Seeing from Scratch : Fifteen Lessons with Godard 9781927852378

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SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ by RICHARD DIENST with 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD ◊ THE POSTCARD GAME

SEEING FROM SCRATCH

with THE POSTCARD GAME

SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD

with THE POSTCARD GAME ◊ RICHARD DIENST

CABOOSE ◊ MONTREAL

SEEING FROM SCRATCH    1 INTERMISSION    99 THE POSTCARD GAME    103

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  131 COLOPHON  132

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LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN LEARN

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In 1979 Jean-Luc Godard filled a page of Cahiers du Cinéma with the word LEARN (APPRENDRE).1 It appears twenty-two times. What do we do when we look at this page? Is it a story, a poem, a dialogue, or a mantra? Is it just one word repeated over and over, or is it a different word each time? Are we reading a text or seeing an image? Maybe the eye will take just a moment to ‘get it’ and move on, or maybe it will linger a while, never really deciding what it is looking at. This page of words appears in the middle of a report from Mozambique, where Godard’s company was advising the government about setting up the newly-decolonised country’s first television system. We can read ‘apprendre’ as an imperative verb addressed to Mozambicans as they build a new society, but also as an infinitive verb that defines a need and a situation that everybody faces. What do we (all) have to learn? The easiest way to read the page is to see it as a syllabus or a to-do list. Learn one thing, then another, then another. When you reach the end of the list, you take a test, get a degree, and start the next list. That is what education usually looks like: a seemingly never-ending series of lists. In that setting, the word ‘LEARN’ will always look like a command, because the first goal of every lesson is obedience. Some people like to learn, just as some people like to obey.

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But what if we see the repetition of the word ‘learn’ in a less authoritarian and more improvisational way? We learn, we re-learn, we learn again. It is not a matter of learning ‘the same thing’ over and over, or learning a series of things in the proper order, but of starting over and over, always facing the possibility that the next round will bring something unexpected.  As long as the process runs in twists and turns rather than a straight line, each moment of learning can recast everything that came before, even to the point of unlearning it. In that setting, it is hard to say whether the first ‘learn’ could possibly know what the twenty-second ‘learn’ might call for. That is the kind of learning that Godard is recommending: not a continuous, finalised sequence, but a persistent, iterative practice. Not a regime of tests but a protocol of experiments. We have to keep learning, not because of some pious reminder that we can never know enough, but because we want to cultivate a certain attitude towards the world that is both actively engaged and attentively reserved.  At every turn we have to test what we already know against whatever prompts us to think things through all over again. Each time the word ‘learn’ appears, it asks something different of us, depending on what came before and what might come next, on what’s right over there and what’s somewhere else, what’s visible and thinkable and what’s out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes the word is a solid stepping stone, sometimes it slips in unpredictable ways, sometimes there are little rhyming passages, and sometimes the pattern flies apart.  As we read down the page, the line of words becomes a tenuous string of images; it doesn’t compose a sentence because it is actually a movie, where every image asks us to see something else.

learn to see before learning to read.2

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Do we really need to learn how to see? We usually assume that seeing comes naturally, while reading comes by good fortune and hard work. Being able to see would be a matter of physical capacity, however complex and variable, while being able to read would depend on more specialised skills, from training the eyes to follow a line of letters to learning enough vocabulary and grammar to assemble phrases. In logic and in life, reading supposedly presupposes seeing, like listening presupposes hearing, or whistling presupposes breathing. Seeing, along with the other senses, helps to orient us in our bodies, but reading orients us in language, which offers access to worlds beyond our own perceptions and experiences. In fact, John Berger begins his book Ways of Seeing (1972) with this statement: ‘Seeing comes before words’.  As a statement about child development or world history, that might sound obvious, but it is not quite right. Each of us may be able to see long before we are able to read, but that does not mean that words keep a distance, waiting for us to grow up. Words are already there from the moment each of us is born, shaping what is seen and who sees it. For infancy and history alike, in this day and age, seeing and reading are always entangled, never one without the other.

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Evidently something important happens when we stop seeing words as strange marks and start reading them as meaningful signs. From that point on, the haphazard process of learning one’s ‘mother tongue’ becomes codified, and the learning curve bends towards reading.  And henceforth it is not only words that we will try to read, but everything else too, including images. With the acquisition of language, we look at the world as if it might already be something other than it appears. Reading comes ‘after’ seeing and hearing in that special sense, because it is supposed to engage our higher faculties of cognition, capable of tapping into invisible layers of meaning over and above mere perception. It promises mastery over all kinds of knowledge about the world and the cosmos, from brute facts to subtle mysteries. Certain specialists in reading—judges and critics, for example—exercise decisive social power, adjudicating and appraising the significance of everything they survey. Whatever concessions may be made to the power of images, the power of words (and numbers) still triumphs, as it has for thousands of years. That’s the usual story, anyway. But by now it should be clear that things are not so simple. Perhaps seeing and reading are neither sequential nor complementary, but actually antagonistic. Perhaps we need to wonder whether reading actually destroys our ability to see. In fact, that is the context in which these words appear in Film

Socialisme (2011): a young woman asserts, as a political right, the demand children should learn to see before being taught to read. It is just one step away from challenging the supremacy of reading altogether.

Godard had already raised this possibility in Here and Elsewhere (Ici et ailleurs, 976), when these words appeared on the screen:

learn to see not to read Now the lesson becomes clearer and more harsh: we ought to learn to see first, because as soon as we learn to read, it’s too late. Or again: we have to learn to see in order to counteract our having learned to read. To unlearn the wrong lessons.

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This refusal of reading is hard to grasp unless we admit the possibility that we have forgotten how to see, or that we never really knew in the first place. Moreover we would have to suppose that this blindness is cultural and historical rather than physiological. ‘Learning to see’ would thus demand constant vigilance, if not outright hostility, towards all of the privileges invested in the act of reading—all those individual acts of discrimination and judgment that add up to the whole edifice of scriptural authority. The accusation is not just that reading directs all questions of knowledge to some higher power or some deeper meaning, as if we ought to leave behind the shared world of the senses; it is that people who embrace the higher value of reading thereby lose the ability to see, to think, and to act on whatever they encounter. So the ‘enemy’ is not reading as such, let alone language as such, but the whole system of procedures and apparatuses that wields a monopoly power over whatever counts as reality. Godard is very clear about that authority: in one place he calls it ‘the state’, and in another he calls it ‘capital’.

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Godard is also clear about the alternative: he calls it ‘socialism’, and it is immediately connected to seeing.  As he says in 1978: ‘The newborn child is, I think, a socialist; she needs to see first and to touch what she sees and to see what she touches’. But the child doesn’t stay like that: she learns to read instead, and henceforth knows the world only through what can be said about it. There would be socialism, then, when people can ‘get along on the basis of what they have seen’ and produce their everyday lives by relating their own seeing and touching with those of others.3 In this sense, all of Godard’s films since the late 1960s could have been called Film Socialisme (and not just the one he released in 2011) because all of them propose seeing and touching as fundamental social bonds, for better and for worse— bonds that cinema alone can teach us to make. What had first seemed like a gentle proposal about our sensory education has turned out to be a call for insurrection. Perhaps this lesson will seem too combative, but there is no going back: we can never again view the relationship between seeing and reading as a natural division of labour or a peaceful compromise. Here, then, is a new starting place for our lessons: we do not yet know how to see, and our ignorance is part of our oppression.

we can say all we want about what we see, but what we see is never lodged in what we say.4

The gap between seeing and saying cannot be reduced to the difference between images and words, or between visual perception and language. What we say can go on and on, as precise and profuse as you like, without ever capturing or enclosing what we see. Likewise, what we see opens up its own kind of zone, irreducible to the efforts of speech to give it form and meaning. Indeed, there appears to be such a rift between seeing and saying that nothing can guarantee a connection, let alone an equivalence.

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And yet, most of the time, the split between seeing and saying seems untroubled. Without worrying too much about it, we carry out a loose and apparently adequate translation between them all the time. Sometimes the distinction between seeing and saying seems to be a matter of personal preference: some people like to talk, others like to look. Even if we assume, based on some philosophical prejudice, that saying is fundamentally truer than seeing (or vice versa), we usually switch between them as if they were overlapping or complementary ways of dealing with ‘the same thing’.  And as long as we assume that seeing and saying are grounded in this ‘same thing’—which may be either an external world to which they refer, or an internal thought process around which they circulate, or both—the difference between them would be simply a matter of inconvenience. Only in certain charged moments—like trying to describe what happened during a soccer match or a bank robbery—do we admit the inadequacy of words to what we have seen. Or it can happen the other way around—say, during a game of Pictionary or a conversation without a shared language—when we are forced to make a picture of something that we could have spoken quite easily. Whenever speaking or seeing—or the ability to toggle between them—fails us, we typically ‘internalise’ the flaw by blaming our eyes, our memory, our talent or our vocabulary. If we do not find a way to work around it, the gap can seem like an abyss, prompting us to doubt whether it is ever possible to make ourselves understood.

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Some might say that seeing and saying remain dissociated only because we have not yet learned how to integrate them. Of course both description—exact verbal notation—and observation—careful visual examination—can be practised and improved. Perhaps we can design an educational program to combine seeing and saying, cultivating a kind of articulate attentiveness.  And so we might hope for a virtuous circle: the better we can say what we see, the better we can see whatever we are able to say.  And so on, round and round, until all things are seen, spoken and thereby known. Contemporary theory would suggest that we have to jettison this whole model. There is no ‘mind’s eye’ or ‘fixed reality’ where seeing and saying can be reconciled. We might even begin to suspect—to anticipate the argument a little—that seeing and saying do not belong to the same person, let alone the same world. Let’s return to the original statement: ‘We can say all we want about what we see, but what we see is never lodged in what we say’. This line is spoken in Godard’s film Le Gai Savoir (1969) by Patricia, who is instructing her friend Émile on the basic principles of ‘joyful wisdom’. In fact, this is an exact quotation from Michel Foucault’s book The

Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses), first published in 1966. It appears in the middle of his celebrated explication of the painting Las Meninas by Velázquez. (This is not the first time Godard has quoted a text about Velázquez, but that’s another story.)

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Foucault is explaining why a verbal description of the painting, in particular an inventory of the people represented there, would be unhelpful in an effort to understand what it makes visible. ‘[The] relation of language to painting is an infinite relation’, he writes, not simply because words are inadequate to convey the richness of the visible, but because ‘the space where one speaks’ and ‘the space where one looks’ operate differently. Here is the passage where Godard found his phrase:

[It] is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.  And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax.4

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Foucault suggests that we should take the ‘incompatibility’ of language and vision as a starting-point rather than an obstacle. It is this incompatibility that makes the act of representation, such as the painting itself, both possible and necessary. (If we could reliably say what we mean and show what we have seen, we would not need to worry about the limits of representation.) His reading of Velázquez proceeds to demonstrate how the visible spectacle of the painting is structured by several gaps and blind spots. On one hand, the scene presented by the painting can never quite anchor (though it tries very hard) its relationship to both the painter and the spectator, who stand outside and look; on the other hand, it can never quite register its relationship to the royal figure whose power it was supposed to make manifest. Either way, no matter how full the spectacle may be, the painting can never fulfil its visual agenda. The painting does indeed ‘show’ us quite a bit, and it does indeed ‘say’ quite a lot, but there is no actual ‘place’ where all this showing and saying comes together. There’s nobody there: not Velázquez, not the king, not us. Again, we should remember that Foucault was writing about this particular painting in order to begin his examination of the regime of ‘classical representation’. He wants to explain how different regimes of representation have, in different historical periods, reconfigured the relationship between seeing and saying. Like Godard, Gilles Deleuze wants to draw a more general conclusion from Foucault’s argument.

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Here is Deleuze’s commentary on Foucault:

There is a disjunction between speaking and seeing, between the visible and the articulable: ‘what we see never lies in what we say’, and vice versa. The conjunction is impossible for two reasons: the statement has its own correlative object and is not a proposition designating a state of things or a visible object, as logic would have it; but neither is the visible a mute meaning, a signified of power to be realised in language, as phenomenology would have it. The archive, the audiovisual is disjunctive.5 Notice how Deleuze has shifted the terrain from ‘seeing and saying’ (which are too easily confined to individual subjects) and ‘images and words’ (which are too easily mistaken for objective raw material) to ‘the visible and the articulable’. For Foucault and Deleuze, these new terms are dynamic and constitutive ‘strata’ of knowledge, historically specific and variable.

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Deleuze elaborates:

As long as we stick to things and words we can believe that we are speaking of what we see, that we see what we are speaking of, and that the two are linked: in this way we remain at the level of an empirical exercise. But as soon as we open up words and things, as soon as we discover statements and visibilities, words and sight are raised to a higher exercise that is a priori, so that each reaches its own unique limit which separates it from the other, a visible element that can only be seen, an articulable element that can only be spoken.  And yet the unique limit that separates each one is also the common limit that links one to the other, a limit with two irregular faces, a blind word and a mute vision.6 Having pushed the opposition this far—where ‘visibilities’ and ‘statements’ operate apart from the particular subjects who witness or utter them—Deleuze wants to ensure that we do not resort to any metaphysical compromises or reconciliations to re-centre or reunify them in the name of some invisible, inexpressible Beyond. Never fully synthesised together, never fully separated from each other, seeing and saying operate according their own modalities, whether collaborating or not. That is why we cannot ascend to some higher seat of reason where their limits could be authoritatively judged. Every attempt at knowledge encounters the disjunction between ‘the visible’ and ‘the articulable’, which is configured in various ways, even as it marks out (or leaves out) an uncertain third dimension that they both traverse.

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For Deleuze and Foucault, this third dimension has nothing transcendental or trans-historical about it. Instead it can be defined as the open-ended space where knowledge deploys itself strategically, where the differential relations of seeing and saying must be grasped in terms of ‘power’, or rather ‘power relations’. As Deleuze puts it: ‘Seeing and Speaking are always already completely caught up within power relations which they presuppose and actualise’. For all of their stratifications, statements and visibilities compose a non-stratified ‘scene’ where thinking finds new potentialities. Deleuze: ‘Seeing is thinking, and speaking is thinking, but thinking occurs in the interstice, or the disjunction between seeing and speaking’.7 This is a very useful formulation, because it indicates all of the work that has yet to be done: for every act of making-visible or making-articulable, we have to examine what powers are in play, what asymmetries and imbalances are at work, how those relationships might be altered, and what remains unseen and unsaid. Godard’s path takes a somewhat different route. No sooner has Patricia finished telling Émile about the difference between what-wesee and what-we-say than she offers an alternative statement. You will have to turn the page to see what she says.

‘if you want to see the world, close your eyes, rosemonde’.8

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We are watching a few moments from Le Gai Savoir. Something interesting is about to happen. In order to register the complexity of this passage, we will have to proceed very slowly. Here is the three-shot sequence: 1. Patricia, in profile, recites Foucault to Émile: ‘We can say all we want about what we see, but what we see is never lodged in what we say’; 2. a title card with the word ‘or’ (‘ou’) written six times; 3. Patricia, facing the camera, recites the line ‘If you want to see the world, close your eyes, Rosemonde’. In its bare outline, this sequence presents two lessons—a statement about ‘seeing and saying’ and a command about ‘closing your eyes’— together with a third lesson, centred on the word ‘or’, asking us to think about how the statement and the command relate, if they do. We have already outlined the significance of the first shot—at least, we have discussed what Patricia says, without addressing how the shot looks, or indeed what it might mean that this statement was presented as a visual image in the first place. (Even if the words are exactly the same, does it make a difference whether you read them on a page or see and hear them in a film?) For reasons that will emerge shortly, we cannot treat this ‘seeing/saying’ shot in isolation, as if it speaks for itself. Instead, it will be necessary to set it alongside the next few shots as well. In principle, each image relates to every other: but the implications of that principle are too immense for us to handle right now.

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Let’s move to the middle shot. How should we understand this word ‘or’? Cinema has a hard time presenting conjunctions like this. Cinema is much more comfortable with ‘and’—in fact, Deleuze has said that Godard’s technique always builds its series that way: ‘and . . . and . . . and’. By contrast, the word ‘or’ implies an alternative, perhaps a correction (the rhetorical term is metanoia), as if neither side can stand on its own. Or, just as likely, the word ‘or’ could imply an equivalence between the phrases, so that grasping either one requires grasping both. So the middle shot clearly expresses a relationship, but it’s not clear what kind of a relation it may be. There’s more. The word ‘or’ appears six times on the title card, each time written on a small square excerpt from an atlas of world history. Looking carefully, you will see that each map depicts an invasion or colonisation. What can we do with all of this information? In this brief shot, the word ‘or’ cannot be reduced to a mere syntactic device, but rather flashes up over and over like a violent interruption from history. Now we can move to the third shot. The phrase is an adaption of a line from Jean Giraudoux’s novel Suzanne et la Pacifique (1922): ‘Veux-tu découvrir le monde? / Ferme tes yeux, Rosemonde’. Godard changes ‘discover’ to ‘see’, which suggests that the world is not waiting to be discovered, but instead is called up by the action of the eyes.

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As the sequence continues, the Giraudoux quote becomes a refrain: 3. Patricia recites the line from Giraudoux; 4. a brief shot of a sidewalk, with a black man in the foreground and several white people walking by; 5. Patricia repeats the phrase: ‘close your eyes, Rosemonde’; 6. a brief shot of heavy trucks driving down a road; 7. Patricia repeats the phrase: ‘close your eyes, Rosemonde’; 8. an even briefer shot of two men and a row of parked cars: a black man with a broom looking at the camera, and a white man walking in the background; 9. Patricia and Émile say goodbye: their lessons are over for now.

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Yes, the line is a command, but it is also quotation—an instruction directed at somebody named Rosemonde. If the first line (from Foucault) makes a declaration about the way the world is, the third line (from Giraudoux) offers a demonstration about how to encounter the world: just close your eyes and ‘the world’ appears. Each time she makes the demonstration, something different appears. Typically this kind of sequence would ‘assign’ these three diverse glimpses to Patricia, as if to say: this is the ‘world’ that she ‘sees’ when she closes her eyes. (That is the standard shot–counter-shot logic of cinema: first we see someone seeing, and then we see what they see.) But instead these images seem random and ordinary, not necessarily grounded in Patricia at all: in fact, that is what makes them seem ‘worldly’. So, on the one hand, they interrupt Patricia’s subjectivity, breaking up the presentation of her performance. On the other hand, these images begin to take on a continuity or reality of their own, prompting us to wonder where they came from and what they might have in common. From one moment to the next, what is fleeting and dispersed becomes weighty and purposeful (and vice versa). Does it matter that two out of three of the shots are centred on a black man in the Parisian cityscape? The first image might seem accidental; the second image seems to send us somewhere else, but the third image brings us back to ask: what are we supposed to see here? Does this recurrence rise to the level of a political statement? Are these images implicitly aimed at disrupting a contemporary viewer’s narrow conception of (white) Paris? Or does this flicker of significance serve instead as a kind of formal disruption, like an inexplicable mark, something that signals a contested ‘world’ beyond fixed boundaries?

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The lesson is paradoxical: opening your eyes does not make you see, and closing your eyes does not make you blind. What we can see with open eyes may be closely related to what we can see with closed eyes. Or, to take that idea one step further: the seen image may be much more closely related to an unseen image than we usually like to think. As we will see next, there is much more to say about not seeing.

P.S. Before we move on, let me remind you that this short sequence

has been extracted from the film by an arbitrary critical gesture. I wanted to isolate a ‘sequence’ that makes a certain kind of sense, beginning with Foucault and ending, glancingly, with the ‘world’ of Paris in the 1960s.  And yet the starting and ending points could be different, leading to a different sense of the ‘rhythm’ of the thought process. Cutting into a film, or instead letting it run, is a fateful choice. Let us also take note of an image that appeared immediately before this sequence. It is a modern painting composed of just a few elements: coloured shapes like puddles or splashes, an arrow, an arc, and various shadings and smudges. On the surface is written: ‘le sens joue’, that is, ‘sense plays’. What do we do with this image? Where did the painting come from? What does the phrase mean? (Does it ‘mean’ at all, or does it ‘play’?) What do we do when confronted by an image we do not recognise? Google’s image search engine does not help: the image is identified as a diagram of ‘the breakdown of carbohydrates’. That may not be completely wrong, but it’s not useful here.

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If you happen to recognise it as a work by Paul Klee—indeed a signature is barely discernible in the upper left corner—another web search reveals that the painting is called Gemischtes Wetter (‘mixed weather’), from 1929. For use in this film, Godard has taken a reproduction, turned it ninety degrees clockwise, and added the words. Although this image passes in just a few seconds, it carries some suggestive implications. Does it function as a kind of précis of the sequence about to unfold? For example, we could ask: Is ‘sense’ something that seeing and saying have in common? And is ‘sense’ something that traverses what we see with our eyes open, and what we see with our eyes closed? But we would have to ask about the painting as well, especially since it looks so different from the cinematographic images all around it. Why use a Klee painting this way? How does this image enter into a composition with the others?

try to see something. try to imagine something. in the first case, you can say: look at that. in the second you say: close your eyes.9

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We have started to track how Godard treats seeing as a specific way of thinking. He compares it to various uses of language—reading, writing, speaking—in order to show how it is irreducible to any of them. It is not a matter of celebrating seeing to the exclusion of speaking or reading—he does not ever go that far, not even in

Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage, 2014)—but rather of discovering how each of these capabilities makes certain kinds of thoughts possible, and how they might be combined in inventive ways. The act of seeing turns out to be complicated and impure. It requires a lot of physiological and cognitive traffic. Eyes are part of a complex assemblage—nerves, muscles, neuronal groups and so on—and, at different levels of functioning, they are tightly linked with other body parts and technical prostheses. Seeing is also linked (and tangled) with other psychic actions, including memory and emotion. As everybody knows, seeing is one of the ways in which we let the outside in and the inside out: our senses are never really enclosed within the black box of our selves. That is why the act of seeing must be described using a variety of terms—impressions, expressions, perceptions, affections, recognitions, distinctions, etc.—each of which touches upon some partial aspect of the process.  And in the midst of all these comings and goings are those things we call images, which are neither produced nor extinguished by the act of seeing itself. In other words: we do not see simply.  And we do not simply see.

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Now Godard is asking us to consider the difference between the act of seeing and the act of imagining. We tend to think they are more alike than different. In a pinch we might say that seeing is directed outward, towards material images, while imagining is directed inward, towards mental images. (We also say that we visualise something inwardly: that is another way to translate the verb Godard uses: se représenter.) Seeing, imagining, visualising and even dreaming require some degree of effort and guidance, more or less conscious.  All of these actions may be more or less sustained, attentive to detail and focused by desires and rules.  And none of this happens automatically: we do not always see what we are asked to see, nor imagine what we try to imagine. In any case, seeing and imagining are supposed to have a common anchor or pivot: our own selves, our minds and bodies.  At any given moment we are supposed to be able to tell the difference between what is seen and what is imagined. We trust our eyes in one direction and our imagination in another. Can we always tell the difference between ourselves and our images, between what we see and what we imagine? Why would we want to separate seeing from visualising? These questions have provoked a series of philosophical scandals for more than two thousand years. How can people ever determine the boundaries of reality or agree upon the truth if anybody can just, you know, make it up? Seeing is supposed to ground us in real things: like the sense of touch, it is a basic source of evidence for all kinds of science. Imagination, on the contrary, seems untethered to anything outside of us, unregulated by anything inside of us. It does not care whether our perceptions are reliable or whether our beliefs are justified: it is perpetually unruly. And yet that is its advantage: by cutting its ties to the outside world, it approaches a pure power of thought.

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One strand of the philosophical tradition has responded to this problem by trying to put imagination in its place, taming it with the tools of reason. Without proper integration with the other faculties, imagination would be a childish pastime or a kind of temporary insanity. Reason teaches us not to dally with imagination for too long, and always to come back to real evidence and true ideas. Yet philosophers have also been tempted to embrace imagination as an indispensable virtue or basic ability, irreducible to any other kind of knowledge. — For the philosophy of art, imagination is a fundamental creative force. Whether it is attributed to gods or to humans, it is essential for both the recognition and production of all kinds of aesthetic beauty. Thus imagination becomes the most powerful faculty of all, transcending every sensory barrier and rational restraint. In that respect, what we envision when we close our eyes would be somehow more true and more powerful than anything we can see when they are open. Imagination exercises a power that belongs to the realm of invisible beings. That is why, whenever beauty is honoured as the highest value of art, the visible image will be treated as a semblance of a truth beyond itself. This exaltation reaches its ancient peak in the Fifth Ennead of Plotinus, where the idea of beauty attains a fully visionary and spiritual truth, reducing all merely visible forms of beauty to the status of inferior shadows. It reaches its modern peak in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where the exercise of the imagination is aimed at the apprehension of the beautiful and where aesthetic judgment allows us to organise our senses and our faculties with the greatest freedom. Only by exercising our judgment in this way do we

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become capable of confronting the immensity and monstrousness of the sublime, where we learn the limits of the imagination and reason alike. —For the philosophy of mind, imagination becomes a wild card for cognition as soon as it leaves sensory inputs behind. Wittgenstein, in the process of laying down his rules for philosophical language games, wanted to draw a sharp distinction between the process of understanding a sentence and being able to imagine something. Without making such a distinction, we would be unable to tell the difference between making sense of an idea and dreaming up an image. Therefore the rule must be: what we can imagine, in the sense of ‘visualising’ or ‘picturing’, has nothing to do with the work of conceptual understanding. Tweaking this point, Colin McGinn has argued that we do not need to dismiss imagination entirely, as long as we understand it as a matter of ‘entertaining a possibility’. In the process of linguistic understanding, then, imagination supplements conventional competence with ‘an ability to envisage possibilities by means of constructing novel combinations of objects and properties’. This leads to a simple equation: ‘understanding is memory plus imagination’.10 In this approach, it is the task of philosophy to supply the verbal distinctions necessary to ensure that imagination nourishes, but does not disrupt, the field of meaning.

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— For a philosophy of existence, imagination poses the problem of non-existence. We can imagine what is not there, and if we take this point far enough, imagination can begin to look like a wholesale refusal of existence. For Sartre, this ‘negative’ element characterises the imaginary itself: ‘To posit an image is therefore to hold the real at a distance, to be freed from it, in a word, to deny it’. But this denial should not be understood as nihilism. In fact, imagination serves as practice in the exercise of freedom: ‘For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back from the world by its own efforts’.11 Yes, imagination uproots us from the ordinary understanding, which is bound up with sensory perception: that is precisely how it allows us to take a free and creative approach to our circumstances. We might summarise all of these discussions with a counter-intuitive rule: in order to see, you must be able to close your eyes. In order to imagine, you must be able to open them again. There is a technological analogy at work, too: both the film camera and the projector function by opening and closing a shutter, either to expose the film or shoot light through it. In cinema, every illuminated image is followed by a black screen, each flash of light followed by an interval of darkness. What happens in our eyes and our brains during those black moments? Alexander Kluge suggests that we see two films, ‘one made by the brain itself out of darkness, and one in light and colour, reported by the eyes’.12 Video, of course, does not work this way: we are faced instead with incessant streaming light. Perhaps that is why it is becoming harder for us to close our eyes.

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Godard does not need any technological explanations. For him the alternation of seeing and imagining has nothing mechanical about it. The act of seeing illuminates the uncertainties of reality— about which we should be as clear as possible—while the work of imagination creates certainties of a different order, capable of orienting the way we live. In cinema this play of light and dark can be sculpted into the most extraordinary movements: ‘our music’, he calls it, as we will see shortly: notre musique.

now i understand the thought process. it means substituting an effort of imagination for an examination of real objects. saying something, meaning something—yes. maybe they’re expressions of the muscular and nervous systems.13 .

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Here is a somewhat elliptical restatement of the relationship between seeing, imagining and thinking. It might be approached as a threepart story. First we try to examine real objects, of which there is a nearly endless supply. But that approach does not really allow us to engage meaningfully with the world beyond our immediate circumstances. Next, we reconstruct what we see with the help of imagination (which travels along the same paths as memory), trying to connect with other people and other places through an internalised creative effort. But no matter how much we wish that we could imagine a connection to anything or anyone, we discover that thinking can only be completed by being expressed somehow, so that the act of articulating what we know is necessarily a particular exteriorisation of our own embodiment. By a circuitous route, the effort to absorb and transcend the world of objects through subjective labour brings us back to where we started—but now everything has changed. The space of seeing and thinking no longer appears to be neatly divided between ‘in here’ or ‘out there’. The distinction between real objects and imaginary efforts has become dynamic and undecidable. The psychic or spiritual urge to think has been looped through somatic impulses. Perhaps this is the existential zero degree where cinema becomes an art of living.

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The remarks on ‘the thought process’ quoted above are spoken by a character (played by Marina Vlady) who wants to pose a very specific political question: how can a European think about a Vietnamese? The question is both absolutely universal—how can anyone think of anyone else?—and absolutely singular—how can she, at a particular place and time, think about someone in Vietnam? Although she must use her imagination, she wants to think about the reality of Vietnam. Likewise, although she can depend only on her muscles and nerves, she wants to be able to speak meaningfully about the world beyond her. As we watch the film, her questions may become ours. How can she think of a Vietnamese person? How can we think of her? How can her thoughts become ours? Godard poses this cluster of questions with minimal ingredients: a few words, a few images and a few sounds. For a moment it might seem that posing the question was tantamount to solving it. Yet this moment of recognition (‘now I understand . . .’) is only the beginning.

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In a famous passage in The Gay Science that Godard may be echoing here, Nietzsche wrote:

As soon as we see a new image, we immediately construct it with the aid of all of our previous experiences, depending on the degree of our honesty and justice.  All experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception.14 It is necessary to be honest and ‘just’ (a key word we will encounter again later) in the way we ‘construct’ the image in relation to our embodied experiences. That is what it means to be able to express ourselves meaningfully. But the muscular and nervous systems, along with imagination and memory, are only components in a larger process; the moral sphere extends to the world where others are making images in the same way. Learning how to see has led us to another task: learning how to relate this body that feels never quite close enough to that world that looks impossibly distant.

learn to see here, in order to hear elsewhere. learn to hear yourself speak, to see what others do. others are the ‘elsewhere’ to our ‘here’.15

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We are still trying to learn to see, but now, in light of the previous lessons, the task has become rather more complicated. It is not simply a matter of training our sense of sight, or of exercising care when criss-crossing between words and images. Learning to see involves a more general kind of attentiveness: not only in the self-centred sense of paying attention to what is immediately around us, but also in the more trans-individual, de-centred sense of finding ourselves in tension with what is not immediately there. Learning to see opens us to our other senses, yes, but it also dislodges us from the present-tense feeling of self-sufficiency and certainty. The above statement from Ici et ailleurs—these are the final lines of the film, spoken by Anne-Marie Miéville—is both categorical and circuitous. The lessons are directly political. —First: unless we learn to see here (ici), we will be unable to hear what is going on elsewhere (ailleurs). Our ability to see where we are depends on an ability to hear the sounds and voices of elsewhere. —Second: unless we learn to hear ourselves speaking, we will be unable to see what others are doing. Without being able to hear how we speak our words and what we are saying, we will be unable to recognise what others are doing. Now speaking and seeing are doubly disjointed, between registers of sense and across intervals of otherness.

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The rearrangement of senses and places is complex, irreducible to a single locus: hearing, speaking, seeing and doing form a matrix of distinctions and distances that cut across the relationship between here and elsewhere. Moreover, we begin to realise that ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ do not belong to the same space: each emerges and subsides through the uneven efforts of those who look and listen. When we ask what it means to understand our ‘situation’, the twists and turns of this statement should come to mind. Today we would say: television makes it all too easy to see at a distance without ever hearing what is going on there.  And the Internet makes it all too easy to hear oneself speak without ever seeing what’s right around you. Attentive seeing and hearing is not passive. It does not merely wait for the world to present itself. It goes out from itself, looking and listening, in order to do something with what it sees and hears. Seeing and hearing become active only when they involve thinking. We can see and hear only when we think about how to allow each elsewhere to have its say, and to show itself, in its own way. Because seeing and hearing do not always become active in this sense, because they do not always involve thinking in this sense, we have to learn how to make it happen. Does it matter that the elsewhere addressed in the film is called Palestine? Is Palestine one of our elsewheres, or one of our heres? What have you heard, what have you seen, what do you know, of the people who live there, if it is really one of the elsewheres of our here?

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When I asked the philosopher Bernard Stiegler about these questions, he told me:

To learn to see, one must learn how to show what one has seen. This statement succinctly clarifies what is at stake in these lessons. To pass from seeing to showing is to pass—by thinking through images—towards an action capable of changing the situation. In theoretical shorthand, one must pass from phenomenology to praxis. As revolutionaries of all eras have discovered, this passage is not as easy as it sounds.

it is necessary to confront vague ideas with clear images.16

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This is one of Godard’s most famous lines. It is painted on the wall of the Paris apartment where the militant students of La Chinoise (1967) carry out their summer re-education program. In keeping with the tenor of the film, it sounds just like a Maoist slogan, but it is actually more radical than that.

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It is a radically simple proposition. It opposes the long and tenacious metaphysical tradition that yearns for the ultimate clarity of ideas above and beyond the confusion of words and images. Ideas are supposed to be perfectible in ways that images and words are not.  According to the principles of logic and the procedures of reason, ‘vague ideas’ can always be improved. In such a scheme, images remain perpetually inadequate because they are opaque, dense with sensuous particularity, while words are only a little better, suspiciously slippery but useful as placeholders for higher abstractions. Ideas alone provide true knowledge, once they have worked their way free from their visual and verbal trappings. Even for those who don’t believe in perfection, the hierarchy of clarity still rules: people often feel that they know something deep inside that is always better, always higher, than what can be shown or said. That whole system is overturned in a single line. Few people will object to the demand to confront vagueness with clarity, but many more will object to the suggestion that images are better suited than ideas for the task.  As the militant phrasing shows, it is not a matter of preference: ideas stand accused of being incorrigibly vague, which allows them to be used as instruments of a mystifying and dominating power. Images, by contrast, exercise a counter-power that can make both things and thoughts clear. The very notion of ‘clarity’ is changed. It no longer designates the transparency or equivalence between ideas and things. Here ‘clarity’ refers to the illumination of singularities, a greater or lesser degree of fullness and differentiation.  A good image makes its particular matter clear: that’s all.

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In other words, the slogan is saying: it is necessary to be a materialist. As long as we treat ideas and thoughts as higher, purer and truer than whatever we can see, hear, say or show, we submit ourselves to mystification and domination. In the terms of Paris in 1967: ideas stand on the side of ideology; images on that of science. Fredric Jameson once said: as materialists, we don’t have ideas, we have words. When I first heard this, I felt a flash of embarrassment: to say that you don’t have ideas sounds like a terrible failure.  Aren’t all thinkers supposed to ‘have ideas’? Isn’t that their job? But a moment later the embarrassment vanished. What a ridiculous pretence—to say you ‘have ideas’ when all you ever have, all anyone ever has, are words! Godard’s line works the same way. From a materialist perspective, words and images are equally opposed to the reign of ideas. Yet we should insist on the word ‘confront’: images confront ideas, they do not replace them (as the English subtitle has it: see note below). One does not simply abolish the power of ideas by brandishing images instead; in fact, because the power of ideas is every bit as material as the power of images, the confrontation is recurrent, practical, and strategic, not categorical and absolute. The slogan proposes a dialectical method that must be practised again and again. To restate the lesson in a more friendly way: whenever you face a vague idea, look for a clear image instead; repeat as necessary.

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Godard would return to this formula on another occasion. In 1979, after several trips to Mozambique to advise the government on setting up a television system, Godard published a remarkable ‘report’ on the experience in Cahiers du Cinéma, comprising photos, notes and proposals. (This is the document that provided our first lesson, a page filled with the word ‘learn’.) Here is a kind of prose poem from the same dossier.

The signal. The traces. Sickness, health, beauty. Formation, formatting, information. Memories. What goes well and what goes badly. How it goes well. How it goes badly. Auscultation and diagnosis. Vague thoughts and clear images.17

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This is another radically simple text. It is like a protocol for materialist practice: these are the things that must be examined whenever we attempt to communicate with others. We have to check the technical and psychic conditions, the specific operations to be performed, and the criteria for deciding what works and what does not. In a few lines, Godard sketches the scientific and the therapeutic implications of the need for clear images. No beauty without sickness and health; no education (formation) or information without paying attention to the format; no listening to the body (auscultation) without diagnosis. The protocol reiterates the claim that images, far from being mere evidence, illustration or decoration, remain indispensable for every act of learning and knowing.

P.S.

1. For some reason, the current U.S. DVD version of La Chinoise renders the line as: ‘We should replace vague ideas with clear images’. But ‘We should replace’ misses the impersonal imperative tone of the original, as well as the more dialectical connotations of the phrase ‘It is necessary to confront’.

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2. Strangely, Jacques Rancière drastically misquotes the line in his essay on La Chinoise. Instead of ‘Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires’, he renders the line as ‘Mettre des images claires sur des idées floues’. The English translation renders this as: ‘To give vague ideas a clear image’.18 This variance is not a matter of casual paraphrase: it is a thorough distortion of the formulation. Why does Rancière alter this sentence? Leaving the possibility of a purely unintentional lapsus to more psychoanalytically-inclined readers, I think it would be more interesting to read the altered sentence as a rewriting driven by Ranicière’s need to treat Godard’s account of relationship between word and image as a dialectic of separation and unification. That shift allows him to read not only this line but the whole film in terms of an unresolved meditation on Marxism. But it would take a full essay to unpack the logic of displacement here— addressing Rancière’s long relationship to Godard, his relationship to the pop-Maoism of the film, his complex understanding of the notions of ‘image’ and ‘idea’ (which intersect in his polyvalent notion of ‘sense’) and even his understanding of the word ‘confront’ (which is central to his political thinking, but which is left out here) in order to explicate the precise terms of this ‘mistake’. 3. Finally, it would be worth aligning Godard’s phrase with a line from Paul Klee’s 1924 lecture ‘On Modern Art’, where the painter explains how the different elements of visual composition—lines, tones, colours—can be used to create new forms of thought. ‘[In] all things, even in colours, must all trace of vagueness be avoided’.19 Perhaps Godard’s slogan in La Chinoise owes more to Klee than to Mao.

you can only think about something if you think of something else.20

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Although it is nearly the last line of a film (In Praise of Love/Éloge

de l’amour, 2001), this statement could serve just as well as the first line of a philosophical treatise, a psychological case study or a poetic manifesto. It tries to say something essential about all kinds of thinking.  And although it seems like a simple, casual remark, it deserves to be unfolded carefully: it is packed with surprising and farreaching implications. Let’s begin by asking how many different ways it might be true. — It could be a statement about the discontinuity of thoughts. Every effort to think about something is forced to take detours. Whether it is due to the complexity of neural pathways or the multivalence of our means of expression, thinking can never follow a straight, unerring line. So we can’t think ‘something’ because we think ‘something else’ instead. — It could be a statement about the interrelatedness of things. You can’t think anything in isolation, because you always need context, or contrast, or comparison. So we can’t think ‘something’ because we think ‘something else’ as well. — It could be a statement about the unconscious: every conscious thought stirs up unconscious thoughts (or vice versa). So we can’t think ‘something’ without thinking ‘something else’ in spite of ourselves. — It could be a statement about the impossibility of thinking anything.  As soon as it begins to take shape, every thought breaks up in distraction and displacement. So we can’t think ‘something’ without thinking ‘something else’, over and over again.

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— It could be a statement about learning processes in general. In order to learn something now, you have to be able to learn something else, too. Learning depends not only on memory, but dexterity; knowledge requires the ability to think more than one thought at a time, without collapsing them together, at least not too soon. In that sense, learning should not be seen as a cumulative or synthetic sequence: instead it zig-zags around, spreading and looping, never following a straight line. Everything depends on the way we conceive the ‘something else’. Is this detour a help or a hindrance? On one hand, it can be understood as a kind of necessary metaphor or technical supplement, something that we have to ‘add’ to a thought in order to articulate it. On the other hand, it can be understood as an inevitable digression, a distraction or veering away that condemns every thought to incurable vagueness and drift. The difference between these views hinges on the question: what kind of relations exist between ‘something’ and ‘something else’? Are both of them equally material, equally visible, equally illuminated? Can we go back and forth between them? And most importantly: in the effort to think ‘something’, are there certain kinds of ‘something else’ that work better than others? This is where Godard’s method leads: instead of trying to pursue knowledge about ‘something’ through speculative argument, by trying to nail it in place, we should look elsewhere. For every thought we want to have, we need to look for the best ‘something else’. For any given image, find another that creates the best thought between them. It may be the condition of thinking that we cannot help thinking of something else, but it is the virtue of thinking that this detour gives thoughts their form.

an image isn’t strong because it’s brutal or fantastic—but because the solidarity of ideas is distant and true.21

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Among Godard scholars, these lines have attracted a great deal of attention. Some are even tempted to read this statement as a distillation of Godard’s late aesthetic. We do not need to pursue such arguments here, but it will be worth lingering over the details of the quotation, because every word counts. The lines have a long history. Godard has adapted them from a short text entitled ‘L’Image’ by Pierre Reverdy, first published in Reverdy’s journal Nord-Sud in March, 1918. The lines quoted above are derived from the fifth section of ‘L’Image’. Reverdy included the whole text in his collection of aphorisms and apothegms, titled Le Gant de

crin (‘The Horsehair Glove’), published in 1927. Between its first and second publication, Reverdy’s text became famous when André Breton quoted it in his Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. Neither Breton nor Godard quotes the entirety of the text; in fact, as we will see, Godard varies the quotation in significant ways over the years. These lines are used (according to both Michael Witt and Antoine de Baecque) six times in Godard’s work between 1980 and 1998. In King Lear (1987) and elsewhere, Godard quotes the earlier sections of ‘L’Image’—up to this sentence, but not beyond it.  As for Breton, he cobbled together his own excerpts, also concluding with this striking sentence. Obviously, this is a touchstone text, as both Francophone and Anglophone readers have recognised for a long time.22 But the translation of the key words is tricky. Here’s the French original:

Une image n’est pas forte parce qu’elle est brutale ou fantastique— mais parce que l’association des ideés est lointaine et juste.

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As I read it, the crucial distinction is between two pairs of words: ‘brutale ou fantastique’ on one hand and ‘lointaine et juste’ on the other. For the first, nearly everyone translates ‘brutal or fantastic’, which works just fine. But the second pair is much more slippery. Usually it is rendered ‘distant and true’, but sometimes ‘distant and just’, or ‘far-reaching and true’, along with other possibilities. Godard himself, delivering the line in English in King Lear, says ‘distant and true’.  And in Histoire(s) du cinéma, part 4B, he says the word ‘lointaine’ twice, opening a distance through the very repetition of the word. The pairing of the words ‘distant’ and ‘true’ sounds strange. In trying to understand the whole sentence, we should notice that these two pairs of adjectives do not refer to the same things: ‘brutal or fantastic’ refers to ‘an image’, while ‘lointaine et juste’ refers to ‘the association of ideas’. So we need to ask: what does ‘association’ mean, if it can be both ‘distant’ and ‘true’? Astonishingly, Godard did not speak of ‘association’ in his first use of Reverdy (in Passion): here the phrase becomes ‘the solidarity of

ideas’. The switch from ‘association’ to ‘solidarity’ also changes the way we should hear the words ‘lointaine et juste’.  A solidarity can be ‘distant’, which might point to something faraway or perhaps farreaching; at the same time, it can be ‘true’, in the sense of being correct, exact, or appropriate. Is a solidarity of ideas true because it is distant, or distant because it is true? Or should we treat this pair of words as though they refer to two distinct and irreducible registers of meaning: a geometry of distances and an ethics of truths? (The strangeness of the phrase itself is a demonstration of the principle it expresses.) And so we can say that a strong image creates its solidarity of ideas according to multiple criteria of composition, without reference to transcendent principles or idealist norms.

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Now we can return to the entire quotation from ‘L’Image’, as recited by Godard (in the role of Professor Pluggy) in King Lear. Remember that Godard is speaking English:

The image is the pure creation of the soul. It cannot be born of a comparison, but of the reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart. The more the connections between these two realities are distant and true, the more it will have emotive power. Two realities that have no connection cannot be drawn together usefully. There is no creation of an image. Two contrary realities will not be drawn together. They oppose each other. One rarely obtains forceful power from such oppositions. An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic but because the association of ideas is distant and true.

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This passage varies from Reverdy and chooses unexpected translations in various places, but I want to point out just one word: reconciliation. It translates ‘rapprochement’, which is famously rendered as ‘juxtaposition’ in Seaver and Lane’s version of Breton’s Manifesto. To see an image as a juxtaposition of two realities is already to give a definite shape to the whole operation. However much it might seem appropriate for Breton’s method, it seems quite wrong here. It is important to see that the word ‘rapprochement’ belongs to the same semantic cluster as ‘association’ and ‘solidarity’—all of these words are trying to designate what kind of a link or bond holds a strong image together, or more simply, what gives an image strength. Thus we can reformulate this proposition in these terms: 1.  At the most general level, images are relations: they appear only in and as relationships; 2.1. In certain specific instances, images create solidarities of ideas; 2.2. Brutal and fantastic images do not create such solidarities; 3. When the solidarity of ideas is far-reaching and fitting, the image is strong. The task of images, then, is to create relationships between different ‘realities’ by calling upon the force of emotions and ideas. In the lessons to come, we will examine how this strength can be cultivated through the practice of montage, which might be defined (in light of an earlier lesson) as the ethical and political procedure where we learn to replace vague ideas with clear images.

if an image, looked at separately, expresses something clearly, if it includes an interpretation, it will not transform itself in contact with other images. the other images will have no power over it, and it will not have power over other images. no action, no reaction.23

We are on the way to a certain conception of montage. But before trying to say what this montage is, we should step back and ask: what makes it possible? What must an image be, if it can be combined with other images? Will any image work, or are there certain kinds of images which lend themselves to montage? ‘Montage’ simply means ‘construction’ or ‘composition’, ‘mounting’ or ‘assembling’, and it is not restricted to cinema. For our purposes we can say that it happens whenever we make something out of what we see, breaking images into pieces while piecing them together. By giving the interplay between each image and all the others a particular shape and trajectory, the process of montage constructs a certain potential of visibility and makes it last, if only for a little while.

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The quotation above, spoken in English by Godard, is drawn from Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph. Bresson’s book is a compilation of aphorisms, slogans and verbal sketches, encompassing philosophical observations, personal exhortations and story ideas, all taken from the ‘log books’ he kept between 1950 and 1974. In this clipped and gnomic form, Bresson’s Notes resembles nothing so much as a book of spiritual exercises for aspiring filmmakers. This particular aphorism dates from 1950–58. On this account, images acquire their power not because of their inherent qualities, but because they prove themselves to be transformable, that is, because they can act upon other images, and be acted upon in turn. This claim must be surprising to anyone who has admired a particular shot in a movie for its pictorial qualities; it is hard to resist the idea that a great film would be one where every shot could stand on its own. (The photographic ideal dies hard.) Yet any image that presents itself as self-sufficient—one that includes its own meaning, that tells you everything you need to know, that can be taken at face value—will be useless for the purposes of montage, that is to say, for cinema and for thinking. In fact, we could just as well say that no such image exists. In an earlier aphorism, Bresson explains:  ‘An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a colour by contact with other colours.  A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation’.24 Just before the passage quoted by Godard, Bresson proposes a ‘Cinematographer’s film where the images, like the words in a dictionary, have no power and value except through their position and relation’.25

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Even after we have grasped the principle that images are irreducibly multiple, dynamic and changeable, there is still something enigmatic in these suggestions. We are being warned that the impotence of images arises exactly where they seem strongest: when they bring us a clear message or when they dazzle us with their beauty. On the contrary, Bresson asserts, images must not be too ‘definitive’. When expression leads directly to interpretation, the image claims too much attention for itself and thus is immediately exhausted. How, then, can images evade this kind of fatal clarity or affective overkill, without succumbing to the opposite problem, vagueness and incoherence? How can images be made, so that they will make themselves available to other images? How can we tell which images will transform themselves ‘in contact with other images’? It might seem obvious that film directors compose their images in order to assemble them into ‘strong’ montage sequences. That is what the vast majority of films offer us: there is not one image out of place. To the degree that every image aligns with the next one along a well-marked path—guided by the overarching unities of narrative, genre, design, etc.—such films will present themselves with built-in interpretations, which the spectators will be more or less able to recognise every step of the way.

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In opposition to that way of working, we have to proceed as if it is possible to practise montage without the advance guarantees of formulaic composition. In that sense, montage can be a radical experimentation, in which we discover which images are strong enough to undergo aesthetic deflection and semiotic recoding. Each image, no matter how definite, will acquire its force only when it is seen in the midst of other, equally provisional, images. It is a question, as Dirk Baecker said to Alexander Kluge, of what the images know: ‘What does the image know about the next image, what does every shot of a film know about the next shot, which is only possible when this or that has been shown before?’ Baecker insists that Godard makes every image according to the knowledge that he can find a way, however unexpected, to put them together. Kluge replies: ‘Godard puts incompatible images next to each other in the hope that meaning will arise out of the gaps between them’.26 Perhaps neither of these positions is quite correct. No image really ‘knows’ what is coming, even if Hollywood tries to make images that never fall off the rails. But that does not mean that images ‘know nothing’ before they are assembled by montage. Every image anticipates the next, although the next does not always arrive, just as every image remembers the last, even when it was never there.

for my part, i have made only one discovery in cinema: how to pass flexibly from one shot to another, between two different movements, or even, what’s more difficult, from a moving shot to an immobile one. it’s something that almost nobody does because they never think of it; it’s a matter quite simply of taking up the movement at the stage where the previous image left it. so one can link any image to any other, for example an automobile to a bicycle or a crocodile to an apple.27

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This is indeed a momentous discovery: ‘one can link any image to any other’. Not only does Godard insist that this linkage is possible in principle; he claims to have found a reliable way to make it happen in practice. We learn what is possible by figuring out how to do it; from that point on, nothing looks the same. If the Bresson quotation (in the previous lesson) told us that montage is impossible when each image stands alone, this quotation tells us that montage is always possible, as long as you know how to make the images go together. Rather than treating this discovery as if it were just an idiosyncratic tweak of the rules of film editing—as if everything is understood as soon as we call it a ‘jump cut’—it would be better to approach it as an immense theoretical revolution. Let’s look at the examples. It seems easy enough to combine an image of an automobile with an image of a bicycle. Beyond the immediate impression that they ‘belong’ together, we can invent narrative, scenic or logical motivations for connecting them. In fact we make connections according to many different criteria: we can see links between images on the grounds of similarities and contrasts, causes and effects, sequences or simultaneities, scales, genres, styles, colours and so on. Indeed there may be countless reasons to connect images, and yet (common sense tells us) not all images can be connected.

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What about the crocodile and the apple? What could possibly connect them? There seem to be only a few ways to go: either we rack our brains in search of a reason for the link (do crocodiles eat apples? are they elements of a story, like the fox and the grapes? are they both symbols of nature? etc.) or we invoke a poetic link between the objects (do they ‘resemble’ or ‘stand for’ each other in some hitherto unexpected way?). In a pinch, even the apparent disjunction between them could provide a motive for connecting them, as though Godard were making some kind of surrealist joke. All of our brain-racking will be in vain, because it misses the point. If there is to be a connection between the crocodile and the apple, it will not be a relationship but a dynamic; it will operate at the level of the specific images at hand, and not at the level of crocodiles or apples in general. In fact it doesn’t really have to do with crocodiles or apples as such, but only with discovering the possible movements that might pass through this image and that image, and the lines of thought that might traverse them. Montage-thinking is a matter of finding the place in each image where a movement can be carried onward, ‘flexibly’, without reducing one to the terms of the other. Godard wants to make montage, as he goes on to say, ‘only from what is there in the image, from the signifying and not the signified’. It is a movement of sense rather than meaning, even if the linkage looks like a meaning in retrospect. It makes its own frames of reference, always more or less open, sometimes along many axes, sometimes along just one. So finally it may be too much to say that there is actually a ‘connection’ between the images: the movement of montage ‘undoes’ each of the images in the process, remaking both by creating the gap that separates them.

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A few years before, Godard described this complex dynamic in a perfect phrase:

Two shots which follow each other do not necessarily follow each other. The same goes for two shots which do not follow each other.28 Now, turning the idea around, we can say that the same dynamic must have been at work with images of automobiles and bicycles, too: it must be possible to combine those images as if we did not already know what they are and what they mean. (Bresson again: if you already know what an image means, it will be useless for cinematic thinking.) How is it possible to see cars and bikes without resorting to generic images, as if they are as strange to each other as crocodiles and apples? And once we’ve used the ‘obscure’ pair of images to open up the ‘obvious’ pair, we should try new combinations: what about automobiles and crocodiles? Or apples and bicycles? Why not? In each case, we can ask: what movements, what thoughts, can be invented here? Do apples ‘go with’ bicycles better than automobiles? How would you make sense of a crocodile and a bicycle? This exercise is not some attempt to return to Lautréamont’s ‘chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’. What we can call ‘the rule of the crocodile and the apple’ does not require metaphoric ingenuity or surrealist extravagance; it is not a matter of constructing a logical category or narrative thread to connect them from outside. It is a matter of learning to think about things in terms of movements, to the point where even the terms ‘thing’ and ‘movement’ seem too vague to designate what is actually going on in each series of images.

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Montage pursues sense in the most rigorous, most concrete way possible, and in discovering how to use montage to see and to think this way, Godard has acted much more like a research scientist than a lyric poet.

P.S. In the opening moments of Chris Marker’s film essay Sunless

(Sans soleil, 1983)—from which the stills at the beginning of this section are taken—we learn how a filmmaker may prefer to treat images as disconnected, even when they must be. Marker offers and withdraws each image in turn, as a woman’s voice describes the predicament: ‘The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: “One day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film, with a piece of black leader. If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black”’.

there is no image, there are only images. and there is a certain form of assembling images: as soon as there are two, there are three. . . . there is no image, there are only relations of images.29

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This apparently casual remark may be the most radical proposition so far. As an empirical statement, Godard’s declaration seems straightforward. There is no such thing as ‘the image’ in isolation— instead images are images by virtue of their relation to each other. Seeing as such can only occur in a situation where relations become visible and thinkable. Whatever we keep calling ‘the image’ always implies other images, if only as potentials. When we try to describe different kinds of images, we are actually differentiating between various kinds of relationships. Learning to see images as relations allows us to use them according to their full range of potentials. And yet, try as we might, the impulse to tame the multiplicity and relationality of images is remarkably stubborn. Evidently we still prefer to take our images one by one. We can see this attitude at work in the fact that intensive readings of individual paintings and photographs remain the most highly prized discourses on ‘the image’. Likewise, more dynamic artefacts (like movies or videos) are typically analysed by breaking them down into key frames and privileged moments. It is not that such analyses are misguided, but only that they tend to approach their material in terms of a single kind of relation, namely, as an object of critique. The point, however, is to multiply the relations and put images to different kinds of uses. In any case, we will not get very far ‘learning to think with images’ if we persist in treating them as inert objects or one-sided pictures.

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How can we learn to see images in terms of their multiplicity, their relationality, and even their vitality? Somehow Godard’s comment reminds me of a song my mother used to sing:

I see the moon, the moon sees me Under the shade of the old oak tree Please let the light that shines on me Shine on the one I love The lullaby neatly summarises the basic dynamics of seeing: ‘I see the moon’—first image (subject/object) ‘the moon sees me’—second image (reversed subject/object) As soon as there is one, there are already two. Seeing necessarily involves at least the possibility of reciprocity: what you are seeing can always somehow ‘look back’ at you.  At the same time, images relate to each other whether or not I am there to see it. Indeed the lullaby recognises that the initial reciprocity is complicated: how can the moon see me when I’m ‘under the shade of the old oak tree’? As soon as there are two images, there are three: the oak tree is part of the scene as well, seen if not seeing.  And of course there might be a fourth image too: the absent loved one who may or may not participate in the circuit of looks. That is to say, as soon as seeing is doubled, it can be tripled (and quadrupled . . .) in a potentially endless looping and relaying of images. Sometimes this opening-up of relationality is experienced as a terrible, even paranoid, sense of exposure and disorientation.30 The lullaby, however, turns this problem into a wish:

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Please let the light that shines on me, shine on the one I love. When the moon is seen not as a mere object but as a relay of light, it ceases to be a fixed image for me alone, and becomes a potential image for others as well. My own seeing thereby loses its isolation and instead acquires a sense of potential as well, which allows me to hope that my look might somehow connect with the loved one. Let us place this old lullaby alongside a short text by Brecht:

On the flow of things And I saw that nothing was completely dead, not even the deceased. The dead stones breathe. They change and are the cause of changes. Even the moon, said to be dead, moves. It casts light, although extraneous, on the earth, and it determines the trajectory of falling bodies and causes the sea water to ebb and flow.  And if it were only to frighten one person, who sees it, and even if only one person were to see it, it would still not be dead, but alive. Yet, I saw, it is in a certain sense dead; if, namely, you accounted for everything in which it lives, it is too little or is not relevant, and so it has on the whole to be called dead. For if we did not do that, if we did not call it dead, we would lose a designation, the very word dead and the possibility to name something that we really can see. But since, as we also saw, it is not dead, we must think of it both ways at once, and treat it as something both dead notdead, though actually more dead, in a certain sense deceased, in this sense absolutely and irretrievably deceased, but not in every sense.31

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Again the ever-changing moon teaches us something about images. Quite apart from its physical participation in life on Earth, it also inspires affects like fear and wonder, and thus comes alive. It flows, or rather, various flows pass through it. That seems to cause a problem for language—what do we call it?—but Brecht does not demand a logical decision on the matter. One does not make sense of the flow of things by insisting that everything has just one sense. The crux is in Brecht’s phrase ‘we must think of it both ways at once’—here is the art and the theory we need to compose ourselves amidst the flows of images and sounds. Will we ever be able to see, to hear, to think, to live ‘at once’?

we have to learn to think with images again; movies will then become more real.32

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This disarmingly simple remark quoted above, spoken in English to

Rolling Stone magazine, summarises the inquiry we have been pursuing here: what does it mean to ‘think with images’? How does ‘learning how to see’ turn around ‘learning how to think’? And, as Godard’s phrasing suggests, why do we have to learn to think this way ‘again’, when it is not at all clear who might have mastered this ability in the first place? Godard is not asking filmmakers to make more ‘intelligent’ and more ‘realistic’ movies. What a paltry request that would be! Instead, he calls for a change in the way we think that would alter the way we use images—filmmakers and spectators alike. Indeed, if movies have any ‘usefulness’ at all, it consists in the way they make it possible for us to see together, and thereby to think together, whatever might be real. Everything about that process remains an open question or an unfinished project, especially since movies are no longer the only place where it such efforts are made. The fact that the vast majority of movies do not help us to think anything, let alone anything real, indicates the scale of the problem. Indeed, there are whole zones of so-called popular culture that do not try to think at all. That is why, in an era where ignorance, forgetfulness and distraction are produced on an industrial scale, the task of learning to think—where it is precisely learning itself that is at stake in every act of thinking—has to be reinvented.

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Two aspects of Godard’s approach have been noted already. On one hand, there is the thinking that arises with perception, so that seeing always involves some kind of thinking.  All you need to do is open your eyes. On the other hand, there is the thinking called imagining or visualising, so that thinking always involves its own kind of seeing. All you need to do is close your eyes. But here Godard is pointing to something much more specific. Thinking with images is a way of making and using the material of this world. Filmmakers, photographers, animators, architects, designers and many others must ‘think with images’ in order to carry out their work.  And those who look at images and put them to use— spectators, players, critics, consumers—are also somehow thinking with images. The productivity and creativity of any kind of thinking is not an accidental attribute: the effort of thinking stands or falls on its potential to make and share something singular or new. Of course there is a lot to say about how different kinds of image involve different kinds of thinking, for makers and users alike. Some people aspire to make images that we would not think about at all, but simply absorb without response or reflex. By contrast, others try to make images that would stop us in our tracks, driven into a state of contemplation or reverie. Sometimes images seem to do all the thinking for us; at other times we have to look hard to find something worth thinking about. In some instances, the act of making an image may seem very different and distant from the act of using it; at other times making and using may be hard to separate.

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Out of all these possibilities—which traverse the whole sphere of aesthetics—Godard proposes a very practical yet somewhat paradoxical approach. He repeatedly suggests that ‘thinking with images’ encompasses not only ‘thinking with the eyes’ but also ‘thinking with the hands’. Even more than the element of visuality, the vital ingredient of all image-making is the touch of labour, its gestures and grasps. Images become useful—that is to say, worthy of thought—only when they demand the collaboration of eyes and hands. Collaboration literally means co-labouring, working together, an effort that is not necessarily harmonious or even cooperative. Images mobilise working relationships even before they can produce imaginary or signifying ones. If our creative acts do not enable us to work differently, or to refuse to work in certain ways, then they will have failed. In this way we learn that ‘work’ can also be a kind of unworking, a determined practice of not working the way we should. And everything we say about ‘work’ needs to be traced through the notion of ‘play’ as well, so that we are not tempted to treat ‘work’ and ‘play’ as a fixed opposition, as if one could always escape, excuse or redeem the other. Sometimes work repeats itself as play, and vice versa. Rather than speaking about Godard’s ‘thought’, then, we should pay attention to the way he is always trying to think. Like Montaigne’s essais—in which the writer, in keeping with the double meaning of the French word, both ‘attempts’ to maintain oneself and ‘experiments’ upon oneself in a mode of potentiality—Godard’s productions present themselves as just so many different efforts to try to think something anew, over and over again.

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This emphasis on ‘attempting’ leads to a new question: what does ‘trying to think’ look like? That phrase implies that thinking may have various modes of existing, including the capacity of being seen. The English language offers a special bonus here. Whereas in French one says ‘ça ressemble’ and in German one says ‘es sieht so aus’, in English, ‘it looks like’ indicates not only a resemblance, but also a kind of interpretation. One can say ‘it looks like an elephant’ for the first sense, and ‘it looks like it will rain’ for the second, but the distinction between noticing a resemblance and making an interpretation is hard to draw. Yet the idiomatic bonus hinges on the word ‘like’, which also opens the dimension of desire and its control, as Shakespeare well knew when he let Juliet say: ‘I will look to like, if looking liking move’. Cinema would not exist if we did not believe that looking liking moves. Or to put it the other way around: how do images make the attempt at thinking visible? ‘To make visible’ often carries a metaphysical overtone: it suggests that there was something invisible that had to await an act of creation in order to become visible. But perhaps a thought does not exist at all until it has been made visible. That is why the act of ‘making visible’ does not mean the production of what is seen; rather it means the making of a capacity to be seen.  And so the minimal definition of the image is not that it shows something or other, but that, in its very provisionality, it makes making visible.

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So when we ask ‘what does “trying to think” look like?’, we have to address all of these questions about resemblance, interpretation and desire, even while recognising that every answer will be provisional. But I don’t want to make the task seem harder than it is, because of course we are trying to think all the time, and we leave all kinds of visible traces, few of which appear in the form of a book or a film. There are countless ways to make thinking visible, which suggests that there is no particular kind of thinking that happens only through images, no ‘visual thinking’ as such. The various academic disciplines devoted to images will never be finished cataloguing everything that has actually been thought in visual form.  And the diverse efforts of neuroscientists and cognitive researchers to specify the physiological and behavioural parameters of thinking will not diminish the necessity of hesitation and uncertainty in the face of thinking, which is just the other face of the effort to see the image itself. Just as an act of looking never exhausts what the image makes visible, so the effort of thinking never exhausts the material that makes a thought possible. We can learn to use this potential in more or less enabling ways: that is perhaps what Godard is suggesting when he says that movies need to be ‘more real’ rather than less. To clarify this question, I will turn to a statement from the philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In an essay called ‘From the Book to the Screen’ he writes:

I would like to propose a minimal definition of thought . . . : To think means to recall the blank page while we write or read.33

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‘Recalling the blank page’ is especially important for Agamben at a time when so many people are attached to their screens, because it is all too easy to forget the existence of the screen itself, and thus to proceed as if it were the transparent site of creativity. The ‘fictive immateriality’ of the screen encourages a catastrophic helplessness in its users. They become literally unable to experience themselves, having consigned all of their work (and play) to the screen without remainder. By contrast, reading, writing, seeing and showing in the mode of ‘trying to think’ offers at least a chance to recognise this helplessness, to recall ourselves to those modes of provisionality in which our lives actually happen, and so to pursue the kind of happiness that ‘becomes possible only through a creative practice’. What I have been calling ‘provisionality’—whatever works for the time being—is closely related to the concept of ‘potentiality’ that unfolds in many of Agamben’s essays. Both words point us to the aspect of ‘creativity’ or ‘thinking’ itself that cannot be taken for granted: the generative element that ‘is never exhausted by the actual work, but continues to live in it’.34 (Agamben here cites Paul Klee as an exemplary figure.) Only those works that are capable of recalling us to the provisional resources of their material (the ‘blank page’ as ‘carte blanche’) will ever allow us to think for ourselves. The motif of the ‘blank page’ as a site of potentiality has been taken up by writers as varied as Hegel, Mallarmé and Queneau, but the most succinct instance comes from Max Frisch, describing a meeting with Brecht:

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[With Brecht] one sees the factor which inevitably distinguishes the creative person from the expert—the kinship, the lively awareness that arises from experience: In the beginning there is nothing! The experts, when they see a drawing, examine it in terms of Dürer or Rembrandt or Picasso; creative people, whatever their field, see the blank paper.35 In fact Godard offers his own meditation on the blank page in

Scénario du film Passion (1982). For much of the video we see him sitting at his composing desk, his back turned to us, as he faces the blank white screen upon which he will conjure up his images. He tells us that his task is not to write a script (scénario) of a film, but rather to see it.  As he demonstrates, seeing involves projecting and receiving images that cross the blank screen: he describes this movement as nothing less than the creation of the possibility of a world. The field of blankness appears as an empty white beach only because waves of movement—characters, scenes, stories, mere pulses of light—can come and go across its expanse.  Although Godard is retelling the process of composing the film, the video is made after the film, decomposing it before our eyes, undoing its finality and returning it to the blank screen.

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The blank page and the blank screen are ‘empty’ only insofar as they can be filled by more than we will ever be able to see. By learning to see the provisionality of what we do indeed see, we learn something about what might yet emerge, as well as what has already slipped away.  Although Godard appears to be teaching a lesson from his long experience, it is clear that he’s never finished trying to learn it himself.  And that is why learning to think through images offers a chance to learn who you are and how the world is going. Each lesson in this endless cycle builds upon a fundamental principle: only in trying to think what we have not yet thought do we learn what we are capable of.

images are what remains to be seen. (a conclusion by way of beginning again)

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Images are what remains to be seen. Let’s begin by reading this statement to the letter: images remain, and they are seen. Their remaining is what lets them be seen—it is what constitutes and composes their visibility. Whatever we see can be an image, not simply because we see it, but because it remains in sight. That is to say, images are images not because of the one who sees, but because of the way the image itself remains available for seeing. The first question to ask of any image is not ‘what does it show?’ but rather ‘how does it remain?’ If we ask ‘what does it show?’ we are rather selfishly assuming that what is important about an image is the impression it makes upon us, the feelings it offers, or the resemblances it evokes. Even some of the most careful ways of seeing proceed no further than these subjective impressions. By asking instead ‘how does it remain?’ we put our own responses on hold until we have considered the image’s material existence—its status as sheer stuff, more or less worked over and built to last, at least for a while. By paying attention to ‘remaining’, then, we try to account for the way images are fabricated in order to face the pressures of time.

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Every kind of image we can examine—such as a carved rock, a printed page, a developed film or a packet of electrons coded for display— remains in a different way, relying on different apparatuses and lasting for different durations. In taking all of these variables into account, we see why images are ‘technological’ in the broadest sense of the term: they exist and persist only through a given and inherited technical system, by virtue of the same technical processes that allow living groups of people to produce, reproduce and extend themselves. Images thus belong to the same general organisation of matter upon which we all depend, and they participate in the same economies of durability and efficacy as everything else we make. Every time we see an image, we need to investigate not only the material circumstances in which it was first produced, but all the circumstances that allow it to remain available for viewing. (If we watch a Lumière film on the Internet, our description of the process of ‘remaining’ will be very complex indeed.) So: images are out here, among us. Yet saying this is not enough. Let us reread the first proposition, slightly revised: Images are what remains to be seen. Now we can read this statement idiomatically: images are what ‘remains to be seen’, what has not yet been seen, what is not finished with seeing. Out of everything that might be seen, whether through the wild flights of human eyesight or the implacable registration of machines, images are what invites another look. Both aspects of ‘remains to be seen’ are necessary in order to define what images are.

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In other words: images are characterised by insistence as well as persistence. If an image does not wait for another look—even if that look never arrives—it was not an image after all. By definition, then, we do not know in advance exactly what will turn out to have been an image. Like the images themselves, we will have to wait and see. When we speak of the ‘materiality’ of images, we are not talking about their inert thingly presence, but about their capacity to keep going, their qualities of incompletion and anticipation. These qualities are absolutely material. In learning to see images, we discover how they can teach us not only about the known world, but also about what we do not know and what we have not done. No matter how quickly the images come—twenty-four or thirty frames a second, or just once, slowly gathered over a lifetime—it remains our task to look for whatever might be real, or true, or somehow worth saving about them, as long as they remain to be seen.

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Notes 1. Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Le dernier rêve d’un producteur’, Cahiers du

Cinéma 300 (May 1979): 86. 2. Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme, 2011. 3. See Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction à une véritable histoire du

Cinéma (Paris:  Albatros, 1980), 183, 186; Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: caboose, 2014), 233, 236. 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:  An Archaeology of the

Human Sciences (1966), trans.  Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 9. 5. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (1986), trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 64. 6. Ibid., 65. 7. Ibid., 82, 87. 8. Jean-Luc Godard, Le Gai Savoir, 1968. 9. Jean-Luc Godard, Our Music (Notre musique), 2004. 10. Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 148. 11. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary (1940), trans. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004), 183–84. 12.  Alexander Kluge, Cinema Stories, trans. Martin Brady and Helen Hughes (New York: New Directions, 2007), 12. The book includes a

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transcript of Kluge’s interview with Godard. In an echo of Voltaire, Kluge asks Godard how he would explain cinema to a visitor from Sirius. Godard replies: ‘I would try to explain to him that there is a special piece of equipment, the camera, which is a metaphor for something ancient, and that it is a piece of equipment that is necessary to see people, just as we need a telescope to see into the distance, or a microscope to see things close up, or eye-glasses to see better’ (12). It would require a separate study to gather Godard’s remarks on the scientificity of cinema, and his oft-repeated conviction that scientists should sometimes report their findings in images rather than words, and that montage might provide a more adequate understanding of cancer. 13. Jean-Luc Godard, Two or Three Things I Know about Her (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle), 1967. 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) 173–74. The German title of Nietzsche’s book is Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, and Godard borrows the French title for a film we have already discussed: Le Gai

Savoir. 15. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Here and Elsewhere (Ici et ailleurs), 1976. 16. Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise, 1967. 17. Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Le dernier rêve d’un producteur’, 85. 18. Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 189; Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (London: Bloomsbury 2016), 144.

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19. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay (London: Faber & Faber, 1948), 53. (First published in 1945, delivered in 1924.) 20. Jean-Luc Godard, In Praise of Love (Éloge de l’amour), 2001. 21. Jean-Luc Godard, King Lear, 1988. 22. Out of the ever-growing scholarship on these issues, one essay deserves special notice: Michael Witt, ‘Montage, My Beautiful Care; or Histories of the Cinematograph’, in The Cinema Alone: Essays on

the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000, eds. Michael Temple and James B. Williams (Amsterdam:  Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 33–50. 23. Jean-Luc Godard, King Lear, 1988. 24. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph (1975), trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), 9. 25. Ibid., 10. 26.  Alexander Kluge and Dirk Baecker, Vom Nutzen ungelöster

Probleme (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2003), 141–42. 27. Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Lutter sur deux fronts’, in Alain Bergala, ed.,

Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard (1985), vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998), 307. This interview was originally published in 1967. 28. Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Parlons de Pierrot’, in Jean-Luc Godard par

Jean-Luc Godard, vol. 1, 263. See also ‘Let’s Talk about Pierrot’, in Godard on Godard, ed. and trans. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo, 1986), 215.

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29. ‘Jean-Luc Godard rencontre Régis Debray’, in Jean-Luc Godard

par Jean-Luc Godard, vol. 2, 430. This interview was originally broadcast in 1995. 30. Of course, there are at least three influential versions of this little scenario, where looking always takes place in the space of a return look: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’; Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and

Nothingness; and Jacques Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. In other words: visual theory has been working over this question for decades. 31. Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti: Book of Interventions

in the Flow of Things, ed. and trans. Antony Tatlow (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 55. (Translation revised slightly.) Brecht’s unfinished book of short didactic anecdotes held a great fascination for Godard. Both Colin MacCabe and Antoine de Baecque report in their biographies that Godard was on his way to a bookstore to pick up a copy of Me-ti when he had his disastrous motorcycle accident in 1971. He would adapt phrases from the book for his script ‘Moi, Je’ (circa 1973). See Jean-Luc Godard Documents, ed. Nicole Brenez et al. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 234, 245. 32. Jonathan Cott, ‘Godard: Born-Again Filmmaker’, in Jean-Luc Godard:

Interviews, ed. David Sterritt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 95. This interview was originally published in 1980. 33. Giorgio Agamben, ‘From the Book to the Screen’ (2014), in The Fire

and the Tale, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017), 108. 34. Ibid., 134, 136.

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35. Max Frisch, ‘Diary, 1948’ in Brecht as They Knew Him, ed. Hubert Witt, trans. John Peet (Berlin: Seven Seas Press, 1974), 112. (Translation revised.) See Max Frisch, Die Tagebücher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 296.

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THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME THE POSTCARD GAME

Scene: a classroom, mid-afternoon Cast: a group of people Step One. Pick a card, any card.

Take a stack of postcards, at least a hundred or so. It is best if they have been collected over many years from various places: postcards bought but never sent, postcards sent from distant friends, postcards that turned up for no reason at all. Shuffle them like a deck of cards. Then ask someone to pick a card, any card.

Ask: what is this? ‘A horse’, someone might say. ‘An Appaloosa horse’, someone else might add. Good answers, but not quite right: try again. ‘A painting’, someone will suggest. ‘A photograph of a painting’, to be more precise. That’s closer but still not there. ‘It’s a postcard’, someone always says at last.

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Here is the first lesson: Learn to see the card before the horse.

Step Two. What is a postcard? The answer seems simple enough. There is usually an image on one side and writing on the other. But before we can talk about one side or the other, it is necessary to ask—what holds the image and the writing together? It is important to notice the fact that it is literally a card, a piece of cardboard or a sturdy kind of paper. (It’s possible to conceive of postcards made of other stuff, too.) We don’t usually pause to think about the ‘stuff’ whenever words and pictures appear: we are so eager to read and to look that we don’t think about the material that makes it possible—paper, screens, ink, electricity.  Are images and texts always made of ‘stuff’? Yes, always. It may seem obvious to talk about the clunky materiality of a woodcut or a Daguerreotype, but the sleek glowing screen of a MacBook Air hardly registers as ‘stuff’ at all. No matter how flashy they are, even digital images are really postcards: that is to say, images and texts passing by way of chips and pixels, even when the texts are unreadable codes and the images move and multiply across the web faster than we can see. —First hypothesis: Every image has the attributes of a postcard. For that matter, so does every text. —Second hypothesis: We can use postcards to help us define not only images in general and texts in general, but the general principles of their relationship. Now, again: pick another card, any card.

What is this? Yes, it’s a postcard. We can start with the ‘back’ of the card—as we spontaneously call the writing side. Look closely and you will see that there are several kinds of text there: — a caption (‘Série 10, No. 183 / PARIS. EN FLANANT / Sainte-Chapelle-Intérieur de la Chapelle Haute’); — a producer’s mark (‘Edition d’Art YVON, Neuilly-Paris—Reproduction Interdite’); — a message (which here includes a date, a greeting, a narrative and a signature); — an address; — a postage stamp from Nederland, which is a kind of image as well; — a cancellation from the Dutch postal service (noting place and date); — and a row of marks along the bottom that might be—this is a guess—a machine-readable routing code added by the U.S. postal service.

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It is important to take all of this into consideration: the printing and handwriting, the imprints of commerce and the state, the mixture of media, and then what we do or do not know about how these various elements relate to each other. In taking note of these details, we try to find our bearings amidst all of the different times, places, and processes marked on the card. The message itself speaks of mobility and change: ‘i found this postcard at a flea market in paris, modified it in brussels, and am writing to you in the jordaan, in amsterdam’. The stamp was cancelled in Amsterdam, two days later. It arrived in my mailbox six days after that, and we were examining it in the classroom the following day.  And so before we could ask what the postcard had to say or what it could show, we had to understand how it came to be here. That is why we can spend a long time on the question of the address. We tend to think that a message is addressed only to the explicit addressee, who is supposed to be in the best position to say what the message means. But postcards easily evade these assumptions. A postcard is always visible, always legible, even when it is still in transit. In order to be addressed and sent to someone, the message must make itself available to others. This simple circumstance—the fact that the message can always be read en route by people to whom it is not addressed—is not an accidental or irrelevant issue. Everything about a postcard is shaped in light of this circumstance.

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The messiness of addresses prompts us to ask about something often overlooked: why is there no return address on a postcard? Does it matter if it gets lost? Just as we might say that a message goes astray whenever it falls into the hands of those to whom it is not addressed, we can also say that it gets lost whenever it cannot be traced back to a sender.  And if—as postcards demonstrate—such contingencies happen all the time, wouldn’t we have to say that messages go astray and get lost in some irrevocable sense as soon as they are sent? Isn’t this ‘errance’ really the condition of all writing? (I should note that this particular line of inquiry is drawn from a book by Jacques Derrida entitled The Post Card.) These questions might provoke some scepticism. Is the postcard really an adequate model for all other forms of communication? Isn’t it an exception, rather than a rule? For the sake of argument, we can distinguish between two approaches to the problem. On one hand, we could treat every text as a postcard, something promiscuously legible at all times and open to all of the hazards of the journey. On the other hand, we could treat every text as a letter, where the transmission of meaning is supposed to be a private affair, secured at either end by the original intention of the sender and the unique perspective of the designated receiver.

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—According to the first view, letters are nothing more than postcards that are in denial about their vulnerabilities. The fact that a message is tucked away in an envelope does not make it any more likely to arrive, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee its meaning for any particular reader. The limitations of a postcard are really its strengths: it allows a maximum range of expression without worrying over the proprieties of authorship and interpretation. Messages can hide in plain sight: Edgar Allan Poe didn’t need to write a story about ‘the purloined postcard’, because that’s what they always are. —According to the second view, postcards are underdeveloped or naïve letters, limited in their range of expression and too careless about ensuring that their message gets through. Moreover, their disposable appearance and lack of proper notation means that nobody will take them seriously, not even postal workers. By contrast, letters offer a close resemblance to a grown-up, face-toface conversation, adapted slightly to meet the requirements of transmission. If we care about what we have to say, we should aspire to write letters. Even people who value letters enjoy reading messages that were not intended for them. And if you ask how often people watch films or TV shows or anything else that was not really meant for them, when

they were aware that they were not the ‘target audience’, it soon becomes clear that the feeling of eavesdropping and sneaking a peek is the rule, rather than the exception. So postcards—at least the ‘used’ ones—offer a useful reminder that you can never really see an image or read a text all by yourself.

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Now we have to turn over the card and look at the front. There is a caption already: this is Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. But we have to look more closely. Sooner or later, someone notices odd little yellow birds flying through the scene, then a strange patch of green on the left, and some peculiar reddish strips (looking like fish skin) along the bottom, and then, eyes screwed up, someone else says that there are some weird purplish patches as well. So although ‘Sainte-Chapelle’ was clearly visible on the image, along with ‘Yvon’, the photographer’s signature, the typical ‘picture-postcard’ view had been disrupted. Someone could say that the image had been ‘manipulated’. The card had ‘layers’, or rather, it had acquired ‘depth’—both visual depth, because the perspective had been altered by the additional layers, as well as hermeneutic depth, because we could no longer treat it as a readymade ordinary object. It ceased to be a flat, unified scene and became instead a kind of sculptural collage.

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On this occasion, the group is unanimous in saying that they ‘liked’ it, but they seem eager to strip away the added layers and talk instead about the ‘original’ image. It isn’t clear to any of us exactly what had been done to construct this image, but there is definitely something both amusing and unsettling about it. There are many weird things to notice: that greenish patch on the left looks like a brick wall with a Dutch roofline; one of those yellow cartoon birds seems to be flying out of a window at an impossible angle; and strangest of all, a purplish photo has been pasted over the brown one, fracturing the perspective and making the space above the high altar seem to ripple.  As we look more closely, we can begin to make good guesses about how it had been ‘worked over’ or ‘manipulated’ (or ‘modified’, as the sender had said), but it is much harder to say why. Should we comb through the handwritten message on the back for clues? Or is it possible that the two sides are working independently? The idea that the image could ‘turn its back’ on the text seems entirely plausible: the front of the card could function on its own, it is open to all of us, and we could puzzle over it—all without assuming that the address or the message would solve its mysteries. Sooner or later someone calls it an ‘artwork’, which seemed to be a way of saying that we would never exhaust the beauty and the complexity of the card.

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A digression: If we had lingered even longer over the postcard from Paris, we could have asked how we might research it—not as a text or an image, but as an artefact, in accordance with the prevailing standards and tastes of literary scholarship. A ‘history of the book’ researcher would start with the publisher of the card, Édition d’Art YVON. An Internet search quickly informs us that ‘Yvon’, whose

signature appears on the lower left corner of the front photograph and whose full name was Pierre Yves Petit, started his postcard business in 1919. He began printing in sepia rotogravure (as this card appears to be) in 1923. The business has continued to this day, becoming the basis for one of France’s biggest card producers, La Carterie, formerly Hallmark France. Their corporate motto is: ‘To Communicate . . . To Connect . . . To Celebrate . . .’ A literary scholar could therefore begin to ask how the conventions of postcard photography and the development of printing technology shaped the iconography of French tourism, and so on.

Step Three. What does This have to do with That? It has to be admitted that everything discussed so far has been preliminary; we have talked about cards, and about postcards, but we have not yet started the postcard game itself.

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Let us start over with the stack of cards: pick a card, any card. The first player pulls one out. On the front is a colour photograph of a line of people holding a yellow banner on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It’s not a very bright or attractive picture, but we will press on nevertheless. The left side of the banner reads (in English): ‘Stop all nuclear testing! Greenpeace’. The right side has a text in Chinese, but it isn’t legible because the banner is bunched up and drooping. In the middle of the banner—in the very centre of the photo—is a cartoon bomb, marked with Chinese characters, crossed out by two red lines. In the background rises the immense brick wall of Tiananmen Gate itself, with its giant portrait of Mao and the long horizontal inscriptions. The card itself is smaller and flimsier than the others. Evidently it is not designed for mailing, because the back side offered no space for a message, address or stamp. Instead there is a statement in big letters: ‘In an effort to end all nuclear testing, Greenpeace leaders . . . staged a protest in Tiananmen Square against China’s aggressive nuclear policies. Six demonstrators were arrested and imprisoned by Chinese police. They were released unharmed’. This text is arranged vertically, in ‘portrait’ mode, unlike the layout of most postcards, and it is accompanied by the Greenpeace logo and a copyright notice.

There does not seem to be much more to say about it: the image and the description appear to match each other very closely. It would have taken very close scrutiny of the photo to figure out why half of the banner was unreadable. Is the man at the far right actually tearing it away from the others? Maybe he is a plainclothes cop? Was this picture taken at the very moment when the police broke up the protest? Was the protest over as soon as it started? It might have been possible to make lots of guesses, but the card itself gives us no further clues. — Rule of Thumb: Whenever it seems as if you have exhausted an image, there is only one thing to do—add another image. Pick another card. The next one is a typical postcard, made of stiffer cardboard and offering lots of blank space on the back. It has never been used, never been sent. First we examine the image on the front.

A shaggy goat is standing on some kind of cobbled-together platform. The goat is obviously dead and stuffed, its nose daubed with red and white paint, and, shockingly, it is wearing a large rubber tire around its midsection. Goats don’t usually do that: this must be some kind of artwork. Someone recognises it immediately: ‘That’s Rauschenberg!’ So we are dealing with a postcard of a photograph of a sculpture by a famous artist. The back offers the details: it is called ‘Monogram’, dated 1955–59, and is composed of ‘angora goat, rubber tire, paint, collage, metal and canvas’. (That description raises the question, quite relevant to the game: is ‘collage’ a material or a technique? Or both?) Rather than getting entangled in the art-historical complexities of this new image, however, it is important to raise a crucial question: ‘what does the first postcard have to do with the second one?’ Look at them side by side: what comes to mind?

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Anything? And what if they are reversed, so the goat comes first? Is there any difference? Does one ordering work better than the other? On this day, with this group, the Greenpeace protest seems to make more ‘sense’—whatever that might be—when it came after the goat. Why? In order to test these vague impressions, we could add the ‘Piebald Horse’ painting back into the mix. Would it make more sense to replace either of these two cards with this one? Yes, it is quickly agreed: throw out the protest card and put the goat and horse together. The decision feels good, but it would be difficult to articulate exactly what kind of sense we are seeing in the new combination. It is just as difficult to say what kind of sense we were losing by rejecting the Greenpeace card, but surely we are losing something. We are simply looking for ‘more’ or ‘less’ suggestive pairings, relying on first impressions. We are vague about the arrangement: are the images supposed to be seen simultaneously (like a diptych) or successively (like a slideshow)? At every turn, there are decisions, and each one sets off feelings of certainty or uncertainty, comfort or discomfort.

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Another digression: At this point in the game, someone usually mentions the ‘Kuleshov effect’. Anybody who has taken an introductory film class has heard of it. When asked, the film students among us will usually say that the Kuleshov effect is based on an experiment by the Soviet director Lev Kuleshov, who made a simple film that cut between an unchanging shot of an actor’s face and various images (a beautiful landscape, a corpse, a bowl of soup). The point is that audiences think that the actor’s face has registered a change after each counter-shot—he looks happy, or shocked, or hungry—when in fact it is the same still each time. The Kuleshov effect, in other words, is supposed to show how montage tricks people into making faulty assumptions about the affective connection between images. It is too bad that Kuleshov’s various experiments in montage are reduced to this bit of behavioural psychology, especially one that emphasises the emotional credulity of the spectator. Even the treatment of the topic in a well-known textbook like David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art treats the Kuleshov effect as a source of illusion, a tricky construction that prompts spectators to make faulty inferences. (If someone in the room happens to have a copy of Film

Art, 8th edition, they can turn to page 228.) But this has very little to do with the postcard game, where there are no establishing shots or stable perspectives, and the relations between shots can occur across multiple registers of sense. There are no illusions: only more or less productive connections. In fact, Kuleshov’s experiment could just as well disabuse us of our tendency to situate meaning in the actor’s face: in other words, it demonstrates that the face is just one image among the others, and has no particular privilege in organising the ensemble. As with any instance where seeing is short-circuited by a fixed assumption, the best remedy is to look again.

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To return to our game: we keep trying out different combinations without getting stuck with a sequence that cannot be expanded any further. Remember the rule of thumb: whenever you are unsure about what you are seeing, it is time to add a new image. Like an optometrist testing a series of different lenses during an eye exam, I hold up one after another, sometimes switching cards from left to right place. I keep repeating: ‘which works better—this pair or that pair?’ We go through about a dozen cards before settling on a pair that seems to make a strong kind of sense: the painting of the horse and a painting of a gentleman by Whistler. We agree that they could serve as the first two shots in a movie, setting in motion some grand tale.

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Step Four. How does anything relate to everything? (Imagination vs. Intuition) With each new combination and reordering of the images, we are forming an immediate impression of their ‘fit’. With each change, the force of attraction between the two images grows stronger or weaker. Meanwhile the quality of attraction between them keeps varying, too: some images ‘go together’ because of their colours, others were linked because of the figures represented, others because of a similar emotional response, and so on. Although there could be many different ways to fit the images together, we seem to be evolving a certain repertoire of combinations. Is it possible to draw up a typology of relationships between images? And if the answer is ‘yes’, could we say whether a typology of relationships would be different from a typology of images themselves? Such a question bears on the very idea of ‘typology’—it depends on identifying traits of the things being organised, so that ‘things’ appear to be bundles of elements shared in common with other things. At that point, it is harder to speak about ‘things’ as such, and easier to speak of networks of relationships. Here we arrive at a crucial speculative question: Is it possible, in principle, to draw a connection between any two images in this stack? There will always be some stubborn person who maintains that there must be some pair of images that absolutely cannot be connected. So we keep laying out postcards, trying to find an impossible pair, but we never do. There always seems to be a way, however weak, to draw a relationship. —Third hypothesis: It is always possible to connect any image to any other.

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Why? Why can we assume that we can always connect any two images? — Is it because we think that connections, even when they are apparently missing, can always be invented? — Or because we think that the connections are already there, and it’s just a matter of finding them? Let us define our ability to connect images according to our own ‘invention’ as imagination, and our ability to ‘discover’ connections that already exist as intuition. The distinction between these terms is fundamental: one can develop a whole world-view from one ability or the other. For these purposes, ‘imagination’ would be understood as the fabrication of something new, and therefore as a kind of ‘transcendence’ of the two initial images by a third image or idea. By contrast, ‘intuition’ would be understood as the tracing of an ‘immanent’ path between the first two images, the revelation of a common ground that both images must have already shared. Imagination seems to put us in touch with the cosmos, while intuition seems to tap into chaos—and we can pass from one to the other as easily as breathing.

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In order to test this distinction, we can turn back to the way in which we pair images by choosing ‘spontaneously’ between stronger and weaker pairings.  A great deal of knowledge, habit and sensitivity comes instantly into play every time we encounter images whose multiplicity cannot be reduced to a single thread. A line from JeanLuc Godard fits the moment perfectly: ‘In order to see one image, you need two’. Of course, Godard has worked from the beginning to assemble images that do not resolve into one register of sense. We might say that his films are full of postcard games, where we watch people trying to put together images of their own.  An ingenious and ridiculous scene appears in Les Carabiniers (1963), where a pair of soldiers return from their campaigns with a suitcase full of postcards, which they proceed to lay out on a table for their girlfriends, as a way of showing what they encountered and conquered: famous landmarks, trains, animals, women. Both Le Gai Savoir (1968) and Here and

Elsewhere (Ici et ailleurs, 1974) feature scenes where people literally handle images in an attempt to put them in some kind of order. In Our Music (Notre Musique, 2004) we see Godard himself giving a lesson to students in Sarajevo, demonstrating the power of combining and separating images by holding stills in each hand or pinning them to the wall in different patterns. In each case, multiple images are laid out for view in such a way that any sequence or series must appear provisional, reversible, and necessarily incomplete. Rather than weakening the images, this way of handling them increases their scope and potential. Yet the realisation that images are always tangled up with each other—whether that tangling happens ‘in our heads’ or ‘out in the world’—raises a new question.

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Paraphrasing Alexander Kluge, we might wonder: ‘what does the first image know about the second?’ It is a disorienting question because we proceed as if the first image never ‘knows’ what the next image will be. But that is clearly not true when we are watching a movie or a TV show. In the vast majority of cases, each image is meticulously crafted to prepare for the next one, just as the next one has been produced in order to follow the earlier one. In general, cinema and television never require us to construct relationships as complex and uncertain as the ones we are here building between the postcards. Our immense and various ability to ‘think through images’ is usually confined to a very narrow range of tasks, running along a track that requires neither imagination nor intuition.

Step Five. Make your own film! At this point, the stack of postcards can be divided among small groups of people, giving each group about a dozen cards. They have to pick three cards to make the ‘best’ sequence or set. Without any further instructions, each group can devise their method, their own sense of scale, and their own degree of coherence or disjuncture. In practice, some may choose to present a simple left-to-right sequence, while others can configure their cards in some idiosyncratic cluster like panels on a comic book page.

On this occasion, the first set of postcard films produces some remarkable combinations: movie posters and portrait photographs; strange constellations of artworks; cartoons clashing with political slogans; landscapes alongside cute animals; baroque interiors set off against desert wastes, connected by a fragile-looking window. It does not particularly matter whether the players recognised that a certain picture portrayed Jean-Paul Sartre, or that another was a painting by Albrecht Dürer, or that a sixteenth-century image was sitting beside a nineteenth-century one. Or rather, it may be that such recognitions might matter, but only when the other images draw out and inflect the relevant aspects. Otherwise, the image travels along another track of significance. For example, a statue of James Joyce in Dublin is quite directly reinforced by a painting by George Grosz. When that combination is extended to a study by Vladimir Tatlin, a whole set of questions about modernity rises into view. When that triad is extended again to a piece of medieval Chinese calligraphy, those questions tilt along a new axis and dimension. Rather than forming a closed set, such sequences construct an open-ended itinerary that invites further testing, research, selection and expansion.

Each of the postcard assemblages deserves to be examined, tweaked and elaborated at length. Each looks like the sketch for a long train of thought, more difficult than any art-house film, more entertaining than any blockbuster. We get the impression that it would take many hours of totally absorbing creative work to sort through all of the possibilities. For the time being, all we can do is to simply ask again which sequences or sets worked ‘best’. After showing all of them around the room, there is a fairly strong consensus about the ‘best’ ones, and the fact that we could reach consensus so quickly and easily seems significant. It might indicate that we share common habits or even prejudices, or on the contrary it might suggest that it would be possible to use images to map the ground of what is known and unknown between us.

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Now that the procedures are familiar, one can play another round of the game, this time aiming to compose a ‘concept’ in three images. As examples of concepts, one might aim for ‘happiness’, ‘beauty’, and ‘truth’. On this occasion, the composition process goes very quickly, and yet the results are not very satisfying. The images composing ‘beauty’ are indeed beautiful, and the images of ‘happiness’ are unmistakably cheerful in subject or tone. But the images tend to lose their richness, as if they could be no more than partial illustrations of a single word. This phase of the game may have to go through many rounds before we could reach the point where the images proved strong enough to force the concepts themselves to open up and take on new dimensions. More than two hours have passed and we are out of time. It is too late to begin a third round of experiments, where each group would compose a picture of ‘the world’ using postcards. How would we go about such a task? Would it be better to sort through the stack of postcards in search of the very best picture of the world? Or would it be better to use as many of the postcards as possible to compose a world, perhaps even using all of them? In other words: would a construction of a ‘world picture’ tend towards fewer and fewer images, perhaps leading to one all-encompassing image? Or would it tend to spread out across many images, perhaps even towards all images?

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— Final hypothesis: Perhaps, in spite of every combination we might draw, and no matter how many postcards we put together, ‘the world’ is precisely what escapes all of them. In that sense, the postcard game imposes a ban on ‘world pictures’. There is no final moment of mastery or conclusion, only the patient making and unmaking of combinations, according to the simple principles of composition. What makes sense here? What happens if we add this image, or subtract that one? In this way, even the idea of ‘what works best’ is transformed, experimentally, into an incessant examination and expansion of what we can see in light of what is still emerging into view, what is just now becoming sensible. What we learn from the inexhaustible postcard game is that ‘the world’ may be nothing other than a name for the array of possibilities opened up by our stubborn and joyful desire to see more, and to see better.

acknowledgements Many thanks to all of the friends, students, and audiences with whom I have shared these lessons and games. Long-overdue salutes to Richard Miller and Bruce Robbins. A special thank you to Julia L. Newman for her exemplary postcard. This work is dedicated to Diane Gruber and Ramsey Eric Ramsey, teachers and iconophiles extraordinaire.

about the author Richard Dienst is Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of The Bonds of Debt:

Borrowing Against the Common Good and Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television. His essays on Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolt Brecht and cultural theory have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.

published without financial assistance, public or private © copyright 2020 Richard Dienst ISBN 978-1-927852-37-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the publisher, which holds exclusive publication rights. Seeing from Scratch: Fifteen Lessons with Godard is part of the caboose essay series Kino-Agora Published by caboose, www.caboosebooks.net Designed and typeset by Marina Uzunova and Timothy Barnard. Set in PT Sans Pro type, designed by Alexandra Korolkova, and in Gill Sans, designed by Eric Gill, and P22 Underground, designed by Edward Johnston, Richard Kegler and Paul D. Hunt.

KINO-AGORA The Kinematic Turn André Gaudreault & Philippe Marion Dead and Alive Lesley Stern Montage Jacques Aumont Mise en Jeu and Mise en Geste Sergei Eisenstein The Life of the Author Sarah Kozloff Mise en Scène Frank Kessler Découpage Timothy Barnard The New Cinephilia Girish Shambu The Videographic Essay Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell & Catherine Grant Seeing from Scratch: Fifteen Lessons with Godard Richard Dienst

SEEING FROM SCRATCH ◊ 15 LESSONS WITH GODARD

with THE POSTCARD GAME Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard arrives on our virtual bookshelves at the perfect time. Never have we needed to rethink how we teach and learn about images more than we do now, a time when we are buried beneath bewildering imagery and when higher education is being transformed in dispiriting ways before our very eyes. Richard Dienst offers us a series of provocations infused with a wit and intelligence equal to that of Jean-Luc Godard, whose work is the inspiration for this ambitious attempt to rebuild a pedagogy of images from the ground up. It should inspire students and teachers of film alike in ways that will surely surprise them. — Christopher Pavsek, Simon Fraser University

In Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard, Richard Dienst teaches us how to see and thereby think through the Swiss filmmaker’s cinematic imaginary. Combining his acute critical lens with a more playful example from a postcard game, Dienst illuminates Godard’s strategic deployment of a system of montage in which a careful selection of images is set in motion, generating a series of profound meditations. Dienst persuasively demonstrates how images, even when isolated, are never alone but exist in complex relationships with each other, forming everchanging constellations. Seeing from Scratch traces the evolution of the nonagenarian’s image theory from the 1960s to more recent iterations in The Image Book (2018) or Goodbye to Language (2014). The lessons we learn from Dienst extend beyond an understanding of Godard and make us rethink the way in which moving images can produce critique in the twenty-first century. — Nora M. Alter, Temple University RICHARD DIENST is Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good and Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television. His essays on Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolt Brecht and cultural theory have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES ◊ ISBN 978-1-927852-37-8