t think I would have been able to make that big leap from documentary to fiction. Her profound insight into trauma, her lessons-throughpractice of empathy as capable of even transforming established theory, her own creation of books as ‘theoretical fictions’, and her loyal

friendship have made it possible to make that leap, to bridge the gap, and realise the importance of such bridging. I thank the many participants in the video art discussed in this book, always committed to make it work. I mention just three actors who appear in the fictional works, and who have been immensely brilliant, cooperative and stimulating for all: Marja Skaffari, Thomas Germaine and Mathieu Montanier. They played multiple roles, always adequately transforming themselves. Along with other great artists I have had the privilege to interact with, Nalini Malani in particular has been an ongoing conversation partner, and has become a close friend. Her brilliant, beautiful and politically incisive artwork has inspired me, and I consider myself very fortunate to have made her and its acquaintance. Her partner Johan Pijnappel has always been at her side, and in the finishing of this book, at mine as well. The fifth person I simply must mention is my life-long ‘critical partner’ – if I may coin another concept – Ernst van Alphen. Among his many great features is the totally convincing way he combines solidarity with discussion and criticism; indeed, he considers criticism an indispensable element of solidarity. Himself a great writer and a master of clarity, he has been indispensable all along. I am also deeply grateful to Kamini Vellodi, for her fabulous scholarly work as well as her enthusiastic reading of mine and the dialogues that ensued. I am very proud that this book is the first in her important series where philosophy and art meet. I am also grateful to Carol Macdonald, at Edinburgh University Press, for her expert and friendly way of accompanying me in the process of the making of this book. One remark is called for before you embark on reading this book. To my profound satisfaction and gratefulness to all those people at Edinburgh University Press who have made this possible, the book contains many images – one hundred. Although the visual aspect of books is always limited, at least at the important junctures of the arguments I was able to make a visual image part of the ideas put forward. The images are not ‘illustrations’, which would subordinate the visual to the intellectual content, but figurations that are integral parts of, indispensable partners in the development of the ideas. It will

be immediately apparent that these images are quite diverse. Many have been made by professional photographers, during filming sessions, and their names are mentioned in the captions, not only out of fairness but to emphasise the collective work. These photographers have their own vision and style, and that alone is of interest: the different kinds of photographs show the aspect of collective, collaborative work that is, by definition, of multiple authorship. But it was not always possible to involve a set photographer. Hence, there are also images that are video stills, grabbed from the footage. This brings in a very different aesthetic. This is compounded by a historical aspect. Some of the video works were made before High Definition, some even before three-chip cameras. In many situations of documentary making, moreover, the intimacy compelled bringing small unobtrusive cameras, which at the time produced different qualities of video images. In those years the work on set, always very limited in time, made it impossible to take pictures during the shoots. In a few cases, it had even been impossible to be present at the filming ourselves. Twice, the camera used by the local cinematographer used NTSC rather than PAL, the footage had to be converted, and the quality suffered; hence, also the video still. The clearest example of this is Figures 10.7 and 7.10, made in a situation of closed borders and ongoing war. I find it important to not obscure, but leave the traces of these qualitative differences, which are not simply aesthetic but also material, so that readers are encouraged to be viewers, indeed, image-thinkers, and look at the images in detail and with a keen interest in what the qualities of the images tell about the history of the body of work I am presenting.

Acknowledgements

Fragments from earlier publications have been integrated in this book. For such recycling I selected, particularly, fragments from those texts that appeared in less-known venues, with small print runs, or different languages than English. No earlier text has been integrated as a whole. Chapter 1: On the issues regarding Don Quijote, I merged fragments from the catalogue Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, edited by Niklas Salmose (Växjö, Sweden: Trolltrumma 2019). The reflections on thoughtimages recycle pages 173–80 of In Medias Res: Inside Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2016). On the merging of reading, imagining and imaging I have written pages 11–22 in the catalogue Mieke Bal: Contaminaciones: leer, imaginar, visualizar, edited by Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro (Murcia, Spain 2020). Chapter 2: Here I draw on my catalogue text of the exhibition Landscapes of Madness, edited by Mia Hannula, with Michelle Williams Gamaker (Turku: Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, 2011), and my preface to the

English translation of Françoise Davoine’s book, Mother Folly: A Tale (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). I also return to the book on Malani mentioned above. Chapter 3: The discussion of universality is excerpted (modified) from my article ‘A Thousand and One Voices’, in Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation, edited by Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Jakob Ladegaard (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2011). The theoretical discussion of ‘voice’ is partly derived from Bal, ‘Phantom Sentences’, in Phantom Sentences: Essays in Linguistics and Literature Presented to Ann Banfield, edited by Robert S. Kawashima, Gilles Philippe and Thelma Sowley (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008, 17–42). The example from Proust is adapted from my 1997 book. Chapter 4: This has some elements from the catalogue of the exhibition 2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration, edited by Mieke Bal and Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro (Murcia, Spain, 2008), on migratory aesthetics and heterochony, and from my 1999 book on ‘preposterous’ history. On Marclay’s The Clock I have written in a catalogue the essay ‘The Time It Takes’, in How to Construct a Time Machine, edited by Marquard Smith (London: MK Gallery, 2015, 34–49), from which I draw some fragments here. I incorporate a few fragments from my article on Hayden White (2013). On the essay film an article appeared in 2020 in the journal Text Matters, on which I draw a little in the last section of this chapter. Chapter 5: I have recycled some fragments from my article ‘Thinking in Film’, in Thinking in the World: A Reader, edited by Jill Bennett and Mary Zournazi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 173–201). I also invoke a short article, ‘Photography After Cinema’, in Photoworks: Photography, Art, Visual Culture. Issue 22: Women, edited by Mariama Attah and Ben Burbridge (Brighton, GB: Photoworks, 2015, 8–9). Chapter 6: Here I merge again some elements from the catalogue Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, with some fragments from the introduction to Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999, vii–xvii), and a few bits from an article for a volume that is in the early stages of preparation.

Chapter 7: Here I draw on an earlier article ‘Facing: Intimacy Across Divisions’, in The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time, edited by Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, 119–44), which I wrote without yet having much experience with presenting the installation Nothing is Missing. Chapter 8: Some fragments of the first half of this chapter are spinoffs from my article ‘Becoming of the World versus Identity Politics’, in Nordlit: Tidsskrift i litteratur og kultur 24 (2009, 9–30). Chapter 9: I have drawn on my chapter ‘Affectively Effective: Affect as an Artistic-Political Strategy’, in How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, edited by Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa, (Leiden and Boston, Brill |Rodopi, 2019, 179–99). Some of the close analyses of Madame Bovary also appear, in a different context, in the 2017 edition of my book Narratology. An earlier version of these analyses that took five years to appear, and which I had forgotten, is now appearing in 2022 in Diversity in Narration and Writing – The Novel, edited by Kornélia Horváth, Judit Mudriczki and Sarolta Osztroluczky, at Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Chapter 10: A very few bits and pieces from the article ‘Travel Companions’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, edited by Sionbhan Kattago (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, 145–62), have been integrated in this chapter.

Prologue: Iconomania – On the Thinking-Image and Madness W. J. T. Mitchell

When it comes to images, why does it always seem as if Mieke Bal has already been there, done that, and thought it through? This is a book that could have been called ‘How to Do Things with Images’, to echo J. L. Austin’s study of words. But that would not have been enough, because Mieke’s project also insists on noticing how images do things with and to us – how they affect us, lead us astray or towards insight and transformation. Do we carry images in our minds in memories and fantasies? Or do they carry us away, like the vehicles of metaphors that break through the guard rails of logic into ana-logic? When you pick up this book, you will have to be prepared to break out of some habitual ways of thinking about what it means to see a film, go to the theatre, visit an exhibition, read a book, hear a voice. Image-Thinking connects all these practices as image-performances across the

boundaries of media in their involvement with the body of beholder/ participant. Superficially, this is a book about Mieke Bal’s practice as a filmmaker, with special emphasis on the phenomenon of madness. When read immersively, however, it reveals itself as a guide through a set of experimental image practices ranging across and beyond the arts. We know that Mieke’s films are often staged within non-theatrical cinematic installations. The effect is a condensed and super-charged version of my own favourite renegade practice in American multiplex cinemas, roaming the hallways between action thrillers, moody melodramas and outrageous comedies. The viewer’s decisions are part of the work, as are those of the filmmaker in sometimes allowing accidental intrusions into the mise en scène. A carnivalesque tolerance for improvisation and surprising juxtaposition makes the experience of her work into a labyrinth of discovery. Image-Thinking provides an Ariadne’s thread through the maze, tracing Mieke’s thought process as these works came together with teams of collaborators. Instead of treating the artwork as the finished product, assembled after a long ordeal of research and planning, Mieke emphasises the ‘search’ itself as the work, the ‘thought-image’ as the lamp that lights the way. What is the ‘thought-image’? Is it Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ flaring up at a moment of crisis? Is it imagination, fantasy, perception, memory, the whole range of mental operations that involve simulation, likeness, resemblance, and go to make up all that we mean when we talk about consciousness and the unconscious? Is it the ‘interpretant’ that flashes before our mind when we read or listen to a voice? Is it the crowd of figures looming over language, from the simplest pun or slip of the tongue to Hans Blumenberg’s ‘absolute metaphors’ (life as a dream, a journey, a stage)? Is it a ‘theoretical fiction’ like Freud’s mythic ethnography of the Oedipus complex or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? Or is it the monumental icon that captures the inner structure of a historical event, the way ‘virality’ has erupted as the trope that links information science and biology in our moment?

Mieke’s thought-images embrace all these possibilities and more. For her, the image is ‘pre-positioned’ at the nexus of psychic and social life, which we can see quite literally simply by listing the prepositions that accompany her image-thinking. We might begin with ‘of ’ and ‘about’, naming the image as the topic that her thought addresses. But we quickly have to move on to ‘in’ and ‘through’, when the image becomes the frame or medium of thought, and we no longer see ourselves in front of the mirror, but find ourselves going through and beyond the looking glass. Or when we find ourselves between and among images in a multitudinous montage, mingling with them, inside or beside them, prostrate before them (like idols), keeping them close to our bodies, taking them with us (fetishes) or making them ‘friends and companions’ (Claude Lévi-Strauss’s definition of totemism). What sort of film practice allows actors, ‘inspired by the group performance . . . to improvise and make their own images’, becoming ‘co-authors’? What kind of exhibition practice relies on presence, discovery and contemporaneity rather than the existence of a predetermined object? What sort of narrative relies on a thought-image of time as an ‘octopus’ whose tentacles reach into every dimension of spacetime? In Mieke’s world one is not surprised to find Descartes talking to his psychoanalyst, or the medieval Everyman ‘representing the Folly of the sane and the sanity of the Mad’, or Cervantes co-authoring a film entitled Sad Countenances, along with the numerous collaborators who gather to act, shoot, edit, record and think together as co-authors of works that are never quite ‘finished’. How, then, do we get from image-thinking to madness? It is clearly not just a topic among others that Mieke might have chosen. It is intrinsic to the ana-logical and ana-chronic character of images, which have always been the place where the human mind goes wild, or finds itself bringing newness into the world. For Charles Sanders Peirce (one of Mieke’s philosophical guides), the icon is the ‘first’ sign to awaken thought, to be followed by the ‘secondness’ of the index (pointer or trace), and finally by the thirdness of the symbolic ‘legisign’, the law-given sign that stipulates a conventional relation between signifier and signified. Iconography and the iconographic ‘reading’ of works of

art as images to be decoded locks the image into the rule of the symbolic, where meanings can be univocally defined. Mieke’s real practice, by contrast, I would call ‘iconology’, restoring the image’s ability to theorise itself and ‘beget fresh images’ that carry us beyond the law into Yeats’s Byzantium. So, madness enters Mieke’s work by a thousand pathways, some leading to the mouth of hell in Peter Brueghel the Elder’s Dulle Griet; some by way of the traditional path of imagination and hallucinatory abilities, hearing voices and seeing visions; others yet via the darkness and erasure of trauma. The mad prophet Cassandra debates Aeneas over John the Baptist as seen in the paintings of Caravaggio and David Reed, in an essay film entitled It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency, made in Poland in 2020, ‘exactly one week before the coronavirus reached its pandemic crisis’. Is the virus, then, and the figure of the ‘viral’ a dimension of the ‘preposterous’ heterochronic history that forms the contemporaneity of this film? It is very tempting to think so, given the way the virus has inaugurated a new epoch of urgency that is subjecting the world to an unprecedented epoché or suspension of ‘normal’ times in the moment of writing this sentence.1 For the virus has become, in my view, a metapicture of image-making and image-thinking in our time, a figure of figuration itself. Biologists still cannot decide whether viruses (as contrasted to bacteria) are living or non-living things. Are they ‘imitations of life’ that undermine this distinction, proliferating, spreading and evolving – just like images and image-thinking? I only suggest this hypothesis to give a flavour of the delight and terror that awaits the patient reader of this book that is so overflowing with vitality and depth of thought. I should mention, therefore, that, aside from intimate insight into the creative processes of one of the pioneering experimental artist-scholar-filmmakers of our time, the reader will be taken on a roller-coaster ride through the vast fun-house of learning in philosophy, literature, art history, visual studies, media and psychoanalytic theory in which Mieke Bal is completely at home. 1  On the implications of the present, see my essay, ‘Present Tense 2020: Iconology of an Epoch’, Critical Inquiry 47:2 (Winter, 2021).

It will be a long time before another book like this is written. When it is, it will fit no known genre, but aspire to that elusive form that Theodor Adorno called the ‘essay’, a setting forth of a partial, exploratory and passionate effort to persuade, and subject itself to the trial of other minds.

1. Introduction: Making as Thinking, and vice versa

(Opposite) Figure 0.1  Emma (Marja Skaffari) looks back at her life. Photo: Thijs Vissia Figure 1.1  Sancho (Viviana Moin) holds Don Quijote (Mathieu Montanier) in order to comfort him at the end of the episode ‘Narrative Stuttering’. Photo: Mar Sáez.

Material Image-Thinking The scene titled ‘Narrative Stuttering’ from my 2019 video instal­ lation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances shows Don Quijote alone on a dark theatrical stage. For most of the eight-minute episode, Sancho Panza is sitting on a chair on the side, holding the script, helping him when needed, as a prompter. The knight is trying desperately to tell his story – the adventures, his opinions, whatever happened to him and those around him – but he is unable to act effectively as a narrator. At the end, he bursts into tears and, as you see in Figure 1.1, Sancho holds him in order to comfort him, demonstrating, by physical touch, that he is not entirely alone. This physicality is a primary point this ending of the episode is to make. But there is much more happening here; and all of that participates in the artwork, its effect­ ivity as affective, and its status as an imaginative presentation of a very sad story. First, these two figures can do what they do because they have a space in which to do it. That space is a stage; hence, a fictional and visual one. The darkness of the stage deprives the space of perspectival depth, at times making Don Quijote almost seem floating. The stage isolates him and, at the same time, gives him an audience. In line with this brief description, I consider the theatrical setting as a material ‘theoretical fiction’. It is material, built as a theatre. And, once the figures are acting in it, it is a fiction – one that helps our thinking about, in this case, the social issue of empathy. Freud came up with the term ‘theoretical fiction’ to justify his fanciful story, in his 1913 book Totem and Taboo, of the sons who kill and eat their tyrannical father. A fiction indeed. But elaborating the story led him to, then helped him with, the discovery and elaboration of the Oedipus complex, a theoretical advance in his thinking. In that case, the fiction consisted of a narrative. The concept of ‘theoretical fiction’ is a broader version of this. From 2008 on, Michelle Williams Gamaker and I have deployed that notion in a variety of films and video installations. Each time, we kept balancing the two sides, reflecting on how

the fictions created by others helped a theoretical idea to make itself both concrete and elaborated.1 This Freudian theoretical fiction is one ‘genre’ of what I call ‘image-­ thinking’. Freud’s is narrative. Others can be visually compelling, cinematic or poetic, such as some concept-metaphors. Or they can be anecdotal, as Jane Gallop has argued (2002). In a sense, Freud’s is the exemplary one, where the theoretical result is primary. In a slightly different sense, where the visuality serves a pedagogical purpose, it is also how Leonardo da Vinci solved his problem of making his complex, abstract knowledge concrete and thus, clearer for himself, and understandable for others, through visualisation in painting. This is more literally image-thinking, with visual art as the primary yield. Primary, yes, for contemporary art buffs who consider Leonardo first of all the great artist he became. For Leonardo himself, who was an ambitious inventor and engineer, it was probably more ambiguous. The French philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch wrote this apropos of Leonardo: Artistic revolutions are not so much a consequence of the introduction of new terms and new methods, even less of new codes; rather, they stem from a theoretical break that engenders a new definition of the system and its internal articulations. (2002 [1972], 80).2 In the scene from Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, the stage with its black floor suggests the potential of the theatre to be affectively effective; that 1  Freud first published Totem and Taboo in 1913. An accessible edition is published by Vintage Books (1960). An in-depth study of the work through theoretical fiction in Freud and Lacan, rightly calling on Proust, is by Malcolm Bowie (1988). Elizabeth Abel (1989) published an analysis of the fictions of Virginia Woolf in a similar, albeit reversed perspective. Ronald R. Thomas (1990) traces the novelistic sources in Freud’s work. Many other publications follow suit, often a bit judgemental, as if ‘fiction’ was the bad side of ‘the truth’. The concept is close, but not identical, to Hubert Damisch’s ‘theoretical object’. 2  On this search in Leonardo’s work, see Fiorani and Nova (2013).

is the theoretical question. This concerns disciplinary specialisations within the Humanities and the cultural practices studied there. The stage proposes a fictional space in which viewers can engage themselves, imaginatively going along with the fiction presented. In this sense, the stage explores how theatricality can help to enable the narratively disabled. But what is, or how can we consider, theatricality? Which, in turn, in epistemological doubt, raises the question whether a definition is what is primarily needed to grasp what theatricality is, and does. Theatre scholar Kati Röttger considers theatricality ‘a specific mode of perception, a central figure of representation, and an analytic model of crises of representation that can be traced back to changes in the material basis of linguistic behaviour, cultures of perception, and modes of thinking’. This multi-tentacled description cannot be considered a definition. It gives theatricality many functions, and foregrounds its participation in thinking as well as its inherent intermediality, which is a primary interest of this book. Theatre and performance scholar Maaike Bleeker gives theatricality the critical edge that my video work – hence, also, the exhibition of which ‘Narrative Stuttering’ is an episode – seeks to achieve when she calls it ‘a critical vision machine’, with a thorough exploration of how that would work.3 What Sancho is doing, physically, on the material stage, is what audience members are called upon to do, albeit without physical touching. Such a call stems from the need of the narratively incapacitated figure in his theatrical setting, and, by extension, the likes of him in real life, for an empathetic audience. If this call succeeds, the viewers can no longer be considered an audience, with the connotations of passivity, receptivity and unification that word suggests, but participants. Material­ ity, intermediality and participation: these three elements already go to show that image-thinking exceeds the limited view of fiction that has misled critics so frequently into judgemental rejections of fiction as unreal, irrelevant and escapist. 3  Röttger (2018). Bleeker demonstrates (2008, 2009), through detailed analyses, how productive such a concept of theatricality can be for a political art that is not bound to a political thematic.

It also exceeds a limited view of images, that core of ‘image-thinking’, as visual (only), and as more predominant today than in the past. For this, the book by Marie-José Mondzain (2005) is of fundamental import­ ance. This philosopher undermines all our preconceptions about the image, its histories, and the taboos surrounding it. Consider this statement at the beginning of her study, through which she presents her title Image Icon, Economy: The image is invisible, the icon is visible. The economy was the concept of their living linkage. The image is an enigma. The economy was the concept of their relation and their intimacy. The image is eternal similitude, the icon is temporal resemblance. The economy was the theory of the transfiguration of history. (Mondzain 2005, 3)4 This complex view makes clear that there is nothing self-evident and simple about the notion of image. And this statement does not even implicate the other senses. For this reason, when, during the filming of ‘Narrative Stuttering’, it turned out that there was an audience in the theatre getting a guided tour of the building, we decided not to accept the offer from the theatre director to ask them to leave, or to postpone the shooting until they left. They were simply asked to keep their voices down. Their near-silent presence is sometimes audible. The slight murmur that signifies the presence of humans adds to the material presence of the process of thinking that the stage embodies. This was a serendipitous event we had not foreseen; one of those accidental events that frequently occur 4  For indispensable in-depth reflections on images, the history of the visual imagination, and the culture of use and abuse of images, see Mondzain (2003, 2005). For a very useful overview of a variety of conceptions of the image, see Mitchell (1986, ch. 1), and on conceptions of fictionality in the (English) novel, see Gallagher (2006). More on this in Chapter 5.

during filmmaking, especially in the kind of low-budget, hence fast-­ produced, film work that is mine. These are the practical, material events that contribute to the image-thinking, because it is a practical process, mostly collectively performed. The occurrence of such events forces filmmakers to think on their feet, and decide right away if and how the incidents can contribute to the thoughts that result: the ‘thought-images’ that the works end up producing. In the case of ‘Narrative Stuttering’ it is the task of the artwork to invite an empathetic audience. This is a primary goal of this exhibition, in which trauma is a specific problematic we aimed to work on, and through; a working that involves thinking in the sense of creating something new, socially helpful, through being artistically meaningful. This is not an argument for the idea of an ‘empathy machine’, working as if automatically (critiqued by Murray 2020). For this emerg­ence of empathy to be possible, a form of display is required that changes from the traditional museal display, which keeps audiences at bay – a distance often materialised by bars, cords, signs, and enforced by guards: ‘Do Not Touch’. Moreover, such routine display is testing on the audience’s physical condition, since standing and w ­ alking are the habitual modes of visiting museums. There is an important temporal aspect to this, which participates in the materiality of image-thinking. For, this trad­itionally imposed mode of viewing g ­ overns the temporality of looking. In the theatre, by contrast, people can sit, and if the display is nearby and accessible, and visiting can consist of quietly sitting, the museum becomes a kind of theatre in this material sense. This situation of the museum as theatre is what makes art contemporary. For, it compels spectators-­v isitorsparticipants to make the work; to make it work. The liveness of theatre produces contemporaneity. The Don Quijote exhibition as a whole seeks to produce such material comfort for facilitating affective attachment in visitors, turning them into participants. The consequence is a radically different temporality of the art experience. This is how the practice of making constitutes an integral part of the t­ hinking.5 5  On the contemporaneity of art-on-display, see my essay (2020a) and Chapter 4 below.

And time, thus, turns out to be a factor of affect. In conjunction with the academic (semiotic) understanding of theatricality of Röttger, and the academic (political) understanding of criticality of Bleeker, this (physical) element of comfort and time is, I argue, intellectual, political and artistic all at once. To make the point emphatically and demonstrate the many tentacles of the process: I contend that seating, benches or chairs, participate in the image-thinking endeavour, and become material ‘thought-images’, just as did the dark stage and the slight murmuring in the background; for time and its duration are the backbones of aesthetic experience. This had become clear to me earlier, when I was designing and curating an exhibition for the Munch Museum in Oslo, in 2016–17.6 The idea of requesting seating was serendipitous, like the audience’s unexpected presence in the theatre. It came, seemingly somewhat randomly, from the realisation that the request to curate a museum-wide exhibition from their collection, including our video installation Madame B, entailed an inequality that went in two directions. Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian hero of modern painting, was to be put together with our modest video work. But – and here the inequality turned around – video is a time-based art. The videos would demand time by definition, whereas the paintings would depend on the visitors’ physical resilience. And therefore, my gut reaction to this dual challenge was: how can I make sure Munch gets an equal opportunity for temporality? The idea of seating came in a flash. It became an artistic issue. Never, since then, have I been able to ignore this aspect of exhibiting.7 6  The invitation to curate an exhibition in the Munch Museum, including our installation Madame B, was an initiative of the museum’s director of collections and exhibitions, Dr Jon-Ove Steihaug. I am deeply grateful for that opportunity to integrate reflecting, making and curating. 7  Moreover, the exhibition took place in Munch’s ‘home’: the museum erected after his death, to house, care for and display the great legacy of artworks he left to the city. For these two reasons Munch, of course, had to come first. Luckily, the collaboration with the museum staff was entirely constructive; confidence and respect were total, and so it took only a minute or two of explanation to get it decided. For more on this exhibition, which merged media and eras, see this page on my website: http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/exhibitions/emma-edvard-love-in-the-time-ofloneliness/ and my book that accompanied the exhibition (2017a).

Searching for a Term So far, I have merged different levels on which what I propose as image-thinking can happen, methodically as well as accidentally. This imagining, testing and reasoning is one example of how this, as well as my other video projects, could be a version of what is currently called ‘artistic research’ – a search through analysis through artmaking. The concept is problematic. One of the many problems of the term is that it leaves a hierarchy in place, and suggests a one-sided temporal sequen­ tiality: first comes the research, then the artistic work that results. In such an endeavour, however, the search is not for direct academic answers, nor for recipes (‘methods’) for artmaking. Hence, for me it is an attempt to make ‘thought-images’ (from the German Denkbilder) by means of its counterpart, the activity of ‘image-thinking’ that helps understanding on an integrated level of affect, cognition and sociality, with a strong participation of creativity. That is my proposal with this book.8 Until recently, I have called the specific genre of video production that seeks to create thought-images ‘theoretical fictions’, as explained above as the deployment of fiction to understand and open up difficult theoretical issues. The fiction, taking the form of a story, through its concreteness suggests a solution to the theoretical conundrum. Once these are opened up, it becomes possible to develop theory through imaging what fiction enables us to imagine. That image is the figuration of the idea. Although I find this concept more adequate than ‘artistic research’ because it avoids the hierarchy and the sequentiality between research and artwork, it still posits a priority for the theoretical result. For Freud this was, of course, his goal, but I was looking for a term that would be more process-based than result-oriented, reciprocal between the two as well as between the 8  Among the closest to my view of image-thinking is a book by Elisabeth Bronfen (2018). Analysing literature, cinema, television series and other works of popular fiction, from present to past and back, Bronfen is a true intellectual travel companion. Another close intellectual companion is a book by Hanneke Grootenboer, which analyses the interaction between art and philosophy. Her term, hence title, is ‘the pensive image’ (2020).

two activities; and one that is not entangled with what are in fact, loathsome considerations.9 I mean this seriously. As Kamini Vellodi warns us in her critique of the concept of ‘artistic research’, ‘although it has led to a host of intellectual debates and inquiry, it is difficult to deny that a major impetus of artistic research has been economic, policy-driven, and managerial’ (2017, 216; emphasis added). With these words, she invokes the curse that is destroying universities worldwide as we speak. This suffices to look around the corner for an alternative concept of what has also been seen as practices of ideas. But her critical analysis of the concept of ‘artistic research’ goes much further than that, delving deep into philosophy, conceptions of thinking, the differentiation between ontology and epistemology. The dangers Vellodi notices are many, a primary one being the imposition of an obligation (of doing research) imposed on artmaking, and also, a simplified view of thought. Both art and thought are thus being damaged. When thinking is subjected to methods, it becomes re-productive. In Vellodi’s Deleuzian view, thought, instead, ought to be the production of the new. This thinking is congenial to artmaking, but just as much to academic work as I see it. In her 2018 book on Tintoretto, Vellodi demonstrates the difference this conception of thinking makes for a productive, innovative view of work in an academic discipline known for its traditional methodological precepts: art history. For the present book, this affiliation between art and thinking on the condition her analysis implies – that both stay away from the reproductive, repetitive implication of the preposition ‘re-’ in the noun ‘research’ – is where I hope to comment on my own experiments so that they can suggest pathways to novelty for others. 9  I know of only one academic study of visual art that was already practising image-thinking long before it came up as an issue, under a different heading. This is the lucid introduction to Ernst van Alphen’s book on Francis Bacon (1992, 9–19), a model for art analysis. For the best, most relevant critique of the concept of ‘artistic research’ that I know, see Vellodi (2019). Ernst van Alphen proposed the concept of ‘image-thinking’ as a counterpart to ‘thought-images’. His concept, in the form of a verb, is more dynamic, rendering the interaction between thinking and imaging more forceful (personal communication, August 2019). For an early book, still quite defensively promoting artmaking as intellectually valid, see Borgdorff (2012).

Let me return for a moment to the case of my 2019 project. The difficulty underlying this project is eminently suitable for a further probing of the alternative concept of image-thinking. The challenge to make a video project based on Cervantes’ Don Quijote was quite specific in its troubled relationship between content and form, and between the narrative and visual aspects involved. The ‘re-search’ part, based on a literary-cultural analysis of the novel, was, first, to decide which aspects of the novel are crucial to make a work that makes a ‘point’. Second, that point had to make connections between artistic and social issues, and to improve our understanding of how these two domains can go together, in the present, with the collaboration of the past in what we call ‘cultural heritage’ – here, Cervantes’ novel. This term, again, is problematic: it suggests the passive reception of a gift. But a heritage is something entrusted to us, with the command to do something with it – now. This stimulates a renewed activity; a novel existence in the present. Through this literary work I sought to foreground the importance of the past for the present. And finally, of course, the selected aspects and fragments from the long novel had to be ‘audio-visualisable’, to liberate them from confinement in the linguistic domain that requires individual reading, and instead open them up for collective perception, interpretation and discussion. For, in an exhibition, no one is alone. Paradoxically, the image-thinking was precisely that: thinking at the crossroads between reading and ‘imaging’. On my reading, the predominant issue that rules the novel’s aesthetic precludes staying within the paradigm of historical studies: the difficulty of storytelling due to the horror encountered (Figure 1.2); the traumatic state that determines the story­telling; its possibility, its mode and the need for empathy in order to break the imposed silence.10 10  For those who wish to read up on this novel, I can recommend two quick ways of getting into it. An accessible volume of short studies on Cervantes’ novel from the critical canon was published by Roberto González Ecevarría (2005). A more recent volume is by Bruce R. Burningham (2020). See especially the essay by the editor on the new ‘cyber-orality’ that makes the current Internet culture encounter the preCervantes medieval culture of predominant orality. I also recommend an article by Jørgen Bruhn (2005) that brings the temporal reciprocity in purview, with the help of the theoretical work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981).

Figure 1.2  Don Quijote tries to tell about his experience in ‘Narrative Stuttering’. Photo: Mar Sáez.

This seemed especially relevant for today. The project, therefore, appealed to two ambitions. First, the current situation of the world makes a deeper, more creative and ‘contagious’ reflection on trauma and its assault on human subjectivity an urgent task for art. The insights the novel harbours with its wild adventures uniquely connect to other experiences of war, violence and captivity, throughout history, that are strongly relevant for the present. Second, this poses a problem of what we call too easily ‘representation’. In response to the difficulty that term poses, and which the preposition ‘re-’ betrays, I thought that a well-thought-through video project could explore and transgress the limits of what can be seen, shown, narrated and witnessed, specifically in relation to trauma. For, as is well known by now, trauma is itself notoriously un-representable. The image-thinking is in charge of bridging that unbridgeable gap.11 In particular, the mode of storytelling is the primary target of the search. There is something enigmatic about the worldwide fame of a 11  See the reflection on trauma in this volume, especially in Chapter 6. For the most lucid analysis of the reasons for the un-representability of trauma, especially in its relation to narrative, see Alphen (1999).

novel that, when read, seems almost unreadable. Full of incongruous events and repetitive stories, maddening implausibility, lengthy interruptions of the storyline, inserted poems and novellas, and at the same time, anchored in a harrowing reality, while also making readers laugh out loud, it challenges reading itself. I wonder every time I reread sections of it – fragmentary, episodic reading seems the best way to approach it – what the appeal is that keeps me haunted. Yet, the films based on this novel mostly bore me, with all due respect for the great makers who tried. Many did, from Orson Welles who could not finish it to Terry Gilliam who took fifteen years to do so. The paradox of turning this novel into a film, a question of intermediality, triggered the underlying ‘image-thinking’ question. Gilliam’s 2018 film is a good example of a postmodern ‘versioning’ of the novel. However, it cannot avoid ridiculing the old man, which is standard in interpretations in whatever medium. Is this what makes readers laugh out loud? I hope not. I object to the cheap shot of the ‘ageism’ or ‘gerontophobia’ inherent in this mode. But through its postmodern aesthetic, Gilliam’s film rather successfully grappled with the problem of linearity that making a film based on this novel entails.12 The tension between the two media, both captives of linearity, makes this linearity problem the most illuminating case for imagethinking in confrontation with such a novel. As a mostly narrative medium, film seems the least apt to do justice to the turbulent incoherence, repetitiveness and incongruous adventures told in the novel. Nevertheless, thanks to film’s audio-visualisation, something must be possible that is more in line with the difficult novel. Talking about it with actor Mathieu Montanier who initiated the project – talking as team-thinking – we got the idea that a video installation consisting of different, non-linear episodes might instead be more effective in showing what is at stake: not the moment trauma occurs but violence-generated traumatic states. In this instance, the process of image-thinking was not a case of quick-as-a-flash but, on the 12  The active verb form ‘versioning’ was proposed by Esther Peeren in a revisiting of Bakhtin’s cultural theory, with a special focus on the chronotope (2008).

contrary, of enduring collaboration; of thinking in discussion. That dialogic nature of thinking is another important element in the present book. A third partner in this discussion was yet another instance of cultural heritage: an idea about media that philosophy had brought up. For, it seemed relevant that Wittgenstein’s ending of his Tractatus (1921), ‘Of what one cannot speak, one should keep silent’, was modified later into ‘Of what one cannot speak, one can still show’. The importance of showing is to enable witnessing as an engaged activity against the indifference of the world. The theatricality of this display might help to turn onlookers from potential voyeurs into activated, empathic witnesses. Witnessing became a prominent issue, especially elaborated in the episode ‘The Failure of Listening’ and its subsequent redress in ‘Testimonial Discourses’. Not telling but showing: thinking through the implications of the distinction between the two, image-thinking, then, became the term I settled on. In the Preface to his later (1953), more philosophical-technical, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein proposed the useful concept ‘ostensive definition’: defining, or clarifying, through pointing to a concrete person, situation or thing.13 Image-Thinking for Thought-Images The hyphen that connects ‘image’ and ‘thinking’ is crucial. The search is not for defining images as visual moving or still items. The question that W. J. T. Mitchell raised in the first chapter of his iconic 1986 book Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, namely ‘What is an Image?’ is not one I seek to answer. Mitchell and others have discussed this definitional question sufficiently. Mitchell’s schema (10) that maps five ‘families’ of images – graphic, optical, perceptual, mental and verbal – each containing several subcategories, convincingly implies that definitional 13  For Wittgenstein’s change of heart, see first the final sentence of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; then Philosophical Investigations #41, commented on by Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, 2013 (17, 51–2), who quote Maurice O’Drury, 2002 (159, 170, 173).

statements are not the most enlightening. Instead, they move in so many different directions that the futility of the attempt to pin down ‘image’ to a single definition is obvious. Others have grappled with the traditional distinctions between words and images that are as hard to sustain as they are to dismiss. Alternatives have been proposed to bridge the gap between the two, such as, most convincingly, Lyotard with his concept of the ‘figural’ (1971) that remains key; Deleuze who, considering thought a medium, made the medial distinction untenable; whereas the intense theorisations of intermediality by scholars such as Elleström (2021) and his group are only possible if the media as such are recognised.14 Lyotard’s concept of the figural argues for language as more dynamic, turning it into a force, a movement, closer to the Freudian unconscious as laid out in The Interpretation of Dreams than to any Saussure-derived structuralist conception of it. Including, especially, force in his concept of language, Lyotard describes meaning as sense, in terms that include affect, sensation and intuition, and also spatiality. Force, for Lyotard, is inherent in language, and it is nothing other than the energy that folds and wrinkles the text and makes of it an aesthetic work, a difference, that is, a form . . . And if it expresses, it is because movement resides within it as a force that overturns the table of significations with a seism that makes sense . . .15 14  Mitchell’s discussion remains the most relevant one for whoever is interested in multiplying definitions of images analytically. He also provides ample historical and philosophical sources. Lyotard’s Discours, Figure, from 1971, was discussed by philosopher-film scholar David Rodowick (2001, 2017). The statement that Deleuze is interested in the medium of thought is the starting point for a volume edited by Holland, Smith and Stivale (2009, 1). Elleström is director of an international institute for intermedial studies at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, called IMS. 15  I quote from Rodowick’s rendering of Lyotard’s concept (2001, 9–10). To grasp the concept, see Rodowick’s first chapter, ‘Presenting the Figural’ (1–44).

Figure 1.3  The traumatised young man, Cardenio, attacks Don Quijote when the latter interrupts Cardenio’s story. Sancho tries to help. Photo: José Martínez Izquierdo.

These words affiliate language with, specifically, cinematic language, based on the etymological sense of ‘movement’ rather than any technical specificity.16 All this matters for my project, but in order to focus more precisely on image-thinking – with hyphen, in the progressive form, as a process – the media and the distinctions between them are not themselves central concerns. Moreover, I suggest that the example above of the two episodes on listening, ‘The Failure of Listening’ and ‘Testimonial Discourses’, important as these scenes are for the primary issue of trauma and the 16  For another solid explanation of the figural in relation to and distinction from ‘figure’ and ‘figurative’, within the context of art history in its relation to psycho­ analysis and philosophy, see Vlad Ionescu (2018). This author discusses the ideas of influential theorists of images. I discuss the conception of the cinematic as kinetic apropos of the paintings by Edvard Munch and Flaubert’s prose in Madame Bovary, making an implicit case for the figural (2017a, 24–43).

need for empathy, would still be too content-oriented to make the case for image-thinking as the process that facilitated their emergence. My first ‘imaging’ intuition suggested that, in order to do justice to the peculiar, cyclic, perhaps even ‘hysterical’ form of Cervantes’ novel while pursuing the two goals of showing and, or for, witnessing, only an equally incoherent, episodic artwork could be effective (Figure 1.3). But this artwork then had to exceed a plain similarity of form. For, that would risk the ‘re-’ of repetition, rehearsal, representation: the bad root of the word ‘research’. Instead – and this is the heart of the present book’s argument – it needs to yield ‘thought-images’ or Denkbilder, created through ‘image-thinking’. Under the impact of thinking as active, these provisional (artistic-theoretical) results remain in process. Like the idea of ‘theoretical fiction’, this concept has a long history. The thought-image was a favourite literary-philosophical genre of the group of writers of the pre-Second World War Frankfurt School of Social Thought. The short iconic texts Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer and others wrote were texts only. What did the word Bilder, images, do there, then? This brings in the issue of intermediality, requiring the distinction between media as a starting point, but not as an endpoint. Walter Benjamin is an illuminating example. He was an avid art collector, and his image-thinking in the invocation of Klee’s Angelus Novus in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ is legendary. This is a good case where ‘image-thinking’ can meet, and yield, ‘thoughtimages’. In Benjamin’s ninth thesis (of eighteen), he forges his thinking through a visual image, Klee’s 1920 print. At the time of Benjamin’s musings this was a work of contemporary art. Benjamin brings it to bear not only on the contemporary but on time as such: on the entanglement of past, present and future. This is not only a presentation of a philosophy of history, but a reflection on time in process, with the said entanglement as an enduring result. It distinguishes between past and future as before and after, so that the inexorable stretch of duration can reveal the piling up of the debris of catastrophe. Although he produced a verbal artefact, an allegory, Benjamin espouses the visuality of Klee’s image. Klee and Benjamin together were able to show – not tell – what the angel of history must look like. The success of this image-thinking of

the philosopher and the artist is not clarity but an enriching confusion. Benjamin writes: Its face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, it sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of its feet. The angel would like to tarry, awaken the dead, and reassemble what has been shattered. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm inexorably propels it into the future to which its back is turned, while the pile of debris before it grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (2003, 392) The point of quoting Klee’s and Benjamin’s imagings in conjunction is not to prove the latter is right with his interpretation of the image. Visually this seems rather far-fetched, but his goal was not a descrip­ t­ive interpretation. Turning the image into an allegory, he severed the expected bond between image and meaning. Nor is my point to allege the image as evidence of Benjamin’s description of it. For it is not, strictly or visually speaking. On the contrary: if it wasn’t suggested by the work’s title, it would be easy to see that no clear wings are visible (Figure 1.4). The creature can just spread its arms and hands, and the few spots on the picture plane can hardly be called masses of debris preventing the supposed angel from closing them. It might simply be measuring the length of some invisible item, like a piece of cloth, and if looked at with a cinematic view, its eyes turned sideways could be addressing another creature hors-champ. Or these eyes may be trying to capture both the future and the past in one single look – an impossible task physically, but worth exploring in thought, through the creation of thought-images

that imagine and image the alternative to the hopeless failure of the ‘never again’ idea. And if we didn’t know the title of the print, nor Ben­jamin’s descriptive inter­ pretation of it, the figure could be a coquettish woman in a short skirt and high heels, with an over-sized head and her hair still in curlers. It is the discrepancy, rather than the similarity, that demonstrates the visual–linguistic interaction, the encounter between the two images. Probably a shock Figure 1.4  Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Indian to Klee, if less to Benjamin, Ink, colour chalk and brown wash on paper, 318 the image has become an × 242 mm. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. emblem, an ‘icon of the left’. That is where its status as Denkbild has been operative in the aftermath of Benjamin’s comment, due to its activating effects on viewers/readers who participated in the thinking. Nevertheless, the noun ‘icon’ stills the image, arresting it in a permanent meaning.17 Some more thoughts on the thought-image are called for, then. In a study of the genre, US-based scholar of comparative literature and German, Gerhard Richter, begins his description of the genre with a whole range of negativities: ‘Denkbilder are neither programmatic treatises nor objective manifestations of a historical spirit, neither fanciful fiction nor mere reflections of reality’ (2007, 2). These negatives have something in common: every category that is negated is inapplicable 17  The phrase ‘icon of the left’ comes from German critic Otto Karl Werckmeister, in a book on leftist political artists (1997). For a profound analysis of Klee’s work, both visual and verbal, and the impact of a little-known text by Hubert Damisch (1973) on Deleuze and Guattari (1994), see Grootenboer (2020, 120–5).

because it is one side of a binary opposition. A programmatic treatise would be something like a political pamphlet, as opposed to historical objectivations – an opposition that audio-visual art is devoted to questioning. The second pair is equally subject to the reductions of binary opposition: what Richter disparagingly calls ‘fanciful fiction’ stands opposed to an equally dismissed ‘mere reflections of reality’. ‘Rather,’ Richter continues, now in a positive discourse, ‘the miniatures of the Denkbild can be understood as conceptual engagements with the aesthetic and as aesthetic engagements with the conceptual, hovering between philosophical critique and aesthetic production.’ In line with the idea of image-thinking, let’s look more closely at the choice of words. ‘Engagements’ brings us closer to the status of audiences as participants. ‘Hovering’ recalls J. Austin’s use of the verb when describing the ambiguity of fire as hovering between thing and event. Integrated with the Freudian concept of ‘working through’, I can also imagine a verb like weaving, mutually engaging on all levels. In writing, these pieces are miniatures, like Adorno’s aphorisms published as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, written between 1944 and 1946. They can also be short fragments, like Benjamin’s reflection, in a childhood memory, on the ball of socks in his cupboard, where the packaging disappears as the content, the socks, unfolds. Most of all, given the following part of Richter’s definition, this resonates with Benjamin’s fifth thesis on images of the past, which has been a guideline for my work on art between history and anachronism: ‘[E]very image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’ (emphasis added). This warning is crucial for our projects; it is one of their main motors. The statement plays a key role in my most recent film, It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency (Chapter 4). There, it is quoted by Aeneas when this figure enacts the student of Cassandra as a Benjamin lookalike.18 18  For the tradition of Denkbilder, see Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (2005 [1951]). Walter Benjamin’s fifth thesis is also in Illuminations. For solid background, see Grootenboer (2020, 66–9).

In his most positive, descriptive definition, Richter explains the thought-image thus: ‘The Denkbild encodes a poetic form of condensed, epigrammatic writing in textual snapshots, flashing up as poignant meditations that typically fasten upon a seemingly peripheral detail or marginal topic’ (2). Here, I want to draw attention again to the choice of words as elements of image-thinking; as process rather than result. The word ‘flashes up’ suggests the quick flash that Benjamin urges us to preserve by means of recognition in the first sentences of that thesis V from which I now quote a later sentence: ‘The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again’ (255; emphasis added). This articulates why and how we seek to revitalise Cervantes’ novel for today, as well as Flaubert’s; and why I felt urged to revisit the writings of Descartes. In Don Quijote we do it, not in a linear film but in video-snapshots, or ‘flashes’: in short, eight-minute video clips. The vocabulary of quick flashes also recalls the quickness of ‘thinking on your feet’, which was stimulated, even necessitated, by the material event mentioned in the first section of this Introduction. Richter’s view also connects to the question of historical truth, at issue in the episode ‘Who is Don Quijote?’ This is one of the central topics in debates about fiction and its potential relevance for reality. In this regard, in his Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes: What cannot be proved in the customary style and yet is compelling – that is to spur on the spontaneity and energy of thought and, without being taken literally, to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire.19 As in Benjamin’s thesis, the language here is again both visual and shock-­oriented, with ‘spur’, ‘sparks’, ‘short-circuiting’, ‘sudden light’ 19  Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997, 322–3). Emphasis added.

and ‘sets it on fire’. This is thought alive, and this living thought is active, fast, risky. The preposition ‘re-’ of ‘research’ and ‘representation’ is out of place here. The language Adorno writes here has agency. And it is visual. In both respects, it is fast. In addition to the propositional content that advocates ‘compelling’ as a serious contribution to knowledge, Adorno’s wording makes the case that thought needs a formal innovation that shocks. Thus, it can gain new energy and life, involve people, and make thought a collective process rather than the kind of still images we call clichés. Our attempt to achieve such ‘sparking’ innovation lies in the combination of material, practical changes of the mode of display, the anachronistic bond between present and past, the confusion of lang­uages and other categories we tend to take for granted, and, above all, the trans-mediation, the intermediality of the audio-­v isualisation of a literary masterpiece. In view of the need for witnessing, such a messy form of thinking ­enables and activates viewers to construct their own story, and connect it to what they have seen around them; connecting the social world with the imagination stimulated by fiction. Thus, I aimed to turn the hysteria of endless storytelling into a reflection on communication as it can breach, and reach beyond, the boundaries that madness draws around its captive subjects, and instead, open up their subjectivity. For this, we speculated that singular installation pieces might facilitate experimenting with the episodic nature of the literary work. According to this expectation, Mathieu Montanier and I designed the pieces together, in a dialogue between actor-artist and academic-artist. Collaboration, too, is subject to transformation, however, lest it become another stultified and stultifying method. This specific collaboration had to change when, at some point, Mathieu felt he had better concentrate on his acting, and we diverged in a somewhat clearer division of labour. The pieces, presenting ‘scenes’ or ‘episodes’, propose situations. To give intellectual insight into, as well as sensuous experience of, the stagnation that characterises the adventures, they are predominantly descriptive rather than narrative. Any attempt at narrative is ‘stuttering’, recurring, without development. The scene

‘Narrative Stuttering’ shows both the incapacitation to narrate and the frustration this causes.20 Sometimes, the images do not match the dialogues. What the French psychoanalyst and theorist of trauma Françoise Davoine calls, citing historian Fernand Braudel, ‘poussière d’événements’ (dust of events) is the motto of this work’s form, as it results from image-thinking: sprinkling situations, moments, over the stage or throughout the gallery space. Thus, the tenuous line of a single narrative yields to an installation that puts the visitors-participants in the position of making their own narrative out of what is there, on the basis of their own baggage, while witnessing events without chronological linearity. This is adequate to the state of trauma presented or invoked in the pieces and in the juxtapositions among them, and to the need to stretch out a hand to, instead of turning away from, people hurt so deeply that they seem so different we dismiss them as ‘mad’. The disorderly display gives a shape, however unreadable and unclear, to the trauma-induced madness of the novel’s form.21 Cervantes, I presume, was one of those ‘mad’ ones. The trauma incurred by Cervantes after being held in captivity as a slave without any sense of an ending to his disempowered state and his suffering, has been beautifully traced in his writings, narrated, and explained by Colombian literary historian María Antonia Garcés (2002). This traumatic state looms over the entire project, and determines its form. Therefore, we tried something we never do, and which in my academic work is almost a taboo: merging the author’s biography, the main character’s ostensive and much commented-upon madness, and the central character of one narrative unit we selected for its 20  We did not derive the thought-image of the stuttering storytelling from the stuttering writer in Deleuze’s chapter ‘He Stuttered’, in his last book, Essays Critical and Clinical (1998, 107–14), but it certainly has affinity with it. 21  The Braudel quote comes from Davoine (2008, 43–4). Davoine has been an ongoing inspiration for our films, to which she has also substantially contributed. In A Long History of Madness, she plays her own character. That film is based on her book published in English in 2014 (first published 1998). On this project, see Chapter 2. She also plays an art teacher in Madame B (see Chapter 9) and has been an adviser for Reasonable Doubt (Chapters 5 and 10).

narrative element, ‘The Captive’s Tale’. Supported by Garcés’s welldocumented analysis, we can only see a haunting autobiographical spirit in the three chapters on the Captive. But the shape of the theatrical display does not ‘re-present’ the madness. It hints at it, makes us reflect on it. The Denkbild is in the form. The form of these pieces is experimental, so that a contemporary aesthetic can reach out to, and touch, a situ­ ation of long ago that, as befits the stilled temporality of trauma, persists in the present. In practical terms of cinematography, the main characteristics of the pieces and of the entire installation as thought-images are the effects of our ‘image-thinking’. This penetrates the forms, the materiality and the affective effects. Long, enduring shots predominate. Soundwise, some are quiet, some loud. This allows the simultaneity, the proximity, of different episodes, without using the socially isolating headphones. Another experimental form concerns the dynamic relationship between visibility and invisibility, image and writing. The actor Mathieu Montanier is visible, but so are, sometimes, the letters of inscriptions, in association with other texts, to foreground the nature of video-graphy as a form of writing. The fragments from her book read by Davoine in voice-off, similarly, break the realism of synchron­ isation. In short, through experimenting with possible forms of the art of video, we sought to invent, imagine and image new forms for the formlessness of trauma.22 The resulting disorderly installation embodies that form; it is its thought-image. Following the mode of thinking in George Kubler’s concept of The Shape of Time (1962) and Thomas McEvelley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought (2002), two studies that argue for form where none seems thinkable, this installation had to answer by means of image-thinking to the paradoxical thought-image of the shape of formlessness. Shape and form are tenaciously difficult to define. Fortunately, defining is not the only, nor even the best, way of approaching and 22  The use of the word ‘formlessness’ is not based on, but does have connections with, Georges Bataille’s concept of formlessness. For an explanation, see Bois and Krauss (1997).

understand­ing something. Thinking-through – engaging what one wishes to under­stand in a reciprocal intimacy – seems more promising, because more open to newness. Thresholds: The Merging of Thinking, Imagining and Imaging In spring 2019, I was invited to hold an exhibition of my fiction-based video work in Murcia, Spain. The curator, Miguel Á. Hernández Navarro and I plotted together, in a productive image-thinking session, to make this an exhibition of fragments, and make the connections among our most common cultural activities the thread running through it. Fragments and connections: nothing is complete, but neither can things be separated rigorously. The cultural activities of reading, imagining and seeing or making images, in other words, imaging, hang together. This thinking-together yielded the exhibition’s title Contaminaciones (‘Contaminations’). This title, a thought-image in itself, indicates the overlap, the fluid demarcations we are used to bringing to cultural domains, between words and images, still and moving images, material and mental images. The key word is ‘between’; what matters is not the categories, the ‘boxes’ we need to distinguish things in order to make sense of the otherwise chaotic world. Instead, the importance is in the thresholds, the spaces where the elements of these cultural areas meet: as events, activities, rather than things. The underlying thought is that cultural life consists of performative events: everything has impact for those who see, or otherwise participate in the process. These take place in space. This is why I began this book with the collaboration of the famous figure of Don Quijote, who combines these activities. While reading, he imagines, and figures in front of him, an image he cannot distinguish from reality. That is why he is considered mad. Madness: as it happens, this was the topic of the first of our fiction projects, but there, not emerging from a book the patients read, but from a reality that has wounded them so gravely that they cannot return to reality. In A Long History of Madness, reading has a different place than in Don Quijote. The earlier project was based on a work of literature and of

psycho­analysis at the same time; an instance of the as-yet-unnamed image-thinking. French analyst of trauma Françoise Davoine had written a ‘theoretical fiction’ to amend Freud’s conviction that psychotic patients cannot be helped with analysis because they are incapable of transference. This book is a literary tale, full of adventures, dialogues with famous scientists, exuberantly visual images and interactions with the mad. While mercifully shorter, it does have affiliations with Cervantes’ novel. It is no coincidence, then, that Davoine later wrote about Don Quijote.23 From Davoine’s book and conversations, we learnt about how to respect and believe the traumatised and thus help them to do what Cervantes wrote in the prologue to his last, posthumously published novel, Persiles y Sigismunda: ‘A time may come, perhaps, when I shall tie up this broken thread and say what I failed to here and what would have been fitting.’ This is precisely what Davoine has found as the entrance into a psychoanalysis of the traumatised: to repair the broken social bond and thus bring them back to a reality in which they can exist in interaction with others. This thought-image resulting from Davoine’s image-thinking is in constant movement, the process of working in this revised psychoanalytic method. It also sums up the content of the inserted novella in Don Quijote, which is close to Cervantes’s own experience as a captive slave in Algiers. The added element is the romance, the fantasy, the possibility for a different future. No wonder he made his primary hero out to be mad with irrealism. But this is also a connection, or ‘contamination’, between fiction and reality, in which fiction has curative potential, able to overcome the wounds reality has caused. The second video project from which we exhibited fragments in Contaminaciones was a response to Flaubert’s masterpiece, Madame Bovary. In this novel, from 1856, he prophetically staged what Marx would come up with in theory – economic exploitation – and Freud 23  The earlier film was based on Davoine (2014 [1998]). Davoine played her own character, and was also present on set as a supervisor to avoid over-acting and the resulting caricature. Moreover, she supervised the historical, autobiographical parts. On the spatiality of thought, see Grootenboer (2020, 75–109).

would bring up decades later – the allegedly enigmatic desires of women, easily diagnosed as hysteria. But it took the 150 years until 2007 before Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz theorised the intricate intertwinement of the two in what she felicitously terms ‘emotional capitalism’. Flaubert had already invented this syndrome, that is still rampant today, all over the world. It is another form of madness – one produced by unfulfilled desires. In Madame B, we worked the mid-nineteenth-century novel into both an update for today, and a sense of continuity. This work is not an adaptation of but a response to the novel, as well as a new imaging of it. It seems no coincidence that Emma, too, goes slightly off the rails by reading too much (Figure 1.5).24 The third project is historical as well as fictional – again, based on reading, imagining and imaging, but in different proportions. It is both a rehabilitation of the alleged master of rationalism, René Descartes, today maligned and ‘surpassed’, and an elaboration of his friendship

Figure 1.5  Emma reading. Photo: Thijs Vissia. 24  On this project as an example of a problem in adaptation studies, see my article from 2017c. Thomas Leitch published an incisive critique of adaptation norms (2003).

Figure 1.6  Is he hyper-rational or mad? Photo: Przemo Wojciechowski.

with Queen Kristina of Sweden at whose court he died. Through scenes from these two famous people’s lives, it is an inquiry into the connect­ ions between madness and reason, now through probing a figure who is historical, and passes for a hyper-rational person (Figure 1.6). Far from being the advocate of the dualism that we so eagerly claim we have moved beyond, Descartes struggled all his life with the Catholic dogma that separates body from soul. The title Reasonable Doubt merges the initials of his name with what is for me the key to his philosophy. He fits in these theoretical fictions that elaborate on madness, being mad enough, in his typical combination of paranoia and megalomania, which he shared with Kristina, as both suffering from an ‘abandonment complex’. This is the incapacity for love caused by early-childhood affective loss. Among the many fictitious elements is a meeting with the young Baruch Spinoza. This never happened, as far as we know, but it could have happened; they both lived in Amsterdam and shared an interest in lenses. The exhibition in Murcia was not organised according to these three projects, however, but picked up fragments from each that

together ‘theorised’ the respective psychic issues, or forms of ‘madness’. Here, the materiality, the spatiality, came in again, to contribute to the image-thinking. If I propose a quick walking tour through this exhibition, it is to include curating in the image-thinking endeavour. This exhibition took place in an art centre, the Centro Párraga. Divided into three open spaces – distinct but not separated – it proposed, first, the meaningfulness of deploying the imagination as a help-maid or ‘squire’ of history. In that section, four sequences pushed further the attempts to know, demonstrating that the imagination is an integral part of knowledge. The first sequence showed the point of deploying the imagination to grasp a sense of history. The following three were concrete in their elaboration of particular ways of doing just that. ‘Learning through art’ shows how Emma and her art teacher – played by Françoise Davoine – visit a gallery of Sol LeWitt wall drawings, where the abstract nature of the art opens up the possibility of seeing new forms, as an enactment of Deleuze’s view of abstraction. Meanwhile, Kristina – played by the same actress, Marja Skaffari – falls in her own way for a kind of emotional capitalism when, walking through her affectively empty palace, she attempts to ‘own’ it more profoundly. Reading a Shakespeare sonnet makes her aware of the emotional poverty that prevents her from loving. When Descartes, played by Thomas Germaine, visits a museum with a friend, he tries to understand rationally the connections between facial expressions and inner emotions. But his friend fails to see it, and Descartes accepts the ambiguities. Doubt is more reasonable than certainty. In the final fragments, the mixture of influences on the life of the great thinker becomes visible. From his sister who teaches the orphaned little boy and wakes him with her tentative harp music, to an adolescent musician and singer who feeds his interest in music, botany with his caring valet in his garden, lonely walks in the dunes where he imagines what the inside of stones looks like, a butcher’s shop where he examines the eye from behind: the motor is curiosity, which leads to imagining and imaging. The sequence also contains an imaging of the two dreams Descartes had in his early days when searching for a direction, and which he has

described – although our dream expert Sigmund Freud thought Descartes had made them up. No matter; the point is that nowhere in his life’s search for knowledge can the imagination remain absent. The second space was devoted to emotions, and the possibility that, getting out of hand, they can lead to madness. With that term we avoid diagnostic specifications that, as we have learnt from Davoine, inevit­ ably entail prognosis and treatment, pharmaceutical and often institutionalising. Strong emotions can cut the social bonds, and the resulting isolation is what makes people mad. The first fragment concerns strong anger, bordering on fury, as one example of such a devastatingly forceful emotion. But rather than coming up with a clas­ s­ification of emotions that can make one mad – precisely the kind of ‘boxes’ we want to sidestep – the space presented different relationships between emotions and potential madness. Paranoid dreams, the incapacity of communicating, social influences and politics are among the roads that can lead to madness. In this second space, also, one fragment showed Descartes in psychoanalysis – an anachronism. Or is it? The theoretical fiction, here, seeks to make the point that with his concept of the subject, Descartes has made the invention of psychoanalysis, which came so much later, a distinct possibility. In a later scene, a fictional posthumous meeting between Kristina and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, the conversation brings this up and mentions his empathetic attitude to the princess’s trauma, which actually did help her – and this is historically documented. So, he even acted as an analyst, in his friendship by correspondence with Elisabeth. But in the fragment, in order to make this suggestion plausible, I staged Descartes as a patient in analysis. He hesitantly mentions some of his issues, including his angry departure when the analyst makes an innuendo of homosexual interest.25 25  In a study on the genealogy of psychoanalysis, Michel Henry devotes his first chapter to Descartes (2015). Henry’s special attention to Descartes’ writing about the senses has inspired the scene, in the fragment on curiosity, where his sister Jeanne teaches him playfully about sense perception. Another relevant study is Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu’s 2012 book. The possibility of homosexual interest is documented, but not enough to make a strong case. Neither did I want to entirely ignore it, as so many do.

The third space concerned fragments of desire: desires developing, desires frustrated, and the subsequent emotional capitalism that becomes the fall-back option for the frustrated. Here, my theoretical argument was that emotional capitalism thrives when people are trained in expecting what cannot exist: permanent excitement – a contradiction in terms. This contradiction was what we needed to ‘image’. Over against this impossible desire we have created the visual imaging of the rhythm of love. The fragment was taken from the final affair in Emma’s life. In two successive instalments of Emma’s weekly rendezvous at a sordid hotel, she goes at the breakneck speed of cinematic imaging from veryexcited to already-bored. The fragment ends when the lover refuses to steal money for her when her overspending, encouraged by the capitalist money-monger, has ruined her. In the sequence on dissatisfied desires, we back-projected the attractions that produce this, the most widespread social syndrome, to the early-modern days of Descartes. His ambitions, his desire for a majestic dwelling, his longing for the mother who died when he was a baby, all join forces in his explorations, including into real estate. But nowhere is the mechanism that ruins people by creating this particular form of social madness more evident than in the Madame B project. The thread of madness, and the contamination among reading, imagining and imaging, come together in these three projects. The contamination is increased by the casting, where the main characters of these three projects are played by the same actors. Let me end this introduction by presenting two more fragments of discourse that both bring up, propositionally, and enact ‘imagingly’, the idea of image-thinking. There is no more telling formulation of it thinkable than psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s thought about thinking: ‘I often find that although I am working on an idea without knowing exactly what it is I think, I am engaged in thinking an idea struggling to have me think it’ (1987, 10). The modesty in the expression of uncertainty guarantees an openness of thought that is essential for image-thinking’s potential to release creativity. The verb form ‘I am engaged’ intimates that the writer is inside the process, and fully committed to it. The idea he is so eager to ‘get’ – but no, not really;

to ‘make’, ‘achieve’ or ‘think’ – collaborates with him, and if the idea is ‘struggling’, so is the thinker, who is still not certain (what) he knows. The statement demonstrates an equality between subject and object, which is lacking in the still-hierarchical concept of ‘artistic research’. The semi-shapelessness of the idea prepares it for shaping – for becoming shaped. And the fact that it struggles also attributes force to it. Cultural analyst Kaja Silverman, whose 1996 book has been deeply formative for my image-thinking as well, uses a strikingly similar expression in a later book when she writes: If, in trying to make sense of this strange account of unconscious memories, I am unable to avoid attributing to them the status of a subject, that is because subjectivity itself is in its most profound sense nothing other than a constellation of visual memories which is struggling to achieve a perceptual form. (2000, 89) Struggling: like the language of sparks, flashes and fire in the Denkbilder of the Frankfurters, with its visual, suddenly appearing performativity, the verb ‘to struggle’ is key to understanding the mutuality between subject and object in image-thinking – which is what these two thinkers do, even if they don’t use the term, and don’t concretely make art. In Silverman’s formulation, the relationality exceeds reciprocity. Her ‘object’ of thinking is multi-tentacled, as her noun ‘constellation’ intimates. The modesty and hesitation we saw in Bollas’s uncertainty recurs here in the negative qualifier ‘unable’. It is as if she is reluctant to grant the memories subjectivity. That she nevertheless acknowledges that she cannot avoid doing so is her way of recognising the power of the object. Both Bollas and Silverman stand on the threshold where thinking meets imaging. In the present book, I hope to demonstrate the relevance, the importance for art and society together, of the balancing act on that threshold.

Overview of Chapters The book consists of ten chapters: the present one as a beginning, a final one as an ending, and two parts of four chapters each in between. In the four chapters of the first part, ‘Keys to Intermediality’, I will bring key concepts and ideas from narrative theory, inevitably and easily transferred to film studies, to bear on video projects where experiments with these concepts nuance and challenge concepts usually taken for granted. In these chapters I discuss Space, Voice, Time and Fiction. In each, a theoretical part interrupts or ends the consideration of my video projects by placing the issues in more general discussions. The decision to put these theoretical musings in the middle or at the end of the analysis is a purposeful gesture of avoiding the usual hierarchy between a theoretical introduction and an ‘applied’ analysis. Instead, I bring the theoretical background in when enough has been made clear about the topic through the discussion of the artworks; that is, when the theoretical setting is called for. In the second part, I will probe more specific questions, all frequently at stake in, but not necessarily central for, literature and film, and all socially relevant: Trauma, Agency and Facing, Cultural Citizenship versus Identity, and Affect. So, whereas the first part widens the perspective, the second part demonstrates that considerations of specific problematics help us to further the in-depth thinking process of image-thinking. As an ending, I will argue for the importance of art as a form of cultural memory. In most chapters, works by other artists will be brought into conversation with my films. The chapter ‘Time-Space: Spatialising Film’ lays out both the difficulty and the need to bring literature and film into each other’s orbit. This chapter takes up the aspect of video installation that makes it most radically different from both literature and film in their traditional ways of functioning. The spatialisation of videos in installation and exhibition makes for a very different process, with a more active role for the viewer-participant. The linearity traditionally presupposed to regulate reading novels and watching films is suspended, if not entirely undermined. That linearity cannot be cancelled, since all acts of viewing also involve time. But the order in which these acts are performed is not

pre-determined by the artwork; it is left to the visitor-participant. A walking tour through the exhibition Landscapes of Madness held in the museum Aboa Vetus/Ars Nova in Turku, Finland, in 2011, will demonstrate how this spatialising works, and how it matters for the affective effectivity of the video work. In this chapter I look at some of the main embedded stories of A Long History of Madness. This video work integrates historical and fictional instances of madness, folly and carnival, with reports of case notes from the psychoanalyst of psychosis who wrote the book. It was first made as a feature film. Only when we were invited to exhibit installations from it in the museum in Finland, and subsequently elsewhere, did it dawn on us that it was indeed possible, even necessary in order to do justice to the people, stories and issues in the film, to not only cut it up into pieces for concentrated looking, but to envision it as a spatial work. This demonstrates how the thinking-throughmaking continues even after the product has been provisionally completed; showing that it is always in becoming. The middle part of the chapter presents the author of the book on which the film is based, as an exemplary image-thinker. The exhibition, designed through the spatial metaphor of a landscape, and which occupied the entire ground floor of the museum, worked so effectively in precisely those areas of thought that were most important to us, that, from that moment on, we decided to design the next film first as a series of installations, and edit a feature film out of the material only afterwards. This became the Madame B project. And when as a single director I made Reasonable Doubt, I did the same. In each case, the spatialising became a new ground for experimenting and thinking. In the next chapter, ‘Who Speaks the Film, in Documentaries? A Thousand and One Voices’, another central concept will be probed. Here, I turn to the very first film, a documentary that I made when my Arab neighbour in Paris got caught in police brutality and European unthinking. The film was meant as a testimony, but it turned out to be a most incredible source of learning. It addressed another key question in film and especially in documentary with its claim to truth: that of the speaker, the subject responsible for the version of reality that is

presented. The question ‘who speaks?’, obvious in narrative literature, asks for the narrator, who may be sincere or unreliable. This question is less obvious, yet is also of crucial importance in attempts to make documentaries according to my ethics of the genre: to do it with, rather than about people. This complicates the assumption of authenticity and truthfulness, another frequently presupposed given. The question becomes even more relevant when the people, whom I consider interlocutors rather than ‘subjects’, come from a culture different from that of the filmmaker. This cultural difference entails the need to reflect on, and deal with, the ethical as well as the epistemological aspect of a genre that easily becomes intrusive, manipulative, exoticising and voyeuristic; disempowering. In Mille et un jours, the question of ‘voice’ becomes acute when, first of all, many different people, with diverging opinions about one another and about the central event, an unjustified police intervention, each get to say their piece. The fourth chapter, ‘Multi-Tentacled Time: Contemporaneity, Hetero­ chrony, Anachronism for Pre-posterous History’, analyses time in its multiplicity. This is also a central concern both in narrative theory and in film. In my academic work I have a long-standing, controversial reputation as someone who does not take chronology for granted. First, after publishing Reading ‘Rembrandt’ (1991) I was blamed for being ahistorical, which, although not true, was a stimulating incentive to think harder about the issue of historical time. That led to my book Quoting Caravaggio (1999), in which I addressed that critique, and developed a new sense of history in relation to time. But it was when, already immersed in filmmaking, I was working with Hernández Navarro on a large collective video exhibition devoted to the connections between the movement of images and the movement of people – in other words, video and migration (not on migration) – that my thinking about temporality took another turn. 2MOVE (the exhibition) was shown in four countries, with, in each, a local artist added. I think the experience of time through two of the video works from that exhibition. The last concept in the chapter’s title is presented through a theoretical interlude, and is also probed through my latest, 2020 short ‘essay film’ It’s About Time! This film, the title of

which is as ambiguous as the concept of ‘pre-posterous history’, addresses the world’s self-destructive impulse, through the voice of Christa Wolf’s character Cassandra, the prophet of doom who will never be believed. There is a poignant irony in the contemporaneity of the making of that film: I made it in Poland exactly one week before the coronavirus reached its pandemic crisis. In this chapter I discuss the different issues of time that, in narrative theory, are usually divided into order, rhythm and duration. I complicate that tripartite theory by adding the experiential aspect (heterochrony) and the categories of the historical disciplines. The fourth theoretical issue of central importance in narratives in both media is fiction: fiction and/in/with reality. This also weaves together the inseverable connection between documentary and fiction, the two cinematic genres I have worked in. I argue that these are aspects of all narratives, rather than genres or grounds for truth claims. I go back and forth between two films, whose primary genres are fiction for the one and documentary for the other, and demonstrate how that distinction falls away under the impact of the audio-visual medium. That dissolving of the genre distinction then also comes to impact on the other medium. The theoretical interlude concerns conceptions of fiction that have ruled literary criticism. The two cases in this chapter are the fiction, or ‘docu-drama’, on the historical figures of René Descartes and Queen Kristina of Sweden, on the one hand, and a documentary about a small child, on the other. They both remain ambiguous, and speak to each other in the way they each call on the imagination. The former film, a fiction on historical figures, holds fast to the historical documentation that makes the appeal for a revision of our commonplace view of the French philosopher plausible. The latter, which cannot be untrue since it is made in the documentary mode, shows the use of the imagination to grasp a thicker view of reality. The little girl liberates us from such constraints as dogmatic historicity. After these four chapters that probe concepts of narrative that are both obvious and problematic, the second part delves into more specific issues. There are particular subjects at stake in both media, which bear on ethical, epistemological and visualising problems. The difficulties pertain to the problems of showing what is fundamentally an inner

matter. And yet, due to the social-political urgency to make those issues discussable, precisely because of that complication, the medium of the moving image and its installations are indispensable. I begin this part, ‘Special Issues, Special Pleading’, with a tenacious problem of representation. Wittgenstein’s famous ending of the Tractatus, ‘of what one cannot speak, one must keep silent’, mentioned above, is particularly relevant for the issue of trauma, although his context did not mention that. That affliction is generally considered unrepresent­ able, and also poses the problem of modesty versus voyeurism that Adorno put on the table in ‘After Auschwitz’. Both philosophers broached a problem of ethical and epistemological delicacy. Both later retracted, or modified, their cautionary severity. Wittgenstein, who wrote in the very different context of philosophy of language, added that one can still show what cannot be spoken, which is useful on the condition of taking Adorno’s warning into account. For showing can also lead to voyeurism. Adorno had second thoughts about prohibiting the express­ion of the horror suffered by the traumatised, which would compel censoring their self-expression, and thereby depriving them of their hard-won agency. The combined issue of both the impossibility and the need for attention to the horrors that cause trauma is at stake in Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, and in A Long History of Madness (2011–13), which is the most typical ‘theoretical fiction’ of my video work, central to Chapter 2. From A Long History of Madness we can conclude, in dialogue with Freud, that his opinion that trauma cannot be helped through psychoanalysis because psychotic patients are incapable of trans­ ference, does not relieve the society whose violence caused the trauma from the obligation to repair what it had destroyed. This project imposes the conclusion that trauma must be dealt with in committed art, even if, or precisely because, it cannot be represented. The issue of agency is taken up again, now in more detail, with the installation filmed between 2006 and 2010, titled Nothing is Missing. Central is the question of facing, which determined the project in its aesthetic and social thrust. This installation concerns a group of people who are distressingly absent in academic libraries: the mothers of those people we talk so much about, and so often despise or envy – migrants.

The migrants live among us, but their mothers, mostly, have stayed behind, missing the child they had raised. Some of them don’t even know if they will ever see the child again. My primary goal in this project was to make these invisible people visible and audible. I attempted to create with and for them the agency they don’t have. This project activates the verb ‘facing’ in its three senses at once: to face, literally, to look someone in the face; to witness how they face it, in the sense of looking it, their loss, in the face; and to make contact, across the gap migration has dug. This work exists only as an installation, and in this sense, its form has something in common with Don Quijote. It was designed to make visitors feel they are guests in a private setting, whereas the Don Quijote project rather lets its viewers-participants loose in a busy city centre, a forest, and other outside spaces. The films of Nothing is Missing have been made to enhance and maximise the agency of the mothers, who are ordinarily quite disempowered. The special issue discussed in Chapter 8 links back to Chapter 3. As participants in culture, and interested in art and thinking, ‘we’ – let’s say, the readers of this book, and many others – have developed attitudes of interest and engagement, responsiveness and responsibility, towards the world around us as much as to the art it generates and shows. I call the result ‘cultural citizenship’. But that concept is much broader. The documentary Becoming Vera, where the main character is a three-year-old child of a triple cultural background, implicitly questions identity politics in its frequently rigid and essentialising effects. In Chapter 5 I discuss the productive deployment of fictionality this little girl demonstrates. In this chapter I look at other ways Vera is able to deflect essentialist attempts at boxing her in. Her tool of resistance is fiction indeed. Narrative, dance, song and image-thinking are among her skilful ways of defending herself against sometimes overbearing although well-meaning adults. The film’s title is to be taken in a strong sense, which mobilises the presence of Deleuze (1925–95): she is in permanent becoming, becomes herself, and comes into her own as a cultural citizen. In connection to the questions raised, especially concerning identity, two other documentaries are briefly discussed. These have a relevant history of

making. The film State of Suspension is a critique of cultural attitudes in contemporary Israel. It was made as a documentary, but it works very well as an installation piece. Installed across from State of Suspension, the film Separations, also a documentary, shows a Jewish family afflicted by a post-holocaust trauma. The two large screens facing each other do justice to the difficulty of dealing with cultural identities on an every­ day basis. The viewer is invited, not to take sides but to make the experience of the one film into a tool to bring a nuancing view onto the other. That, at least, is what it did to me in the process of imagethinking, during the months of editing, hence, of making the two films in parallel, and the thought-images they produce. Another special issue that gains relevance when we are confronted with cinematic image-thinking is affect. The ‘affective turn’, as academic fashion-speak would call it, is one of the tendencies that come and go as being ‘in’ or ‘hot’ for a while. But this one is not so easily dismissed when we immerse ourselves in what we study. The case of the Flaubert-based project offers the opportunity to reconsider both the fashionable use and the facile dismissal of ‘affect’ as an important tool for political thinking in cultural criticism. The concept of affect is examined in its conceptual meaning, but also in the way it helps or hinders detailed analysis of cultural texts. The affective charge will be especially explored in how the videos present the most political, as well as ‘pre-posterous’ (anachronistic) bond between Flaubert’s time and ours: ‘emotional capitalism’. Madame B foregrounds affect in its aesthetic. The role of ‘beauty’ – in landscapes as well as figures – is made prominent in the cinematography, in order to raise the question of the affective charge of the combination with sadness, frustration and despair. The temporality discussed in Chapter 5 returns with a vengeance. My short documentary film Doris Salcedo: Palimpsesto is here only taken as documentation of an artwork that is strongly affect-based, but hard to describe and practically impossible to show in photographs. In this case, image-thinking is indispensable. Memory is the loud-and-clear conclusion. As different from the concept of affect, that of memory fortunately refuses to be dismissed. This is partly due to the enduring importance of memory in thought about

culture. Moreover, it harbours the issue of agency. I recall earlier thoughts about memory as an (active) act, as happening in the present, and as both subjective and collective. And Silverman’s formulation of subjectivity as a constellation of memory images foregrounds the importance of memory for culture. But we know that memory is also liable to error, abuse and repression. Two films already discussed in earlier chapters return briefly in the concluding chapter to inflect the focus on memory in order to discuss its failures. In A Long History of Madness, the repression of real occurrences leads to inattention to traumatised people, whose suffering is ‘resolved’ by hospitalisation and ‘pharmaceuticalisation’, rather than by active acts of cultural memory that could help. In Reasonable Doubt we revisit moments of madness of the master of rational thought, in order to rehabilitate him and his legacy. In this final chapter I consider where acts of memory either remain unperformed, or misfire. This leads to some thoughts about the Humanities and its mission of not only preserving but understanding and revitalising what we consider the most important elements of culture. As a counterpart to the opening chapter, I will end by bringing together the different aspects of imagethinking as, specifically, thinking in film. The preposition ‘in’, here, is analogous to its use in the expression ‘thinking in a foreign language’. Reasonable Doubt’s recasting of a great philosopher as an affectdeprived, emotionally overwrought person is also the only fiction film where the subject is a real historical figure. This facilitates a short rehearsal of the relationship, in film, of documentary and fiction and of history and fiction. I do this while remaining loyal to the thrust of the book as a whole: to demonstrate the mutual aesthetic and intellectual nourishment to be had in the collective practice of image-thinking.26 26  Just as I was getting ready to send this book off to the publisher, I received a special issue of a Polish art history journal, Artium Quaestiones, from the University of Poznań, edited by Filip Lipiński, titled The Cinematic Turn in Art Practice and Theory. The opening article, by Lipiński, was heartwarming for me in its deep understanding of my pursuit of the integration of video art and academic reflection. Titled ‘Cinematic Art (History) and Mieke Bal’s Thinking in Film’, it is a great support of the endeavour laid out in the present book.

2. Time-Space: Spatialising Film A Long History of Madness Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Mad Meg

Introduction: Beginning Becomes Entrance This chapter concerns the condition of the viewer or visitor of exhibitions who is, literally, ‘placed’. Time yields its priority to space. The timebased art of cinema is also inevitably space-bound. In the project discussed here, the spatialisation of film is at stake in two different ways. On the one hand, the installation form makes film a spatial art. This will be demonstrated in a reflection on installation, compared to theatre film. On the other hand, once we are alerted to that spatial aspect and the transformation it makes for the viewer, we become sensitised to the spatial aspects of and in the films themselves. The places where the films are set become activated through that reflection. They end up being almost characters in their own right. Moreover, such a space becomes a miniature version of the social world.

The central image-thought work is a film I have made with British artist Michelle Williams Gamaker, A Long History of Madness (abbreviated as ALHoM, from 2011). This was the first fiction film we made, started in 2009. We decided to make ALHoM for a variety of motivations; primarily to get closer to ourselves. Having made many documentaries on issues of migration and identity, we felt the issues that came up in those did not leave us aloof. ALHoM concerns something that is, in fact, very ‘popular’: madness. It stages, performs, enacts and critiques (ideas about) madness and its cultural history. Given that subject, making a documentary was impossible, ethically as well as epistemologically, since the ‘mad’ cannot give informed consent. This was the reason we shifted to fiction. But there was also an occasion, something that made this shift plausible. This was the experience of making, in 2008, the documentary Becoming Vera. This film, the last documentary I made with Michelle, triggered our thinking about the thought-value of fiction. Although I made three more documentaries after this one, Vera stuck in my mind, admonishing me to believe more in the creative and socially productive yield of fiction. That film follows a little girl of a triply mixed heritage, from her third to her fourth birthdays. Especially during editing, Michelle and I were impressed by the strong little girl who managed to resist cultural pressure, with well-meaning people attempting to impose a sense of identity on her. She resisted this by appealing to fairy tales and other fictional expressions. The fictional figures became her buddies, her ‘comrades in arms’, to use the etymological translation of the word ‘therapist’ as Françoise Davoine explains it, to goodhumouredly refuse that imposition. Vera, who at moments during the filming almost took over the directing of it, made us see how fiction can be a useful strategy. Impressed by this strong, creative and smart person, we felt that we, too, ought to be able to use fiction for socially relevant image-thinking. Learning from a three-year-old: a great lesson in learning itself. And the topic of madness came up as an important social issue within our own environment. The frequent occurrence of madness in everyday culture, its long historical lineage, and the need to be delicate in taking

the subject on, all made it a fruitful subject for image-thinking. Based on the 1998 book Mère Folle by Davoine (Mother Folly, 2014), but deviating from its source in aspects that have to do with imaging and image-thinking, the two-hour-long film and the nineteen-channel installation derived from it, stage and question the practice of the psychoanalytic treatment of people diagnosed as ‘psychotic’. We indicate them as ‘mad’ to avoid diagnostic discourse as well as for solidarity, since everyone at one time or another can turn ‘mad’. In particular, the ambiguity of the word in English, where it means both crazy and angry, helps to ‘normalise’ madness. At the heart of the project is the intellectual question of whether and how psychosis can be successfully treated analytically, without recourse to drugs and confinement in hospitals. The project is therefore also deeply interdisciplinary – including the inter-ship between theory, imaging and social practice.1 This film and the installations constitute the beginning of the reflections that led to the present book. A first issue is the status of images on a par with words, and the many ways in which images move. In our film projects, Michelle and I have been interested from the beginning in how images engage, that is, help articulate and embody thought. Images can perform an equivalent of speech acts; they can respond (‘speak back’) to the look cast onto them, and they can entice viewers to theorise. In that sense, they are performative. They do something; they act. Michelle’s 2011 PhD thesis was entirely devoted to this, making the case for a radically social conception of art. In my own academic work, I used to call such ‘speaking images’, which speak back, resist (parts of) my interpretation of them, and make me think, ‘theoretical objects’, in line with Hubert Damisch. The current chapter focuses on the spatialising aspect of his view.2 1  Recently, W. J. T. Mitchell came up with the beautiful term ‘mental traveler’ (2020). 2  Damisch never published a separate article on his concept of ‘theoretical object’. Only an interview with Bois et al. (1998) articulates it. In my documentary about Damisch, from 2011, Hubert Damisch: Thinking Aloud, he reasons along the lines of this concept, without explicitly naming it. For more on the concept, see my 2010 book, where I discuss it in relation to ‘case study’ (3–9).

When I began to supplement my research into contemporary (especially migratory) culture with filmmaking, I wanted to understand from the inside how images activate thinking, and how thought takes shape. I considered filmmaking as itself a form of research, and the mutuality between theory and practice demands the return in reflection after, but primarily through the films I make. This writing is a form of thinking that integrates my own practice of image-making as itself a form of thinking, and reflecting on what I have made as a continuation of the making, hence, the thinking. The concept of images as performative underlies it; and through it, the relationship between the films and the intellectual reflection remains dialogic, reciprocal and becoming – never finished. I look back at my attempts to account for that back-­and-forth process of thinking: intellectually, visually, socially, and back again. Specifically, in this chapter I address the issue of what happens when a film, from a timebased performance one watches in a dark theatre, is transformed into an exhibition. I ground these reflections in the experience we have been involved in, when an exhibition based on our film was installed, first in Turku, Finland, opening on 20 October 2011, and later in other spaces.3 Political Spacetime: Film in the Gallery The transformation from ‘theatre film’ – a long projection, in this case of two hours, in a darkened theatre with seats frontal to the screen – into ‘gallery film’ – disposed in a semi-dark art setting where visitors walk around and determine their own pace and space – entails important differences. These are best considered as ‘spatialising film’. In her discussion of the video installations of Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Kari Yli-Annala wrote about the effect of installation: As in any film screening situation, the video installation fuses the physical time 3  There was a total of nine exhibitions in 2011–12, in different venues, countries and even continents. See http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/exhibitions/, from Saying It to Landscapes of Madness. For a review of my image-making project with special focus on space, see Hernández Navarro (2020a, 2020b).

and space occupied by the viewer with the fictive time and space of the installation. In a gallery space, however, I am more acutely conscious of my environment and the people around me; I am able to move around and thus to respond more spontaneously to what is happening around me than if I were viewing a film in a cinema. (2002, 223) As this passage suggests, the primary distinction of installation is the concrete and material space in which it is presented, in which the images move and the viewer can move. Films in this genre, however, are not merely films made for exhibition in spaces designated for art audiences – they are not opposed to theatre films, which are supposedly made for larger audiences. More fundamentally, gallery films use cinematic techniques and aesthetics to displace the primary feature of cinema, its temporality, and inflect it into a spatial feature.4 This, at least, is what Lev Manovich suggests when he proposes that multi-screen works function as ‘spatial montage’ (2001, 325). His is an attractive proposition, as it immediately evokes not only the spatial arrangement in the gallery but also the multiple implications of the concept of montage itself – a case of ‘thinking in film’, a subgenre of image-thinking. In the gallery, space is the environment, the medium within, or on which, the film ‘grows’ its specific effects. The gallery space is where visitors immerse themselves, becoming participants. Montage is, indeed, a spatial form: the juxtaposition of fragments that, together, form a new whole, but between which gaps remain, even if filmmakers do try to make those invisible. Moreover, in multiple-screen installations, the montage between clips within each screen is overdetermined by a montage between screens. Whereas the former montage 4  With the term ‘gallery film’ and the placement of our exhibition in a museum, we also participate willy-nilly in what is called ‘high culture’. For a wide range of views, see Gripsrud (2001, 1995), and for the relation to media, Gripsrud (2002).

is mostly made invisible by seamless edits, the latter is meant to be seen. The same holds for the juxtaposition and sequential succession of video pieces in an exhibition. One must make astute use of the potential of this double montage for a film-based exhibition to work. The exhibition situation allows the curator to develop what we can call a semiotics of lateral montage. This lateral montage produces a foregrounded ‘installation-ness’ that, through its affective operation, emphasises the political potential of the contact space that installation – and hence also exhibition – is.5 Manovich’s proposal should not be mistaken for the idea that the moving image can shed its fundamental temporality. Such an interpretation would rest on an unwarranted binary opposition. Time and space, instead of being opposed, are inseparable; they are two facets, or dimensions, of the same process: movement. We only distinguish them to talk about either one of these aspects, emphasising or foregrounding them depending on our project. Throughout this book, I argue that deploying this inseparability is the primary contribution of the gallery film and its forms of installation to the domain of the political. This chapter, then, does not oppose or even distinguish space from time, but only concentrates its focus on the indispensable spatiality of any showing of artworks, still or moving, in a public space such as a museum, gallery or otherwise.6 In Turku, we sought to maximise this political potential – not as party politics, partisanship or obedience to governmental measures but of enticing people to think, resist, disagree or otherwise exercise their capacity to think and – who knows? – change their views. The exhibition offered visitors experiences they do not ordinarily have, neither in the 5  Manovich proposes this in the different context of simultaneous computer files in experimental narratives. Thinking in Film is the title of my book on the installation works by Ahtila (2013a); I borrowed that title from an interview by Iles with Ahtila (2003). In that book, I developed the specific place of affect in gallery films. I took the latter term from Fowler (2004). For the deictic aspect of gallery films, see Butler (2010). 6  I base my concept of ‘the political’ on Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between (institutional) politics and the (social) political (2005). I discussed the issue of the political in and of art most extensively in the introduction to my 2010 book on the work of Doris Salcedo.

Figure 2.1  Crossroads in landscapes of madness. Photo: Jari Nieminen.

cinema nor in the museum. In a combination of shock, pleasure, strangeness and beauty, they were invited to make a journey through ‘madness’ – something most of us know, and none of us has an easy time dealing with. The preposition ‘through’ entails both a meandering through the relatively small spaces of the museum, and the activity of making choices. Where watching one film is already disturbed by the sound or the shimmering light of another, the activity of viewing requires a more active, performative attitude – a choice-making that allows pace and direction to remain the visitor’s decision. When we reflected on how to spatialise the time-based medium of film, we realised we had already started doing this within the film. But whereas the film takes two hours, the ‘landscapes of madness’, as we titled the exhibition, constitute an aesthetic voyage of discovery that can take any length of time and itinerary, according to visitors’ interest and willingness to engage (Figure 2.1).7 7  The exhibition, curated by Mia Hannula, occupied the ground floor of the museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku.

Social Relevance: Madness to Learn From The title of the exhibition was Landscapes of Madness. This section’s subtitle alludes to the recently posthumously published seminars of Jean-Max Gaudillière, edited by Françoise Davoine as The Jean-Max Gaudillière Seminars (2021); in French published as Leçons de la folie (Lessons from Madness). An exhibition about ‘madness’: avoiding the clinical terms that pin people down not only to a diagnosis but also to a course of treatment, we staged forms of madness that are deeply affecting, hilariously funny and unexpected sources of wisdom; another great lesson in learning. Thus, we engaged the integrated aspects of affect, humour and knowledge. They have in common that they stage the social nature of madness. This social aspect appears both in what generates madness – the violence and its perverse assaults on subjects who produce it as a defence mechanism – and in the equally violent refusal of others to engage with mad people on an equal footing. The former aspect gives society as a whole responsibility for it; the latter speaks directly to us all. It is to these forms of violence that our project tries to offer an imaginable, thinkable alternative. We do not put ourselves in the place of the specialised and trained therapist, but only try to deploy creativity to aid the process of thinking about these difficult issues.8 An exhibition titled ‘landscapes’: like madness, landscapes are social constructs with a history. It is in landscapes that wars are fought, that people go hungry, and destruction is wrought. Importantly, the exhibition not only presented landscapes in the videos, but also created landscapes in the galleries. This is an element of scenography. In their 2017 book Scenography Expanded, in which they theorise scenography beyond the limits of theatre and the theatre building, editors Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer distinguish and discuss three key characteristics of expanded scenography: materiality, relationality and 8  In addition to Davoine’s book mentioned above, for the psychoanalytic argument we rely on Davoine (1992, 2008), Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) and Montoya Hernández (2006) – a book that gave us our exhibition title.

Figure 2.2  Lessons from madness. Photo: Jari Nieminen.

affectivity. All three are crucial for our exhibition. The loose itinerary was open to comings and returns, circular movements, and individualised paces. In this respect, it constituted a spacetime not unlike that of madness itself. Or, to reverse this simile: we can learn from madness – its structural properties, which include a fundamentally anachronistic experience of time, or ‘heterochrony’ – to understand the complexities of culture more in general. Landscapes of Madness consisted of video installations through which the idea of ‘madness’ was given a variety of interpretations, in turn leading to different shapes, moods and scenarios. Madness is thus generative of a number of c­ ultural modes, and produces knowledge that includes affective transmission (Figure 2.2).9 9  On anachronism as a productive concept, see my book from 1999. On ‘heterochrony’, see Chapter 4 below. As mentioned, there have been more exhibitions and installations based on this project. See http:​/​​/​w ww.miekebal.org​/​a rtworks​/​e xhibitions​/​ (from Saying It to Islands of Madness; and http:​/​​/​w ww.miekebal.org ​/​ artworks​/​i nstallations​/​t he-mere-folle-project​/​ for infor ­m ation, explanation and photographs.

The exhibition is an experiment in audio-visual storytelling in multiplicity. Distinct from cinema, in the installation the ‘secondperson’, the visitor-participant, is in charge of making the stories through their own itinerary and combination of situations, stories, portraits and scenes on view. The exhibition consisted mainly of installations – settings where people engage with artworks, in space and through time. These were supplemented with photographs, costumes and props. As an exhibition of installations, Landscapes of Madness attempted to elude rigid categories in art presentation. Meaning is not offered to the audience simply to be consumed, but is created by and within each visitor-participant. Landscapes of Madness sought to facilitate this process for each of them. ‘Spatialising’ means that visitors wander through the spaces, encountering forms of madness – some tragic, some humorous; some play-acted and some ‘really mad’. This raises questions that pertain to the inquiries in the cultural disciplines. For example, it raises – and stages – questions concerning cinema and theatre, with the different styles of acting these distinct media require. It raises questions of cultural history, where ‘madness’ cannot be construed as a transcultural constant. And in view of an understanding of the political of this cultural embedding, it asks: are these people mad, do they play the fool, or am I too rigid to allow them to be sane; and what does the answer to that question say about me? Visitors compose their own narratives by choosing itineraries and pace. The characters staged – some ‘mad’, some ‘fools’, some ‘normal’ or ‘sane’ – unravel their life stories in such a way that they keep visitors fascinated long enough to experience the encounter. Hence, it is no longer the duration of the videos that determines the experience of art but the pace, choices, coordination and combination, the spatial behaviour and the degree of interest that sets the clock. This ‘learning from madness’ also possesses several aesthetic features, and as set in an art museum, presupposes an aesthetic framing. What can that mean, when the primary subject is someone usually subjected to isolation and contempt? Our concept included turning a medium that is intrinsically a temporal one into a sculptural work. It is also

premised on something uneasily called ‘beauty’ in the encounter with madness. To be represented with dignity not in spite of but in their madness, the patients cannot be voyeuristically documented nor caricatured. Similarly, the medieval Fools are not presented as ‘historically correct’ but as people whose temporality clashes with our time. And instead of offering beauty as aesthetic enjoyment for its own sake, we deploy beauty as a tool to make the proposition concrete that madness, in all its forms, is not only a part of social life, but also has enjoyable things to offer – this without underestimating the real suffer­ ing it entails, for the mad person as well as their environment. I consider aesthetics as sensorial engagement, and thus as an indispensable complement to or even integral element of the political. Various aspects increase audience engagement. The videos result from intense group acting, with only a few professional actors. Actors had relatively free rein with the script, and sometimes this yielded exceptionally powerful moments. The images of beautiful landscapes in Spain, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Finland, and of compelling interiors, add to this ‘beauty-effect’. Similarly, the music, sometimes staged within the scenes, exerts a strong appeal. The music is of crucial importance for this project. It is partly documentary, recorded during the medieval festival in Turku and the carnival in Basel, both in 2009. It is partly performed by the amateur actors, such as two young boys who, as ‘young fools’, play the violin while jumping through the garden. And most of it was composed especially for the film by percussionist and composer Leticia Bal, who is specialised in ‘world music’. In the installation ‘Sissi’s Treatment’, the music was composed and electronically performed by American composer John Morton. One video is devoted explicitly to a conversation on the analogy between music and psychoanalytic practice, between Françoise Davoine and harpsicord restorer Claude Mercier. The overall goal of this exhibition was to make it attractive for participants to overcome, undermine or deconstruct ‘the last frontier’: the difficulty of having social relations with people considered mad. Madness traverses all social, ethnic, age and gender groups. The artistic experience of the encounters is offered as a contribution to overcoming this boundary in

the social domain. In this respect, the project is a natural continuation of our long-term project of documenting migratory culture. This is not the culture of migrants but the culture we share with migrants; a culture in which migration is generalised and must be considered normal. Abolishing the last frontier, then, is the larger social goal to which our project seeks to contribute.10 Forms of Madness Spatialising the film can be done, in the first place, through pluralising and representing not madness as such but a great variety of forms of it – some historical, some contemporary; some funny, some tragic; but all in different ways engaging. This requires a story. The form of narrative facilitates the movement through time and space as the setting for possible encounters. Let me now make all this more concrete through a description of some of the exhibition pieces in their juxtaposition (Figure 2.3). What happened for visitors who entered the museum, and how did they become participants? The ground floor of the museum consists of seven relatively small spaces – an ideal set-up for our project. Our strategy was to pluralise madness; to show it in so many forms that it becomes impossible to cast it out of our social orbit. Anyone will recognise some form of it, and minding the double meaning of that word, I suggest that recognition entails commitment. The subject was introduced in three ways: historically, geographically and personally. None of these offered direct access; none allowed distancing. Precisely because the political theatre of the sotties was a popular practice, the historical manifestations of madness in that medieval theatre of Fools cannot be fully accessed; the 10  The large, travelling group exhibition 2MOVE (2004–8), which I co​-​curated with Miguel A. Hernández Navarro, was devoted to the idea of migratory culture (Chapter 4). Hernández Navarro curated an exhibition of my videos in Murcia, Spain, in 2011, which carried the title The Last Frontier. Also in 2011, a large exhibition in St Petersburg, Russia, was devoted to a larger body of video work on this subject. See http:​/​​/​w ww.miekebal.org​/​artworks​/​exhibitions​/​towards​-​the​- ​other​/​ and http:​/​​/​ www.miekebal.org​/​artworks​/​exhibitions​/​la​-​ultima​-​f rontera​/​ for images and descriptions of these exhibitions. On sound and music in ALHoM, see Klumpen (2011).

Figure 2.3  Three different moments in a small space. Photo: Jari Nieminen.

written documents are scarce and unreliable. Hence, we did not create a historically correct image. Similarly, the landscapes did not yield positive knowledge of their past. Individuals always retained privacy. Instead, we connected the ‘live’ encounter of the Turku medieval festival with historical violence, hoping to make a tangible connection between ‘then’ and ‘now’ (Figure 2.4). Before entering our exhibition, visitors to other floors of the museum were confronted with an outof-place work. In a corner of the medieval ruins where a stairwell leads to the medieval part of the museum, we put a tilted monitor with an alternation of two types of fragments: pseudo-medieval scenes derived from the ‘sotties’, and documentation of that festival, of a contemporary historicising puppet show where a medieval damsel in distress is saved because the dragon about to eat her prefers to eat her rapist, so that she can produce more soldiers. Then, in the entrance gallery, a large flatscreen monitor with landscape images suggests violence without representing it. And before entering into the somewhat darkened spaces, the visitor encountered some photographic portraits of individuals who may be mad, or play at being mad, or let us project our

Figure 2.4  Middle Ages meet today. Medieval festival in Turku. Video still.

own ideas of madness upon them. If it is unclear which, we have reached our goal. After this triple first encounter, one could turn right or left. On the left side, on a large, wall-filling projection, documentary images of the historic carnival of Basle intersect with scenes where fools enter the

Figure 2.5  Musical nurse (Leticia Bal) calms down the mad. Video still.

garden of a mental hospital to wreak havoc in the peaceful but disturbingly eventless lives of the patients. This scene was set in the labyrinthine garden of the Maison Descartes in Amsterdam. The interaction between the two groups confronts the psychoanalyst who came to hold her office hours. The primary tool through which this polemical encounter is staged is sound, in a competition between noise and music. This competition, and the importance of sound it entails, is one element the film had added to the book. It is a self-reflective element of the medium. Sound is a fundamental element of cinema, as well as of social life. Noise belongs to the Fools and the mad; music is meant to calm them down with a structured version of their own sounds (Figure 2.5). The Basel images are documentary footage of a ‘real’ carnival in historical continuity with the medieval tradition of Folly. Moreover, the music, a combination of sharp flutes and drums, is a unique leftover of a medieval musical tradition. Because they are documentary images, with their masks and costumes – some of these quite violent, aggressive and scary – they offer fiction in reality. The hospital images, set in the courtyard, are, in contrast, staged as a fiction; yet, they broach topics of real importance for today’s social place of madness. Thus, in this projection, in a second self-reflective inquiry, the genres of cinema were turned upside down; documentary and fiction turned out to be both involved in becoming each other’s indispensable counterpoint. Next to this, on a cube-shaped monitor on a plinth that brings the images to eye level, an anonymous character, the Man, recites a poem to two children (Lena Verhoeff and August Voskuil) who are both in awe of him and doubt his sanity (Figure 2.6). This character of the Man recalls the medieval figure of Everyman, representing the Folly of the sane and the sanity of the Mad. The communication between the Man who reads his mad poem, ‘Madness comes in Three Halves’, and the children who are totally at ease with him, stands for an alternative social structure in relation to madness, or more generally, difference. As Everyman and madman both, participating in an encounter with children capable of engaging him in both his creativity and madness,

Figure 2.6  The Man (Richard Wank) reads his poem to the children. Video still.

he embodies the utopian possibility of overcoming the last frontier. The prominent participation of children constitutes a third addition the film makes compared to the book. From this point on, the exhibition initiated encounters with characters involved in a story; all are singular but share forms of madness and Folly, as well as sanity and wisdom. The first was a posthumous encounter with the patient Ariste (Fleur Sulmont), who had died of an overdose. Was it an accident, a suicide, and who is responsible for this horror? His death occasions a crisis for all concerned, first of all his treating analyst. Angry, the young man looks at us all from beyond the grave, projected on a floating screen and speaking through a sound shower that brought the merry music of the carnival to an abrupt halt when one entered the Ariste gallery. Red is the predominant colour – the red of violence, death and passion. In the film, the death of this young man sets the analyst on a course of travel, search and education – a picaresque form of a Bildungsroman. In the exhibition, the juxtaposition of this gallery with the next foregrounded the different forms of questioning binary oppositions: (moral) right and wrong, good and bad (treatment), (socially) productive or sterile relationship, (subsequent) life and death.

In a smaller image on a free-standing cube monitor, his peers and his analyst remember Ariste. His memory incites some to feelings of guilt, others to revolt, or to identifcation; they ask the establishment critical questions. Some evoke – in their madness, or in their wild wisdom? – the wars that have plagued Ariste’s family. But with his unexpected wisdom the dead man also stands in the tradition of Folly. Hence the nearby presence on a flat-screen monitor on the wall of two figures, Fools who act as a pair of siblings, but also, the one recalling Western culture’s Master Fool, Don Quijote (see Figure 2.3). They act out the sibling rivalry we all know so well, on top of a tank that intimates the presence of war and violence in proximity to such rivalry. The shadow of Cervantes’ character raises yet another question of cultural history. While Don Quijote may well be considered mad, and his author was certifiably traumatised, the integration of the tragic and the humorous in this figure liberates the different moods in theatre and allows an affective encounter that both made visitors uneasy and helped them to engage the sensorial space where laughter can merge with grief. The slight allusions to genres, figures and situations from canon­ ical as well as popular history also challenge the status of the images themselves in their cultural habitat. The diversification of forms of madness, thus, entails a probing of the status of images and the pos­ s­ibility to recognise as well as encounter novelty in the confrontations the exhibition staged. Image-thinking is at work again, precluding a separation between the two activities, imaging and thinking, as well as between their results, images and thoughts, both always provisional, in process. This leads to a further analysis. As an interlude, I now insert a brief discussion of the images in a (preposterous-) histor­ ical perspective in preparation for the continued stroll through the exhibition. Beginning In the beginning was the book; an example of image-thinking. At this juncture, let me stop and present, to those who don’t know her yet, the woman who constituted the inspiration for this film, opened up her

Figure 2.7 Françoise enacting Davoine in the scene ‘Office Hours’. Photo: Markus Karjalainen.

experiences in treating madness, and even played herself in the film: Françoise Davoine (Figure 2.7). She is the author of many books – some with Jean-Max Gaudillière. In her primary professional incarnation, she is a French psychoanalyst specialised in the analytical treatment of traumatised people. Her work in this area is world famous, not only due to its quality and creative approach but also because the world keeps producing so much trauma that its treatment continues to be urgently needed. And Davoine’s practice in this domain is impressively successful. This is especially remarkable if we consider Freud’s own conviction, first laid out in the Schreber case study, that the trauma-generated psychosis – ‘madness’ – cannot be analysed (1911). The key issue in this debate is the possibility of psychotic patients performing the necessary transference. Davoine’s success is due to her empathetic, respectful and, at the same time, down-to-earth approach, and of course, to her great theoretical mind. For she is not only an effective clinical psychoanalyst but also, as her many books and lectures demonstrate, a very strong theorist, both independent of any school and profoundly knowledgeable about many: Freud, Lacan, the British school, American approaches to psychoanalysis and Aboriginal modes of healing; as well as philosophy, history, classics and sociology, and historical and modern literature. She integrates the collective wisdom and knowledge of these varied sources and disciplines to develop and articulate, neither eclectically

nor with orthodoxy, her unique theory and practice of the psycho­ analytic treatment of the mad. Thanks to her open, equality- and empathy-based approach she demonstrates that the mad are capable of transference after all – on the condition of equality. But she is much more than a high-level scholar and clinical practitioner. Two more features are relevant here. Her ongoing seminar ‘Madness and Society’ at the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, which she has been teaching for four decades with Jean-Max Gaudillière until his passing in 2015, attracted a consistently large group of active participants, many also practising in Davoine’s vein. One of the scenes in the exhibition, set in a theatre, the ‘Trial Scene’, is filled with so-called extras who are mostly colleagues, participants in the seminar, and former patients of hers. The seminar’s popularity was due to the fact that, as a third element of her intellect­ual profile, she is also an extremely engaging teacher. This is partly related to the fact – a fourth of this author’s traits – that she is also a born storyteller. Whether it is about (anonymised) ‘cases’ or about events in her own life, about History or about small events, Davoine’s stories are moving, as riveting and as suspenseful as a first-rate murder mystery. She is deeply invested in understanding and responding to the way violence generates madness.11 The book on which our project was based demonstrates all four of these traits. All four are indispensable for achieving the book’s ambitious goal, which is to articulate a theory that takes psychoanalysis out of its orthodoxies and makes it what it was always meant to be: a truly social science. And it does so by way of argumentation: saying – demonstration: showing – and affective engagement: dialogic feeling. At once an explanation of a theoretical thesis and a development of a great number of documented case studies, a gripping story and a picture book – although no pictures are reproduced in it – a learned treatise and a humorous tale, her book can be read in different ways and for different ends. It bears many rereadings. One look at the opening page says it all: 11  On trauma-induced psychosis in relation to cultural analysis, see Caruth (1995); therein especially Kolk and Van der Hart. Caruth has also published a book of interviews that includes Davoine, and in which our film is also discussed (2015). See also Kolk (2014).

theoretical, narrative, humorous, tragic, the beginning grips readers, whatever their intellectual interests. The story is positioned in time: ‘All Saints’ Day was coming up.’ That makes ‘today’, the present of the story, the Day of the Dead. And indeed, the author has just learnt that one of her patients has died. This death sets the story as well as the first-person narrator’s crisis in motion. The narrator immediately begins her self-interrogation: ‘Was I a monster? Just before leaving home, I’d almost killed a clumsy insect – mechanically, without feeling – on the simple pretext it had no business being in my house.’ Between the huge event of the death of a patient and the automatic gesture of ‘almost’ killing an insect, Davoine establishes a similarity-in-difference that sets the tone for the book. The encounter with that insect, a bee, not coincidentally that mythical social insect, opens a barrage of associations that lead in a variety of directions. We traverse psychoanalytic theory, sociology, personal reflection on the use or ab-use of professional behaviour. We also go to classical Greek – for example, the meaning of ‘therapist’ as ‘buddy’, a key social function that, since the AIDS crisis, has gained in visibility. And all this is broached in a tone that meanders between playful and serious, while the profound and pertinent thoughts that announce the theoretical thrust are understandable, concrete and affectively appealing for everyone. Erasmus’s Folly is introduced – the backdrop for the book’s title – and the equality between the ‘I’ and the bee prefigures the theoretical position of equality between analyst and patient that is the foundation of the theoretical and clinical approach to psychoanalysis. All this on the first page. Given my own intellectual and creative engagement with the book, I limit myself to just a few of its narrative and verbal images, hoping to show these are not simply frivolous. Instead, they are the building blocks of its complex but limpidly exposed intellectual, theoretical and clinical point. Storybook This intricate and integrative mode of writing makes it impossible to distinguish the many levels on which this book operates, or performs. On my way to image-thinking, this became crucial to my understanding

of storytelling, in spite of the many years I had already studied narrative. The story goes like this. The narrator – let’s call her Françoise, to distinguish her from Davoine the author – has just learnt of the death by overdose of one of her psychotic patients. Discouraged and guiltridden, she enters a deep crisis. This crisis is not an explicit topic as much as it is the motor of the narrative. She is tempted to abandon her job at the psychiatric hospital. While pondering this decision in the hospital’s courtyard, she takes a book on the Middle Ages out of her bag. Then, the enigmatic figure of Mother Folly (Murielle-Lucie Clément) appears – as if out of the book – as its embodied interpretant. A number of medieval Fools accost Françoise, challenging psychoanalysis. Their primary grievance, unpacked in a funny and learned dialogue, a mixture of contemporary and medieval discourses, is the privileging of word over gesture, the individual over the group, and the past over the present. Their leader, Mother Folly, is depressed because the Fools do not obey her any more. Their traditions were destroyed. She sits down in silence, in melancholy. This depressed state turns the figure into a patient of sorts. This depression and its ending in political combativeness is shaped with a wink to iconography: she takes the pose of Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I; when she recovers, she becomes, or performs, the New York Statue of Liberty. A discussion ensues from this encounter, in which a dead-pan Françoise remains situated in the present without being astonished by the confrontation with another historical time, and responds as if discussing with colleagues or patients. Again, absolute equality is the basis of both narrative and intellectual persuasion. It is this ability to remain her professional self while engaging with other times and their discourses that is her primary strength, as a writer, as an analyst, as a discussant – and, as it turned out, also as an actress. Throughout the story reigns an ontological uncertainty about madness: between enactment, being and being-perceived. Since playing the fool is the Fools’ profession, this quest takes a specifically theatrical form. Parallel to the confrontation between the psychoanalyst and her severely traumatised (‘mad’) patients, this encounter enacts a second confrontation with which the first is intertwined. This sets this

contemporary world up, first against, then with medieval Fools, agents and performers of the late-medieval political theatre. That this is theatre, and political to boot, is crucial for the serious function of the Fools. Most of the time, these two worlds mingle. That is a major point of the book, a philosophy of time interwoven with a philosophy of the permeability of the boundary between ‘madness’ and ‘sanity’. The theoretical-political thrust of the film lies in a positive presentation of mad (psychotic) people, their creativity and their truths, and a constructive interaction between mad and sane people through which both learn things from the other that help them live their lives. The medieval Fools strike precisely that balance. The story shows how the Fools, once appearing in the hospital’s courtyard, can no longer be separated from the Mad. This creates a risk of anarchy but also an opportunity to mitigate the frontier that casts the mad as a different species, outside of our social purview. The Fools end up irritating Françoise so much that she intends to resign from her job, but going inside to tell the director this, she runs into a leaving patient. The success of that patient’s treatment compels her to return to work, albeit reluctantly. As she talks with patients, the distinction between the Fools and the Mad fades away. This ontological uncertainty of madness runs through the entire story, and is, indeed, a major theoretical point the book and the videos make. The intermediate spaces of the courtyard and the treatment room in the hospital, the corridors and the analyst’s office, contribute narratively to these ambiguities. These spaces participate in the spatialisation of the story and the argument, and are enhanced by the set-up of the exhibition. This is one of many moments where the inextricable intertwinement of theoretical and narrative articulation becomes visible, and thus demonstrates the way the literary and scholarly modes of writing strengthen each other, creating thought-images together. The perform­ ative medium of space shapes each appearance differently. This questions the ontology of personhood embedded in the idea of madness. At stake in this playful enactment is the notion of the individual subject itself. And, since the book proposes a theory of a social

psychoanalysis, where the small histories of the patients converge with the tragedies of History, this questioning is in tune with the book’s theoretical thrust. The alleged fools come from the tradition of ‘sotties’, the political theatre from the late Middle Ages mentioned above, a kind of carnival of Fools. These are the Fools who merged with the patients at the hospital; their arrival, thus, becomes a p ­ olitical 12 moment. Then, Françoise is abducted by two Mafiosi, and so begins a strange voyage. She is taken to the Middle Ages – or rather, the Middles Ages surface in the present. There, Françoise is brought before a court where she is blamed for her lack of insight, and psychoanalysis’ repression of gesture in favour of words. The episodes of that court case confront her, and us, with the sane reasoning behind the Fool’s mask. This scene, set in a theatre, becomes in the exhibition a two-screen piece where the court and the accused, with the public behind her, face each other. That political moment is facilitated by the fact that, as opposed to the patients, the Fools have impunity. Françoise, consistent in her egalitarian approach I call in-betweenness or ‘inter-ship’, cannot help herself listening to and discussing these issues seriously.13 The narrator’s own literary and philosophical sources also mix in during the trial in the form of imaginary or dreamt dialogues with great thinkers such as Antonin Artaud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, T. S. Eliot, all three staged in the scene. In the book, we also hear the voices of the psychiatrist Maurice O’ Drury (Wittgenstein’s disciple) and the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. For the narrator, this dialogic traversal of time is also a return to her own past. Her boundaries – in time, space and identity – melt down. The relevance of this undermining of individuality becomes clear when she becomes capable of identifying not only with her patients, in whose adventures she begins to participate, but also with her former self. The autobiographical slant of the narrative becomes 12  The scene of the Trial conforms subtly to the traditional genre of the ‘sottie’. See Aubailly (1976) and Koopmans (1997). In order to foreground the theatricality, we decided to work with theatre actors. 13  See http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/a-long-history-of-madness/ for a trailer, more information and photographs.

multilayered, and is not in the least hampered by the evidently fictional elements. Two patients from the past stroll through Françoise’s world, like spectres. These are Sissi (Marja Skaffari) – Davoine’s first patient-failure of twenty years ago – and the timeless elfin Ariste who dies at the beginning, only to resurface regularly throughout the book when she evokes his hovering presence as an ‘inspector’ (or as Françoise’s bruised super-ego), as a source of gossip, and as a memory. These two phantom patients constantly confront Françoise with the difficulty of her work and the danger, yet likelihood, of failure. Ariste becomes Françoise’s spectre, in the combined philosophical and sociological-political sense Derrida has put forward (1993). His death is a sacrifice to earn insight into the importance of identification; a kind of gift. And through Peeren’s book on spectres, the merging of the invisible spectres and the equally but differently invisible subaltern has become an important new insight (2014). Françoise runs away from the trial after a confrontation with the mad and maddening Antonin Artaud (Thomas Germaine), and after having been ‘disrobed’ in accordance with the historical Fools’ theatrical mock trials. Sissi is the central subject of that imagined conversation, a subject that incites reflection on physics’ analogies to psychoanalysis and madness. Françoise conjures up a ‘transfer-box’, an enigmatic object that gives concrete shape to her resistance as an analyst to accept the transference Sissi performed during her analysis. She converses with the historical scientist Schrödinger as if they had been long-term friends. The dialogic form, so appropriate for philosophising, not only borrowed from Socrates but also from her own earlier book Wittgenstein’s Folly (2012), is eminently suitable for the staging of opinions and doubts, moments of hope and of despair, illusion and discouragement, reasoning and passion. From these combined travels Françoise gains a capability to practise immersion into the deliriums of her patients, in order to become a fraternal equal to them. Only through such an extreme identification will she be able to carve for them a space in between wherein the ‘catastrophic regions’, already evoked on the opening page and which generated their madness, can be confronted.

Throughout the story, the narrator has been doing precisely that: becoming an equal to the ‘fools’ and the ‘mad’. It is on this hopeful note that, in the middle of the turmoil of the Carnival of Basel and a visit to the august predecessor and teacher Gaetano Benedetti, the immers­ ion into the medieval universe of folly and a dialogue of wisdom, the story ends.14 In allusion to the rules of classical tragedy, all this is set in a single day. Between the trial and the Carnival, Françoise’s day is not over. She continues to treat Herlat (Thomas Germaine), a homeless patient who turned up at her doorstep when she returned from the trial. Then she pays an overdue visit to the grave of her former teacher, the sister of her father’s Resistance friend Monsieur Louis, as well as to that of the latter’s ‘mad aunt’ who also haunts her childhood memories. Temporal turbulence reigns in this book as strongly as spatial swirling. Imagine the challenge this posed for the filmmaking, but then, also the yield in image-thinking and its resulting thought-images. Theoretical considerations, which initially occur only in the mind of the narrator, will be taken over and continued, alternately initiated, by Fools, colleagues or patients. Case histories, sometimes elliptic but always both clear and based on actual session notes, provide these considerations with an empirical basis, while the patients become theorists or ‘buddies’ of the theorist. The book thus produces theory: a theory of madness as bound up with historical catastrophe; of psychoanalysis as a social science and practice; of the individual subject as fatally but also, helpfully porous, inseparable from other subjects; of images and their capacity of speech; of speech as imaged and imagina­ tive; of space as a medium that facilitates sociality. And, last but not least, of theory itself as (the product of) a collective process. Davoine’s entire project is a battle against the individualism that keeps the mad impermeable to psychoanalysis and cuts them off from society. Mother Folly depicts her own crisis and the voyage of discovery that leads to her insight. It is a kind of Bildungsroman or travel story – what the 14  Instead of staging the conversation with Schrödinger, we bring Sissi herself in; from object of discussion she becomes its subject.

Spanish created in the tradition of the picaresque novel. Through the intensely engaging writing, the book achieves its persuasion both intellectually and affectively. It is well known that the concept of performativity has been taken up from philosophy into cultural studies, primarily under the impact of Judith Butler’s ground-breaking books (1990, 1993). Butler emphasises that it is not the exceptional speech act, but routine, reiterated speech acts that determine who one is. Treating people consistently as ‘mad’– refusing to take them seriously, responding to their mad utterances with disbelief, instead of using the opportunity fiction provides in exemplary manner to ask ‘What if . . . ?’ – actually contributes to madness. But Butler’s primary point was that the habits of reiteration are also open to (slow) change. Through inhabiting a routine, one can change it from within. Narrative is eminently suitable to shape such subtle and dynamic transformations. And reading a narrative can be an exciting process of getting to know alternative possibilities. There lies its social relevance; its performativity. Picture Book This performativity is also significant for images, including images that, according to our ontological distinctions, do not (materially) exist. Davoine’s book is strongly visual. This has had enormous consequences for me as a cultural theorist, critic and filmmaker with a keen interest in imagery. I was astounded by the visuality of Davoine’s book. While I was reading, images whirled through my head. In a film based on a previously published book, one expects the images to be derived from the book’s descriptions. Film buffs know this is rarely the case. The images of the film are not ‘after-images’. Instead, they are ‘inter-images’, or, in semiotic terms, ‘interpretants’ – a product of the visitors’ imaginative reshaping that is, strictly speaking, also a spatialisation. The spatial nature of these interpretants emerges from their anthropomorphism in combination with the endeavour to stage encounters with them; they come forward, towards the viewer, through the exhibition space.

What made this a turning point was that I could never detach those images from the theory and the narrative. But they were images – as in dreams. At that time, as I mentioned, Michelle Williams Gamaker and I had been looking for inspiration for our first fiction film. That it became this book by Davoine was unexpected. And yet, it was a perfect match. How this happened demonstrates the power of visuality in writing. One of Mother Folly’s strengths is that it is a picture book as much as a storybook: you see what you read. Not coincidentally, ‘seeing’ is a long-standing metaphor for understanding. In addition to affect, perception contributes to knowledge, and the etymology of ‘theory’ leads back to ‘seeing through’. As one of the innumerable fringe benefits of reading this book, I learnt more from it about how this seeing and/as knowing and this understanding and/as affect operate than I had learnt from any of the academic word-image studies I had read. In this reading experience lies the beginning of my thinking about image-thinking. Images as interpretants are the product of the visitors’ imaginative reshaping. Here is my narrative thought-image of how that happens. First, an author wrote a book in which she described images emerging from her own readings. Second, Michelle and I read that book, and images –the same ones? different ones? – arose from our reading of Davoine’s readings. Except for this book’s cover image, a detail from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting Dulle Griet (Mad Meg, ca. 1562), which represents women driven mad by war, no images were reproduced in the book. The cover image gelled with the epigraph from Robert Musil, also about war, but on the mode of the small, the bee’s, level – ‘War is born, like crime, from the little incivilities that unthinking men enact every day’ – to form a word-image hypothesis: this book is about war, its madness, and the madness it generates, and we will see what that looks like; it is about the routine, the small things, from which war and subsequent madness emerge. Unthinkingly, every day. The book itself contains no visual illustrations. These written images were so strong that, after seeing them with my mind’s eye, I had to make them, not as ‘after-’ images, although chronologically they came later, nor as ‘faithful’ representations of what Davoine had created, but as ‘inter-images’ that were interpretants of the images evoked but not

described. To explain how her book achieves its exceptional effectiveness, I use the term interpretant in the sense in which American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce theorised the sign. Thus, images can be signs even if they are not materially extant. Peirce begins his definition of the sign with a perceptible object; but perception need not be physical. As we see images and hear sounds in our dreams, we can see and hear with our minds. The objects are just as perceptible. The question posed by this object – ‘What does it mean?’ – cannot be answered by revealing something inherent in the object. Instead, the cultural group in which the object circulates works the meaning out in a practice that yields a second, further developed object. That second object, or sign, is the interpretant, a new sign developed on the basis of, and evoked by, the attempt to understand the first sign. In this way, interpretation is both ongoing and social.15 Objects, including images, are active participants in the performance of analysis in that they enable reflection and speculation; they can contradict projections and wrong-headed interpretations (if the analyst lets them), and thus constitute a theoretical object with philosophical relevance, whether materially embodied or not. Reflecting ‘from within’, in my case as filmmaker, on how these processes work is itself an activity steeped in a larger cultural context. A good example of this interpretive process that allows collective theorising to happen is the figure who gives Davoine’s book its title: Mother Folly. The figure emerges from a historical tradition, but traditions are never ‘pure’ and homogeneous. Our figure has at least three genealogies: 1. She is the leader of the late-medieval political theatre (sotties). Davoine’s story is actually structured like a sottie. That theatre frequently took the form of a mock trial, in which political abuse was exposed and tyrants were undressed at the end, so that their true colours, the yellow and green of folly, became visible. Readers see this figure throughout. 15  For the definition of the interpretant I consulted the 1984 edition of selected works (Peirce 1984).

2. She is inspired, secondly, by the speaker of Desiderius Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, a text in which the personification of Folly speaks in the first person, as announced in Erasmus’s text: ‘An oration, of feigned matter, spoken by Folly in her own person.’ This aspect of the figure is already mentioned on the book’s opening page. Readers hear this voice throughout. 3. W hen she has been driven mad by the violence of war, the figure shows up as Brueghel’s Dulle Griet/Mad Meg. This incarnation of the figure is on the cover of the French edition of the book. The theme of war this Brueghel figure embodies is insidiously present across the entire book. Between words and images, the formation of interpretants can be seen as a version of intertextuality. The invocation of Erasmus’s Folly thus brings in more than the citation alone. We are sensitised to the import­ ance of her voice and address, by words like these from the beginning of Erasmus’s text: But if you ask me why I appear before you in this strange dress, be pleased to lend me your ears, and I’ll tell you; not those ears, I mean, you carry to church, but abroad with you, such as you are wont to prick up to jugglers, fools, and buffoons . . .16 Like Davoine, Erasmus masterfully introduces the main issues with his opening words. Contrasting ‘church’ with going ‘abroad’, meaning the opening of oneself up to the unknown, the strange, the mad, is the most productive way of learning from Folly. It is also about hearing; address and listening as the essence of sociality. This suits the audiovisual medium of video, and binds it to the practice of psychoanalysis, also primarily based on listening. It is all about hearing, address and 16  Erasmus (2008 [1509], 9–10).

listening as the essence of sociality. And, let’s not forget: hearing needs space. Our film stages a praise of Folly through a praise of and play with anachronism – and this close engagement with anachronism serves the exhibition project perfectly well. The two aspects of madness/folly and voice, it appears, go together in their attempts to break through the boundaries of a narrow, and constantly narrowed ‘reason’. They appeal to openness to the ‘second person’, meanwhile searching for wisdom and knowledge in unorthodox ways. In the exhibition, the address in the film – sometimes caring, sometimes aggressive, ironic, hysterical – became a key to the disposition of the works in relation to soliciting visitors’ engagement. The third source or ‘pre-text’ is the one that I find most relevant here to argue for image-thinking. Working Through and Overcoming Iconography Brueghel’s painting is an iconic figure in Western art (Figure 2.8). In contemporary Flemish, ‘dul’ means the same as dull in English – boring, flat, gloomy or, when said of affectless people, daft, and stupid. Such a state could be a symptom of trauma. Hence the translation ‘mad’. But this is based on unreflected anachronism, projecting the present onto the past, for, in Renaissance Flemish it meant ‘furious’. This makes much more sense of the figure that is running, fully armed, towards what is considered the mouth of hell – a face with an open mouth, the size of a hut. And ‘furious’ also makes more sense of the figures in Davoine’s book, the session notes on which their statements are based – hence, with documentary truth value – and their anger fits. The difference between mad and fury also asks about the object of fury. What or who has made Meg furious? And conversely, looking back from fury to mad: what is it that has made her mad? This difference sets the entire painting in movement, including in the ‘pre-posterous’ reciprocal time. What is she running towards? What is she setting out to do? In relation to the idea of fury, one can wonder what all those other, small figures are doing there – demons, animalised people, close to Hieronymus Bosch’s universe of monsters. They might be part of Meg’s army, or they

Figure 2.8.  Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Dulle Griet / Mad Meg, ca. 1562. Oil on panel, 11 × 62 cm. Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp / Bridgeman Images.

might be entirely unrelated, simply partaking of the madness of the world. The painting has been interpreted through the fool-proof method of iconography.17 This, then, is a moment when image-thinking becomes relevant and can be explained as meaningfully countering strong methodologies – mind you, countering is relational, not rejecting, as ‘anti-’ would mean. As an example, I cite an article that, within that genre, seems excellent to me. In a learned and solidly documented interpretation, Margaret A. Sullivan alleges literary sources to demonstrate that the painting is an allegory of sin, specifically of greed and violence, and a satire of the consequences of such sins for the world. Bringing in Erasmus, she comes up with an explain-it-all reading that is as convincing as it is levelling. The painting 17  The method of iconography is best accessed through the 1970 edition of Erwin Panofsky’s founding book, Meaning in the Visual Arts. For a critical analysis, Holly (1984).

becomes a document. This is not surprising, given the opening of the article, where the scholar promises that the complexity of the painting will be reassuringly eliminated: ‘. . . underlying this complexity there is, in fact, a comprehensive scheme that unites all these details in a coherent and rational way’ (1977, 55; emphases added). I am not saying that this is wrong; it is just limited, and limiting. Although it is a responsible, rich analysis, it excludes prematurely what makes the painting so special. Therefore, I prefer to refrain from eliminating the complexity that makes an artwork out of what may otherwise be a document. Only in the face of that complexity can we see how the figure of the Mad and Furious Woman at War can function in contemporary art and culture. It functions powerfully for Davoine’s book but also, prominently, for Indian artist Nalini Malani’s shadow play Remembering Mad Meg, from 2007–11. Malani refigures the painting showing how the figure must be remembered, and what acts of memory the artwork elicits from its viewers (Figure 2.9). As per the title of the work and the recurring appearance and disappearance of her shape in Malani’s work, which consists of turning reverse-painted cylinders, I must make both memory and this figure, including her madness and/or fury but also the way she is figured, central for a brief moment.18 Why would an Indian artist of the twenty-first century devote an installation to a 500-year old painting from a Western culture? In other words, what is it that the 2007–11 artwork quotes, how, and to what effect? At first sight, the painting is busy in the style of the time and place where it was made. But instead of explaining that busy-ness away, I contend that this is the painting’s point. Reducing it to a rational coherence, even if that interpretation has its own validity, is an example of what I irreverently consider the anti-visual stance implied in an iconography that only reads, swapping what we see for 18  For more on the painting and on Malani’s shadow plays, see my 2016 book, of which the final chapter is devoted to Remembering Mad Meg. That chapter has exuberantly rich visuals (327–93). I see a strong affiliation between Davoine’s book and Malani’s artwork: two brilliant instances of image-thinking coming from the opposite ends of that concept’s spectrum.

Figure 2.9  Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg, 2007/2011. Three-channel video/ shadow play, stop motion animation, eight reverse painted Lexan cylinders, spotlights, sound, 6’. Collection Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

meaning, rather than looking. Explaining away what astonishes, even if historically responsible, is artistically and, I contend, also intellec­ t­ually irresponsible if done too fast or too comprehensively. For it takes out of the artwork what makes it art that works – that is, compels (image-)thinking. My premise is that art ‘thinks’, in the way I proposed in the Introduction – and that artists in the past produced such ‘thinking’ art, too. If we consider the painting, like Malani’s contemporary artwork, as at least also proposing a Denkbild, I see the busy quality of the painting as putting forward not only the madness of war but also, in a reflection on vision, the paradox of figuration. Both sides of the thought the image produces are mutually interdependent and illuminating. War and painting, then, are bonding. I advance this example from old-master art to contend something about such art that is seldom attributed to it: the making of thought-images that are not emblems – not fixed, not enduring, but in movement. Both the moving-image medium of video and Malani’s turning cylinders foreground this aspect of Brueghel’s war

painting. Such complex thoughts were not impossible at that earlier time; alleging they were, in a resistance to anachronism, harbours a condescending vision of the past. The question of conscious awareness is unanswerable, and is not necessary for the resulting thought-image to emerge. To earn access to the thought the image generates we must give up the certainties of iconography and endorse remaining puzzled. Spatialising comes in here, sowing confusion. The isolation of the Meg figure entails another discrepancy in the image. The scene as a whole seems self-absorbed, the figures active but not in a narratively coherent manner. This is a ‘landscape of madness’, featuring monstrosity and distortion, where figures are too tiny to become individually pertinent, and their mass, along with the strange props, buildings and natural elements, precludes narrative. The figure of Meg dominates the landscape, turning it into a backdrop. The figure suggests movement, frantic action, which makes us wonder what she is about to do, and where she is going. This turns the painting into a double image, one descriptive and one narrative; one a landscape, one an action image. They are both there, impossible to disentangle, yet equally impossible to integrate into a single view. Meg is too large to fit into the landscape, but also too small to completely take over. This may have unsettled Sullivan into foregrounding the painting’s unity. A unity, to be sure, that can only exist in meaning; not in visuality. And it is not simply the superimposed figure of Meg that prevents us from unscrambling the image. The lack of linearity of perspective contributes to that puzzling effect. That lack ensures that we don’t assimilate the figure into the scene. This has major consequences for the interpretation of the thought it produces. Seen in isolation, as on the cover of Davoine’s book, the figure is even more disturbing. Here, she is armed with a sword, carries lots of things like a jewel box or money bank, precious objects, a pan and other kitchen utensils, and a knife hanging on a rope from her waist. Her apron morphs into body armour; a helmet covers her long hair. One sleeve of her garment seems inside out, and is falling off her shoulder. Figures 2.10 and 2.11  Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Dulle Griet / Mad Meg (details).

Her facial skin seems leathery, as of an older woman or one who lives outdoors. This is doubtlessly an effect of a slightly ‘rough’ paint application. Some lines that at first sight look like wrinkles continue from facial skin to matted hair without interruption. Her eyes protrude as if she were never going to blink again, her lipless mouth drops open, forming a perfect triangle. The helmet is battered, more likely to have come from a theatre props chest than from an army supply unit. When we focus on her face for some time, she seems barely alive, a mask rather than a live woman (see Figures 2.10 and 2.11). The words ‘theatre’ and ‘mask’ bring in another semantic field. This field, of play acting and theatre, evokes the street theatre of the late Middle Ages, one of the temporal settings of Davoine’s story. This was frequently used as an outlet for political dissension. Theatre actors and their characters got away with saying things against the authorities that could escape censorship because they were not ‘real’. Diderot’s paradox of the actor was not yet relevant; acting did not strive for realism but, on the contrary, emulated carnival, wildness, and madness. It is precisely for this reason that theatre questions the figure’s ontology and what she stands for. The first question was, is she mad or furious, madly waging war or driven to madness by war; furious because of her forced assimilation into the acts of devastation visible all around? Unlike Sullivan, I think the point is this ambiguity, and must not be smoothed out through literary references, which the viewers, even contemporary ones, have most likely not read, do not remember or are not visualising. But with the frame of theatre brought in, a second question emerges, compounding the first one. This is the question of her state of being. Is she mad or is she enacting, playing this? In other words, is this a figuration of ontology – who is she? – or of epistemology – how can we know her? How, that is, other than through her performance – play acting – or the theatrical accoutrements that seem excessively numerous, as if she had raided the props department? The thought-image that combined a critique of war with a reflection on painterly genres leaves this question open – raising it, and in its refraining from answering, complicating the point of painting. Painting is of such primary interest

for Malani, so central in her work, that I speculate that this accumulation of ambiguities would be of interest to her as a painter. And Davoine, keen to let images and words converge and merge, so that their merger can generate thought, would be just as invested in that ambiguity. And when I utter the word ‘excessive’ in relation to the number of objects the figure is carrying – an excess that may explain Sullivan’s reassuring tone – I am making a judgement and thus, considering the viewer’s role. Malani works to integrate the viewer in the performance of the work. The work compels us to follow the turns, to stay until the next round, to disentangle the projections from the paintings on the cylinders, in order to better see their inseparability (Figure 2.12). All these built-in activities demonstrate that, for Malani, art is a collective activity. This is why I bring her in, as an image-thinker. This sets the tone for a view of the Brueghel painting as double, because it actively isolates the figure from the community-in-disarray that constitutes its backdrop. Thus, the painting, through its highly theatrical mode and its un-integrated double form, raises a question of wider relevance: the ontological uncertainty about madness, fury or

Figure 2.12  Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg (detail).

other afflictions, between enactment, being and being-perceived. In a work that explores and entices one to remember this figure, this uncertainty stages the scene of the artwork. We, as viewers, are implicated in that uncertainty. Given the English translation of Brueghel’s title, also adopted in other languages, we can sum up the questioning with Mad Meg: is she mad, furious, or the one because of the other? If the latter, does violence lead to madness, and what has the way we look at her to do with that state? These are all aspects of the underlying question about what needs to be remembered, and how. Making us think about this is Davoine’s primary point. Following Davoine’s book, not to the letter (Erasmus’s ‘church’) but to the spirit (‘abroad’) our film work stages a praise of Folly through a praise of anachronism. The two, it appears, together attempt to break through the boundaries of a narrow, and constantly narrowed, genealogical, evolutionist ‘reason’, and instead appeal to openness, to what grammar calls the ‘second person’, while searching for wisdom and knowledge in unorthodox ways. Many of the choices made for an audio-visualisation of a book, especially a theoretical one, are necessarily ‘deviations’ or ‘betrayals’. But, from making this film, we learnt what really matters in Mother Folly, namely, not to be literal with regard to obedience or faithfulness (church) but to be bold and inventive (abroad), like this extraordinary book itself. From conception to script, to actual filming and editing, we made the film in close collaboration with the author. The images she ‘saw’, or had in mind, when she wrote her book are inevitably very different from the ones that ended up in the film. There are several layers of interpretation and imagination between the one and the other. This is compounded by the fact that the author plays herself. But only after the images had circulated, and we had transformed them, did they come back to the author who, in playing her role, transformed them again. This is why the film images can only be ‘inter-images’, with several temporal and visual layers separating the initial from the images in the film. The fact that, at no moment in the work on the film, did Davoine have any second thoughts or criticisms of our visualisations speaks volumes about the kind of mind at work in her image-thinking

book. Instead of feeling ‘betrayed’ as would an author who believed in ‘faithful adaptation’, she felt our film had enriched her book. This process of collective work has a dynamic that fits the theory Davoine puts forth. ‘Schizophrenia’: Two Sides to Every Story, Two Figures in Every Life It is impossible to describe the entire exhibition. Let me just give a few examples of how the space is deployed to propose ideas in-through images. Towards the finale of the film and the last screens of the exhibition, the analyst appears talking with a friend of her father from the Resistance; in the past, when he was imprisoned for tax evasion (Alberto Montoya Hernández), and in the present, old and disabused, resisting the analyst’s tendency to idealise him (Francisco Fernández Navarrete). The video is screened on a flat-screen monitor standing on a coffee table, in front of which chairs allow easy viewing. In the video, Françoise and her younger self (Susana Espín López) alternate. The two incarnations are emphatically different. To underline the radical, nearlymad inaccessibility of her traumatised former self, the younger Françoise speaks Spanish, the older one French.19 The space of this encounter was made small, intimate to the experience, even if the gallery is itself quite large. On the larger side-space of this gallery, photographs and props contributed to this change of the space and the aesthetic of the exhibition. The photographs on the walls are of landscapes: the civil-war ridden hills of southern Spain, and the madnessridden northern island of Seili. Props comprise jewellery, hat and gloves of the fancily dressed patient Sissi; the Fools’ ‘marottes’ or hand-carved sticks with heads on them; a gas mask from the Second World War. They fully participate in the questioning the exhibition stages. Are these things real or fictional? This uncertainty is given specific historical resonance when the next gallery shows, in a niche on the left, a historical 19  Like all our video work, this one is multilingual – in this case, twelve different languages are spoken. In this scene, the different languages spoken by the younger and the older Françoise acquire a specific meaning.

cell in the psychiatric hospital on the island of Seili, including its original furniture, faithfully reproduced. A video of a (fictional) patient (Mervi Appel) in the real cell confuses the historical reconstruction. This is visible on the right side of the photograph in Figure 2.1. The patient sitting in that same room appears on a small, old-fashioned monitor, put on the dresser like the framed photograph she picks up. On a large wall-projection, the patient Sissi and her analyst (Marjo Vuorela) are caught in the act. Driven mad by an abusive father and a fearful, distant mother, Sissi, in her resistance to her abject state, thinks of herself as the empress of Austria-Hungary. She dresses and gets herself coiffed accordingly. She is a strange woman, ‘raving mad’; yet, she has wisdom, insight and sometimes even analytical skills. Her psychoanalyst is able to sit beside her, and show her own problems. This saves Sissi. This video both demonstrates and undermines the last frontier, showing that the boundary separating ‘mad’ from ‘sane’ is a racism without race. On a flat-screen monitor on the side wall, Sissi performs seemingly meaningless acts outside, in the grounds of a ‘halfway house’ that prepares patients for the outside world. But how outside is an island? In the last – or first – gallery, the works are most drastically arranged spatially. First, a sculptural arrangement of screens, ‘Office Hours’, invites us among sequences of madness ‘happening’ – patients saying strange things with bits of wisdom surfacing; or watching real horror on television, demonstrating that becoming mad is, in fact, a defence against the perversion of senseless violence. And in the most spatial of all, a two-screen installation, the psychoanalytic space is presented as both complicit and communicative. The installation consists of a rug on the floor, indicating the analyst’s office; two armchairs, in which visitors can sit, which they can move about to choose the view, position and identification they wish to explore; and two floating screens, opposing each other, with the analyst on one side, the patient on the other. Where, then, do you, as visitor, choose to sit? This piece offers the answer to the indictment of the Trial scene. After a haunting two-minute silence, the patient Herlat ends up able to speak, hence, ‘cured’ (Figure 2.13).

Figure 2.13  The two-screen installation ‘Herlat’s Treatment’. Photo: Jari Nieminen.

This installation, like the Trial scene, is clearly theatrical. In fact, the theatricality is emphatic; the actor playing Herlat, Thomas Germaine, is a theatre actor, and it shows. This theatricality is not, however, an artificiality that undermines the plausibility of the scene. On the contrary; while it fits the character and his madness, it also undermines the voyeuristic tendency a more cinematic acting style might have solicited. The theatricality, instead, invites visitors’ participation, the desire to enter the stage and play along. Thus, although never properly seeing mad people, one sees madness, but instead of being scary, this madness is contagious.20 At this point, the visitor may want to move back in the opposite direction. The video pieces do not, together, reconstruct the narrative of the film. Instead, a space of wandering, probing, questioning and encountering constitutes the stuff of the exhibition. But the moments of encounter are themselves narrative, as much as theatrical; the 20  On this politically productive deployment of theatricality, see Bleeker (2008, 2009), mentioned in Chapter 1.

figures talk, tell and play. After the short manifestations of madness on the sculptural installations, Sissi’s sequence will make much more sense; the island a reminder of how tenuous and limiting the ground is on which the idea of madness is based. The past explains the present, and the judgement seems even more out of place. Ariste’s death now seems both inevitable and pointless. Why would he have to die, if others can be taken out of their madness? And so the stories continue . . . Spatialising a film, then, is not an alternative to temporal film. Unlike what a binary reading of Manovich’s proposed term ‘spatial montage’ might suggest, the temporality of exhibition is different from that of cinema, but it is not absent. Exhibition-making is very closely entangled with temporality, and I would even suggest that curating is at its most successful when visitors spend more time in the galleries than they expected. The specific contribution of video exhibit­ ion in distinction from movie-theatre film is that the time spent is freely given by the visitor, not imposed by the film’s duration. This can, in fact, lead to more time being spent with the installations than the two hours of the film. The specific attraction of an exhibition based on the spatialisation of a film may well be the complicating ways in which narrative is broken up, so that no story is maintained, yet, narrativity – with its dynamism, movement, time, durational effects – can even become stronger. Transformed into moments of encounter, the narrative of the film becomes oriented into a stark first-second person dialogue; a space where subjectivity is born, inflected and strengthened. This is what makes spatialising film a socially relevant act. A Sense of an Ending21 All this is also in line with a specific conception of the fundamental intertemporality of images, which makes ‘ending’ impossible. Even a material painting has once existed in the artist’s mind, before it was 21  The heading of this section pays homage to Frank Kermode’s influential 1966 book.

realised on a support, as something quite different. And that material painting subsequently keeps changing in each act of viewing projected upon it, with the time, place and social circumstance of its subsequent ‘life’ as a work of art. To that process, there can be no ending, for an image will always be in ‘becoming’. The mad people Davoine calls upon in this book know this. They deploy forms that are never definitive but always coherent with the compulsion to show what cannot be said; to make visible what the silence imposed on them – denial, forgetting, taboo – has made inexpressible. But in their wisdom, the mad know this silence cannot ‘disappear it’ – to render this verb actively transitive and release it from its more usual fatalism. They make images that, unendingly, move; this was yet another reason why a moving-image work as image-thinking with Davoine’s book imposed itself. Both Davoine as author and Françoise as character have learnt this survival of the past from their mad companions, to whom she/they serves as therapôn, buddy, dialogic double – and the other way around. To show is ultimately the mission of the book, and thus, the mission the book assigns to the film: to show, audio-visually, the transformable realities in which the past can recuperate its place – that place it had refused to give up. For example, when Sissi appears and behaves regally, this is not a mad arrogation of movie star allure inspired by her namesake made glamorous by Romy Schneider. Instead, she gives herself the dignity back that had been taken from her. Visualising this self-dignification by means of stylish costumes and hairdo was our way of enabling this allegedly mad person to become a source of unexpected wisdom to which her elegance and beauty constituted a form of access, while still showing her wounds in the form of facial expression and mode of speaking. Thus, the character and her interlocutor, the analyst, become each other’s doubles, a doubling that, in turn, enabled a res­ toration of the broken social connection. This, then, is healing as becoming whole again. It requires a reversal of time, so that the past can participate in the present. The sense of an ending, as a result, consists not of an end but of a change in feeling: a lightness of being against the heaviness of the social rejection that preceded it.

Each new phase of such becoming-lighter is informed by a later moment that retrospectively glosses an earlier state. That becoming, and the mad reversal of time that makes it possible, also holds for the collective work of author and subjects, filmmakers and actors. The work consisting of multiple images, the body of images named ‘Mère folle’, inflected by what ‘my work’ – as a reader, filmmaker and critic of the resulting images – adds to and changes in that corpus on the basis of what was already there but needed showing. Thus, according to the retrospective logic I have termed ‘pre-posterous’, the beginning or starting point is the set of filmic images, followed by the images ‘we saw’, only then followed by those in the author’s book and ending with those images the author ‘saw’, and that are fundamentally inaccessible to us – even if they can and must be shown. Showing is, also, what scholarly writing and fiction have in common. I have mentioned that Davoine’s book hovers between fiction and theory; a true theoretical fiction. Sometimes, as Freud’s story of the rebellious sons intimates, it takes fiction or other forms of imaginative thought to understand something for which reason is too simple. Like Freud, Davoine has theoretical points to make and uses speculation and fiction to develop, articulate and make them. But, unlike Freud’s primary tool of plot, Davoine’s points are primarily made through images. The plot itself serves, rather, to frame the images. In this way, looking back at my first reading of it, it seems the book already harboured a film – indeed, asked for one. Ending this reflection, then, is the hardest part, because there is no ending. Davoine does not like to use the word ‘cure’, and even less ‘cured’, to denote a finite state. To do so would entail belief in a stronger boundary between ‘mad’ and ‘sane’ people than is plausible. On the contrary, it is the facile but false assumption of such a distinction that continues to isolate the mad. By refusing to acknowledge the responsibility of society – a society that condones rape, abuse and war – for the continuous generation of trauma and its aftermath, ‘we’, the collective that stigmatises madness, make it impossible for the mad to be, and feel, acknowledged as ‘one of us’. Their stories must be believed, even if distorted by the thick layers of pastness that constitute their

madness, confusing generations and subjects. We must co-inhabit their ‘catastrophic zones’, as Davoine calls them; open them up for cohabitation and also for exit. If there is an end to madness it is not as cured but as socially reintegrated. ‘Healing’, rather, is what can take place. No end but a partial transformation. In this chapter, I have consistently spoken of ‘madness’ and ‘the mad’. This is due to another refusal of boundaries in Davoine’s conception. A great impulse of the book is a polemic against pharmaceutical treatments, which tend to be based on the expertise of the widely consulted American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. On the basis of its classifications, patients are frequently diagnosed, which boxes them into a specific kind of illness. This diagnosis comes with a prognosis, which is pursued by means of pharmaceutical medication. In protest against this ‘fixating’ mode of dealing with mental disorders, and heeding the preferences of patients themselves, we prefer to use the ludicrous but nicely vague and ambiguous term ‘madness’ instead of anything that reeks of classification. Out-of-the-box, as they say. Moreover, in English, as the title of this book indicates, there was another choice to make. The French ‘folle’ covers both madness and folly. English does not allow this ambiguity. Too bad; I’d have liked the sense of ‘angry’ in ‘mad’ to remain present. The choice of Folly, which resonates with Erasmus’s text but also with the tradition of the sotties and such festive variations as Carnival, wrenches the word and the event, the people and the tradition, out of any classificatory isolation and makes the turbulence Davoine has staged the subject of the book. In that turbulence, the reader is called upon to participate; to listen, and instead of questioning, to go with the flow, towards an adventure that makes the best of what ‘social’ means: the tendency of groups and persons to develop links and live in communities; to form transient but vital groups, living together in becoming; in cheerful, not fearful, difference. Davoine wrote her starkly visual book as a mixture of theory, documented practice (in the form of case histories) and fiction. As a character, Françoise stands for both the failure of this practice to deal with madness, and its possibilities, after all – provided we change our attitude

in the face of it, and dare to stand side by side with the mad. Structured like a trial, the two screens facing each other enact the medieval tradition of the Theatre of Folly. This gallery raises the question of the appropriateness of judgement, curbing that question away from moralism towards a willingness to abandon the binary opposition of good versus bad. In a complementary video the analyst offers the analogy with music instead: striking the right chord is more important than diagnosing, judging and treating. In this work, the modulation of noise versus music seen earlier is theoretically, historically and theatrically substantiated. Throughout the process, Davoine helped us understand the psychoanalytic situation and get its fictional repre­sentation right; right enough, that is, to avoid betraying the mad. That situation is spatial, hence, social. At the end of this chapter, and after writing on our first fiction film, this seemed a good place also to acknowledge the social side of the making process by showing Michelle, who has been a terrific partner in the making of our fiction films, of which ALHoM was the first. Here we are working together: in Figure 2.14 we are setting up the camera, in Figure 2.15 we are editing.22

Figure 2.14  Mieke and Michelle setting up the camera. Photo: Markus Karjalainen. Figure 2.15  Mieke and Michelle editing. On the monitor screen is Françoise Davoine. Photo: Margreet Vermeulen. 22  For more on this project, see http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/a-longhistory-of-madness/ and to watch the film, http://player.vimeo.com/video/106800593, password: ALHoMforFriends.

3. Who Speaks the Film, in Documentaries? A Thousand and One Voices Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain Introduction: Subject, Source, Speaker The question ‘who speaks?’ is central in narrative theory, in spite of recent attempts to dismiss it. These cannot quite succeed, because of the implied question of narrative responsibility. Where does a presentation, opinion or vision come from, who are their target audiences, and what is the ‘force’, in Lyotard’s concept of language as the figural, that makes sense? This question is always pertinent, in all cultural texts. Speaking is generally assumed to be a linguistic act, but in film, where an explicit narrative voice is more the exception than the rule, the narrative emerges from different sources; from the figures who appear in the filmic world to begin with. I argue in this chapter that

this makes the question more rather than less relevant. The medium helps us probe the complexities of narration precisely because it cannot be personified in a ‘voice’. The question is of crucial importance, espec­ ially in documentaries where ‘who speaks?’ becomes ‘whose truth?’ I have experimented with a solution to the conundrum that seems to produce an opposition between the issue of responsibility and the logical and linguistic convictions of some theories. My ethical, political and aesthetic commitments to the genre compel me to make the documentary films, hence, do the telling with, rather than about, people. Therefore, we cannot ignore the question of the subject or source.1 This question is even more acutely relevant when the people, whom I consider interlocutors or participants rather than ‘subjects’, come from a culture different from that of the filmmakers, and all concerned are thereby steeped in what has become an essentialising idea, ‘cultural difference’. This cultural difference requires reflecting on, and dealing with, the ethical as well as the epistemological aspect of a genre that easily becomes intrusive, manipulative, exoticising and voyeuristic, resulting in a disempowering effect. The film I will analyse in these respects is the first full-length film I (co-)made; the first film that made me acutely aware of the rich yield of insight to be gained from making images as a form of analysis. In Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days), the question of ‘voice’ becomes acute when, first of all, many different people, with diverging opinions about one another and about the central event – an unjustified police intervention – each get to say their piece. Does the film take sides, is the audience encouraged to take sides? Second, the question ‘who speaks?’ also probes the delicate relationship between filmmakers and interlocutors, since many decisions are made in post-production, when the participants may be elsewhere. With this particular film and the process of making it, as well as my resistance against dogmatic certainties, I will take up the discussion of 1  Gérard Genette (1980) put forward the question as a question: who speaks? – for him it is primarily a technical, narratological, literary question, not an ethical or political one. On the countering of the question ‘who speaks?’, the foundational work is by Ann Banfield (1982), on which more below. For a recent resurgence of this negative view of narratorial subjectivity, see Patron (2021).

‘who speaks?’ in the domain where it has near-dogmatic status, narrative theory. For this discussion I engage Ann Banfield’s seminal countertheory, exposed in Unspeakable Sentences (1982). There, she argues against the then-ruling assumption of the communication model of language, refuting its universalist implications. She claims that in certain discourses there are sentences that cannot be attributed to a specific speaker. In narratology, these allegedly ‘speakerless’ sentences are called free indirect discourse or style – henceforth FID. The most sophisticated theories explain them as ‘text interference’: the mixture of discourses by the narrator and that by the character. The main tenet of Banfield’s theory, which is also the most controversial aspect for narrative theorists, is the idea that narrative sentences do not need to be attributed to particular speakers.2 Banfield’s later book, The Phantom Table (2000), provides a grounding for this view in the philosophy of language and the cultural climate of Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell, Bloomsbury and Cambridge, in the early twentieth century – in other words, a specific site of modernist thought and literature. Here, she includes visuality, getting closer to ‘the figural’. Indeed, as her article ‘L’imparfait de l’objectif: The Imperfect of the Object Glass’ (1990), with its inspiringly multiply-punning title, intimates, Banfield binds linguistics to photography, and, thus, language to the visual in what Lyotard would call ‘the figural’. When the collective Cinema Suitcase began to present its first film (2002, re-edit 2004), the question of narrative voice came up right away, but not in a theoretical-technical sense. ‘Who is responsible for this account?’ was the first question viewers asked. From the filmmakers’ 2  More recently, this has been further elaborated by Sylvie Patron (2021) in a collective volume. The misunderstanding comes through in the very first sentence of Patron’s introduction to the book: ‘The ubiquity of fictional narrators in fictional narratives has been a fundamental assumption that distinguishes narratology from previous narrative theories’ (1). Both the limitation to fiction and the characterisation of narratology as distinct from other narrative theories makes her approach less relevant. I also take issue with the way Patron systematically qualifies arguments in favour of what she sarcastically calls ‘pan-narrator theories’ as dogmatic, as opposed to her (in an explicitly binary opposition) ‘optional-narrator theory’ where she uses the word ‘discoveries’ (8).

perspective, the film was so intimately situated in inseparably interacting cultures that it seemed impossible to give it a single, particular voice – to attribute, implicitly or explicitly, the narrative to a single speaker, or even a ‘culture’. Between that vexed notion of cultural difference with its risk of relativism, and the claim or accusation of universalism attributed to the communication model, and in the concrete proximity of the filmmakers with their interlocutors, the question of responsibility required modesty and reticence. Instead of an impossible singularity of ‘speaker’, the story asked to be multi-voiced without universalism, with the singularity of each voice being audible, heard and listened to. Yet, for potential viewers it was precisely that situatedness and the resulting intermediation that could easily be perceived as a lack of political clarity and commitment. Bringing along the singular into the general, which preserves the traces of the singular that enrich the general, and transfers back to the singular the generality of the political domain, is where I look for the general validity we tend to call, but never quite rightly, ‘universality’. This film with its many moments of specificity offers a good platform for such a discussion.3 For narratologists, every narrative is ‘uttered’ by a voice emanating from an explicit or implicit narrator. This is a theoretical universal: every speech act, including visual or mixed media speech acts, originates from a ‘speaker’ who utters it. Moreover, the question of voice raises the question of narrative responsibility. My argument is not meant to deny the linguistic, semiotic or, indeed, ethical aspects of that idea; on the contrary. Instead, I question the implications of the assumption that all narratives originate in a speaking subject – one that, on principle, would be singular and particular. I propose a provisional suspension of this assumption, not by cancelling the concept of the narrator but through pluralising it. 3  The collective was formed in the making of Mille et un jours, which started out as a group of friends and fellow residents at a postgraduate arts centre, where I did tutorials. In alphabetic order, Cinema Suitcase originally consisted of Mieke Bal, Zen Marie, Thomas Sykora, Gary Ward and Michelle Williams (Gamaker). The importance of hearing and listening to speakers, which is also a feminist issue, has recently been made crystal clear again in the exhibition of the brilliant artwork of Nalini Malani, You Don’t Hear Me (see the beautiful trilingual catalogue, Malani 2020).

Even though film is predominantly a narrative genre, the one-­ utterance, one-voice assumption does not readily apply to it. Yet, if the common assumption holds, then film, even if it does not necessarily contain a narratorial voice, can also be assumed to have a narrative subject, even if this is a collective one. Therefore, I deploy film here to look at the common concept of voice in order to denaturalise it. The concept is up for debate, not in its defining properties, but in the way that we use concepts to think. Like people, concepts cannot be rigidly determined: instead, I have argued that they ‘travel’ (2002). I will consider this travel in the confrontation of the concept of voice with cinematic narrativity, over-determined by the individualisation of narrativity. Mille et un jours tells a story of events that happen to many, shown through the intimate life of one. This would make it particular. But it is steeped in a socio-political situation that makes it ‘exemplary’. In principle, exemplarity turns the particular into the generalisable. In order to present the kind of image-thinking at issue, I briefly place the film in relation to three aesthetic traditions that meet in this film: documentary film, Greek classical tragedy and ‘oriental’ tales as exemplified in the famous assemblage of A Thousand and One Nights. As a collective of filmmakers, we sought to address these traditions at a moment when they were tested to their limits, in a time when they were not quite obsolete but no longer vital either. For, the film Mille et un jours is a film on migration. This topic has the same ambiguity: it is both very actual, and has a very long history. Moreover, migration transgresses boundaries between cultures. Hence, thematically as well as structurally, it is not reducible to one specific culture. Consequently, the film resists universalising concepts from the Western tradition such as voice. Instead, in the end I will offer a different kind of generalising as a potentially productive ‘strategic universalism’. Migratory Aesthetics and the Trouble with Voice In Mille et un jours we celebrate the outcome of a long and intricate journey – of the anguish, struggle, loneliness and financial constraints of Tarek, a young sans-papiers in Paris. The joyful three-day

celebrat­ion of his wedding establishes the here-and-now of this documentary, which is organised through an Aristotelian unity of time, space and event. But within that same event, pockets of history weigh in with darker times and tougher spaces. The people in the film descend into memories of fear and uncertainty, only to bounce back again and rejoice in the outcome. This temporal structure, singular as it is, already precludes any particularity of a single voice. Let me tell the story in my own voice. Once upon a time, in 1999, Tarek (aged twenty-four) came to Paris from Tunisia to pursue an education. Despite the difficulties of his (non-)status as ‘illegal immigrant’ (sans papiers), he made a living doing odd jobs, while taking a course in computer science and obtaining his diploma. As he was pursuing this double life of earning a living and studying, the French authorities tried to expel him. They did not succeed. After some 1,001 days, his marriage to Ilhem (aged twenty-one), a young woman of the second generation of Tunisian immigrants, finally established him in the ordinary life of a legal resident of Europe. At the heart of the film is the fact that the police tried to prohibit the marriage. Tarek had to go underground; he appealed, and his appeal was granted. The prohibition was, thus, even for the French authorities, implicitly recognised as harassment. But this story is never really told. Tarek’s complex adventure cannot be offered as a coherent narrative in the film; nor does a unifying, identifiable subject or ‘voice’ mediate the content (Figure 3.1). Instead, the film tells a story through the voices embedded in it of the people involved; they also provide closure through celebration. As filmmakers, we were part of that group. Like the collection of Arabic tales from which the title is derived, the film organises a multiplicity of stories around a single event, a wedding. Through intimacy with the men and women in front of the camera, the film invites the viewer to become acquainted with their situation – to be a guest at the wedding. This intimacy further hampers assigning an overall voice to the film. Even its viewers cannot easily step out of the diegesis.4 4  For the travel of narrative theory from literature to film, see Verstraten (2009).

The multiplication of voices extends across time and worlds. With the wedding celebrations in full swing, four generations of Tunisian immigrants give shape, each in their own way, to the predicament of migration, its opportunities and hardships (Figure 3.2). The politics of immigration thus never ceases to haunt the present. However, not all generations talk about this constantly present and pressing theme. Consequently, adding up the voices does not cut it either; there is no unified nor a collective narrative voice. Instead, what narratologists would call the film’s voice is dispersed through a multitude of voices and images, none of which can be considered unifying.5 The unifying voice is not merely lacking but actively foreclosed. An example: Against the backdrop of political machinations, the film offers a consideration of what is easily dismissed as an ‘arranged marriage’. This is presented through the voices of the bride and her parents, the groom and his future brother-in-law, in a mixture of denial, endorsement and doubt. Importantly, the issue is never named, never ‘voiced’. The topic suggests itself in concerns for the bride’s future life. Western viewers, considering arranged marriages a token of cultural foreignness, might have expected an explicit discussion – and perhaps would have demanded political ‘clarity’, a position for or against. But it is the very ‘naturalised’ status of arranged marriages in the culture from which the parents migrated that precludes a clear voice addressing this issue; even a term for it. Hence, using a narratorial voice, asking questions about it, would violate what is most ‘natural’ to the couple and their guests. All we could do was collect statements that seemed to refer to it. But these were addressed to us filmmakers; hence, dialogic. In addition to the politics of immigration and arranged marriages, a third theme that is highly present but not ‘voiced’ is time. This is where cultural difference becomes an element of dramaturgy. Cast against the shadow of his father’s difficulty, as an earlier immigrant, to cope with capitalist time, Tarek seems obsessed with time’s speed. To show this without making it more explicit than it was for the participants was a challenge. 5  Migration is an issue where (institutional) politics and the (everyday, lived) political clash, as the film shows several times (Mouffe’s distinction).

Meanwhile, other elements of the film do appear to solicit more straightforward identificatory viewings. For example, an insight into the social fabric of immigrant life is given, as well as a tender portrait of a young woman and her friends reflecting on the transformation of one of them from schoolgirl into adult woman. The profound grief of loving parents about to see their eldest child leave home and move to the capital city alternates with the joyful anticipation of and pre­ parations for a wedding that gives expression to their love for and pride in their daughter. These motifs facilitate identification across cultural differences. Short of calling these expressions of emotions, or the emot­ ions themselves, ‘universal’, I assume they speak to Western viewers as much as, even if differently, to the community of Arab immigrants; to a cultural plurality rather than a universal humanity. Another attack on narrative voice stems from the voices of a misguided official and a faux journalist, edited in alternation. Their contrary views open up – rather than shutting down in consensus and prejudice – the question of how the administration ought to deal with situations where rules and people are no easy match; where politics clashes with the political. Here, the contradictory views cannot be resolved in a higher, universal truth. Instead, what is universal, perhaps, is the film’s performativity. The contradictory nature of much of the film’s speeches itself constitutes that performativity. This will be my paradoxical answer to the question of universality. Rife with bureaucratic violence but also with the characters’ vitality, determination, honesty and intelligence in outsmarting ‘the system’, the film’s content and aesthetics together constitute a plea for a world without firm borders. Yet here, time, it seems, constitutes a border. None of the people in the film is aware of this, and no connection is therefore made – through a voice – between time and borders. Yet, the unliveable nature of Western time is manifest. It is in the false universality of time that another universal occurs: the performativity, not the nature, of experience.6 6  For an analysis of the non-universality of time, see Munn (1992); and, on the need to historicise experience, Scott, in a volume that is relevant as a whole (1992). On the semiotic nature of experience, see De Lauretis (1983). More on time in Chapter 4.

As the concept of ‘voice’ travels from its theoretical anchoring to confront this object, Mille et un jours, it turns out to be useful to the extent that it fails: the situation for which it fails to adequately account stakes its claim for a ‘migratory aesthetics’ that honours this failure. This migratory aesthetics affects the theoretical status of the concept – its apparent universality. Migratory aesthetics partly emerges from the failure of ‘voice’, while voice, in turn, foregrounds aspects of migratory aesthetics that might otherwise remain invisible. A travelling concept, therefore, ‘voice’ is here a concept under assault that fiercely defends itself. This chapter, then, also brings image-thinking to bear on theoretical positions and the dogmatism so easily attached to them. Voice and the Documentary Tradition In Mille et un jours, narration is fully embodied. The accents in our film are multiple and of various degrees. Affect and voice are strongly connected, whereas narration as such is dispersed. This, in turn, reincarnates the voice. But narrative theory cannot deal with the fact that, in the very attempt to incarnate it, to give it body – by marking its gender, age and other social positions – the voice is deindividualised. Voices also comprise ‘accents’, those little signs that denaturalise the disembodied neutral voice of classical narrative and its theory. A strong moment of the bond between affect and voice occurs when the bride’s mother, Chamkha, expresses her total shock at the police intervention, simply saying ‘Nous, on ne connait pas ça du tout’ (we don’t know that at all). She also expresses her concern about her daughter’s policyinstilled anxiety. Her face, in extreme close-up, embodies the Deleuzian affection image (Figure 3.3).7 Through such ‘accents’ Mille et un jours is anchored in a ‘migratory aesthetics’. This term concerns the utterly small yet significant aspects of everyday culture as well as academic thought, which are ‘foreign’ in origin, but not any more. In a sense, these aspects are ‘beyond’ identity 7  On the political functioning of accents, see the interdisciplinary study by Hui (2020).

but carry visible and audible traces of ‘foreignness’. I have further explored this in a film and installation project, GLUB (Hearts) from 2004. That project is entirely devoted to the habit of eating sunflower seeds, which migrated to Western countries and changed the cultural and social fabric significantly. This makes any concept that unifies and grants authority unusable. What appears as the narratological ‘messiness’ of Mille et un jours is precisely where the classical Western tradition of narrative intersects and interacts with the profound hybridity of the migratory aesthetics through which migrants’ home and host cultures mutually enrich each other. Hence, this ‘messiness’ appears so only from within the one tradition when that Western gaze is not engaged with the mixture that is the de facto cultural situation. It is the mech­ anical application of the concept of ‘voice’ that is the theoretical version of this clinging to habit.8 The ongoing relevance of ‘voice’ shows in the fact that most people in the film speak in a second language, inflecting their utterances with their efforts of translation. This intensifies their body language while slowing down their speech and its understanding, both physically and through the deployment of verb tenses and metaphors unusual in French. The editing espouses that peculiar rhythm, in order to preserve and convey this mixed temporality of the resulting narrativity. But this narrativity cannot be attributed to either the participants, who gave no signs of being aware of their mixed rhythm of storytelling, nor to the filmmakers who could only be as loyal as possible – ‘documentarywise’ – to their interpretation of these storytellings. It is to the extent that we preserved these as much as possible that the film is documentary. ‘Voice’ is not universal to narrative but a universalism about it. It reinforces our habit of perceiving reality through linear narratives. But since reality is not linear, in films reality cannot possibly be straight­ forwardly linear either. Rather, the disorderly reality in which we live constantly bleeds into our field of vision. What would happen if, instead 8  More on the concept of ‘migratory aesthetics’ in Chapter 4, and also the two volumes our project has yielded (Durrant and Lord 2007, and Aydemir and Rotas 2008). For more on GLUB (Hearts), see my article (2005) and http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/glub-hearts/.

of streamlining events retrospectively into a story, we position the moment of storytelling in the unpredictable present and allow the past to creep in, like an apparition of what is both insignificant and decisive? This was the ‘research’ question the making of the film helped address through three difficulties. Making Mille et un jours posed three problems related to voice in the documentary tradition, all related to the genre’s truth claim. First, we aimed to make a documentary based on the culmination of a story full of trauma and shock, the memories of which impinged on the joyful outcome – the wedding celebration. But how to document the inner truths of memory when memory is notoriously the biggest liar of all? Second, how do you represent past and present at the same time? And finally, on the level of emotion and the medium’s work with affect (affect as a medium), how to render joy and grief, relief and anxiety, trust and mistrust, within a threshold situation between private and public, as well as, again, within the same moment? These three challenges constitute the ambiguity of documentary as a genre – its mission of trying to reduce the heterogeneity between the language of film and the world it signifies, symbolises and necessarily betrays. This is the reason why voice-over is the primary tool of doc­ umentary – its claim to a universally valid (objective) knowledge, or truth. But the very familiarity of narrative renders events familiar, thus lessening their affective impact. If truth can lie, it is on this affective level that it does so most readily (Felman 2002). It is easy to flatten out emotions or, by contrast, to arouse them through sentimentality. Hence, it is in the preferred use of a narrative voice-over that the universalising deceit inherent in documentary lies. Linear narrative and its explanatory voice-over seemed an unsuitable form for our story, composed as it had to be from the fragmentary strands that constitute memories. As a result, the grief and anxiety, the Figure 3.1  Who is speaking? Video still. Figure 3.2  An intercultural wedding cake. Video still. Figure 3.3  Chamkha speaking about her daughter. Video still. Figure 3.4  Tarek cannot believe the cops looked for him at his fiancée’s house. Video still.

impact of the small acts of violence as well as the more positive emotions of relief, love and happiness, barely surface. Due to this avoidance of sentimentality, the small tips of icebergs are more affectively powerful. One such moment can be glimpsed when Tarek, instead of complaining, simply mentions the prohibitive phone call that called off the wedding at 4 pm the day before it was planned. When asked if she was afraid, Ilhem first says that she was ‘surprised’. While putting on lipstick, her mother says that Ilhem became more decided when the prohibition came. Instead of a story of collective emotion, then, these tiny moments dispersed through the sequence and interrupted by other events form an emotional ‘rhizome’, composed of multiple interconnected sing­ ularities (Deleuze and Guattari 1976). Politically, Mille et un jours is not a one-issue film. Nor is there a single answer to any of the questions that come up. First of all, there is no ‘one issue’ through which, and no ‘one position’ from which, the story is being told. For example, there is no loud-and-clear indictment of the French police. This is not because we wished to make an apolitical film. On the contrary: in a situation where ambiguity and tension are more ‘normal’ than a clear-cut right and wrong, and where such values are contingent upon the power of those who do the speaking, a de-fetishisation of right-and-wrong decisions seemed politically necessary. This issue came up around the police intervention at the heart of the story. This intervention was both extremely modest, in that no physical violence was used, and extremely hurtful. It violated the safety of the domestic sphere, set up trusting people against one another, nearly ruined the marriage and with it the groom’s ticket to legal residency, and scared the daylight out of a young boy who was home alone when the police came to search the apartment. At the same time, no one was beaten up and no one was put in jail. In fact, the police’s powerlessness to act, due to their lack of insight into the culture they were assaulting, is pathetic, and even, at times, comical. Tarek is genuinely astonished that the police went to the bride’s family home to look for him (Figure 3.4). For him, it would be unthinkable he would be there before the wedding. For these reasons, we refrained from interviewing the police.

No one has the last word on any of the storylines. Those who exper­ ienced the events first-hand are the narrators of their own fragmented stories. The people you see in the film are not only ‘being themselves’, but also ‘speaking themselves’, and, to a certain extent, ‘playing themselves’. But, like everyone else’s lives, theirs are complex and not reducible to a single preoccupation. As guests or participants in the wedding that is the film’s present tense, they speak whenever they wish to say something. No formal interviews were staged. The challenge for the filmmaking was the image-thinking that would do justice to this multiplicity and still produce a kind of coherence-in-incoherence; enough for the film’s viewers to stay engaged. As a result, the many strands of stories interwoven show lives in a way the truthfulness of which must go against the grain of traditional documentary and its truth claim. Murmuring Voices: Intimacy and Hybridity Within Here, migratory aesthetics comes in. If a film modelled according to such an aesthetic is to avoid an exteriorised, voyeuristic, even eroticised othering and yet avoid erasing differences, a constant negotiation between outside and inside perspectives is needed. In terms of narration, the exchange between the perspectives of the filmmakers and that of the people in front of their cameras embodies a gift culture inside the host culture. Cinematic form, thus, espouses the hybrid situation aesthetically. One aspect that the concept of migratory aesthetics clarifies is the unusual intimacy of the film, which encompasses the filmmakers themselves, addressed and evoked discreetly but persistently as guests of the party. There is indeed a consistent situating of the filming inside the ambiance of the group of people concerned. For example, at the height of the celebration the camera is inside a close group of dancers.9 This is not a simple expression of sympathy and political partiality. Instead, it is deeply connected to the formal ‘messiness’, the attempt to 9  For a critical discussion of intimacy in an intercultural context, see Stoler (2002). See also Intimacy (2000), edited by Lauren Berlant, especially Svetlana Boym’s essay on diasporic intimacy.

convey the sense of multiplicity beyond singular narrative strands. The way the film has locked itself inside the group gives shape to the idea that it is from the inside one can bear witness to the ‘hybridity-within’ that characterises migrant situations. The outside world comes inside the home, the family life, and settles there. This is the thought-image that proposes an alternative to cultural difference and univers­ality both. The image-thinking happened both during the filming, which was also participating in the celebration, and during post-­production.10 Two central and clear manifestations of this principle run throughout the film. One is the presence-absence of the police, already evoked, of which the memories continue to shape the relationships between the groom and his future in-laws, and of the bride’s family with their neighbours. Rather than highlighting the outward, public manifestation of the intervention, we wanted to show the impact of this police intervention inside the home, in the private sphere, where the small violence ‘hits home’. Rather than having police officers say they had a job to do, it seemed to us important to show the bride’s father’s brief moment of doubt about the groom, the direct consequence of the police intervention. Shifting from the bride’s father to the son-in-law to be, visible grief over the absence of his beloved mother and uncle overruled in Tarek’s emotions the anxiety over his civil status. But this overruling occurred and could hence only be perceived against the backdrop of that anxiety. The film is not our attempt to do justice to the perspective of the ‘insiders’, the people concerned, however. That would be committing two mistakes. One is to turn them into objects, speaking ‘for’ them, as if they were powerless. To a serious extent, they make the film and decide what to say and do. Nor are they passive victims. A second mistake we sought to avoid was to suggest that a clear, unambiguous truth was at stake, against which the ‘bad guys’ of the state and its 10  This term ‘hybridity-within’ alludes to Barbara Johnson’s term ‘difference within’ (1980, 1987): an attempt to displace opposition from the tensions between groups to hybridity within groups. ‘Hybridity’ remains a problematic term. See Young (1991) for an incisive critique. During post-production, we went back to the family several times to run the drafts by them and ask if they agreed with the way the film came out.

Figure 3.5  The student pretending to be a journalist. Video still. Figure 3.6  The official speaking about ‘love’. Video still.

police would dictatorially rule. In need of avoiding those mistakes, we staged a blatant contradiction. It is through the only two staged interviews, with two wedding guests, each of whom attempted to play a part in getting the marriage approved, that we can see how the outside world of politics is being imported into the party – perhaps, we can even say, being manipulated from inside. Both proposed the interviews themselves. Positions taken are politically muddled indeed, an aspect of the film to which spectators turned out to be quite sensitive. First of all – perhaps to the shock of those with binary expectations – a Magrebhine woman, a friend of the family but also an official at the town hall, defends the French state with arguments appealing to republican, democratic values and to sentimental talk of ‘love’ – spoken, suddenly, in the administrative, universalising ‘we’. Conversely, it is a French man who speaks up against the state, sensitive to the real, albeit non-physical, violence committed in the name of the law, and, he felt, in his own name (Figures 3.5 and 3.6). This reversal of expected, pre-judged positions alone makes for a kind of political ‘messiness’ best suited to generating fresh discussions. One of the tools to keep that messiness in view is the suspension of the unifying voice.11 11  On the intricate connections between violence, law and lawfulness, see Derrida (1990), and Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (1997).

This is a good example of Lyotard’s ‘figural’: the formal messiness joins the affective and experiential messiness that is constantly visible and audible, in what we see and what we hear. For example, the arranged marriage is the object, not of a discussion ‘for’ versus ‘against’, as in a public debate, but of opinions, feelings and emotions that install themselves within the fundamentally hybrid cultural situation of migrancy: of doubt, denial, uncertainty and a desire to explain and justify, and for which they don’t even have a term. It is just ‘this’. As the bride’s brother phrases it: ‘This is often done, even here.’ And where he seems to contradict himself blatantly when he says, on the heels of those words, ‘Yes, it’s a cultural thing, but be careful, it’s not part of the culture’, he is neither simply stumbling into denial nor being confused, but giving expression to the difficulty of knowing what ‘the culture’ really is. Here, a voice speaks, yet two ‘voices’ collide in his speech. To add to the messiness, Mille et un jours was ‘authored’ by five filmmakers of five different cultural backgrounds. Moreover, the film was shot in France and edited in the Netherlands. If ‘voice’ is a term invented to eliminate authorship as the prime preoccupation of literary studies yet to let it in again through the back door, the speakers in the film cannot be discarded as its (collective) ‘voice’ without assessing the position of those who wielded the cameras, the editing program and, most importantly, the position of ‘second person’ to whom the interlocutors speak. The word ‘voice’, a near catachresis, is naturalised to account for the fact that a story does not come out of the blue and that someone is responsible for it. That ‘someone’ may be a collective, as is routine in cinema and theatre, but the struggle to acknowledge filmmakers collectively, beyond the director alone, shows the difficulty of shared responsibility. It is even more unusual to come across the acknowledgement of subjects – fictional characters or the participants in documentaries – as ‘co-authors’ whose voices co-structure the text. Given the importance of responsibility, it seems indispensable to circumscribe the subject of the text. But when we use words like ‘responsible’, we enter the domain of the ethical. And this domain becomes active when the ‘object’ of narration is the audience’s culture’s

‘other’ – a qualifier that is as problematic as hybridity but also hard to avoid.12 In such a project, it seems obvious that the unifying, explaining voice-over, which is considered a tool for mediating between an audience keen to understand, and subjects and situations just enacting their own everyday life, had to be replaced by what I can only call ‘murmuring’. This is the opposite of voice-over: instead of a knowledge claim to universal truth, an intimate knowledge is voiced by a plurality of participants inside. Even the semblance of coherence offered by chronological storytelling would have imposed a form of unifying thinking that is at odds with the situation. That situation was anchored in an everyday that is neither reducible to specific moments nor structured according to linear time. On the contrary: as the film makes clear, linear time hampers the everyday life of the people who inhabit Mille et un jours. Phantom Sentences13 Let me take a step back and look more closely at the theory and history of ‘voice’. Having contributed, myself, to narrative theory from the vantage point of communication (2017b [1985]), I have always felt the need to come to terms with Ann Banfield’s strong and yet, for me, only partially convincing theory. The present interlude foregrounds both the narratological background of the concept of ‘voice’ and the way it can be deployed to include and integrate two important issues of ‘inter-ship’ of this chapter, and of this book as a whole: intermediality and interculturality. Whereas Banfield’s later book makes the case for the relevance of her theory and offers a unique perspective on the modernist 12  This sense of the importance of collective responsibility I derive it from contemporary Spinozist notions of collective, historical responsibility, and its distinction from ‘guilt’. For an illuminating discussion, see Gatens and Lloyd (1999). 13  This heading cites the title of an article on which I draw here that I wrote for a Festschrift in honour of Banfield (2008a). My title was adopted as the title of the entire book. I had used it to combine Banfield’s 2000 book, Phantom Table, with her 1982 one, Unspeakable Sentences.

body of writings, I struggle with the question that for me was the impulse that overruled all others: that of responsibility. Moreover, when we ask ‘who speaks?’ it is equally, perhaps even more important, to ask ‘who does not get to speak?’ These questions remain key, accompanied by ‘whose vision is presented in that speech, and whose remains unseen?’ This is the question of what I have termed, after Henry James and then Gérard Genette, focalisation. Clearly, my questions would not be recognised by Banfield as relevant for FID, because, for her, the primary ground from which to ask these questions is not ethical responsibility, but forms of knowledge. I contend, however, that an intermedial view of narrative cannot separate the ethical and political from the epistemological aspects. With Banfield I question the assumption that all narratives originate in a single speaking subject; in line with Banfield’s ‘unspeakable sentences’ I denaturalise this assumption. I take up her notion of sen­tences without a speaker – or ‘unoccupied perspectives’, as she calls it, since she does not distinguish narrator and focaliser – to consider sentences rendering ‘crowded’ instead of empty perspectives, whose origin, authority and sincerity cannot be traced to a singularity. Instead of being unspeakable, these sentences point to diffuse speech; to a pluralised phantom speaker, rather than either to an individual narrator or character, or to an empty subject position; they present ‘narrative murmuring’. Thus, I argue that, far from incompatible, Banfield’s view offers a complicating caution to my own: it helps flesh out instances where the latter is reductive and deceptive. I approach the intermediality between language and film as reciprocal, taking literature as my starting point. As I have insisted above and elsewhere (2002), concepts cannot be rigidly determined; they ‘travel’. One way in which concepts ‘travel’ is in their everyday back-and-forth commute between theory and object. In this context, I argue that ‘below’ or ‘behind’ the thematic of narratorial sincerity, authenticity and competence lies an alleged, naturalised unity of culture in which those features are considered virtues. I contest that implicit claim of unity as well as the moralising valuation of those three features of ‘voice’. Like ‘free indirect’ sentences, voice cannot claim origin, that

other doxic cultural obsession. Yet, origin implies generativity, and that perspective must be kept in its – limited – place. If words and images ‘come from’ somewhere, it is from the culture in which the work and its readers participate, which they share at least partially. Mikhail Bakhtin has argued that they don’t know where they have been, but neither do they ‘forget’ that passage (1981). The ‘originless’ words are picked up like graffiti and litter, from the roads we walk along through our lives. Some end up in art and literature. Bakhtin insisted long ago on cultural polyphony, and many scholars have followed suit. Against the craving for self-evident origin, I suggest that ‘voice’ insists too exclusively on illocution, the aspect of speech that indicates the speaker’s intent – and by extension, of all cultural utterances. In the process it privileges the speaker, writer or maker of images. Thus, the concept lends itself to subordinating and obscuring perlocution, the utterance’s effect, and thereby disempowers the listener, reader or viewer.14 I take an example from Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) – an eminent instance of image-thinking. My example is a mixture of literary and cultural reflection on voice, leading up to intermediality. New to the phenomenon of the telephone, the narrator uses amazement as a device for literary production. Far from re-subjectivising speech, amazement is triggered by a mixture of emotional and epistemic alterity. One is amazed by newness, by what comes into one’s field of vision for the first time, acknowledging it was there before, ‘unoccupied’. Therefore, amazement helps the articulation of historical and aesthetic experiences, and image-thinking in response. The concept of ‘voice’ is the one that, in the wake of Roland Barthes, killed the author while it enables critics to continue analysing texts by positing a ‘speaker’ who allegedly uttered it.15 The occasion in Proust’s story is a telephone call. The ‘speaking subject’ whose identity the reader has been building up by means of the revelations that gradually flesh him out, decides to call his beloved grandmother. He 14  The terminology here is taken from John Austin’s theory of performativity (1975 [1962]). 15  Here I target especially the disingenuous concept of the ‘implied author’, introduced by Wayne Booth (1961). I have recently tabled authorship again (2020b).

is amazed when he hears her voice. The epistemological productivity of amazement becomes immediately clear: through it, he discovers what a voice is. This amazement thus becomes a theoretical object: it points to implications of the idea of ‘voice’. The narrator is amazed when he is confronted with his grandmother’s voice, detached from her body, from her face. As a result, the voice redefines this voice–body attachment, precisely because technology has cancelled out perceptual routine. Proust’s text maps a fragmented body with isolated and separated functions. This fragmented body generates a sense of alienation. The difficulty of grasping these functions as separate must be unravelled. There is, therefore, a need for artifice, for a kind of prosthesis. The telephone is such a device. This possibility of technical supplementing makes a huge impression on the narrator. It also saddens him, because there lies the collapse of the effect of the real, whose artifice appears. With a painful awareness of perception’s unreliability, Proust’s narrator says: . . . suddenly I heard that voice which I mistakenly thought I knew so well; for always until then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she said on the open score of her face, in which the eyes figured so largely; but her voice itself I was hearing that afternoon for the first time. (2.135) Proust’s narrator laments the ‘mono-mediality’ of audio-perception only, and is nostalgic for the ordinary intermediality. The voice is no longer the known voice, the object of affect and cognition, when it is detached from its visuality. The musical score that he follows, ordinarily, on his grandmother’s face, is like the map of a labyrinth. The eyes, he adds somewhat disconnectedly, take a lot of place in that maze. This place is where he can temporarily dwell. But this map is now hidden, so that the voice is cut off, from the body but also from the temporality that body guarantees. The voice has neither past nor future, only a present

existence of which he still has no knowledge. Ordinarily, voice, eyes and music converge. Separating them estranges subjects from the affective bond between them. I take this image of perception as, first, intermedially integrated and, second, affectively framed. It becomes an allegory for the cultural field within which I consider my film work as doing its image-thinking. The ‘accented’ speech and its embodied performance must be seen in light of these two aspects. This amazement is no isolated occurrence in the novel. Nor is it limited to the voice. Elsewhere, Proust imagines – fantasmatically and visually, imaging that is – the collapse of time and space. This collapse accompanies the collapse of the senses – where hearing depends on vision – when he theorises photography as the technological prosthesis for visual perception. Here, it is the narrator in his role of visual agent who is deprived of his perceptual routine: Of myself – thanks to that privilege which does not last but which gives one, during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being suddenly the spectator of one’s own absence – there was present only the witness, the observer, in travelling coat and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places one will never see again. The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. (2.141) The photograph embodies the object of visual perception detached from the relationship that inflects perception – its subjectivity. This passage resonates with Banfield’s ‘phantom table’. The famous passage ends in the result of that defective act of vision, disturbing in its negativity. It develops towards an increasingly hostile language, almost violent, to shipwreck, at the end of this unsettling

degradation, on a description of that mental photograph that is always ‘with’ or ‘in’ the narrator: ‘I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know’ (2.143; emphasis added). The voice phrasing what this viewer sees cannot be identified as the writer who wrote the novel. Nor can this hostility easily be mapped on the narrator, who loves his grandmother above anyone else. This voice is detached from both, as the voice through the telephone is detached from the grandmother’s body. Proust is here doing what we can call ‘imaging theorising’. He theorises what ‘voice’ means through imaginative discourse and imaging, both in the reality of his created universe and, by extension, for his writing about that world. The title of Banfield’s second book is derived from a reflection by Bertrand Russell, who, in a moment of utter scepticism, ends an enum­ eration of visions of what an ordinary object like a table is, with the words: ‘Among the surprising possibilities, doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all.’ The words ‘phantom’ and its parasynonym ‘ghost’ hover over the conjunction of reality and time, as well as language and reality. This kind of radical scepticism has mistakenly been seen to elude responsibility, while, as is clear from Banfield’s insistence on the importance of this kind of knowledge, one’s responsibility only increases when knowledge is no longer psychologised (2000, 48).16 For Banfield as for Proust, the issue boiled down to knowledge. Far from being subjectified, this knowledge is ‘alterised’ and is recognised only when the subject is aware of that knowledge. Thereby, Proust manages to gain fuller knowledge of the voice of his grandmother. He does this by going through and then surpassing the alienation due to the detachment of the fragmented body from the distance through which the body travels. This distance is not geographical but ontological, a distance from the routine of perception when it is embedded in 16  The statement is from Russell (1959 [1912], 16), quoted Banfield (2000, 43). The phrase ‘phantom table’ comes from Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (Banfield 2000, 157). On spectrality in connection to migration, see Peeren (2014), already mentioned.

affection. Affection is what frames perception, in the Derridean sense of parergon – both inside and outside of the image. This frame is a diffuse but indispensable supplement without which we cannot live. The body, whose integrity and totality are bracketed by this amazement, just as much as the identity we attach to it, needs such extensions. We are all cognitively and affectively handicapped. We need instruments, tools – glasses, for example – to be able to go out of ourselves, towards others.17 But as usual, Proust’s metaphor is not what it seems. In its extra­ ordinary inversion of perspective, it implies that it is not the telephone that is the prosthesis. The supplement fabricated by means of the new invention is the face. The face, which both ideology of individualism and police practice present as the carrier of identity, is here a mere score – a design, a projected performance. It is the material support, the tool that projects a reading of the voice that is its true performance. This reversal of what is ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ and what is techne or artifice accomplishes three things. First, it entices me to suspend – but not give up – what seems ‘normal’ or even ‘natural’ in the equipment I have got from my training and the traditions within which I work. This includes the concept of voice and others we routinely work with, the methods learnt and practised. Second, the reversal suspends the distinctions between the domains which the humanities have accustomed all of us to consider separately: art, literature, film, the ideas and images that run through philosophy and religious studies. This is why I claim that Proust theorises intermediality, a claim that is only tenable within image-thinking. Third, the diffusion between the ‘normal’ and the ‘artif­ice’ questions the concept of voice as borrowed from the domain of the anthropomorphic imagination and deriving its apparent self-­ evidence from it. It is especially in this last questioning that I encounter ­Banfield’s refusal to take ‘voice’ for granted.18 17  The philosophical relevance of amazement has been pointed out by Groot­enboer (2020, 165–9). 18  Adorno wrote in the 1950s about the ‘essayistic’, philosophical aspects in Proust, which I now consider image-thinking. See his ‘The Essay as Form’ (1991 [1954–8], 8). For more on Proust and intermediality, see my book (1997). Kravanja wrote a study of films based on Proust’s novel (2003).

Dispersal of Voice Amazement is not only a literary or cultural device. Theories also evolve when their authors/thinkers are capable of amazement. The history of the concept of ‘voice’ demonstrates this. The word ‘voice’ as a concept/metaphor in literary studies came into use around the 1930s, in the wake of certain technological discoveries and developments. Before that, neither of the two earliest modern publications now considered narratological – the collection of Henry James’s prefaces in The Art of the Novel (1962 [1907]) and E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1974 [1927]) – use the term as a metaphor. James deploys a remarkably visual vocabulary, whereas Forster writes the term ‘story-teller’ to refer to the author of narrative literature (e.g. 22–3). When Forster uses the term ‘voice’, he refers either to tone (e.g. 86: ‘a tone of voice’), or to a concrete, physical voice. He writes: ‘. . . the story as a repository of a voice. It is the aspect of the novelist’s work which asks to be read out loud’ (27). But, although he does not mention the concept in the anal­ ytical sense of later narratologists and linguists, his phrasing does reveal something of the transforming meaning of voice in a culture about to embark on a ‘secondary orality’, in the days when radio and sound film were becoming common. Forster writes, with a tellingly enthus­iastic primitivism: What the story does do in this particular capacity . . . is to transform us from readers into listeners, to whom ‘a’ voice speaks, the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the audience falls asleep among their offal and bones. (1927, 27; emphasis on primitivism added) The late 1920s and the 1930s, I speculate, would be the moment when the word ‘voice’ became replenished with sense and relevance in a culture that saw itself as modern.

This is a period of special interest to Banfield’s Phantom Table. There are excellent reasons why a theory of voiceless sentences would find its anchoring in a time of literary experimentation (Woolf) and philosophical probing of individualism (Russell). Specifically, it is the moment of the transition from silent to sound film. Film offers the heuristic analogy rather than the modernist novels from which Barthes got much of his inspiration for killing the author. Stemming from the new visual wonderment yet harking back to a primitivity both embraced and proudly left behind, the concept of voice is steeped in technology. Before, the idea that images could have a voice was as utopian as it was exotic. The movement of the image was already an impressive miracle for which painters like Degas and photographers like Muybridge and Marey had prepared the public. In order to turn technological experiments into multimedia spectacles, pianos were brought into the cinema. Sound was a decorative supplement to the moving image. It did not narrate . . . until one day, technology made possible the transition that we now find so natural – from silent to sound film.19 This was not a single transition. For this chapter, the transition that matters is when sound began to transform from ornament to supple­ ment, before it became integral to the moving image; that is, the moment when sound began to be added to the image. This was not the speaking image, or the image speaking simply because the image has human beings in it and humans speak. Rather, the image was made first, then sound was put together with it. A generation later, the true wonderment at the procedure, its technological spectacularity soon forgotten, was nostalgically evoked in fictional form by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly in the film Singin’ in the Rain (1952). This film contributes to understanding the impact of the concept of ‘voice’ beyond narrative analysis only.20 19  On the history and theory of early sound film, see Lastra (2000) and the collection of pioneering texts edited by Weis and Belton (1985). For the many implications of these artists’ attempts to ‘store time’, see Doane (1993, 1996). Doane also writes on the ‘scandalous’ separation of voice from body (1980). On relevant aspects of early cinema, see Verhoeff (2006). For a comparative-theoretical analysis of early and late photography, see Alphen (2018). 20  On this transition and the procedure of adding voice or ‘goat-glanding’, see Armstrong (1998).

In this film, play-acting without words, as the ‘original’ or ‘natural’ form of the moving image, is presented in all its fantastic splendour when Debbie Reynolds acts as an acoustic prosthesis to the ‘mute’ actress whose voice wouldn’t pass. Whereas the Reynolds character ends up achieving final victory, the class-bound censorship of her counter­ part’s voice exceeds the humour of the set-up of doubling and splicing of body and voice. It also puts the finger on what I call the politics of voice. It is in relation to the policing that comes with it that in the making of Mille et un jours we struggled to preserve the accented speech without making the figures become criticisable for making ‘mistakes’. Historically, adding voice or ‘goat-glanding’ opened the possibility of a new engagement between language and image. This engagement turned cinema into an art that was neither literature nor visual art nor a simple combination of the two. It was rather a fundamentally different art in which language and image were inextricably intertwined, along with other media such as music and space. Thus, cinema was able to cast doubt on the essentialism that sought to split the media into separate disciplines. This is when ‘the figural’ was born, although not yet named. In that cultural situation, cinema already had the role of cultural model, in its break with the idea of ‘pure’ media and its access to the mass public; a role which grants the masses the status of consumers, interlocutors and judges of art. But this situation also generated a crisis. The concept of ‘narrative voice’ is an instrument in the service of the repression of that crisis and the crisis of authorial authority it entailed. In this light, Banfield’s theory of ‘unspeakable sentences’ becomes a welcome response to approaches that endorse the author­ itarianism and the individualism inherent in the one-sentence/ one-speaker approach. This cultural crisis that knocked absolute authority out of the hands of expertise is also the crisis of the authority of the author. Barthes (1967) and Foucault (1969) only derived the philosophical consequences from the technological change, and quite late, in fact, when they proposed the idea of the author’s death (Barthes) and the dispersion (Foucault). The crisis had already occurred several decades before. The trigger was the cinema, recently provided with a voice. Soon the spoken

dialogue, added after the fact or not, became an integral part of the cinematic work. Voice became the bearer of realism, which has in turn been a rhetorical instrument in the service of guaranteeing authenticity as effect. Proust, writing before this naturalisation of the added voice, and postmodern writers such as Jorge Luis Borges writing after it, both undermined this realistic effect. Both writers opposed it: Proust opposed this effect for the affective conditions of possibility of communication while Borges undermined the ontological conditions of matching voice and agency. The ‘Other’ Tradition and Cultural Belonging The realistic effect is not only undermined through the denaturalisation of that matching, though. The dispersal of voice, a key aspect of our film, is another way to deprive the voice of its authority and its unifying force while still recognising its importance. The foregoing reflections bear on the political thrust of the film. The persistent presence of ‘cultural background’, of North African traditions, to which, at various moments and in varying degrees, the people in the film wish to belong, preclude both a disembodied and a one-sided voice. The use of not only multiple cameras but also of multiple technical qualities, in borrowed home videos and historical footage, underscores the active contribution of the protagonists’ culture. Early in the film, where footage from home videos of the children’s early years shows a good degree of integration, the bride’s parents express a longing for their background, as well as regret that Tunisia is just a holiday destination for their French-born children. At the film’s end, this view is reversed when it turns out that the daughter had insisted on a traditional Tunisian wedding, whereas her mother, while happy to comply, does not know the meaning of some of the traditions involved. The film ends with the mother’s expression of limited knowledge, when she is both clearly pleased that the traditional after-wedding meal is being served while actually unable to explain its meaning (Figure 3.7). (p. 118)21 21  See Turner’s discussion of the impossibility for practitioners to explicitly know the meaning of their rituals (1969).

Figure 3.7  The after-meal and the self-evidence of tradition. Video still.

This generational difference-within also turns chronology upsidedown. What, for the parents, is a lived past to which they cling and towards which they gently push their children, marks for the children a possible future, potentially filling an emptiness or gap in their genealogy. For this generation, there is a hybrid belonging to a culture that was never theirs to begin with, yet one that is always present in their lives through their parents’ nostalgia – ‘remembered’ in what is called, with a somewhat problematical term that was strongly adopted, ‘postmemory’.22 At the heart of this push and pull sits the relationship to what the participants see as tradition. Tradition: as a general concept, we may have a universal here; again, a paradoxical one that universalises cultural difference. In convergence with that semantic and affective field, the reference to the canonical work of Arabic literature in the film’s title 22  On the concept of postmemory, see Marianne Hirsch (1997). For a convincing critique, see Alphen (2005), and Hirsch’s excellent reply (2008). More in Chapter 10.

suggests the film’s claim to a traditional genre. The Arabic tradition as embodied in A Thousand and One Nights helps establish genre. It inserts into the film the discourse of the fairy tale and the structure of the patchwork, the string narrative and the loosely connected collections of stories in which so much of ancient world literature is captured. This is an inter-discourse, a discursive inter-locutor. It is present as an antecedent, but also, and at the same time, as the discourse of ‘post’commentary, à la Bakhtin’s heteroglossia.23 The clearest aspect that the title foregrounds is the multiplicity of narrative strands, inherent in everyday life. As mentioned, the story of the police intervention that triggered the desire to make this film could not be foregrounded as a primary story, since the oppressive effect of administrative violence does not disempower the characters as totally as is easily assumed – an assumption anchored in the trad­ ition of single-­strand narrative. Attributing a narrative voice to this intervention would have obliterated the people’s resilience. Consequently, it might erase their continued commitment to the intimacy of their lives. As individuals, as a family and as a cultural group, they do not just claim a voice that is only partially granted them but also, to use a legal phrase, ‘the right to remain silent’. Thus, episodes from the other stories follow each other in rapid succession – the arranged marriage, the help from peers, the wedding preparations and the renovation work in the apartment – so as to weave a fabric within which the police activity is simply absorbed, perhaps even caught, entrapped in the spider web of everyday life.24 The interdiscursive resonances between Mille et un jours and A Thousand and One Nights are yet more specific. Sometimes, structure compels a shift to thematics. In the tales of The Arabian Nights (as the 23  On the use of this term in cultural criticism, see Hirschkop and Shepherd (1989). For a confrontation between Bakhtin and popular culture, Peeren (2008). On tradition and its ambivalences, see the chapter in my 2002 book. I put ‘post’ in quotation marks to indicate my resistance against the idea of overcoming and moving beyond that the preposition so often implies. See my article on this topic (2019). 24  On the aesthetics of everyday life in relation to migratory culture, see my article on GLUB (Hearts) (2005).

collection is also called), a standard narrative prevails: the prince travels, falls in love and encounters obstacles. Authorities attempt to subvert his happiness, and the heroism of the prince consists in defeating authority through cunning. In the story of Tarek’s attempt to become ‘legal’, this skeletal story is clear: the ‘prince of Remada’ embarked on a journey over high seas and mountains, even if a few hours’ plane ride considerably condensed the adventure. The remainder of the story is spread over the 1,001 days that it took him to go from Charles de Gaulle airport to legal residency in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris.25 Similarly, as happens in the original tales, a woman shows up. But fairy tale and documentary part ways when we realise that the question whether or not Tarek fell in love with her, as did the prince in the tales, is explicitly denied. For, he explains, as long as his situation was as it was, he could not afford love. The obstacle is set up, in a big way, and, like the hero in the tales, Tarek vanquishes it through cunning. He pulls it off with the help of collective actors: family, friends, the uncle and even a ‘traitor’, the official mentioned above who deals with the authorities. Each person makes their contribution. The collective action, however, is also the gear change through which the traditional story is recast, eluding the universalist idea of tradition as permanent. There, heroism is rendered in the form of a lone struggle. Here, no sign of Tarek’s struggle is shown; only the anxiety and the opponent, an incomprehensible bureaucracy. Yet, with the help of his own collective, his group of peers, can the hero withstand this anonymous pressure. His heroism, then, is to be able to enlist and direct the group, to invent what needs doing and to persevere. That group-directing is visible in the film. The meaning of heroism itself is thus reversed, again through deindividualisation.26 25  The phrase ‘the prince of Remada’ is meant a bit literally. Usually, small communities send their smartest, most entrepreneurial young men to achieve a financially better future in the metropolis. Idealisation is part of the social structure. In this sense, Tarek was the ‘prince of Remada’. 26 On A Thousand and One Nights, see Leeuwen (2007); in relation to feminism and colonialism, Khanna (2008).

The question of voice, far from being futile, is central in the Arabic classic, but then in a concrete, embodied sense. The diegetic thread that keeps the stories together consists of the fabulous gift of storytelling Scheherazade possesses, which saves her life. The point is not, then, to eliminate voice from our inquiry but to examine the point of its occurrences. The life-saving quality of voice in the universe of Mille et un jours resides, precisely, in voice’s multiplicity. As Tarek himself asserts, without his friends who have the key (to his mailbox, but also, by extension, to his life) he could not have managed it all. The ongoing relevance of the question ‘Who speaks?’ lies in its aesthetic implications. It connects the two domains that make literature and art matter. Their importance lies in the way ideas are presented to us in forms, that is, the formalisations that produce intersubjective access, and their political, ethical and ideological impact. Here, then, in addition to the identity of the speaker, the question ‘who?’ probes the meaning of the verb ‘to speak’. This implies two questions about meaning. The first concerns meaning’s construction. ‘What does this mean?’ and ‘What does she mean (to say)?’ are two different conceptions of meaning that the metaphors of authorship conflate: signification – the production and processing of publicly accessible meaning – and intention – that inevitable urge to identify meaning with the mind of the artist who made that meaning public. The former has no bearing on authorship; the latter does. Conflating them, then, begs the question of meaning. The second question concerns agency. ‘What are the consequences?’ is a way of phrasing this. This raises two further questions: on the one hand, that of effectivity in terms of reception; in other words, what does the work ‘do’ to its readers or viewers? For Mille et un jours, the impossibility of determining who speaks translates into a dispersal of ‘voices’, which facilitates a reception equally diverse: each viewer can both recognise their own cultural voice and encounter less familiar voices. On the other hand, there is the question of the social relevance of the work, that is, ‘what does it do to the public domain in which it functions?’ In our case, facilitating intercultural encounter helps further such encounters for both groups that give shape to the European public

domain – say, ‘Western’ and ‘Arabic’ together. These two questions must be asked in the positive but also in the negative form. What meanings and critical possibilities are repressed when we use a concept of the ‘who?’-kind such as narrative voice? These questions are a backlight for this chapter. Beyond Aristotelian Time This film is, also, classical according to the rules of Aristotelian tragedy. The visual focus on a specific time, place and event – the three wedding days in Sens, France – alludes to classicism, with a wink; it is not exclusive, as regular classicism would require. How does an object like this film respond to that essentially Western tradition? The concepts of theoretical and historical analysis that pertain to classicism help articulate some aspects that might otherwise pass unnoticed. One such aspect is the distribution of moods. Our film is not a tragedy but a celebration. But it could have been a tragedy. Indeed, the anxieties surrounding that possibility accede to presentation, albeit discreetly packaged in fragmented commentaries. The central event is itself subject to a doubt that can easily turn into tragedy, and the many allusions and comments regarding the status of the marriage function quite like a chorus – the collective expressing a communis opinio. Thus, the voices of relatives and friends highlight the question that is not asked, only alluded to: is this a ‘good’ marriage, a ‘real’ one as conceived by the standards of Western culture, romantic and inspired by love, or, is it, after all, a dubious case of a green-card marriage for him and an arranged marriage for her, an escape from confinement into lovelessness? The binary thinking, here, is undermined by indeterminacy. The groom is explicit: this marriage did not begin with love. But that is not saying it is loveless. There are moments when this question seems to receive an answer, although not from either groom or bride, nor explicitly. But whether or not we believe that answer and take it as our clue to forming a political opinion depends on how far each viewer accepts the invitation extended by the film’s intimacy. Ultimately, the alternative of this either/or question seems bizarrely

out of place. Hence, it makes us rethink both arranged and romantic marriages, not in opposition to each other, nor in evaluation. And this ambiguity induced by the ‘chorus’ is the political point. This film also returns to the classical tradition, then, in that it does not endorse individual psychology, the predominant model of realism in novel and film. In our individualistic but also globalised age with its tendency to spread particularity in the guise of universality, it seemed inappropriate to dig into the interior motivations of the characters inhabiting this film. This decision determined the performativity of the conversations. We let the individuals be as personal as they wished to be, refraining from asking probing questions. Hence, whereas the intimately personal conversations were like gifts extended to us from within a gift-culture and entrusted to us for an appropriate recycling, some of the speakers, and particularly Tarek, were not inclined to make emotional appeals. The cultural group with its decisive modes of behaviour constitutes the interiorised vraisemblance of Tarek’s ways. The confrontation of classical tragedy with the conceptual metaphor of voice also qualifies the conception of art that underlies the film. The privilege mostly unreflectively accorded to narrative voice easily entails an extreme mimeticism, an assumed and endorsed, albeit disavowed, seamless match between social relations and art – a match that it is, however, art’s mission to question. The relevance of artistic narrative resides, precisely, in its refusal to obey the pressure of realism as trompe l’œil. The question ‘who speaks?’ can only escape that trompe l’œil if its other, the question of ‘who doesn’t speak?’, is systematically co-present, like a parasite. The question which character, in what social position, does not have access to speech pertains on the one hand to voice, but on the other hand undermines the belief in and obedience to the text, hence, also, the documentary, as ‘account’. The attachment to realism is rooted in the need to protect the aspect of authority in the metaphor of voice. The presence of authority in humanistic studies allows the authorisation of interpretation to be naturalised. The concept of narrator is part of that authorising impulse. As a phantom presence, the author continues to lurk in the wings as long as the major analytical concepts partake of the author’s

anthro­pomorphic shape. The attribution of intention that this concept of narrator facilitates subordinates the reader. The latter, brainwashed by education to interiorise the taboo on exercising her function of second person, is too easily submissive to the intention that clothes the text as long as it is conceived as the unquestioned product of a voice. This is a universalistic strategy that no universal sustains. The film alludes to that classical model, then rejects it as too limited for this open and disorderly situation. Take the issue of time. The concentration on the wedding days is unifying, suggesting the possibility of a classical condensation that did not materialise because the linear time in which the unity is embedded, is problematised. There is a constant tension between ‘too early’ and ‘too late’. This tension makes Tarek both energetic and nervous, turning him into the ambivalent kind of ‘hero’ described above. The triumph that the wedding constitutes is, also, the triumph over linear time as well as over singular authorship. This defeat of a naturalised linearity of time cannot be narrated by any one voice, for it remains entrenched below the threshold of awareness. Instead, the defeat is given visual shape by way of the film’s work with faces. Slow close-ups defeat linear, measurable time – because they endure. Here, we can look back to the face of Marcel’s grandmother in Proust. This first becomes clear when the voice of authority, embodied in the woman who served as the liaison with the town hall, is herself visually isolated from the wedding. But, second, this woman’s voice, and specifically her statements concerning persons and their rights – statements defending France’s republican values – are visually accompanied by a range of close-ups of the principal members of the wedding, incarnating their status as persons with such rights. This series of close-ups counters the official’s Enlightenment discourse and thwarts the woman’s implicit claim that the democratic values and individual rights she invokes go against the characters’ attempts to exercise their own rights in performing this marriage. The film asserts the opposite: using closeups to contribute to the temporal confusion, the film undermines the development narrative that would cast cultural ‘others’ in a different time. Each face says ‘no’ to the official’s voice insofar as it proclaims

France’s humanistic superiority over the countries it has so thoroughly exploited.27 Third, the defeat of linear time is constituted by the belatedness of these Western humanistic claims. Long before the representative of the municipality utters these claims, two screen-filling close-ups had already stipulated that different interpretations of personhood are available and have equal rights. A first one is the rather long close-up of the bride, whose right to choose her life course had been stolen from her under the pretext of the condescending protection that, precisely, undermines her status as a person. The second close-up is the shot, already mentioned, when the bride’s mother’s face – warm, personally engaging and utterly reasonable – fills the screen to voice her gentle protest against the bureaucratic violence. She says it is difficult to explain what happened to them because ‘we’ – her group, her culture – ‘have never, anywhere, experienced such things [as this police intervention]’.28 Linear time is undermined in yet another way, also at odds with the classical model, which the film thereby invokes a contrario. This is through the performative aspect of the film itself – a performativity grounded in belatedness. The concentration on the moment of the wedding locks into times past all the events that make this wedding different: the threat, the intervention, the fear underlying the festiv­ ities. The audience is informed, from the outset, about what has happened. This retrospectivity transforms the performance itself – the moment of viewing the film – into a quest for a knowledge that foregrounds its own irrelevance. Strikingly, it remains hard to keep track of which wedding is being witnessed – of the four weddings this couple had to go through in order to be ‘really married’. Of the four weddings – the one that was cancelled, the successful civil marriage, the celebration, and the re-celebration in Tunisia made necessary by Tarek’s mother being denied a visa – no single one can be considered a marriage. 27  On the meanings and effects of the close-up, including its assault on linear time, see Doane (2003). 28  This relation to anti-linear temporality and the close-up is inspired by Deleuze’s view of this device; see Pisters (2003, 66–71), and Marrati (2008 [2002], 46–52). For an in-depth study of Deleuze’s cinema books, see Rodowick (1997).

This is, precisely, the performance. The ‘migratory aesthetic of time’ resides in that confusion. Such performativity is the true, and perhaps the only universal in the film, because it undermines all the false ones. Everywhere within the current wedding are the two failed, forbidden weddings: the civic marriage, which was ‘only an engagement’ for one and a ticket to freedom for the other – a wedding that comes belatedly, in the wake of the police intervention – and the post-wedding, made necessary by the administratively induced absence of the groom’s mother. As a result of this play with time and knowledge, the film becomes ‘intransitive’: rather than offering an account of the story, this story happens only when, performatively, the audience can let go of the linear story.29 There is one last temporality that resonates with, then counters, the analogy to classical tragedy. Because of the redundancy and insufficiency of the information – we know it all from the start, yet we are constantly confused – a space opens up for another, forward-moving, temporality. The emphasis put on preparations displays a desire to make things happen, a vitality that no bureaucracy can paralyse: the urge to declare, not in words but in actions, ‘we are here to stay’. This forward movement puts time back into the equation. Time is a constant pain for Tarek, who feels his time is out of joint. He looks at his watch, surreptitiously or overtly, and each time he voices his dismay at time’s speed (Figure 3.8). Clearly, time is an enemy for him. Westerners tend to think that migrants lag behind – hence the pervasive use of concepts of development. The social ideal of sharing time, in what Johannes Fabian famously termed coevalness, is thus denied to migrants (1983). But by denying coevalness to migrants, Westerners deny themselves coevalness with migrants. Against the backdrop of this politics of time, there is one moment, one shot, that visualises this temporality most poignantly. Mediated through a cut-away shot of their shoes and the hem of the bride’s dress, the bride and groom step forward; after having shed the white wedding dress, the former now wears a festive ballroom dress that recalls 29  I owe this insight to theatre scholar Maaike Bleeker.

Figure 3.8  Tarek always feels the hot breath of time. Video still.

debutante balls of the 1950s. Right after this shot, the couple makes another parade-like re-entrance, this time with the bride in the traditional c­ ostume of Tarek’s town. As the couple steps forward, the costume can also be seen as a step backward, to a tradition this wedding – which establishes Tarek in France – moves away from. This step back in time, back to the tradition in which the bride, as a second-generation migrant, never lived, is paradoxically the major step forward. With her as a mediator, the viewers are allowed to share time with this group, in a short moment of coevalness. In light of this brief moment of visualised coevalness, the fact that the ‘authentic’ wedding – the fourth one, celebrated in Tunisia, after the ‘main’ wedding – is shown only after the film, during the extensive credit sequence, is an appropriate answer to the ethnographic question that this film also raises. If this is an ethnographic film, of what ethnos does it write an ethnography? This question is unsettling yet inevitable, since ethnography is the genre par excellence of the Western unified voice with its claim to universal truth. Turning the ‘authentic’ into a supplement in Derrida’s sense, the film places ‘authenticity’ beyond the boundaries of the world of the film. It is there, but not quite. The most traditional of the four weddings does not constitute a regression, a substantiation of the temporal lag that will always place migrants ‘behind’. On the contrary, this event too was induced by the French authorities, who refused Tarek’s mother a visa. In a very precise sense,

it is, thus, a step back in a step forward – a wilful and playful anachrony born out of a newly conquered liberty to travel back.30 Travelling Forking Paths Travelling: this qualifier for the deployment of concepts in inter­ disciplinary cultural analysis also stands for the culture of migrancy. Travel can no longer be translated as tourism, that model of cinematic entertainment in the medium’s early days. Under the aegis of travel with unknown returns I have proposed putting the concept of voice ‘under erasure’ in a confrontation with an object that is ‘accented’. I wished to question voice and make it liable to produce its own altern­ ative. I aimed to morph the anthropomorphic question ‘Who?’ into a spatial question, ‘Where?’, the question that was central in the previous chapter. Where does meaning come from, where does it go and which paths does it follow? This ‘travelling’ of concepts is their universality; not their rigid fixity.31 The metaphor of the path has two advantages over ‘voice’. First, it denaturalises the individual ‘behind’ the work of art as the source, origin and authority of its meanings and effects. Second, it facilitates travel between the disciplinary fields involved, the text-based ones of which literary studies is the primary but not the only representative, and the visually oriented ones represented by film studies and art history. In this travel, I suspend answers we tend to desire too quickly, and instead propose to listen to presentations where ‘speaking in tongues’ (Henderson 1989) is the standard and a single unified voice a particular, perhaps deviant, manifestation. For all cultures, including Western European culture, speak in many voices. This is a liberating 30  Fabian (1990) attempts to reconceptualise ethnography beyond the unified voice. See my critical analysis of this text (1996). In a discussion of the film in 2004, Murat Aydemir suggested the status of the fourth wedding as a Derridean supplement. 31  The term ‘accented’ refers to Himid Naficy’s concept of ‘accented cinema’ (2001). See Hui (2020) for an interdisciplinary and intermedial theorising of the concept of accent. Patricia Pisters discussed the status of Mille et un jours as accented in Naficy’s sense (2005).

universal. Its performativity is its empowering aspect. Attending to this multiplicity and its performances is a universalism I gladly endorse. For a provisionally final word on intermediality I call upon a succinct, very illuminating article by Anthony Uhlmann on Samuel Beckett’s only film, the 1964 Film. The author concludes with the following summary of what the image does to intention. This sums up succinctly why the image is productively incompatible with intentionalism, an insight most useful for the migratory aesthetics of the face. He writes: What Film in part offers is the exploration of a medium that draws its power – the power to produce sensations – through gaps. Yet, images provide sparks that leap from one side to the next, like messages across synapses, thereby allowing the formation of a unity among difference: intuition and sensation, intuition and the idea, intention and reception, philosophy and literature. (2004, 103) Paradoxically, Uhlmann uses here the discourse of medium-specificity to make a point about the merging of domains, and the discourse of embodiment – sensations – to posit gaps. These gaps, far from referring back to the subject as origin of texts and images, establish discontinuities between the shards, fragments and noises of which literature and art consist in light of cinema. The principle of montage acknowledges these discontinuities. Montage shows the ruins of the subject. In the same vein, interdisciplinarity, an academic variant of montage, demonstrates the impossibility of essentialising the media – of treating language as severed from vision. Banfield demonstrates her awareness of this not only in her interest in phantom tables, but also in her constant emphasis on the inherent importance of vision, not in order to establish an origin in the subject but, on the contrary, to endorse the consequences of that impossibility. Together with Russell and Woolf – the philosopher and the imaginative-imaging

writer of fiction – Banfield maintains the importance of vision not in spite of but because of the possibility that things can remain unseen (2000, esp. 129). These writers endorse the shadow the phantoms cast over their writings. Once the difficult notion of unoccupied perspectives comes into view, its counterpart, the notion of crowded, inaccessible perspectives, becomes necessary. When sentences float from mouth to mouth, they harbour such crowded perspectives. Phantoms of collectivities that are only imaginable as immediate future or recent past do not leave the individual subject who is neither all-powerful – as in the (misconstrued) Cartesian tradition – nor utterly disempowered, as in the Berkeleyan one. Taken together, their ghosts hover over such masterly modernist literature as Woolf ’s and Proust’s, in which vision is utterly necessary. Perhaps the answer to the question ‘Who speaks?’ in a documentary such as Mille et un jours is just that: a collectivity, shaped for the purpose.32

32  The very beginning of my interest in documentary making goes back to 1990, when I was the ‘object’-subject of a documentary made by Thom Verheul. I very much enjoyed the process and the result. Thom gave early feedback on Mille et un jours, which turned out to be crucial (briefly: ‘slow down the film’).

4. Multi-tentacled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Pre-posterous History 2MOVE (the exhibition) Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled Marclay, The Clock It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency Introducing Time’s Thought-Image: An Octopus Having resisted attempts to define concepts discussed so far, it is not with time, or temporality, that I am going to start saying what it is. We all know, or think we know, live in, are subjected to, the self-evident dimension of life we call time. But in spite of George Kubler’s brave 1962 attempt to argue for the contrary, time has no form, no shape; it is not a thing. It can leave shapes, in the sense of historically specific styles, which is more in line with Kubler’s essay, but time itself is formless. It can be used in rhythm, which can sometimes create the impression or

feeling of form, something we take from music and rhythmic poetry. But it is not time that has that form; it is the music, verse, or even the rhythmic breathing that has a form. Formlessness does not entail invisibility, however. The choice is not to either see fully shaped forms or to see nothing, but, as Silverman puts it, to learn to practise a ‘visual habitus’ that enables us to see what, by lack of recognisable form, seems invisible (see the introduction to her 1996 book). Although she proposes this not in the context of time but of an ‘ethics of vision’, the idea of a visual habitus can be brought to bear on time. In general, as the time passing in the everyday, ‘all the time’, time is so self-evident that one would not wonder about its potential form. It only accedes to awareness when its apparent flow is interrupted. This can be due to nature or man-made disasters, traumatogenic events, which change the course of time, in one way or another, or to an exceptionally intense experience.1 Formless as it is, time is culturally ubiquitous. And it exerts great power over society and individual lives. Therefore, I give it a (meta­ phorical) form, to make it concrete in a thought-image. Traditionally, time is represented as an arrow, going in one direction. This metaphor is burdened with simplifying consequences: briefly, a one-liner, unidirectional. Narrative could easily be considered such an arrowsubjected cultural form. And so could film. They both take time; in order to engage works in those media, you need to give them time. This give-and-take is imperative if these two modes are to be processed at all. In narrative theory, issues of time have been divided into order, rhythm and duration. Both narrative literature and film can play with these three distinct but imbricated aspects of time. As a result, the arrow is halted, or at least slowed down, in its relentless unidirectional 1  For a multidisciplinary reflection on what time ‘is’, see Wyller (2020). Kubler (1912– 96) answered criticisms in a later essay (1982). For the concept of formlessness, I refer once more to Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (1997). The witty phrase ‘time is there all the time’ was coined by philosopher Kristin Gjesdal in her essay from 2017 on Norwegian artist Jeannette Christensen. Corry Shores discusses a Deleuze-inspired phenomenological view of cinematic time, focusing on ‘temporal depth’. He is in dialogue with Vivian Sobchack (1992). Anaïs Nony studies time in video as a temporal ‘volume’ of electronically produced signals, probing video as a specific medium (2019).

course. But I will argue in this chapter that it can also be diverted from its course, as well as multiplied.2 Thanks to narratives and films, and of course, music, we can experience time differently. The arrow must yield to the many tentacles of temporality. This is why I propose a thought-image that gives a different view of time in its problematic relation to form: an octopus. The thought-image of the octopus is not only characterised by the many different but equally important tentacles that sprawl from, while constituting, its body. The animal has eight limbs, hence its name; but for the thought-image, it is the sur-numerousness that counts, not the actual number. It is easy to articulate time as well into eight tentacles: sequence, duration, motion, repetition, parallelism, action, change, speed. But if we then count rhythm and deixis, we reach ten already. Each tentacle, in addition, possesses many suction cups, small organs that serve to attach the animal to other things or creatures, but, more crucially, to suck up, incorporate, food: in the thought-image, the cultural nourishment called attention, engagement, dialogue.3 The main body of my pet octopus consists of the first temporal aspect, category or idea, derived from deixis: the contemporary. This is the one that incarnates existence in the now. The present tense – or, as Deleuze called it, the living present – that characterises our engagement with one another, with art, politics – in short, with the world – is the creature itself: egg-shaped, glimmering, fattish, and endowed with 2  The three narratological categories of time – order, duration and frequency – have been systematically laid out and analysed, in dialogue with Proust, by Gérard Genette (1980 [1972]), a book that has been deeply formative for my thinking. Much as I have also felt compelled to criticise it, without this book my work on narratology would not have happened at all. My own version of the temporal categories is presented in Bal (2017b, 67–103). 3  The octopus has been put to earlier intellectual use by others, such as Donna J. Haraway (2016, 30–57). Although she discusses the octopus in a more general sense, her metaphor qualifies also as a thought-image. Her primary carrier of ‘tentacular thinking’ is the spider, also eight-legged. And her central idea concerns connecting, not differentiating. An important philosophical source is the work of Gilles Deleuze, especially Difference and Repetition (1994 [1968]) and Bergsonism (1990 [1988]). Deleuze uses the thought-image/metaphor of the arrow, but multiplies it. See ­Williams (2011) on Deleuze’s philosophy of time.

a subjectivity, or self, where the sharing of time, as the word ‘con-temporary’ has it, can do its communal work. Its tentacles reach out, widen the scope of the contemporary. The present hovers between thing and event. It is where and when we are. Its suction cups embody the engagement it requires and proposes. The semi-abstract sculpture in Figure 4.1 clearly alludes to the form of the octopus. But when seen closer, it becomes more powerful. The open cavity on its top now seems to be dominated by Medusa-like snakes. Is it an open mouth, or a vagina – a screaming Medusa or a hollow patch to synthesise the different tentacles of time? No matter. It is the tangle of protrusions, going in all directions, refusing the straightness of the arrow, that counts. The shiny, slimy surface and the sheen of its ceramic image are meaningful, too. It functions like the gleaming glass the painter Francis Bacon (1909–92) insistently put in front of his paintings, in spite of the elaborate work with surface, impasto, thinness, bare canvas, so characteristic of his works. This was not to make the surface uniform; on the contrary. The glass makes seeing the paintings more difficult, and this compels closer, more attentive looking. That difficulty of seeing makes the differentiated surfaces accessible. In the case of my octopus, similarly, the skin below the surface has spots, colours and other details we don’t see if we limit ourselves to looking at the sheen (Figure 4.2). Moreover, the sheen reflects the viewer a bit, who is thus systematically also visually involved.4 The octopus is a thought-image rather than a metaphor, though, because it solicits awareness of the Deleuzian ‘living present’ as multiple, with stretches and durations of different lengths (Williams 2012, 69). This also fits with Deleuze’s philosophy of the symbol, adequate in that it is multiple and faceless (102). The latter aspect may well be what is created by the open cavity in the sculpture. With this Figure 4.1  Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled, 2011, 41 × 33 × 23.5 cm, ceramic. Figure 4.2  Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled, 2011, detail 4  For a highly illuminating study of Bacon that includes reflections on the surface, see Alphen (1998 [1992]).

thought-image in mind, in this chapter I will distinguish but also merge the image-­thinking in the different tentacles, the temporal aspects. First of all, I focus on contemporaneity, an over-used but under-theorised term, which I see as what the word literally means: being-together in time. This is best exemplified by exhibitions and their audiences (Bal 2020a). My preference for exhibition as the key instance, or model, of contempo­raneity is due to the inevitable involvement of spectators-participants. This involvement must be presented as an inextricable element, without which the concept of contemporaneity makes no sense whatsoever. I will again briefly invoke the exhibition of Don Quijote: Sad Counten­ances, because it was deliberately designed to compel involvement. Staying with the temporality of the present, I also want to discuss an aspect that narrative and film share, but that is most important in any attempt to connect art to the social world: the experience of time as heterogeneous. I thought this idea up during work for the travelling exhibition 2MOVE that I co-curated in 2004–8 with Spanish art historian Miguel Á. Hernández Navarro. Whilst preparing this exhibition and studying the video works, I realised how fundamentally the experience of time differs from person to person, according to their lives in the present of contemporaneity. The reflection on this steered me towards developing the concept of heterochrony. In the framework of the 2MOVE exhibition, this concept became the key, literally, the gear shift between the two sides of the project: the movement of people, in migration, and the movement of images, in video. The connection between these two sides, a comparative perspective that is not thematic – we did not select specifically videos about migration – helped us understand movement as an aspect of the experience of time. The final tentacles of the octopus attach themselves to the most tenacious dogma in historical research: chronology. Sucking themselves solidly, in order to fasten reflections on what narratology would call ‘order’, to the flexibility of this in narrative where play with order is the order of the day, compels reflection on, endorsement of, and working with the reciprocity of temporal order. The past has impact on the

present, but we cannot even perceive the past if it isn’t through the screen of the present. As a result, the past changes constantly, according to who considers it, and when. I have termed this reciprocity ‘pre-posterous history’.5 Togetherness in Time This heading is the literal translation of the word ‘contemporary’. ‘Con-’ means together, or with, from the Latin preposition ‘cum’; and ‘-temporary’ qualifies that togetherness as temporal. This can only occur in the present. We may identify with people from the past, empathise with them, or, in case they were the bad guys, hate and loathe them. But we cannot be together across time. I propose exhibition practice as a model for the contemporary condition. For, in exhibition, the contemporaneity traverses all levels of space, visitors, material conditions, as much as the artworks that can only work in the present tense, in the encounter with an engaged spectator-participant. All this is highly relevant for my project, but in order to focus on image-thinking – with hyphen, in the progressive form, as a process – the media and the distinctions between them are not central. Exhibitionism stands for conceit, vanity. Here exhibition-ism turns exhibition practice into a key for what the qualifier ‘contemporary’ can mean for understanding art as emerging from and returning to the social world of today. And ‘-ism’ indicates my conviction that this is an important lead to follow. Not as a period label, nor as a stylistic qualifier, but taken literally to analyse what art is and can do. The practice of exhibition-making, called curating, here becomes central, rather than derivative and ­secondary to the artmaking that allegedly precedes it. For me, curating is part of artmaking.6 5  For a study of temporal turbulence in contemporary art, see Hernández Navarro (2020b). This book’s fourteen chapters each present and analyse a different temporality through the work of a contemporary artist. 6  On exhibitionism in the more usual sense, in its current practice of video and online image-making, see Alphen (2017). On the hyphen as a critical concept, see Tuin and Verhoeff (2021, 68–70).

The root of ‘curating’ resonates with ‘curing’ as ‘care’: the curator as artist, but also, the spectator as co-artist. Both functions are indispensable for art to work. This is so because the art is nothing if not seen, even if its objects can be stored in archives or storage spaces. It is there, sleeping, ready to be awoken and brought to do its primary job, which is to work on and with spectators. Hence, curating and artmaking converge in a process that can only reach its accomplishment in the moment, now. The three photographs shown in Figures 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5, made by different people, of different exhibitions of the same artworks curated by different people, show the differences between the works in different venues. It is the task of art to solicit an audience that can relate to what is on display, to be seen. This is a primary goal of exhibitions. But for my endeavour of image-thinking, a relationship between the art-inexperience and the part of the lives people bring to the experience is equally indispensable. When what is to be seen is intertwined with what happens in the contemporary world, that relation can have a critical, amused, admiring, confused quality. In one way or another, the viewer participates, co-performs: the art– viewer relationship is affective. How that affective bond is shaped and experienced is up to each viewer. But the curator and the artist may have specific affective goals in mind when they do their work. In this project, for example, we aimed for a relationship to be empathetic. That relationship, coloured by whatever mood or emotion, is what makes art contemporary; it makes it ‘living’ in the present. For this to happen, as I mentioned in the Introduction, a mode of display is required that changes from the traditional museal display. The mode needs to be conducive to, or at least enable, an engagement that makes the artworks alive, and the viewing situation live. And this is necessary if exhibition is a model of contemporaneity, as I am proposing here. The materiality of the museal condition is inherently involved in this. The opportunity to sit down and stay with the artwork is obviously a factor of temporality. Figure 4.3  Don Quijote in Växjö. Photo: Ebba Sund. Figure 4.4  Don Quijote in Murcia. Photo: Luz Bañón. Figure 4.5  Don Quijote in the Leeds Art Gallery. Photo: Memory Potifa.

Figures 4.6 and 4.7  Don Quijote reading. Photos: Lena Verhoeff.

This view has consequences for the ontology of art: it exists, it ‘is’ only when and to the extent that it ‘works’. The contemporary, then, is not an enduring condition but something that happens. That verb foregrounds the event, the act, the punctuality, the momentariness, instead of, say, a period label, as in ‘contemporary art’. Such period labels beg the question of when a ‘period’ begins and ends. For older periods, this may be possible, if we accept a certain imprecision. Renaissance, baroque, classicism, modernism: they each go by a beginning date, usually bound to a ground-breaking new work or artist. But, as ‘modernism’ already suggests, the cut-off date is hard, even impossible, to fixate. If, instead, we accept that the contemporary is not – indeed, cannot be – a

period, it makes sense to consider it rather through the event-ness that exhibitions embody. This has two sides to it: change and duration. For philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the first meaning of ‘event’, of the six he discusses in his short book on the topic, is reframing (2014, 10). For Deleuze, it is the caesura, the cut. This cut separates the present from the future. As James Williams phrases it: ‘It is that all events must be such cuts, because to be presents and passing presents they must have singularities or express differences.’ And he continues: ‘So, for Deleuze the future as novelty is not only a caesura. It is also an assembly of events. Each novel event assembles all other events in a novel manner’ (2012, 15). That ‘assembly of events’ I consider to be

what happens to the viewers when they stretch out their mentalemotional tentacles to what they see on each screen.7 And as Deleuze wrote, Bergson, the primary philosopher of duration, qualified that concept as contemporary: ‘Bergsonian duration is defined less by succession than by coexistence’ (1990, 60). All this yields a complex gathering of ideas, fitting the thought-image of the octopus. Therefore, I want to discuss art in this frame of eventness, as something that happens, which is always temporally specific. It is also spatially specific, and involves many different agents and their performative acts. When, in this book, I write ‘art’ I mean an ‘art event’ in this sense: coexisting, happening, contemporary, which allows a change of frame, hence, an event, to occur, in the living present. This is why I concentrate on what we call ‘exhibition’. In the Don Quijote exhibition, the nearness (‘con-’) of the first two screens enacts this; it is a novel assembly. In the first, Don Quijote is reading, connecting the viewers’ experience to their memory of the novel (Figures 4.6 and 4.7). That scene has itself a lot of tentacles. Going through rapid changes of frames, the Don laughs, weeps, smells, caresses and eats pages of the book, and ends up catatonically leaving the scene. Meanwhile, about halfway, the Priest and the Housekeeper come in, coexisting with the master without interacting with him. They are carrying a shopping bag of the French supermarket chain Monoprix, chosen for the ironic lettering ‘votre vie n’a jamais été aussi bien remplie’ (your life has never been so well filled). They are going to fill this bag with those of Don ­Quijote’s books that they consider dangerous for his mental well-being.8 In close proximity to this scene, another one, where Don Quijote is recruiting his squire Sancho Panza, consists even more literally of changes of frames in coexistence. Don Quijote addresses the other figure as Sancho and bullies him/her into obedience (Figure 4.8), 7  In his (2012) book on time in Deleuze, Williams analyses two early books, Difference and Repetition (1994 [1968]) and The Logic of Sense (1990 [1969]). For a different view of the event than that of Žižek, more related to current politics and within a semiotic framework, see Wagner-Pacifici (2017). 8  In this project, all scenes are eight minutes long, with the exception of two that have double lengths. http:​/​​/​w ww.miekebal.org​/​a rtworks​/​e xhibitions​/​don​- ​quijote​-​ tristes​-​f iguras/

Figure 4.8  Don Quijote and Sancho-to-be arguing. Photo: Lena Verhoeff.

whereas the actress playing Sancho, Viviana Moin, asks him about her contract and the labour conditions. For viewers, the juxtaposition, or the contemporaneity, of these two scenes compels the realisation of, precisely, those two aspects of the contemporary: eventness as change of frame, and coexistence of different, incongruous situations. This makes the idea that the character was driven mad by excessive reading, as the beginning of the novel states it – but given the multiple unreliable narrators, tongue-in-cheek – untenable, without taking it entirely away. ‘Exhibition’: the term is usually understood as what is exhibited already existed before. It did, as an object; and it did not, as a working work. In this respect, I argue for this sense of contemporaneity through what is most contemporary in my practice: the present tense of what I am up to now. This is the exhibition that has recently been happening, as Figures 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 show, and is planned to happen again, differently of course, in the very near future. This present tense also holds for the making: the theorising, or thinking, happens during, through

the artmaking and curating. This is an additional meaning of the contemporary: during, enduring. Most crucially, the culture that is our lives’ environment, to which the sucking cups on the tentacles of my octopus suck themselves for nourishment, happens today, in an ongoing, ‘durational’, hence, juxtaposed, process of contemporaneity. The image-thinking search of which this project is the provisional result is permanently in process. As mentioned, it concerns more than the novel’s content; nor does the work directly address the author’s biography. I have always resisted biographical interpretation, as well as appeal to the author’s intention. But for this project, this reticence was not quite tenable. A change of frame, hence, an event in my thinking, imposed itself when I took seriously three facts together – ‘con-facts’. First, the author Cervantes was captured and held in slavery, from 1575 to 1580. Second, the novel contains an inserted story about such a soldier captured and enslaved (‘The Captive’s Tale’, chapters 39–41 of part I). This narrative is likely to be anchored in autobiography. Third, slavery is not a thing of the past at all; in the contemporary world there are over 40 million slaves. In this sense, the novel from four centuries ago is contemporary with today’s world. Reprinted regularly and sold like hot cakes, this novel is enduringly contemporary, for these reasons as well as for its haunting literary qualities. The video pieces of my installation titled ‘She Too’ and ‘A Hand and the Thread of Hope’ make the biographical issue contemporary while staying very close to the old-master novel.9 Of the former scene, the allusion in the title makes the connection to the contemporary obvious: ‘She Too’ alludes to and thereby becomes contemporary with ‘#MeToo’. Of the latter scene, the intertwining of the real-life horror with a fairy-tale ending dreamed up, in addition to the actual naming of the author in the Captive’s Tale (Cervantes’s second surname Saavedra is mentioned) and the set in a fake-gothic castle with cars parked in front, all merge fiction and history, past and present, and especially, the first-person/second-person exchange 9  For an argumentation against intentionalism, see the relevant chapter of my 2002 book.

between artwork and visitor – the heart of the contemporariness of the work. In Chapter 6, I will delve deeper into this bond between life and novel, in a discussion on the problem of representing trauma. For now, it is the contemporaneity that matters. Heterochrony Caught in the Act10 The heading of this section continues the event-thinking of the previous tentacle of time. ‘Caught in the act’ refers to a coincidence of an event and the perception of it. The image-thinking in this section concerns another point of exhibiting, proposed as the thought-image of contemporaneity in the previous section. This is the limited value of thematic convergence only, and the augmented value that can emerge when a theme is elaborated through reflection. The travelling exhibition 2MOVE: Video and Migration (2004–8) combined a theme with a theoretical reflection. The two aspects are most effective when merged, so that the theme is theorised and the theory embodied. 2MOVE was strictly a video exhibition, theorising the medium in relation to migration.11 In accordance with the theoretical view of this chapter I will only position a few works in the present tense of the exhibition. The goal of the project was to give specific meaning to the conjunction ‘and’ in the descriptive phrase ‘video and migration’. The intertwined concepts of time and movement served to make sense of that conjunction beyond the distinction between thematic and theoretical thinking. The first 10  This heading alludes to an article I wrote about this, in the volume co-edited with Hernández Navarro (2011). That article draws on the catalogue text of 2MOVE. 11  Many publications about video art follow the traditional art-historical format of the chronology of pioneers and influences. Starting with the emergence of video art in the 1960s, they tell the story of an art form and a medium. Well-known overviews of this kind can be a useful background for this exhibition, but they do not practise image-thinking at all. Good traditional studies of video art as a medium are Rush (2003, 2005), Lovejoy (2004, 93–151) and the volume edited by Fagone (1999). An illustrious precedent of a different kind of exhibition is, for example, Catherine de Zegher’s Inside the Visible (1996). This impressive show integrated the thematic focus on women, and art made by women, with a theoretical unpacking of what such terms can possibly mean.

and most general feature video and migration share is, of course, movement, a feature it has in common with too many other mediums to be useful as a distinctive characteristic. Here, however, movement, the essential but by no means exclusive property of video as a medium, was denaturalised in the works in the exhibition. Not the movement itself but the way it is denaturalised began to demonstrate a specific bond between video and migratory culture. Thus, movement became itself a medium.12 This denaturalising process, performed in different ways and with different thematic emphases by all the works, is due to the superposition of the two terms of the title of the ongoing project, ‘Migratory Aesthetics’ – ‘aesthetics’ and the ‘migratory’. I use ‘aesthetics’ here not as a philosophical domain, but rather, as referring to an experience of sensate binding, a connectivity based on the senses. And the ‘-s’ at the end of the word is meant to indicate the plural form, not the ‘science of ’ or meta-meaning. ‘Migratory’, as an adjective, does not account for the actual experiences of migrants, but refers to the traces, equally sensate, of the movements of migration in contemporary culture. Both terms are programmatic: different aesthetic experiences are offered through the encounter with such traces. From the beginning of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, a misconstrued Kantian perspective has prevailed over the founding view of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. To squeeze a 900-page treatise written in Latin into a single sentence: for him, aesthetics is based on an experience of three aspects: (1) binding (2) through the senses (3) in public space. This view contributes to the value of exhibition-ism as the thought-image of the contemporary. Baumgarten published his Aesthetica in 1750.13 12  The critical analysis of the conjunction ‘and’ as literally conjoining very different things has been brilliantly put forward by Shoshana Felman in her book Literature and Psychoanalysis (1982), which has the telling subtitle The Question of Reading, Otherwise. This book was an extensive development of an earlier article (1977). 13  As far as I know, there is still no accessible English publication of this influential treatise. Baumgarten (1750–8) is succinctly presented by Bennett (2012). Bennett’s earlier book is implicitly grounded in this view (2005). I use the German edition from 2007, as well as relying on other scholars. See Hlobil (2009) for an informative review, and Berndt (2020) for an account of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica as a theory of literature.

In line with a thematic approach, this section of the chapter, reflecting on 2MOVE, would be about video and migration. However, when taken in its customary sense, this would come too close to ‘video of migration’. Instead, I try to make more than juxtaposition of ‘and’, to overcome the limitations of the thematic approach. ‘And’ does not mean ‘about’. It does not imply either that one field automatically illuminates the other. Rather, this is a juxtaposition in the literal sense: put one thing next to another and see how they begin to merge, converse or oppose each other, in that Bergsonian-Deleuzian coexistence. Thus, the way video can help articulate migratory culture, and vice versa, compels a theoretical framework within which the individual works of 2MOVE make sense and to which, conversely, each of them contributes. The concepts that came up – movement, time, memory and contact – clarify with increasing specificity how video and ‘the migratory’ can illuminate each other in an encounter. This is why we titled the catalogue as 2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration (2008). ‘Art’ became the interpretation of ‘and’. One meeting point that raises uneasy questions about the culture/ politics bond through video and migration is a phenomenon and resulting experience that characterises both. This is the politics of time. In terms of contemporaneity, video is the medium of our time, available to many, and put to many uses. It is also the medium of time; of time contrived, manipulated and offered in different, multilayered ways. Migration is the situation of our time. Although there has never been a world without migration, suddenly it seems as if the whole world is on the move, but not as in mass tourism. In contrast to such freely undertaken trips with a return ticket, the movement is relentlessly urgent and goes in one direction only. As William Kentridge’s 1999 Shadow Procession, included in 2MOVE, drives home through its form, this unidirectionality is a thought-image of migration. But here I want to engage another aspect of time in relation to the meeting between On the moving image, see the exhibition L’image en movement, by Philippe-Alain Michaud, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2006). On the participation of the senses, see the readings of the sense-based innovations in modernist literature by Salmose (2020).

video and migration – one drawn from the octopus. Migration is also the experience of time as multiple, heterogeneous. The time of haste and waiting, the time of movement and stagnation; the time of memory and of an unsettling present not sustained by a predictable future. The phenomenon I call multitemporality; the experience of it, heterochrony. Image-thinking requires that the two concepts be distinct yet connected. Multitemporality has always been there, but was overruled by the predominance of measurable, linear time in the organisation of social life. Heterochrony is something one can be afflicted by, suffer from. You can ‘have’ heterochrony as you can have the flu, or corona. When multitemporality becomes a problem, an inhibition and a paralysing contradiction, you ‘have’ heterochrony. But it may also lead to a pleasurable sense of fulfilment, when the multiple temporal strands in a day make that day particularly intense or meaningful. Both video and migratory culture intensify experiences of heterochrony. In both aspects, then, the exhibition in its double focus on video and migration was timely, and worked with its own and its works’ timeliness. Heterochrony is the first point of intersection between the video­ graphic and the migratory mobility. The super-positions, tensions and incongruous encounters of different temporalities alert us to the simple fact that time is not an objective phenomenon, nor a singular one. Although our lives are regulated by a relentless clock and the fixed schedules it prescribes, someone who is bored experiences time differently from the hard worker who never quite manages to do what needs doing. People in situations of migrancy are often torn between haste and standstill. This simple experiential discrepancy is compounded by political and economic temporal multiplicities in the (wrongly termed) post-colonial era. Imagine the everyday life of someone who is waiting for legal residency, for a much-needed employment permit, or for news from far-away family. Meanwhile, he is searching for a liveable habitat. All this is exasperatingly slow. But the clock is ticking. That person needs to earn money to support the family back home and thus justify the tearing apart of his family, his life. In such situations, the hectic rhythm of social

and economic life, always too fast, contrasts sharply with the time of waiting, always too slow. Although temporal discrepancies and disturbed rhythms occur in all human lives, multitemporality is specifically tangible in the life of someone who is permanently on the move. Time, in all its internal differentiation, is usually subjected to one of its aspects only, that of chronology. This linear logic has a profound sensate effect on everyone, and more strongly so on those whose relationship to the local chrono-logic is oblique. ‘What is chronology but timing,’ writes Jalal Toufic in an essay on the vampire as a model for film, ‘so that events that belong to the past should not arrive too late, that is in the future, and events that should occur in the present would not occur too early, in the past, or too late, in the future . . .’ (2003, 31). Chronology is a stricture that looms over events and colours the heterochronic experience of time with a dark shadow of inadequacy. Heterochrony is more than subjective experience, however. It contributes to the temporal texture of our cultural world.

Figure 4.9  Roos Theuws, Gausian Blur, 2005–6. Video still.

Hence, understanding and experiencing it is a political necessity. This texture is multitemporal. Video can make multitemporality visible, and the experience of heterochrony tangible. A video work by Dutch artist Roos Theuws, called Gaussian Blur, named after a video effect she does not use, was one of the key works in the show (Figure 4.9). Thematically, it has no relationship whatsoever with migration. The work works with slowness. Gaussian Blur captures the profound and physical sensation of a multitemporality that entails the experience of heterochrony; only through that effect does it ‘touch’ on migration. Theuws’s video flickers with points of light, looking like blisters on the video’s skin. Layers of peaceful, pastoral images and of violent storms threatening the landscape’s peacefulness simultaneously stream slowly through the frame. The video’s temporality hesitates between still images reminiscent of Impressionist painting, and exceedingly slowed-down moving images of real people and animals. This work tells us that there are things to see that are difficult, demanding, that don’t surrender to the lazy eye. Instead, they ask us to engage with the surface of light and only then do they offer access. A kind of near-but-not-quite timelessness infuses the undeniable but exceedingly slowed-down movement. While the viewer is physically aware of the external temporality of his or her body – an awareness increased by the points of light that prick us with a very different pace – another temporality reaches out, interferes with ordinary haste, and insinuates slowness into the sensation of looking. There is a relentlessness about the slowness, an insistence on the ongoing quality of time, precisely due to the almost unbearably slow pace. Storm-riddled tree branches become more threatening as a result; the human figures, the horse, detach themselves through this slow movement from the still Impressionist idyll. They move infinitely slowly, yet infinitely faster than their painted counterparts, the visual memory that infuses them. Meanwhile, the flickering of points of light keeps us aware of the fleeting fastness of time ‘outside’ these slow movements. The time of the surface is disconnected from the time of the images it covers. This disjunction determines the visual experience of the work.

It trains the viewer to be sensitive to this aspect of temporal incoherence in the lives of people among whom we live. Video and migratory life have, thus, a complex and challenging multitemporality in common. This is one of the many points of intersection between the two cultural phenomena we were seeking to connect through the work this exhibition was meant to do: ‘and’ means ‘art’. Video helps us understand what this means – to feel it in our own bodies. Through this medium and, in particular, its manifestations in the works selected, as well as their installation together, we can grasp, perceive and experience traces of the lives of those who live among us, but of whom we know so little. For example, Gonzalo Ballester’s documentary Mimoune from 2003 is a postcard – made video – with a second card sent in response. As in all epistolary traffic, between sending and delivery a time gap occurs. This gap is constitutive of writing, with all its political and juridical consequences.14 In a move that turns metaphor and poetry into a literalised concretisation, the artist makes a video postcard or letter, takes it from the migrant to his family in Morocco, and brings their greeting back to him. But this epistolary act of mercy is not as simple as that. After a shot of the sea in the wake of a boat – a topos in the visualisation of migration – and a view of the houses in the Moroccan countryside, Mimoune sits down in front of the camera saying his greetings. Then the family greets him back, also in front of the camera. The parties have little to say to each other beyond conventional polite discourse. The point, clearly, is not what they say but that they speak and see each other. It is the act of sending videos back and forth that is less the medium than the message itself. Thus, the epistolary aesthetic becomes thickened with layers of ‘video-agency’. At the same time, it is a profoundly personal experience. This makes it so poignant, for the viewer, to see the senders and receivers alternating more rapidly than reality would allow. We see Mimoune sitting down and saying hello, then immediately we see his wife, children and other 14  The plot of the biblical Book of Esther is largely based on this motive; see Bal (1991). On the temporal discrepancies of writing, see Derrida (1976 [1967]).

relatives watching and reciprocating the greeting. It all looks so simple, so normal; yet it is impossible. Time lies at the heart of fiction, here – the fiction that is truer than truth. The simple aesthetic that this work mobilises makes that fictionality look deceptively real. Yet, there is also a self-reflexivity – a foregrounding of what Hernández Navarro calls in his essay in 2MOVE ‘second-hand technology’. The first sign of this self-reflection is the entrance of Mimoune on the set. The chair is placed so that he will sit right in the centre of the frame. In order to get there, however, he must bend a little, and when he walks into the frame he barely fits. Thus, the filmmaker has foregrounded the simple technology: a video camera on a tripod, uncertainly disposed for the shooting. The fiction is doubled: the fictionality of the situation is exposed by means of a fictive simplicity – Ballester would surely have been able to start with a hand-held shot, then cut and put the camera on the tripod, without visitors being alerted to this camera and editing work. The look of the images recalls unedited home video; the mode of production of heterochronic experience. This then also bleeds over into the surface of the video itself, and the cultural-political modes of looking the medium offers its viewers for consideration. The surface sometimes evokes an uncertainty of looking – its possible in­appropriateness, as well as its necessity. We see people who long to be together, yet have little to say; a heart full, probably, but not enough time to say it. Groping for words, they slow the event of speaking down. Pressured to speak, however, they also speak before they find the words. Time can lie. Heterochrony versus Clock Time There is no more fitting artwork by which to understand heterochrony and its political tenor than Christian Marclay’s 2010 video installation The Clock. ‘Ordinary’ time is also that relentlessly ongoing process we call duration. Is The Clock, with its twenty-four hours, an instance of Bergsonian duration, a Deleuzian ‘time image’, a time machine of sorts, or does it propose another relationship to time? It is obviously ‘about’ clocks, but how is it ‘about’ time – addressing the complexities of our current thinking about time and the image? Margot Bouman’s article

on the intricacies between what she calls, after Bourriaud (2010), ‘postproduction aesthetics’ and everyday life considers the curatorial act Marclay’s work performs (2014). And although she writes extensively about what can be called ‘duration fatigue’, the ambivalent responses people express after the intense and long confrontation with time as such, duration itself is not discussed in her article, and neither Bergson nor Deleuze appear in her references. The idea of a time machine is also absent from Bouman’s article. So, why would I bring up these concep­ tions of time, if they are not relevant for Marclay’s work? Because that negativity is remarkable, and can help us get a clearer sense of heterochrony through Marclay’s masterpiece, and vice versa.15 I have not been able to see the full twenty-four hours of The Clock, but enough hours of it to see that Bouman rightly ignored the three theories of time. While The Clock is constantly, sometimes nerverackingly alerting us to the passage of time, it is not durational. You can spend as much time in/with the work as you like, and it neither stretches nor compresses time; no slow-down, no speeding. Instead, it is both continuous and hectic. In this respect, it is in video what Don Quijote the novel is in literary narrative. Through smooth editing, the artist manages to suggest continuity between clips, and thus would seem to heal the cuts of the montage and soften the spatialisation of time that time-reckoning entails. Bergson’s insistence on continuous duration was a protest against such spatialisation. But Marclay’s video does all that transition work while simultaneously highlighting the ticking of the clock. He seems to attempt to reconcile clock time with Bergsonian duration. He does that to foreground the intractable, relentless domination of clock time. And there lies the political aspect of time that keeps heterochrony at bay.16 What is at stake, in thinking about time, is more than the thematic obsession of the work. Marclay deploys a cinematic aesthetic, editing 15  For an extensive analysis of The Clock in relation to other installation works on temporality, see María Luz Bañón (2021). 16  The political aspect of time is demonstrated in a cultural analysis of the contemporariness of one of the most ancient objects we know, the dinosaur, by Mitchell (1998).

together arbitrary sequences of clips. His master device – of making the clocks in the clips coincide with real time – creates an opposition that, through its focus on the clock, questions it. He contrasts the cinematic experience to the everyday aesthetic from which the cinematic temporarily relieves us. This opposition complements the other one, the clock-duration antagonism, with an awareness of the social importance of recognising the tyranny of clock time. As a cinematic dispositif, the work ‘discusses’ the clock, but not in opposition to duration. The opposition between time and its spatialisation is foregrounded in the presentation of The Clock as an installation, although a singlechannel one – neither a theatre film nor a sculptural installation. That tension between cinematic aesthetic and everyday experience shifts the cinematic experience as well as the experience of art in galleries from the autonomist suspension of reality to a constant interaction between the two. It is within that interaction that the question of the social importance of the tyranny of clock time and its tensions can be considered in more depth. This helps us get closer to grasping what an image is and does, and how it relates to time.17 This understanding is necessary because those tensions compel society to adhere to clock time; at least, to borrow from it the naturalisation of the divisibility of time. What makes The Clock important is that it is supersedes the opposition, not denying it or taking sides but bringing clock time to the centre, then encouraging viewers to acknowledge its power and yet stay with the cinematic dream of manipulatable time, in a sampling of fictional moments. The viewer who, every now and then, looks at her watch to check if the film is not cheating, is put in the middle of experiential time and thrown out of cinematic cushioning time. And thanks to the integration of the two, that experiential time is put in tension with clock time. Those tensions constantly impact on our lives. This is how we come to realise that time is not homogeneous in our experience. Because we are so frequently multi-tasking, we are also multitemporalising: simultaneously living different paces in the 17  The Clock has been extensively discussed. I just mention the dossier edited by Catherine Russell (2013), which offers excellent analyses.

same stretch of clock time. The concept of heterochrony helps account for the experiential differences facing, or being ruled by, clock time entail, and to bring it to bear on ‘migratory aesthetics’. Once we realise such differences in experiencing time, a little thought experiment as an exercise in migratory-cultural awareness could be to imagine being that migrant evoked above, who is standing in that same line, and is waiting for months to hear about his residency, hence also work permit. Meanwhile, his family back home is waiting for money – making money was the justification of his painful departure. For such a person, the wait becomes oppressive – an enforced waste of time. But heterochrony gets more complex, or dense, when such a migrant has also, in the home country, been used to hanging about the village, unemployed, with all the time in the world on his hands. Then, forced into clandestine labour by the slowness of bureaucracy in the new country, suddenly every minute counts to make the hours necessary to support his own everyday life. Waiting in line in the supermarket becomes a double negative. This person experiences time in both durational and clock aspects, at the same time, and in tension with one another, with clock time winning. Heterochrony is decisive in our experiencing of time, and no hom­ ogenised clock can regulate that away. Understanding images must take this into account, so that we can learn to empathetically relate to the temporal experiences of others. An effective display of video instal­ lations foregrounds, indeed ‘theorises’, the fundamental temporality of images, including allegedly still images. This is why I tend to include photographs in my video installations. For, this art form enables reflection on, and subsequently, developing strategies for, the struggle against the tyranny of clock time. In this sense, video installation is a time machine, one for shifting priorities in experiencing time socially. Time is a timely topic, and many art scholars write about it. From the image in time, drawing the discussion back to the temporality of images, including but not exclusively, the moving images of film and video, time is currently being considered in its many aspects and manifestations. We can think of sequential ordering, duration, rhythm, memory, uncertainty and undecidability, affect and suspense, to name but a few,

and the kinds of time the combinations of these aspects entail, such as deep time, geological time, narrative time. Many scholars, also, bring these considerations of time to bear on the capitalist time we are submersed in. Some film scholars even developed a convincing concept of ‘depth of time’, as a counterpart of ‘depth of field’. I abbreviate and generalise that notion to clock time, but, conversely, it is useful to remember that clock time, dating from the colonisation period, is fundamentally in the interest of capitalism. It is not only scholars who explore time in art; artists themselves do so in depth and creatively. So does, for example, William Kentridge in his 2012 opera Refuse the Hour, which is a brilliant artistic reflection on time and specifically its anchoring in colonialism, as well as the video installation version, The Refusal of Time. That focus on colonialism, of course, makes an excellent contribution to the thought experiment suggested above. Kentridge’s opera, with its fast-paced music (composed by Philip Miller), singing and dancing, the slowly declaiming lecturer (Kentridge himself), the video projections on several screens and the odd instruments, is as fundamentally about heterochrony as Marclay’s work is about multiple experiences of clock time.18 To understand the way images are in time, Bergson’s conception of the image is relevant. Neither Bergson nor Deleuze, whose work on cinema (1986, 1989) is anchored in Bergson’s work – primarily his 1896 Matter and Memory – give a definition of either duration or the image. And while Deleuze’s exegesis of Bergson’s work, published in 1966 as Le Bergsonisme (1988) clarifies key points, definitions remain lacking. Rather than deploring this, I applaud the absence of reifying, fixating definitions of concepts. Concepts travel, through time, space and disciplines, and fixating them in definition denies or precludes such 18  Sven Lütticken brings many threads of these thoughts together (2013). Fragments from the Kentridge 2012 opera appear in Madame B. For the concept of depth of time, see Shores (2016, 10–11), with an analysis of what he calls ‘temporalized depth’ (16–18). With ‘deep time’ as a starting point, Jørgen Bruhn published an analysis of views of time in relation to the climate change issue in a collective volume edited by Salmose and Elleström. He insists that intermediality is crucial to grasping different temporalities (2019). His framework is narrative, with Paul Ricoeur’s monumental volumes (1984–8) as the central source.

journeys, forcing the concepts to return unchanged to their point of origin. Instead, Bergson’s work encourages an imaginative understanding of his ideas and concepts. Given the high level of abstraction in Bergson’s texts and the complexity of Deleuze’s, with my term ‘heterochrony’ I propose a simple way of imagining what the philosophers thought. Matter and Memory is subtitled as an ‘essay on the relationship between body and mind’. But instead of either matter or memory or both, either mind or body or both, all chapters have the (undefined) word ‘image’ in their titles. The body is the central image in the processes Bergson analyses. If for that reason alone, the book is entirely subject-centred. As a prelude to my simplified account, here is another image-thought experiment. Imagine a vertical line, representing time, which meets a horizontal line, representing space. At the point of meeting is the subject in the act of perceiving. A point: nothing; no time, no space. But potentially, movement in both directions: past, when the present perception touches memories; and future, towards which the perception inclines. And something similar on the space line: also, movement, of images-candidates to be seen. So far, it all seems utterly simple and clear. Now, imagine both lines extending and expanding and becoming fields, filled with a variety of images. Suddenly it is not so simple any more. The time line transforms into a wild, rocky landscape of heterochrony. The space line becomes a field where all kinds of things move to get the attention of the subject. Replace ‘field’ with ‘tentacles’, and it becomes both much messier and much clearer. No wonder the subject must be selective, as Bergson insists; that selection constitutes the image. Not as thing but as process. This is a selection we can call an ‘image-act’.19 Indeed, selection is key to living in such chaos. Bergson’s book starts with the thesis that perception is not a construction but a selection. The subject selects from amongst all possible things to see in the material 19  Aylin Kuryel coined the term ‘image acts’ for socially influential images, in a detailed examination of the use of the image of Atatürk for the promotion of, but also changes in, the political landscape of contemporary Turkish society (2015). See also Bredekamp (2018).

world around her. The subject does this in view of her own interests, including bodily interests. This simple idea has deeply, albeit belatedly, transformed contemporary thinking on representation, which for a long time was bound to an opposition between mimesis (seen as imitation) and construction. Perception, in Bergson’s different view, is an act of the body and for the body. The act of perception occurs in the present – a moment in time that occurs in, but has itself no duration. The meeting point of the two lines at the frontier of the body of the octopus indicates the present. The result of the act is an image, based on the similarly restricted spatial selection. That is why ‘image acts’ is a suitable term. The question is, how the rigorously continuous duration – past and future – and the rest of the space surrounding the selected bit participate in the image in the present. Time-wise, this is where memory comes in. While occurring in the present, perception is bound to memory. A perception image that is not infused with memory images is impossible to understand. The subject would ‘do’ the image but not automatically be able to make sense of it, and thus make it work for her own interests. At the end of the book, Bergson writes on contemporaneity: In concrete perception memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of sensible qualities is due precisely to the fact that our consciousness, which begins by being only memory, prolongs a plurality of moments into each other, contracting them into a single intuition. (218–19) The final part of this sentence explains why Bergson insisted on duration so strongly. Like time itself, memory is indivisible, and what he calls ‘intuition’ is an understanding – with body and mind – of the image resulting from the act of perception as filled with older images, as well as projecting futurality. This is what Deleuze meant when he wrote that Bergsonian duration is defined less by succession than by coexistence (1990, 60). Think of the line, now thickened to become a field, landscape,

or a madly moving bunch of tentacles, densely heterochronic. That coexistence of different moments (or memories) has a spatial aspect to it, and this timespace is given shape in video installation in the simultaneous presence of – and, hence, the simultaneous movement on – multiple screens.20 For the concept of the image I am proposing, what matters, in Bergson’s view of perception, is the movement inherent in the act of perception that leaves the images as its result. What Kuryel understands with her term ‘image acts’ is not only the momentary act of selection but also the subsequent deployment of such acts in the social domain. The image constantly changes in all respects: meaning, location, use. Hence, still images can also be considered moving. In our installations, especially in Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, this affiliation between still and moving images is demonstrated through the curatorial acts of combining the messy installation of the screens with grouped images on the wall. Between the two elements there is a tension, a difference, but not an opposition. The grouped photographs become films in their own right. A comparable effect emerged in the video installations of the other projects. Like the seating mentioned earlier, I include photographs in video installations, because of the distinction and the tension between the two media that enhances their affiliation.21 From Anachronism to Pre-posterous History What precedes pertains to the theoretical interlude I have woven into the discussion. This section is devoted to a temporal tentacle that counters a dogmatic historicism. By ‘countering’, I don’t mean rejecting. The nuanced difference between ‘counter-’ and ‘anti-’ lies therein, that countering recognises and engages critically its other, here, history, while opposing it (‘anti-’) and rejecting it would be throwing away the 20  A recent issue of Versus is devoted to various aspects of time. See Salerno and Lozano (2020). Especially relevant are the editors’ Introduction and the articles by Violi, Wagner-Pacifici and Hartog. 21  This account of Bergson was the basis for my analyses of the work of Finnish video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila (2013a).

baby with the bathwater. Hayden White is the historian, or philosopher of history, who in 1973 shook up the complacency, arrogance and certainty of history as an academic discipline. White’s views have had a lasting impact, also on art history. It served as a deliverance, of the kind that stimulated thinking. ‘Truth’ is the name of the pursuit of scholarship and science, and epitomises in particular the pursuit of the discipline of history. When White’s Metahistory appeared in 1973, I was working in literary theory, and, with my structuralist bent, was not too well versed in considerations of history. What I studied was the imagination; a richer field I could not imagine. But we literary theorists were somewhat embattled by those who did not believe the imagination had anything to do with reality, and could therefore not be subjected to the test of ‘truth’. I countered that the imagination is part of reality. I remember vividly how colleagues came into the building waving this new, miracle book. For those of us on the far side of the historical versus structural approaches, the appearance of this spectacular book was, indeed, a bit of a miracle. It vindicated our supposition that those colleagues who contradicted everything we said about literature with the injunction to ‘Historicise! Historicise!’ and scolded us for ‘formalism’, and, worse, ‘interpretation’, were proven wrong. They were blind to their own interpretative and formal choices. The word ‘imagination’ in White’s subtitle, yoked to the qualifier ‘historical’, made our case. Those were days of fierce polemics, when we had not yet learnt to be nuanced and to refuse being locked in binary oppositions. You either did history, or you were ‘a-historical’ and, hence, dismissed. My sense of ‘form’ – of the influence of form on meaning – was too strong to compromise, and I happily called myself a ‘formalist’. When I started to work on visual art I realised that simultaneously with White’s ‘formal’ – indeed, literary – turn in historiography, the contextual turn was beginning to rage in art history, and there, ‘formalism’ rapidly became a fresh taboo. And then, here was a book about the historical imagination – which seemed a contradiction. This book told us that historians too adopt a form, interpreting their alleged ‘data’ after first selecting these according to principles of form. It was bluntly stated on one of its first pages: ‘My method, in short, is formalist’ (3); something

I’d never have dared say out loud. At the time – and I see this as a historical moment – to adopt a formalist methodology was to endorse a certain universalism of forms.22 The insight that viewing, no matter when an artwork was made, occurs in the present tense, does not reject a relationship with history, with the past. But that relationship can only occur if the present is endorsed as the time of viewing, hence, the viewer’s responsibility is also necessarily endorsed. Only then can the ‘middle voice’ emerge, and only then can the visitor and the artwork speak in a merging of affective, aesthetic and political discourse that is a true middle voice between the linguistic modes of active and passive, or emission and reception. Currently there are more and more museum workers who plead for ‘transhistorical’ exhibitions. In spite of the consensus that the relationship between contemporary art, with the visions that feed it, and art from the past is an inseverable connection, what is erased in the widespread term of ‘transhistoricity’ is the engagement – in other words, the relationship. And in my view, forgetting relationship can easily lead to an arbitrary, formalist or repetitive thematic grouping of artworks. ‘Trans-’ means ‘through’, as in going through, without stopping, changing one’s own view, being affected by what one traverses; without relating.23 In view of that unthinking use of prepositions I must quote what I wrote at the beginning of my 1999 book, Quoting Caravaggio: Like any form of representation, art is inevitably engaged with what came before it, and that engagement is an active reworking. It specifies what and how our gaze sees. Hence, the work performed by later images obliterates the older images 22  White (1973). I wrote an explanatory article about White’s work, which may be useful for those who don’t know the book well (2013b). White also wrote an illuminating book on form (1987). 23  On the middle voice, see White (1992), and Boletsi (2017). Ann DeMeester, director of the Frans Halsmuseum in Haarlem, is a great advocate of exhibitions unbound by period-thinking and chronology.

as they were before that intervention and creates new versions of old images instead. This process is exemplified by an engagement of contemporary culture with the past that has important implications for the ways we conceive of both history and culture in the present. The choice of a particular preposition matters. I find that a worse one than ‘trans-’, with its neutralising connotation, is the temporal prepos­ ition ‘post-’. Once, at a conference titled ‘Narrating Beyond Narration’, I was irritated enough by the easy dismissal implied in ‘beyond’ to devote my entire lecture to the risks of the use of the preposition ‘post-’: the way it erases any relationship to what comes before, the subsequent claim to originality and superiority, based on the denial of the pernicious continuation of what was so wrong in that past, yet persists in the present. Denying that makes it invisible again; as invisible as it was when it was too self-evident to be noticed. ‘Postcolonial’ is the most blatant example. So, after bracketing that preposition I went on to defend ­narration. No one really left narrative behind. But many pretended to the hip connotations of ‘post-’. It was an illuminating experience. The unthinking choice of certain prepositions over others is also rampant in discussions of disciplinary fields and their connections.24 I distinguished prepositions in 1988, early on in the attempt to make disciplines less rigidly divided, when discussing different models according to which disciplines were trying to connect, merge or otherwise collaborate. With ‘transdisciplinarity’, academics indicated thematic explorations that would bring together literary, folkloristic, anthropological and visual ‘versions’ of a story that, according to early structuralist thinking, could be considered basically the same. The 24  The conference was held in 2017, and co-organised by Dr Sasha Vojkovic. Selected papers, including mine, were published in 2019 in INDECS, Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems, volume 17, issue 2.

influence of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, published in English in 1966, which proposed a grammar of stories entirely based on thematic categories, is evident here. This was soon followed by Roland Barthes’ elaboration of it into a structuralist theory of narrative (1975 [1966]). The key concepts in structuralism, such as similarity, repetition and abstraction, soon made such a structuralist theory irrelevant for the study of literature and art. With the sense that nuances got lost, the transdisciplinarity lost any critical edge it might have had. Multi­ disciplinarity was conceived as an ‘umbrella’ under which people from different disciplines studied similar themes, such as projects like ‘musical instruments in painting and literature’. I believed, and still believe, that only interdisciplinarity led to new visions that affected the participating disciplines themselves.25 Since then, I have tried to advocate the concept of interdisciplinarity, along with interhistoricity and many other forms of ‘inter-ships’. That neologism brings together all forms of activity named with the help of the preposition ‘inter-’, from interdisciplinary to intertextual, inter­ national, intermedial, intercultural to interdiscursive. Inter- means between. It denotes a willingness to exchange on an equal basis. To no avail: although many are involved in such endeavours, the termino­logical victory of the preposition ‘trans-’ seems irreversible. This hurts my linguistic as well as my political and artistic feelings. The meaning of ‘trans-’ is ‘going through’. This is why ‘trans-’ so often comes with ‘across’. As we know from trans-lation, however, such a movement does not mean that there is no impact of the original on the translations. And if we think that should be avoided, we ought to rethink Walter Benjamin’s brilliant, perhaps disillusioning but linguistically and philosophically loyal view of language and translation. According to Benjamin, history, including the history of art, is neither a reconstruct­ion of, nor an identification with, the past; it is a form of translation. Yes, here the preposition ‘trans-’ makes sense, and has become common enough to maintain it, as long as we heed Benjamin’s multiple qualifications. And these are relevant for our 25  I discussed the need for this distinction in a book on the methodology of the study of the Hebrew Bible (1988).

concern with art in exhibition as temporally heterogeneous or, as we can now call it, ‘hetero­chronic’. That relevance comes from the impossibility of trans-, as a non-affecting going-through; an indifferent traversal. Translation: tra-ducere. To conduct through, pass beyond, to the other side of a division or difference. If this etymology of translation is acceptable, it can be recognised in Benjamin’s celebration of translation as liberation (1968, 80), transformation and renewal (73), as a supplementation that produces the original rather than being subservient to it. The philosopher’s view of translation becomes relevant when we consider it as a backdrop to his crucial remark in the fifth of the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, quoted in the Introduction. There, he warns, in one statement, against both the neglect and the fetishisation of the past, while foregrounding both visuality and the imagination. The past rejected by ‘anti-historical’ thought disappears, forever. The past made irrelevant for the present deprives past art of its political agency, and nurtures indifference. The preposition ‘trans-’, premised on the traversal without stopping and engaging, risks neglecting the awareness that the past does not need to be fetishised, precisely because it is inevitably with us – like time, it is there all the time. And this is the case because older art has its own contemporaneity. Artists from the past made their work as contemporary – inevitably. It is that contem­poraneity that needs to be kept in view. If artworks still have so much to say to us, it is not because of some concept of beauty, since such concepts, and the taste that sustains them, change with time. Nor can coherence, plausibility, or depth of ideas, narratives, or figures be considered trans­historical or universal criteria. Such judgements presented as universal are unreflected anachronisms. This entails a careful part-­generalisation concerning interand hence, ‘inter-ship’ that, in turn, serves as a frame for my plea for anachronism as a guide for assessing the loyalty, or friendship, and debate between contemporary art and its then-contemporary predecessors, whether or not these can be considered ‘sources’. The need of relationality and the acknowledgement of the past’s presence in our present makes a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ anachronism so necessary that the term ‘pre-posterous’, which brackets

the more common term while alluding to the common rejection, seems to serve the purpose better. Indeed, historians tend to think of anachronism as the worst mistake, and they are not altogether wrong. ‘Bad’ anachronism projects a contemporary vision on a past for which that vision could not yet exist, and hence, cannot be relevant. Thus, it is historically naïve and it hampers insight into that past one seeks to understand. Anachronism, one might think, flattens time, makes everything resemble the present, and thus clouds the historical artworks with irrelevant considerations. Often, such criticisms are justified. I want to argue, however, how a strengthening of anachronism brings us closer to older artworks, not as a heritage from the past passively received, but as partners in a discussion of what matters in contemporary culture. This approximation does not come at the cost of historical difference; on the contrary, it enhances it, deploys it as a tool to sharpen how and what we can see. Anachronisms can invigorate our interactions with historical objects. They can achieve this revitalising by means of different responses to the past in relation to the present. Although many now endorse the idea of anachronism, precious few detailed analyses of art based on it demonstrate the relevance of this pre-posterous view. An exceptionally illuminating example of such a demonstration is Vellodi’s detailed analysis of time in the work of Tintoretto (2014). Including close readings of significant paintings by the artist, Vellodi differentiates aspects of time, addressing a variety of scholarly conceptions. Moving between Vasari and Panofsky and others, like a true octopus she ends up in the Deleuzian event-based sense of time that makes it possible to see the works through their unorthodox temporality that, as the title of her later book has it, makes Tintoretto’s difference (2018). The article will give the reader a taste; probably one that will make the book a must-read. No wonder this scholar proposes an ‘unhistorical art history’, again based on detailed, theory-informed considerations of old-master art, this time of the lesser known sixteenthcentury painter Amico Aspertini (2017). In an installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Michelle Williams Gamaker and myself once had the opportunity to show visually

how a strengthening of anachronism can be very productive. The installation was simply titled Anacronismos. The visual argument was a plea for a Benjaminian, revitalising anachronism. I like to imag(in)e an octopus with an exuberance of tentacles. Anachronisms can achieve this revitalising through at least four different responses to the past in relation to the present; clash, continuity, projection or reversal. Provided we refrain from ahistorical presentism, anachronism allows us to be more, rather than less, loyal to the moment in time with which it establishes a discordant dialogue. If history is accounting for, explaining and giving meaning to change over time, then anachronism is key to history. It is indeed the conditio sine qua non of noticing, seeing change. I contend that this is, in fact, what our time has in common with the Baroque. That period shares with ours a keen awareness of the fact that time is not linear, and that past and present are co-temporal. Both are part of a present that does not flatten time but, on the contrary, multiplies and enlivens it. Imagine baroque folds running wild, and we have our octopus back.26 This must suffice to make the case for the need for relationality that, I would like to propose, is the point of what is problematically called the ‘transhistorical museum’. ‘Inter-’, instead, precludes such indifference to the past. Clumsy as the term may sound, I propose to speak of the interhistorical museum, or exhibition. Emma & Edvard was such an interhistorical exhibition. And if ‘inter-ship’ as a term is so close to internship, that may be a good thing. For the relationality of ‘inter-’ keeps us all learning – avoiding self-satisfaction and arrogance. So much the better: learning is the most dynamic way of life, in contemporaneity.

26  The installation was commissioned in 2010 as a commentary on the exhibition The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish Painting from the Städel Museum curated by Jochen Sander, then acting director of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Our installation was to make sense of the exhibition of such a classical body of painting in Frank Gehri’s exuberantly ‘postmodern’ building that houses the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. For a critical analysis of ‘presentism’ in relation to history and historicism, see Hartog (2003).

It’s About Time!27 A short history of my latest film. The week of 1–8 March 2020, just one week before the coronavirus pandemic shut-down, I spent in Łódź, making, or, in allusion to the literal meaning of the word, trying to make, an ‘essay film’. This was at the invitation of the Łódź Film School, which has an experimental programme on research and experiment on the essay film. The School had been the recipient of a grant that allows Dr Jakub Mikurda (henceforth, Kuba) to invite some people to explore, through creative practice, what an essay film is: what it can be, what it can do. I had never thought about this essay-film question. So, I was slightly flabbergasted; but when, upon receiving his invitation, I said so, Kuba’s quick answer was: ‘But all your films are essay films!’ The truth of that answer stunned me. Upon reflection I had to agree, and was grateful, both for the invitation and for the way it compelled me to think again about my own films in light of this concept. Is it a genre, an approach, a characterisation of a specific content? If the latter, how could I briefly describe the content of each of my films? I now think the concept of image-thinking covers it. Thinking further, it struck me that Adorno’s extensive writings on literature (in English, two volumes) begin with an essay on the essay, thus giving it pride of place in literature. But not as a genre. Rather, unexpectedly, as ‘form’. This brings it in proximity with White’s self-declared ‘formalism’. Adorno devoted a large part of his essay on the essay as form to bridging the gaps that binary oppositions tend to dig, by means of nuancing, even if he does not foreground that verb. That, too, affiliates the text to White’s. Here is a passage that characterises the philosophical tone – a nuance that goes well with Adorno’s use of ‘form’: The essay allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly; it is radical in its non-radicalism, in 27  This film can be accessed at http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/ its-about-time/.

refraining from any reduction to a principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character. (Adorno 1991 [1954–8], 9) Along with the series that ends on rejecting reductionism, the words ‘partial’ and ‘fragmentary’ bring us closer to what an ‘essay’ can be or do. Both words resist the idea of the total, of the encompassing whole, but also, in its shadow, the currently rampant totalitarianism. The opposite of totality, ‘partial’ also means ‘subjective’, as acknowledging that what the essayist brings forward cannot pretend to be an objective, factual truth, even if it can possess Whitean truth-value. And it means ‘passionate’, in that the holder of the view brought forward cares about it; also ‘rational’, since partiality also generates the wish to persuade, which requires rational arguments. As for ‘fragmentary’, this accords well with the non-total(itarian). All these features match nicely Heringa/ van Kalsbeek’s ceramic Medusa-Octopus. But what made Kuba consider my films as ‘essay films’? In addition to taxing, difficult – one of the meanings of the English word ‘trying’ – the word ‘essay’ means ‘trying’ also in the more common sense: attempting something for which no ready-made genre exists as yet. The word includes modesty. Trying, attempting, groping towards, fumbling, even floundering. That modesty itself acknowledges that nothing is perfect, and also, that no one does anything alone; that making something is collective and social. It also has temporality, since it suggests that ‘things’, such as artworks or films, are never finished; they are ‘in progress’; ‘trying’ is never over. They are like a tentacle stretching out. ‘Essay’ also includes ‘thought’. You don’t try something without, first, thinking about it. As it happens, one of my films that Kuba considered essay films, Reasonable Doubt: Scenes from Two Lives (2016) (next chapter), concerns thought: the social, collective, performative aspects of the activity and the resulting ideas. According to that film, thinking itself is tentative; thinking occurs in the essay-mode. This makes the essay an important – indeed, crucial – cultural phenomenon. So, if only as a tactic, it is useful. This essayistic aspect, with its

tentativeness and dialogism, has its own multitemporality, with halting, rushing, speeding and slowing in the dialogue where no one is master.28 For this first film commissioned explicitly as an essay, then, I was to develop something around an issue that was important to me (‘partial’) – intellectually and politically. I am partial to the academic problem that chronology still rules historical thinking. And what bothers me most in the current situation of the world is the general indifference to – or, at least, powerlessness towards – the imminent environmental disaster. So, in view of these two apparently unrelated partialities, with my conviction of the relevance of narrative and the bilateral temporality in mind of ‘pre-posterous history’ – the hyphen turning ‘ludicrous’ into ‘pre- and post- change places’ – made ancient history in relation to the (very) near future pop into my mind. At the same time, my narrative impulse called up a character: Cassandra, the prophetess who could foresee the future, but whom nobody believed. The most extensive ancient story about her is in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon (458 bce). The best-known modern retelling is Christa Wolf’s novel (1988 [1983]). Apart from a few opening lines it is entirely written ‘in the first person’, identifying (with) Cassandra as the subject, not only of the story but of the emotional heaviness it entails, reflecting during the day she knows she is going to die. I was alerted to the relevance of Wolf’s novel by the 2012 video-shadow play In Search of Vanished Blood, by Nalini Malani, and subsequent conversations with the artist. Malani also made a multi-panel painting on Cassandra.29 Wolf ’s Cassandra is a strong-headed, sensitive, worried young woman, in love with the Greek, Aeneas. This character lends itself to the figuration of the essay’s warning in visual form: to what Rodowick has termed ‘the figural’ in his Lyotard-inspired attempt to overcome the tenacious opposition between words and images, and also by Deleuze’s 28  For the concept of ‘tactic’ as distinct from ‘strategy’, see Michel de Certeau (1984). Tingting Hui brought it to the present (2020). Briefly, a strategy is for the powerful who seek to win a battle; a tactic for the ordinary people who seek to live (Certeau 1984, xix). 29  On that shadow play, see the first chapter of my 2016 book. On the earlier 42-panel painting from 2007 titled Listening to the Shades, see Storr and Malani (2009). Of the many publications that denounce the indifference meant here, Grosz (2005) includes relevant ideas about time.

Figure 4.10  Aeneas-Adrian impersonating Caravaggio’s John the Baptist. Video still.

rejection of the opposition between abstraction and figuration. (2001, 1–44). In the essay film, the figural is where the essay’s argumentation and its narrative concretisation in the character seamlessly merge. Kuba found someone eminently suitable for the role, Magdalena Żak. I had ideas about how to figure stubbornness and despair. I also thought about costume, a shapeless and colourless (off-white) silk dress and an equally colourless necklace consisting of large links, a chain evoking captivity. In Wolf ’s novel, Cassandra reflects on her captivity. For the role of Aeneas, the actor Adrian Budakow, like Magdalena, was a true find. Both actors were totally committed to understanding the ‘essay’ gist of my script and to enact it to perfection. This was also an opportunity to realise a decade-long dream of a concretisation of ‘pre-posterous’ history: an impersonation, as a tableau vivant, of Caravaggio’s 1602 painting John the Baptist (Figure 4.10). I had been considering this for a long time as a demonstration of pre-posterous history in the present – concrete, figurative, without commentary.30 30  Ever since I wrote my 1999 book on Caravaggio and contemporary art I have nurtured the fantasy of re-enacting the John the Baptist painting and bringing it

Determined to bring together my many concerns about time, the ambiguous title It’s About Time! came up. The title contains a warning, too: hurry up! figured through the exclamation mark. Hence the subtitle, Reflections on Urgency. Urgency: another tentacle of my octopus. Yet another figural aspect of time is rhythm. This has a bodily side to it, important for recognising the body is not separate but at one with the mind. This comes up in something Cassandra says, during a stretch of wild disco-dancing, and repeated at the end. The backbone of the essay is Cassandra’s temporal awareness. Pondering temporality, she says: ‘“Time must pass,” I heard Arisbe say. How could time help me? . . . There are gaps in time’ (123–4).31 Her repeated call for urgency is key, both to the ancient myth and Wolf ’s subjectivation of it, and to my attempt to make an essay film on this issue. And in addition to these aspects of temporality, the most personal, intimate moment in the film, I thought, should be one when the near-future infringes on the figures’ personal lives and causes an event in the present, a radical break. This became the moment when Cassandra dumps Aeneas, because he remains too close to the powersthat-be, resulting in a near-future in which he would become stultified. She abandons him with the poignant words: ‘I cannot love a hero. I do not want to see you being transformed into a statue.’ Right after the break-up, she sees a statue of a starving, melancholic woman, a critical near-replica of Rodin’s Thinker.32 Like any film, the essay film needs ‘directing’. Directing a film in the spirit of the reciprocity and the multiplicity that inheres in the practice of filmmaking cannot be the bossy and hierarchical activity the word suggests. Thus, an additional aspect of the ‘essay’ concerns my own role: without formal training as a film director and having landed in a linguistic community whose language I didn’t understand, even had I wished to enact directorship in the traditional sense – which I did together with David Reed’s paintings. There is a sequence where a Reed painting does appear, shifting over the Caravaggio (see Figure 4.12 below). 31  For clarification on the temporality of the figural, see Ionescu (2018). 32  This is The Thinker by Spanish artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo, from 2018, photographs of which appear in Bal (2020a, 10–19) with an analysis.

Figure 4.11  Collective directing in a multitemporal space. Photo: Alicia Devaux.

not – I couldn’t have. Instead, I considered the dialogic work of, among others, French philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch, on whose ideas and, especially, intellectual attitude I had made the documentary in 2011 mentioned in Chapter 2, which I now see as an essay film. Inspired by his work, I felt that the directing was a humble and heavy job of overseeing the many tentacles of the process and keeping these together so that chaotic threads could become a woven tapestry. And obviously, such overseeing was indispensable, yet included unconditional respect for, endorsement of, and indeed, pleasure in the autonomy of the participants. As it happened, they immediately relieved me of any concern I might have had about the relationship between my script and their work of realising it. They had studied it, understood its thrust, and their interpretations is what ended up as the film, figurally shaped by the actors (Figure 4.11).33

33  In addition to the actors, camera operator Magdalena Bojdo, editors Alexandra Rosset and Alicia Devaux and sound engineer Jacek Harasim were brilliant. Of Damisch’s work I have been especially inspired by his Origin of Perspective, in view of the ‘pre-posterous’ historical perspective for which it sowed the seed (1994 [1987]).

Nevertheless, directing remains a necessary element. For, in response to my insistence on multiplicity, Kuba’s pointed out a relevant question, ‘how about authorship?’ that cannot be discarded. This goes back to the issue discussed in Chapter 3: whose ‘voice’ is speaking here? The key issue is not the copyright, the right to show, or the income generated, which, in the case of my films, is a non-issue anyway. What matters is responsibility. Having written the script and, therefore, bringing forward, with some insistence, the different conceptions of temporality with today’s urgency at the core, taking on the role of director is less a privilege than a duty. This comes close to the ‘materialist ethics’ that preoccupies architects and urban planners and designers, for example (Radman 2018). It means taking responsibility, materially, artistically and intellectually, for what the essay is saying, or trying to say – not only to ‘it’, which, as per Bollas (Chapter 1), desires the best way of coming across, but also towards the inter­ locutor, spectator-participant or engager; the essay’s second person, or ‘you’. And by acting as ‘creative producer’ in a collaborative spirit,

Figure 4.12  Cassandra and Aeneas discussing ‘preposterous history’. Video still, with a painting by David Reed.

Kuba endorsed a part of that responsibility, without ever taking ­decisions for me. Cassandra, with her warnings, also should figure the teacher of historiography, explaining to her lover Aeneas how time refuses to be plotted as linear (Figure 4.12). Impersonating a prim art-history teacher, with a Benjamin-lookalike Aeneas as her student, she extensively analyses a sculpt­ural ensemble that is based on pre-posterous history. This work, El soplador (‘the blower’) by Lidó Rico, is shown, slowly, as if the camera is grazing its surfaces, but in projection. This sometimes seems to make the two main characters shift between layers of imagery. This scene morphs into the impersonation of Aeneas as John the Baptist, a scene where the ‘teacher’ explains pre-posterous history through Caravaggio, and a contemporary painting by American artist David Reed also shifts into the reproduction of the Caravaggio, slowly over-layering parts of it.34 Moving across the image, Reed’s painting becomes a character. This contemporary painting, the figures enacted by the two actors, the figure in the Caravaggio and that work itself: they all seem to talk to one another. This is the most preposterous case of pre-posterous history: in a film from 2020, the character from classical antiquity, from 458 bce, recast in the 1980s by Christa Wolf, re-enacts a biblical figure from the first century ce. If this is not a partial and fragmented essay on time’s tentacles . . .

34  The sculptural work from 2018 they are discussing in this scene was filmed for the occasion by Jesús Segura Cabañero, and the footage edited by María Luz Bañón.

5. Making Up, Making As: Fiction and/ in/with Reality Becoming Vera Reasonable Doubt Various works of contemporary art Introduction: Think Again! When three-year-old Vera sits on the knees of her father Germain and tells him a story of witches she had seen, Daddy answers: ‘Oh, like Snow White’. This happens in the kingdom of Bamun, a traditional nation within the modern republic of Cameroon. What is Snow White doing there? Vera is silent for a few seconds, looks sideways, and then she sets her father straight (Figure 5.1). This is the literal dialogue, entirely improvised by the two figures: VERA: she was very kind she didn’t have a witch’s hat she had pretty bunches

in her black hair GERMAIN: like Snow White? VERA (continuing her story): and colours on her hair (answering her father belatedly) so, that’s not the same thing it’s my own story I made it up you have to look at the story with me (continuing her story) the ladies I saw . . .  This is the moment, in making the documentary film Becoming Vera, that Michelle and I realised the power of fiction. It happened during the

Figure 5.1  Vera on Daddy’s knee, telling her story. Video still.

editing, and it was a decisive realisation. The child had set not only her father but also Michelle and me straight. Germain had too quickly counted on the children’s canon of Western fairy tales; we had counted on documentary as the film genre to image-think in, reckoning its truthfulness was what mattered most. So, let’s think again. To end this first part on general concepts of major importance for image-thinking, and for intermediality, the interaction between words and images leading up to the figural, I return to thinking in images but now explicitly beyond the truth–fiction binary. For, the primary topic of this chapter is a circling back to the beginning, this time with fiction taken in the literal sense of making. The Latin verb fingere means shaping and contriving. The imagination as the primary tool of that making cannot be over-estimated.1 For some time, I have doubted the common conception of thinking. Forget the study, the books and the armchair. Whatever is claimed or imagined, thinking is not a lone, individual act but a social process, embedded in what I have called, referring to the artist Doris Salcedo, ‘the social buzz’ (see Bal 2010): the constant implicit discussion – agreement, disagreement, qualification, passionate thinking – of ideas by the people constituting the social environment of the thinker. Three aspects can be derived from that collective nature of thought that, in my view, are most central in that activity. They are, respectively: performativity, theorising and ‘anachronising’. Thinking is neither individual nor particular. Nor is it bound to the time of articulating the ideas. The life of thoughts is like that of images: both are enduring as well as constantly changing, and collectively, that is, socially, sustained. They are subject to debate, and thus entice people to do the thinking with, through, in, more than about the world, including its imagining and imaging. We do not ‘read’ the content of thought in an image but make, construct it, in interaction with it. 1  In addition to the sources on fiction mentioned above, two books by Spanish literary scholar José María Pozuelo Yvancos (1993, 2014) consider fiction in depth and detail, arguing against an ontological divide. Apropos of Don Quijote, he puts the issue succinctly (1993, 26) when he claims that what matters is not fiction in the novel but the novel as fiction.

As a result, at any given time, what each of us sees when considering an idea is a new idea, fresh from the thought-act the viewer with his or her baggage of thoughts brings to bear on it. This is never our own thinking power only, but primarily the idea, or word, metaphor or image we encounter that persuades us in the interaction. This is how ideas themselves can be said to participate in the thinking that produces them: in interaction (performatively), in theoretically relevant ways (as theoretical object), and across time (anachronistically). This thinking power of ideas and images makes thinking with, rather than about, the ideas of others an important contribution to the understanding of the social world. This is what Vera tells her father. That is the process, the activity of what is called ‘philosophy’. In these respects, thought is quite like art. I find it useful to keep thought and art in each other’s company, albeit without merging them. Creativity and the imagination are essential to both. It is also what we do as academics – in my case, in the humanities, rubbing elbows with the social sciences. Thinking, when it is ‘in touch’ with the world in a strong sense of that expression, is a form of analy­ sing. And since it is largely based on what we see around us, it is anchored in visuality. This chapter concerns not thought about art but art about thought, and practice as a form of theory. I consider the task of the humanities to be understanding, analysing and explaining the importance of art for the contemporary world. This has made my work interdisciplinary, simply because I could never believe in the delimi­ tations of fields. Literature also contains images; paintings don’t stop at the edge of their frames; and images move, if only because people move in relation to them when visiting museums, or flip pages in books. I have termed it ‘cultural analysis’ and co-founded, in 1994, with Hent de Vries (philosophy) and Peter van der Veer (cultural anthropology), the research institute ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) to promote interdisciplinary activity in this sense. I am happy to say that ASCA is still thriving. When working on visual art, the movement of images is my starting point. Images move in ways philosophers, espec­ ially Bergson and, in dialogue with him, Deleuze have attempted to articulate. I am interested in movement as an integration of physical,

conceptual and emotional movement; the intertwined trajectories of concept, affect and percept. Thinking, for me, belongs in the same ­category.2 After the ‘turn to fiction’ that Michelle and I made as good students of the three-year-old teacher Vera, and having been enriched by the experience described in Chapter 2, we undertook a project based on my favourite novel, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). In the course of this project I understood more and more how Flaubert, while committed to creating beauty, was (also) a brilliant thinker, ‘inventing’ hysteria before Freud, and understanding capitalist exploitation before Marx. He was able to articulate these two syndromes by means of his imagination, in the creation of fiction. The making of the images compelled us to integrate ‘beauty’ with the ideas that we retrospectively termed, after Eva Illouz, ‘emotional capitalism’. Today, we live with the ongoing economic crisis and its worldwide consequences for individuals and families – and, relatedly, the resurgence of feminism because, after laying to rest what we thought was a won struggle, the renewed need for activism in this regard becomes clearer every day. Thus, it became more and more obvious that visual thinking is important, specifically, ‘thinking in film’. The need for activism calls on performa­ tivity; learning from Flaubert about Freudian and Marxian ideas requires anachronism. This together leads to theorising film as a form of thinking.3 When I was pondering, in the aftermath of the Madame B project, how powerful this combination of the three elements of thinking is, and searching for philosophical support, Descartes, the classic master of Western thought, came along. This happened when in my readings I encountered the empty, dismissive qualifier ‘post-Cartesian’ one time too many. I felt disconsolate about the lack of thinking in texts 2  To get a sense of the intellectual brief of ASCA, see Bal, Elsaesser and others (1998) and, for my own view, Bal (ed.) (1999). The three elements are at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1994). 3  On emotional capitalism, see Illouz (2007, 2012), and Chapter 9. Flaubert foresaw it, and what is now a deeply disturbing reality has been analysed in persuasive detail by Saskia Sassen (2014) among others.

on thought, and I decided to go back to my roots in French Studies and look again at the work of this master of thought. I was interested less in his ideas than in the way he did his thinking, and, with my three elements in mind, in the question of how to visualise that process. In this ‘how?’ I found the actor I wanted for the role, Thomas Germaine, entirely on my side. When I asked him if he was interested in playing Descartes, he said: ‘yes, but . . .’, a hesitation comparable to Vera’s seconds of silence after her father suggested ‘Snow White’. Thomas’s hesitation concerned discoursing. He explained: ‘I think during walks, not at my desk.’ I wondered if it is possible to show thought-as-process visually. I took up the project to show, in film, how thinking happens, and at the same time, to do that through thinking ‘in’ film, as a foreign language. In this chapter I present a number of instances of how through thinking in film I attempt, each time differently, to unfold how think­ing is, in a sense, filmic. This can only be unfolded if we incorporate the social, physical and imaginative aspects of it. 4 Two of the films I (co-)made put fictionality on the table, as an issue, a question, in tension and relation to its seeming opposite: reality, documentary, historical research. In both cases it is not fictionality as a theoretical problem that questions realism or creates a tension between fiction and reality. I take for granted that fictionality, like words, images, grammar, meaning, and all the other tools we have to make cultural artefacts, is a fundamental – indeed, indispensable – element in any reflection on the world. Fictionality, like time, is there all the time. The two films belong to the two different bodies of work, documentary and fiction. Yet, both are ambiguous in relation to their ‘official’ genres. Becoming Vera, as mentioned, was the documentary 4  I got acquainted with Descartes when, in my second year of French Studies, the inspiring teacher Françoise Guyon gave us a fragment in which Descartes described a tree and the homework assignment to describe something else according to his way of describing the tree. Description became Françoise’s impact on my thinking. My very first article was on a description in Madame Bovary. It seems pointless to cite sources for the dismissal of Descartes; I’d have to cite hundreds of such sloppy thinkers. On Descartes in connection to visuality, see Grootenboer (2020, 80–2).

which drove home the social value of fiction. I undertook the making of Reasonable Doubt, in contrast, as a fiction, but one that had two strong historical figures as their subjects, and would therefore not do as totally fictional. Some historical plausibility was necessary. The intimate connection between fiction and reality is immediately obvious when we realise that, in both cases, the deployment of fiction is a reply to social pressure: an act of resistance. Becoming Vera in Free Indirect Discourse The black hair Vera mentions in her story to her father is doubtless derived from the hair colour she sees around her in Cameroon. The bunches in the nice witch’s hair seem resultant from Vera’s own mirror image and her incipient awareness of her femininity. Her hair is not black, though, which will become a focus for the self-image her surroundings send back to her. But Germain’s attempt to frame the story into the Snow White ‘classic’ is not successful. For the little girl knows how to resist such streamlining through the use of fiction. She has no desire to become ‘snow-white’. Vera’s distinction centres on hair – which is her own feature of distinction. Moreover, she teaches her father a lesson in fiction writing when she explains to him that he must follow the narrator’s lead. By phrasing it as she does, in visual terms – ‘you have to look at the story with me’ – she even handles the narratological distinction between narration and focalisation. And in saying ‘I made it up’ she asserts the power and subjectivity-enhancing quality of fiction. In this way, she develops her self-confidence as a girl (and, hence, as a prospective woman), as someone of African descent (her bunches), as a maker (of fiction), as a speaking subject (her story to be endorsed) and as a focaliser (‘look at the story with me’). Thus, she can continue on her path of ‘becoming’ Vera. This is her negotiation of strictures. Her becoming is based on the transformation of borders from stable lines into shifting spaces; it follows a ‘Sahara aesthetic’ of constantly moving and transforming sand hills. Vera’s canny address to the viewer tells us that such mixtures are not naïve or romantic, but a savvy way of dealing with confinement by

treating borders (in gender, class or culture) as spaces to navigate, for ‘becoming’ oneself.5 Born of a Cameroonian father of princely status in Bamun and a French-born mother of high noble Russian descent, little Vera Loumpet-Galitzine grows up in a modest apartment in Paris – as a French girl. She goes to nursery school and to a ballet class, where a somewhat militaristic tune sets the rhythm of the little girls’ movements and their traditional ballet costumes reinforce another aspect of Vera’s identity: her ‘girliness’. Vera plays with other children and with her Barbie dolls, tells stories, and sings songs. As with all children, her most important toy is her imagin­ation. But this faculty is culturally embedded. Many of the self-made songs and stories echo what she has learnt in school, at home, as well as in Cameroon. The film’s title refers not to the old idea of becoming as a trans­ition to a permanent state, however, but more to an ontology of instability; more a Deleuzian Sahara with shifting waves than the psychoanalytic­ally inspired common-sense notion of identity. ‘Becoming’ Vera is the child’s way of negotiating the borders that the adults erect around her.6 Two points regarding borders underlie my view in the film and in the present chapter. First, I consider the linguistic theory of deixis the most clarifying theory in the humanities to explain the problem of identity and the borders that instate, confirm and perpetuate it. Proposing that not meaning but deixis is the essence of language – and, by extension, of communication – French linguist Émile Benveniste made a fundamental distinction between I/you, the first and second persons, and he/she/them, the third person (1971 [1966]). The first two are bound up together and their positions are exchangeable; ideally, 5  For the term ‘Sahara aesthetic’, see Buydens (2005, 110) explaining Deleuze. I find it fascinating that the rejected classic (Snow White) is such an emphatic story of whiteness. See Bal (1999, 209–30) on an artwork by Carrie Mae Weems that indicts the fairy tale for its racial categorisation. On ‘becoming’ in an anthropological perspective, see Biehl and Locke (2010). 6  Becoming Vera, digital video, colour, 53 minutes (Cinema Suitcase, 2008); see http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/becoming-vera/. On this conception of becoming, see in particular A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1992 [1980]).

they must exchange all the time. The third person is excluded, talked about, and acted upon. Benveniste’s intervention in linguistics had a lasting impact, an intervention comparable to Austin’s performativity. Second, I have consistently contested the overwhelmingly predominant logic of binary opposition, and since borders deploy the us/them logic to impose rigid binaries, they are a primary target. As a line, a border, be it political, geographical, linguistic or cultural, keeps ‘them’ outside and encloses ‘us’ inside. As a negotiable territory, however, ‘they’ enter into the purview of ‘us’ and become partners in the turn-taking ‘we’ and ‘you’.7 Combining these two claims, I wanted to propose, as a source for understanding fiction, a film in which implicit, informal and domestic, if not quite private, borders are both erected and ignored, transgressed and negotiated at the same time. Going through some of these borders, in Chapter 8 I will try to point out what ‘cultural identity’ can mean and how it is constructed and transmitted in relation to borders that separate one national or ethnic identity from another. The complexity increases even more when we realise that the choice to film a child before the age of awareness posed, of course, its own cinematic and ethical problems. How can you film the growing cultural awareness of a child so young, who does not speak about nor analyse cultural distinctions and encounters? This difficulty broaches the problem, but also the potential, of what in literature is called ‘free indirect discourse’ (FID). This narrative style consists of an interference between narrator’s text and actor’s text. Signals of the personal language situation of the actor and of the (im)personal language situation of the narrator cross without any explicit indications.8 7  This paragraph relies on the analysis of borders as territories, proposed by Inge Boer (2006). This book came out of a draft we discovered on Inge’s computer after her untimely death. We completed and edited it the best we could on the basis of the manuscript and the long-term friendship with Inge, which made us confident we knew what she would have thought of the issues brought up. But in such cases the editors cannot help unwittingly changing and adding ideas we could no longer check with the author. 8  More on this in Chapters 3 (on ‘who speaks?’), 8 (on identity) and 9 (on free indirect discourse as a tool for affect).

The concept of free indirect discourse seen as intermedial can illuminate an aspect of the film that is a direct consequence of Vera’s stage of development. Without being able to ask her about it, we attempted to imagine what all these different places looked like to Vera. In this way, we as filmmakers reiterated a feature of Vera’s ostensive behaviour. While Vera projected her fantasies on fictional, sometimes magical creatures, we were bound to project on her our own vision of what we saw as a child’s vision. What does she see, think or imagine? No one can have access to her mind; we could only follow her gaze with empathy, trying not to impose ourselves – yet, even in play and in sleep, she was in the eye of a camera. The resulting vision merges hers and ours. This would be the cinematic equivalent of FID. The lesson we learnt from Vera came in good stead when, some years later, I ventured to make the film on the philosopher and the queen – René Descartes and Queen Kristina. This became a case of ‘thinking in film’ taken literally, concretely, as well as conceptually. I took up the project to show, in film, how thinking happens, and at the same time, to do that through thinking ‘in’ film, the cinematic variant of image-thinking. The analogy, or metaphor, of the foreign language agrees with Adorno’s essay on the essay, where he wrote: The way the essay appropriates concepts can best be compared to the behavior of someone in a foreign country who is forced to speak its language instead of piecing it together out of its elements according to rules learned in school. Such a person will read without a dictionary. If he sees the same word thirty times in continually changing contexts, he will have ascertained its meaning better than if he had looked up all the meanings listed, which are usually too narrow in relation to the changes that occur with changing contexts and too vague in

relation to the unmistakable nuances that the context gives rise to in every individual case.9 With its visualising, moving images, sounds, voices, gestures, and its appeal to active acts of looking, ‘film’ as a site of social interaction – a site where the ‘social buzz’ can concentrate itself and go ‘live’ – is so common in contemporary culture that it bears comparison with language – that means of communicating we consider so normal as to be unnoticeable as a medium. With ‘film’ I mean moving images, no matter whether analogue or digital. And as we think in language, we also think in images. Hence, ‘film’ is that synaesthetic medium we can ‘think in’ – as, for example, when engaged in intensive learning of a foreign language, we sometimes dream in that language. ‘Thinking’ is what the artworks and their viewers do in interaction with each other. ‘In’ refers to an otherness that comes with a certain familiarity – as the phrase ‘in a foreign language’ intimates. This can be seen as an intellectual, linguistic form of FID. It also alludes to the spatial situation, physical and relational, of video installation as an art form, which is why both Madame B and the film project I will discuss here, Reasonable Doubt: Scenes from Two Lives, exist both as feature films and as video installations. And what better subject for an exploration of ‘thinking in film’ than making a film on thinking, the activity of thinking of a master of thought? The need for a story, however tenuous, diffused the individualistic myth that surrounds philosophy and its practitioners. We speak of influence, but not about the need to be with others for thought to be even possible. Also, it seemed obvious that thinking is not done in one single way, or mode. Moreover, thinking – in spite of the vulgarised but misconstrued meaning of the cogito – does involve the body, and moods. 9  Adorno (1991, 13). I borrow the phrase ‘thinking in film’ from the artist ­Eija-Liisa Ahtila, discussed in an interview with Chrissie Iles (2003). To my regret, it was only after finishing the film that I found the book by Kyoo Lee (2013), which is wholly consistent with the view of Descartes presented here, and even more radical. This author, too, considers Descartes’ thinking ‘cinematic’.

It also needs places where the process can happen. All these considerations compel the deployment of the imagination. In what follows I present a number of instances of how I attempted, each time differently, to unfold what thinking-in-film is, and how thinking is, in a sense, filmic, and thereby, fictional.10 As an experiment to audio-visualise thought, this project stages scenes from two lives of thinking people, briefly crossing in an intellectual (thinking) friendship. The encounter led to the death of Descartes and influenced the abdication, conversion and expatriation of Kristina. The video work is not a biography; it does not produce a proper narra­ t­ive, but a series of scenes that constitute a non-coherent double portrait. For this chapter, it matters that some scenes are historical, some are my fictionalising way of doing justice to historical ideas relevant for today, and my imaginative imaging of what thinking looks like. Without the imagination, without fiction, the film would have been impossible. Thinking in Film The installation pieces qualify the notion and experience of film. They have been made to accommodate visitors’ interest, moods, endurance, and, if it so happens, impatience, as a complex and embodied way of absorbing thought in process. The possibility to see them in installation – either sculpturally dispersed throughout a space, or simultaneously projected on a wall – makes the idea of ‘thinking in film’ spatially concrete, according to Chapter 2, and precludes attempts to turn the pieces into a (linear) biography. Wherever in the scenes one is focusing, what one has seen before becomes an amalgamation of memories. Thought works that way, rather than in linear fashion. The pieces 10  The project consists of a feature film (98 minutes) and five installation pieces (30 minutes each). Both film and exhibition premiered in Kraków, Poland, on 23 April (film) and 24 April (exhibition), 2016. These events were organised, and the exhibition curated, by Professor Roma Sendyka of the Jagiellonian university of Kraków. I am deeply grateful for her commitment to make this happen. See http:// www.miekebal.org/artworks/exhibitions/reasonable-doubt/ for this event, clips and photographs.

present moods rather than events, while biographical moments appear a bit more than in the feature film. Some of these are semi-ironic allusions to historical research. As I have insisted before, in exhibition, seating should be provided to encourage immersive looking. Sound must be calibrated carefully; there is quite a bit of on-set music, embodying the ‘noise’ that is always also part of the thinking process. The music is also part of the content, as Descartes was very keen on music. His first writing was a treatise on music. Each scene experiments differently with expressing the inexpressible, the subtleties and ambivalences of reason and emotion together, outside of the narrative impulse, in the process of thinking.11 The feature film, in contrast, has a fixed duration over which the viewer has no say. Compared to the installation pieces it is mostly limited to presenting the thought process intensely. And, as a feature film, in order to keep the viewers interested, it needed an underlying story, tenuous as it is. After a relationship by correspondence, and seduced by her flattering messages, philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) met and briefly interacted with Queen Kristina (1626–89) in Stockholm, where he died six weeks after arriving, due to the cold. Once Descartes had reached Sweden, the two didn’t see each other much. Kristina’s philosophical interest was genuine enough. But he was there in a more or less decorative function, to adorn Kristina’s ambitious project of ­creating an Academy that would put Sweden’s intellectual elite on the European map. So far, I have deduced this narrative from the sources. Although no interpretation can do without some imagination, this would still count as ‘historical’.12 11  On the specific effects of video installation as a medium, see also Kate Modloch (2010) and Mathilde Roman (2016), the latter emphasising the theatricality. A comparative study on the differences between video installation and film is Houwen (2017). The five installation pieces can also turn the film into a serial, with the segments as a way of thinking about each at leisure, and starting the next day with the next piece. This potential occurred to me to accommodate a very interested viewer who was too ill to make the trip to the exhibition venues. It worked very well, according to her. 12  To get as close as possible to the encounter and the interaction between the two, see Jean-François de Raymond (1993). This short book contains letters Kristina wrote

But not as an engaging film. For this, a more narrativising imaginative step was needed: my own interpretation of what I had gleaned from the sources and Descartes’ own writings. Descartes left Western thought with a burden, and a treasure. The burden: a misconstrued dualistic tradition. In my view, he accepted the dualism of the Catholic Church, but fought against it all his life – torn by doubt, because it is not reasonable. The treasure: a decisive advance in rational thought that, precisely, did not excise the body, nor religion for that matter. The (in-) famous cogito can be interpreted in the opposite direction from the clichéd dismissal of it, as an attempt to embody and subjectify thought. This is clear when we look back from his last book, The Passions of the Soul (1649), and see the ongoing struggle against dualism in different episodes of his life.13 Moreover, he left a more specific treasure. Descartes dedicated that book to Kristina, but he also had another woman friend-by-correspondence, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in my imagination was the ‘real’ addressee. This woman had been traumatised by childhood events of a political and economic order. As she writes in her letters, Descartes helped her overcome a chronic affliction caused by the trauma. Although they never met as a trio, Descartes at some point asked Kristina to help Elisabeth. So far, this has been historically documented. I use that anecdote for the far-reaching claim that through his mode of thinking, specifically thinking with the other person, he ‘invented’ psychoanalysis, in a ‘post-Freudian’ form à la Davoine that returns this theory to re-becoming a true social science. Speculation, indeed. For this intellectual claim that would advance our knowledge, fictionality is needed. This theory that so eminently integrates body and mind, as it was later developed, emerged not only from Descartes’ thoughts about the interaction between body and mind as exposed in his book, but also from the solidarity with Elisabeth that he, as one who to Descartes, which demonstrate her philosophical questioning convincingly. 13  For a subtler interpretation of the cogito, see Balibar (2017 [2011], 55–73). The complexity of Balibar’s interpretation emerges from the fundamentally interdisciplinary thinking he practises, forging an inter-ship between philosophy, political science and anthropology.

was also traumatised in childhood, felt and demonstrated. This also has implications for a contemporary feminism that makes us too easily consider gender relations in the past as hopelessly exclusive. The two women who thought with Descartes, and helped him think with them, stand for the aspect of thinking that counters the myth of the thinker as loner. I consider this claim about thinking as social, historically responsible, but to show it in film I had to imagine a scene that I know not to have taken place in historical reality. This is how the imagination is needed for history; Hayden White was right.14 Descartes’ struggle to integrate what religion had separated is of concern to me for pre-posterous reasons: because, among the many tenacious dualisms we continue to use are those between cultural and economic values, and between academic and artistic – in other words, intellectual and sense-based – expressive thought, analysis and reasoning. In these and other dualisms I live and work; they hamper me. I see Descartes’ thinking process in the cracks between the certainties he also proffered when bracketing his doubt in his reasoning. In order to help overcome them, I look at the discrepancies between the Descartes we have abused and dismissed and the one who was the point of departure of the struggle for a non-dualistic mode of thinking. Conversely, Queen Kristina is not only capricious but also philosophical, constantly thinking about life, and the bearer of the after-effects of this different Descartes. And, as a conversation partner, she asks the questions the philosopher needs to ponder in order to make headway in his thinking process. As a general interaction, this is well-enough documented. The specific conversations, however, I had to make up, in order to make (fingere) a plausible scene out of it. I also added a final scene after Descartes’ death – the one I know not to be historical. My interest in doing this project focuses on the complexity, and the resulting subtlety, of the rationalism these figures represent. The productivity of the dialectical relationship between reason and a certain 14  My primary sources for Descartes, in addition to the French volume in the Pléiade edition that includes correspondence (1937), are the autobiographical treatise Discourse on Method and Meditations (1960 [1637]), and The Passions of the Soul (1989 [1649]).

kind of madness in both Descartes and Kristina was never fully recognised. I wanted to suggest that reason and ‘madness’ – meaning the form doubt takes when it is cut off from the social bonds based on respect and dialogue, as discussed in Chapter 2 – can go very well together. The persistent deceptive and arrogant progressivism in our thinking is fond of the qualifier ‘post-Cartesian’ as something we have happily left behind. But it is that ‘post-’ thinking itself that betrays us as, I’d say, pre-Cartesian; as failing to integrate doubt in reason, as he so masterfully did. Caught in a world where dogma ruled and dis­ believing it was severely punishable, Descartes spent his life doubting dualism and attempting to overcome it, rationally as well as in his capricious behaviour. Had we really listened to him, that vexed preposition ‘post-’ itself would be used with more (Cartesian) doubt. His doubt is convincingly shown in his face in the photograph in Figure 5.2. Using audio-visual images to put this on the table is my attempt to bring thought and images together in supporting each other. The line between historical fact and contemporary fiction, already so fine, can no longer be drawn here. This is image-thinking caught in the act. Why Imaging and/or Thinking Move The most characteristic image of thinking as a process is a sequence where Descartes is walking alone in the dunes, or along a busy highway, clearly thinking. Although I stumbled upon this historical fact after having heeded the actor’s wish to walk as an expression of thinking, it turned out Descartes was famous for his long walks. The first scene integrates the sense of avid learning, curiosity and ambition, and his walking and moving about are the physical condition of this learning. It also includes the obstacles that emotional turmoil sometimes mounts in a young person unaware of what makes things difficult for him. The mood is eagerness and insecurity. In this scene we also get a glimpse of the young philosopher’s economically easy, but emotionally difficult, everyday life, where caring men surround him. Beginning with a preface Figure 5.2  Descartes’ doubt, or his madness? Photo: Przemo Wojciechowski.

that puts all relevant ideas on the table, the scene ends on a non-narrative cliffhanger of sorts. Energetically walking towards an unknown place, in the preface a still insecure Descartes visits an art exhibition on emotions in the seventeenth century (curated by Gary Schwartz for the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem in 2014). He wants to explain his views on the human as an integration of body and mind to a friend, hoping to get confirmation. Asking his friend questions, he seeks to understand the bond between body and soul, and its visibility in painting. Asking questions is the first mode of thinking we get to see; it couldn’t be more clearly social. The tentative harp music his sister played when the two were little lingers

Figure 5.3  René learning from his sister Jeanne. Photo: Neal Markage.

in his head. These scenes are the fictions I forged to make sense of the hints he gave Elisabeth in their correspondence. But their narrative content came solely from my imagination, and is based on the question that generates fiction: ‘what if . . .?’ This connects the preface of the film to the childhood scenes that follow. Waking him by tentative harp music, his sister Jeanne (Olympe Lefèbvre) playfully teaches the little boy (Ambroise Lefèbvre) about the senses, their deceptive nature, and the need to understand the world through them (Figure 5.3). After asking her about the absence of their parents, the little boy walks off alone into the woods, metaphorically standing for the great wide world, and continues walking on what looks like the same path and in the same direction when he turns into a young man who makes walking outside his substitute armchair. Music, the sister and walking constitute together the condition of his thinking. Film is the language in which this can be articulated and shown, with the imagination that feeds fiction as an inextricable element of it. Putting Descartes in a museum, in the preface, even if the building and the paintings belong to the same era as was his, is pure fiction. Museums had still to be invented. Nevertheless, there is a historical ‘couleur locale’ in that scene, which is not a claim to historical truth at all; this is not systematically pursued in the work.15 The presence of art serves a different function. Each scene contains an artwork by someone else, to make the point that ‘thinking in film’ cannot be done alone any more than thinking in general. After dreaming about making choices, Descartes turns to intellectual work, without ever sitting at a desk. As avid a learner as he was in childhood, after thinking and exploring botany in his own garden we see him walk through nature. So far, this is historical. Then I fictionalise him, thinking about the mineral world in a dunes landscape – the microscopic images of minerals filmed from the inside, a fragment from the artwork 15  See Schwartz and Keestra (2014). I am grateful to Gary Schwartz and to Ann DeMeester, director of the Frans Hals Museum, for their collaboration and permission. I also thank child psychoanalyst Jacqueline Duval, who has been advising me all along, beginning with Becoming Vera, about the psychological and ethical issues of filming children. On walking as aesthetically relevant, see Careri (2017 [2002]).

Figure 5.4  Meeting Beeckman. Photo: Margreet Vermeulen.

A Thing Among Things by Giovanni Giaretta (2015). This artwork shows Giaretta’s fictional imagination at work. The thinker asks for a butcher’s help to understand anatomy, for he believed in studying in practice. This, too, is historically documented. He studies plants in his garden, with the help of a young valet (Simon Ferdinand). Hunting for a house – the grandeur of which is never good enough, I imagine – he meets the mathematician Isaac Beeckman (Ilja Nieuwland), with whom he strikes up a friendship (Figure 5.4). The new friend becomes the recipient of his first writing: a treatise on music, a new year’s gift. But for Beeckman’s eyes only! says the insecure

would-be philosopher. This will lead to his first serious break-up. The events are based on historical evidence, but the weaving together in an audio-visual creation of thinking-in-process needed film as its language. We weren’t there when it happened. But the fictional imaging kicks in when I give Descartes another friend to test his social clumsiness. Among his practice-based learning experiences is his search for a dialogue with lens makers, when he was studying dioptrics – the science of the refraction of light. Descartes writes about this wish at the beginning of the treatise. That opening suggests that he sought to be ‘democratic’ in his writing, wanting it to be accessible to the men of practice even if they had no scientific background. This is explicit in his text. Then the ‘what if ’ question of fiction takes over. What if one of the men of practice – the artisans working for a living around him – happ­ ened to be called Baruch Spinoza, the next of the world’s most brilliant philosophers, over twenty years his junior? There is no historical impos­ s­ ibility. We can assume it never happened; Spinoza would have mentioned the encounter had it ever taken place. But they met

Figure 5.5  Meeting Spinoza. Photo: Margreet Vermeulen.

intellect­ually, when Spinoza responded critically to Descartes’ work. He made a stronger opposition through radicalising Descartes’ mind–body dualism, then countering it. But they could have met historically, perhaps, and what would have happened then? This question required ‘thinking in film’ with fiction (Figure 5.5).16 Testing Descartes’ democratic mindset, I staged a meeting of the two in a lens shop. Descartes solicits the young man’s help. Spinoza (Abel Streefland) is eager to give Descartes’ treatise a critical read-though. At the end of the scene they agree to meet. What will happen when they do? That is the intellectual cliffhanger that ends the first scene, with ‘intellectual’ not limited to reason. This scene is fictional. But the ‘what if?’ question is never entirely without connections to historical reality, even if those connections cannot be verified, or are inexistent, as in this case.17 Spinoza appears as the earnest young man he must have been about the time that Descartes was trying to link up with lens makers. As evidence of the social buzz, I fabricated a Spinoza who was able to turn Descartes’ thoughts into an affect-based form of thinking that was possible, although barely, twenty-five years later. Bringing these two thinkers together was a performance of anachronism as an element of thought. Spinoza’s theory of affect as inherent in ethics is presently current in cultural philosophy and analysis.18 The bond between movement and the image is not limited to the moving image of film. I staged the fictional scene at the museum in the beginning as a preface, to bind the moving image to the still one of painting. The fictional space of it is inspirational to anachronistically 16  This can be concluded from a useful collective volume (Smith 2017, esp. ch. 9 by Peterman). 17  The most informative biography of Descartes – and for me the best resource because it integrates historical facts with an analysis of the philosophical ideas – is by Desmond Clarke (2006). The historical details mentioned in this analysis all come from that book. The biography by Stephen Gaukroger (1995) goes deeper into the development of the ideas. 18  See the accessible study by Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd (1999), already mentioned. They bring Spinoza’s ideas to bear on postcolonial theory, among other subjects, such as affect, collective thinking, and the distinction between guilt and responsibility.

understand Descartes’ search for such a relationship. Perception, in Bergson’s view, takes place in the present. Not only the interests of the perceiver motivate it, but also her memories. ‘(M)emory [images], laden with the whole of the past, responds to the appeal of the present state’, Bergson writes (1991, 168). The coexistence of different moments (or memories) he mentions has a spatial aspect to it. This timespace is shaped in video installation in the simultaneous presence of – and, hence, the simultaneous movement on – multiple screens (Chapter 2). This was one reason I examined Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s work in the earlier study. I have learnt a lot from it; about space, in particular.19 According to Bergson, space is not geometrical, as in Renaissance perspective; consequently, it is neither measurable nor identical for everyone who perceives it. Instead, our sense of space develops according to what Bergson calls a ‘natural feeling’. This natural feeling is heterogeneous and different for everyone, depending on wherever they are. This comes to the fore in the images of Descartes, armed with a magnifying glass, roaming around the world – whether the small portion of it that is his garden, the tiny world of a slaughtered pig’s head in the butcher’s shop, or the larger one of the dune landscape. The multiple screens of video installation exemplify heterogeneity with their non-synchronously moving images. In video installations, space is precisely that: heterogeneous, multiple, both fictional and real, both subjective and ‘extensive’, or deictic. The story may be fictional; the contact with it is real. Again, the distinction becomes (almost) moot. Reminiscent of Descartes’ unsettlement in The Passions of the Soul, Bergson considers the body to be a material entity, and he consequently sees perception as a material practice. This is a deeper level on which images move; it comes closer to affect. The image itself – not its support – is both moving and material. It is plural and functional; it does something. Today, we call it performative. In 1907, Bergson coined the term ‘creative evolution’ to account for yet another aspect of movement in the image: 19  I have also benefited greatly from two other books by Bergson: Time and Free Will (1960 [1889]), especially for the concept of extensity; and Creative Evolution (1983 [1907]), for the political potential of art.

the readiness to act, which occurs when the perception image, as Deleuze called it, morphs into an affect-image and makes the perceiver develop the readiness to act. This readiness – not the potentially resulting actualisation – contains the political potential of the (figurative) image, film and video installation. The combination of these kinds or forms of movement is the possibility film offers when we try to ‘think in film’.20 Mastery, in Doubt While never happening in isolation, even when the thinker is a bit of a recluse, thinking is also subjected to the dialogic relation within the self. In the second scene, the mood is the difficult-to-live-with combin­ ation of pride and fear. What might seem a weakness of Descartes turns out to be his primary strength: he dares to doubt, fear and panic. This scene begins with the discussion with Spinoza (Figure 5.6). The passionate plea of the young man converges with the mature thinker’s

Figure 5.6  Spinoza visits Descartes. Video still.

20  On affect in the Deleuzian sense, and its importance for art and aesthetics, see Bennett (2005), especially the Introduction; and a lucid, succinct explanation by Alphen (2008). Also, a collective volume edited by Alphen and Jirsa (2019). More in Chapter 9.

conception; it is as if they repeat each other’s ideas. Throughout the scene, Descartes enacts his status of the famous master of thought he had become in his lifetime, and simultaneously runs into his personality problems. The philosophical doubt of his somewhat sceptical leanings converges with his paranoid tendency and his suspicion of others. In short episodes, I merge the many friends and correspondents of his social buzz into one, named – after a loyal and long-standing one – Hector-Pierre Chanut (Florent Houdu), French ambassador to Kristina’s court. This friend regularly appears. Merging many different encounters and conversations in one friend is a fiction as such, even if the staged conversations have been held in historical reality, and the dialogue consists of literal quotations. Merging, then, is an act of ­f iction, with the help of real ingredients. The meeting with Spinoza shows that Descartes’ attempt to consider the ideas and lives of others – his democratic statement at the beginning of the Dioptrique – shipwrecks on his sense of superiority. When he pontificates to the young man about the interaction of light and colour – for which I inserted a sequence from a fabulous abstract artwork, Deep Orange by Ann Veronica Janssens (2010) – the future master of ethics interrupts him with challenges. Spinoza puts forward the need of the imagination, and of the togetherness of people in the present. This insistence on presentness and togetherness has turned Spinoza into an anachronistic master of contemporary social thought. Spinoza, here, articulates the elements of thought that sustain the need for the humanities, and the study of images, as serious ‘theoretical objects’ with potential thought of their own. Slightly flabbergasted, Descartes’ understanding dawns. Who is this young craftsman? He sounds like a philosopher! Well, why not? answers Baruch. Is working for a living incompatible with thought? Again, a short moment of silence intervenes. Then Descartes concedes that the young man is right.21 21  In addition to the work mentioned earlier (Gatens and Lloyd 1999), two further studies have been indispensable for my understanding of Spinoza in relation to Descartes: Lloyd (2008) and Nadler (2011), which both show the incipient secularism in Descartes’s thought. In an image-thinking-like endeavour, Nadler made a comic book, together with his son Ben, on Descartes and Spinoza (2017).

After challenging Descartes’ class prejudice, Spinoza disappears. A symbolic expression of a lonely Descartes’ ambition is enacted when he (fictionally) visits the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in a professorial robe. Again, this is a space acting like a character. There, he encounters a portrait of Christian Huygens, the son of his good friend Constantin, and prophetically (anachronistically) recognises the successful scientific career of the young man. Then he recalls the death of the young scientist’s mother. These moments are my (Bergsonian) ways of showing how we merge personal memories of childhood with what we notice about others and what we strive to achieve. Descartes’ father was not proud of him the way Huygens was of his brilliant son. And René, too, had lost his mother, here invoked by a painting of the Allegory of Teaching by Ferdinand Bol (anachronistically, from 1663). Disgusted with the futility of ambition, he tosses the robe on a chair and leaves the grand room. Everything I just wrote as what went through Descartes’ mind is nothing other than my retrospective interpretation of the actor’s play in the setting, based on a succinct description. The actor is a co-author, as is the space. Home again, a young collaborator (Reinier Schouten) is practising the violin. Chanut comes to visit, and whispers something in Descartes’ ear, to which we are not privy. Upset, Descartes shouts out that Beeckman has betrayed him. The historical issue is that the mathematician appears to have spoken about the music treatise to others. Scholars agree that the philosopher’s angry reaction is excessive; preparing for psychoanalysis, I tend to call it hysterical. The violinist attempts to take the fury over in his music. Chanut suggests that René should see a ‘soul doctor’; the theoretical fiction kicks in again. If it doesn’t help, it will at least teach him something about the body–soul relationship; instruct him about the ‘passions of the soul’, says Chanut – pre-posterously citing the subject and title of Descartes’ last and, for my speculative interpretation, most important book. Chanut’s fictional intervention laid the basis for Descartes’ developing interest in mental illness through his own personality problems.22 22  On Descartes’ treatise on music, Cohen (1984, 161–77, 188–97), and Prins and Cohen (2019). Also D. P. Walker (1976) for the anecdotal history of the occasion for

Figure 5.7  Descartes in, and inventing, psychoanalysis. Photo: Margreet Vermeulen.

So, to figure how Descartes came to become the inventor of psychoanalysis, instead of making him talk about it, I staged him in analysis (Figure 5.7). To the ‘soul doctor’ (Henk Hillenaar) he reveals his childhood traumas. But, to avoid implausible self-declarations, we only hear it from the doctor who read it in his new patient’s brief written autobiography, not from Descartes himself. The attempt to get professional help with his anger fits come to naught when the doctor picks up on a metaphor Descartes’ father had used to malign his son: he was ashamed to have produced a son who ‘let himself be bound between two layers of leather’. A historical anecdote, pre-posterously updated for what it would mean today, not then. The analyst asks if the metaphor might have other connotations than the shameful act of getting published. The allusion disturbs the patient, who runs off in fury. End of story. The scene hints at Descartes’ possible interest in men, hesitantly documented; to inform viewers of this childhood trauma of repeated

the treatise. I am surely not the first person to consider Descartes’ madness as an indispensable element of his genius. See, among the most prominent arguments, Derrida (1978).

abandonment, solidly documented; to the idea that his conception of the subject made psychoanalysis possible, philosophically documented; and to his childhood loneliness and his present troubles with others. I contend that his view of subjectivity – especially as articulated in The Passions of the Soul and in the correspondence with Elisabeth, as well as the (imagined) interaction with Kristina – will become the foundation of psychoanalysis. In these two scenes, anger is the mode of thinking; because he is ‘beside himself’ and directing his emotions to the people who challenge his mastery, he closes his thought process off. The relationship between the two scenes of anger fits is based on futurality. Not only will this excitable man have a great impact on the world in his inauguration of modern thought; also, his own life is filled with hints to the future, including future difficulties anchored in his complex personality. Meanwhile, Queen Kristina (Marja Skaffari), impressed by his work that she has seriously studied, writes to him with her magnified metaphysical questions. One of these, concerning the nature of love, compels the philosopher to invoke a childhood memory to explain it – when his first, ‘scientific’ explanation, doesn’t satisfy the Queen. This exchange hints at the indispensable role the two women – Kristina and Elisabeth – had, in the footsteps of René’s sister Jeanne, in nourishing the philosopher’s thinking process. Chanut – now in his capacity as Kristina’s ambassador – tries to persuade his friend to make the trip to Sweden. Knowing what happens next, the scene is ambivalent. It is entirely based on quotations from the correspondence. We see Descartes’ wavering determination influenced by flattery. The dream of grandeur wins over prudence. Ambition, important for the insecure, is also a double-edged sword. In the end, we see a frail man, bent over, walking on the beach, insinuating his inevitable upcoming voyage. Still walking, but no longer in mastery. Although this scene occurs in the film as well as in the installation piece, the effect is different. In a single-space installation, this ambivalent decision will run simultaneously with the encounter with Spinoza in scene 1. Both are talking scenes, and the visitor-participant, immersed in a cacophony, must choose what to listen to, how to listen, and when to change direction. Visitors are both free to focus attention where they

wish but also compelled to make choices of attentiveness. This embodies the social buzz; the impact of the viewers as interlocutors; their (partial) mastery over what they take from the scenes. The image struggles with the sound. There full of plans, here Descartes is going to his demise; the spring has left his step and the bent-over figure, filmed from a distance, looks old, as if already near dying. Chronology is made redundant. The installation of these two scenes together helps us understand another aspect of how thinking works. It makes tangible that a person is not just a one-moment subject, but carries a life-long baggage of memories.23 From Impatience as Lifestyle to Mis-Encounters The next two scenes bring the second main character in, and begin with an image of stretched-out time. In the third scene, Kristina – without Descartes, but with the philosopher constantly on her mind – is the character, and impatience as an element of thought is being presented. The mood is irritation about the power of another over the self. She is impatiently waiting for Descartes’ arrival. Meanwhile, she is failing in her personal relationships, as well as in her studies, and managing the State and her estate. The palace where she lives, acting like a character, imprisons her. Time is stretching endlessly, something she cannot tolerate. Sadness and anger alternate. This scene concerns feeling time in confinement, and the resulting futility of beauty, riches and power. The end withholds certainty in a moment where dream and expectation, fiction and reality converge in music. No event can occur. The scene also reflects film’s basis in time. What is time like when nothing happens? This question, and the viewer’s participation in the experiment, brings up heterochrony (Chapter 4). What Kristina is ‘really’ doing during the long wait for Descartes’ arrival doesn’t matter. The scene presents us fictionally with the moods 23  In addition to the beginning chapter of Michel Henry’s book Généalogie de la psychanalyse (2015 [1985]), a number of interpretations of Descartes’ concept of the subject that, like a patchwork, move into that direction is the collection edited by Kim Sang Ong-Van-Cung (1999). Memory is crucial in thinking, and particularly so in psychoanalysis. See Bal, Crewe and Spitzer (1999).

that come with the (documented) impatience enacted. One of her philosophical/futile occupations is watching a drop of dew slowly roll off a leaf. For emphasis, both on her impatience and on the long history of drops in visual art, this scene occurs twice. The eternally mourning Queen Mother hovers over a daughter with whom she has no contact whatsoever. Two unhappy women, together but alone. Nothing can occur. Kristina runs, plays with her dog, and explores her palatial home like a tourist seeing it for the first time. She looks into mirrors and questions herself, and her physical beauty. Thinking, it seems, is foreclosed when time is the enemy. She does try to think – she does barely anything else. Reading bits and pieces in a number of books, she feels she is drowning in them. A Shakespeare poem she stumbles upon seems to summarise her plight: if she doesn’t marry and procreate, everything she is and has will die with her. The entrance of her lady-inwaiting and friend Bella cheers her up for a while; but, shy of entering into another phase of the friendship, she blames the other and the sweet moment is over. She roams around the hostile palace.24 As a scene, this is pure fiction. As for the moods, these are enacted on the basis of documentation. And although the hovering Queen Mother is anachronistic, since she lived elsewhere when the philosopher’s arrival was expected, the sense that Kristina’s traumatised and traumatising mother hampered her life seems plausible enough. Her roaming in her palace figures her insecurity about who she is, and what she can do with her life. It is her mode of thinking, her variant of ­Descartes’ walks. Coming upon a small sculpture of the famous Frenchman, she covers it with gauze, as if unwilling to show him – if and when he arrives – that she cares. A brilliant photograph of the preceding moment by Przemo Wojciechowski has become the poster image for the project. Figure 5.8 Kristina looking at herself, or/and Descartes? Photo: Przemo Wojciechowski. 24  For a fabulous analysis of dew drops rolling off petals and leaves, philosophising on transparency and the thinking activity in still-life painting, see Grootenboer (2020, 127–33).

The photo also harbours a thought-image of media. It was taken literally and figuratively ‘after’ cinema. It is part of a photographic reportage of the film shoot that took place between 28 March and 3 April 2015, in Nieborów Palace, Poland. This palace, which is part of the National Museum of Poland, was the setting of about 35 per cent of the film. In the scene after this photograph was taken, Queen Kristina is looking in a mirror (Figure 5.8). She is impatiently waiting for Descartes to arrive. The Queen is lonely and insecure, about her beauty, her gender, her power, her intellect. Descartes’ slow arrival makes her insecurity worse. Winter is approaching. Descartes, having hesitated too long, arrives too late in the season and gets trapped and doomed by the Swedish winter. So far, the scene is based on historical documentation and my fictionalising imagination. I chose this photo because of the dense narrativity in the still image. My involvement is manifold. I am interested in narrative, and I am the maker of the film for which the scene was played, the photo made. This involvement brings my excitement about the paradoxical nature of this photograph close to home. But the photograph is also made ‘after’ cinema: it is a very cinematic photograph, albeit not in slavish imitation of the seventh art. It emulates the moving image and is successful in that endeavour. The image harbours the entire story with its own means; by its stillness. This is not a snapshot that captures a movement. Kristina’s half-open mouth does not look as though she was caught in the middle of speaking. Rather, she, as much as the photograph, is still. Her mouth makes her seem astonished; it has dropped, and stays open. It is a feature of her face, not a consequence of her act. She remains arrested in fascination, doubt, fear. ‘Is that me?’ She can see it all, in the mirror, so she can reflect as much on herself, her self-image, and the making of the image, all at once. But still, a narrative interpretation lingers. Once we look at the photograph as a flat, still, shiny image, something else happens. Light, composition, mise en scène and dramaturgy conspire to create a sense of foreboding, regardless of what we know. The photo was taken against the light. But instead of counterlight ruining the illumination of the face, it enhances it. Even the grain of her skin is visible; every hair stands separately on her head, where

the hair is parted, and where it hangs down. Like a Rembrandt selfportrait, the relative darkness of the face makes us look more intensively, and hence, see more. The ambiguity of the photograph raises numerous questions, and in that respect, too, it is a moving image; it sets our thinking in motion. Does Kristina’s clutched fist stand for her anger about Descartes’ delayed arrival? Her fear that she is ugly, or at least, not regally beautiful? Is her insecurity due to older wounds? Does her doubt concern the question whether she is up to conversing with the great man? We cannot know what caused her inner turmoil, only that it is there, in those eyes, and that open mouth. For, when we see the image we know nothing else. And although her riveted gaze does suggest a mirror, it is not visible; nor is the Queen’s reflection in it. She might as well be looking at a painting, or some other image. Like the obscurity generated by the counter light, the mirror’s invisibility transforms the image into an enigma that makes us modest. The composition, like the light, enhances the enigma. It doesn’t obey the rules. The yellow curtains are not symmetrical. The floor is not entirely straight. The woman’s head on the right is out of scale with the sculpture on the left. Does scale express the inequality of power? The woman is a Queen, after all; the man a mere thinker. And there stands that sculpture that, as if coincidentally, represents the great philosopher. Even when keeping narrative at bay, we cannot avoid interpretation. And thus, we are ‘in’ the image; we participate in its game. The colour is also an element in the stillness. It is almost a monochrome. Yellow and brown; white and light-grey tones. And once we notice that the figure in the sculpture looks out through the window, through that white net curtain, we can divide the figures according to colour scheme.25 When I consider the mise en scène, another inequality strikes me. The sculpture, smaller, perhaps a mere prop, seems to float; we do not see on what pedestal it stands. Kristina, in contrast, leans on the chimney. And then there is the dramaturgy. Kristina looks straight ahead, most likely 25  For more about scale, an accessible scientific-philosophical book by Truls Wyller (2010) is helpful.

at her self-image; the marble Descartes looks away. The roll of writing in his hand remains rolled up. The encounter won’t work. We imagine her going through her house as a way of realising that she owns it all, while also expressing her estrangement from the worldly goods that – after Descartes’ death – will no longer interest her.26 But then, she has a dream – of potential beauty. An artwork by Jane Harris, Potential Beauty (2004), visualises her dream. This is a dancing dress, without a body inside it. But the dress acts; it bows, greets, displays itself and dances. This artwork explores the fine line between thought and cognition. Beauty doesn’t leave Kristina entirely indifferent. Her apparent disinterest is as defensive as Descartes’ excessive anger. On an unconscious level, since she is dreaming, she would like to be more beautiful than she considers herself to be, or so it seems. A somewhat mysteriously talking valet (Władysław Chojecki) tries to reassure Kristina, calm her impatience. His primary function is to make her speak out her disquiet; express her arrogance while also showing the insecurity that generates it. In a fit of fury she first throws over a game of chess, then breaks dishes in her kitchen. But when she orders a servant (Milja Korpela) to clean up, in a fit of economic thinking (historical), she tells her not to throw away the pieces (fictional). Finally, Descartes’ arrival is announced. Nervously, she dresses up in a regal outfit – crown and all – looking outdated and a trifle carnivalesque, and sits down while Lulli’s music resounds through a hallway, now empty, then filled with dreamy-looking women in baroque costumes who play the music. If we seek to distinguish the fiction from the real, we had better realise that this is impossible. The traditional standard of plausibility (vraisemblance) does not work. Some unlikely details are historical, whereas more plausible ones are fictional additions. For example, the 26  Not reading Swedish, I had to rely for this scene and the following on secondary literature. See especially the well-documented book by Veronica Buckley (2005). See also the imaginative, ‘first-person’ novel by Françoise D’eaubonne (1979). This novel is fictional, but here, too, bits from the documentation can be recognised. Although time as I discuss it here is alien to Descartes’s thinking, there is an instance of thinking about time in his work (Leydesdorff, 1994).

exhausted and freezing philosopher takes out of his coat pocket a pair of white gloves, in order to be ‘proper’ for the encounter with her majesty; historically documented. But the comparable subsequent detail, that he strikes his hair to look proper when passing by a mirror, was an improvisation by the actor. The welcoming music (by the Polish string quartet Con Affetto) coincides in a single-space exhibition with the man walking on the beach, and with the first meeting with Spinoza. Together, these three endings of scenes compress decades into a full, ambivalent moment, stretched out to last as long as the visitor wishes to stay. Thought and time stand opposed as enemies. It is up to the viewers to bring their own thinking to how they will look at and listen to this, and for how long. The fourth scene begins with the arrival, and the encounter that doesn’t go well. The mood: awkwardness. This scene shows how these two great minds of the seventeenth century did not manage to really meet. Here, the fictionality is in the negative. Both had based their interest on something different than what they get. Descartes had hoped for the magnificent recognition of his greatness by royalty; Kristina for a pliant servant, a great man at her beck and call. The scene is painful. But in painfulness thinking also happens. Upon entering her room, his nervousness matches hers. The failure of the long-awaited encounter is imaged through montage. The two figures, sitting in the same room, alternate, but do not meet in the same frame. This precludes the sociality needed for thinking. He begins to express an excessive, slightly disingenuous gratitude, speaking to Kristina in the third person (‘votre majesté’) so that a personal conversation becomes impossible; then he shows off his philosophical personality somewhat pompously. Matching him in his attempt to impress, she shows her mastery of the French language, criticising its structural properties. What can you say when your new acquaintance tells you that your native language sucks? His reaction is clumsiness. When she then tells him to meet the next morning – and every day afterwards – at 5 a.m. (historical), the man who has the habit of staying in bed, sleeping then working, until noon (historical), stays behind in shock while the Queen rushes to welcome her cousin, who

visits to attend an imminent concert (semi-fictional). So far, no thinking is possible yet. With a casual hand gesture, Kristina, who does not bother to introduce her guest to her cousin, sends him to an adjacent waiting room. There, the exhausted philosopher has a vision of the world, turning with its many problems. This is a fragment of the shadow play Transgressions by Nalini Malani, with turning cylinders (2009). After the concert, the two go their separate ways. Descartes falls ill while Kristina makes plans for a ballet to celebrate the Peace of Westfalia. She is angry when her valet tells her about Descartes’ illness. His death during her planning is yet another imaging of temporal discrepancy, and the impossibility of chronology. A sense of social schizophrenia emerges. The endings of the different scenes add to this a sonic schizophrenia. Kristina, so far unable to show affection to Descartes, falls apart when she learns he has died. Self-centred, she considers herself a victim. Kristina is devastated: Descartes’ death is an assault on her personal autonomy. Her loss of self-power also affects her body when we see her sink to the floor. But, thinking, she turns her sadness into a philosophical question: she sees the limit of her power of selfdisposal. This, combined with her ambition, will ultimately enable her to change her ways, including, in my imagination, her selfishness. After-Effects and Pre-Figurations The mood in the last scene is a mix of sadness bordering on melancholia, and brave attempts to learn, after the fact, from the wisdom of the friend she has lost. The narrative of the scene is entirely fictional. The ending, in all its fictitiousness, is one of the rare moments in the project that something really happens. This, too, is a futural moment. Trying to pick up her life, she does the inevitable: continue her routine. Some of these images are presentations of small routine acts; some are symbolic figurations of self-loss, as when she disappears into a hollow tree; an example of visual thought, close to metaphor but embodied. Doing something that makes no sense is also an incipient thought: an experiential attempt at feeling loss as loss of self.

This allows another form of thinking to emerge. When sitting dejected in her large but empty private room, Kristina has a vision: the spectre of Descartes visits her (Figure 5.9). Now she is able to say what she couldn’t muster the openness to say during his lifetime: that she misses their discussions; what constitutes most fundamentally what thought in process can be. Descartes contradicts her by saying that discussing is just what they are doing, now. Thus, he points at yet another form thought can take: imaginary dialogue. In the same move, he foregrounds the importance of the present.27 In this imaginary ghost conversation, Descartes encourages her to continue with her work, and to practise the passion of generosity, the most important one. Kristina understands the message: Descartes’ friend, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (Johanna ter Steege), needs help, and she may be able to extend a helping hand to the other woman. After the spectre has disappeared, all the imminent changes in Kristina’s life begin. The spectre, or vision, or dream, appears able to performatively reactivate a stagnating thought process. This scene is doubly fictional; after being invited to film in Kristina’s historical habitat, the Palazzo Corsini in Rome, I proposed to add that after-scene, but the actor could not make the date for that. So, one evening in Nieborów Castle, while filming other scenes, Thomas, Marja and I developed this scene, at Thomas’s initiative, as a ghost appearance. The scene came off quite convincingly, because both actors were able to appear (in the ghostly sense) as simultaneously together and separate. When Descartes’ ghost vanishes, Kristina touches the sofa, as if to check if it was warm; his appearance real. This was an initiative of the actress. After the apparition, Kristina moves to Rome. Entering the city, she is tempted by the Church. Regardless of her actual conversion to Catholicism (historical), my point was to show the temptation itself as a form of thinking, dialogic and incomplete. She ends up in her palatial dwelling, the Palazzo Corsini. There she faces antique imperial busts, as if matching her own status that she has given up to that of those 27  On the fine but decisive line between consciousness and cognition that underlines this ghost scene, see Hayles (2017).

prestigious predecessors. Seeing her surrounded by ancient art and old-master paintings, one feels the futility of the worldly riches. A biographer (Mervi Appel) shows up, asking about her interest in science and philosophy. While she answers by reminiscing about the foundation of a university in Uppsala when she was thirteen years old, another visitor is announced: the Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia she thought she should help, if she was to obey Descartes’ spectre’s injunction to be generous.28 The final scene stages Elisabeth’s appeal to Kristina on behalf of her daughter Charlotte (Fleur Bongertman). This is based on the accounts, in the correspondence, of how Elisabeth needed Descartes’ help with her life. But fiction was needed here. The daughter had to be invented to turn the documented need into a narrative. This was the opportunity to recall the moment when Descartes himself needed help. Whereas the scene is fictional, the ideas it images, the faltering reasoning and the sympathetic thinking, Elisabeth’s uncertainty about the meaning of some of Descartes’ recommendations, and her insistence on gender difference, come from the correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth. In the conversation between the two women, Elisabeth expresses doubts about Descartes’ universalising claims (Figure 5.10).29 Kristina, trying hard to think with Elisabeth but clearly not aware of the intricate discussions between the latter and Descartes, ends up recommending that she consult a ‘soul doctor’ in Amsterdam like the one Descartes had been seeing. Obsolete as this sounds, this is a key word. Descartes, in the correspondence, actually called himself Elisabeth’s ‘doctor’. When, full of renewed hope, Elisabeth and Figure 5.9  Descartes’ ghost appears to Kristina. Photo: Przemo Wojciechowski. Figure 5.10  Kristina and Elisabeth discussing in Kristina’s palace. Photo: Thijs Vissia. 28  On spectral agency in the context of another kind of disempowered subject, the subalterns such as servants or refugees, see Peeren (2014), already mentioned. 29  This correspondence was interpreted by Yaëlle Sibony-Malpertu as psycho­ analytic (2012). Ironically, after abdicating her throne, in Rome the historical Kristina became known for her performances in the milieus of papacy and royalty. She seemed to wish to turn herself into a fiction. This brings my fictionalising scene closer to historical reality. See Kandare (2012).

Charlotte depart, the latter unexpectedly and inappropriately kisses the former Queen, who stays behind in confusion. This moment brings up a key question: what is the meaning of social behaviour? Can an inappropriate kiss be a thought-image, too? I think so. It marks the moment that the traumatised, psychotic young woman re-enters the social domain. The prospect of healing beckons her; it already helps the sick young woman set a first step in getting better. And the ex-queen, socially handicapped, experiences a brief social encounter in spontaneity. She, too, needed the shock of that kiss to put her in doubt about social behaviour.30 The constructions of thought-in-process that constitute the body of this series of videos must remain unexplained. Only hints, allusions, small details can make the audience experience the enticement to think about what it is that brought Descartes and Kristina to genius and worldwide fame, through the activity of thinking. Obviously, answering that question can easily become callous; a thoughtless satisfaction of immodest curiosity. Hence the need for reticence. There is historical evidence. For my project, this was indispensable for the construction of a narrative layer, a character presentation, and a meaningful link between the lives and the modes of thinking, as well as the resulting thoughts. But it was especially crucial to begin my own thinking in film as image-thinking. These are the elements I have gleaned from the sources, and that became the incipient thoughts about this project. This is not a biography but my interpretation of why bringing these two figures together makes sense for understanding the formless shape of thought. So, let me end on a biographical note, instead of beginning with it. Both Kristina and Descartes had a rather tough beginning in life. Kristina became a queen at the age of five, after her father’s death on 30  The gender aspect in the discussions between the two thinkers deserves another chapter – perhaps even another film. The crux of the disagreement between them is embodiment, something that – against the clichés – was very important for the philosopher. But then, Elisabeth replied, gender difference invalidates the universalism. In addition to Sidony-Malpertu’s book, see Genevieve Lloyd’s chapter ‘The Philosopher and the Princess’ (2008, 160–91).

the battlefield. She had been close to him. She was alone, with a mother in desolate mourning for the rest of her life, who didn’t care much for the daughter who should have been a son. René lost his mother at fourteen months, and barely saw his father, who was too busy pursuing his career elsewhere. When his father remarried, he took his older son and the daughter with him, leaving René behind. These childhood situations of different forms of abandonment, and subsequent orphan-like loneliness, predict adult turmoil. And so it happened. Both grew up to be brilliant, obstinate, easily angry, suspicious and capricious; ambitious and impatient with resistance. In common parlance, we would call them paranoid, and otherwise neurotic. Both loved music. The anachronistic choice of musical works in the project hints at experimental attempts that they both tried: Descartes in his theorising music, Kristina in commissioning musical works.31 Once he started showing his writings to others, the philosopher was constantly under ecclesiastic surveillance – or thought he was (Freud: being paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you). He moved around, mainly in the United Provinces (now the Netherlands), refusing to leave forwarding addresses, and was considered a great man. But, because glory is never enough for the fundamentally insecure, he managed to fall out with friends he initially adored. This master of rationalism did his thinking often in the turmoil of extreme emotions. He was a good-enough Catholic, yet dangerously close to heresy. He led the life of what the French called an honnête homme: someone of good breeding and education, whose talents and skills could not be captured by isolated disciplines. From biology to philosophy, astrology and medicine, Descartes also shone as an expert in what we would now call ‘mental illness’, when he comforted his friend Elisabeth who was suffering from a bout of it. Where did that skill come from? My guess is: it takes one to know one. This is why I credit him with the ‘invention’ 31  The musicians chose their pieces themselves. This is one of the aspects of my filmmaking – also reflected in the actors’ contributions – through which I aim to make the collaborative nature of filmmaking as ‘thinking in film’ the projects’ crucial aspect.

of psychoanalysis – his conception of the subject making its later explicit invention possible.32 I imagine both figures suffered from the symptoms of what we now call neurosis, specifically an abandonment complex – a tendency to reject affective bonds while constantly seeking them. Out of fear of being abandoned, they prefer to be the first to do the abandoning. This is what underpinned their passionate attachments to, then rejections of, others. Always craving, but feigning indifference out of fear that the parental abandonment would repeat itself. And since these things tend to be reciprocal, they were seen as alternatingly attractive and repuls­ive. It also explains why the queen insisted so strongly on the meeting, but then didn’t really take intellectual advantage of Descartes’s presence. In the end, it also explains their brilliance, and the suffering it took to achieve it.33 Both Kristina and René declined to marry, choosing to spend time with people of their own gender rather than doing ‘the proper thing’. Hints of homosexual interests circulated about both. René, who had an acquaintance burned at the stake for precisely this, had an additional reason for fear. Kristina was notoriously fond of a woman at court called Ebba; she called her Bella. For me, this was not a reason to turn them into homosexuals, as Mika Kaurismäki did with Kristina in his film The Girl King (2015), made simultaneously with my project. His film turns entirely on Kristina’s lesbianism, without giving the figure of the queen much character. Paradoxically, this emphasis becomes disturbing instead of emancipating. I preferred to bring the hints of it in, without making it more than a hesitating sexual orientation. René surrounded himself with caring male friends that he adored, then broke up with, and depended strongly on his young valets. In my version, these are very affectionate relationships. One of them plays the violin as a comfort to Descartes when he is depressed, dejected, and feels betrayed. In short, 32  With the phrase ‘it takes one to know one’ I allude to Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of homosocial desire (1985). 33  I learnt everything I know about the abandonment complex and the way it can be acted out in fiction from another teacher of my French Studies time, Han Verhoeff (1976).

these two major figures of the seventeenth century had much in common, but this didn’t help their friendship. Nevertheless, what they had in common made them ideally suitable to think in film what thinking can be when it happens, in the social buzz, performatively, and across time. The qualifier ‘post-Cartesian’ can really be banned, lest we keep our blinkers on about what these processual aspects of thinking entail. I prefer to enlist Descartes, as Spinoza’s interlocutor, to theorise the place of affect and sociality in that activity we tend to consider hyper-individualistic: thinking. To understand, see and experience that kind of thinking I needed fiction. This demands a final note. Throughout this chapter I have been using the noun ‘fiction’ as if its meaning was self-evident. While I refrain from defining my concepts, in order to avoid closing them down, it is important to open them up, as Mitchell did with the concept of ‘image’. Fiction is important in literary studies, where it has a great diversity of backgrounds, meanings and relationships to the novel. Gallagher (2006) gives a useful historical overview, focused on the English novel. Two influential modern theories are ‘possible-world theory’ (Ronen 1994; Ryan 1991), a comparative-contrastive approach; and the one modelled on the ‘I was . . .’ mode of children’s games (Walton 1990). The latter theory especially brings us back to Vera, and her capacity to deploy fiction for self-defence, especially when considered in relation to the most widely known and, in my view, still the most convincing formulation of what fiction is: Coleridge’s 1817 ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’. If we take its three main words at their word, we can see how they help each other to remain serious (history) for example, about guilt and responsibility, but also about liberation, the latter through the release of fantasy. The suspension is willing; neither coerced nor automatic. This makes a case for the importance of exhibition display, where emotional manipulation is less easily achieved than in theatre film, and the immersion in the fiction less obvious than in individual reading. Suspension does not mean elimination. That would risk an attitude of denial. Suspension is temporary bracketing, a shoving aside for the time being rather than a giving up on remembrance of reality. And disbelief does not mean that belief in general is suspended,

but merely the policing of the truth that can only lead to censoring attitudes. Here, Vera and Descartes meet, discuss and converge. Vera is undisturbed when, at the end of the film, playing with her toy phone, she receives a phone call from two imaginary bandits just as she is about to fall asleep. I quote the following little trialogue as an instance that demonstrates the forceful agency Vera derives from her fictional/ making practice: (to the bandits) bandits, what’s come over you? I tell you to stop it! ALEXANDRA (Vera’s mother): to whom are you speaking? VERA: (to Alexandra) I’m talking to the two gentlemen (to the bandits) yes yes but . . . (to the others in the room, and louder) when I am on the phone one doesn’t make noise! (to the bandits, on a tone of polite conversation) yes, I’m fine (changing tone) but what are you doing near Buka’s street? [Buka is Vera’s Russian grandmother, living in Paris] (impatiently) no, we are NOT in Paris we are in Moscow! no, not at all! no, we are not in Fumban after this we go to Paris In this stunning play with fantasy, reality – and, specifically, her multinational background – becomes an ingredient for the imagination, with the addressees serving as the anchors of both domains. The

bandits, obviously, enter Vera’s imagination from reading and television. But in shifting addressees, Vera also changes her discourses, showing a fine sense of what is appropriate in certain situations. ‘Yes I’m fine’ is a learnt phrase of politeness. Her bossy request for silence is a case of role-playing. Her shifts also show, however, that she is not simply absorbed in her imaginary world. On the contrary: she is skilfully negotiating a great number of spaces at the same time. She teaches us that immersion is not passive absorption. The extent to which reality is an ingredient for fantasy appears when Vera mentions the three place names between which her life evolves in this conversation: Paris, Moscow and Fumban. She knows very well where she is and where she will be going next. Yet, Buka’s street – which is in Paris – has been absorbed into her Moscow time, doubtless because Buka belongs to the Moscow side of her cultural experience. Vera knows she is fantasising, and does so with gusto. This gives her mastery over reality, warranting her commanding tone to the people around her. It also prevents her cultural identity from overruling her. Another instance of this canny double look demonstrates this. When visiting her grandfather’s grave at the Russian cemetery near Paris, thereby adhering to a Russian custom she is unaware of, Vera conjures up a phantom. But how seriously does she believe in it? Vera is clearly not frightened, even if the impolite phantom answers her polite welcome by rudely threatening to eat her. Then, reality intervenes once more. The phantom comes from Paris and is ‘very white’. Equating Paris with the predominant whiteness of its people, she acknowledges her – imaginary – fear and the safety offered by her mother. Vera, here, as in the episode quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is boss of her story. This mastery is clearly visible in the medium she uses. Vera looks into the camera, or, rather, as is usual in home movies, talks to the person holding the camera, with whom she has built up a friendly I/you relationship. Thus, she modifies the genre of the film. With her canny look, she assumes a position somewhere between an actress and a poet. The intimacy with the camera operator and the swift shifts in roles she performs demonstrate that her identity is neither whole nor unified, but the constant stake of a negotiation of borders in what is clearly a space,

not a line. Fiction, where making, making up and making as constantly merge, is Vera’s primary tool.34 The provisional end of this part of the book gives the last word to the youngest participant in my films. As these scenes demonstrate, she is also the most powerful, because the most inventive, least hindered by rules, definitions and genres. The four chapters of this section have each brought to the fore a key aspect of the intermedial interaction between literature and film, as well as that between film and installation. The four aspects are closely intertwined: space, voice, time and fiction are all central in any creative, narrative, artistic work that, emerging from the social world, returns to it, as a response, proposal and gift. These four issues all entail consequences for any special consideration of problematics that are addressed in these films. The next part of the book, therefore, is devoted to such consequences. The following chapters analyse difficult, sometimes tricky because contradictory questions of re?presentation. Between voyeurism and censorship (trauma), between facing and looking away, in other words, silencing and agency, between recognising and imposing identity, sentimentality and empowering affect, and disremembering and misremembering: cultural agents, including filmmakers, must face the dilemmas that make representation so problematic, because of the preposition ‘re-’ that indicates repetition instead of novelty. In the four, somewhat shorter chapters, these dilemmas will be explored, and potential solutions probed. Concepts, rather than being defined, will be opened up again, this time with special focus on their connections with some of the social problems that colour our world.

34  On the special nature of the relationship of figure to operator in home movies, see Alphen (2007).

6. Showing Trauma? Difficulty and Necessity Don Quijote: Sad Countenances A Long History of Madness

Figure 6.1 Zoraida (Nafiseh Mousavi) looks out with frustrated longing, or in catatonic stupor. Location: Teleborg Slott, Växjö. Photo: Ebba Sund.

Looking at Photographs Trauma, the common insight stipulates, cannot be represented. Nafiseh Mousavi intensely enacts the role of the captive young woman as traumatised in all the senses relevant in this chapter. Looking at this photograph (Figure 6.1), which was made on the set of the scene ‘She Too’ of Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, we can see both the intense longing and the frustration of the young woman whose face is shown here. This photograph by the young Swedish artist Ebba Sund entirely adequately presents both the difficulty and the necessity of showing trauma. Sund’s photography successfully avoids the traps of representation: the appeal to voyeurism, with immodesty; the censorship that is its counter­part; the sentimentality that would function as a ‘tear-jerker’ and even as an incentive to ‘trauma envy’, the wish to appropriate the suffering of others; the sense of repetition (trauma fatigue), ‘here we go again’; and the narrative thrust that would overrule the image with its content: what happened to her? The details are both expressive and subtle. The half-open mouth of the young woman does not suggest screaming. The grain of the skin that almost merges with the thin hairs in front of her ear compels a close looking at the image. Her face turned slightly upwards, but not dramatically, expresses a relationship to the outside that is not narratively explicit.1 I will be looking closely at Sund’s work, especially in this chapter. My goals in such looking are multiple. First, I want to make the case for the difficulty, even impossibility, of showing trauma, yet the need to do so; the need, that is, to foreground and pay attention to, bestow empathy on, something that cannot be represented. Sund’s photographs do this very adequately. This also entails, secondly, an appeal to, or task for the viewers. For, if they remain unaffected by the image, it cannot do its work. I am hoping that this chapter will yield an ‘apprenticeship’ in the kind of looking that trauma, and other vital cultural concerns, require. 1  What I write on photography is strongly influenced by the 2018 book by Alphen. His title Failed Images refers to the strategies of photographers to counter the cliché demands of realistic or representational photography in favour of cultivating a compulsion to focus on the image, rather than its content, or the portion of the outside world it allegedly represents or ‘copies’.

But I also aim, thirdly, to strengthen the case that allegedly still images also move. My installations always comprise photographs, arranged in a way that makes them seem closer to the moving images of the films. Thus, in addition to the intermedial relationship between literature and film, I also seek to persuade my readers of the intermediality between photography, or other still-image media, and film. And since one of the four Bergsonian movements concerns the development of the willingness to act, a fourth goal is to make the case for the political efficacy of art. And then, finally, I seek to recognise multiple authorship. Killing the author in order to revive the reader, in Roland Barthes’ 1967 metaphor, risks staying in the binary that opposes the two functions. That metaphor has been taken too literally, with a fierce polemic and a forceful rejection as a result. This binary precludes a solid engagement with the I/you interaction that defines art as it defines language. I make this case by foregrounding Sund’s crucial contribution to the making of Don Quijote: Sad Countenances as an artwork that suspends the fiction–reality binary through engaging viewers who cannot remain indifferent. Authorship as an act of creation as augmenting, expanding what is already existing, makes sense, with the added advantage of countering the ruling of the property rights of authorship, the individu­ alism of that concept, and of fighting the increasingly complex bureaucracy that discourages interdisciplinary experiments and collective production. It also helps with the ‘fair use’ (for educational purposes) of ‘illustrations’ – a loathsome term that subjects artistic works to the argument the critic develops on or around them. I am now firmly persuaded that single authorship is not only a culturally damaging idea, but a false, untenable one. No human being is alone; no thought is purely individual; no artwork can exist without building on the pre-­ existing, on which, with the luck of creativity, it expands. The artist can only be a co-maker. Ebba Sund and I, as well as all the other p ­ articipants, are co-authors. And so are, along with Cervantes, his considerable crew of fictional authors.2 2  I wrote a plea for recuperating authorship, but only as multiple (2020b). On Cervantes’ co-authors, see especially chapter I, 9 of the novel. For an analysis, see Melberg (1995, 51–84).

The need to focus first and foremost on the image does not discourage one from engaging the content, however. It makes that content more, rather than less appealing, but not as an object of representation to which the image is enslaved. In the image, and with an open eye for the fiction that acting a role implies, the state of trauma in which the figure Zoraida is caught shows in her gaze: beyond craving liberation, she seems catatonic. If we look at the detail, we notice that the reflection in her eyes of the light that stands for the outside world comprises the bars on the windows that keep her inside. In the scene ‘She Too’ within which this photograph was made, this is the only moment that we can see on her face in the eight-minute episode. Trial viewers commented on this: why can we not see her face? The impossibility for the visitors to look her in the eyes, whereas her captor-father constantly does so, is the cinematic visualisation of her captivity. In Sund’s artwork we cannot look her in the eyes either, even if at least one side of her face is visible, because the face is impenetrable. The scene as a whole rejects contact. Or rather, it suspends its possibility. Both the craving for it and the imprisonment that prohibits it, visible in the image, compel the desire, in viewers, to overcome those difficulties. The trial viewers’ complaint was not a misreading of the scene but a frustration that approximates them to the state in which the figure is caught; an incipient empathy. Trauma Predicaments The term ‘trauma’ has been terribly over-used in the aftermath of discussions of cultural memory in the 1990s. This was the era when holocaust survivors and witnesses started to disappear. That end of the possibility of consulting eyewitnesses made a renewed examination of the issues the holocaust had generated most urgent. But, as often happens when an issue becomes ‘hot’, from that moment on the term began to float around too freely to remain useful as a concept. As a result, it has practically lost its meaning. This is unacceptable, since it indicates a real and severely grave issue of today’s culture. The unrepresentability of trauma, serious as it is, might threaten to relegate it also to incurability, which is especially intolerable since it entails

giving up on human beings. Therefore, in the Don Quijote project, as well as in others, especially A Long History of Madness, the attempt is to present, but not represent, trauma. For this purpose, I have been thinking experimentally – in other words, image-thinking – how to deal with the contradictory aspects of the trauma-and-art encounter. First of all, it is imperative to distinguish between three aspects of trauma: its cause, the situation or state that cause produces, and the state of near-powerlessness of bystanders, yet the hope for a possibility to help people suffering from it. This distinction can be formulated succinctly as follows: violence – an event (that happens) trauma – a state (that results) empathy – an attitude (that enables) The subjects of these three facets are different: the violence has an agent (culprit, perpetrator); the traumatised subject is the victim; and the subject of empathy is the social interlocutor, who can potentially help overcome it. In the case of these projects, this is the visitor who is the primary target of the exhibition; its interlocutor, and the interlocutor of the fictional figures brought to life. These exhibitions aim to activate visitors to become such empathetic subjects. The display is meant to have performativity in this specific sense.3 There are many publications on trauma that do not take it as lightly as those fashionable ones that use it as a catch phrase to indicate anything sad or bad. Between psychoanalysis and cultural analysis, Michelle Williams Gamaker and I made the video project based on Françoise Davoine’s book Mère Folle (Chapter 2), which deploys her ‘theoretical fiction’ to argue with – not against – Freud about the possibility of analytically treating psychotic patients, most significantly the traumatised. As mentioned, Freud considered this impossible, 3 On performativity, see Austin (1975 [1962]). Of the many discussions, I consider the most lucid one to be the overview by Culler (2007). A ground-shifting recent text focusing on trauma is by Alphen (2019).

because, he alleged, they cannot perform transference. Reversing the burden, Davoine claimed that the psychosis, the madness resulting from trauma, is mainly inflicted by social agents, and that, consequently, society has a duty to help. For this purpose, she revised some tenets of the Freudian method, and with great success.4 How can we approach this challenge as ordinary social agents, not professionals of mental health? In everyday life, images of violence conducive to trauma are considered informative (‘the news’). We take them in, even get bored by their repetitive nature, not even absorbing what that repetitiveness says about the world. According to the groundbreaking philosophy of language developed by John Austin, mentioned above, it is better to change gears and consider such images not informative but enhance their performativity. This can result in a shift from activist art, which persuasively focuses on specific political issues, to activating art that seeks to strengthen the performativity of the images. The rationale of this shift is the insight that the trauma and the powerlessness that result are not inherent in the violent events them­ selves. As analytical psychiatry has diagnosed and cultural analysis has studied, it is the impossibility of processing, even experiencing, extreme violence that generates the trauma and obstructs its representation. Confusions and ethical problems threaten in attempts to show such horrid acts of violence. In our projects, we do not show these acts. A solicitation of feel-good identification (‘trauma envy’, Mowitt 2000) is utterly unhelpful, even ethically problematic, but always lurks. So does, as we know from Adorno’s caution against it, the risk of voyeurism. Davoine writes in her 2008 Don Quichotte: ‘Cervantes doesn’t try to arouse visions of horror for voyeuristic readers’ (93). One moment where violence occurs in our videos is when a traumatised young man, 4  Alphen’s earlier article (1999), already mentioned, provides a systematic explanation of trauma in relation to narrative, an original instance of intermediality. Other key publications on trauma: in psychiatry, Kolk and Hart (1995); in cultural analysis, Caruth (1996); Alphen’s critique of ‘postmemory’ (2005) and Hirsch’s reply (2008). Susan Brison (2002) wrote impressively about the aftermath of trauma, as an analytical philosopher and a traumatised survivor of a horrific sexual assault. The 2017 book by Patricia Violi is particularly relevant for its deployment of landscape – both literally and figuratively. This harks back to Chapter 2 of the present book.

Cardenio (Theor Román), acts out. But, Cervantes’ novel intimates, that is a consequence of earlier violence. This is in the episode ‘The Failure of Listening’. Cardenio’s attacks on his interlocutors are responses to their failure to allow him to speak without being interrupted. This interruption, then, is a kind of violence, the scene suggests; a psychoanalytic violence, of the kind Adorno would categorise with the semiotic violence in the quotation below. But what happens to us, the beholders of the images that stage situations of violence? This is where trauma can be (en-)countered by empathy. A counterpart to the episode is the one where Don Quijote is listening to witnesses who are deeply involved in contemporary situations of refugees. There, he is able to be sensitive and forget his own obsessions. This scene, ‘Testimonial Discourses’, acutely updates the traumatic events in the other scenes. The hope is that visitors are alerted to the actuality of the issues Cervantes was able to draw out from his own life experience, with the help of his imagin­ ation, and to the importance of listening as a first step towards empathy. To avoid confusion between event and state, and between perpetrator and victim, we foreground the non-evenemential, enduring situation of captivity. This avoidance is also important with respect to the role and attitude of witnesses. As we have known, since Adorno’s famous 1949 indictment of making and enjoying poetry ‘after Auschwitz’, what is best called modesty – restraint, discretion, but neither prudishness nor censorship – is crucial in our relationship to representation. The philosopher gives the reason for this severe indictment: he refuses to make sense of what doesn’t make sense. Such sense-making is wrong because it would be honouring violence with semiotic access; and to take pleasure, in other words, in making a potentially pornographic use of the suffering of others. Clarifying this point, later Adorno wrote: After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate. (2003 [1974], 361; emphasis in text)

Feelings are the agents of image-thinking, he intimates. Here, as in the thought-images discussed in Chapter 1, the choice of words is key. The violence in the word ‘squeezing’ stipulates that semiotic behaviour can also be violent. This choice of verb brings the issue further than semiotic access. The verb hints that language is material. This is so because it is performative: it has consequences in that its utterances affect the addressee. The verb ‘to squeeze’ recurs when Adorno explains that his refusal to condone such renderings is its potential pornographic use: The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed out from it. (2003 [1974], 252; emphasis added) It is this pleasure, the sheer possibility of it, that Adorno calls ‘barbaric’. However, the motivation for the works discussed in this chapter is to take on board the flip side of Adorno’s compelling call for modesty. For, this is a forbidding taboo that risks making the violence invisible and thereby, unknowable. It is less well known that Adorno himself retracted his stern attitude to representation for this reason, when he wrote: ‘perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream’ (1997, 362).5 The earlier statement has turned the representation of trauma into a moral censorship. It is against this taboo that French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman spoke up in his short but influential treatise, which is a plea for attention to even the vaguest Auschwitz photographs: ‘In order to know, you must imagine’, as his opening sentence has it. And in order to relate to others we do need to know, and when full knowledge is impossible we still must try to approximate, encircle or 5  The classical passage is in Adorno (2003, 162). The retraction is in Adorno (1997, 362). On the concept of barbaric, see Boletsi (2013); on the violence of language, Butler (1997).

feel it. That is what it means to imagine. That is why the imagination is important. This, in turn, is why art is important; offering the visual imagination something it images. Taking the element ‘image’ of the imagination, turning it into an active verb that allows a middle voice, and thus bringing it to the viewer, both body and mind, is the material practice through which art matters.6 Another, less philosophical, more banal risk is involved. The abundance of representations of traumatogenic events in the electronic media generates a forgetting of their historical and psychological impact. The surplus is produced by, and produces, consumption. Through their graphic explicitness and their recurrent appearance, these pictures are confined to historical insignificance, even oblivion. As mentioned above, our project designs an intervention in that cultural attitude, by inflecting activist art into activating art, public-oriented, for a more general change of attitude. The case is made for a community-creating effect of art that helps repair the broken social bond that has resulted in trauma. The traumatised person is alone, and not even able to (fully) remember the horror that caused the state of trauma. As a result, they are even alone within themselves. If anything can be done to help such victims exit their paralysing state of stagnation, it must be through reducing that double loneliness. This is a social task for which everyone is qualified. Alone Within Himself: Drama versus Narrative This brings me to the second photograph. That being-alone is more than lacking the social bond that nurtures life. Traumatised persons, because they cannot even consciously recall the trauma-inducing violence, are also locked up, alone within themselves. That makes them vulnerable for the assaults of the trauma, which they cannot master by the narrativity of memory. Instead, these become a drama inflicted 6  Didi-Huberman (2008 [2003]). His plea for the importance of the imagination is crucial for any attempt to make politically relevant art. On the middle voice (between active and passive, belonging to neither), see Boletsi (2016).

on them. This is the core of the work (1889) of French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, a colleague of Freud’s at the Paris Hospital La Salpêtrière, whose work has been neglected in favour of his more famous fellow intern. But his ideas have been revived in a very useful article by Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart (1995) which was key in the rethinking of trauma in the 1990s. They take issue with the standard conception of repression. Instead, they draw attention to the difficulty of incorporating trauma in narrative memory. Instead of repression, the crucial concept in the then-successful psychoanalytical theory of trauma, Janet, and in his wake, Kolk and Hart, propose more attention to dissociation. In narratological terms, repression results in ellipsis, the omission of important elements in the narrative. Dissociation, instead, doubles the strand of the narrative series of events by splitting them off into a side-line, called paralepsis. Repression interrupts the flow of narratives that shape memory, whereas dissociation splits off material that cannot be integrated into the main narrative. Kolk and Hart describe the difference in a way that has implications of a narratological kind while also being an instructive instance of image-thinking: Although the concepts of repression and dissociation have been used interchangeably by Freud and others with regard to traumatic memories, there is a fundamental difference between them. Repression reflects a vertically layered model of mind: what is repressed is pushed downward, into the unconscious. The subject no longer has access to it. Dissociation reflects a horizontally layered model of mind: when a subject does not remember a trauma, its ‘memory’ is contained in an alternate stream of consciousness, which may be subconscious

or dominate consciousness, e.g. during traumatic reenactments. (168–9; emphasis added) Dissociation seems more logical, since the traumatised often end up with the disorder of schizophrenia: doubling rather than repressing. The italicised words in the quote turn the statement into an imaging. The authors then become narratologists when they sum up this crucial insight: ‘He [Janet] even viewed memory itself as an action: “memory is an action: essentially, it is the action of telling a story”.’ (175) This is how traumatic (non)memory provides insight into the formation of ‘normal’ narrative memory, by contrast. In the wake of this idea, we (the three editors) titled the 1999 collective volume Acts of Memory. The article by Alphen in this volume lucidly probes the relationship, or lack of it, between trauma and narrative, in the most helpful contribution to this discussion in the humanities. In the introduction to that volume I cite the example of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Rue du Commerce, 1018 Bruxelles. In this pioneering feminist film, the main character (Delphine Seyrig) peels potatoes, filmed in real time, in an exasperatingly boring routine. This exasperation is thrown onto the spectator, too: the film is very long, at three hours and four minutes. The repetitiveness of women’s work is here potentially traumatising. In fact, the figure acts upon this possibility: she ends up killing her last client of the day.7 The example of a film helps one to realise that the re-enactment of traumatogenic experience takes a different form than narrative: drama. This difference entails a disempowerment of the traumatised. All the narrative manipulations by a director-narrator, such as the possibility of expanding and compressing, summarising, highlighting, underscoring or minimising elements of the story as they wish, are unavailable to the actor who is only able to enact a drama that is not hers to master, even though at some point in the past it happened to her. In Akerman’s film, this strong sense of non-mastery is shown in the close-up of the peeling 7  See also Kolk’s later book (2014) for a more extensive study of trauma. An early response to Akerman’s radical film can be found in Doane (1980).

hands and the empty stare of the figure. The film thus presents the difference between drama as an art form and re-enactment as compulsive behaviour. This makes traumatic re-enactment tragically solitary. The subject to whom the event happened is deprived of the narrative mastery over it, so that a narrative memory cannot come about, but also of a ‘second-person’, an interlocutor. Again, a work by Ebba Sund provides us with an image that, image-thinkingly, seems to think this through. The figure seems locked up in a dark, grotto-like space. And he is alone – alone within himself; the space is a metaphor of his mind (Figure 6.2). The near-monochrome image presents his loneliness in the combination of his slightly opened lips and the turn of the head to a possible outside. His eyes, like Zoraida’s, show craving, but at the same time without hope of achieving the desired liberation. The points of light in his eyes and on the tip of his nose do suggest there is an opening in the wall on the right side of him. Once we give the image the time images demand, we notice that even the hairs on his chin capture the light. The delicate balance of light and dark, with light behind him as if he is pushed inside the prison, and then the suggested light on his side, is a collaborative

Figure 6.2  The Captive alone within himself. Photo: Ebba Sund.

work, fitting authorship as multiple. It was staged by cinematographer Jonas Valthersson, who was painstakingly walking backwards in an impossibly narrow space while directing the actor, since there was no space for me as the film’s director. And then it was recreated by Ebba for this still image. Two authors together, then, or rather three, with the actor included. Another work by Sund I consider a masterpiece of the adequate presentation of trauma that avoids all the pitfalls while, imagining in order to know, according to Didi-Huberman’s opening sentence, is supplemented with the step, crucial for my project, of imaging: visuallyexplicitly. This became the poster image of the Don Quijote exhibition (Figure 6.3). When I received it, I could not stop looking at it in wonderment. How did they know? This is not a representation of a traumatised man; yet there is no doubt that this is an image of trauma. The attempt to ‘imagine in order to know’ can only succeed thanks to the imaging. It is as an image that this is, again, the work of collective authorship. This time, I just told the actor to ‘look traumatised’, and the photographer to capture that. But

Figure 6.3  Trauma imaged. Photo: Ebba Sund.

they both did so much more. Additionally, the set itself was also a co-author: like the cave-like narrow space in Figure 6.2, the prisonsuggesting iron lattice was just there, as an element of an old, ruined castle, the Slott Ruin in Kronoberg, Småland (Sweden). This belongs to the Småland Museum in Växjö where a few months later the exhibition premiered. Although the place itself has no agency, the chief curator of the museum who allowed us to film there, Nicolas Hansson, does, and was closely involved – so much so that he invited the exhibition on the basis of that Saturday morning shoot in May.8 But it is to the image we must give our time and attention. The cropping suggests a much larger grid, two doors entirely consisting of iron bars. This out-of-frame (hors-champ) extension augments the effect of enclosure and even affects the separating contraption. But on the right, we can see that the door is already on its way to opening. Or is it being closed, and is the Captive just being captured at this moment? This ambiguity is a sign of intermediality, since it intimates movement. There is another ambiguity, intermediating differently: the slow transformation in the focus, from blurred on the right to sharp on the left shows a hesitation between three- and two- dimensionality. This situates the image between the environment of the set and the flatness of the photograph. That effect is enhanced by the perspectival lines that recede towards the left. The grid, clearly, is pictured obliquely. What can be the point, or meaning of that? The oblique angle establishes a contrast between the lattice and the face of the Captive – in the novel, he is indicated with a capital C as if captivity was his proper name, foregrounding the dehumanising effect of captivity. This face is starkly frontal. That contrast is key to the image as ‘imagination in order to know’. Whereas in Figure 6.2 the Captive was tragically alone, here he is more strongly locked up but not entirely alone within himself. For here, he has an incipient interlocutor. His mouth is covered by the large lattice. His moustache shows a bit above 8  The spirit of collaboration of all concerned during that one-week shoot in Växjö, organised by faculty of the Linnaeus University, with the main organisers Johan Høglund and Niklas Salmose, was amazing.

it, his beard below it, so that the absence of the mouth is more strongly suggested. Meaning: he cannot speak; he cannot tell about the horror of slavery, captivity and forced labour that he has had to endure, years on end. For Cervantes the writer, it was five and a half years. For the character he created, the Captive, the time is not specified, we can only imagine. But then, what is the point of that contrast between oblique and straightforwardly frontal? His eyes say it all. He cannot speak, because he cannot narrate what happened to him. But, the image says, he can look at you; look you in the face, and implore you to fulfil his desire – life-giving, life-saving – to have an interlocutor. Please look at me, see me, and help me. The eyes look at us imploringly, but also, they are deeply sad. It won’t be an easy task, for the viewer, to help this man out of his plight. But it is already a crucial step to wish to do so. According to Cervantes’s embedded story of the Captive, in the end, he manages to escape. In the novel, this is thanks to a fairy-tale fantasy. The daughter of the slave-owner, Zoraida (Figure 6.1), falls for this gentlemanly Captive she considers good enough for a husband. So, in a convoluted story, she helps him escape, and escapes with him. In the exhibition project, we simplified this, avoiding the excessively fantastic narrative, which risked visually distracting from the primary imaging act. Among the reasons for this slimming down of the scene was the need to leave the traumatised state of the Captive intact, so that the subtle shifts of an incipient restoration of the narrative power over the self could be shown. For, as we know from the experts, trauma doesn’t simply go away. But narratively, in Sund’s photograph of the next moment, we receive an answer to the question the ambiguity of the previous photograph posed: is the door about to open or about to close? (Figure 6.4). This image has an ambiguity similar to the previous one, but in reverse. The perspectival lines go in the opposite direction, from left to right. This tells us that the previous image was made from the outside, whereas this one was taken from the inside. Now we see the Captive moving away from the apparent interlocutors, in order to escape and turn his back to us. Have we failed him, or has our empathy empowered him? Moreover, his body is sharply in focus, whereas the lattice is blurry. This indicates

Figure 6.4  Escape. Photo: Ebba Sund.

that, now, the one who is striving to become master of his story is running away, and the ones busy capturing the view are locked inside the prison. The Captive is running to his freedom – indicated by the straight line of the forest on the other side of the lake. That lake might be the obstacle, the expanse of water that makes access to ‘the other side’ of freedom, still a way off, an allusion to the sea in the novel. But his clutched fist, and the determined body pose, indicate that he will not give up. He is already outside – the outside, which the lake and the forest signify, opposed as they are to the bars of the prison. Sund’s play with perspective, with the ambiguity between two- and three-dimensionality, resonates perfectly with the previous image. The ostentatious frontality of the face, half-hidden as it is, in Figure 6.3 resonates with the straight line in the distance in this one. In Figure 6.3 the frontality was close to the picture plane. Here, it is in the far distance. There, his eyes were his tools to solicit empathy; here, they are invisible, since he has turned his back to us but, we can trust, they are sharply focusing on that other side of freedom. However, the sense that ‘we’, the spectators, are now locked up, makes for a form of identification, not with the man himself but

with the position into which he was locked. This, again, is created by means of subtle contrasts. The blurred lattice separates us from the sharply focused (ex-)Captive, as the darkness of the black iron contrasts with the fresh green grass outside. Impossible Storytelling: Towards the Cinematic How did the scenes from which Figures 6.1 to 6.4 were the result end up in the project? In our attempt to describe or show, or rather, subtly hint at the unrepresentable state of trauma, while doing justice to Cervantes’ hectic storytelling, the challenge was to dodge the traps mentioned above while alluding to the risks. The primary issue was: how to deal with narrative, in the face of its impossibility? In order to incorporate, while questioning it, the narrativity that is, after all, the novel’s primary mode, and to thematically foreground captivity, ‘The Captive’s Tale’ on which these three images are based, Don Quijote I, 39–41, had to be included, explored and given a shape that imagethinking can design. This was originally developed in three scenes. It is the one ‘captivating’ story of captivity: an embedded novella, with a plot of sorts, of a soldier taken in slavery, and the intricate adventure of his escape. This story is clearly based on autobiography, supplemented with dreams of wish fulfilment. A first decision: the Captive is played by the same actor who plays Don Quijote. This allows viewers to reflect on, and decide, how they consider narrative, and its complex, delicate connection to fiction, itself not without relevance for reality (Chapter 5). The confusion between the two characters also hints at the potentially autobiographical source of the story. But as it turned out – and this is how image-thinking as analysis works – it was only once I immersed myself in Teleborg Castle in Växjö, Sweden, and reread my script of the scenes there, that it dawned on me that the rich, beautiful young woman, Zoraida, the dreamed-of saviour of the Captive, is herself also a captive. She is subjected to the patriarchy embodied by her doting father who is jealously guarding her. Today, the title of that scene, ‘She Too’ speaks for itself. This implicitly feminist aspect of the tale resonates with the more

explicit, strongly feminist tenor of Marcela in the episode ‘Woman as Anti-Suicide Bomb’. It honours Cervantes’ amazing insight into patriarchal biases. Cervantes foregrounds key aspects of the traumatic state in his novel very precisely, at a time when the term, the theory, and the attempts to remedy it were not available. One of these aspects is time. Not only is time stopped in its tracks, halted and stretched out; it is also frequently interrupted, but such interruptions do not restore the everyday experience of time. Instead, as I mentioned above, they impose the dramatic re-enactment on the disempowered subject.9 In a study of war trauma after the First World War, Thomas Salmon (1917) discusses as one of the features of ‘shell shock’ the permanent immediacy. This cuts through the immobility of the stretched-out time, interrupting it with accelerations that flash up like lightning – again that image from the Benjaminian thought-image. This matches unexpectedly, but with great relevance, the work of Norwegian artist Jeannette Christensen, who plays the artist-photographer in the scene ‘Who Is Don Quijote?’ In a series of Polaroid photographs and currently also videos, Christensen explores the relationship between exasperating slowness and the interruption of time. This project fits mine to help understand what can be called, with a paradox, the formless shape of traumatic time. I cite Christensen here because her subtle explor­ ations of time and the interruptive incidents demonstrate the problematic of the traumatic state without any of the literary allusions involved in my project.10 Another aspect of trauma related to time is the movement of the invoked images of actions. Davoine remarks several times on the ‘cine­ matic’ in the novel (e.g. 2008, 389) and in this she joins my own view of cinematicity in either still images, such as Frans Hals’s portrait of René Descartes, or in literature, as in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. This is not   9  The title of the Marcela scene is inspired by Davoine’s take on the scene, and her use of the phrase. I also thank Luis Rebaza Soraluz for insisting on the feminist aspect of the novel. The creation of ‘She Too’ also came from that insistence. 10  The remarks on time in shell shock render Davoine’s account of Salmon’s study (2008, 59). She sums up these points from Salmon (1917). I have followed Christensen’s artwork since 1996.

in itself a feature of the traumatic state, but in Don Quijote it is especially the result of the hectic rhythm of the storytelling, as well as of the adventures told. The inserted novella of Cardenio, presented in ‘The Failure of Listening’, is so cinematic in its presentation of the event that I had to double the length of this video (see Chapter 1, Figure 1.3). That image, made by José Martínez Izquierdo, also draws attention to itself by means of not representing trauma. Instead, the face of the young man who is clearly driven mad by trauma remains hidden from the viewer. We only see the shocked face of Don Quijote, who is suddenly assaulted without knowing why. The ‘paisaje lunar’ (lunar landscape) in the environment of Murcia contributes its dry sandy soil and the starkly vertical trees. The artist took this aspect of the landscape on board, giving the figures ample space around them, thus demonstrating a different kind of loneliness: there is no hope of help. The confrontation between the invisible face of the attacker and the shocked face of the attacked contrast with the practically oriented body-pose of Sancho, who is trying to hold Cardenio back from Don Quijote. But while using strength, the gesture is not

Figure 6.5  The happiest day of their lives? Photo: Mar Sáez.

violent at all. Viewers of this scene will most likely also have seen the first half of this double-length episode. There, we become acquainted with the defensively generated violent tendency of Cardenio. The story in Cervantes’ novel tells how Cardenio’s best friend, ­Fernando (Ramón González Palazón), betrays his friend by seducing his beloved Lucinda (Jessica Cerón González). This ended up with an enforced marriage of Lucinda with Fernando, motivated by her parents’ greed. The wedding photo, made by Mar Sáez, shows clearly how the wedding is far from being the festive occasion it is supposed to be (Figure 6.5). But, in contrast to Figures 6.2 and 6.3, this is not an image of trauma. Rather, it seems an image of sadness; of anti-marriage propaganda. The groom looks away, as if already considering how to escape the confinement of the marriage. The bride looks desolate. Not only is she in love with someone else – with Cardenio, who attends the ceremony – but she is also aware of the groom’s reluctance to marry her. The most striking aspect of the image is the non-communication between the two figures. In the cinematic episode, this is a constant feature. In this image, it is enhanced by the contrast between the bodily proximity and the radical distance figured in their faces. Again, the actors, the photo­ grapher, the set, which was a fancy, historically resonant palace, and the other actors (the Priest, the groom’s parents, and the wedding guests) contributed to making this poignant image possible. Mar Sáez created it, involving all the other co-authors and the material elements. Yet, Cardenio, the main character of the novella, is traumatised. How that happened we could not stage; that would be falling into the trap according to Adorno’s warning. Although the next photograph does show violence, this is not what traumatises Cardenio. The traumagenerating violence – the small moment, event or act that drives Cardenio to insanity – is when Lucinda says ‘yes’ in the formal performance of marriage. Her voice is clearly reluctant when she says it. But the social-ritual significance of the small word is enough; the loss Cardenio suffers is turned definitive. Cardenio takes a knife, and first attacks the groom, then himself. This indicates the birth of trauma, but is not its representation. It doesn’t seem relevant that the attack takes place, nor on whom, but the trigger, the ‘yes’, does it. The photo doesn’t

Figure 6.6  Cardenio attacks – but whom? Photo: Mar Sáez.

tell (Figure 6.6). The fury in Cardenio’s eye seems directed at no one; it is interiorised. Lucinda’s outstretched arms don’t do anything else than try to stop the violence. She is not protecting anyone in particular. Yet, something is happening that will leave its traces in the figures involved. If we take the image, not the story, as our focus, all we can tell is that something horrible is shown, a violence. The dramaturgy makes that clear. But that is all; no story, no narrative appears. The doubling of the length of this video became necessary when we realised that both the madness of the wild man in the forest and the story of the wedding that triggered it read like a film; they only make sense together. Once we have left the palace where the wedding takes place, the moments of calm and madness alternate in the sequence of the encounters between Cardenio and the others. A shepherd who tells the story of Cardenio’s mad attacks of violence warns his listeners, but to no avail. Both the Priest and Don Quijote overrule the madman’s attempt to tell his traumatogenic story, turning oral narrative with listeners into a film. For the wedding sequence, the movement of slowness, ritually made routine, is interrupted by Cardenio’s attack.

These are incidences of shock, as Jessica Cerán González, interpreting Lucinda, brilliantly demonstrates. The interruption is repositioned in relation to traumatic stagnation by the inserted still images of religious sculptures that were part of the decor, but became silent witnesses. Cinema can do this, with its technology of montage that facilitates the play with movement and sound editing together. The cinematic aspect is thus mobilised to demonstrate the particular contribution of the medium to a suggestion of trauma. But in his literary ‘madness’, Cervantes invoked the possibility.11 A Way Out? The transfer of Cardenio’s aggression from Fernando to himself dem­ on­strates that Cervantes has understood trauma staggeringly well. This is an allusion to the self-immolation frequently associated with trauma. It is the victim’s response to the perpetrator’s attack on her or his subjectivity. This is not resignation at being destroyed as a subject, but an attempt to recuperate a bit of agency for the destroyed subjectivity; a revolt. In narrative terms, this is what Alphen, in line with Kolk, ana­ lyses as the impossibility, in the traumatic state, of knowing who one is, whether one is (co-) responsible or not for what happened – in narra­ t­ological terms, of occupying an actantial position. This is where trauma touches on the narrative it casts out. It is a destructive attempt to integrate narratively what was until then an assailing spectre. The most famous instance of this is the heroine of the Roman legend of Lucretia, who killed herself after having been raped. Incidentally, this legend explains the founding of the Roman Republic, which hints at how deeply political the issue is. I have interpreted this act as an attempt to regain some control over the destroyed self. This attempt at reactivation of the subjectivity that is crushed, a greater force that cannot be resisted, is totally negative; the subject dies as a 11  I have written about Flaubert’s cinematic writing, in connection with that in Edvard Munch’s paintings (2017a). On cinematic movement in Frans Hals’s tiny portrait, see Bal (2020c), based on a 2018 brochure for the exhibition Rendez-vous with Frans Hals, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.

Figure 6.7 Homeless, Cardenio (Theor Román) roams the woods, perhaps in search of someone to talk to. Photo José María Martínez Izquierdo.

consequence. Cardenio survives, after the attempt on his traumatiser, then himself, but he reiterates the violent impulse when the Priest and the Knight interrupt his account. They act as bad analysts. This insistence on listening is Cervantes’ psychoanalytic understanding in a pre-posterous interpretation. But if he can invent cinema, why not psychanalysis, of the kind that can help overcome trauma by repairing the broken social bond? His own experience of traumatisation rather than theoretical study must have made it possible to develop those ideas, in his literary image-thinking (Figure 6.7).12 The issue of the unrepresentability of trauma, joined with the reflections these photographs have solicited, is staged and worked through by the figure of Sissi, who is prominent in the other project on 12  See Alphen (1999), mentioned above. My analysis of Lucretia – in Shakespeare and Rembrandt – is chapter 2 of my 1991 book. Another pre-posterous claim related to trauma is my interpretation of Descartes as the inventor of psychoanalysis in a ‘post-Freudian’ variant (Chapter 5).

trauma-induced madness, A Long History of Madness (ALHoM). This case history, in the analytic sense, ends on a hopeful opening, a way out of trauma. This opening does not lead to happiness but to sadness – a huge step forward for the traumatised, if only because it can be experienced, felt and (narratively) remembered. Sissi, Davoine’s first patient, like Freud’s Dora, gave up on her treatment, accusing the analyst of incompetence. There are serious issues involving a lack of empathy on the part of the analyst, as Freud’s writing on Dora, and the Cardenio episode in the forest clearly demonstrate. In Françoise’s case, Sissi blames her for refusing identification. Later, the analyst is able to see the justification of that blame. So far, this is a real story, based on Davoine’s session notes. Sissi runs off, and ends up, in our fictionalising continuation of her adventures, in a psychiatric hospital on the island of Seili, Finland. Here, surrounded by the magic landscape of a summery Nordic island, she is hospitalised and treated by another analyst who seems able to offer empathy and equality. In the end, Sissi is enabled to retrieve her disassociated past experience, and comes out of it much better, even if the idea of ‘cured’ remains dubious.13 Whether it is Cardenio, the Captive, Descartes or Sissi, the way out of madness is an ongoing process of becoming, without an endpoint. But importantly, the process is in movement, no longer stuck in stagnation. The same holds for my project of image-thinking. Each new phase of that becoming is informed by a later work that retrospectively glosses an earlier work. Each new work puts a spin on the ensemble of what came before it. In that becoming as an oeuvre or a work consisting of multiple images lies my theoretical object, inflected by what ‘my work’ as a reader, co-filmmaker and critic of the resulting images adds to and changes in that corpus. An additional layer occurred when the actors, inspired by the group performance, started to improvise and make their own images. Thereby they became co-authors. And, 13  Freud’s Dora case has been extensively interpreted (Bernheimer and Kahane 1985). The set of the scene of Sissi’s treatment was the abandoned Pietkaniemi hospital in Nokia, while much of the affiliated scenes were set on Seili. The quotations from Davoine’s book are now attributed to the other analyst, although, in reality, Davoine herself accompanied Sissi on her ‘way out’.

according to the retrospective logic I have called ‘pre-posterous’, the beginning or starting point is the set of filmic images, followed by the images ‘we saw’, only then followed by those in the author’s book and ending with those images the author ‘saw’, and that are fundamentally inaccessible to me. It is this retrospective impact that is the point of studying an image as a source of further and more profound insight than the usual documentation can offer – on the condition that its ‘becoming’ remains in process.14 To demonstrate this, I invoke Sissi in a few thought-images of her breakthrough session, where the trauma could become an incipient narrative. Neatly made up and exuberantly dressed, as was her way of attempting to recuperate some of her destroyed subjectivity, she enters the analysist’s office. In Figure 6.8, many layers of imagings of psychoanalytic treatment are juxtaposed and superposed. Traumatised by repeated rape by her father and his friends, and her mother’s looking away, she was destroyed in early adolescence. This was compounded by a later abuse, when the doctors in the hospital where she was treated aborted her without her or her mother’s consent. Photographer Olli Heinola has captured the ambiguity of Sissi at this stage of her treatment. She is about to retrieve her memory of the abuse. Her face suggests both anger and sadness. Or is it fear, hesitation, anxiety, ­shyness? Ambiguity rules. The figure is almost glued to the door, ambiguous in itself, between entrance into a state of being locked up, or exit from the stagnation that has held her captive for so long – just like the Captive (Figure 6.3). Since she is holding on to the door knob, we cannot determine which is the case. But that holding on does connote a tiny bit of self-empowerment, which the anger in her face underlines. Flanked by an image of a historical doctor who looks pretty self-satisfied, and, on the other side of the door, by anatomical representations of the 14  It is relevant that my pre-posterous logic squares perfectly with Davoine’s conception of history, particularly as it plays itself out in madness. See the clip ‘Françoise on Time’ on the video section of the film’s website, as well as many remarks in her books (1992, 1998, 2008), and the scenography of her encounters with people from the past registered there.

Figure 6.8  Sissi enters the analyst’s office for the decisive session. Photo: Olli Heinola.

human brain, and (invisible on the photograph) stacks of books about schizophrenia on the nearby shelves, we can hardly expect her to feel comfortable in the situation. Her image is both emphatically flat and centred. There is something artificial (‘made up’) in her self-presentation. This is strongly marked, also, by the triple-layered Issey Myake dress she chose to wear. Printed on that dress is another deeply ambiguous image: a flat image by Ingres of a three-dimensional sculpture, an Indian allegory of the source of a river. But in Sissi’s body, it is going to contribute to her self-revelation, her memory of her father and his

friends fondling her breasts. That abuse has turned her into a ‘flat’ person. The little sign that betrays the soon-to-be-recalled event is the small slit at the bottom of that image printed on the dress, which turns the nude woman into a man’s jacket, while the slit also remains evocative of the wounded body-part. The next photograph from the same scene shows the breathtaking moment that Sissi begins to talk (Figure 6.9). In contrast to Don Quijote and the Priest, the analyst has her mouth emphatically closed. She will not talk, only listen. Her gaze suggests compassion, patience and hence, a silent, subtle encouragement. And she sits next to Sissi, not behind the head of the couch, invisible to the patient, as is ‘proper’ in psychoanalysis. The equality and her capability to listen will make the exit possible. Sissi’s eyes, directed to the stack of learned books, but also, next to that, a copy of Brueghel’s Mad Meg painting, will be another support for the crucial event of Sissi’s exit from trauma to sadness, and from dissociation to remembering. It may be a coincidence that the female nude on the dress here looks straight at the viewer, as if asking us to support Sissi by listening, not talking. And then, while she is narrating her memory of the abuse, her eye is struck by the Brueghel painting. She now looks a bit upset. She will soon stand up, approach the painting and start talking about the figure of Mad Meg, wondering if she is a witch. She brings her finger to outline the figure in the painting (Figure 6.10). Her eyes do not suggest that this is a friendly encounter, a kind of identification. But the allusion is also to establishing a historical affiliation with the tradition of the street theatre of the sotties, where the lines between being, acting and only seeming mad are so fine that ‘madness’ as a category – or, as it has been called, a ‘classifixation’ – loses its grounding (Chapter 2). And that ultimate ambiguity puts the door ajar. Moreover, the historicism in this encounter between Sissi and Brueghel’s Meg gives Sissi’s barely retrieved memory a longer time frame.15 15  The concept of ‘classifixation’ to point out the fixating effect of classification was introduced by Iris van der Tuin (2015). See Tuin and Verhoeff for a glossary of such unorthodox concepts (2021; on classifixation, 47–49). For more on Brueghel’s painting, see Chapter 2 and references there.

Between these three photographs, we see a marked progress. Not that Sissi becomes any more cheerful. But she becomes more animated, more capable of participating in the social world. Her expressive face of concern and questioning in the final picture contrasts strongly with the face in Figure 6.9, where her incipient talking does not yet affect her self-enclosed eyes. The trio as a series gains narrativity, but the ‘story’ is not the one of what happened to Sissi in her past. Instead, it is the story of her painful but helpful exit out of stagnation. None of it represents trauma. But the photos do respond to the becoming sad of the traumatic young woman who regains the capacity to respond.

Figure 6.9  Sissi begins to talk. Photo: Olli Heinola. Figure 6.10  Sissi responds to the narrative painting. Photo: Olli Heinola.

7. Agency, Facing Nothing is Missing (the installation) Bertien van Manen Introduction: Facing Migration All over the world, and in your own living room: are we able to consider, experience and value these two locations and the ensuing positions at the same time? As I began working on this chapter, Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen (1942–) had an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Her answer was a loud and clear yes! Van Manen is known for her radical documentary photo­ graphy in which she combines intimacy with the people in the image with an awareness of their specific situation – visual diaries that travel the world. And although mostly she is herself not in the image, her presence in the depicted situation, her relationship of the people whose languages she even learnt, and her respect for them are strongly visible. Proximity and respect for their differences. She shows the possibility of intimacy in a globalised situation. The question of

Figure 7.1  Nothing is Missing, Massaouda. Video still.

that possibility brings us back to the question of universality (Chapter 3).1 Here I will zoom in on an issue that challenges attempts to impose as well as to discard universalisms, for it is easier criticised than avoided. One of the most tenacious instances of universalism – the belief in the universality of something, a phenomenon and its value for human life – is motherhood. This is also, doubtless, the most intimate, hence, local of relationships. The current state of the allegedly globalised world makes this universalism both urgently necessary and deeply problematic. This chapter is inspired by this ambivalence. I focus on the concept of 1  Photobooks of Van Manen’s work tend to be sold out; I managed to find two (2014, 2016). The artist learnt Chinese and Russian (not the world’s easiest languages) in preparation for her trips there.

facing in order to develop a vision of art that foregrounds both the global and the local, the universal and the intimate. First of all, we must shed the problematic binary between universalism and relativism that has so long dominated our thinking about intercultural issues. Thinking of motherhood as a universal usefully counters a problematic relativising. For example, relativising the horror of losing a child by alleging that, in some severely underprivileged countries, losing a child to illness, hunger or violence occurs so frequently that it is ‘normal’, would be a dreadful condescendence and a scandalous acceptance of the unacceptable. In the globalised world, the opposite move is necessary. Now that we are bound to those under­ privileged situations by knowledge and economic complicity, assuming the universality of motherhood – through a ‘strategic universalism’ – is a political necessity. Only through that assumption does the scandal of the inequities that globalisation both promotes and lays bare become apparent.2 At the same time and for the same reasons, the opposite move is just as indispensable. One of the most severe challenges to the idea, or hope, of any universality is the division produced all over the world between people whose everyday life and its intimacy are safely assured and those who lead an existence of ‘infra-humanity’. Amongst other consequences, this division produced an unsettling tension when the two parts of our supposedly unified world collided in Western countries as a result of migration. Migration causes the coexistence in one social environment of people who can afford to live permanently in a place and those who cannot – those who are driven to displacement.3 2  By ‘strategic universalism’ I mean a universalist treatment, analysis and understanding of issues, not a belief in their unmovable universality. Of the many publications on the problem of universalism, I recommend the final chapter of Balibar (2017, 275–302). As I mentioned in Chapter 5, Balibar integrates philosophy with anthropology and political science, and criticality with a reliable account. 3  The term ‘infra-humanity’ comes from artist Doris Salcedo. Salcedo’s Unilever Commission Shibboleth at the Tate Modern in London consisted of a long, deep and elaborate crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall. The catalogue explains the artist’s attempt to put the global division between people down literally. The term ‘infra-humanity’ must be understood in that context. See Salcedo (2007).

This situation deeply impinges on conceptions, experiences and practices of motherhood. It interrupts that relationship and brutally destroys the relation of intimacy, since the proximity or distancing between mother and child is no longer a matter of choice. The combination of motherhood and migration, then, is a good place to reflect on the confrontation between globalisation and intimacy against the backdrop of a non-oppositional, unresolved dialectic of singularity and universality. The relationship between the singular and the general – to use a more abstract pair that encompasses both universality/ singularity and globalisation/intimacy – also holds for my own analyses. It has consequences for the relationship between my video-making (or, taking the word videography literally, video-writing) and my scholarly writing, to which this book is devoted. I must reiterate that, with one of my video installations being central to my argument, this is an exploration, through one particular case, of the dynamic complement­ arity between media. One goal is to make the mothers staged in this installation full participants in what can only be a multi-voiced discussion. Documentary videos, while of course not full accounts either, preserve something of the voice of their subjects. Rather than generalising on the basis of a singular case, I go back and forth between one special view and another. In terms of the logic of reasoning, this movement is neither deductive nor inductive but what Peirce called ‘abductive’. This method has been defined as follows: ‘In general abduction is considered as that type of inference which leads to hypothetical explanations for observed facts. In this sense it is the opposite of deduction.’ Abduction goes from consequence to possible cause. This type of logic is ‘diagnostic’, in the double sense of both pinpointing and problem-solving.4 Deduction, in contrast, reasons from cause to consequence and is thus prognostic. As a method of logic, abduction makes innovation possible. For Deleuze, innovation, or newness, is a defining element of thinking; its condition sine qua non. According to Peirce, abduction is 4  For a lucid explanation, see Lubbe and van Zoest (1997, 805, 806), who use the term ‘diagnostic’.

Figure 7.2  Installation, Tampere Art Museum, Finland. Photo: Mia Hannula.

the way through which new ideas become possible. It has the singular as its starting point and makes creative leaps. It thrives on uncertainty and speculation, but its origin in observable fact remains primary. This makes it an excellent tool for image-thinking. Thematically speaking, I consider abduction the most suitable form of reasoning in the face of globalisation and the need to know what intimacy can mean for people at the other side of the economic division.5 This abductive approach has been a guideline in my work. First, as mentioned, between 2002 and 2008 I explored this tension through several documentary videos on migration. Most of these are based on the performativity of intimacy with migrants (Chapter 3). These experimental documentaries are concerned with situations of displacement (Lost in Space) and show migrants struggling to achieve some level of integration (A Thousand and One Days; A Clean Job) or with the history of and current suffering from the economic consequences of globalisation (Colony). The tension between intimacy and the consequences of globalisation is enacted most explicitly in a 5  For an early presentation of the term ‘abduction’ and the sources in Peirce’s oeuvre, see Frankfurt (1958).

video installation made between 2006 and 2008, with a supplement in 2010 (Figure 7.2). Through this installation I sought to image intimacy on terms that allow for the strategic use of universalism (‘motherhood’) as well as for the acceptance, respect for, and even foregrounding of differences (‘migration’). The central concept became ‘facing’.6 Abandoning Control The installation is titled Nothing is Missing, after the statement of the first of the mothers (see Figure 7.1 above). Quoting her statement as the project’s title is already a first step in abandoning authorial authority. The work consists of a variable number of audio-visual units, between five and seventeen, that play DVDs of about thirty minutes in which a mother talks about a child who has left in migration. Imagine a gallery looking like a generic living room, where visiting is like a social call. The image is a portrait, a bust only, of a woman speaking to someone else. Apart from a short introductory sequence that sets up the situation, the videos consist of unedited single shots. The decision to not edit is a second step in abandoning authorial control, to do justice to the empowerment of the mother and to minimise my own authorship. Sometimes, we hear the voice of the interlocutor; in other cases, we hear no one other than the woman speaking. Every once in a while, they fall silent. In the multi-channel installation, this seems as if the silent one was listening to the others. The installation itself enacts the tension between global and intimate, since the domestic ambiance is created within a space that is public, although often not a space where such installations are expected. I have had it installed in museums and galleries, academic settings, and office spaces – most radically, in a 6  For the documentaries mentioned and the others I made, see http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/ and the list at the end of this book (‘Film­ography’). The 2010 supplement was occasioned by an invitation to exhibit these works in St Petersburg, which made inclusion of Russian mothers relevant. For reasons of discretion, given the intimacy of the situations, I promised not to put the entire films on line. For a complete list, stills and synopses of the elements of Nothing is Missing, see http:// www.miekebal.org/artworks/installations/nothing-is-missing/

Figure 7.3  Installation, Ministry of Justice, The Hague. Photo: Mieke Bal.

corner office at the Department of Justice in The Hague, which had become unrecognisable as an office where the (anti-)immigration policies are being written (Figure 7.3). This installation probes the tension between usages of universalism as escapist exclusion and as a strategy to enhance differences. My provisional answer to the contradiction between these two elements is to replace any thematic universalism with a performative one, and an essential universalism with a strategic dynamic variant that is constantly challenged by singularities. Between aesthetic and academic work, an activism for activation through the promotion of reflection in sensebased experience is at work. The question that the installation raises, and that the present chapter attempts to answer, is how it is possible to make intimate contact across the many divisions that separate people in different cultural – that is, linguistic, economic and familial – situations without ignoring or erasing differences, and why it matters to do so. The goal is not to reach a universal ground for communication

but instead to establish the universal as the ground on which differences can performatively be brought into dialogue. The women live in various countries from which people have migrated since the onset of modern-day globalisation. Still living in their home countries, they all saw a child leave to go to Western Europe or to the United States. If we are to understand the possibility of a universal such as motherhood through insight into the intimate local relationships against the backdrop of a globalised world, we must first of all realise the enormity of the changes in the lives and life experiences of individuals taking this drastic step. We must wonder, that is, why people decide they must leave behind their affective ties, relatives, friends and habits – in short, everything that constitutes their intimate everyday lives. Imagine. These motivations, which are too complex to allow any generalisations, tend to include economic necessity but are rarely limited to that overarching issue. While my purpose is not to fully understand those complex motivations, I bring them up, considering that they are among the ambivalences towards the migration of their child to which the mothers testify. My primary goal is to explore the possibility of an aesthetic understanding that, by means of its own intimacy across the gaps of globalisation, can engage the political. These terms refer to a simple understanding of the two domains. In order to make aesthetics participate importantly in reaching the goal of empowering the mothers pursued here, I return to the eighteenthcentury philosopher Baumgarten, who developed the notion of aesthetics as binding through the senses, and, not coincidentally, also considered aesthetics a useful approach to the political (Chapter 4). The ‘binding’ and its sensorial nature are key to Nothing is Missing. Since this conception presumes neither formal beauty nor a separate artistic sphere, it seems a useful starting point to develop the idea of an aesthetic understanding that straddles the distinction between cultural-analytic and artistic exploration. This is why image-thinking is needed. Moreover, the proximity presupposed by the sense-based experience also establishes intimacy between the subject and the ‘object’ of the aesthetic moment. Hence, this approach furthers my attempt to develop a method that approximates the ‘object’ to becoming a subject, not as the

anthropological subjects subjected to the researcher’s gaze, but as full co-authors of their image. In a clear and concise book, Chantal Mouffe defines her two key terms as follows: by ‘the political’ I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by ‘politics’ I mean the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political. (2005, 9) In this distinction, politics is the organisation that settles or suppresses conflict; the political is where conflict ‘happens’. Thanks to the political, social life is possible. Politics, however, constantly attempts to dampen the political, turning tension into consensus, with its own exclusions. According to Mouffe’s view, everyday life, including the intimacy that inhabits it, pertains to the political. This is the sphere where conflict, tension and disagreement can flourish, as can reconciliation and other forms of change in approximation. It is there that intimacy must be understood. The Triple Act of Facing At the heart of this project is a triple act of facing. Facing sums up the aesthetic and political principle of Nothing is Missing, which is an attempt to reflect on severance and its consequences. Through this installation, I attempt to shift two common universal definitions of humanity: the notion of an individual autonomy of a vulgarised and misunderstood Cartesian cogito, and that of a subjecting passivity derived from the principle of George Berkeley’s ‘to be is to be perceived’. The former slogan has done damage in ruling out the participation of the body and the emotions in rational thought. The latter, recognisable

Figure 7.4  Installation in the exhibition 2MOVE, Enkhuizen, Netherlands. Photo: Astrid van Weijenberg.

in Lacanian as well as in Bakhtinian traditions, has sometimes over-­ extended a sense of passivity and coerciveness into a denial of political agency and, hence, responsibility. Reflecting on facing helps to rethink these notions. I try to shift these views in favour of an intercultural aesthetic based on a performance of contact. In order to elaborate such an alternative, I have focused this installation on the bond between speech and face as the site of the performance of a universal. Here, I use speech not just in terms of ‘giving voice’ but also, and more importantly,

in terms of listening and answering, all in their multiple meanings. I would like to turn the face, the classical ‘window of the soul’, into an ‘inter-face’ (Figure 7.4). Facing constitutes three acts at once. Literally, facing is the act of looking someone else in the face. It is also coming to terms with something that is difficult to live down by looking it in the face rather than denying or repressing it. Third, it is making contact, placing the emphasis on the second person, and acknowledging the necessity of that contact to sustain life. Instead of ‘to be is to be perceived’ and ‘I think, therefore I am’, facing proposes: ‘I face (you); hence, we are’ – a ‘we’, in this sense, that is not a false universal but an I/you exchange. For, facing is my proposal for a performance of contact across divisions, one that avoids the traps of universalist exclusion and relativist condescendence. The project Nothing is Missing is structured through these three meanings of facing. For this purpose, I first make the move from the two universalist views of humanity – Descartes’ and Berkeley’s – to a merger that replaces both: from esse est percibi (to be is to be perceived) to cogitote ergo sumus (I think of and with you, therefore we are). There is no clearer – almost programmatic – demonstration of Berkeley’s view than Samuel Beckett’s only film, from 1965, already mentioned, titled Film. As Anthony Uhlmann has pointed out, Berkeley’s formula, as elaborated to exhaustion by Beckett, is agony-inducing (2004). As it happens, this identity without agency already shows linguistically in the mere fact that the formula defines being in non-personal forms. As a result, Uhlmann argues, Beckett’s film explores the agonising feelings that result from a being through being perceived. Film explores the relationship of disharmony between the three types of images Deleuze distinguishes in the first of his two books on cinema. The perception-image is the result of the viewer’s selection from the visible world of those images that might be useful for her. The actionimage presents possibilities to act upon what is seen. In between, the affection-image compels the viewer – who is affected by the perception – to consider action. Stuck in (negative) affect when he is the object of someone else’s perception, the protagonist of Film, played by the aging

and decidedly uncomical Buster Keaton, flees from the notion of perceivedness into the film’s ‘action images’. The sets of eyes that watch this man and that he systematically eliminates show us the potential violence of the perception-image, whereas the ending, the close-up of the affection-image, translates affect into pure horror. This story can offer a useful counterpoint for the installation Nothing is Missing. There, these three types of images culminate in the mitigated close-up of the face that shuttles between perception-image and affection-image without the leap to action. Here, neither horror as a form of revolt, nor passive perceivedness as a handing over of human agency, but a rigorously affirmed second-personhood is the reply to this pessimistic view. The ‘perceivedness’ that the predominance of the close-up foregrounds does not lead to either rejection or agony, but instead to an empowering performativity. This, then, is my reply to Berkeley’s pessimistic view of vision as violence. Now, Descartes. As I have argued apropos of Reasonable Doubt (Chapter 5), the notion that Descartes is the bad guy of Enlightenment rationalism seems to reduce him in the same way as he was seen to be reducing human existence. According to French philosopher JeanJoseph Goux, the stake of the cogito is not primarily the link between thinking and being, nor the emphasis on reason and the excision of the body, but the tautological grammatical use of the first person: I think, [therefore] I am. The point for Goux is the possibility of describing human existence outside of the need to use the second person (1994). The popularity of this formula has done more harm than good to Western thought, especially in its exclusions, its excising of not only emotions, but also the dependency of human life on others. I call it an autistic version of humanity, and deny it the universality it has come to claim – ‘after’ Descartes, vulgarising his statement, rather than following him. But Goux did have a point. Concerning Descartes, I have interpreted his incapability of forging and sustaining relationships as a symptom of his abandonment-complex neurosis. For, it does require an explanation. The dependency on others is so obvious that it may well have been its inevitability that informed the desire to hold it at bay it in the first place. From the baby’s mother to social caretakers to linguistic second

persons, this dependency has been articulated clearly in psychoanalysis, sociology and linguistics: so much so, in fact, that being a second person seems more ‘natural’ a definition of being human than anything else. Sufferers from an abandonment complex are handicapped in this respect. Hence, the tautology in the formula. Second-personhood, I contend, may well be the only and most important universal of human existence, while its repression underlies other universalist definitions.7 This means that we cannot exist without others – in the eye of the other as in the eye of the storm (Berkeley, Beckett), as much as in sustenance of others. This is the ethical imperative to which Descartes, according to the vulgarised cogito, refuses to owe his existence. I see this differently. That is where I would start any attempt to confront universality as the ground where globalisation meets – allows, enables or precludes – intimacy. I do this not to pursue the beating of the Cartesian dead horse, but, on the contrary, to keep in mind the pro­ ductivity of returning with ‘critical intimacy’ to moments of the past, such as the dawn of rationalism in the seventeenth century. Descartes, who has so sorely missed intimacy in his early life, deserves to get a bit of it back from the twenty-first century.8 In this I am joining a growing group of scholars exploring the history of thought and developing alternative ways of thinking humanity, many influenced by Deleuze, his Spinoza, his Leibniz and his Bergson – to name the names of Deleuzians that underlie my thoughts here. An increasing number of scholars are studying the relevance of Spinoza for an alternative stream of thought between early and late rationalism. The line Spinoza–Bergson–Deleuze has led to important and productive revisionings of the image, perception and feeling. Some of these new ideas lie at the heart of the ‘migratory aesthetics’ of my installation – an 7  I have learnt to think in terms of second-personhood from two books by Lorraine Code (1991, 1995). Louise Anthony (1998) develops a universalist definition of humanity from a feminist perspective, avoiding the universal-relativist trap. 8  ‘Critical intimacy’ is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s productive term in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). Her controversial concept of ‘strategic essentialism’, which comes close to strategic universalism, is best presented in the Reader from 1996.

aesthetics of geographical mobility beyond the nation-state and its linguistic uniformity (Chapter 4). In view of this, it is important that philosophers Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd unpack those ideas in Spinoza’s writing that can be deployed for contemporary social thought (1999). Gatens and Lloyd’s book does three things at once that are relevant for my project, furthering the activity of ‘migratory aesthetics’ and implementing the performative face in that context. First, they develop an intercultural relational ethics. They invoke the relevance of Spinoza’s work for a reasoned position in relation to Aboriginal Australians’ claim to the land that was taken from them by European settlers. These claimants are not migrants since they stayed put while their land was taken away from underneath them, but their claims are based on a culturally specific conception of subjecthood and ownership that makes an excellent case for the collective and historical responsibility the authors put forward through Spinoza. This responsibility is key to any possible universality. It is a relation to the past that we have to face today. That this intercultural ethics should be based on a seventeenth-­ century writer who never met such claimants – although he was definitely a migratory subject – makes, second, a case for the histor­ iography I have termed ‘pre-posterous’ (Chapter 4). Clearly, this conception of history is focused on the relevance of present issues for a re-visioning of the past, as much as the other way around. In alignment with intercultural relationality, I call it intertemporal. Third, the authors make their case on the basis of the integration of Spinoza’s ontological, ethical and political writings – three philosophical disciplines traditionally considered separately. This exemplifies interdisciplinarity. In order to transform it from a fashionable buzzword into an intellectually responsible and specific notion, interdisciplinarity could be modelled on inter-facing in the sense I am developing here: as a strategic-­ universalist practice. Against this background – my search for an alternative to maso­ chistic passivity and social autism as a ground for the possibility of a performative universal – the face, with all the potential this concept-image

possesses, seemed an excellent place to start. But to deploy the face for this purpose requires one more negative act: the elimination of an oppressive sentimentalist humanism that has appropriated the face for universalist claims – as the window of the soul, as the key to identity translated into individuality, and as the site of policing. With this move I also seek to suspend any tendency to sentimentalising interpretations of Nothing is Missing (Figure 7.5). Ideologies of the Face The abuses of the face that individualism underpins are, in turn, articulated by means of a form of thought that confuses origin with articulation, and runs on a historicism as simplistically linear as it is obsessive. Common origin is a primary ideology of universalism. This involves motherhood. Creation stories from around the world tend to worry about the beginning of humanity in terms of the non-humanity that precedes it. Psychoanalysis primarily projects on the maternal face the beginning of the child’s aesthetic relationality. Both discourses of psychoanalysis and aesthetics show their hand in these searches for beginnings. Both are predicated on individualism, anchored in the mythical structure of evolution as ongoing separation, splitting and specification. Here, I take issue with an individualistic conception of beginnings through an alternative view drawn from literary theory. Some years after his path-breaking 1978 book Orientalism, the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote a book on the novels of the Western canon, entitled Beginnings: Intention and Method (1985). In this book, he demonstrated that the opening of a literary work programmes the entire text that follows, from its content and its style to its poignancy and aesthetic. It is the implied thesis of Nothing is Missing that this is true for cultural-political reality as well. Origin is a forward-projecting illusion. Therefore, in this installation I wished to explore a different sense of beginning – not in motherhood, but in migration. The primary question is why people decide to leave behind their lives as they know them and project their lives forward into the unknown. With this focus,

I aim to invert the latent evolutionism in the search for beginnings, and, in the same sweep, the focus on babies inherent in that strange contradiction of individualistic-universalist theories of the subject. Today, with authorities displaying high anxiety over the invisibility of the Islamic veiled face, we cannot over-estimate the importance of the ideology of the face for the construction of contemporary socio-political divides. To briefly show the workings of this ideology, I look to an art-historical publication that earned its stripes in its own field: a study of the portrait, the artistic genre par excellence where individualism is the conditio sine qua non of its very existence. Confusing, like so many others do, origin with articulation in his study of the portrait – the genre of the face – art historian Richard Brilliant explains the genre with reference to babies: The dynamic nature of portraits and the ‘occasionality’ that anchors their imagery in life seem ultimately to depend on the primary experience of the infant in arms. The child, gazing up at its mother, imprints her vitally important image so firmly on its mind that soon enough she can be recognized almost instantaneously and without conscious thought. (1991, 9) Like psychoanalysis, art history here grounds one of its primary genres in a fantasmatic projection of what babies see, do and desire. Both disciplines can and must be challenged for their speculative universalism.9 The shift operates through the self-evident importance attributed to documentary realism, a second unquestioned value in Western humanist culture that has been elevated to a universal status and that has also 9  ‘Occasionality’, a term introduced by Hans Georg Gadamer, refers to the reality depicted; in the case of the portrait, it refers to the sitter. Gadamer is here affiliated with Heidegger.

been inscribed in the face. Brilliant’s theory of the portrait with its use of ‘occasionality’ demonstrates that he, too adheres to this. Identity pictures as a form of policing demonstrate the bond between these two sides of the ideology of the face. The point of the portrait is the belief in the real existence of the person depicted, the ‘vital relationship between the portrait and its object of representation’ (Brilliant 1991, 8). The portraits that compose Nothing is Missing challenge these joint assumptions of individualism and realism and their claim to generalised validity. Yet, the work is documentary. The women filmed are as real as you and me, and individual – and as different from you and me as the world’s divides have programmed. At first sight, they have also been documented as such. At the same time, however, the installation enables them to speak ‘together’ from within a cultural-political position that makes them distinct and connected at once. This is the meaning of the silences that suggests they are listening to one another, even if they have never actually met. As for the documentary nature of their images, again, this is both obvious and obviously false, since the situation of speech is framed as both hyper-personal and utterly staged. I filmed the migrants’ mothers talking about their motivation to support or try to withhold their children who wished to leave and about their grief at seeing them go. The mothers talk about this crucial moment in their past to a person close to them, often someone whose absence in their life was caused by the child’s departure – a grandchild, a daughter-in-law, a best friend, or the emigrated children themselves. This is a first take on the universal performance of contact, against the more exclusionist universalities. In this performance, intimacy plays itself out against the odds of globalisation-informed separation. The act and mode of filming are implicated in this theoretical move. It is, in one sense, perfectly and perhaps excessively documentary. I ‘staged’ the women – ‘staging’ meaning that I asked them to choose a place in their home, a chair to sit on. Then I asked their interlocutors to take their place behind the camera; I set the shot, turned the camera on and left the scene. This method is hyperbolically documentary. To underline this aspect, I refrained from editing the shots.

Aesthetically, the women are filmed in consistent close-up, as portraits – the other side of the face of Brilliant’s babies (see Figure 7.6). The relentlessly permanent image of their faces is meant to force viewers to look these women in the face and listen to what they have to say, in a language that is foreign, using expressions that seem strange, but in a discourse to which we can relate affectively. This is a second form of the performance of contact. Another assumption of Brilliant’s argument concerns the nature of identity. In his view, identity is based on the baby and is enabled by seeing the mother’s face; in this way, the ontogenetic perspective is constantly mapped onto the phylogenetic one, in which development is the matrix and old equals primitive. This baby-basis is challenged most explicitly by the simple fact that the figures speaking here are the mothers, the other side of that face gazing up at them; they now become the holders of the inter-face. The face as inter-face is an occasion for an exchange that, affect-based, is fundamental in opening up the discourse of the face to the world. Crucially, for Brilliant, identity emerges not only out of appearance and naming but also out of distinction. Moreover, the recognition of appearance triggers interaction and expression. Typically for the cogito tradition, the two are practically the same: Visual communication between mother and child is effected face-to-face and, when those faces are smiling, everybody is happy, or appears to be. For most of us, the human face is not only the most important key to identification based on appearance, it is also the primary field of expressive action. (1991, 10; emphasis added) The assumed link between these two sentences equates communi­cat­ion with identification and expression. This equation is grounded in the double sense of identification – as and with – that underlies the univer­ s­alist paradox and to which my installation proposes an alternative. In

line with my attachment to the preposition ‘inter-’, I call that alternative ‘inter-facing’. The socio-cultural version of this political ambiguity is most clearly noticeable in the dilemma of ‘speaking for’ and the patronising it implies, versus ‘speaking with’ as face-to-face interaction. The self-­ sufficient rationalism of the cogito tradition is thus in collusion not only with a philosophical denial of second-personhood but also with a subsequent denial of what the face, rather than expression, can do. In order to move from an expressionism to a performativity of the face that writes a programme for a new, tenable strategic universality, I deduce three uses of the preposition ‘inter-’ from Gatens and Lloyd’s take on Spinozism that can be mobilised in a helpful way; three inter-­ ships. But in order to prevent an over-hasty, over-optimistic mystification, we must acknowledge that each ‘inter-’ works across a con­stitutive gap. Intercultural Ethics: Relationality across Gaps Inter-cultural relationality, in its inscribed mobility of subjectivity, posits the face as an interlocutor whose discourse is not predictably similar to that of the viewer. These women speak to ‘us’, across a gap, as they speak to their own relatives, again across a gap. The first gap is that of culture, if we continue to view cultures as entities instead of processes. In such a conception, intercultural contact is possible on the basis of the acknowledgement of the gap that separates and distinguishes them. The sometimes-over-extended emphasis on difference in postcolonial thought is a symptom of that gap. The second gap is caused by ‘the cultural’ conceived as moments and processes of tension, conflict and negotiation, rather than as a reified ‘thing’ or ‘state’, according to Fabian’s conception (2001). To highlight this dynamic, including recognition of the gap, I invited the mothers to choose a spot in their own home and intimates as the interlocutors. The people to whom the women tell their stories are close to them, yet distanced by the gap that was caused by the migration of the loved one. Tunisian Massaouda’s daughter-in-law, for example, who

was not chosen by her for her son, as her culture would command her to do, is reaching out to the mother across an unbridgeable gap produced by history. In Romanian Elena’s case, even the son himself struggles to overcome the gap that sits between him and his mother, with whom he talks during the short summer period when he visits her. There are yet other gaps in play. As I have suggested, the two simultaneous situations of speech – between the mothers and their relatives and between the mothers and the viewer – doubly mark second-personhood, but across gaps. The strong sense of intimacy emanating from the direct address of the mother to her closely familiar interlocutor at first excludes the viewer. Only once one makes the effort and gives the time to witness or even enter the interaction can the viewer earn a sense of participation. When this happens – and, due to the recognisability of the discourse, it does – the experience is exhilarating and, I contend, unique in public events such as art exhibitions. Once, during setting up, I saw a cleaner of the exhibition space in Melbourne, an immigrant from Sudan, put down his tools and sit, watching riveted a mother from his home country talk to a close friend. He remained glued to his chair for at least half an hour, with tears in his eyes.10 The third gap opens in the making, due to the theoretical and artistic alternative to artistic authority I had constructed, a ‘wilful abandon of mastery’, which underlies the filming in my own absence. There is necessarily a gap between intention and artwork. The gaps as entrances into sensations that are ‘borrowed’, grounded in someone else’s body, open the door to the inter-face. Gaps, in other words, are the key to a universality that rejects a romantic utopianism in favour of a difficult, hard-won but indispensable inter-facing. Gaps, not links, are also the key to intermediality. As my installation suggests, the two go hand in hand. There is another discourse to be addressed here, in the wake of the humanism à la Brilliant and the self-enclosure of vulgarised Cartesianism. I am referring to the discourse of intention, predominant in the humanities. I have frequently argued against the relevance and 10  The notion of ‘giving time’ alludes to Derrida (1992).

tenability of that discourse, most extensively in Bal (2002). The theoretical and artistic alternative of a ‘wilful abandon of mastery’ underlies the filming in my own absence. The participants are in charge; the mother and her intimate interlocutor can say what they feel like saying, without any pressure from me as the artist. Uhlmann points this out through Beckett, and the latter uses that same noun, gap: there is necessarily, not coincidentally, a gap between intention and artwork. Beckett wrote this in a rare joyful passage, where he describes the sense of accomplishment he felt precisely because of his failure to do what he had intended: I felt it really was something. Not quite in the way intended, but as a sheer beauty, power and strangeness of image . . . In other words . . . from having been troubled by a certain failure to communicate fully by purely visual means the basic intention, I now begin to feel that this is important and that the images obtained probably gain in force what they lose as ideograms.11 Interdiscursively, this statement engages the question of intention as medium-specific, binding it to images and, hence, bringing the discussion of intention within the domain of art history, where the relevance of intention is usually not discussed but taken for granted. For someone like Beckett, a writer, this serendipitous experience was crucial. It made him an intermediality artist, also in his writing. Uhlmann concludes his essay with the following summary of what, in the wake of the affiliation he establishes between Berkeley, Bergson and Beckett, the image does to intention. I quote this formulation because it succinctly sums up why the image is productively incompatible with intentionalism – an incompatibility that, I argue, is most useful for what 11  Beckett writes to Alan Schneider here, in Beckett and Schneider (1998), as quoted in Uhlmann (2004, 101–2). For more background on Beckett’s Film, see Beckett (1969).

I am trying to develop with this project and this chapter: a migratory aesthetics of the face. He writes: What Film in part offers is the exploration of a medium that draws its power – the power to produce sensations – through gaps. Yet, images provide sparks that leap from one side to the next, like messages across synapses, thereby allowing the formation of a unity among difference: intuition and sensation, intuition and the idea, intention and reception, philosophy and literature. (Uhlmann 2004, 103) Mark the use of ‘gaps’ as well as the use of ‘sparks’, reminiscent of the Frankfurt School writers’ fondness of that thought-image (Chapter 1). Significantly and paradoxically, Uhlmann uses the discourse of mediumspecificity here to make a point about the merging of domains and the discourse of embodiment – sensations – to posit gaps. The gaps as entrance into sensations are grounded in someone else’s body, opening the door to the inter-face. Gaps, in other words, are key to a migratory aesthetics that binds globalisation to a transformed intimacy. Pre-posterous Time This concept of the gap lays the ground, in turn, for the second partner in the exploration of ‘inter-’, namely intertemporal thinking, which comes with the pre-posterous foregrounding of the present as starting point. These women carry the history of the severance from their child. They state their acceptance of that separation as a fact of the present. Moreover, the concept of video installation positions the co-presence of the mothers with the viewer visiting the installation. Here lies one function of the acoustic gaps, the silences in the films. When they do not speak, it seems as if it is the viewer’s turn to speak back to the mothers, who are now just looking the viewer in the face (Figure 7.7).

But importantly, the intertemporality also plays out in the belatedness of the viewer’s engagement. To understand the need for this engagement in its inevitable belatedness, two steps must be taken. The first makes the move from individual to social, the second from past to present. At the same time, the social nature of intersubjectivity holds the performative promise of the improvement of the social fabric that the imaginary enactment of identification will help to build. As agents of image-thinking, the images themselves fulfil a function in this intertemporality. They do this through the exclusive deployment of the close-up as affection-image. Here, Spinoza’s writing on affect becomes relevant. As Gatens and Lloyd explain, ‘the complex interactions of imagination and affect [yield] this common space of intersubjectivity, and the processes of imitation and identification between minds which make the fabric of social life’.12 Aesthetic work is eminently suitable to double-bind the women to a social world whose fabric allows their experience to be voiced. Instead of being caught in a double bind that forces them into silence, they can be relieved of carrying their burden too solitarily. This is where the affection-image, which Deleuze theorised as emblematically situated in the close-up, comes in with its typical temporality. Succinctly put: closeups subvert linear time. They endure and thus inscribe the present into the image. Between narrative images and close-ups, then, a particular kind of intermediality emerges: one that stages a struggle between fast narrative and stillness. Here, the type of intertemporality at stake takes the present of viewing as its starting point. Paola Marrati points to the crucial function of the affection-image as the closest to the materiality both of the image and of subjectivity. She writes: ‘Between a perception that is in certain ways troubling, and an action still hesitant, affection emerges’ (2008, 35). The affection-image binds a perception that has already taken place but leaves a trace, to the future of possible action. This is why the affection-image remains closest 12  Gatens and Lloyd (1999, 40). This statement and the following had a great impact on the way I image-thought up the fictional scene of the meeting between Descartes and Spinoza (Chapter 5).

to the present while providing it with the temporal density needed to make the inter-face possible. Gatens and Lloyd recall that Spinoza’s conception of affect is explicit in its intertemporality. They write: The awareness of actual bodily modification – the awareness of things as present – is fundamental to the affects; and this is what makes the definition of affect overlap with that of imagination. All this gives special priority to the present. (1999, 52) The resulting images are far from the documentary realism so dear to Western culture. They possess a temporal density that is inhabited by the past and the future, while affect remains an event in the present – an event of becoming. This is especially strong in the affect produced by the close-up. This is not an event in the punctual sense, but a slice of process during which external events slow down or even remain out of sight. Becoming harbours the presence of the past. If we take this presence to the realm of the social, we can no longer deny responsibility for the injustices of the past, even if we cannot be blamed for it. Without that responsibility, the use of the vexed pronoun ‘we’ – ‘the full deceptiveness of the false cultural “we”’, as Torgovnick (1994) calls it – itself becomes disingenuous, even unethical.13 Gatens and Lloyd’s ‘Spinozistic responsibility’, then, is derived from the philosopher’s concept of self as social, and consists of projecting presently felt responsibilities ‘back into a past which itself becomes determinate only from the perspective of what lies in the future of that past – in our present’. Taking seriously the ‘temporal dimensions of human consciousness’ includes endorsing the ‘multiple forming and reforming of identities over time and within the deliverances of memory 13  For this relevance of becoming in what could be seen as an anthropological context, see the explanation of the concept by Biehl and Locke (2010), already mentioned, which gains special relevance here.

and imagination at any one time’ (81). This pre-posterous responsibility based on memory and imagination makes selfhood not only stable but also instable (82). This instability is a form of empowerment, of agency within a collectivity-based individual consciousness. Facing Restraint Becoming also defines our activities as scholars in the humanities. Hence, third, inter-disciplinary thought is needed. This allows us to make the connection, in the present and across the cultural divide, between a number of discourses and activities routinely either treated separately or unwarrantedly merged. I have been a fervent proponent of interdisciplinarity for a long time. However, in the course of this project I became more cautious about the self-evident value of any form of interdisciplinarity. From the women in Nothing is Missing I have learnt what I had only intuited earlier: sometimes, invoking a disciplinary framework can do more harm than good to the insights we try to develop through it. The most obvious case seems also the most problematic one: the place of psychoanalysis, the darling approach of some and a changeling for others. I was faced with the need to hold back, in this respect. Obviously, I do not dismiss the theory. But, lest I universalise Western conceptions, in some cases it was necessary to give full weight to the mothers’ enacted desire to refrain from self-expression, which compelled me to abstain from interpreting this. First, the situation of filming, in the intimacy-with-gaps and in the absence of the filmmaker, could easily become a trap to solicit more self-expression than the women would want to endorse. The intimacy of the speech situation has a globalised world of viewing as its backdrop, after all. But it is at moments of restraint, when they seem most reluctant to express themselves, in the Western sense of that phrase, that the performativity of their self-presentation is most acutely able to pierce through the conventional surface. These are the moments of the performative inter-face. I will describe one instance where the ‘performance of reticence’, so to speak, in fact yielded the most beautiful insight into the way intimacy and globalisation intersect.

The woman I filmed first, Tunisian Massaouda, offers a striking instance of a culturally specific reluctance that cautions us against psychologising or psychoanalysing her, her facial expressions, and her speech. Not coincidentally, this occurs at the most strongly performative moment of the video. As I have been able to see first hand, Massaouda and her new daughter-in-law, Ilhem Ben-Ali Mehdi, get along famously. But in their relationship remains the stubborn gap that immigration policies have dug. When Ilhem married Massaouda’s youngest son, the mother was not allowed to attend the wedding: the authorities had denied her a visa (Chapter 3). Not only had Massaouda not been granted the opportunity to witness who Ilhem was, nor had she been able to fulfil her motherly role as her culture prescribes it, which is to help her son choose his bride. At some point, Ilhem ends up asking with some insistence what Massaouda had thought of her when she first saw her, after the fact and, hence, in a situation of powerlessness (Figure 7.8).14 At first, Massaouda does not answer, which makes Ilhem anxious enough to insist, and to ask: did you find me ugly, plain? The older woman looks away at this point. The young woman insists. We will never know what Massaouda ‘really’ felt, but the power that the filming bestows on her, as if in compensation for her earlier disempowerment, is to either withhold or give her approval. She does the latter, but only after some teasing. When I saw the tape and understood the speech, I was convinced Ilhem would normally never have been allowed to ask this question and thus vent her anxiety – an intuition she later confirmed. As for the mother, she took back and then exercised the power she had been denied, and she used it, first to mark the gap, then to help her somewhat insecure daughter-in-law. ‘We’ – global, mostly Western viewers of adult age – can undoubtedly relate to this moment. Such insecurity, for example, can easily be construed as universal. This interaction between Massaouda and Ilhem is thoroughly social, performative, but also bound to the medium of video. Yet, it does not allow, say, a universalising psychoanalytic 14  In fact, it was Massaouda’s enforced absence at Tarek’s wedding that compelled me to begin the project Nothing is Missing.

inter­pretation. Neither did I as maker have any influence on this occurrence. I wasn’t even present. Nor can we construe it as a realistic, documentary moment in the sense of Brilliant’s Gadamerian analysis of portraiture, where an ‘occasion’ was recorded. Significantly, it would never have happened outside of the situation of video-making. Thus, it contradicts and suspends the universalising myths of realism and documentary ‘truth’. There would never have been an external reality the film could have documented. It is a moment, in other words, that was staged, yet real, thus challenging that distinction. Nor can we pinpoint a psyche offering symptoms for interpretation. For this to happen there was, instead, a need for a culturally specific relationship between two women related by marriage and separated by the gaps of migration, and for a relationship to the medium that allowed the women to overstep cultural boundaries. Thus, reflecting on what I have learnt from this experimental filmmaking, I felt bound to extend my wilful abandonment of mastery from the filming to the critical discourse I am offering here. An installation of voices, intermingling and alone – of women facing other women none of them had ever seen: I did this, but I could not master how I did it. The art-making, in other words, is not an example to illustrate an academic point, nor an elevated form of cultural expression. Instead of these two things, equally problematic, I propose the universal validity of the performance in its non-universal singularity, including the moment of slight tension between Massaouda and Ilhem. The performative moment is the product of an act of filmmaking that required the absence of the filmmaker. Moreover, it also required the surrender of the two women to the equipment standing between them. This surrender entailed a cultural transgression – to insistently ask a question that in the culture of origin would be unspeakable. This, more than her accented pronunciation of Figure 7.5  Installation, Freemantle Fibonacci Centre, Freemantle, Australia. Photo: Nanna Verhoeff. Figure 7.6  Alham; Khartoum, Sudan. Video still. Figure 7.7  Massaouda; Remada, Tunisia. Video still. Figure 7.8  Ilhem seeks her mother-in-law’s approval. Video still.

Arabic as a second language, is Ilhem’s ‘accent’, in the sense in which Hamid Naficy famously uses that term (2001), and Hui recently re-theorised it and brilliantly brought it to bear on a great variety of social and artistic situations (2020). This ‘accent’ emblematises the productive, innovative and enriching potential of intercultural life. In this case, it could occur thanks to the absence of the filmmaker – but also of the two husbands – and the situation of displacement for both women. This interaction – between the people performing and the critic reflecting on how to understand what they did – would be stifled if a psychoanalytic apparatus were let loose on this event. This is as useful a lesson as any for a scholar interested in interdisciplinarity. It takes us out of the somewhat despairing ‘anything goes’ posture that the flag of interdisciplinarity seems to cover too often, and which the indifferent use of the terms multi- or transdisciplinarity betrays. The insight is the result of the shift from an essentialist concept of a static culture to a performative, confrontational concept of what could be called ‘the cultural’. In this adoption of Fabian’s concept of culture as a process of contestation and in analogy to Mouffe’s distinction between politics and the political, I see a possibility for articulating an intimate cultural dynamic in the globalised world: the inter-cultural, indeed (Figure 7.9). Facing Speech Massaouda’s and Ilhem’s performances of intercultural contact were done on the basis of a close collaboration of the face and the word. Indeed, the spoken word is central to these performances of contact across divisions as well as to the installation. The word is deployed in an attempt to turn a condescending act of ‘giving voice’ into an affirmation of everyone’s right to be given that voice. Video binds the image we see to the sound we hear. That sound is, in this case, primarily and almost exclusively the human voice and the spoken words it utters. Speech, then, becomes the occasion for a positive deployment of interdisciplinarity, one that operates through intermediality. First, the centrality of the spoken word impinges on the visual form, the close-up.

Film studies have been keen to include sound in their analyses, but the visual appearance of words in subtitles seems to solicit nothing but indifference, both in the film industry, where an ugly outlining of words pollutes the most beautiful images, and in the work of scholars who tend to ignore that aspect. In Nothing is Missing I have attempted to experiment with the visualisation of speech in order to make the most of the convergence of words and images. The ‘surtitles’, for example, make it easier to read the words and watch the faces at the same time.15 In order to further privilege the voice of the mothers, the films consist of single unedited shots of their faces as they speak and listen. The personal situation presupposes sincerity. At the same time, they are acutely aware of the public nature of the speech they are producing in front of the camera. The nature of this performance is closer to theatricality, in the critical sense, than to traditional filmmaking. As theatre, the situation is closer to improvised and inquiring forms of theatre than to perfectly mastered public forms.16 Second, the translations presented as surtitles also embody the close bond between the linguistic and the visual aspects of the images – the bond between face and speech. As mentioned earlier, the viewer is confronted with different languages, foreign to most, audible in their foreignness and visible in a visualised translation. Placed above their faces, the language is both made important and presented as somewhat of a burden. English as the universal entrance is exploited as well as denaturalised, both by this visual foregrounding and by the translations themselves. Translations are as literal as possible, bringing out the poetry in the original languages without sacrificing to clarity. None of the translators are native speakers of English. Their assignment was to help me stay as close as possible to the phrasings the women used. This method results in this ‘accented’ English that maintains the bicultural status of the communication. 15  The books by Michel Chion on sound in cinema, beginning in 1988, are useful. 16  This last sentence connects to the discussion of the sonic image in Madame B (Chapter 9). On the rhetoric of sincerity, see Alphen, Bal and Smith (2008).

Finally, the most acute intermediality occurs in the faces, which visibly produce the sound of the voices through their movement, thus yielding the movement of the image by means of sound (Figure 7.10). For this, with the language we do not understand, and the need to translate, all in one, the face is the actor. It is really difficult to separate sound from vision, since the mouths articulate with the rhythm of the sounds. This is not simply a case of the ‘moving image’ of cinema. Instead, the moving quality becomes a poetic, self-reflective statement about the medium that reintegrates what the predominance of English as universal language has shattered. This contrasts to the particular home-boundedness resulting from a lack of education, in turn aggravated by misogyny and colonialism. In this way, the face and its acts become the emblematic instance of video’s power to transgress boundaries. For Critical Freedom In Nothing is Missing I do address actual migration, but not as the thematic heart of the work. That heart, rather, is the encounter with the faces as negotiated universality, where globalisation meets and inflects intimacy. The focus on the face embodies the act of facing in its three meanings, staged as acts of mutuality facilitating contact. The emphasis on activity reflects back on the face itself. No longer the site of representation and expression, the face has become an agent of action: what this installation demonstrates is what faces can do, rather than how to do things with faces. How, then, can the face be a universal, without presuming that facial expression is cross-culturally present or stable? The face faces, looking us in the face, which makes the viewer the interlocutor. It faces something that is hard to live down – here, the severance of the primary bond that humanism construes as defining for humanity: that between mother and child. In these videos of acting faces, that event is qualified as larger than the individual. All women speak in understated tones of the causes Figure 7.9  Guilhermina; Cuernavaca, Mexico. Video still. Figure 7.10  Hamdiah; Gaza, Palestine. Video still. Figure 7.11  Elena; Bucovina, Romania. Video still.

of the child’s departure, and they do so in terms for which Western cultures can assume some measure of historical responsibility, if only ‘we’ reason with Spinoza. The severances, all having different causes in the past and being experienced differently in the present, are lived as what for me is the ultimate tragedy: that all of the mothers say they are happy about the sore fact that their child left. These backgrounds are understated because they can neither be eliminated from the present nor be allowed to overrule the existence of the mothers in an everyday that is also rich and sometimes happy. Hence the discourse intimated in the installation’s title – the one on which Massaouda ends her eventual hard-won openness about what matters most to her as a mother: that her son finds bread to eat. As I will discuss in the final chapter, the present is as important in realising what memories can do, as the past when what is remembered took place. Facing these present pasts, this kind of recognisable and perhaps, dare I say the word, universal motherhood that results nevertheless fulfils the becoming of who we are in the present: facing these pasts together so that ‘we’ can ‘be’ is part of our own potential of becoming.17 But how can we do that? Making contact, the third and most important act implied in facing, facilitates that becoming – becoming world citizens, building our existence on mobility without having to move. This making of contact is suggested as an effect of the insistent facing in Nothing is Missing. What faces can do is stage encounters. This is the point of the mothers’ faces – their empowerment. In the installation, the face is constantly present, in close-up but not as close as possible. As a visual form, the close-up itself is the face: There is no close-up of the face. The close-up is the face, but the face precisely in so far as it has destroyed its triple function [individuation, socialization, 17  The phrase ‘present pasts’ alludes to the title of Andreas Huyssen’s relevant 2003 book.

communication] . . . the close-up turns the face into a phantom . . . the face is the vampire. (Deleuze 1986, 99) If the close-up is the face, the face is also the close-up. Hence the slight distance nevertheless built into the image to avoid locking the viewer up and denying the women any space at all: to avoid facile conflation and appeals to sentimentality; to give the face a frame within which it can exercise its mobility and agency; to make the images also look a bit like the busts of Roman emperors and other dignitaries. That slight distance, then, provides the space for a certain kind of freedom (Figure 7.11). This would be a freedom à la Spinoza – a freedom that is ‘critical’. Critical freedom, wrote James Tully in 1995, is the practice of seeing the specificity of one’s own world as one among others. Intertemporally, this freedom sees the present as fully engaged with a past that, insofar as it is part of the present, can be rewritten a little more freely. The act of inter-facing can do that. The term, or illusion, of universality may not be the most felicitous one to characterise this act, but accompanied by the verb ‘confronting’ it makes sense beyond a relativism that implies turning one’s back on such faces.

8. Cultural Citizenship vs Identity Becoming Vera State of Suspension Separations Aleksandr Pushin, Eugeni Onegin Introduction: Citizenship Political, Colonial, Cultural A few years ago, when I showed the documentary Becoming Vera to an international audience in Germany, a French viewer-participant expressed his astonishment that we had made such a ‘French’ film. The remark clearly went beyond the obvious, namely that the child who is the film’s main character is, in fact, French. She was born in Paris, although brought over from Cameroon for the occasion; her mother is primarily French, although of Russian descent. Vera goes to school in France, and hence, she is in the process of being shaped by that forceful school system I admire and find confining at the same time, even if she spends much of her summer holidays in Fumban, the capital of Bamun, in Cameroon. All these forms of Frenchness are subject to some qualification, but then again, these are minor.

That colleague’s remark was also more than the expected French-­ centredness of the French. But to get that, I had to ‘become French’ myself: identify with a French look at the film. After a while of that exercise it dawned on me how much of the portions of the film that are not devoted to Vera’s life in Paris are also strongly coloured by Frenchness. That must have been what he meant! Going through some of these, I will try to point out what ‘cultural citizenship’, as I call it to distinguish it from both nationality and identity, can mean, and how it is constructed and transmitted. The case of a young child, still blissfully unaware of the pressure of cultural identity that our time exerts on its citizens, seems to lend itself quite well to such an inquiry. Therefore, I will focus on her dawning, or ‘becoming’, cultural citizenship, and the various framings that contribute to it. A clear case is the Palestinian who speaks in our 2005 documentary Access Denied. This man, Ihab Saloul, says two things during that film. One is that, as a Palestinian, he has no passport, hence, no national identity. He is a citizen of a non-existing country; falling under Israeli dominance and yet deprived of that identity as well. He actually keeps saying ‘no identity’, as if national identity is primary to give access to an identity in general. The other thing he says is that he doesn’t know how to be anything else than Palestinian. Concretely, being Palestinian is like having a cultural citizenship where no administrative support for it exists. This, as the film suggests, makes the cultural citizenship, the identification with Palestine, its history and its ongoing plight, only more forceful, inevitable and unconditioned. This intimates that oppression stimulates not repression but the opposite, the production, even the cultivation of cultural citizenship. Since Saloul, then a PhD student, has become a scholar of (cultural) memory, I will say more about this film and his work in the final chapter, where memory is central. Here, I want to explore the cultural nature of identity, in order to propose the notion of cultural citizenship as a mode of belonging that stays away from the politics of nation states, as well as from the bossiness, the power structure, that so frequently pertains to belonging – under threat of expulsion. To take the insight I gleaned from Saloul’s appearance and statements in Access Denied to Becoming Vera, several things we had filmed

with a very different notion in mind fall into place as ‘French’. And to highlight the parallel with Saloul’s allegiance to ‘being Palestinian’, the most obvious entrance into this analysis is the ref lection by Vera’s father, when he says that ‘contact’, as colonisation is called with a denying euphemism, only strengthened the culture of Bamun. He says: since the confrontation with Europe very specific mechanisms . . . of resistance and survival thanks to which the kingdom of Bamun survives the major political elements of the history of the 20th century in Africa and in Cameroon and that this kingdom keeps . . . . . . still the contours at least the formal aspects . . . Resistance and survival, or resistance for survival, has clearly saved the kingdom from demise. As in the case of Saloul, the coloniser, in this case France, has thus strengthened instead of weakened the cultural citizenship of the Bamun people. The ‘Frenchness’ of Vera, the situation, and the film itself cannot be severed from this political aspect, in which colonialism remains a stubborn presence, even in allegedly postcolonial times. Her father is himself a case in point: having been educated, first, in the colonial French school system, then in a Parisian university, he nevertheless returned to occupy his position in the kingdom. More than that, he takes his small daughter’s position as a link in the lineage quite seriously, as he explains: of the ancient organisation always based on lineage, a political idea as long as the njis survive and the transmission continues the kingdom of Bamun survives, hence

she is called to . . . . . . ensure the continuity From this perspective, we can see the entire organisation of the ritual around Vera’s enthronement as a French-driven assertion of Bamun cultural citizenship. In this way, cultural citizenship includes the polemic against past acts of violence and keeps those in the present; as in Huyssen’s book, ‘present pasts’. Becoming French in Cameroon and African in Russia With her Cameroonian father of princely status and French-born mother with Russian ancestors of high noble status, little Vera LoumpetGalitzine is growing up as ‘simply’ French. She goes to nursery school, where we see her in her class, a situation echoing her father’s explanation of the Frenchness of his own education, where he got to sing songs about the threat to French civilisation posed by the ‘barbarians’ – the savage hordes of ‘Germains’ – French for Germanic. Never mind the resonance between that image of barbarism and his own first name, Germain. Many of Vera’s self-made songs and stories echo what she has learnt in school, at home and at her grandmother’s, as well as in Cameroon. Of her highly charged intercultural inheritance she is unaware. Her maternal grandmother, who remains more ‘Russian’ than her mother, often picks her up from school and takes her home, singing Russian songs to her, and telling Russian stories. As we saw in Chapter 5, Vera calls her by the Russian word for Gran, ‘Buka’. But some day, Vera’s cultural unawareness had to change. Her parents were bound to transmit to her some of what they got transmitted to them, fragments of other cultures than that of Paris. The integration of those elements without conflicted fragmentation is a form of negotiating borders. We sought to capture that change in the film, as a documentation of how cultural transmission happens. We follow her to her school and neighbourhood activities in France, to Cameroon and to Russia. It all began with a typical ethnographic situation, when we witnessed how, in Fumban, the capital of the kingdom, at barely three, Vera was initiated

as nji mongu, the oldest daughter of the nji (prince) of Bamun. The ceremony took two full days, a time span unusual for a child so young. The first day, the women performed the ritual; the second day, the men. Thanks to Vera’s mother, who fixed the dates of both the ceremony and my visit for another purpose (the project discussed in the previous chapter), both these occasions coincided with the bi-annual festival Nguon, in which the king is celebrated. Vera’s father looks upon his daughter’s status in the Bamun tradition with a double look. Double, not divided; his commitment to her status in Bamun is total, even if he seems not wholeheartedly convinced of the ethnographic ‘truth’ of it all: she must naturally play her role even without knowing it I asked the other njis don’t you think she’s very good? and they answered ‘no it’s not she who acts’ Perhaps Vera’s cultural citizenship of Bamun, complementing her Frenchness, will be inflected by this striking integration of commitment with the scepticism of anthropological canniness he incurred in French university. A similar double allegiance shines through Vera’s behaviour. As her father proudly commented on her being ‘good’, and the elders consider her ritual occupation by the ancestors’ spirits, she sits still for hours while the women and men of her father’s people dance around her (Figure 8.1). This was quite astonishing and moving indeed. But just when the images suggest a small girl made the object of an incomprehensible ritual, she looks up and connects to someone outside the frame (Figure 8.2). This was the second day, when the men perform the ritual. Figure 8.1  Vera looks down. Bored? Photo: Nanna Verhoeff. Figure 8.2  Vera looks up, connecting to someone outside the group. Photo: Mieke Bal. Figure 8.3 Vera during the hair-cutting and burying ceremony. Photo: Nanna Verhoeff.

At another moment, on the first, the women’s day, during another ritual that involves cutting her hair and burying it in the river wrapped in a palm leaf, her self-absorbed face lights up in a smile to someone (Figures 8.3 and 8.4). Clearly, she is both ‘inside’ the situation and distanced from it. The notion of ‘out-of-frame’ (hors-champ) is meaningful here. This confirmed our intuitive take on the situation. For, this ethno­ graphic moment was not what we sought to capture in this film. Instead, it was the way identities cannot be taken wholesale – neither whole nor unified. The older view of identity would inevitably lead to a view of Vera’s identity as ‘fragmented’ or, as American discourse has it, ‘hyphenated’. She would be French-Cameroonian, for example. According to the colleague who considered the film so French, this would be, I suppose, illogical. And I have to say, the more I think about it, more I agree with his assessment. The relation to Vera’s other legacy confirms this. Her mother, also an anthropologist and art historian, took Vera to Russia for the first time, to encounter her side of where she comes from – an idea that emerged from the becoming of this documentary. In Russia, in Moscow and its surroundings, she visited the estate of her mother’s ancestors, who were exiled during the revolution. This visit meant a lot to Vera’s mother, who has deep feelings about her cultural background. Here, Vera runs around in the setting of historical socialites described and sometimes mocked in Pushkin’s writings, where strict social rules determined gendered lives. A hospital, a railway station, a town and a palace, all called after her mother’s name, cannot but astonish the little girl. Thus, as in Fumban, along with the cultural identity, it is her class identity that is mirrored to her, although the meaning of ‘class’ is very different in these contexts. And this is as much in tension with her everyday situation in Paris as is her status as oldest daughter of the nji in Bamun. Her Frenchness is bound to a class ‘normality’ from which the two other aspects of her background set her apart. Clearly, for Vera these visually engaging landscapes seem easily integrated into her rich fantasy world. She dances, sings and runs Figure 8.4  Vera smiles at her cousin. Video still. Figure 8.5  Vera points at a black man in the background of the painting. Video still. Figure 8.6  Vera comments to filmmaker Michelle on Pushkin’s hair. Video still.

around. Equally clearly, like Pushkin’s major heroine Tatiana, and in contrast to the vision of the Elders in Fumban, she takes bits of her being into her own hands. In Russia, she looks at paintings and sculptures in the stately homes her mother shows her, but onto these pieces of pictorial fiction she projects her imagined stories. These, in turn, are clearly influenced by her cultural surroundings. For example, as if practising the teaching of image-thinking by American artist Fred Wilson, in a painting of Cleopatra she points out the black man in the background (Figure 8.5). Her noticing this traditionally marginal figure of an African suggests her awareness of that side of her background, and her determination to alert her environment to it. Wilson, who describes himself as of ‘African, Native American, European and Amerindian’ descent, made an impactful exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992–3, Mining the Museum, in which he did just that: pointing out, hence foregrounding, the African presences in the Western canon, invariably as background. This agency plays out most clearly in Vera’s forms of address. The smile to the outside of the frame in Fumban is one example of this. That smile, asserting her autonomy from the ritual she so submissively seems to undergo, extends the frame of that temporary confinement to include the outside. In Russia, she talks to the stone lion, the bronze cat and imagined bandits on a toy telephone (Chapter 5). How can you film the growing cultural awareness of a child so young, who does not speak about nor analyse cultural distinctions and encounters? Attempting to imagine what all these different places looked like to Vera, we wondered to what extent they concerned her cultural identity as anything other than French. What does she see, think or imagine? Thanks to her strong agency, she reverses the camera’s imposition; she looks into it, and tells us, the filmmakers, what she sees, imagines and thinks. Meanwhile, her parents explained their own intercultural situation and its potential implications for Vera. They have, of course, their own mixed feelings about the mixture they live, and the drawbacks this entails for their personal and professional lives. This turns the film into a kind of mélange of a different kind to Vera’s allegedly mixed cultural

identity. While we do not speak to her in the film, we as filmmakers tried to put two and two together, literally by using the parents’ utterances as voice-over, and figuratively, by seeking combinations of voices and images where contrast vies with harmony, so that it is not so clear who is boss. One form we sought to give to Vera’s relative autonomy was the avoidance of chronology. Instead, we hop around from moment to moment where Vera’s playing becomes learning, a young child’s mode of image-thinking, as a means to becoming Vera: the singular human being who is like no one else. How French is she? Becoming Pushkin We have seen in Chapter 5 how Vera is also an expert storyteller, with an awareness of her agency in that activity. For the filmmakers, the image-thinking extended to literature when, during this project, we discovered the strange chance encounter between Vera and Pushkin. Alexandra, Vera’s mother (and, along with British artist Michelle Williams Gamaker, co-author of the film), told me that her late father, Prince Boris Galitzine, had been commissioned by the govern­ ment of Cameroon to make a film about Pushkin’s roots. The footage he made has not been located to date, and Boris died before the film could be edited. But when I asked around about Pushkin’s background, most people in the know told me he was from Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, and of princely family. I have not found any substantiation of these claims. As to the former, I began to suspect the entire Ethiopia story served purposes other than historical truth. Perhaps the princely origin served to obliterate the subsequent slavery story, and Ethiopia a ‘the northerner the whiter, hence the better’ version of his ethnic back­g round. Here, a comparison with Vera becomes relevant. Awareness of cultural background is clearly an issue for Pushkin as his masterpiece Eugeni Onegin (1833) demonstrates. And as our film documents, such awareness inevitably becomes an issue for Vera too. But what the child cannot articulate, the literary genius can be expected to fold into his writings. While the sources on Pushkin’s background that place his

great-grandfather in what is now Cameroon are convincing, in view of argumentative modes I am more interested in the reasons why the Ethiopia (‘Abyssinia’) version came up, and more so, why it remained current. A figure whose (black) great-grandfather was reputed to have stood up for the emancipation of (white) serfs – an allusion to which occurs in Onegin – presents the complexities of racial thinking, including the racialisation of class. And Pushkin was very proud of both sides of his ancestry – his Russian nobility as well as his African origin and its nobility. This brings Vera clearly into his orbit.1 Pushkin, who is sometimes portrayed in ways that make his racial features invisible – including by himself – and sometimes with exaggerated black features, again including by himself (in drawn self-portraits; in the poem ‘My Genealogy’), lends himself perfectly to such politicised mystification. The most amusing embodiment of this contradiction in Becoming Vera is the little girl’s response to Pushkin’s bust in ‘Viaziomy’, now the Pushkin museum (Figure 8.6). The bust is white, while the portrait has African features. This offers an opportunity for learning and un-learning ‘race-reading’. Vera is not fooled by the colour of the marble. Pointing to her own hair, then to the bust, she suggests that, unlike hers, Pushkin’s hair hasn’t yet been done according to her own recently acquired stylish bunches. She identifies enough with the white marble figure to compare notes on their hairdo. Incidentally, this awareness of her hair – a recurring albeit subliminal motif in the film – entails not only an awareness of her African roots but also of her femininity, as well as of her age – her growing up, ‘becoming’ Vera. Pushkin’s status as the greatest Russian poet, the icon, even genitor, of the Russian literary language – in short, as a key figure of national identity of a white-peopled nation that maintained the custom of slavelike servitude – has increased the writer’s function as an example for the emancipatory ambitions of African Americans. This importance 1  On Pushkin’s awareness of his mixed ancestry, see Binyon (2003, 3–4). For the sake of a few comparisons, I include three different translations in the bibliography: the most widely accessible one, by Charles Johnston; a revised, modernised one by James E. Falen, and Vladimir Nabokov’s too-literal one.

might have influenced the eagerness of critics to place the writer’s great-grandfather in sub-Saharan Africa. Pushkin as a deconstructionist of racism; Pushkin as a role model for a relativising conception of national identity. Pushkin, in other words, is a double-edged model for multicultural societies.2 In both aspects, he also serves to deny the consistency and relevance of both ‘race’ and ‘nation’ as ‘classifixations’. Today more than ever, such deconstructions are useful. The Abyssinian story must be read as a counterpoint to the ambition to appropriate Pushkin for the enhancement of black culture. This makes the story suspiciously defensive. While there were serious stakes in that ambition, the opposite claim was, according to Anne Lounsbery, an attempt to bleach his origins: ‘“Abyssinian” meant “not really black” or even “fundamentally Caucasian”’ (2000, 48). The issue is even more confusing with such phonetically close Russian words as ‘arap’ for black, ‘rap’ for slave, and ‘arab’ for North African. The issue may be moot if we believe that such racial categorisations as were still rampant in the time on which Lounsbery focuses are no longer current – wishful thinking. But the Cameroonian connection is significant for my purposes here for other reasons. What is clear, and even more relevant, is the fundamental ‘hybridity’, mélange or mestizaje of practically everything about Pushkin: his origins, his writing and his fictional characters. Consider the characterisation of Onegin as a ‘lyrical diary’, in which ‘Pushkin documents his own growth and charts for himself a space of possibility’ (Hasty 1999: 4). This is, mutatis mutandis, what Vera does in the fourth year of her life. Creating a space of possibility outside the frame – literally, when establishing contact with the hors-champ, the outside of the camera, but also of the film, and of the cultural citizenship imposed on her – is what she does most typically through her address to creatures of her choice and creation. These juxtapositions provide Vera’s story with historical density, multinational opacity and, thus, meaningful mélange.

2  Lounsbery (2000) points this out, quoting Rogers (1972, 87).

Pre-posterous Encounters of the Third Kind The connections between Vera and Pushkin pop up as complex, multilayered connections. I will allege a few of these to suggest that Vera and the film are, indeed, ‘French’ but that, through them, this very notion changes meaning, from political to cultural. Just before the confrontation with the bust, evoking the times of Pushkin while strolling around the estate that once belonged to her great-grandparents and now houses the Pushkin Museum – hence, at a moment of literally grounding herself in the writer’s footsteps as well as his current location – Alexandra sums up the various connections: my daughter who is half Cameroonian next to the Pushkin estate with a great-grandmother who was Pushkin’s model for ‘Queen of Spades’ . . .  Connections geographically remote and near, as well as literary links, emerge together to suggest a past come alive through the presence of a little girl. Alexandra then recounts how the Pushkin family came to church in the Galitzine estate, Viaziomy house, because they did not have a church of their own. Her great-grandmother barred the young Aleksandr from courting her daughters. In this context she mentions the possibility that slavery was the background of Pushkin’s ancestor Gannibal’s arrival in Russia: by the way, they say that Pushkin who was a . . . descendant of a young Cameroonian who was probably taken in slavery to the court of Peter the Great Figures  8.7 and 8.8 Vera horrified by the story of racism. Video stills. Figure  8.9 Telling about the encounter with the phantom. Video still.

was courting the young Galitzine girls hence my great-great grandmother had refused him access to Viaziomy house At that moment in the film, Vera covers her eyes as if horrified by the story of slavery (Figures 8.7 and 8.8). When her mother continues suggesting the great-grandmother’s probable racism and classism in this interdiction, Vera sits on the stairs making indignant faces. It was after this little scene that she criticises Pushkin’s hairdo. Of course, the juxtaposition of Alexandra’s story and Vera’s gesture is an effect of montage, hence, a fictional connection between two documentary images; a case of image-thinking. And it is likely that Vera herself is role-playing here. Which does not make her reaction to her mother’s account insincere, implausible or totally fictional. The connections between this small sequence and Russia’s bard are manifold and funny. First, as the most tangible site of encounter, there is the bust, so remarkably a target of identification for the little girl, but not as Russian; rather as African. An African identity is clear in the bust, most unequivocally in the frizzy hair. And that hair is in fact Vera’s one and only clearly ‘African’ feature. Vera’s hair, densely curled, golden-blonde, comes up several times in the film, as a modest motif. It is remarked upon, braided in African style, and the hairdo changes several times, thus attracting attention. And in the little scene with the bust, she is clearly proud of her tasteful bunches. In semiotic terms, the encounter is based on a subtle iconicity that Vera’s finger, a true index, points out to the viewer. While her mother is talking about the Cameroon connection, Vera is running around in the grounds of the palace where the Galitzine family socialised with the Pushkins. That her mother’s great-grandmother ruled there when Pushkin was a neighbour, who presumably visited, makes this geographical overlap amusing. If, as Alexandra thinks, that same ancestor prohibited Pushkin from courting her daughter, for reasons we can only guess at, the following verses from Onegin suddenly receive a very personal target, in addition to their obvious critique by hyperbole of the strictures of High Society:

you too, mamas, I pray attend it, and watch your daughters closer yet, yes, focus on them your lorgnette, or else . . . or else, may God forfend it! (1, XXIX) This particular ‘mama’ is avenged when Pushkin took her as a model for his unflattering portrait of the unbearable countess of his short story ‘The Queen of Spades’ (1833). The reason I bring this up, through Alexandra, is not to write a small supplement to the biography of Pushkin. Instead, the visual–verbal interchange between the mother who knows the history of her family and the child who is still oblivious to it brings the poet back into the present, and gives the child a fragment of her past. The strange encounter, determined by chance, constitutes a moment of learning. Not only is Vera slowly becoming aware of her background, in this scene by hearing the adults talk about it. She is also in a place of rules and regulations. This is a normal part of every child’s upbringing, but may be more complex where those regulations are suddenly attached to, even anchored in a cultural past so far unknown to her, yet which she is expected to uphold. As Vera’s maternal grandmother, or Buka, says in the film, speaking as much about herself as about her expectations for Vera: in the end, a double culture is the best and the worst thing in the world it can be enriching and it can be a heavy, heavy burden but the burden of that double culture . . . to disappoint neither daddy nor mummy that will be very hard It is simply the way cultural images infuse ‘real life’. Vera’s path is still open, but, as I argue in what follows, everything we have seen during that year points to her growing closer to a contemporary Tatiana.

Reality in Fiction Caryl Emerson (1998) claims that Pushkin was especially creative when living in confinement – in exile, for example – and this capacity for the creative imagination when outside resources are reduced has clearly been projected onto his most endearing heroine. Tatiana turns the boredom of the countryside into a fertile stimulant for her imagination. Confinement as a form of poetic liberation is, then, the bridge not only between Tatiana and her creator, but also between Pushkin’s heroine and ours. For, Vera, too, is an impressively creative person, and perhaps this also has to do with being doubly ‘confined’: as a child, always depending on adults; and as an only child, without siblings to play with and learn from. Moreover, she is brought to different places and contexts, where, through lack of a sibling-playmate, she is often left to her own devices. And these are a great resource; she turns her experiences into fantasies. At the end, in her conversation with the imaginary bandits (Chapter 5), she becomes, like Pushkin’s Tatiana and Flaubert’s Emma, a writer of sorts. Vera turns every moment of waiting – of which there are many in the life of every only child with professional parents – into an opportunity to try out something new. She talks to stone, china and bronze animals. Some of those experiments involve her cultural citizenship in convoluted ways. For example, Paris is where she can watch movies on DVD. Hence, it is in Paris that she watches her favourite Indian-dancer movie while her parents are busy co-editing the film about her. Right after watching this Indian film, which supplements her cultural baggage with both stereotypical Indianness and stereotypical femininity, dressed up in her princess dress, she hums the melody of the Bollywood film while rocking her Barbie doll. She later thinks she recognises the Indian dancer on a poster in Moscow. Like her Russian predecessor Tatiana, Vera also absorbs the ideological influences of her readings and other cultural pressures. She tells, sings and chants stories about wolves, hunters, princesses and witches, and is quite accommodating to phantoms. But even at this young age she is not a simple passive recipient of this cultural nourishment. While she is undisturbed when talking on that imaginary telephone to two bandits,

her conversation with a lion in front of the entrance to the Sheremetiev Palace is not to be interrupted. To the lions she gives new words and names, and, significantly, at that moment of creativity she is not available to reality, in the person of her mother. Consider this bit of trialogue: VERA: you will be the most beautiful ‘zarole’ of the king you will be ‘cercule’ ALEXANDRA: Vera! VERA: yes? go mind you own business! She invents names and/or functions for the lion. And, rather than being unfriendly to her mother, the last sentence of this fragment expresses her need for autonomy, and the importance of her fantasy life relative to the expected obedience to her parents. Buka can rest assured. Vera’s encounter with the phantom clearly demonstrates her savvy awareness of both her own fictionalisation and the nature of her environment. She tells us: where did he pass? I have seen him! I see him, right behind the poppies a big phantom! he is very white and he comes from Paris and I was scared and I hid near my mum on her back I was going to sleep and then I heard him . . . ‘how do you do?’ but he said ‘I am going to eat you!’ and I quickly hid on my mum’s back moreover, he went that way

Vera shows that the imagination is most productive when kept firmly tied to reality. While telling us of the visit of the phantom and her search for him in the cemetery, Vera is looking in the camera, or at the cinematographer, as well as pointing to places in her environment, without displaying any signs of fear (Figure 8.9). She knows where she is, to whom she is talking, and sets her story in the place where we are. This is the logic of place in cinema. Her canny look places her somewhere between actress and poet. The intimacy with the cinematographer and the swift shifts in roles she performs demonstrate that her identity is neither whole nor unified, and this would, I presume, reflect on her cultural citizenship. This look in the camera and the storytelling tone mixed with real excitement demonstrate that she is well aware she is making this up and, in the process, claiming superior knowledge over the operator who is being informed. This, then, is the ‘history’ – the history of the present, the intercultural reality as lived – that Vera shows us. Vera’s address to her parents, the filmmakers and the viewers tells us that such mixtures are not naïve or romantic, but a savvy way of dealing with confinement – in gender, class or culture, three forms of belonging that lead to a notion of cultural citizenship – to pick and choose from and thus constitute, or become, oneself. For this self-building she deploys a feature of Frenchness: a literary literacy. Memory, Nostalgia, Exile This literary inclination is perhaps the most profound ‘Frenchness’ in Vera’s becoming. And although her mother is specialised in things visual, I speculate that this feature is her primary contribution to Vera’s cultural citizenship. The Russianness, in turn, inflected as it is in class-consciousness, is mediated through a nostalgia that can only reconfirm the radical loss of that past – which places Vera more firmly still in France. Again, there is an anecdotal-biographical and a literary side to this. Across generations, equally distant on both sides, Vera and Pushkin are neighbours in Russia, compatriots in Cameroon: in spite of the anachronisms involved in this formulation, the

configuration is striking. Alexandra’s great-grandmother knew Pushkin; Pushkin’s great-grandfather knew Cameroon, perhaps as a nji or the son of one. But less anecdotally, between Becoming Vera and Onegin these places play a crucial part in producing another kind of history, when a shared emotion infuses both texts; one that comes across as very modern in the one, and as historical in the other. This emotion concerns the relationship between a person and a place – what we could now consider cultural, or geographical, citizenship. It is a resource of creativity for Pushkin as well as for Vera, who lives it in a way that is more and more frequent in the contemporary world. This relationship is figured less through narratorial voices than through focalisation. In my attempt to sever citizenship from national belonging, I seek to extend the notion of dialogic reading, so very Russian in theory (through Bakhtin) and literary in practice, to translations of Onegin in connection to Becoming Vera. The term ‘dialogue’ suggests spoken language, but its Bakhtinian resonances evoke a mélange of discourses. Consider the following passage, often quoted among the passages where Pushkin reflects upon his background: and there, beneath your noonday sky, my Africa, where waves break high, to mourn for Russia’s gloomy savour, land where I learned to love and weep land where my heart is buried deep. (I: 50; Johnston translation) For Pushkin, it took exile to Odessa to feel the pull of Africa. But this Africa, an ‘imagined homeland’ no doubt, further south from Odessa, serves as a springboard to be able to ‘mourn’ (Falen’s translation has ‘sigh’) for Russia. Nabokov embeds the southern element and Africa within the ‘sigh’ for Russia (‘and sigh, ’mid the meridian swell, beneath the sky of my Africa, for sombre Russia’; 1964, I: 120). Without having access to the original, my feeling is that this translation misses something – not literally, since

Nabokov’s is likely to be semantically the most ‘faithful’ translation, but emotionally.3 According to many critics, exile is a source of creativity, to the same extent, and partly for the same reasons, as confinement is according to Emerson (1998). But exile produces more than confinement. In addition to throwing the individual back onto his or her own imagination, as does confinement for Pushkin, exile generates longing. This is ambivalent, since the place to which access is barred by exile is also the place of hostility, the place guilty of the exile’s exclusion. This ambivalence is an even greater resource for the imagination. Longing and memory generate particular forms of focalisation. In the ‘my Africa’ passage, the subject exiled to the south is pushed further south by intergenerational memories. Hence, the place of the exile, his (impossible) cultural citizenship is, in a sense, in the middle between the one place, of roots never known, and the other place, of longing, from which the poet was exiled. The passage suggests that exile from the north generates longing for the southern roots, which, in turn, become the basis for a longing-back for the north; a kind of sentimental triangle. But what Pushkin really expresses here is the longing anchored in the intercultural state per se. This we can learn from Becoming Vera.4 In the film, we quote Pushkin’s passage as an oblique comment on something Alexandra says towards the end of the film. Evaluating why, for her, this visit to Russia with her daughter had been so important, she says: in a way it’s Vera who brought me back to Russia and Cameroon has prepared me to 3  For the concept of ‘imagined homeland’, see Alphen (2002). On nostalgia, see the 2001 book by Svetlana Boym, and, for a succinct and concrete analysis, her article from 2000 in Berlant. 4  See Saloul (2020, 245) for a lucid and succinct explanation of ‘memories in exile’, his term for the concept he proposes (Chapter 10). The suggestion that places can be ‘guilty’, metaphorical as it is, has been given literal concreteness in the work of Dutch artist Armando, who devoted his life’s work to the guilt of places that let plants overgrow concentration camp sites. See Alphen (2000).

go back and love Russia so my personal circle is completed This statement comes so close to the sentiment in Pushkin’s Onegin I 51 that it seemed necessary to set them off against each other. If we realise that Alexandra is as French as Pushkin is Russian, and that Cameroon is her ‘third place’ as Odessa is for the poet, the Onegin passage suggest that Alexandra misses one element of her geographical triangle: France. Unless, that is, we consider Vera herself Alexandra’s ‘French connection’. This triangular emotion is a product of focalisation: barely conscious, yet infused with feeling, the triangle is a structure waiting to be breathed to life, like the earth creature in Genesis 2:7. Rhythm can do, here, what semantics cannot. The rhythm of this triangular nature of this exiledriven longing – perhaps nostalgia – is flattened away by Nabokov’s translation, literally correct as it may be. Syntactically embedding Africa within the nostalgia for Russia, he turns the evocation into a mere metaphor. Falen and Johnston may be more removed from Pushkin’s literal words, but they both preserve the triangular nature of the emotion, which, I speculate, must also breathe through the Russian text. This turns the sentiment as it comes across in these two translations into a ‘diagrammatic icon’ according to Peirce’s classification of signs. It is this nuance, not expressible in words, that poetry can create, as a rhythmic thought-image.5 Nostalgia is usually considered the product of ideological manipulation. Yet, in both Aleksandr’s and Alexandra’s words it becomes a resource. Thanks to the right mélange of imagination and reality, it is through the emotional experience of the irretrievable lack – his and her lost yet never possessed past – that a balance can be achieved. The ‘third place’ provides the wedge to open up a dyadic structure that risks being a confining and generating idealisation. This makes the structure I am pointing out here 5  Van der Lubbe and van Zoest explain this as ‘interference switching’ (1997). Vellodi’s Deleuzian study of Tintoretto demonstrates the relevance of the concept of ‘diagrammatic’ (2018).

comparable to the need of the parental figure to open up the dyad of mother and child, according to psychoanalysis. It also, rigorously, determines that the object of nostalgia is, precisely, lost.6 Nabokov’s literalism misses another nuance compared to both poetic translations. The qualification of Russia is, in his prosaic words, ‘where / I suffered, where I loved, / where I buried my heart’. Falen foregrounds an inchoative aspect absent in Nabokov: ‘Where first I loved, where first I wept, / And where my buried heart is kept’. The last word (‘is kept’) makes the present part of this evocation of the past. This is crucial for cultural citizenship. This translation includes the aspect from which another sense of ‘roots’ can be derived: as felt origin. Johnston has, more poetically, ‘land where I learned to love and weep, / land where my heart is buried deep’. ‘Land’ foregrounds the semantics of exile and nostalgia. The verb ‘learning’ retains Falen’s inchoative but adds an aspect that is key to our film: the learning the child is involved in throughout the year we followed her. Learning is both the ‘nurture’ aspect of the ‘nature or nurture’ question, and presupposes a ‘becoming’, a development of subjectivity in interaction between personal and social – in other words, private and public – influences. Learning, however, mostly follows prescriptive paths laid out by national school systems. Just compare the dance class in Cameroon and the ballet lesson in Paris in our film. In addition to these differences, there is one that I must mention because it inflects the focalisation at stake, although the scholar of Russian I consulted said it is not in the Russian original. This is the use of the second person possessive pronoun in Johnston’s translation, ‘and there, beneath your noonday sky’. To grasp the feeling in this small addition we must consider more of the stanza. This stanza is the most concentrated expression of the triangular desire of exile, nostalgia and longing for return in Onegin. It begins with a sigh for freedom, which brings the poet to the shore (of Odessa). There he watches the weather – preparing the later remark on warmth – and he sees ships – potentially means of escape. As is traditional, the sea is both confining and free. But (Johnston) his craving is triggered by a formal lack of beauty: ‘It’s 6  For more on nostalgia, see Bal (1999, 64–75).

time to drop astern the shape / of the dull shores of my disfavour’. In this masterful rewriting, ‘disfavour’, the understatement for the plight of his enforced exile, rhymes with ‘savour’, a positive word including the sense of taste. Hence, the stanza moves from the lacking formal beauty (dull) to the incorporation of experienced beauty. This rhyme of ‘disfavour’ and ‘savour’, not Nabokov’s syntactic embedding, encloses the evocation of ‘my Africa’, the addressee of the ‘your’ in this translation. Alexandra’s feelings of longing for her ancestors’ Russia is much quieter, more mediated by time, space and life experience. She uses the word ‘complete’ to describe the circle – I have called it a triangle – of exilic nostalgia. Her ‘my personal circle’ resonates with Pushkin’s implied ‘you’ (made explicit by Johnston) – a second person address that is implied by a first person speaking (‘my Africa’). Here, we have the focalisation variant of the addressee, as well as the lyrical in the narrative to which my colleague, the Slavist and semiotician Willem Weststeijn, alerted me long ago. Pushkin’s ‘Africa’ is Alexandra’s Cameroon; a place she has come to know and love in her adult life; he, through stories and imaginary identification with the great ancestor. Cameroon ‘has prepared me to go back and love Russia’ is, then, a quite precise, contemporary expression of a sentiment Pushkin wrote in his fabulous verses two centuries ago, by means of seemingly irrelevant little nuances: ‘my’ and its correlate ‘you’; the geography of desire; the syntax (his or his translator’s) that foregrounds it. And this at a time when Alexandra’s ancestors were none too pleased to see their neighbours’ boy, I imagine, recite poetry to their daughters. The significance of this bit of twenty-first century Pushkiniana becomes clear through the following anecdote. Alexandra told us that when she began dating an African, some Russian friends were quite hostile. The way they expressed their racist anger was hilarious: they said ‘what do you want to demonstrate?’ ‘that we are not good enough for you?’ ‘what do you want to do? fabricate a little Pushkin?’

And this, at the time, was meant as an insult. The slur puts a spin on Vera’s ‘very white’ Parisian phantom, which was so rude while she was so polite to him. A wholehearted, resounding ‘yes’ would be my answer, after having been led, by Vera, to reread Pushkin. The cultural citizenship comprehends all these nuances, emotions and instances of ideological stereotyping. Racism as well as nostalgia; multiple and fractured, past and present; literary, visual and social. Encounters of Cultural Citizenships In the academic year 2007–8, I stumbled on a strange situation, on which I have to be brief. At one and the same time, I was requested to co-make two documentaries, by two different experienced filmmakers who didn’t know each other at all. Both Jewish in their felt identity, they each had a personal stake in the film they wanted to make, and needed me to dilute that personal interest. The one was on a post-holocaust Jewish family in Brazil, the other on the collective psyche in contemporary Israel. In addition to the strain on my time, the tenor of the two projects were quite contrastive. That made it thought-provoking and appealing for me; making two very different films simultaneously seemed a novel way to image-think; now with the thinking going on in an implicit discussion, between the two different projects. What became the film Separations constituted a new development in my series of works on migratory culture. It became a strangely mixed autobiographical film. Here, the co-author of the film, Andréa Seligmann Silva, is herself a migrant, from Brazil to the Netherlands, from São Paulo to Amsterdam. She wanted to make an autobiographical film, and explore the question why she and her siblings were so prone to migrating. She had not foreseen that the (post-)holocaust issue would become so prominent. In fact, it was when I saw the footage she brought back from São Paulo that I saw and said the real topic of it was the holocaust, rather than the migration that was its consequence for her parents and may have been so for her and her siblings. In the end, I felt I made an autobiography of someone else: a very intimate encounter with a cultural citizenship in which I had never really participated.

We were co-authors on an equal footing. Andréa had expressed the wish to make a film that would be autobiographical but not self-centred. For her, the latter part was the challenge. For me, the difficulty was the former part, the ‘auto-’. Initially, the question was how to involve myself in such a contradictory project, and in the end, how to disentangle myself from too many subject positions. Andréa wanted to use the opportunity of a family reunion, in São Paulo, of her parents and her siblings to make a film on the question of why her family was so caught up in the foreign – all her siblings, at one time or another, had migrated. When Andréa returned with the footage, on which I had had no influence at all, it turned out that the material showed a different thematic. At least, that is how I saw it, and inflected the film.7 In 1939, when she was three years old – Vera’s age – Andréa’s mother Edith was taken out of her familiar environment and boarded, with her parents, the last ship to leave Germany with Jewish refugees on it. They ended up in Brazil. The little girl, out of her depth linguistically, was put in a German school by well-meaning parents who thought it would do her good to speak her native language. Her fellow pupils, it turned out, mostly children of Nazi families, refused to play with the Jewish girl. The trauma of the separation from her familiar place and relatives, doubled up with the isolation in the school that retroactively ‘explained’ the first one, marked the girl. She grew up to become a prominent psychiatrist. Rather than focusing on the migration of the siblings of Andréa’s generation, in the process of editing – which is where documentaries are largely made – the film could not stay away from the consequences of this traumatic beginning, both in the tendency of the younger family members to migrate, and in Edith’s difficulty in relating, a psychotic crisis that occurred after her retirement, and her inability to let go of her ambitions for her children. For these, going abroad, it seems, means returning. But it also means escaping, a generation later, from something that was confining, incomprehensible and affectively deficient. 7  We did, of course, discuss the project extensively beforehand, and after her return I had the opportunity to film some additional footage in Amsterdam.

The film uses a home video aesthetic to enhance an intimacy between image and spectator that compensates, if possible, for the troubled intimacy within the family. For my own position as co-author of the film, the question was: whose autobiography is this? At first, I completely sided with Andréa, trying to help her elaborate her frustrations and unhappy childhood memories. We were sitting side by side in the editing room, after all, making a film together. The collaboration was fabulous. As the film grew, however, I was hit by the realisation that in terms of my own life – in other words, if this was my autobiography – the resemblance would be greater with Edith’s than with Andréa’s life. Like Edith, I, too, had given priority to a professional career, felt unable to make the opposite choice, and resented the expectation to make such a binary choice in the first place. Yet, the identification with Andréa was not replaced with an identification with Edith. For very different reasons, but also due to her traumatic childhood, I had had a bad relationship with my own mother. I was compelled to go through the emotions of frustration with Andréa, even as I was also drawn to Edith’s inexpressible anxieties over her children’s refusal to comply with her need to compensate, through them, what she had been deprived of. Meanwhile, this film, more clearly than any of the others, demonstrates that underneath the compulsion to migrate there is always a need, a desire and a history. Be it of the holocaust or of colonialism, psychic damage, often paired with economic damage, acts up in migration history. That acting up of history needs to be acknowledged more fully if our migratory culture is to become less anxiously polemical and ‘classifixing’, and more flexibly enriching: a site of encounter, rather than a search for an impossible and undesirable cultural ‘purity’. Impossible Cultural Citizenship The cultural mixture in Becoming Vera is not a model of how cultural citizenship can grow, outside of the stricture of nationality. The process is not always as constructive as it is there. Although the co-maker, Benny Brunner, is also Jewish, and also migrated to Amsterdam, State

of Suspension is a very different film from both Becoming Vera and Separations. Instead of home-movie-like, it is set outside, on the street. It does have a similar informal quality that enhances the documentary plausibility. In addition to a systematic deployment of political satire, what makes the film distinctive is, also, the abundant use of archival footage. Here, during the process of making, the topic did not change. From the beginning, it was meant to be an account – documentary and critical – of the contemporary mentality in Israel. The way fiction in the sense of performative acts got mixed in was also a first in my work. Four political-satirical acts by Israeli comedians Yossi & Itamar form the film’s backbone. Their address to people in the street and in specific sites solicits revealing responses expressive of how Israelis look at the state of their nation. Between these acts we interspersed short collages consisting of archival material, compelling situations, and revealing statements by a variety of people, all related to the current state of Israel, suspended as the nation is, morally paralysed by existential dilemmas. For the political manifestations of the conflict, we included material from the video archive of BTselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, and of the Nakba Archive in Beirut. The archival material we selected from BTselem depicts demolitions of Palestinian houses in Jerusalem, army and settler violence against Palestinians, harassment and humiliation of Palestinians at checkpoints. From the Nakba Archive we selected testimonies of first-generation Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 from their towns and villages in Galilee.8 To end this chapter, I will give a dry description of the film, as an image of the thought that cultural citizenship can not only be ham­ p­ered but precluded by the national identity that supposedly is part of it. The film begins with a cleaner dusting and preparing a room in the old Tel Aviv museum for the day’s guided tour. Then the tour guide explains the historical place: here Ben Gurion read the Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. Music begins at that moment, and a group of young women musicians start singing – against the 8  Yossi Attia and Itamar Rose are a famous Israeli duo of critical performance artists, who consistently work in the public domain.

background voice of Ben Gurion – the most poignant sections of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. These sections are blatantly in contradiction to what subsequently happened. Daniel Dworsky composed the music espec­ially for this film.9 The four-minute scene that reworks the Declaration of Independence into a cinematic segment of a music video clip-like appearance encompasses the entire thematic of the film. During this music scene we contrasted the Declaration’s text with the realities on the ground by splitting the screen, and filling the spaces with archival material of soldiers and settlers perpetrating violent acts against Palestinians, Ben Gurion declaring the state, and the participants in the film reciting a line or two from the Declaration. The design was intended to have all the film’s participants and themes present in this opening scene. Enter the two comedians Yossi & Itamar, whose performances of political satire consist of interactions with people on the street. These are not only hilarious; they go straight to the heart of the collective Israeli psyche. In terms of the film’s ethical and aesthetical position, it is important to realise what you can see immediately but may not grasp straight way: these performances were not filmed with a hidden ‘candid’ camera. The people knew perfectly well they were being filmed. This connects the film to the photographs of Bertien van Manen, where the relationality between photographer and ‘subjects’ or participants is so movingly visible. In the first scene devoted to their acts, they play with a football and follow joggers in a park, then they each present themselves frontally to the camera. This mode of selfpresentation is followed throughout the film whenever interviewees or other participants appear for the first time. The first of the comedians’ act is the request to both Jews and Israeli Arabs, allegedly on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs keen to improve the image of Israel to the world, to sign a white football for a young Palestinian or Jewish boy, respectively, whose legs are said to have been injured during an attack. Some people sign, some won’t, or can’t (‘it doesn’t come from the heart’) 9  Of his many excellent books, Ilan Pappe’s 2006 one documents Ben Gurion’s knowledge and complicity in the breaking of the promises of that Declaration.

and discussions follow. Those who sign are subsequently requested to face the camera and say ‘sorry for the innocent who died’. The responses are poignantly revela­t­ory of the soul of Israeli society. Barely anyone is willing to say sorry. In between episodes of these performances we inserted short portraits of Israelis – Jews and Arabs – of different ages and cultural and religious backgrounds. They range from holocaust survivors to Nakba survivors, from refusniks to settlers, and from peace workers to refugees. These portraits are combined with present-day cultural manifestations of the conflict, and political attitudes vis-à-vis the Israeli Palestinians and the occupied Palestinians. One such manifestation is the systematic erasure of the Palestinian history of the country. This is visible in the spraying over of Arabic street and place names on road signs. An Arab and an Israeli are searching for the remains of a village they knew was there but cannot locate; no traces remain. Gideon Levi, a veteran Haaretz columnist who has been covering the Occupied Territories for twenty years, and his collaborator Miki Kratzman, head of the photography department of the Betsalel Art School in Jerusalem, are the subject of a double portrait. We accompany them on their weekly venture into the West Bank in preparation for Levi’s next column. Between the acts of the comedians we placed short scenes that combine archival material and interviews. The first archival footage seen in the film was clandestinely filmed by a Palestinian resident of the town of Qalqilya where the Israeli army carried out an ‘arrest and destroy’ operation in August 2007. We see men of all ages in their underwear, being marched away handcuffed and blindfolded, and houses being bulldozed down in an orgy of destruction. The voice of a child, presumably the young daughter of the man who did the filming, asks what those people are doing. The contrast between the destruction by bulldozers and the naïve voice of the child carries the sequence. This footage is framed by conversations among teenagers who are facing the decision whether to join the army, and if they join, which unit. We see two groups of teenagers who studied together in the same class at high school: one student who enlists into the army, a second who refuses. Members of the first group are doing their utmost to join

prestigious elite army units, such as the air force to become fighter pilots, or land and sea commando units; members of the second group are willing to spend time in jail and jeopardise potential careers in order to hold to their values. Both groups see themselves as Israeli patriots and both believe that the other’s way will harm Israel. One can notice a subliminal, unconscious body language and facial manifestation of jealousy between members of the two groups, as if some of them would like to change sides – at least for a little while. The comedians follow with their second act. Yossi and Itamar, dressed in a semblance of a blue Israeli police uniform, pretend to be ‘inspectors of patriotism’ working for the (non-existent) Homeland & Security Office and carrying ID cards with which they implausibly wear sunglasses evocative of mafiosi. They block access to a beach for those who cannot prove their patriotism, first and foremost by having served in the army, or by promising that their children will serve. Again, some addressees burst out into a tirade against those whose patriotism is dubious; others laugh it off, see through the act, and refuse to comply. These different responses also mobilise the documentary–fiction tension. After this act of policing, we see another one, real this time, of Israeli soldiers at a ‘flying checkpoint’ – an improvised roadblock – where Palestinian motorists spend hours waiting while the settlers keep driving; there is nothing to hold them back. The scene is interspersed with interviews with Levi and Kratzman. They describe how the Israeli means to sustain the occupation grew more and more violent over the years, and so did the Palestinian resistance to it. Next, we join a guided visit to the Palestinian/settler city of Hebron. Hagit Ofran, Peace Now’s Settlement Watch person, shows an older Jewish-American couple how a handful of Jewish settlers, about 600, manage to close down the centre of a city of 160,000 Palestinian inhabitants. The bleak empty street, the burnt-out shops, and the police and soldiers who patrol the streets visually confirm the contradictory situation. Archival footage of settlers’ children throwing stones at barricaded Palestinian houses, and a fight between a settler woman and the Palestinian woman who filmed this harassment as part of the project ‘Shooting Back’, closes in on the unliveable situation.

This then merges into another short scene that offers, yet again, archival footage of the clandestine placement by settlers, during the night, of mobile homes on Palestinian land. The Palestinians protest and one of them risks his life by standing under a mobile home, not allowing the huge crane that holds it the air to place it on the ground. At a certain moment one of the settlers punches the Palestinian in the face but to no avail: the Palestinian literally offers his ‘other cheek’ to the fuming settler. This archival footage is mixed with an interview with Ofran, who talks about the Israeli policy of driving out Palestinians from East Jerusalem by not issuing them building permits, thus pushing them to build illegally. They then proceed to destroy the resulting houses. There follows another satirical act. Comedians Yossi and Itamar suggest a utopian vision of a bi-national state to emerge in fifteen to twenty years from now. Jews and Arabs are asked to help them design a new flag and to come up with a name for such a state. Once that game is in full swing, they begin to ask more probing questions. They assert the need for a new enemy once Jews and Arabs stop fighting each other. With a deadpan face, Yossi and Itamar ask people: who would they prefer as the new enemy for the new bi-national state? Some people protest that the idea of a bi-national state is, precisely, to finish with enmity, but others cite the USA, Russia or other Arab nations as potential new enemies. The final question is: which minority group should replace the Arabs as the target of discrimination? No one challenges the idea that the Arabs are that, indeed. The answers move from the new Ethiopian emigrants, through asylum seekers, to cheap foreign workers who steal the jobs. A woman stresses that it’s time to discriminate against men. The unliveable conditions in the Occupied Territories become even sharper in the next short scene: archival footage of the demolition of a brand-new five-storey house – in Italian-style pink colour – in East Jerusalem before the eyes of the stunned owners. Here, the accompanying interview is with Martin van Crefeld, who offers a cold look at the strategic thinking that drives Israel to use its military might, including the undesirable doomsday scenario when ‘nuclear missiles will fly in all directions’. This military historian, an independent and unorthodox

thinker on the right, provides an inside glimpse into the military thinking of the Israeli establishment. Acting as photographers on behalf of the Armoured Corps museum, Yossi and Itamar ask visitors to pose for a photo to be printed in the museum’s sixtieth anniversary calendar. The comedians invite them to choose a war – out of the ten major wars Israel has fought over the past sixty years – that they would like to represent in the calendar; their ‘favourite’ war. A discussion on the nature of the chosen war follows: was it a victory, a defeat or maybe a draw? Next, people are asked to enact the emotion the war evokes in them. One family re-enacts the Israeli ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip. Members of another group alternate happy and sad faces in their enactment of the 1973 Yom Kippur war – a war that ended in a draw, according to the comedians. No one comments on the irony of the touristy behaviour around and on tanks, nor on the notion that a war can be happy. The film ends with a new version of the national anthem sung at the beach, contrasting with the music-video kind at the beginning. The music has been maintained but the lyrics have been rewritten by Fouad Suleiman, an Israeli-Palestinian: In the heart of every oppressed Palestinian That beats as free as a bird A shining hope enriched with light That we shall be granted a proud justice Wherever our eyes wander we find no country For our proudly solid Palestinian people in spite of the sorrow How pure is our hope A proud soul is embedded in our peoples’ hearts We want to live as equals in our country And from Noah’s ark no one will expel us The song is followed by an extensive credit sequence that, in the case of the teenagers, tells us what happened to these young people after the film was made. It’s not a cheerful story.

Places are inevitably important in film, and in mine I enhance that feature of the medium. To boost the complexity of Israeli reality we contrast places that are geographically close but socially and politically worlds apart. Thus, the liberal pleasure-seeking parts of Tel Aviv are juxtaposed with one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country, in Lod. These places are located a mere twenty-five-minute car ride from one another. Another case is Jerusalem. We expose the dark side of the ‘City of Light’ also referred to as ‘the eternal capital of the Jewish people’. In Jerusalem today, using bulldozers and bureaucratic regulations, Israel is busy smashing the Palestinian community in East Jerusalem to dust. Jerusalem has become a de facto apartheid city with services and human rights on one side and their blatant violation on the other side. These three documentaries each propose a very different sense of cultural citizenship. This diversity is important for the concept itself. The noun ‘citizenship’ denotes social responsibilities and rights. Here, I use the qualifier ‘cultural’ primarily to distinguish it from a sense of identity as ‘national’, hence, ‘political’ in the sense of politics. As Fabian has argued, mentioned above, it is perhaps more meaningful to speak of ‘the cultural’ than about ‘cultures’. The sense people have of their cultural citizenship comes to the fore especially in situations of tension and conflict. In Vera’s case, her (incipient) sense of her cultural citizenship is primarily of mixture. The different components of that mixture are not quite equal, nor constantly present. We have seen in Vera’s falling-asleep fiction, talking to the bandits, that the three are equally there. In Moscow in the market she sees wooden African sculptures, and in Cameroon, in the middle of the ethnicity-reinforcing ritual, she ‘escapes’ to the outside world. In Separations, it is the tension between the two generations that make ‘the cultural’ present. Although the memories of Europe are inextricably mixed with Nazism and the enforced separation from home and family, for Andréa’s generation the pull of Europe is irresistible. They have a sense of belonging there. The intimacy between parents and children is tense, but real. In contrast, State of Suspension shows a culture which is in turmoil, antagonism and suspicion. And in that film, the participants don’t know one another, and hence, if there is intimacy,

it remains limited to accidental groupings. Mostly, the relationality is between the activist comedians and their targets, or victims: the people who ‘spontaneously’ fall into the trap of sarcasm. This relation, of course, is also tense. But whoever said that cultural citizenship is, can be, a cosy and enduring solidarity? Fabian’s view of ‘the cultural’ seems effectively convincing.

9. Affect as an Artistic-Political Strategy Madame B (the film, various installations) Doris Salcedo: Palimpsesto

Introduction: The Point of Affect This chapter scrutinises a concept that suspends the centrality of representation, and foregrounds, instead, art’s solicitation of viewers’ engagement through affect. It focuses analysis on the resulting interactivity between artworks and their viewers. Instead of taking what is there to be seen, affect analysis establishes a relationship between that sight and what it does to the people looking at it and, precisely, being affected by it. While detailed affect-oriented analysis of artworks may seem more difficult to achieve than, say, a form-based analysis of the artwork only, such analysis is called for to account for the cultural processes in which art functions.1 1  For a fundamental discussion of affect in art, see Alphen (2008). With his usual lucidity, he explains the Deleuzian concept of affect, and is critical of Sylvan

Whether or not the term ‘affect’ is explicitly used, the affect-oriented perspective is not new. Here are three long-term recognisable examples. Discussions of pornography have always been focused on what pornographic images might do to its audience. Does porn entice people to act upon the desires aroused by the images? Such a question already presupposes that the image has the function to arouse; it is performative. The sexual arousal is not ‘in’ the image but happens in the wake of someone seeing it. Second, censorship responds to the image or text ‘accused’ of corrupting its receivers. If, soon after the publication and smashing success of his 1856 novel Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert was taken to court, the prosecution was motivated by the sense that the novel was doing something to the culture of the day – it was addressing the present. They seemed to panic about the welfare of that culture. The sentence that reversed the generally accepted morality, and became a key target of the prosecution, was considered dangerous because it was taken to entice people, especially women, to indulge in adultery. This sentence in FID, ‘Oh yes, if only . . . before the filth of marriage and the disillusions of adultery’ (II, 15; emphasis added) uttered by the narrator and clearly – but perhaps, dangerously, not exclusively – focalised by Emma, hurt the prosecution’s sense of propriety. That discomfort is the affective consequence of a performative sentence. The ‘danger’ is literature’s performative power. Moralistic as this view is, it does broach the question of art and its relationship to society. The implication is that it combined an idea for consideration – that marriage is ‘filthy’, even if adultery also disappoints – with an effect that we can consider sensuous – people would actually be enticed to desire and act upon that desire, with the demise of standard morality as a consequence.2 Tomkins’ pluralisation of affect, which too frequently confuses affect with emotion. I also address the critical question Eugenie Brinkema has posed to the frequent but vague use of the concept of affect (2014). 2  I reiterate the relevance of focalisation. The last revised edition of my book Narratology makes this relevance clearer than the earlier editions (2017b, 132–53). See also the companion book, Narratology in Practice, with more extensive examples, of which more visual ones (2021).

In this sense, the prosecutors intuited that the novel would be per­ form­ative, and, given the topic, it would function almost as pornography. Flaubert won his case and was acquitted. This was due to his cheeky argument that his novel was art, not reality. That this argument convinced the judges proves them, in fact, wrong. This defence was successful in that the judges fell for a false binary opposition between ‘art’ and ‘life’, not because they were, in the end, more liberal. This brings up the third example of affect. Discussions of aesthetic merit are based on the notion that the work to be evaluated has an effect, called ‘aesthetic’, if it is successful as art.3 But while not new, the way affect has been foregrounded lately, after the cultural fatigue with event-oriented models of analysis, is useful. It has been called upon to help articulate the effects hitherto called political or ethical, aesthetic or sexual, under a unifying rubric that does not depend on the figurative quality of a given artwork, as the prior centrality of representation would assume. The concept of affect has two advantages for the ‘how to’ question of cultural analysis. It helps provide the cultural disciplines with a unifying and with a comparative concept that can bring such divergent art forms as painting, film, video, music and exhibition practices under a single perspective, while still allowing differentiation, both between media and between artworks. Brinkema’s timely call for affect’s analysability brings us back to the humanities’ primary skill and task for the larger cultural world: detailed and subtle analysis of the complexity and nuances of art. Her 2014 book begins with a well-documented history of the tear – of crying, generously quoting, and commenting on, a long lineage, from antiquity to modernity, including David Hume, Adam Smith, William James, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre – all famous philosophers, writers we mostly know from other contexts. In the subsequent chapters she points out, in (film)texts, what it is that triggers the affective intensity between the artwork and the viewer. 3  On Flaubert’s trial, see LaCapra (1982). For a different view of the trial, Haynes (2005). This author complicates the interpretation that the acquittal was a liberal recognition of the special status of art. I agree with her.

While I wholeheartedly underwrite and adopt her endeavour, I want to caution against a misunderstanding her book’s title might unwittingly encourage. I don’t think the phrase ‘the forms of the affects’ is the most suitable formulation. Like time (Chapter 4), affect is not a ‘thing’ that has a form. It is a process that occurs between the artwork and the viewer (Alphen 2008). Yet, what can be analysed and deployed for the kind of close reading Brinkema rightly advocates is not the form of the affects, but the elements and aspects in the artworks that trigger the occurrence of affective intensity. That includes forms, but not exclusively. These triggers are performative. Occasions for or triggers of affect, rather than forms, then; and forms can function as such triggers. In this chapter, I will enlist two artworks, both installations but in different media and with different effects, to substantiate my argument that affect-based analysis can do more for our understanding of art than formalist analysis only, while still including form in the endeavour. Affect, thus, enjoys strong analytical advantages over ‘representation’ – a concept that is problematic for many reasons. 4 Affect has the additional merit of facilitating analysis of the agency of art. For the affective effect is a specific instance of the more general concept of performativity. Here, again, it helps unify what earlier concepts kept separate. In its interest in ‘what happens’ to receivers of, or rather, participants in art and literature in the event of art, the concept of affect unifies in image-thinking such divergent effects as sexual arousal, political manipulation or resistance, ethical and intellectual edification, the compulsion to reflect, aesthetic pleasure. It can even account for the eagerness to learn, to have new experiences, or to fondly remember old ones, that would fall under the didactic mission of art and museums. To sum it up in one word, affect activates viewers. In the following, I will follow how these affective triggers work 4  Brinkema’s concept of form remains a bit elusive. But her real insistence, in what she calls her ‘radical formalism’ (also 2020, where colour is the form she focuses on), is on the need to read for the form (2014, 21). She seeks to provoke, and wrote her book as a polemic (2014, 179) to shake up the complacency of throwing in vague terms; and in this I side entirely with her. My insistence on the notion of ‘trigger’ alludes to a volume edited by Alphen and Jirsa (2019).

through the narratological concept of focalisation in Madame B. This concept demonstrates a kind of (narrative) form, but cannot be reduced to form only. As the second case, I briefly consider Doris Salcedo’s installation Palimpsesto, on the basis of form and temporality – two triggers of affect. The look that is staged there is the humble documentary look that leaves the thinking to the documented artwork. In this case, the thinking I did myself was limited to that: stretching the experience of being in and with the artwork. From ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi’ to ‘Emma Is Us’ Flaubert’s 1856 masterpiece Madame Bovary is a novel that passes for realist – the long-time predominant aesthetic of the genre. Subverting that aesthetic, Flaubert deployed it to address, and fiercely critique, his own culture, time and place. How can I then claim that ‘Emma is us’, in 2021? The answer is in the concept of focalisation – its meaning, use and relevance; focalisation in its power to manipulate, persuade and, thus, have political efficacy. That power can be understood, and thereby either undermined, when damaging; or enlisted, when supportive in view of a wider cultural political interest. It is the form affect can take in narrative. I present Flaubert’s novel and the film and installations I made with Michelle Williams Gamaker to explain how focalisation and its close analysis can do this. I offer a few examples only, which are visible in the film in its response to the novel.5 According to one of its best early critics, Jonathan Culler, Flaubert’s novel is fundamentally ambiguous, both in narration and in focalisation (1974). The result of that ambiguity transforms our view of the woman character, and the implications of the novel as fictional. From an object of pity, or even contempt, judging her naïve, from the past, the ambiguity transforms her into ‘one of us’ – a victim of the combination of ‘emotional capitalism’ and of sexual selfishness and sometimes abuse, what we 5  The point I make in this chapter has not been made before: the close link between affect and focalisation as a primary trigger of affect. And since it is a formal feature of narrative, this argument complies with Brinkema’s insistence on form. Nor has the bond between focalisation and witnessing been proposed.

now call ‘#MeToo’. In other words, a victim of the cultural politics of Flaubert’s time as much as of our own. I begin with the beginning. Beginnings are notoriously difficult to write, but important (Said 1985). It begins with an internal, diegetic narrator: We were in study-hall when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the handyman carrying a large desk. [Nous étions à l’Étude quand le proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre.]6 Note that the novel’s first word is nous, ‘we’. ‘Nous’ turns this realistic novel into a so-called first-person narration – a confessional genre, far removed from the novel’s alleged realism. As a consequence, technically, all quoted speeches are, then, second-level narrations. But the firstlevel/first-person narrator quickly disappears. He never says ‘I’. The collective first person, repeated only once a few pages later, serves to posit the reality of the subsequent narration; the pronoun indicates that the narrator and his classmates were there when it happened. He is, then, a narrator-witness. That status turns him into a focaliser. Soon, he will be forgotten, and the rest of the long novel seems to be told by an external narrator. But as a witness, hence, focaliser, he continues to implicate himself, and across time, ‘us’.7 After the first few pages, the ‘nous’ (we) returns one more time: ‘It would be impossible today for any of us to remember anything about him’ (‘Il serait maintenant impossible à aucun de nous de se rien rappeler de lui’) (emphasis added). Relevant for my ‘pre-posterous’ conception of temporality, and for a formalism à la Brinkema, the adverb maintenant 6  Given the many different editions and translations of this novel, I will not refer to page numbers but to the chapters, relatively short, as I did with Don Quijote. On the beginning, a favourite of Flaubert critics, see Raitt (1986) and González (1999). 7  On witnessing, Felman and Laub (1992).

(today, now) pulls the first person from the past into the present, after the events. Yet, formally speaking, the preceding description is so precise, detailed, even including quoted speeches, that its form contradicts the double negative of memory. Proust’s memorial writing repeats this ploy, turning it into its own rhetoric of ambiguous focalisation. But here, the focaliser-witness is plural (‘nous’). The empathetic denial of knowledge must serve some other purpose than establishing contradiction. The ordinariness of the new classmate must be the point of the use of ‘nous’. The narrator is a witness, but the character could be anyone, easily forgotten. His status as a witness will enable the narrator to present a devastating critique of his environment – the here-now – as well as shift his position constantly from identification with the main character, Emma, through focalisation, to an outsider’s position. This is the formal consequence of the ambiguity Culler noticed. This discourse of us in the here-and-now is Flaubert’s realism. Flaubert refines the notion of realism as implicating the reader and placing the novel in a strictly contemporary environment – one that can travel through time, but must remain contemporary. Hence the need for anachronism. This tends to be construed as a historical flaw, and in assessments of films based on novels, an infidelity to the source novel.8 In 2011–13, we made a film and a video installation, the different versions of which are 19-, 13- or 5-channel works, re-edited for each version. This is based on the novel, and explores not only the literary masterpiece but, in a project of image-thinking, also the relationship between novel and film on less orthodox terms than the usual view of ‘adaptation’ allows. Our film Madame B is not an adaptation but a response to the novel; the relationship is not imitative but interactive: an ‘inter-ship’. It does not claim fidelity, but loyalty; it is not a ‘faithful’ imitation of characters and events, but an attempt to first examine what makes this novel so relevant, and then try to come up with imaginative 8  On the problematic notion of ‘fidelity’ in adaptations, see the article by Leitch (2003), already mentioned. This specialist in adaptation studies edited a useful handbook on the subject, to which I contributed a more extensive version of the argument of the present chapter (2017c).

equivalents in cinematic language. That is the primary image-thinking here. By messing up chronology, we foregrounded that the film was not to be considered ‘faithful’. Instead, we turned the ambiguity of narration and the implication of witnessing through focalisation, as staged in the novel’s opening, into a beginning image that posits the pre-posterous temporality that makes us all peers of Emma. You see Emma in the ruined house that is an image-metaphor of her ruined life (Figure 9.1). But after a short while the image becomes ever so slightly wobbly, indicating a hand-held camera. That feature does not signify a claim to authenticity, but the presence of others: of focalising witnesses. These others, whom we do not see in the image but only in that slight movement, witness Emma’s ruin either with empathy, or with relish, as some neighbours do in the novel. We see this anonymous but far from neutral witnessing later, when Emma is alone, including at her wedding. The not-quite-stable image hints at spying, meddling, or possibly empathising others. The hand-held camera creates the ‘nous’, the ‘us’. As a result, no viewer of the film can deny that the mid-nineteenth century concerns us. Ambiguous Focalisation: Suspending Judgement As a tool for narrative rhetoric, in the sense of potentially manipulative, potentially empathetic, artful storytelling, focalisation has the affective power to persuade. That power can be understood, either undermined or supported. I claim Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as a ‘theoretical object’ to explain how focalisation and its close analysis, reading it for form, can do this, and through our film to argue for the relevance of the concept in other media as well. The examples are also putting forward an ‘intermediality’ that complicates ‘fidelity’ and replaces it with a dialogic, non-chronological, not prioritising relationship between novel and film. The ‘theoretical object’ is thus extended from the excerpts of the novel alone to the relationship between these and their cinematic Figure 9.1  Emma in precarity, opening image. Photo: Thijs Vissia.

(non-)equivalents: equivalent in storytelling, formally different in each medium; but not equivalent in fabula events.9 The novel’s ambiguity transforms Emma into ‘one of us’ – a victim of the combination of ‘emotional capitalism’ and sexual selfishness. In other words, of the cultural and sexual politics of Flaubert’s time, as of our time. The ambiguity binds fiction to reality through the inevitable, affect-inducing activity of reading or viewing. These activities undermine any binary opposition between fiction and reality. This ambiguity, thus, helps point out how focalisation in this novel both indicts and transforms the politics of the culture we live in, and that Emma lived in. For this, my second case, I selected a very ordinary passage, a conversation between Charles and his mother concerning Emma’s vague and inexplicable malaises. It begins in direct discourse: ‘Do you know what your wife needs?’ said the older Madame Bovary. ‘She needs to be forced to work – hard, manual work! . . .’ ‘She keeps busy, though,’ Charles said. [Sais-tu ce qu’il faudrait à ta femme? reprenait la mère Bovary. Ce seraient des occupations forcées, des ouvrages manuels! . . . - Pourtant elle s’occupe, disait Charles.] (II, 7) Formally, this is classical quotation including the verb ‘to say’ and quotation marks, as well as an indication of the subject who speaks. Each speaker can be characterised by their discourse: the mother harsh, full of contempt for Emma; the qualifier ‘forcées’ with ‘occupations’ qualifies the mother and her discourse as cruel. Charles weakly defends Emma. Soon, then, the discourse changes, from quotation of character’s 9  On intermediality, see Bruhn and Gjelsvik (2013). That volume stems from an active research group on intermediality at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. See also the two recent volumes edited by Lars Elleström, director of the Centre (2021).

speech to a narratorial conclusion. And, while such passages are supposedly clarifying, here, all clarity vanishes: So, it was decided to prevent Emma from reading novels. The project presented certain difficulties, but the old lady undertook to carry it out: on her way through Rouen she would personally call on the proprietor of the lending library and tell him that Emma was cancelling her subscription. If he nevertheless persisted in spreading his poison, they would certainly have the right to report him to the police. [Donc, il fut résolu que l’on empêcherait Emma de lire des romans. L’entreprise ne semblait point facile. La bonne dame s’en chargea: elle devait quand elle passerait par Rouen, aller en personne chez le loueur de livres et lui représenter qu’Emma cessait ses abonnements. N’aurait-on pas le droit d’avertir la police, si le libraire persistait quand même dans son métier d’empoisonneur?] (II, 7) The beginning of the passage seems to be a narrator’s summing up, as a conclusive ‘so’ indicates. The second sentence implies a conver­ s­ation – let’s say, the hesitant Charles objects it is difficult to do, and the resolute mother promises to solve the problem. But then, the mother’s active meddling is rendered in narrator’s discourse, as the descriptive ‘old lady’ (‘la bonne dame’) indicates. Neither Charles nor the mother herself would qualify her in such terms. And ‘s’en chargea’ (undertook) is the narrator’s verb that characterises her readiness to act, again summing up. But like the verb ‘carry it out’,

it can be either a narrator’s word choice or her own, as if saying: ‘don’t worry, son, you don’t have to do anything, I’ll do it’ [je m’en charge]. The second half of the sentence clearly moves towards the ambiguity of FID. This is projecting a plan. She was leaving soon anyway, and it is as if we hear her say: ‘On my way through Rouen, I will call on the proprietor of the library and tell him that Emma is cancelling her subscription.’ The final sentence of the fragment is more clearly FID, in fact a double one. It renders a quote within a quote. Imagine what the mother will have said to her son: ‘I will threaten this man: [quote] ‘if you nevertheless persist in spreading your poison, we will surely have the right to report you to the police’. A narrator could have used the word ‘threaten’ and sum up the rest with ‘the police’. But both ‘spreading your poison’ and ‘have the right’ smack of the angry, intimidating old woman’s righteousness, as she will threaten the librarian with conviction and even passion; her thoughts, her words. Formally, the entire passage becomes a mixture of narrator’s discourse, character’s quoted discourse, and FID. Why would a novelist structure this passage so confusingly? The point is to demonstrate the power of the meddlers, so important in this novel. Like Homais the nasty pharmacist, and the gossiping townsfolk who judge Emma’s behaviour and rejoice in her downfall, Madame Bovary senior is herself a poison of sorts. Such phrases as ‘his poison’, meaning novels, can hardly be attributed to the primary narrator of a carefully crafted and proudly presented novel. Instead, the narrator here quotes, freelyindirectly, not just the mother but the public opinion of a large segment of the population, from ‘fiction is dangerous’ to ‘fiction is nonsense’. It is in allusion to this qualification of literature that we can see Don Quijote’s bold act of eating a page of the book, in scene 1 of Don Quijote: Sad Countenances. Thus, the structure of embedded speech builds up the oppressive environment in which Emma lives, where the imagination is censored and freedom of thought forbidden. Realism, here, does not mean objectivity but a fiercely ironic rendering of a real social structure of embedding whatever a character says in clichés, what Flaubert called idées reçues.

What Is Focalisation? The idea of the concept of focalisation is that whenever events are presented, it is from within a certain vision. A point of view is chosen, a way of seeing things, a certain angle, whether real historical facts or fictitious events are concerned. This slanted, or subjective, nature of storytelling is inevitable, and denying it constitutes a dubious political act. Objectivity is an attempt to present only what is seen or is perceived in some other way. Perception depends on the position of the perceiving body: a small child sees things in a totally different way from an adult, if only as far as dimensions are concerned, but also due to the knowledge and experience that inform understanding. The degree to which one is familiar with what one sees also influences perception. We are confronted not with events, a fabula, but with a vision of the fabula. Focalisation is, then, the relation between the vision and what is seen, perceived. This relation is the space of affect. The short passage with Charles’s mother is translated into cinematic language in a brief moment when the mother sees Emma come down the stairs wearing, once again, new expensive clothes. Without words, she shakes her head and looks contemptuously at her daughter-in-law, so that the latter throws her out (‘get out!’). The issue we gleaned from the novel is not, or not simply, to indict the cruel mother but to demonstrate that silent looking participates as a full speech act, the evidence of which is that Emma responds with a speech act that is, indeed, a response to a previous act – that look. Understanding this helps us grasp the complexity and subtlety of language, verbal and (audio-)visual, to express disagreement, difference, hostility.10 As a third example, consider the famous sentence: ‘Charles’s conversation was flat like a side walk’ (‘La conversation de Charles était plate comme un trottoir de rue’) (I, 7). It is devastating for Charles in Emma’s eyes – if we consider the sentence as focalised by Emma. However, unmooring discourse and thus precluding facile judgemental 10  This is what Anger termed an ‘affective interval’, a moment when affect stalls the temporality of the fabula (2019).

attitudes is Flaubert’s project, as this ambiguity suggests. The point is that, affectively touched, we feel her boredom, empathise with it, and yet keep also in view that Charles has no access to that understanding. The sentence is short but durational, as the verb tense of the imperfect (‘était’) indicates. This brevity exemplifies Flaubert’s economy of words. The generic noun ‘conversation’ with a verb in the imperfect tense expressing the reiteration of routine, ‘tells’ an infinite number of words. And according to the comparison, these are deadly. This sentence is not only a narrative expression of a non-event – what Genette called with a paradoxical phrase, given the topic of wordiness, ‘Flaubert’s silences’ (in 1966) – but also an indirect image of the boredom that will kill Emma. It reverses the narrative economy and its dynamic between narration and description, and between literary and cinematic. The sentence continues, and readers are made aware of language as the primary material of this artwork: . . . and the ideas of everyman came by; they wore drab everyday clothes, and they inspired neither emotion nor laughter or dreams. [ . . . et les idées de tout le monde y défilaient, dans leur costume ordinaire, sans exciter d’émotion, de rire ou de rêverie.] (I, 7) The sidewalk is one element of the comparison; strollers come by, but when their clothes are commented upon, readers lose the thread and thus realise the incongruity of language. This is one of Flaubert’s formal devices to de-realise and re-orient his alleged realism. The transformation of narrative discourse implicates a later short sentence that resonates with the comparison: ‘Especially during mealtimes she couldn’t stand it anymore’ (‘C’était surtout aux heures des repas qu’elle n’en pouvait plus’) (I, 9) This specifies time within duration. A metaphor sums up: ‘it seemed to her that the entire bitterness of her existence was served to her on her plate’ (‘toute l’amertume de

son existence lui semblait servie sur son assiette’) (I, 9). Auerbach claimed this image as ‘the climax of the portrayal of her despair’ – a ‘formless tragedy’. ‘Tragedy’, yes; but the qualifier ‘formless’ ignores the tragic in the temporal form. We wanted to do justice to these crucial short sentences, but not literally quote them. Instead, we wished to show – rather than tell – their implications, including their effect on Emma and the possibility for viewers to be touched by it; its affect. Conflating the two short passages into an extensive audio(-visual) image demonstrates the performative nature of Charles’s monologic conversations – a performance of communicative failure.11 What is the cinematic role of focalisation in this passage? In the film, the three short sentences turn into an audio-image in audio-visual FID. This enables the spectator to experience, on a sensate level, a double, conflicted perception. For this durational scene, a monologue creates the image. Charles drones on about the weather, the project to build a shed in the garden, a patient, and the tastelessness of the raspberries this year. Focalising on Emma’s face shows the visual echo of Charles’s boring chatter. Between the two characters the sonic image continues the visual performative image of an earlier scene, when Charles’s look brings Emma to life, recognising in the girl the woman she is becoming right now. The dinner scene is edited almost exclusively with Emma’s face in the image, as the affected ‘second person’ of the monologue’s performativity. That is where the boredom is figured, producing more and more exasperation. The long takes are edited minimally, contrasting with the nervous discourse; they enhance the durational character of the scene. Instead of his face we see Charles’s shoulder, blurred, in what in cinespeak is a ‘dirty close-up’, dark, looming over Emma. The close-up draws attention to the medium, comparable to Flaubert’s bizarre comparisons that foreground language (Culler). Because we barely see him, Charles’s talk constitutes, indeed, a sonic image. In the novel, Emma focalises the one short sentence, even if the narrator without 11  Auerbach (1956 [1946], 483). The scene is based on a brilliant improvisation by actor Thomas Germaine. See also the psychoanalytic commentary by Collas (1985) on the role of food and poison, eating, and eating disorders in the novel.

identity takes over. It is that narrator who makes the sentence ambiguous, implicating the readers-viewers as witnesses into Emma’s focalisation. For Emma is the prisoner of the conversation – flat, like a sidewalk; crushing. According to the performative conception of the look, the viewer-participant enables her to show her boredom and, at the end, when boredom transforms into horror, to scream. It is the viewer who, seeing and feeling the horror, reads the face and grants the boredom visibility. As an interpretive anachronism, instead of figuring the meta­ phor, the scream makes Auerbach’s reading (‘the climax of the portrayal of her despair’) and its instantaneousness, concrete; not in spite of the durational sentence, but through it. Speaking of deadly boring topics and in a monotone voice, Charles never­theless talks in a nervous rhythm: fast but also with silences, and sighing. Once he says pleadingly: ‘Say something!’ Thus, he figures the anxiety of the character who is also a prisoner of this marriage without exit. Sensing his wife’s boredom, Charles fills the inevitable silences, and hence accumulates stupidities. Thus, bêtise is shared, and, as Emma will say when she lies dying: no one is to blame. The film takes the work out of the moralism that, suggesting judgement, would leave the viewer out of the novel’s grasp. Charles and Emma are more united than ever: by the boredom, the nervousness, the anxiety, and by the sonic image’s reflection on Emma’s face. Their infernal union says everything that Flaubert, with his economy of words, did not narrate but implied through focalisation.12 The visual image of Emma’s increasingly exasperated face is the product of the voice, of words, of the dialogue with a single speaker that Flaubert has characterised hyperbolically, in a proto-postmodernist vein. Charles is the character who brings about an invisible, but far from silent, event: he transforms Emma, barely awoken to life, into a living cadaver, entering an agony that fills the remainder of the story. He does not cause this agony but only facilitates it, as its instrument. The cause is the expect­ ation, the passivity, of she who is captured by a system that she fails to understand, but that has been instilled in her from an early age. This 12  Bêtise, which Flaubert cultivated in order to indict it, can also be contagious, as the moralistic reading by Marc Girard (1995) demonstrates.

system, that needed to wait for decades to be articulated, is what Flaubert staged, as the space of affect. And it is what binds his time to ours. An Illness We All Have: Emotional Capitalism Flaubert’s special, indeed sometimes almost ungrammatical, use of verb tenses – a formal feature – figures the idea and experience of routine as the source of boredom. In loyalty to this aspect, the central part of the film is marked by an alternation of different routines in Emma’s life and the repetition of sequences from them. In the installation, these routines are screened in a square inside a small hut. This part tackles the central topic to which the film shifts the core of Flaubert’s novel, making visible what is central in it. It stages ‘emotional capitalism’ – then and now (Figure 9.2). This system, where capitalism and romantic love trade places, where commodities are invested with emotion and love is for sale, is what kills Emma and continues to damage people. This is the bond between Madame Bovary and Madame B, the past to the present. The underlying syndrome is a confusion between domains: the translation of desire from one domain to another, as a response to frustration. This is as true of today as it is of the 1850s.13 The most revealing images in this respect show Emma’s insecurity upon entering a designer store. Shadows, reflections and mirrors confront her with herself, her looks and her anxiety, transforming herself from a middle-class woman into a fancy-dressed beauty. The caring figure of the salesman reassures her with the allure of capitalism and its ability to exploit emotions, insecurity and hope for a more exciting life. Emma’s desire to transform herself is matched by the fairytale decoration of the store she enters.14 13  We had construed this syndrome, but it took the belated discovery of the work of Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz to sum it all up in a single concept: ‘emotional capitalism’. See Illouz (2007). She writes on Madame Bovary in a later book (2012). The earlier book is clearer on the concept and its background. 14  This is an unmodified real store, L’éclaireur in Paris; and its real salesman, Pierre Lassovski, brilliantly played the part that is his everyday business, something he knew our film was criticising.

Emma’s lethal trap is, then, not psychological but social and economic. Flaubert’s novel confronts us with a thematic-stylistic exploration of the cultural conspiracy that turns business into an emotional issue, and love into a business venture. In studying the novel in view of filming, in intermedial image-thinking I saw how Flaubert, as a philosophersociologist image-thinker, had staged this syndrome. The novel helps understand this cultural perversion that Flaubert imagined, Marx and Freud theorised, and in which today we still participate. In Illouz’s words, ‘modern identity has become increasingly publicly performed in a variety of social sites through a narrative which combines the aspiration to self-realization with a claim to emotional suffering’ (2007, 4). A decade before Marx and half a century before Freud, Flaubert had seen it coming; he had also seen its deadly quality. The responsibility is collective and systemic as well as individual. This is where Spinoza’s concept of responsibility becomes relevant: we, as we live now, cannot be guilty of the capitalist madness. But we are responsible for its consequences, not only on ourselves but also on others. The same holds for colonialism. Illouz defines the concept of emotional capitalism as follows: Emotional capitalism is a culture in which emotional and economic discourses and practices mutually shape each other, thus producing what I view as a broad, sweeping movement in which affect is made an essential aspect of economic behaviour and in which emotional life – especially that of the middle classes – follows the logic of economic relations and exchange. (2007: 5) According to Flaubert’s novel, people are especially vulnerable to this powerful social contrivance when they find themselves in slow time, or Figure 9.2  Emotional capitalism in practice. Photo: Thijs Vissia. Figure 9.3  Emma caught in emotional-capitalist madness. Photo: Thijs Vissia.

duration: the time of routine, of waiting, of boredom. That is the thought-image the novel unfolds. The emotional-capitalist seduction, excitement and then boring routine seamlessly match the erotic ones. Although Flaubert doesn’t use the same words for it, clearly the confusion between the two seductions and routines is crucial. Buying is not a means to seduce – by looking more beautiful, showing good taste – but it is the same thing. It is the translation of frustrated desire into another domain. This holds equally for excessive drinking, religious overload or eating disorders. The clearest articulation of emotional capitalism occurs when Emma, becoming aware of her infatuation with Léon, thinks of herself as virtuous because the young clerk doesn’t make a move. Instead, Lheureux the money-monger constantly makes moves. Then all her desires conflate, and she becomes attached to the pain in what is (too) easily called masochism: Then the desires of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy of passion all blended into one suffering, and instead of putting it out of her mind, she made her thoughts cling to it, urging herself to pain and seeking everywhere the opportunity to revive it. [Alors, les appétits de la chair, les convoitises d’argent et les mélancolies de la passion, tout se confondit dans une même souffrance; et, au lieu d’en détourner la pensée, elle s’y attachait davantage, s’excitant à la douleur et en cherchant partout les occasions]. (II, 5) This image of Emma in the store is crucial for an understanding of emotional capitalism. The triangle consists of Emma, her mirror image or objectified sense of self, and the salesman (Figure 9.3). In

Figure 9.4  Thomas Germaine as Emma’s three men: Léon, Charles, Rodolphe. Photos: Thijs Vissia; collage: Margreet Vermeulen.

moments like this Emma literally doubles herself when she tries on the clothes and the mirror image shows the result. Her sense of self seems split, schizophrenically, into a corporeal and a visual version. Both receive the unrelenting affective support of the salesman who profits from her translation of one craving into another. It is obvious, I hope, that historical costume dramas – the privileged genre for Madame Bovary films – cannot do justice to the affective-political force of Flaubert’s novel. His novel was fiercely critical of his contemporary culture, including the growing emotional capitalism. So, any film based on this novel must make the visual culture in it contemporary – for now.15 The heart of this problematic is confusion. One way to make that visible was the casting of the three men in Emma’s life to be played by one actor (Figure 9.4). This was our cinematic thought-image, to show that Emma is not in love with anyone in particular but with Love itself: its (false) promise of permanent excitement, a contradiction in terms. The casting, then, inflects focalisation. The identical face looking differ­ ent enough to someone who ‘has’ the illness, shows focalisation in 15  On the classical Madame Bovary films, see Donaldson-Evans (2009).

action. It is a translation of experience, emotion and visual modalities into a subtle subjectivation of focalisation. Seeing the same man, differently made up and attired, the viewer can either see through the disguise, or go along with Emma and fall for the illusion. It all hints at a transformation, translation and confusion of contradictory exper­ iences: the heart of emotional capitalism. When we consider the increasing gap between wealth and poverty all over the world, we must insist on the perverse nature of this bond between capitalist and emotional exploitation in all the ways we can, of which visual culture is one. For this we need anachronism, respons­ibility, and practices that are truly critical to merge in affect. Empathy: Siding with the Dying My first example was the beginning, my final example is the end. Both are challenges for novelists, as Edward Said on beginnings (1985) and Frank Kermode on endings (1966) persuasively argued long ago. As becomes a novel that is a life story, Madame Bovary (almost) ends on Emma’s death, even though, true to the beginning ‘nous’, after her death we return to Charles and the others. Death poses an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, sufferers need witnesses, to not be alone in this ultimate moment; to keep knowledge of what happened to them alive, perhaps to benefit others. On the other hand, watching, at a safe distance, the suffering of others risks producing voyeurism – of the kind Adorno was so agitated about. This ethical dilemma is over-determined by a moral one, as Adorno’s initial indictment implied. Figurations of death raise the question whether making art out of death is exploitative, a kind of abuse; or whether, in contrast, it can help learning, and thus be used to improve life in the future. This dilemma is avoided by the choice of making alleged criminals the corpses of choice to learn from. Such a conscience-reassuring compromise was not quite convincing to our philosopher-artist; in this case, Flaubert, but also, famously, Rembrandt. Take his Anatomical Lesson of Dr Tulp, from 1632, in the Maurtishuis (The Hague). None of the eager, interested men look at

Figure 9.5  Emma dead. Video still.

the dead body. When he painted another subject like this where the dead help the living to learn, he figured the corpse as reminiscent of Christ – after Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ from ca. 1480 – and disposed it frontally, almost looking us in the eyes; the body a big empty hole. This later painting, The Anatomical Lesson of Dr Deyman, from 1656 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), literally confronts us with the dilemma of what exactly we do when we supposedly learn from, or enjoy, art, especially when it represents torture, suffering and death. In his ambiguous extensions of character-bound focalisation, ­Flaubert’s novel explores this through the first-personhood of the con­ temporary subject as it is drawn into a web of illusions where the idea of love and longing morphs into the desire for commodities. The dilemma is at its sharpest when Emma dies. Denis Hollier (1988) recalls that Foucault wrote that it is impossible to say: ‘I am dead’. Only in fiction, and in hallucinations – in other words, only through the activity of the imagination – is such a statement possible. This is why figuring death entails figuring knowledge, and also why the difficulty

of both figurations is the driving force of Western mythology, including Christian imagin­ ations, which thus acquire a philosophical relevance very different from the theological. Hollier’s title, ‘The Word of God: “I Am Dead”’, suggests that only by ‘God’, radically outside of human language, can death be ‘spoken’. ‘God’ stands for radical alterity. It is the way a dead body is both human and not human that poses the challenge to figuration, and to language as the medium of choice to explore it through. Our film alludes to this discussion, and the long tradition from Mantegna to Rembrandt and beyond, by an image of Emma lying dead, frontally (Figure 9.5).16 Thus, death breaks down one of the most tenacious and problematic dichotomies in narrative theory. It also hovers between the two aspects of its own impossibility: the first person and the present tense. Flaubert, always experimenting, subverted the system of French verb tenses, as well as the use of the conjunction ‘and’. Yet, because death hovers between state and event, while also between its impossible first-personhood and the ersatz first-personhood in the memory of others, it becomes a source of infinite possibility. Careful to keep his doubts open and to not overwrite his crucial ­e xperience of not-knowing by literary decisions, Flaubert’s novel is replete with indirection. The author disliked dialogue; he thought it was contrived, and a violation of realism (Gothot-Mersch 1969). This poses a great dilemma for film­makers. A new work that takes off from – re-­con-­f igures – an earlier one tends to be both loyal and ­critical of the antecedent. If loyal to Flaubert’s anti-dialogism, speech must be sparse; but if loyal to his alternative, the FID and anonymous focal­isation, which does justice to the social buzz he so fabulously imagined, a film must give figuration to indirection; create a thought-image of it. This is a paradoxical requirement, but loyalty forbids one to ignore it, lest we skip over something so deeply invested in the novel’s l­ iterary art. 16  A most accessible text on this (im?)possibility is a four-page article by an ‘experience expert’ who integrates theoretical reflection with an account of her own near-death experience (Goosen 2020).

The death scene of the novel is a masterpiece of indirection. Ten pages long, it contains lots of spoken words, mostly the irrelevant quibbles between the priest and the pharmacist, the doctor and Charles; they overwrite what happens to the dying woman. They over-speak the unknowable death. So, how can a film both figure and critique this scene of dying? In other words, how can we show Emma’s death while addressing the difficulty of figuring death? This requires image-thinking most urgently. Here is how Flaubert describes what happens in that room. This is about the witnesses. Clearly, he establishes distance: Distracted, stammering, close to collapse, Charles walked in circles around the room. He stumbled against the furniture, tore his hair, and never had the pharmacist dreamed there could be so frightful a sight. (Emphasis added) [Éperdu, balbutiant, près de tomber, Charles tournait dans la chambre. Il se heurtait aux meubles, s’arrachait les cheveux, et jamais le pharmacien n’avait cru qu’il pût y avoir de si épouvantable spectacle.] (III, 8) Typically, subverting the conjunction ‘and’ and with his taste for succinctness, he combines in a single sentence the despair of the husband Charles, who does not understand what is happening yet displays the traditional signs of grief, and the hyperbolic, exploitative curiosity of the pharmacist Homais, always there to probe but never to understand nor empathise. Whether the frightful sight is Emma or the lamenting Charles remains ambiguous. But this is not what the text seeks to make us see and feel. Instead, it calls on the participants, be they readers or viewers, to witness, and choose sides. The diegetic witnesses each have their own affective response. Justin, the adolescent apprentice pharmacist infatuated with Emma, is in our

version the recipient of her last words, which in the novel are the first words of her suicide letter to her husband. The words, ‘qu’on n’accuse personne’ – don’t blame anyone – acknowledge the social nature of the confused causality that has doomed her. Homais, with his morbid curiosity and exploitative attitude, is also, in our version, more than a caricature. The doctor, in the novel the only man with the appropriate authority, is replaced by a woman who has known Emma from childhood, a substitute for her absent mother. And Charles – well, he is devastated, and doesn’t understand.17 But the novel also figures what Emma thinks at this ultimate moment of her life: Emma was thinking that now she was through with all the betrayals, the infamies, [and] the countless fierce desires that had racked her. She hated no one, now; a twilight confusion was falling over her thoughts, and of all the world’s sounds she heard only the intermittent lament of this poor man beside her, gentle and indistinct, like the last echo of an ever-fainting symphony. [Elle en avait fini, songeait-elle, avec toutes les trahisons, les bassesses et les innombrables convoitises qui la torturaient. Elle ne haïssait personne, maintenant; une confusion de crépuscule s’abattait en sa pensée, et de tous les bruits de la terre Emma n’entendait plus Figure 9.6  Emma dying. Video still.

17  The pharmacist is played by Mathieu Montanier, who took the initiative to deepen the character, stripping him of caricature and, instead, attributing hysteria to him. As in other cases, we were keen to welcome participants’ initiatives, and Mathieu’s wish to perform in improvisation the character’s hysteria led to amazingly effective moments.

que l’intermittente lamentation de ce pauvre cœur, douce et indistincte, comme le dernier écho d’une symphonie qui s’éloigne.] (III, 8) Emma loses her capacity of sense perception. The sign of specific and crucial focalisation, here, is that Flaubert’s predominantly visual novel yields to audio; her indifference to, sometimes hatred of, Charles morphs into a recognition of his sweet nature and sincere affection. The figuration of this confused audio perception is, again, a moment where loyalty to the novel helps audio-visual meaning to be more affectively effective. We have tried to give Emma her own focalisation, even when she is no longer able to see. The witnesses, to her, have become ghosts,

s­ pectres. Since Derrida, or since Derrida’s Marx, the spectre is an undead, someone the subject sees because it haunts her: toxic, dangerous, but without substance, and, in most narratives, without subjectivity. But what happens when the spectre, or ghost, is allowed to be the focalisor? (Peeren 2014) That question also pertains to Emma’s death. The confused hearing of Charles’s lament, ‘the last echo of an ever-fainting symphony’, is figured through the focalis­ ation of the dying woman who ‘sees’ only ghosts because she already is one (Figure 9.6). Charles is the source of the echo, indirect, but harmonious – a ‘symphony’, like the novel. This gave him the cinematic privilege to stay close enough to Emma to remain on her side, instead of turning into a ghost.18 The participant-viewer also has a place in this affect-image. The blurry off-white on the lower right invites us to come close to the dying woman, caress her with our haptic gaze, and make her feel she is not alone. This is the image-thinking-through of the command of the ‘ethics of non-indifference’. This is a concept I have developed in a compar­ ative study of a story in the Bible and the Qur’an. It was in the latter version of the story that I found instances of such non-indifference. The use I have made in this analysis of the concept of focalisation as relevant in Madame Bovary and Madame B points to instances of affect where affect itself does not have a form, while formal aspects and elements of the artworks trigger, or create a space of affect. In Figure 9.6, the concept of affect becomes even more indispensable. Affective Things? I am using the concept of ‘affect’ in an attempt to make a tripartite connection leading up to my view of art as a cultural force with political effectivity. Through the etymological sense of aesthetics as binding through the senses, affect connects the aesthetic quality of artworks in 18  This is a technical intervention through depth of field by cinematographer Christopher Wessels. Like the slightly wobbly images mentioned earlier, Wessels made astounding contributions to the meanings displayed, by means of the technical apparatus of the camera.

exhibitions, and the art such exhibitions include, to what I see as a fundamentally contemporary politics of looking. Affect does not need to resort to psychology. Such an appeal, understandable as it is, would ground the use of the concept of affect in an anthropomorphic analogy between art and its subjectivity, on the one hand, and the human psyche on the other. Such anthropomorphising of art distracts from, or dilutes, the performative force that triggers affect. Instead, we need a different concept of perception, neither a somatic processing of the reality confronting the eye, nor an interpretive construction of an image on the basis of visible elements. To understand affect without resorting to psychology, our best resource is a combination of the work of Deleuze and one of his sources of inspiration, Henri Bergson (1859–1941). At stake is the relationship between the still and the moving image. Painting, photography and cinema each produce images, different ones in many respects. These media do not have a privileged power to trigger affect. Yet they share something fundamental that is a property of images as objects of perception, which is why Bergson had such a profound influence on Deleuze (1986, 1989, 1990). I take ‘affect’ in the Deleuzian sense of intensity. This remains provisionally unspecific on, even void of, the emotion that would make it anthropomorphic. Deleuze defines intensity in Difference and Repetition as a ‘qualitative difference within the sensible’ (1994, 182). There is a subtle temporal discrepancy involved here – one between perception and understanding – for Deleuze adds that intensity can only be grasped, or felt, after it has been mediated by the quality it creates (182). This posteriority defines affect and makes it difficult to grasp, impossible to locate since it is not a ‘thing’, yet crucial for political art. This is one of the reasons why, as I argue below, the temporality of Doris Salcedo’s installation work Palimpsesto is such an indelible aspect of its affective work. That temporality is not quite a ‘form’, but it is an analysable trigger of affect. The artwork needs the mediation of the image that moves through duration, thereby moving the spectator who, in turn, must float away from her fixed position. Affect as a semantically unspecified intensity can only be experienced and recognised once it has been followed, filled, specified, by emotional and cognitive feeling-understanding.

Affect needs the participation of experiencing humans to work, but cannot be limited to humans only. Such affect can emanate from things as much as from people. This is why affect is social by definition, as is the (public) artwork that triggers it; even though its consequence and interpretation are individual. Bound up with perception, it is also connected to something as banal-sounding as ‘use’. Perception, in the Bergsonian-Deleuzian sense, is a selection of what, from the universe of visuality, is ‘usable’ in our lives. Perception makes visible the usable ‘face’ of things. This is why perception is bound up with framing: cinema as well as exhibitions make such a selection for us, proposing a particular perception. Such a selective perception prepares the possibility for action. ‘Action-images’, as Deleuze calls them, show us possibilities for how to act upon what we perceive. Deleuze uses the verb ‘incurver’: to ‘incurve’ the visible universe to mete out a virtual relationship of action between us and the things we see. Mutuality is key here: images can act upon us as much as we can act upon them. The intensity produced in the interaction between artwork and viewer is relational. The way affect can induce political effectivity is best understood through Deleuze’s typology of images. In some instances, images trouble us. We wish to act upon them, do something about the state of the world we witness. Between a perception that troubles us and an action we hesitate about, affect emerges. Affect is a temporarily congealed, yet turbulent relationship between perception and the action that coincides with subjective agency. In other words, the viewer sees (what is within the frame), and hesitates about what to do; she is thus ensnared in affect. This is even more strongly possible in Salcedo’s installation Palimpsesto, where the work cannot be seen at all unless one is inside it.19 Affect-images are important because, like the close-ups whose form they often take in cinema, they arrest linear time without becoming still. The specific receptivity that such images entail connects them to 19  The most succinct formulation of these three types of ‘movement-images’ is in Deleuze (1986, 66–70). In order to eliminate misunderstandings of a sentimentalising interpretation, I will not use Deleuze’s term ‘affection image’ but replace it with ‘affect-image’.

aesthetic effect. ‘Art preserves’, wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy? (1994). They describe the objects of preservation as ‘bloc[s] of sensations’, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects. These blocs exist independently of the subjects experiencing them. The gripping images continue to exist as percepts, affects and as syntax: a syntax that ‘ascends irresistibly into his [the writer’s] work and passes into sensation’. Salcedo’s Palimpsesto is so effective because, in countering the inuring effect of repeated photographic representation of the drowning of refugees – day after day on television and in newspapers – the work’s own repetition of filling and emptying out engraved letters rides on the relationship of complementary contrast between photography and memory. Silverman formulated this relationship in the following words: ‘Whereas photography performs its memorial function by lifting an object out of time and immortalizing it forever in a particular form, memory is all about temporality and change’ (1996, 157). As a result – and this is, here, what ‘art preserves’ – the visitor is able to let the installation ‘introduce the “not me” into [her] memory reserve’ (185). It is time to look at Salcedo’s work.20 The Experience of Feeling-Looking Movement, of the smallest, subtlest kind, trembles through an immense plaza consisting of large slabs, each 4.5 metres long, 1.28 centimetres wide, in sand colour, with a grainy surface of extremely fine pebbles, designed to resist the absorption of water. Nearly effaced names are written on them, in a dark hue. These are written in sand. Overwriting these are other names, in the same size and font, in shallow relief engraved in the slabs. Suddenly, a shiny drop of water appears, rolling towards the relief; then more, until the letters of the name are filled, and the water becomes a slightly convex shiny surface, surmounting the 20  Silverman alleges a limited kind of photography (1996, 163, 164, 167). A study of very different photographic practices, which he calls ‘counter-practices’ because they ‘disobey’ the common standards of ‘serious’ photography, is Alphen (2018).

flatness of the slabs. After a few minutes, the water letters start to tremble; then they disappear. Appearance and disappearance: the names keep moving. Movement, as physical instability, and as affective effect, produces turmoil. The flat ground on which the visitor must walk; the humble material; and the constant unsteadiness: these are the basic tenets Doris Salcedo’s Palimpsesto (2017). The water names nearly overwrite the sand names, which, while being put in the shadow of the water names, remain as a palimpsest, a trace of forgotten people.21 This work was on view at the Palacio de Cristal in the Parque del Retiro in Madrid, from 6 October 2017 to 29 March 2018. I had the privilege of experiencing it there, hours long. Salcedo, whose art has been devoted from the beginning, in the 1980s, to counter the oblivion of violence and the violence of oblivion, has made a brilliant, affectively effective political art installation. The term ‘counter-monument’, certainly appropriate, doesn’t cover it. It is a performative work, in the dual sense of performance – it keeps moving and changing – and perform­a­ tivity – it has a strong effect; an affective one. And it invites, even compels, the visitor to walk in/on it: in, because there is no other space for the viewer; on, because the work is the floor. Every step, one has to decide whether to avoid stepping on the names or, in a callous indifference, walk on top of them (Figure 9.7). The possibility of indifference also hits a nerve, since the names form a recollection of and homage to the innumerable victims of European indifference who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.22 This is not a ‘theme’; the work is not ‘about’ this acutely political issue. Salcedo does not represent the violence she invokes, nor the oblivion she counters. Although her work is never abstract in the traditional sense, it does not proclaim political opinions, in the loud voice of so much (activist) art that calls itself political. Her work deconstructs, in line with Derrida, and then Deleuze, the binary Figure 9.7  Doris Salcedo, Palimpsesto (detail).

21  For an analysis of Palimpsesto, see Huyssen (2018). 22  On counter-monuments, see Huyssen (1999).

opposition between abstraction and figuration. The objects in her earlier work are concrete ‘things’ – stacked shirts, pieces of furniture – but they signify on a very different level, triggering affect and, in their installations, subtle lighting touching their viewers. Without ever stating a ‘theme’, the work concerns, and is committed to, a political cause.23 23  On deconstruction, see Derrida (1976) and, for a lucid explanation, Culler (1983). On Deleuze’s theory of abstraction, most accessible in Deleuze and Guattari (1992 [1980]), see Rajchman (1995) and a more extensive version (1998).

In Palimpsesto, the issue at stake is perhaps the most tragic one of the world in our present time, over-visible due to the media, and precisely due to that media exposure, too well known to avoid becoming invisible – forgotten, on a day-by-day basis. Too much sand and too little water push people to embark on the precarious boats of human traffickers, only to perish in too much water. Sand and water: they are basic conditions of survival, in the wrong proportions precluding survival. As a consequence of such a disproportion, people cannot stay where they were born and would have stayed if only they had had the merest chance of surviving the negative dialectic of too much (sand), too little (drinkable water), too much (sea water). An artwork can hardly be more contemporary – it is happening in our time, today. This relates to one point I seek to make: affect happens in the present tense. And it is devoted to that tragedy of ongoing violence we all, in Europe, continue to condone. The names ‘tell us’ that the drowned are not an anonymous mass but individuals whose lives matter – each of them as human as we all are, or pretend to be. After five years of strenuous work and creativity, at great personal expense of time, artistic thought and economic resources, and in collaboration with a crew of twenty, with Palimpsesto Salcedo shows the cultural necessity, yet difficulty, of mourning. But ‘to show’ is not the right verb – nor is ‘to tell’. The only verb I can think of is ‘to do’. That ‘doing’ is the triggering. And this can be analysed. By means of its form and temporality, animated both by its movement and its scale, the work invites – indeed, compels – us to grieve for the unknown dead. In the intensity that occurs between the work and the viewer, it contaminates us with a desire to protest against the violence of indifference and of the acceptance, and even a certain stimulation of the murderous violence by governments – in this case particularly the European ones. But Salcedo’s art always integrates the negativity of protest and critique with a positive aspect. That combination makes it so affectively effective. This is a protest that is at the same time an homage to each of those persons, now named by their names, as when Figure 9.8  The installation in the space. Photo: Mieke Bal.

people are introduced to one another. That double effect, of soliciting indignation and grief, of beauty and pain, is unspeakable. The surface of this work, adapted to the irregular oval shape of, and the many columns in the building, covers the entirety of the Art Nouveau glass Palacio de Cristal, 1,065 square metres. The snapshot shown in Figure 9.8 (no better photo available) gives an impression. Each of the 220 slabs is 4.53 × 1.29 metres and weighs 980 kilos. One can only imagine the logistics of transporting it. What matters here is that the alternation of appearance and disappearance of the water is the trigger of affect. This is due to many aspects, especially temporality. It makes the visitor want to stay, to see the vanishing water reappear, and thus witness the act of witnessing that this work constitutes and performs. It is in this sense that time becomes a ‘form’, an aspect of the work that triggers the intensity that generates affect. One cannot write on water, and sand will not stay in place. These are strongly material elements of nature, unstable yet persistent in their materiality. But the artist demonstrates that one can write with water, and with sand. The names written with sand belong to victims of European indifference who died before the year 2010; the names written with water, to those who died after 2010. Only a fraction of the individuals who died could find a place in this enormous work. But that each of them counts is clear. As clear as the brilliant drops of water. The name is what distinguishes one human being from another; it is the label of their uniqueness. Against the abjection of anonymous death, the brilliance of the water dignifies the persons named. The transparency and the evaporation of the water with which the names are written constitute a subtle, ‘live’, performative metaphor of the fragility of human existence, and, in these cases, of lives cut off too early. A complex mechanism underneath the slabs pushes the water up, drop by drop, to the surface. Each drop rolls, or ‘walks’ towards the sculpted letters, appearing through the tiniest hole in the stone, between the minuscule pebbles. That is their performance. When the drops merge, and take leave from their brilliant first appearance where the sun makes them look like precious stones, we realise we must resist that comparison because nothing stays stable, and the material is humble.

Instead of diamonds we see tears; the earth is crying. This weeping of the stone stands in for the absent tears of all of us, who shake off the everyday spectacle of deaths shown, in half a minute, on screen.24 Instead, in Salcedo’s installation, one is captivated enough to spend a long time with the dead. That is the performativity. While waiting for the vanished water to return, caught in intensity, we can and must takegive the time to reflect on the political issue so powerfully made tangible, thanks to the absence of a distracting representation that would narrow it down. Thus, grief is brought together to suggest that we can, indeed must, break the cycle of silenced violence. The tool: memory. And acts of memory happen in, and require, time. When oblivion is replaced with memory, dead things come alive, intensity emerges, and this produces the affect we feel. In Salcedo’s installation, no visitor is alone. The fact of being together in a (social) space is an important aspect of the experience. While developing the thoughts that the work solicits, one is aware of being with those others as well as with the dead. Salcedo’s work addresses cultural memory in its complacent negativity, its failure, and seeks to find hints of solutions. Salcedo’s focus is on actively, albeit not necessarily purposely, repressing or, in a different view, disassociating – in other words, dis-remembering, as the title of a 2015 work of hers calls it. This is a devastatingly wasteful missed opportunity for the present and future. Without moralising, Salcedo counters these failures. Her refusal of representation achieves affective effects that do not repulse viewers by moralism but, instead, trigger in them the desire to affectively transform their subject position towards the world’s tragedies. The Anthropomorphic Imagination Along with the presentness and the durational temporality, this refusal of representing human figures while staying within a concrete 24  As mentioned, Brinkema’s first chapter is devoted entirely to the tear, to crying, and the relationship between the emotions, where causality is not self-evident. (2014, 1–25). Her analysis can give more depth to my comments on Salcedo’s drops.

imagination is another aspect of the affective quality of Salcedo’s art. The human figure constitutes the primary subject matter of figurative literature and art, although by no means exclusively. In literature, especially narrative, the human figure takes on the propulsion of narrative thrust. As agent or patient, it carries the action that is the motor of the plot. There, this figure is named character. Both figure and character can be seen as figurations: figurative in that they embody ideas shaped in forms, better termed figural, and figures of anthro­ pomorphic appearance that are, do and appear. It is the convergence of figure and character in their guise of figurations that projects the terms in which we tend to analyse art. A most emblematic manifestation is the recurrence of the self-portrait, but also the memoir, autobiography or self-reflexive moments in fiction. I consider the convergence between art and its analysis as the work of the ‘anthropomorphic imagination’. This is a tendency to approach cultural artefacts through the lens or frame of frequently unacknowledged anthropomorphic concepts. The tools of analysis are thus made congruent to the objects. This telescoping of object and analysis produces a number of tendencies, of which I point out a few of the problematic ones. One such tendency is the conflation of artwork and the maker’s intention. Another is the unification of the artwork, to resemble a unified human being anxious to hold him- or herself together. A third tendency is ‘spiritualisation’, the de-materialisation or dis-embodiment of art, art-making, and viewing or reading – jumping to philosophical, ideational conclusions. These three tendencies distract from the affective potential of the artwork. It is in countering these tendencies that Salcedo’s work yields to and focuses on the victims in need of remembrance. While recognisable for their subtlety and that intricate combination of formal beauty with affective bleakness, her works are impossible to ‘sign’; her intention cannot be read off the page. They also pluralise the human beings they bring back to memory, thus precluding the anxious unification. And countering spiritualisation, they are emphatically material. The humble yet persistent materiality of sand and water makes any spiritualising tendency to disembody them futile. And while the work is so large as to cover an entire museal space, every

name, every letter, every drop and every tiny pebble counts as a recollection of a human being destroyed by violence. To produce the space of intensity that facilitates viewers to realise, feel and remember, is the affective work of art. Such artworks thus become more effective and stronger utterances than any news item or political debate can effectuate. In this work with and for memory, Salcedo joins artists who deploy the shadow as the spectre of the dead returning. The shadow as the trace, such as the names written in sand in Palimpsesto, becomes a spectre when we take time itself into account. And time is the motor of memory. When we think of time, we cannot ignore the past, hence, history; but affectively, I am under the impact of the contemporaneity of this artwork, hence, of the past’s present. There, the plurality of experiences of time lead to heterochrony. One of the durational differences in the various experiences of time is the duration of the look. Think of the Deleuzian ‘crystal image’, that tangled unit of an actual image and its virtual image where we see the sprouting of moments of time through the various facets of the crystal: all these temporal forms are activated in the contemporary crystal of this multitentacled artwork. This is one of the many meanings and effects of the shining drops of water, unhindered by the anthropomorphic imagination.25 In this brief account, I have attempted to bring together its formal, temporal, performative and semantic aspects. If affect is difficult to grasp in concrete analyses of art, it is because these aspects cannot be distinguished. On the contrary; affect can be characterised as the place, moment, process or event where these aspects are inextricably fused. But they all count; as triggers, they participate in the affective interaction, and, as I hope to have shown, they can be analysed in their collaborative effects. That is when looking becomes one with feeling. After demonstrating how affect works in the aftermath of this artwork, in the following section I will unpack the theoretical ins and outs of affect as 25  On the crystal image, see Deleuze (1989, 82). For an in-depth study of this and affiliated concepts, see Sutton (2009).

a conceptual tool, in view of my ongoing quest to conceptualise the difficult but important question of how art can be politically effective. Through Salcedo’s work I have suggested that affect is an indispensable tool for such effectivity. Photographs cannot do justice to the way this artwork deploys affect for political effect. As a meagre compensation, a short documentary on the work can be consulted. In this video Huyssen also speaks.26 Palimpsesto demonstrates the point of affect as an over-arching concept. This concept opens up many possibilities for analysis. To be sure, many artefacts we call artistic can be qualified as affect-images. But, to give one example of this concept’s non-unifying potential, this Deleuzian term need not be associated with the human – or digital, ‘posthuman’ – face. Rather, it refers to images that neither mediate (Deleuze uses the verb ‘translate’) between the viewer and the image nor lead to action, but that elicit a merging of subject and object. As discussed in Chapter 7, the face is a staple of the history of art, precisely because of its humanistic value. As Mark Hansen argues in a different but related context, however (2003), Deleuze identifies the affect-image he spotted in the close-ups of classical cinema not only with but as the face. Deleuze’s view of the close-up image qua face, standing in as face instead of the human face, becomes relevant for an analysis of contemporary, ‘post-humanist’ affectively effective art. Images and other phenomena, such as, for example, that temporal version of the close-up that is the extreme slow-down, can be just such a ‘face’, without being a close-up of the object represented; it is a close-up of and to the viewer that collapses subject with object in the space of intensity between the two.27 For Hansen, this Deleuzian view leads affect away from the viewer’s body. In contrast, in what Hansen calls digital-facial-images (DFI), the viewer’s body is directly addressed and hence, mobilised, not into action 26  See https://vimeo.com/239840671. 27  Prior to Hansen’s essay, Doane discussed the relationship between affect, close-up and the face, in view of temporality (Doane 2003). For a study of the face in film and its many different effects and meanings, see Steimatsky (2017).

but into affective response. I think Hansen suggests a theoretical opposition here, whereas the distinction pertains to the examples each author alleges and to their historical positions. But regardless of the relevance of oppositional reasoning here, the viewer’s body, although not forced into motion as in interactive video, is swept into the motion the artwork generates, that is observed, and within which the artwork had positioned it. Affect, Medium and Mood Given the relationality of the intensity that generates affect, I am tempted to call affect a medium, in a specific, double sense: as technical medium and as mediation. The status of affect as a medium in and of itself asks us to further specify, on the basis of the affective intensity, the work itself that triggers it, and our own fundamental freedom to respond to it. This is what Brinkema suggested with her call for reading for form (2014, 21). Art cannot dictate feelings. This is why I resist both the plural in the phrase ‘the affects’ of Brinkema’s title, and the classification of Sylvan Tompkins’ theory of affect. Moreover, that status as medium suspends the relevance, although not the presence, of the heterogeneity of the media of visual imagery and literature, respectively. Instead, something like ‘mood’ becomes the ‘language’ through which the work speaks.28 Salcedo’s positioning of the viewer inside the work radicalises a feature that video installations often deploy. Mood is key in establishing and specifying the connection of Deleuzian intensity in the posterior temporality mentioned. Affect as a medium, then, remains effective throughout Salcedo’s installation, ‘making’, or suggesting mood. But in many different ways it can be invoked to map the visual and linguistic, aural, cinematic and painterly effects of the installation as it unfolds in the short duration during which the figure experiences, then endorses, her subject position; what Heidegger called the ‘thrownness 28  Gumbrecht also stresses the importance of textual detail in connection to mood (Stimmung) (2012).

into the world’. ‘Mood’ is a powerful conceptual tool for such an analysis. Kaja Silverman, speaking of Heidegger’s notion of ‘care’, formulates this as a paradox: ‘we are only really in the world when it is in us’ (2000, 29). This formulation adequately presents the affective effect of being in Palimpsesto, and furthers our grasp on what the affect compels us to ‘feel’. These artworks, then, as thought-experiments, philosophise. If we are to be affected by our presence with the dead through the appearance and disappearance of the water, we must grasp the diversity of perspectives that make up the ‘Being’ of others who are there. Heidegger, too, speaking of care, shuns identification in any facile sense; that is, any sense in which either the other is reduced to a clone of ourselves, or we melt into sentiment and lose our agency.29 The struggle against indifference – the ethics of non-indifference – as the sole alternative that results from this anti-identificatory politics retains its full actuality today, as Salcedo’s work demonstrates. Silverman formulates the resulting paradox: ‘it is only by embracing other people and things that we can free them to be themselves – only by enfolding them within our psychic enclosure that we can create the space where they can emerge from concealment’ (2000, 55). This paradox, she writes, ‘is resistant to all rationalizing gestures’. Perhaps art can do what thought and its writing in criticism, theory and philosophy cannot. Salcedo’s work shapes this struggle. The word ‘shape’ intimates form, which, once ‘read for’, can be analysed. Placing us in a spatial relationship of affective permeability with a range of moving names of unjustly dead people is this artwork’s creative proposition towards a solution of the Heideggerian paradox. These two examples must suffice to suggest the productivity of affect, the conceptual tool that unifies the different possible emotional responses to artworks and their exhibition. Affect is so powerful because, far from seducing one to a sentimental interpretation, it 29  The former would be what Silverman theorises as idiopathic identification, a form of psychic cannibalism (1996). The latter is the object of dismissal for Brecht (1964 [1949]). For a critical discussion of Brecht, see Adorno (2003, 240–58).

possesses a strong political component, due to its compulsion to mobilise mood. Mood is essential to our being in the world, to our potential to envelop others in care without devouring them by stripping them of their otherness. At the end of an explanation of mood in Being and Time, Heidegger writes emphatically: ‘Essentially, a state-of-mind implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters to us.’30 It is because mood, the viewer’s mood, is so essential that Flaubert’s figure is put in charge, not of suffering from psychosis and eliciting our compassion, but of deploying psychotic perception as an (imaginative) means to trigger our felt endorsement of the intense confusion as a possible way out of the paradox of ‘care’. The smallest installation of the Madame B project, Precarity – its five-screen enclosure, the large scale of the screens, the quality of the sound and images – is the conduit, or medium in the material sense, through which the resulting affect can be transferred onto the viewer, who can develop and inflect a specific mood for it. Bringing Salcedo and our works together, I must now specify that, as bound with affect, mood is the further medium here, not the object of representation. Because of the range of subsequent phases of affect, it is the most open, yet the most pervasive and invasive one. If we must engage with art on the mode of affect rather than the kind of taxonomies on which the divisions of the humanities rest, I am now compelled to spell out what this imperative entails, and why it must by definition transcend as well as work through the different disciplinary domains to which the work appeals. To explain this, I cite a conception of affect very different from the one I am proposing here. ‘Affect,’ writes Charles Altieri in a remarkably negative definition, ‘. . . comprises the range of mental states where an agent’s activity cannot be adequately handled in terms of either sensations or beliefs but requires attending to how he or she offers expressions of those states.’31 Affects, he continues, ‘are ways of being moved that supplement 30  Heidegger (1962 [1927], 177; emphasis in text); quoted in Silverman (2000, 60). 31  Altieri (2003, 47). The definition is remarkable in its negativity because the book

sensation with at least a minimal degree of imaginative projection’ (47). The author then proceeds to specify the affects according to a hierarchical range, from sensation to passion: Feelings are elemental affective states characterized by an imaginative engagement in the immediate processes of sensation. Moods are modes of feeling where the sense of subjectivity becomes diffuse and sensation merges into something close to atmosphere, something that seems to pervade an entire scene or situation. Emotions are affects that involve the construction of attitudes that typically establish a particular cause and so situate the agent within a narrative. . . . Finally, passions are emotions within which we project significant stakes for the identity that they make possible. (48) From this short taxonomy, it is clear that mood is truly the affective domain where artwork and viewer or reader can most easily share the diffuse sense of subjectivity that is grounded in the relational intensity between them. This is not the same thing as identification. In a meditation on war and the confrontation with mortality, Silverman, relying on Heidegger, writes that we can assume our finitude affectively, rather than rationally, ‘by way of a mood rather than abstract knowledge’. But what is it that makes mood, here, more suitable than the other affects? In connection to her own focus, facing death in war, Silverman offers an illuminating distinction between fear and anxiety, again derived from her reading of, mainly, Being and Time. This in which it appears is devoted to promoting affects as aesthetic elements. I submit that its compulsion to classify (or ‘classifix’, after Tuin 2015) and to anthropomorphise diminishes the book’s effectivity.

distinction can help us understand why mood is more effective than the other affects as Altieri distinguishes them, such as, in particular, emotion; and it clarifies why the presence of water in Palimpsesto is based on the refusal of stability. Silverman writes: Fear is the affect through which we apprehend the ‘nothing’ in the mode of a turning away. Anxiety is the affect through which we apprehend it in the mode of a turning toward. Fear fails to reconcile us to the nothing, because it always represents the attempt to specify or concretize the nothing. Anxiety, on the other hand, ‘attunes’ us to it, because it is the affect par excellence of the indeterminate.32 To create a mood appropriate to assume the disasters the world is staging, as distinct from representing through media such as television, and through those representations, stripping them of affect; in other words, to create a mood that activates, and thus helps in deciding how to respond to them, I contend, these installations need both representational reticence and forceful staging of mood. But staging, here, takes a particular theatrical form, where the discrepancy between mood and events, not the representation of the latter, produces the effect of invading the viewer’s affective capacity. The viewer co-acts on that stage. In our film and video installations, the mood, not shown on the character’s face but evoked in her utterances, is one where a 32  Silverman (2003, 235; emphasis added). The first part of this quotation paraphrases Heidegger’s ‘philosophy of mortality’ (Silverman’s phrase, 341) in Being and Time (228–35). She explains the multiple connotations of the German word Stimmung, Gumbrecht’s key word, which means ‘mood’ as well as ‘attunement’, including in the musical sense. Importantly for his philosophy of being in the world, Heidegger characterises mood as the attunement of Dasein to something else. In the installations, we trigger mood, present its possibility, and entice viewers to adopt it; we do not represent it.

curious neutrality of tone literally and figuratively leaves space for an invasion of the body yielding to a diffusely affected sense of subjectivity. The concept of affect helps to address the political and aesthetic potential of art critically in a number of different mediums, periods and styles, regarding single objects or groupings of objects. This diversity of objects is not meant to suggest, however, that under the banner of affect, all art is the same. On the contrary. Affect, much more clearly than representation, allows as many nuances, distinctions and accents as that greatest nuancing object of all, the work of art, asks us to be sensitive to. Sensitive: not only with cognitive skills, but with a willingness to be thrown into the world. To allow that to happen is the ethically and politically alert viewer’s mission; to enjoy the dizziness of that movement is, ultimately, his or her gratification. Such is the work of aesthetics: that it will not separate the domains of the world from the sense-based engagement with it. The concept of affect, then, does justice to the way in which art is, must be, activating, and cannot avoid exercising its tremendous cultural agency.

10. By Way of Conclusion – For Memory: Dis-remembered, Mis-remembered Access Denied, A Long History of Madness, Reasonable Doubt Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where?

Introduction: Meandering Through Memory Thought At the heart of this book is memory. This is why I refrain from writing a conclusion. In the end, art is a form of remembering. Since I am insatiably curious, over the forty-some years of my career, my work has been one long journey, going from discipline to discipline to establish connections (‘inter-ships’) between them, turning corners without cutting them, and looking for ever-new ways of testing my ideas in ever-new relationships with others: artists, friends, students, colleagues, actors, cinematographers, photographers. As a result, I have encountered and temporarily journeyed with too many companions to count. The relationship between thinking about memory and remembering companions has been particularly intense, manifold and inspirational. When, twenty or so years ago, I first began to work on

memory, it was at the request of other people. Although I had written on memorialists such as Proust, memory had not been a concept that preoccupied me particularly. But when two professors at Dartmouth College, Leo Spitzer and Jonathan Crewe, invited me to work with them to conduct a six-week seminar on ‘cultural memory and the present’, their title immediately made me think about each of its terms. These two colleagues, and the other participants – among whom were noted memory scholars such as Marianne Hirsch, Ernst van Alphen, Marita Sturken and Susan Brison, to name but a few whose work has inspired me especially – became, thus, my first companions. The resulting publication, Acts of Memory, appeared in 1999. Another result of this initial and initiating experience was that I proposed the title ‘Cultural Memory in the Present’ (note the change from conjunction to preposition; from juxtaposition to embedding) for a book series I was invited to co-edit with Hent de Vries for Stanford University Press. This was undertaken within the framework of the institute for cultural analysis (ASCA) Hent and I had then-recently co-founded, and of which I was the ­academic director and Hent the chair.1 Along the way, interacting with students whose critical enthusiasm also greatly helped my thinking, I had embarked on the project that resulted in the book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. This book came out of my practice as a teacher at PhD level and beyond. With an interdisciplinary group, conceptual confusion always looms, and searching for a way to a satisfactory solution led to that book. In this context, the current question is: can ‘memory’ be considered such a travelling concept? Significantly, there is no chapter devoted to memory in the 2002 book. In my view, concepts may be fluid, and memory certainly is; but with ‘travelling’ as well as with ‘concepts’ I meant something else. Rather than fluid, open and malleable, travelling concepts are precise, but transform as they move from one period, discipline or cultural domain to another. The concept of memory is used in so many contexts that the idea of travelling becomes redundant, since there is no ‘home’ 1  I have co-edited the book series ‘Cultural Memory in the Present’ from its beginning in 1997 to 2012, when it became too taxing on my time.

where it would begin its travel. According to a distinction I made in that book, ‘memory’ is a word, rather than a concept. The difference is that words may have various meanings and connotations, and may be used in different contexts, but they do not contain a mini-theory the way concepts do. Only when memory is qualified, as, for example, ‘collective memory’ – based on community (Halbwachs) – ‘public memory’ – dominated by media and institutions – or ‘cultural memory’, does it begin to approach being a concept. But, as the title of our collective volume indicates, there is a different concept there: ‘acts of memory’. This phrase-concept harbours a set of characteristics that, together, do form a mini-theory. I want to mention two scholars of memory who have been totally crucial in foregrounding memory as a concept from early on after the ‘memory turn’, and whose work is indispensable, both for grasping the ‘mini-theory’ that concepts harbour, and differentiating, while keeping them connected, the different kinds, functions or framings, of memory. Their works are also great examples of image-thinking. Marianne Hirsch has been writing on memory as connecting generations, most famously through her concept of postmemory, explained in her 2012 book but already proposed much earlier (1997), and implicitly developed in her work from the beginning. In many projects, conferences, books and exhibitions, she has brought family histories and school histories to our attention – those allegedly private yet deeply formative framings where memories are being shaped. Griselda Pollock pioneered a feminist art history bound to thought, especially critique of ideology, beginning with the book she wrote with Rosizka Parker, with the witty title Old Mistresses (1981, to my joy recently republished, 2021). Her monumental 2018 book Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory sums up the many ideas she has developed over the years through her close reading of artworks, in which she theorises as she goes along, and pays homage to an artist whose work has been known but rarely given such consistent attention as in this book. Pollock also combines her scholarship and teaching with curating. Both scholars are keen on assisting younger generations of students in their intellectual development, and do so through a ‘discussive’ mode of teaching on an equal basis, of the kind

that speaks to me, as I explained in the interviews on teaching with Lutters (2018).2 With the phrase ‘acts of memory’ – the title of a volume to which both Hirsch and her discussant Ernst van Alphen, as well as Susan Brison and other important memory scholars (including Huyssen) contributed chapters – I seek to flesh out that mini-theory that concepts harbour, keeping it mini-, yet clarifying it implicitly. That is what a concept is. Memory, then, is a verb, and its mode is active: it is something we do. And, as the change to the preposition ‘in’ for the title of our book series indicates, that act takes place in the present. The phrase encapsulates a theory of memory. This twofold characteristic – activity and present tense – in turn imports into the concept aspects of cultural utterances such as performativity and duration. The former implies that the act of memory has consequences for its ‘second persons’, which may be the subject herself; the latter, that it takes, occupies, or gives time. And with this conception of the act of memory a whole new world opens up. There is no better place to seek inspiration for this thought-on-themove than the world of art. Indeed, I find in the process of analysing artworks that the refinements, the assessments of the consequences and potential, and the politics of memory come to the fore. A few years after I came to this insight, I made yet another turn in my work: the one to which this book is devoted. The subject of the first films I made invariably turned out to be acts of memory. The subjects of the experimental documentaries concerned issues key to the culture in which migrancy is a normal way of life. This is the culture we all share, whether we ever move or not, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4; in short, present cultures around the world. Issues of not having legal papers; of identity becoming a burden; of not being admitted into your own country; and of being boxed into categories that never fit. In this context, from 2006 to 2008 I made the video installation Nothing is Missing, discussed in Chapter 7, in which a group of women completely erased from our cultural awareness perform their own acts of memory. 2  I concur with American literary scholar Jane Gallop, who considers close reading to be an ethical responsibility (2000), for the encounters it produces.

Figure 10.1  A visual discussion with Freud. Photo: Michelle Williams Gamaker.

These mothers of migrants talk about the memories of the child who left, from birth and childhood to the departure and its aftermath. The next phase of this development was the making of fiction films and video installations derived from them. As an act of intertemporal dialogue, we installed a version of ALHoM as an exhibition in the Freud Museum London, where a monitor at the foot of Freud’s iconic coach performed a visual dialogue with the master of psychoanalysis. As we visually argued, the condition of proving Freud wrong and setting past wounds right is that the analyst behaves like a therapôn, or companion (Figure 10.1).3 3  In the video at the foot of the coach, the analyst and patient are sitting side by side. The importance of the companion in Davoine’s book converges with the issue of memory. On the film and exhibition project, see a special section of the journal Le Coq-Héron, in an issue devoted to ‘Cinéma et psychanalyse’ edited by Eva Landau, ‘Dossier Autour de Mère folle et Histoires de fous’, 211, December 2012, and the catalogues for the exhibition Landscapes of Madness at the museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku, 20 October 2011 to 29 January 2012 (discussed in Chapter 2), and Saying It, Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker and Renate Ferro, curated by Joanne Morra, Freud Museum London, 20 September to 19 November 2012.

Making Acts of Memory: Responsibility in the Present Thus, from colleagues and students, to artworks, to the people who appear in my own artworks, to the fictionalised characters whose memories of history had been blocked by madness, I was able to theorise acts of memory that could touch upon, activate and overcome the blocked, or even unformed memory we call trauma. Through the experi­ ment of making this film, I attempted a theorisation of memory that takes as its starting point the active performance of acts of memory in the present, and encompasses the different kind of such acts from unreflective, routine memories, sense memories to narrative memories and the impossible memories that cause trauma, as well as the moods that colour memories – such as nostalgia. Underlying that theorisation is the insight that memory is also dialogic, hence, social. What makes an act of memory capable of overcoming traumatic incapacitation is the social process that enables psychotic people to be heard, believed and socially accepted. A second fiction film enacts yet another act of memory, also thoroughly cultural albeit in a somewhat different way. That project – again with Michelle – is the updated version of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Taking quotation (a mode or act of memory in itself) as the basic mode of our filming, we foregrounded that the combination of capitalism and patriarchy that disables the main character Emma is still rampant today. This entails not so much an actualisation of the nineteenth-century novel but, instead, working with that novel’s own fundamental contemporaneity. Flaubert wrote from and for his own time, and that horizontal temporality is what underlies the idea of acts of memory. Radicalising this aspect, we installed an immersive exhibition of eight installations, together made up of nineteen screens. Thus, visitors are positioned in a confrontational, as well as empathetic position, surrounded by screens on which emotional capitalism is acted out and leads to the demise of a talented and beautiful young woman. This installation entailed yet another layer of contemporaneity: that of each museum visit, where content is constructed in the present, while the classic story is also present in its durative contemporaneity.

Encouraged by the installations to actively engage with the characters, visitors literally perform acts of cultural memory in the present, recalling, through the old masterpiece, the current situation of economic anxiety and the ongoing illusions of romantic love. It stages the deceptive promise of that impossibility, permanent excitement, with which emotional capitalism keeps luring us all and destroying many of us. This temporal reversal is perhaps the most literal enactment of the theoretical concept of acts of memory in the present. And, since they are not alone in the galleries where the installations confront, surround or solicit them, visitors also enact the social aspect of such acts.4 In what follows, I will first invoke work by an artist who has greatly enabled my thinking on this, Eija-Liisa Ahtila. From her I borrowed the phrase ‘thinking in film’, which constitutes the starting point of my continued thinking about ‘image-thinking’. Her work has enticed me to reflect more on memory, and to embark on that mode myself. She emphatically chooses the present tense for her works that perform acts of memory. She addresses (past?) violence and attempts to make art relevant for dealing with it. She seems to heed the warning by Walter Benjamin that, for me, condenses the mini-theory of the concept and its political relevance in the most convincing way possible, which I quoted in the Introduction: ‘[E]very image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.’ Putting the philosopher’s statement and the artworks in dialogue, I attempt to refine and further flesh out the concept as I have so far articulated it. In particular, Ahtila’s six-screen installation Where is Where? from 2008 establishes a strong connection between a past long ago that happened elsewhere, and a present here-and-now. Her endeavour as I interpret it is to enable cultural memory to be active and politically productive by distinguishing between guilt and responsibility. She thus 4  After a première of the film in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2014), the installation project was first installed in the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, and travelled in different forms in 2014 to Estonia, Switzerland, Finland, Colombia, Malta and London. See http://youtu.be/sfx7OH579XQ for a video tour on the exhibition in Łódź.

eliminates an unproductive postcolonial guilt and replaces it with contemporary responsibility in and for migratory culture. I learnt this from her work as well as from Spinoza, and this distinction helped me understand the political aspect of acts of memory. Her work consists of an imaginative installation that presents viewers with the possibility of immersion in a temporal-audiovisual cacophony. Her tool for achieving political agency for art by means of acts of memory is affect. Positioning the Algerian War of Independence as an issue for, even a creation of, the present, the work is programmed to produce a dynamic intensity in the space between images and viewer. But the creation – rather than reconstruction – of history in the here and now does not let us escape into fiction. Instead, she deploys different ways of authenticating the created history through acts of cultural memory. The most obvious one of these is the use of archival footage, recalling both the war and early cinema, but the citation of authoritative intertexts is another. Both constitute acts of memory, recalling the recorded reality and the fictional imagings of a past contemporaneity. Both contribute to the build-up of a cultural network, a spider’s web of responsibility in which we are caught. This leads to the inquiry the work’s title solicits, the question of location – geographical, social, psychic, political – literally, a question. The retro­s pectivity of the approach joins a retrospective engagement of the medium. Primarily, a dissociation of image from sound, staged in a dissociative ‘syndrome’ of the character of one of Ahtila’s earlier works, The House, (2002), keeps medium and politics bound together. Finally, it is in the genre of tragedy – alluded to, staged, and yet held at bay, that the unique combination of video-graphy, the writing of visions, takes place. The final image of the central part of the installation is a close-up of a young Algerian boy who has killed a friend, simply because the friend was European. The anecdote comes from Frantz Fanon’s book Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) from 1963 [1961]. The Figure 10.2  Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where? 2008 HD installation for six projections with sound. Close-up of Adel. Photo: Marja-Leena Hukkanen. Figure 10.3 Where is Where? Priest/Angel guides the boys. Photo: Photo: MarjaLeena Hukkanen.

image is an extreme close-up which, projected on the huge screen of the installation, is as imposing as it is impressive. Filmed in the context, set in Algeria, the face may have an ‘Arab effect’. Cinematographically, the close-up creates an affect-image. The affect-image is the one that suspends time, that intensifies duration (Figure 10.2). In her book on Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, Paola Marrati points at the crucial function of the affection-image – the closest to both the materiality of the image and to the materiality of subjectivity. I already quoted her terse formulation: ‘Between a perception that is in certain ways troubling, and an action still hesitant, affection emerges’ (2008, 35). ‘It is this image’, she continues, ‘that transforms the movement of translation into a movement of expression’, ‘in pure quality’. This is why the affect-image is in the present tense. It also has the temporal density needed to make contact possible, or to establish an ‘inter-face’, both with other people such as viewers, and with other times. This property makes the affect-image an ideal vehicle for a memory enacted to be shared. An image with an ‘Arab effect’ that is an affect-image and stops time: the combination alone is worth dwelling on; an instance of image-thinking if ever there was one. What the affect-image does is to provoke a confluence, even if conflicted, between subject and object, without cancelling out the heterogeneity and without falling into a deceptive harmony. Affect, in this conception, is a medium, not a message. The dynamic intensity that is affect enables viewers to ‘have’ – to perform the act of – other people’s memories. This is how they can become companions of people who suffered in the past – to help not those victims now long gone, but potentially similar victims.5 The affective force of the image is enhanced by the acting style. Throughout, the young actor, Allaedin Allaedine, suspends all emotion. While in Fanon’s passionate anti-colonialist text the interview is a trans­cription of a psychiatric expertise, so that the psychiatrist impli­ citly interprets the lack or suspension of emotion as that particular disturbance we now call traumatic, in Ahtila’s visual work it signals 5  ‘Having the memory of others’ is a phrase coined by Kaja Silverman (1996).

avoidance of the pathetic. The addressee in Fanon is the psychiatrist whose questions the boy is answering. In the installation, the addressee is the spectator, invited to resocialise the traumatised boy. At some point, by subtle visual allusion, under the guidance of the enigmatic figure of a female priest, we are also momentarily in an immigration office. The priest character now floats above the ground, dressed in the red of a Jan van Eijck Madonna or donor, or the red of devils, and of violence (Figure 10.3). The allusion to red queuing ropes also suggests museums. We are confronted by this image: two Algerian boys plucked from the 1950s are pushed forward by a figure – a guardian angel or a devil – as in the Christian religious tradition, passing along the queues of contemporary immigration offices. ‘Where is where?’ then becomes the question about where the work is situated in space and in time, between a literal and an extended sense; so that multitemporal and multidirectional acts of memory become possible.6 The merger of fiction and documentary in this work leans on theatricality. This work is also a tragedy. The term implies tradition, death and theatre. Of all literary genres, tragedy is the most longstanding and prestigious one; it is truly traditional. The tradition of art, especially politically resonant art, is doubly emphasised: in the many references to literary and cinematic masterpieces, as well as in self-reflexive references to the media of both arts. And to the art that binds the two: theatre. Theatricality is visible in the relentless passage of time, which theatre shares with cinema. At key moments, the setting is a podium with folding chairs around it. This is a visual topos at the ending of Where is Where? when Adel’s final sentence is spoken to three screens of such empty chairs. The figure of Death, in theatrical costume, illuminated so that we barely ever see anything more than his mouth, keeps us aware of Samuel Beckett’s theatrical reductions. And while most of the speeches directly address the spectator, the scene where Death and the Poet sit together at the breakfast table recalls amateur theatre performances in 6  Multidirectional memory evokes an intellectual companion who greatly impacted on my thinking about memory: Michael Rothberg (2009).

small-town venues (Figure 10.4). And it is precisely because most of the speeches seem performances of poetry-like philosophy, or philosophical poetry, never drama, the moments where the boys in the prison hospital talk to the doctors on the other screens foreground theatricality in the four-screen disposition (Figure 10.5).7 However, the notion that the disposition of Where is Where? in four screens is a theatrical setting must be qualified. For, with four screens disposed in a square, theatre is reversed: the work does not take place in front of us but surrounds and absorbs us. In relation to the work, we, its spectators, are on stage. Although the installation is based on an implacable logic, it is impossible to follow this logic ‘logically’. The environment of four screens one cannot simultaneously observe embodies this impossibility. From this paradox another one emerges: far from contradicting or mitigating it, the theatricality of this piece, including its emphatic artificiality, constitutes its political force. The work is able to make History enter art, and thus end the unfortunate and damaging opposition between fiction and reality. In between, memory is situated. Ending that opposition, even as a non-polarised distinction, is a condition sine qua non for political art – not to establish a preferred presence of ‘reality’ but to literally suspend the distinction and thus keep fiction present in a never-resolved dialectic. Precisely on the basis of the indispensable co-presence of fiction and reality as not distinguishable – fiction is part of reality, and so is language – it becomes possible to approach art beyond the fatigue of an all-pervasive, powerless habit of critique. To make the case for the political force of Ahtila’s work, we first need to resituate the political in and of art, for we cannot avoid the great aporia put forward by Adorno in his essay on ‘Commitment’: 7  On tragedy, see, Loraux (2002) and, in its relation to modernity, Taxidou (2004). But see the incisive critique of the common concept by Marx (2013). Figure 10.4 Where is Where? The Poet talks with Death over breakfast. Photo: Marja-Leena Hukkanen. Figure 10.5  Where is Where? The prison doctors interviewing Adel. Photo: MarjaLeena Hukkanen.

art that seeks to speak of politics becomes propaganda and ceases to be art – it loses political efficacy; but art that only wishes to be art is political in its refusal of politics.8 Taking this aporia as a starting point, we know that neither rhetoric nor a thematic focus work, for both pertain to ‘propaganda’. Hence, they cannot be ‘art’. Resituating the political in art happens where we least expect it: in the avowed, self-conscious artifice of the theatrical. Theatre, writes Bleeker, ‘presents a staging of the construction that is also constitutive of the real’. Theatricality is a vision machine that stages possible forms of looking around us from a culturally and historically specific consciousness, on the basis of a destabilisation of the relationship between the act of looking and what is staged.9 Around us: Where is Where? once again takes this phrase literally, surrounding us with images that we look at with a sharp awareness that we cannot see them all. It imposes a certain physical restlessness on spectators, and makes the acts of memory these are invited to perform, multidirectional. It compels them to turn around such that their bodies are implicated in the act of looking. To understand how this literal embodiment of theatre works, we need to realise what cinema and theatre have in common, as how I began this book. This work is cinematographic, but in its theatrical disposition it is also opposed to the illusionism theatre and cinema encourage when spectators comfortably sit in the dark, looking straight ahead and forgetting their body. To this illusionism it opposes a ‘critical habitat’. We sit or stand there, physically unable to remain abstract and distant, and hence, whatever our critical reflections, we cannot disentangle ourselves from what we critique.10 The main character, who is a poet, sets the tone of this multiple memory of the tragedy of the transgenerational transmission of violence. She is a woman who seems real, but whose interlocutor is an allegorical 8  Adorno (2003, 240–58). 9  Bleeker (2013), discussing Barbara Freedman’s 1991 book. 10  Apter defines a critical habitat as ‘art informed by geopolitics; by an ecologically engaged conceptualism; . . . that critiques the relationship between media and environment and explores forms of global identification . . .’ (2002, 22).

figure. Cinematographically, the memory of Ingmar Bergman is visible here. In a theatrical dialogue, she conducts a discussion with Monsieur la Mort, who asks her to give him words. Later, words fly from a page freshly printed. One wonders where they go, and where that where is. For, boundaries between the Poet and Death, between her and the boys, the watertight boundaries of the individual, as well as of periods and countries, have melted under the spell of multidirectional memory. One gets the feeling that these words, which have flown away, enable this sort of shamanistic communication. The graphic disposition of the words on the page looks more like a script than like a poem. A script of a play, enhancing the theatricality of that destabilisation of even the printed word – or is it the script of the work we are watching, in a selfreflexivity that foregrounds the Poet’s, the artist’s endorsement of her complicity? I believe it is both – the play that destabilises, and the script of Where is Where? that puts us in the presence of that destabilisation, for at stake in this deconstruction of boundaries is responsibility in the present. This is both the temporality of video installation, as it is the temporality of the close-up that suspends linear time and positions affect instead. Affect is the glue that makes such acts of memory contagious. There lies the relevance of art. Ahtila deploys representation to do her multidirectional memory work, and her central theme here is death. But the actual performance of memory – the act achieving performativity – is due to her chosen format of the surrounding video installation. As we have seen in Chapter 9, Doris Salcedo is another contemporary artist committed to keep the memory of violence alive; or even to make such memories accessible where trauma-inducing violence had erased them. Through her work, I add to my mini-theory of the act of memory, the ‘palimpsestic’ memory put forward by another contemporary companion, Max Silverman (2013). For the film A Long History of Madness, we had travelled to Seili Island, Finland, to a former psychiatric hospital, a pinkish building set amidst green meadows. On Seili, a former leprosy colony had been converted into a ‘madhouse’ – something that, as Michel Foucault has told us, had been done in many cases (2006). The disappearance of leprosy generated the invention of the madhouse, or psychiatric hospital.

On Seili, patients were admitted on one condition: they had to bring their own coffin. This chilling fact that sentenced, without trial, the allegedly mad to life imprisonment, never to be seen again, turned our filming on that location into a historically layered act of memory that I qualify as ‘political’. The social and cultural relevance of such artistic acts of memory as Ahtila and Salcedo perform fits Benjamin’s caution like a glove. His powerful and frequently quoted fifth thesis stipulates that an image of the past only matters for the present when it is seen ‘as one of its own concerns’. If it is not identified as such, the image will disappear. Since extinction is forever, the question is: how can art prevent the extinction of the past so that the present can make it matter for itself? First of all, through images of it; images that represent the past; that come to us from the past; and that make the past matter for the present. Those are the three meanings of the preposition ‘of ’ that resonate in Benjamin’s sentence. The operative verb in his urgent warning is ‘to recognise’. The images of the past must be recognised – and recognised in their relevance for the present – so that we can effectively bring them to bear on the present, with all their palimpsestic layers. The penalty for failing to do so is the irretrievable loss not simply of the past but of its images – hence, also of the three forms of relevance that the preposition ‘of ’ suggests they have. The two meanings of recognition, one cognitive – to know again – and one social – to give acknowledgement to, to recognise something ‘as’ – are bound up together. This is, according to Davoine’s book and our film, the double condition of the overcoming of trauma’s mad-making blocking of memory. In both senses, recognition pertains to the dialectic of similarity, or repetition, and of difference or innovation that constitutes representation. The cognitive sense insists on similarity in the new act, hence, on similarity and innovation as two distinct moments in time, whereas the social sense intimates similarity between self and other as both equipped to take the roles of first and second person in turns. Intertemporality and intersubjectivity are, thus, at issue in the concept of recognition; as they are, too, in Benjamin’s statement, in Salcedo’s and Ahtila’s works, and in the spaces of their installation. Forbidding to forget is an attempt to make trauma

potentially curable. Whether representation is deployed or not is immaterial; the address to the viewer through affect, enhanced by installation-ness, is what makes these acts of memory performative. Place, as a critical habitat, remains crucial in video installation. Reunion, Resilience, Resistance A most critical habitat is the one central in an early documentary, on which I now want to end these reflections. When Amsterdam-based doctoral student Ihab Saloul wanted to bring a witness on his first trip ‘home’ to Gaza after five years of exile, the project stranded when the witness-filmmaker Gary Ward was denied access to Israel because he held an Irish passport (Figure 10.6). Irish, it seemed, equals ‘terrorist’. This prohibition of the development of an intercultural friendship came to stand for the difficulty of understanding each other across cultural divides. And it became the subject of the film, which ended up being about the impossibility of making it. The title Access Denied stamped in Gary’s passport imposed itself. Ihab’s world is itself divided, between the classrooms of the university and the hapless poverty of Gaza. While Gary turns around in circles of pointless tourism in Egypt, waiting the two weeks before his return ticket, Ihab conducts his fieldwork, interviewing former teachers and unknown workers, visiting his elderly great-grandmother, and trying to construct a narrative for and about his own people. His cultural citizenship is in jeopardy.11 Impossibility characterises Access Denied. This film embodies the difficulties of dealing with the past, both in terms of the story and of the aesthetic of the video itself. The film uses the metaphors of travel and failed encounters for a meditative reflection on the intercultural meeting between Arabic and Western individuals, eager, but not always able, to understand each other. The projected story comes to a halt when the Palestinian Ihab, en route for his first visit home after migrating to the Netherlands five years earlier, is arrested at Cairo 11  Access Denied, 2005. Digital video 25 f/s, colour, dolby, stereo sound,16 bit, 48 KHZ; 31’ English and Arabic spoken, English subtitles.

airport and separated from Gary, who intended to film Ihab’s journey back home. Ihab, thinking on his feet, immediately enlisted a friend whom he knew had a video camera, although his tapes worked in a different format. Images shot on NTSC format and transferred to PAL aesthetically convey the migratory nature of Ihab’s situation. The duality of the video, in which Ihab and Gary each have to make do without the other, is over-determined by the different quality of the images. Moreover, when the image is beautiful and the technical quality poor, aesthetics and technology diverge and struggle with each other. When, for example, in a beautiful image of ‘transferred’ quality, Ihab walks towards the sea and talks about literature, and how the resilience of people in the face of constant danger and imminent tragedy becomes a cause for celebration, he does not relent (Figure 10.7). While the less brilliant quality of the video image keeps the limitations put on such self-empowerment in check, the young man keeps his multiple lives going, teaching, even in the absence of students. Meanwhile, in Egypt, Gary is facing the prohibition against talking with women, and trying to understand attitudes and stories, bodily gestures and misunderstandings. Ihab, a few weeks before his projected marriage in the Netherlands, learns that Israel has closed the borders and that he cannot get out. The film alternately cuts from Egypt to Gaza, from one form of bewilderedness to another. And while Ihab progresses in his cultural analysis of the concept Al-Nakba (catastrophe) and the place of hope therein (Figure 10.8), Gary has a shave and listens to the exasperation of a shopkeeper in front of an anthropologist who intrudes into his business. The ruptures between the two lives of the two young men so keen on establishing a common ground become the aesthetic principle of a film made of bits and pieces, always engaging. As I was writing this chapter, I received a book in which the same Ihab, now a prominent professor, published an important article that qualified Figure 10.6  Ent[e]ry denied . . . Video still. Figure 10.7  A beautiful image in a different quality. Video still. Figure 10.8  Ihab as a beginning teacher. Video still.

the concept of memory. The title of the book contains an innovative verb: Visioning Israel-Palestine (Pasternak 2020). In his article in that volume, Saloul refines Marianne Hirsch’s popular concept of postmemory, connecting it to oral history and ethnography in a methodologically meaningful manner. This is the reason I postponed writing on Access Denied until this concluding chapter on memory. In the article, Saloul proposes the concept of ‘memory in exile’. This enables him to reconcile the somewhat problematic ‘post-ness’ of postmemory with the ‘present-­ tenseness’ of acts of memory. In an argument for interdisciplinarity between narratological and ethnographic analysis, he writes: I argue that any disciplinary perspective employed should pose ‘the subject of the everyday’ as the question at the heart of any narrative about the condition of Palestinian exile. Posed as a question, ‘the subject of the everyday’ can help us not only to refine our reading of exilic narratives as historical representations but also to supply insights into the narratives’ depiction of current affairs. Most importantly, with regard to the visioning of Israel-Palestine, I explore oral histories and ethnography as forms of visioning that go beyond palpable visual materials. (2020, 245) With this in mind I can see how the documentary of which he was the protagonist in 2005 does precisely that. He invokes the Nakba and subsequent exile, while interacting with his mother, grandmother and other relatives, talking to a former schoolteacher, and doing his fieldwork which was the primary purpose of the trip. Meanwhile, we see him fearfully board the plane, waving a depressed hand at Gary at their separation in Egypt, talking with fellow students and dancing at his wedding in Amsterdam (which took place after all). This shows quite precisely what Saloul writes in continuation of the previous quotation:

This mode of reading entails a shift of focus from the historical event itself, in its inevitable pastness, to the subject of this event and his or her present-day condition. Rather than referring to al-Nakba of 1948, I shall mobilize what I call mankoub – the ‘catastrophed subject’. (245) In order to make the memories of that subject, in the present-everyday, relevant for a ‘visioning’ of Israel-Palestine, he first establishes and then destabilises the distinction between autobiographical and memorial modes of storytelling. This balances out a potentially exaggeratedly individualised sense of subjective identity and brings the friction between past and present experiences that memories harbour to bear on cultural citizenship (Chapter 8), as a destabilising, hence a de-­ essentialising, tool. It brings resilience and resistance into each other’s orbit. Saloul wrote this in continuation of his book from 2012. I find Saloul’s refinement of the concept of postmemory eminently suitable to remedy the problems of that concept that Alphen had noticed. According to the performative conception of art, art participates in the political – it does not simply represent it; rather than merely critiquing, it intervenes. For such intervention to be possible and relevant, art needs to possess as well as bestow agency. I understand ‘relevant’ in the sense of being incisive for that domain where differences of opinion are recognised and treated as antagonisms; as the alternative to enmity. Negativity is necessary in order to avoid the moralising talk of ‘dominant ideology’ and instead to acknowledge, even endorse, complicity, as Gayatri Spivak has recommended repeatedly (esp. 1999). Above, I mentioned an essay by Fabian on the compulsion and impossibility of defining ‘culture’ in anthropology (2001). He advocates a rigorously negative (non-)definition of this concept. He contends that it is helpful to invoke confrontation and negotiation as the moments in which ‘the cultural’ emerges. This formulation both avoids positive, reifying definitions that are inherently ‘othering’ and foregrounds

process as the domain of culture. Thus, it involves temporality, agency and plurality, without falling into the traps of self-congratulatory celebrations of multiplicity and freedom, of idealisations of the possibility of democracy, and of the insidious imposition of particular values as universal. Here lies, perhaps, the crucial importance of acts of memory: multidirectional, palimpsestic, and including the memories of others, something that seemed impossible, since memory is bound to individual subjects. Acts of memory occur in the present, but they cannot occur without a multiple past, indispensable for living. One of the tools of the constant bond between mass violence and the singular suffering it causes is the deployment of time. It is in this aspect of installation that, in spite of the many differences, Ahtila’s and Salcedo’s work join forces. They both entice their visitors to respond to Ahtila’s question ‘Where is where?’ with a temporal-spatial intensity that allows memory to be socially productive and helpful; as a companion, a buddy; a therapôn. What Kinds of Memory Matter? Postmemory, collective memory, cultural memory: the terms risk swirling around too much. Memory must be understood as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual and social one. Although the term ‘cultural memory’ is quite popular, my proposal for this ending is that these three aspects of memory cannot be separated. All memories have an individual, a social and a cultural aspect. This is why the Silverman/ Saloul idea of memories of others holds. The distinction is only a matter of emphasis, of perspective and interest on the part of the researcher, analyst or memorising subject. This is reasonable, since the subjects that remember are also participants in all three of these domains. Moreover, memories have a three-part temporality. Memory is a connection between the three times of human temporal awareness: the past, in which things happened that the memory engages – or not; the present, in which the act of memory takes place and into which the remembered content is ‘retrieved’; and the future, which will be influenced by what the subjects in the present, together and embedded

in their cultural environment, remember and do with those memories. The memories that matter are steeped in those tripartite processes. If I focus here on ‘cultural memory’, this is a focus only; one that brings forward political aspects, and the plurality of the subjects involved.12 What matters particularly, when we discuss memories, is to reflect on those memories that miscarry. That is where the past is not recognised for what the present can and should do with it. Failure of memory is not so much forgetting, a very useful concept we should not forget when considering memory. Aleida Assmann, at the opening of her 2015 book, sums up forgetting as ‘a filter, as a weapon and as a prerequisite for the creation of new things’. Instead, I want to draw attention to actively, albeit not purposely, repressing or, in a different view, disassociating – in other words, dis-remembering, on the one hand; as well as on wilfully distorting potentially helpful memories on the other hand, as mis-remembering. Both are devastating, wasteful – missed opportunities for the present and future. I have probed both these negatives in film projects already discussed. The two failures take shape in the cultural imagination in and with which humans exist. I explored the distinction and integration of the two forms of failure in a video installation in Warsaw in 2017, at the occasion of a conference of the appropriately called European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. This was an integrative combination of Reasonable Doubt (mis-remembering) and ALHoM (dis-remembering). These memories pertain to the cultural domain of art, through which the past is frequently recalled (‘cultural heritage’). The unreflected conflation between representation of humans, human agency, and humans in the flesh can be suspended. The close resemblance of human figure and character to humanity as we live it need not be denied, however. But the closeness of figures to bodies, and characters to agents as we know them, can be endorsed as semiotically and 12  In addition to Hirsch and Alphen, Aleida Assmann’s 2015 book on forgetting distinguishes seven forms of forgetting; Catharina Raudvere’s 2016 edited book addresses issues comparable to Saloul’s in a broader perspective; and Ben-Amos and Weissberg (1999) connect memory to cultural identity, as what I call ‘cultural citizenship’ (Chapter 8).

aesthetically exciting, but only if we also set them off alongside ourselves through resisting the temptation to automatically identify them by identifying with them. Semiotically, that closeness helps imagine solutions to memorial problems humans encounter. Aesthetically, on the basis of sensation, it becomes possible not to identify with, but to encounter, in the public space of art, subject-figurations that show, rather than obliterate, what went amiss; what led to dis- or mis-­ remembering. This alternative is the backdrop to my attempts to figure, in video installations, how we can engage and understand the issues of memory outside of the psychological, but instead, with the imagin­ ation as our most important tool. I cast memory’s failure at the interface between figure and character that the personification of artistic agency comes to enact. In theory, this discussion would open the question of the anthropomorphic imagination through the fragmented, synecdochic body. Body parts deployed as synecdoches dispense mastery over the objects: ‘voice’ (of the narrator), ‘hand’ (of the artist) and ‘eye’ (of the connoisseur/viewer). As we have learnt from Barthes and Foucault in the 1960s, all three serve to identify in order to bestow authority on the ‘owner’ of the body part – the ‘whole’ person of which it is only a part. This authority unifies, conflates work with intention, and, due to its deceptiveness, de facto dis-embodies those figures; in the act, de-materialising the artwork. Keeping the need to avoid that bestowal of authority in mind, I primarily probe the anthropomorphic imagination further in its disembodying thrust. The operations of an anthropomorphic metaphor that reduces the figure to its ‘fleshless’ essence serve various interests such as realism, rigidified images, exclusion, repression and the exploitation of violence along with the repression of its remembrance. These interests can be countered by proposals for a deployment of the same metaphors in a less anthropomorphic, unified and unifying analysis based on the dispersal of these concepts over all parties of the artistic process. One can think of, respectively, ‘body’, ‘character’, ‘psyche’, ‘spirit’ and ‘person’; all these not unified, but as a disorderly part of what matters. These aspects join forces, without unification, in the failed memories I would like to bring to the fore. They enable us to

explore the possibility of a useful psychoanalytic approach to art – and what can be more anthropomorphic? Such an approach is neither naïve about the ‘unconscious’ status of the work’s ‘psyche’ in a consciously elaborated artwork, nor entangled in the problematic causality and author-centredness of classical psychoanalytic and intentionalist criticism. I recall the statement by Silverman, quoted in the Introduction. It is emblematic of what a psychoanalytic perspective can contribute outside of the drawbacks of the anthropomorphic imagination: If, in trying to make sense of this strange account of unconscious memories, I am unable to avoid attributing to them the status of a subject, that is because subjectivity itself is in its most profound sense nothing other than a constellation of visual memories which is struggling to achieve a perceptual form. (2000, 89) But in order to make cultural memory really work for a visual aesthetic that helps the plight of the dis-remembered, the last words of Silver­ man’s invocation of visual habitus must be taken up: perceptual form. Ideas, too, must achieve form. This is where the writing we, as academics, curators and students, do to articulate ideas, and the ‘constellation of visual memories’ that we are, as subjects, come together. Perhaps this struggle to achieve perceptible form and articulated thought can also be considered an adequate definition of art. The form of the multiplescreen installation gives shape to that struggle.13 The psyche has been a common-sense anthropomorphism; inter­ pretations based on untheorised psychology are pervasive in scholar­ship on art and literature. Following the lead of Silverman and Bollas, I propose to examine what is possible if we displace the anthro­pomorphism of the psyche in favour of a more aesthetic view while remaining, or not, 13  Roland Barthes was an early proponent of video installation over theatre film. See his article ‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’ (1986 [1980]).

within the psychoanalytic paradigm. ‘To be inside someone else’s memory’ (Silverman’s phrase) is an act of solidarity. It is the impossible formulation that connects the psyche to no one in particular – no biographical author, no specific audience, no hypo­thetical mind of the text, so that the vacant position is open for every cultural participant to inhabit. This is a memorial equivalent to the concept of fiction. I argue for this conception of cultural memory art, with and through the figures in these videos, asking how the viewer comes to concretely partake of the direction of the memory-alias-artwork, and how this affects visual analysis of and for cultural memory. The phrase-concept ‘acts of memory’ comprises a set of characteristics that, together, form a mini-theory that makes it a suitable basis for analysis. By the term ‘mini-theory’ I mean that the concept implies the elements and the syntax that form a theory; the concept can be seen as a summary of a theory. This makes it possible to use it for analysis in precise ways so as to reach its political potential, as simple words cannot. Paul Patton explains: ‘Philosophical concepts . . . fulfil their intrinsically political vocation by counter-effectuating existing states of affairs and referring them back to the virtual realm of becoming’ (2010, 139). The Deleuzian verb form ‘becoming’ finds its basis in the tripartite temporality of memory. The concept of ‘acts of memory’ also seeks to be specific in that it links memory to narrative. Traumatic (non-) memory thus gives insight, through contrast, into the formation of ‘normal,’ narrative memory. This implication of narrative in the concept is relevant for the art form of video installation. And it helps in understanding its failure in traumatic (non-) memory.14 Thus, the concept encompasses, while privileging the middle one, the three kinds of memory I have disentangled in the introduction to Acts of Memory: Automatic, routine memory, that is as crucial to our everyday functioning as it is uninteresting to bring to consciousness. If 14  For what follows, the article by Kolk and van der Hart (1995) is crucial.

such unreflected habitual memories are worth mentioning, it is to distinguish them from narrative memories. Narrative (‘normal’) memory specifically recalls events from the past that have some bearing on or relevance for the present, and suggest possibility for the future. Traumatic memories remain present for the subject with particular vividness and/ or totally resist integration. In both cases, they cannot become narratives, either because the traumatizing events are mechanically reenacted as drama rather than synthetically narrated by the memorizing agent who ‘masters’ them, or because they remain ‘outside’ the subject. (Bal, Crewe and Spitzer 1999, viii) Memory, this (mini-)theory says, is a verb, a transitive one; and its mode is active. It is something we do; it has a subject and an object. And that act takes place in the present. The phrase thus encapsulates a theory of memory; hence, its status as a concept. This engages viewers of these videos to insert themselves into the thoughts, psyches or fictions of the figures presented, in an interactive mode. With this conception of the act of memory, there is no better place to seek inspiration for this thought-on-the-move than the world of art. Doris Salcedo’s installation Palimpsesto is an eminent demonstration of art’s potential to activate this. Indeed, along with inspiring philosophers and scholars, I find in the process of analysing as well as making artworks that the refinements, the assessments of the consequences and potential, and the politics of memory come to the fore. The video installation, as an art form, comprises figurative images, and these, whether or not they convey movement technically, are moving by definition. This moving quality of affect is activated in space and mediates effects that are not bound to the traditional ways of meaning

making. It is in the intersection between movement and space that the political potential of figuration in installation resides. Video presents movement, and installation, space. The question of how this mediation occurs refers us to the bond between meaning and affect. Images do not evince a one-to-one relationship between signs and meaning. ‘Thinking in film’ specifies image-thinking to unpack these connections in discrepancy. Failing the Past is Failing the Present By way of an ending, I now briefly present, for comparative reflection, a confrontation between two failures of cultural memory. The first is derived from the film project A Long History of Madness (ALHoM). As we have seen, in Davoine’s book, the author develops a theory of the analytical treatment of trauma-induced psychosis through fiction as a mode of thinking. Davoine’s book, and the film project based on it, have acts of memory at their heart: the memories of old, medieval traditions of revolutionary street theatre; the memories of violence, in wars and within homes, sometimes going back several generations; failed memories, in the acts of negligence of collective forgetting as looking the other way; and memories of dreams and delusions that help insight to become possible when social companions listen, believe and support.

Figure 10.9  Installation Anacronismos, Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, for exhibition ‘The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish Painting from the Städel Museum’, curated by Jochen Sander, 7 October 2010 – 23 January 2011. Photo: Neal Markage.

In the first photo in the present chapter, of the interventionist exhibition in the Freud Museum London, a monitor at the foot of Freud’s iconic coach performed a visual dialogue with the master of psycho­ analysis. As we audio-visually argued, the condition for proving Freud wrong is that the analyst behaves like a therapôn, or companion, mate or buddy, with whom the traumatised subject can come to achieve narrative form. In the video installed at the foot of Freud’s coach, the analyst and patient are sitting side by side on a couch – a countermethod to Freud’s clinical method, yet remaining within the psycho­analytic paradigm. This is the important difference between the prepositions ‘counter-’ and ‘anti-’, the former implying critical discussion, the latter implying wholesale rejection (Chapter 4). To aid the recollection of the dis-remembered without falling back into a disingenuous and exploitative identification (‘trauma envy’), then, I advocate the deployment of anachronism to connect, in the intertemporality that is indispensable for memory, not only times but also experiences and forms. Sometimes, a contemporary perspective can bring to life something we might not otherwise have seen. A simple example is the contemporary idea of ‘music therapy’, in two canonical old-master paintings, a Rubens and a Rembrandt, in our installation Anacronismos in the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum in 2010 (Figure 10.9). The physiognomy of Rembrandt’s Saul depicts paranoia according to seventeenth-century icon­ ography, which Rubens’s does not. But also, David’s hand displays ‘music-making’ and, together with his barely outlined, de facto blind face, attunes the viewer to look synaesthetically so as to ‘see hearing’. Then, look at the tense fist with which Saul holds the lance, the other hand holding the chair’s arm as if preparing to get up and kill David. All this fits perfectly in the iconographic tradition within which this painting was made. But then, these gestures have something cinematic: predicting an action to come, they prefigure a moving image, in the two senses of that qualifier. Then, it becomes easier to see Saul’s head also turning away, the eyes looking back. Suspense is produced, and we hold our breath, waiting for the violence to break out. And if Saul remains still, it is not only because painting is a still medium. Also, narratively, the music calms him down; he is still suspicious and the threat is not

over yet. All that, we can imagine and hence recall. This is a clear case of a productive anachronism – that historiographical madness.15 The tension between visibility and invisibility, parallel to that between remembering and forgetting-repressing, raises the question whether there can be an ‘iconography of madness’ – one that navigates the fine line between stereotyping and failing to see, while avoiding an appropriating, sentimentalising identification. Unhindered by the logic of the narrowly practical considerations of everyday life, the straitjacket of habits and routine – what we call ‘normal’ – madness and art are both capable of transgressing the boundaries of which they thus demonstrate the arbitrariness. The other kind of failed memory concerns the neglect of the crucial importance, for today, in the age of new, ‘democratically elected’ dictators and the dominance of communication in Twitter-word-bites at the expense of thinking, of the contributions of earlier thinkers. These figures from the past came up with then-new ideas we consider too quickly and easily ‘obsolete’, and strive to move ‘beyond’. This is our failure to acknowledge that memory does not belong to the past, but to the present in view of the future, as Saloul explained (2020). In this case, we ‘mis-remember’ the contributions of seventeenth-century philosopher Descartes to rational thought, by declaring ourselves hastily ‘post-Cartesian’ (Chapter 5). By reifying the strenuous thinking efforts of the first rationalist philosopher of the modern age, and reducing them to a dualism that, in fact, he spent his life challenging, we have mis-remembered what he could contribute to remedy the sad situation into which we have allowed the world to slip. This constitutes another wave of collective madness – the current rejection of reason in favour of a fanatic othering, with the abduction of the word ‘radical’, formerly indicating endeavours to go all the way, to firmly and consistently follow the logic of a position, such as Descartes attempted. This word, before our very eyes, has been transformed and is now a synonym of ‘terrorist’ – the terrorist being the cultural other. 15  The low technical quality of this photo is adequate to the resolution on the screens of the installation.

The traumatised mad and the ‘father of rationalism’ are not so ‘radically’ different as we assume, if only we bother to examine the Life & Works with a more open mind. I image-thought this through, and the result was the Warsaw installation Dis-Remembered & Mis-­ Remembered, where I combined these two mistreated streams of memory, selecting installation pieces from both projects that were made independently of one another. And the first thing I noticed is that Descartes, too, was subject to psychotic episodes, which totally under­ mines the opposition on which we have based our view of his thoughts.16 Analysing the heritage of the traumatised ‘mad’ and Descartes’ work audio-visually together, it was my hope that, encouraged by the installation to actively engage with the characters, visitors would literally perform acts of cultural memory in the present, recalling the violence that has produced madness, and the great efforts of thought that can counter the resulting devastation. This temporal reversal, ‘pre-posterous’ as it may be, is perhaps the most literal enactment of the theoretical concept of acts of memory in the present. And, since they are not alone in the galleries where the installation confronts, surrounds or interpolates them, visitors also enact the social aspect of such acts. For a Different Mode of Thinking Through the presentations of ‘mad’ people, I have attempted to establish a connection between a past that happened long ago and elsewhere, and a present here-and-now. The endeavour is to enable cultural memory to be active and politically productive by distinguishing between guilt and responsibility (Spinoza). This distinction eliminates an unproductive postcolonial guilt and replaces it with contemporary responsibility in and for the migratory culture that is an affective aftereffect of colonialism. That after-affect is what needs to be remembered. I learnt the importance of Spinoza’s distinction from making this video work, and this distinction helped me understand the political 16  For a critical reflection on this abduction of the word ‘radical’, see Mondzain (2017).

aspect of acts of memory as based on responsibility in the present. Here is a somewhat denser patchwork than I gave in Chapter 7, of some passages of the book concerning responsibility: ‘Spinozistic responsibility’ is derived from the philosopher’s concept of self as social, and consists of projecting presently felt responsibilities ‘back into a past which itself becomes determinate only from the perspective of what lies in the future of that past – in our present.’ Taking seriously the ‘temporal dimensions of human consciousness’ includes endorsing the ‘multiple forming and reforming of identities over time and within the deliverances of memory and imagination at any one time’. (Gatens and Lloyd 1999, 81) I propose to keep thought and art in each other’s company. Creativity and the imagination are essential to both. As I mentioned above, I chose Descartes when in my various readings I kept hitting on the judgement that we are presently ‘post-Cartesian’, without any further explanation and specification. Kyoo Lee’s 2013 book supported my sense that Descartes’ memory would gain value once his madness was recognised. I was interested less in his ideas than in his thinking modes. I wondered if it was possible to show past thought-­ as-process visually, to make it accessible for everyone in the present, so as to undo the mis-remembering that made the important ideas, and the social processes that generated them, invisible. I took up the project to show, in film, how thinking happens, and to do that through thinking ‘in’ film. In Figures 1.6 and 5.2 the actor Thomas Germaine convincingly enacts a ‘mad enough’ Descartes. As mad as the world, its inhabitants, Figure 10.10 (previous page)  Doubt, deception, duality. Reasonable Doubt installed in the Luca School of Arts, Brussels, 2018. Photo: Mieke Bal.

even its architecture. The final photograph (Figure 10.10) suggests this madness, through its 3D effect. The mis-remembering occurs in, and is perhaps due to, our habit of thinking in linear chronology. We speak of influence, but not of the need to be in dialogue with others for thought to be even possible. Also, thinking is not done in one single way, or mode. Moreover, thinking does involve the body, and moods. It also needs places, where the process can happen. The possibility to see them in installation, sculpturally dispersed throughout a space, turns the idea of ‘thinking in film’ into a spatial argument against attempts to turn the pieces into a biography, where the anthropomorphic imagination would take over. Wherever in the scenes one is focusing, what one has seen before becomes an amalgamation of memories. Thought, including memory, works that way; not according to the arrow metaphor but to the octopus. Each scene experiments differently with expressing the inexpressible, the subtleties and ambivalences of reason and emotion together, outside of the narrative impulse, in the process of thinking.17 Psychoanalytic theory, which is so centrally construed through memory, emerged not only from Descartes’ thoughts about the interaction between body and mind, but also from his empathetic solidarity with Elisabeth that he, as one who was also traumatised in childhood, must have felt, and according to the correspondence, demonstrated. Descartes’ thinking process happened in the space between certainties. In order to help overcome them while ‘recognising it by the present as one of our own concerns’, in Benjamin’s line, I looked at a different Descartes, who struggled, in Bollas’s way, for a non-dualistic mode of thinking. Why is doubt so important an ingredient of reason? Madness is the form doubt takes when it is cut off from the social bonds based on respect and dialogue. Yes, this is what we most urgently need, so that we can turn mis-remembering into a memorial solidarity that recognises and, thus, narrativises trauma. This act can defeat the dis-remembering 17  For more on the installation and the exhibition in Kraków, see http://www. miekebal.org/artworks/exhibitions/reasonable-doubt/

so that we can actually ‘cure’ or, retrospectively, ‘make sense of ’ the madness. It is the ‘post-’ thinking in the qualifier ‘post-Cartesian’, as well as the over-use of the phrase, that betrays us as failing to integrate doubt into reason. Using audio-visual images to put this on the table is my attempt to bring thought and images together in supporting each other. As mentioned, in 1907, Bergson proposed yet another aspect of movement in the image: when the perception-image morphs into an affect-image and makes the perceiver develop the readiness to act. This readiness lies at the heart of the political potential of the image, film and video installation. The combination of these forms of movement is the possibility film offers when we try to think visually, in this case, ‘think in film’, in order to make the dis-remembered memorable, and let the mis-remembered guide us to what we need most urgently: solidarity.

Author’s Filmography

It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency Director, editor, script 2020 Essay film. 31.25' colour, Dolby sound. Polish, with English or Spanish subtitles Commissioned by the Łódź Film School, Poland Don Quijote: Tristes Figuras / Tristes Figures / Sad Countenances Director, editor, script 16-channel video installation, colour, Dolby sound, total duration 144'. 2019 Spanish, French, Swedish, Farsi, with English, Spanish or French subtitles Reasonable Doubt: Scenes from Two Lives Director, editor, script Docu-drama, colour, Dolby sound, 98’, 5-channel installation 30' each, 2016 French, Finnish, Polish, with English subtitles

Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism ​Co-director, ​co-editor, script With Michelle Williams Gamaker (Cinema Suitcase), 2012–14 Drama, 96'; installations of 19, 13 or 5 channels, colour, Dolby sound French, Finnish, Polish, with English, French or Finnish subtitles Commissioned by the Łódź Film School, Poland A Long History of Madness Co-director, c​ o-editor, co-camera, script With Michelle Williams Gamaker (Cinema Suitcase), 2011 Theoretical Fiction, 120'; installations of 20 or 5 channels Colour, Dolby sound Twelve languages spoken; subtitles in six languages Hubert Damisch: Thinking Aloud ​Director, camera, editor Colour, Dolby sound Documentary, 20'13", 2011 Anachronismos Co-director, co-editor With Michelle Williams Gamaker 3-channel video installation, 2010 Colour, Dolby sound Commissioned by Städel Museum Frankfurt and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Separations Co-director, B-camera, co-editor With Andréa Seligmann Silva (Cinema Suitcase), Documentary, 83'5", 2009 Shortened version 52', 2010 State of Suspension Co-director, co-editor With Benny Brunner (Cinema Suitcase & Xela Films). Documentary, 80'09", 2008

Becoming Vera Co-director, co-camera, co-editor With Michelle Williams and Alexandra Loumpet-Galitzine (Cinema Suitcase) Documentary, 53'12", 2008 Un trabajo limpio (A Clean Job) Co-director, co-camera, co-editor With Gary Ward (Cinema Suitcase) Colour, Dolby sound Documentary, 19'38" (looped), 2007 Commissioned by the government of the región de Murcia, Spain Colony Co-director, co-camera, co-editor Cinema Suitcase (entire collective) Colour, Dolby sound Social documentary, 34'38", 2007 Elena Director, camera, editor Colour, Dolby sound Video (single element from Nothing is Missing) 32' 2007 Romanian, English sur-titled Nothing Is Missing Director, camera, co-editor Multiple-screen video installation between 5 and 7 channels, 25–35 minutes (looped), 2006–10 Colour, Dolby sound Various languages, English sur-titled Road Movie Co-director, co-camera, co-editor With Shahram Entekhabi. Performance, 17'04", 2004

Colour, Dolby sound, no dialogue The Alcazar Co-director, co-camera, co-editor With Shahram Entekhabi. Performance, 12'25", 2004 Colour, Dolby sound, no dialogue Caution Co-director, co-camera, co-editor With Shahram Entekhabi. Performance, 12'25", 2004 Colour, Dolby sound, no dialogue Rockefeller Boulevard Co-director, camera, co-editor With Shahram Entekhabi. Performance, 4'22", 2004 Colour, Dolby sound, no dialogue Lost in Space Co-director, co-camera, co-editor With Shahram Entekhabi Experimental documentary, 17'01", 2005 Colour, Dolby sound Various languages, English on-screen titled Access Denied Co-director, co-camera, co-editor Cinema Suitcase. With Thomas Sykora and Gary Ward. Social documentary 31'40", Amsterdam/Gaza, 2005 English, Arabic, English subtitled GLUB (Hearts) Co-director, co-camera, co-editor With Shahram Entekhabi. 29'43" documentary and installation, Berlin/ Amsterdam, 2004 Colour, Dolby sound English spoken and subtitled

Favourite Spots Director, editor Documentary of the exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois: Geometry of Desire’, 15 minutes, Zacheta Gallery of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2003 English spoken and subtitled Eye Contact Co-director, co-camera, co-editor With Shahram Entekhabi Documentary on the exhibition ‘Intimate Abstractions: Louise Bourgeois’, 10 minutes, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2003 English spoken and subtitled Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days) Co-director, co-camera, co-editor Cinema Suitcase (entire collective), 43'53", Video. Social documentary on migration, 2004, re-edited 2006 ArtClips Director, co-editor Series of nine 6½-minute video clips on audience interaction with single artworks. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2002

References

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Selective Index of Names and Titles

This index is limited to citations that, alone or together with others, constitute an argument, or a part of one. I have not included citations that already appear in one of the other lists, such as figures. This entails the omission from the index of actors, photographers and other participants, named elsewhere. 2MOVE, 34, 54, 136, 145–52

Aesthetic Theory (Adorno,) 20, 408

Access Denied, 287, 383–6

Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 169

Acts of Memory, 233, 368

‘A hand and the Thread of Hope’,

Adorno, Theodor W., xxix, 16, 19–21, 36, 113, 167–185, 228–30, 242, 342, 362, 379–80 Aeneas, xxviii, 19, 169–74

144 Ahtila, Eija-Liisa, 46, 48, 159, 185, 197, 373–82, 388 A Long History of Madness, ALHoM,

Aeschylus, 169

44, 89, 371, 346, 389, 394 and

Aesthetica (Baumgarten), 146, 259, 412

chapter 2

Alphen, Ernst van, 9, 11, 115, 118, 135,

Bennett, Jill, xxiii, 146, 198

137, 198, 220, 224, 227, 233, 244,

Benveniste, Emile, 182–3

245, 281, 306, 321, 324, 351, 368, 387

Bergson, Henri, 142, 153, 156–9, 178,

Anacronismos, 166, 394–5 Angelus Novus (Klee), 16–18 Ariste (character), 58–9, 66, 84

197, 264, 272, 349, 402 Berkeley, George (Bishop), 130, 260–4, 272

Aristotle, Aristotelian, 95, 122

Bleeker, Maaike, 4, 7, 83, 126, 380

ASCA (Amsterdam School for

Boer, Inge, 183, 205

Cultural Analysis), 178–9, 368

Boletsi, Maria, 161, 230–1

Assmann, Aleida, 389

Bollas, Christopher, 31, 173, 391

A Thing Among Things (Giaretta),

Borges, Jorge Luis, 117

194 A Thousand and One Nights, 94, 119–20 Austin, John, xxv, 19, 109, 183, 227, 228

Bouman, Margot, 153 Bowie, Malcolm, 3 Breughel, Pieter the Elder, xxviii, 43, 69–80, 249 Brilliant, Richard, 267–9, 271, 279 Brinkema, Eugenie, 322–4, 326

Bacon, Francis, 9, 135

Brunner, Benny, 312

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10, 109, 119, 305

Budakow, Adrian, 170

Ballester, Gonzalo, 151–2

Butler, Alison, 48

Banfield, Ann, 91–2, 107–12, 129–30

Butler, Judith, 68, 230

Bañón, Luz, 138, 153, 174 Barthes, Roland, 109, 115–6, 163, 225, 390, 391 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 146, 259, 412 Beckett, Samuel, 129, 262, 264, 272, 377 Becoming Vera, 37, 44, 175–182, 193, 286–313 Beginnings: Intention and Method (Said), 266

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi, xxviii, 170–1, 174 Cassandra, xxviii, 19, 35, 169–174 Cervantes, Miguel de, Saavedra, xxvii, 10–25, 59, 144, 225, 228–9, 237–44, 245 Charles (character), 330–6, 342, 345–8 Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory (Pollock), 369

Being and Time (Heidegger), 363–5

Christensen, Jeannette, 132, 240

Benjamin, Walter, xxvi, 16–20, 163–4,

Cinema Suitcase, 92–3, 182

166, 174, 240, 373, 382, 401

Code, Lorraine, 264

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 217

‘Essay as Form’ (Adorno), 113, 167

‘Contaminaciones’, xxii, 25

Eugeni Onegin (Pushkin), 295–397

Culler, Jonathan, 227, 325, 327, 335 Fabian, Johannes, 126, 128, 270, 280, Damisch, Hubert, 3, 18, 45, 172 Davoine, Françoise, xix, 13, 22,

319–20, 387 Failed Images (Alphen), 224

25–29, 44, 45–50, 53, 60–89, 188,

Film (Beckett), 129, 262, 264, 272

227–8, 240, 246–7, 371, 382, 394

Flaubert, Gustave, 15, 20, 25–6, 38,

Deep Orange (Janssens), 199

179, 240, 244, 302, 322–3, and

Deleuze, Gilles, 14, 18, 22, 28, 37, 102,

chapter 9

125, 132, 133, 135, 141–2, 153–8,

Foucault, Michel, 116, 343, 381, 390

169, 178, 179, 182, 198, 255,

Freud, Sigmund, xxvi, 2–3, 8, 14, 19,

262–4, 274, 285, 349–60, 376 Deleuzian, 9, 98, 135, 147, 152, 165, 182, 198, 264, 321, 349–61, 392

25, 29, 36, 60, 86, 179, 188, 215, 227–8, 232, 246, 323, 339, 371, 395

Derrida, Jacques, 348, 352 Descartes, René, xxvii, 20, 26–30, 35, 165–210, 274, 396–401 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 230–1, 235 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze), 133, 142, 349 Don Quijote (the character), xxii, 2, 20, 24, 59 Don Quijote (the novel), 10, 25, 37, 153, 177, 239, 241 Doris Salcedo: Palimpsesto, 38, 321

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 267, 279 Gamaker, Michelle Williams, xix, 2, 44, 69, 93, 165, 227, 295, 325, 371 Garcés, María Antonia, 22–3 Gatens, Moira & Genevieve Lloyd, 107, 196, 199, 265, 270, 274–5, 400 Gaudillière, Jean-Max, 13, 50, 60–1 Gaussian Blur (Theuws), 150 Genette, Gérard, 91, 108, 133, 334 Germaine, Thomas, xx, 28, 66, 67, 83–4, 180, 335, 341, 400

Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess, 29,

Giaretta, Giovanni, 194

188, 193, 202, 211–15, 401 El soplador (Lidó Rico), 174

Hannula, Mia, xxii, 49, 256

Emma (character), 26–30, 302, and

Harris, Jane, 208

chapter 9 Erasmus, Desiderius, 62, 71, 73, 80, 87

Heidegger, Martin, 267, 361–5 Heinola, Olli, 247–51 Heringa/van Kalsbeek, 168

Hernández, Miguel Á. Navarro, 24, 34, 46, 50, 54, 81, 136–7, 145, 152 Hirsch, Marianne, 118, 228, 368–70, 386, 289

Le Bergsonisme (Deleuze), 156 Lidó Rico, 174 Łódź Film School, 167 Lounsbery, Anne, 297

Homais (character,) 332, 345–6

Lucretia, 244–5

Hui, Tingting, 169

Lyotard, Jean-François, 14, 90, 92,

Huyssen, Andreas, 284, 289, 352,

106, 169

360, 370 Manen, Bertien van, 252–3, 314 Ilhem (character), 95, 102, 277–80 Illouz, Eva, 26, 179, 337–9 In Search of Vanished Blood (Malani), 169 It’s About Time! Reflections on

Madame Bovary, 15, 25, 179, 180, 240, 322 and chapter 9 Mad Meg (see Breughel) Malani, Nalini, xxii-iii, 74–5, 79, 93, 169, 210

Urgency, xxviii, 19, 171–4

Manovich, Lev, 47–8, 84

Izquierdo, José Martínez, 241, 245

Mantegna, Andrea, 343–4 Marclay, Christian, xxxiii, 152–9, 156

Janet, Pierre, 232–3

Marrati, Paola, 125, 274, 376

Janssens, Ann Veronica, 199

Marx, Karl, 25, 179, 339, 348

John the Baptist (Caravaggio), xxviii,

Marx, William, 379

170, 174

Massaouda (character), 270, 277, 279, 280, 284

Kentridge, William, 147, 156

Matter and Memory (Bergson), 156–7

Klee, Paul, 16–8

Mère Folle (Mother Folly) (Davoine),

Kolk, Bessel A. van der and Onno van der Hart, 61, 228, 232, 244, 392 Kristina, Queen of Sweden, 27–9, 35, 184, 186–217 Kubler, George, 23, 131–2 Kuryel, Aylin, 157, 159

45, 51, 76, 80, 86, 227, 371 Metahistory (White), 160 Mikurda, Jakub (Kuba), 167–8, 170, 173–4 Mille et un jours, 34, 90–130 (chapter 3) Mimoune (Ballester), 151–2

Lamentation of Christ (Mantegna), 343–4 ‘Landscapes of Madness’, 33 and chapter 2

Mitchell, W. J. Th., xxv-xxix, 5, 13, 14, 45, 217 Moin, Viviana, 143 Mondzain, Marie-José, 5, 397

Montanier, Mathieu, xx, 12, 21, 23, 346

Rodowick, David, 14, 125, 169 Röttger, Kati, 4, 7

Mouffe, Chantal, 260 Munch Museum, 7

Sáez, Mar, 242

Munch, Edvard, 7, 15, 244

Said, Edward, 266, 326, 342 Salcedo, Doris, 38, 48, 177, 254,

‘Narrative Stuttering’, 2, 4–6, 22 Nothing is Missing, 36–7 and chapter 7

352–63, 381 Saloul, Ihab, 287–8, 306, 383–9, 396 Sancho Panza (character), 2–4, 142–3, 241

Palimpsesto (Salcedo), 38, 325, 350–62, 393 Peeren, Esther, 12, 66, 112, 119, 213, 348 Peirce, Charles Sanders, xxvii, 70, 255–6, 307

Seligmann Silva, Andréa, 310, 404 Separations, 38, 310–3, 319 Shadow Procession (Kentridge), 147 ‘She Too’, 144, 224–6, 239, 240, 277 Silverman, Kaja, 31, 39, 132, 351, 362–5, 376

Pollock, Griselda, 369

Silverman, Max, 381

Portraiture (Brilliant), 279

Singin’ in the Rain, 115–6

Potential Beauty (Harris), 208

Sissi (character ALHoM), 66–7, 81–5,

Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 71–2, 80 Proust, Marcel, 3, 109–13, 117–24, 130, 133, 368 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 295–310

245–51 Spinoza, Baruch, 27, 195–6, 198–200, 209, 217, 264–5, 274–5, 284, 339, 374, 397 State of Suspension, 38, 319–20

Quoting Caravaggio (Bal), 34, 161

Sund, Ebba, 224–5, 234–8

Reasonable Doubt, 27, 33, 39, 168, 175

Tarek (character), 94–127 (chapter 3),

and chapters 5 and 10

277

Reed, David, 171, 173–4

Tatiana (character, Pushkin), 294, 301–2

Refuse the Hour (Kentridge), 156

‘Testimonial Discourses’, 13, 15, 299

Rembrandt, 207, 245, 342–4, 395

The anatomical lesson of dr Deyman

Remembering Mad Meg (Malani), 74, 79 Richter, Gerhard, 18–20 Rodin, Auguste, 171

(Rembrandt), 343 The Anatomical Lesson of Dr Tulp (Rembrandt), 342 ‘The Captive’s Tale’, 23, 144, 239

The Clock (Marclay), 152–4 ‘The Failure of Listening’, 13, 15, 229, 241 The Passions of the Soul (Descartes), 188–9, 197–202 The Phantom Table (Banfield), 92, 107, 111–12, 115, 129 ‘The Queen of Spades’ (Pushkin),

Unspeakable Sentences (Banfield), 92, 107, 116 Valthersson, Jonas, 235 Vellodi, Kamini, 9, 165, 305 Vera (character), 37, 44, 175, 179–80, 181–219 Verhoeff, Nanna, 115, 137, 249 Vinci, Leonardo da, 3, 13

298, 301 The Refusal of Time (Kentridge), 156 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Benjamin), 16, 164

Wessels, Christopher, 348 Where is Where? (Ahtila), 373–88 White, Hayden, 160–1, 167–8, 189 Williams, James, 133, 135, 141

The Thinker (Rodin), 171

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 13, 36, 65

The Thinker (Sánchez Castillo),

‘Who is Don Quijote?’, 20, 240

171 Theuws, Roos, 149–50

Wojciechowski, Przemo, 205 Wolf, Christa, 35, 169–74

Totem and Taboo, 2–3 Toufic, Jalal, 149 Transgressions (Malani), 210

Yossi & Itamar (State of Suspension), 313–4

‘Trial Scene’, 61, 82–3 Tuin, Iris van der, 137, 249

Žižek, Slavoj, 141–2

Selective Index of Terms and Concepts

This index is limited to concepts that are (part of) an argument. Only places where the mention is theoretically or critically meaningful have been included. It is designed to serve a different purpose from the usual. This selective approach is meant to facilitate the users of this book to invent and articulate the shaping of their own theories, essays or thoughts, small or larger, simple or complex. This is also the reason why some entries have many citations, and others very few. Abandonment complex, 27, 216, 263–4 Abduction, abductive, 255–6, 396–7 Abstraction, abstract, 28, 135, 157, 163, 170, 199, 255, 352–3, 364, 380 Abuse, 5, 39, 70, 86, 247, 249, 325, 342

Accent, 128, 280 Action-images, (Deleuze) 350 Acts of memory, 39, 74, 233, 357, 368, 369, 370, 372–4, 377, 380–8, 392–400 Address, 71–2, 94, 181, 294, 297, 309, 313, 322, 377, 383

Aesthetics, aesthetic, xxi, 7, 10, 12,

Autobiography, autobiographical, 23,

14, 19, 23, 36, 38–9, 47, 49, 52–3,

25, 65, 144, 201, 239, 310–12, 356,

81, 91, 94, 97–9, 103, 109, 119, 121,

387

126, 129, 146, 151–5, 161, 181–2, 193, 258–9, 260, 265–6, 273, 312,

Barbarism, barbaric, 230, 289

323, 348, 351, 366, 383–5, 391

Beauty, 38, 49, 53, 85, 164, 179, 203,

Affect, affective, 38, 48, 50–1, 61, 68–9, 98–100, 106, 111, 113, 138, 161, 179, 196–8, 216, 269, 275,

205–8, 259, 272, 308–9, 337, 356, 358 Becoming (Deleuze), 31, 33, 37, 46,

3224, 374 and chapter 9, 392–4,

57, 67, 82, 85–7, 181–2, 246–7,

397

259, 275–6, 284, 289, 308, 392

Affection-image, 262–3, 274, 376, 381–3, 402 Agency, 21, 36–7, 39, 117, 121, 151, 164, 213, 218, 220, 236, 244 and chapter 7, 324, 350, 362, 366, 374, 387, 390 Anachronism, 19, 29, 34, 51, 72, 76,

Beginning, 59–60, 86, 140, 143, 247, 266, 311, 326, 329 Biography, biographical, 22, 144, 186–7, 214, 304, 392, 401 Binary opposition, 19, 48, 58, 89, 92, 160, 167, 183, 323, 330 Borders, 97, 183

80 and chapter 4, 179, 196, 327, 336, 342, 395–6 Anthropomorphic, 113, 124, 128, 349, 357–9, 390–1, 401 Archive, archival, 138, 313–7, 374 Arranged marriage, 96, 106, 119, 122

Capitalism, capitalist, 30, 96, 156, 179, 337, 339, 342, 372 Censorship, censoring, 36, 78, 116, 218, 220, 224, 230, 322 Chronology, 22, 34, 69, 107, 118, 136,

Artistic research, 8–9, 31

145, 149, 161, 169, 203, 210, 295,

Audience, 2, 4–7, 19, 47, 52–3, 90–1,

329, 401

106–7, 114, 125–6, 138, 214, 286, 322, 392

Cinema, cinematic, xxvi, 15, 17, 30, 38, 39, 43–7, 52, 57, 83–4, 94,

Audio-image, 335

103, 115, 116, 128, 132, 153–4, 182,

Authenticity, 127

184, 206, 226, 239–44, 282, 304,

Author, authorship, 59, 69, 80, 81,

329, 333–5, 341, 348, 361, 395

85, 86, 109, 114–6, 123, 144, 200, 225, 236, 247, 391–2 Authority, 99, 108, 116–7, 120, 123–4, 128, 257, 271, 346, 390

Cinematography, cinematographically, 23, 376, 380–1 ‘Classifixation’, 249, 297

Clock time, 152–9 Close-up, 98, 124–5, 233, 263, 269, 274–5, 280, 284–5, 335, 350, 360,

Documentary, 33, 35, 38, 39, 44, 53, 56–7, 72, 91 and chapter 3, 181, sections of chapters 5, 7 and 10

374–6, 381

Duration, durational, durative, 7, 16,

Coevalness, 126–7

35, 52, 84, 132–3, 135, 141, 142,

Comparison, 185, 295, 323, 334,

144, 152–5 and chapter 4,

356

334–40, 349, 357–9, 370, 376

Concept, conceptual, xv-vi, 3, 5, 8–10, 13–4, 29, 32, 35–8, 46, 90 et passim Concepts, travelling, 98, 156, 368 Contact 48, 147, 197, 205, 226, 258, 261–2, 268–70, 280, 282–4, 290, 297, 376 Contemporaneity, contemporary, 6,

Emotional capitalism, 26, 179, 325, 330, 337–42, 372–3 Empathy, empathic, 6, 10, 13, 16, 29, 60–1, 137–8, 155, 184, 224–9, 237, 246, 327–9, 343–72 Engagement, 37, 53, 61–2, 72, 116, 133, 138, 161–2, 225, 274, 321, 364–6, 374

16, 23, 38, 46, 54–5, 63–4, 72,

English, 45, 72, 87, 168, 281–2

74–8, 133, 137–40, 142–6, 164–5,

Epistemology, epistemological, 4, 9,

178, 191, 309, 313, 327, 341, 343, 349, 354, 374, 395

34–6, 44, 78, 91, 108, 110 Essay-film, 167–8, 170–4

Critical habitat, 360, 380, 383

Ethics, ethical, 34, 35, 36, 44, 91, 93,

Crystal image (Deleuze), 359

106, 108, 121, 173, 183, 196, 228,

Cultural analysis, 10, 61, 128, 153, 178,

264–5, 270, 275, 314, 342, 366, 370

227–8, 323, 368, 385 Cultural Citizenship, 37 and chapter 8, 287, 312–3, 319, 383 Cultural heritage, 10, 13, 165, 389, 397

Ethics of non-indifference, 348, 362 Ethics of vision (Silverman), 132 Event, 19, 62, 87, 91, 95, 122, 127, 135, 142, 145, 152, 165, 171, 203, 227, 249, 275, 334, 344 Exhibition, 10, 24–8, 32, 47–8, 50, 52

Death, 342–8, 356, 364, 377, 381

and chapter 2, 136–8, 142–3, 187,

Deixis, deictic, 48, 133, 182, 197

217, 232, 372, 395

Description, descriptive, 17–8, 20–1,

Exile, 302, 304–9, 383–6

68, 76, 112, 145, 180, 327, 331, 334 Dis-remembering, 357, 389, 391, 395, 401–2 Dissociation, 232–3, 249, 374

Face, 17, 72, 78, 98, 110, 113, 124, 129, 206, 224–6, 236–8, 241, 247, 251 and chapter 7

Facing, 37, 65, 220, 260–6 and chapter 7 Faithfulness, Fidelity (in adaptation), 69, 81, 306, 327, 329

Globalisation, 254–7, 259, 264, 268, 273, 276, 282 Guilt, guilty, 59, 107, 217, 306, 373–4, 397

Fetishisation, 102, 164 Figural, 14–5, 90, 92, 106, 116, 169–71, 177, 358 Figuration, figuring, 8, 75, 78, 169, 170, 344, 347, 394 Focalisation, 108, 181, 305–9, 322, 325, 327, 329–37, 341–8

Heterochrony, 34–5, 51 and chapter 4 hors-champ, 17, 236, 293, 297 ‘hovering’, to hover, 19, 66, 86, 135, 205, 344 ‘hybridity-within’, 104

Force (Lyotard as starting point), 14, 31, 90, 117, 244, 341, 348, 349,

Icon, xxvii, 5, 18, 296, 307

376, 379

Iconography, xxvii, 63, 72–81, 395,

Fools (medieval figures), 52–7, 63–7 Forgetting, 85, 161, 231, 380, 389, 394, 396

396 Identification, identificatory, 66, 82, 97, 173, 228, 238, 246, 249, 269,

Formalism, 160–1, 167, 324, 326

274, 287, 300, 309, 312, 327, 362,

Formlessness, formless, 131–2, 214,

364, 395–6

240, 335 Fragmentation, fragmented, 103, 110, 112, 122, 174, 289, 293, 390 Frame, framing, 52, 78, 86, 111, 113, 141–4, 164, 181, 249, 268, 287, 315, 350, 358, 369 Frame (cinematic), 82, 152, 178, 209, 236, 285, 290, 293–4, 297 Free Indirect Discourse (FID), 92, 108, 183–5, 322, 332, 335, 344

Identity, 37, 44, 65, 98, 109, 113, 182–3, 219–20, 262, 266, 268–9 and chapter 8 Image-act, 157, 237 Imagination, imagining, 5, 8, 21, 24, 28–30, 35, 80, 157, 160, 168, 177, 179, 182, 186–9, 199, 218, 231, 236, 274–6 Anthropomorphic 113, 357–61, 390–1, 401 Imaging, 8–10, 17, 24–31, 45, 59,

Gallery film, 46–8

111–2, 129, 177, 186, 195, 210, 233,

Gaps, 47, 129, 167, 171, 259, 27–3, 276,

247

279 Ghost, 112, 130, 211, 347–8; see also Spectre)

Individualism, individualist, 67, 113, 115, 116, 120, 123, 185, 217, 225, 266–8, 387

Installation, xxvi, 12, 21–3, 32, 33 et passim Intensity, 323–4, 349, 350, 354, 356–7 and chapter 9

231–4, 247–9, 275–6, 287, 306, 327, 344, 351, 357–9 and chapter 10 Middle voice, 161, 231

Intention, intentionalism, 121, 124,

Migration, 34, 37, 44, 54, 94, 96, 112,

129, 144, 271–3, 358, 390–1

136, 145–8, 151 and chapter 7

Interculturality, intercultural, 121,

Migratory aesthetics, 98–9, 103, 129,

254, 261, 265, 270, 280, 289, 294, 304, 306, 383 Interdisciplinarity, 45, 128, 163, 178, 188, 268 Interdiscursivity, 119, 163 Intermediality, 14,108, 163, 184, 220, 225, 339

146, 155, 265 and chapter 4 Mis-remembering, 389–90, 400–1 Modesty, 36,93, 168, 229–30 Mood, 51, 59, 122, 138, 185–7, 191, 198, 203, 205, 209, 210, 361–5 Movement, 14–5, 25, 34, 48, 51, 54, 72, 75–6, 84, 115, 126, 136, 145–7,

Interpretant, 63, 70

150, 157, 159, 178–9, 196–8, 236,

Inter-ship, 45, 65, 107, 163, 164, 166,

240, 244–6, 282, 329, 350, 351–2,

188, 270, 327, 367 Intertemporality, intertemporal, 265, 273, 371 Intimacy, intimate, xxi, 5, 24, 95, 103, 119, 122, 219, 252, 254–7, 259–60, 264, 304, 312–9 Linearity, linear, 12, 20, 99, 124–6, 149, 166, 186, 266, 274, 350, 381, 401 Loyalty, 164, 327, 337, 344, 347

366, 376, 394, 402 Multi-temporality, 148 Music, 28, 53, 54, 57–8, 89, 110–11, 132, 156, 193, 203, 215, 314, 323, 395 Mutuality, 39, 46, 282, 350 Nakba (Palestine), 313–5, 385–7 Narrator, 2, 34, 62–3, 67, 92, 93, 108, 110–12, 114, 123–4, 183, 233, 322, 326–7, 335–6, 390

Materiality, 4, 6, 23, 28, 50, 138, 274,

Nostalgia, 118, 304–10, 372

356, 358, 376 Medium, 12, 14, 35, 36, 47, 49, 52, 57, 64, 67, 71, 75, 91, 100, 129, 132, 145–7, 151, 185, 187, 219, 272–3, 279, 282, 330, 335, 361–6 Memory, memories, 19, 32, 38–9, 66, 74, 100, 142, 148, 150, 156–8,

‘Occasionality’, 267–8 Octopus (thought-image for time), 131–175 (chapter 4), 401 Origin, 82, 93, 98, 108–9, 116, 128–9, 157, 162–3, 256, 266–7, 295, 308

Partiality, partial, 168–9, 174, 203 Participants, 32, 52, 137, 173, 202, 286, 366, 348, 392 Perception, 10, 69, 70, 110–1, 112–3,

Pre-posterous, 35, 38, 72, 86, 137, 159, 164–5, 169–70, 172, 174, 200, 245–7, 265 Present (time), xxviii, 8, 10, 11, 16, 19,

157–9, 197, 198, 262–4, 274, 333,

21, 23, 39, 62, 63, 65, 72, 81,

335, 347, 349–50, 363

84–5, 96, 100, 135–8, 141, 149 et

Performance, 70, 78, 79, 111, 113, 126, 129, 142, 168, 178, 196, 213, 242,

passim Present (tense), xxviii, 103, 133, 137,

259, 261–2, 265, 268–9, 279, 281,

143, 145, 157–8, 161, 162, 344, 354,

314, 352, 372, 381

370, 373, 376, 386

Performativity, performative, 24, 31,

Projection, projecting, 70, 72, 158,

45–6, 49, 64, 68, 97, 109, 123,

166, 266–7, 275, 364, 400

125, 129, 177, 179, 183, 197, 211,

Psychoanalysis, 15, 22, 25, 29, 36, 45,

227–8, 230, 258, 274, 276–7, 280,

50, 61–2, 65–7, 71, 82, 89, 146,

313, 322–6, 349, 352, 356, 359,

182, 188, 193, 200–2, 216, 229,

370, 381

232–3, 245, 249, 264, 266,

Photography, 92, 111, 115, 224, 225, 349, 351 Political (the), 48, 52–3, 93, 97, 197–8, 259–60, 366, 374, 379–80, 387, 394, 397 Politics, 29, 37, 48, 96, 97, 105, 126, 133, 142, 147, 260, 280, 287, 319, 326, 330, 380, 393 Pornography, pornographic, 229–30, 322–3

276–80, 371, 391 Psychosis, psychotic, 25, 36, 45, 60–1, 64, 214, 227–8, 363, 372, 397 ‘race-reading’, 296 ‘radical’, 167, 396–7 Realism, realist, 23, 78, 117, 123, 180, 224, 267–8, 275, 279, 325–7, 332, 334, 390 Recognition, recognising, 14, 95, 112,

‘Post-‘, 162, 169, 191, 386, 402

164, 191, 349, 373, 382, 387, 389,

“post-Cartesian”, 179, 191, 217, 396,

400

400, 402 Postcolonialism, postcolonial, 149, 162, 196, 264, 270, 288, 374, 397 Postmemory (Hirsch), 118, 228, 369, 386, 387 Postmodern, postmodernism, 12, 117, 166, 336

Relationality, relational, 73, 185, 265, 350, 364 Relativism, 93, 254, 262, 264, 285, 297 Representation, 11, 16, 21, 36, 69, 89, 158, 161, 220, 224, 226, 228, 229–31, 242, 247, 268, 282, 321,

323–4, 351, 357, 363, 365–6, 381–3, 389 Responsibility, 37, 50, 86, 90–3, 106–8, 112, 161, 173–4, 196, 217, 261, 265, 275–6, 284, 339, 342, 370, 373–4, 381, 397, 400

Storytelling, 10, 11, 21, 22, 52, 63, 99, 100, 107, 121, 239, 241, 304, 329, 333, 387 Strategic universalism, 94, 245, 254, 264 Subjectivity, 11, 21, 31, 39, 84, 111, 135, 158, 181, 202, 244, 270, 274, 308,

Schizophrenia, schizophrenic, 81–4, 210, 233, 284, 341

348–9, 364, 376 Surtitles, 281

Seating (in exhibitions), 7, 37, 187 Second person, 72, 80, 84, 106, 124,

Tactic, 168–9 Temporality, 23, 34, 47–8, 53, 84, 99,

144, 173, 182, 234, 262–4, 270–1,

110, 125–6, 131–3, 136–7, 150,

335, 370, 382

153–5, 165, 171 et passim

Selection, 157–9, 262, 350 Self-expression, 36, 276 Serendipity, serendipitous, 5, 7, 272 Shock, shocking, 18, 20, 21, 49, 98, 100, 209, 214, 241, 244 Singularity, 93, 108, 255, 279 Slavery, slave, 22, 25, 144, 237, 239, 295–6, 298, 300 Social bond, broken, 25, 29, 191, 231, 245, 401 Solidarity, 45, 188, 320, 389, 392, 401, 402 Sotties, 54, 55, 65, 70, 87, 249 Sound, 23, 49, 54, 57, 58, 70, 114–5, 185, 187, 203, 244, 280–2, 374 Space, 2, 4, 22, 24, 28–31, chapter 2,

Theatre film, 43, 46–7, 84, 154, 217, 391 Theatricality, 4, 7, 13, 65, 83, 187, 281, 377–81 Theoretical fiction, 2–3, 16, 25, 29, 36, 86, 200, 227 Theoretical object, 3, 45, 70, 110, 178, 246, 329 Therapist, therapôn (etymology), 44, 62 ‘the social buzz’, 177, 185, 196, 199, 203, 217, 344 ‘thinking in film’, 39, 47, 48, 179–80, 184–6, 193, 196, 214–5, 394, 401 Thought-images, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 16, 17, 18–20, 23, 38, 64, 67, 75, 230, 247

95, 111, 116, 126, 137, 149, 156–8,

Time, politics, of 126, 147

181 et passim

Tradition, traditional, 14, 32, 57, 59,

‘spatial montage’, 47, 84

63, 65, 68, 70, 87, 89, 94,

Spectre, spectrality, 66, 211, 244,

98–103, 117–20, 122–3, 127, 138

248–9, 359

Threshold, 24, 31, 100, 124

Tragedy, tragic, 52, 54, 59, 62, 23–6,

Universality, 93, 97, 98, 99, 107, 118,

284, 335, 354, 374, 377, 379, 380,

124, 126, 129, 164, 254, 258–9,

385

260–2, 264–8, 277–9, 281–2, 284,

Translation, 44, 72, 80, 99, 137,

288

163–4, 281, 296, 305–9, 337, 340–2, 376 Trauma, 6, 10, 11–2, 22–3, 25, 29, 36,

Violence, 12, 36, 50, 55, 58, 59, 61, 80, 82, 97, 102, 105, 119, 227–30, 231,

39, 59–61, 72, 81, 86, 132, 188, 214

242–3, 263, 289, 313, 352, 354, 357,

and chapter 6

359, 373, 380, 388, 390, 394–5

‘trauma envy’, 224, 228, 395

Visual habitus, 132, 391

Trigger, 109, 116, 242–3, 269, 308,

Visualisation, 3, 12, 21, 80, 151, 226,

323–5, 348–50, 353–4, 356, 359, 361, 363, 365

281 Voyeurism, 36, 220, 224, 228, 342

Truth, 3, 20, 33, 72, 91, 97, 104, 152, 160, 168, 177, 218, 279, 290,

‘what if ’, 68, 193, 195–6

295

‘willing suspension of disbelief ’, 217

Truth claim, 33, 35, 100, 103, 107, 127, 193

Witnessing, 37, 104, 111, 271, 277, 326–7, 329, 345, 350, 356, 383