In(ter)discipline

New Languages for Criticism

Gillian Beer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351195171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"'Interdisciplinarity' has dynamised the Modern Humanities like no other recent academic trend. Yet, this presents serious challenges involving both translation and affect: how can we transmit facts and interpretations, sense and sensations between disciplines, between different artistic media, between cultures, between the private and the public sphere? What are the advantages, the difficulties, and risks? Another challenge concerns language: if single disciplines have produced their own technologies of reading and writing, this book examines and breaks the routine to propose alternative languages. Some of the most distinctive voices in criticism, both established and upcoming, from literature, music, the visual arts, psychoanalysis and philosophy, amongst others, show here their commitment to comparative thinking. The challenge has been to reach beyond the jargon and the epistemological constraints of individual disciplines while remaining coherent and incisive. The outcome successfully reveals new links between different forms of cultural expression. Gillian Beer (English Literature, Science Writing), Malcolm Bowie (French Literature, Psychoanalysis) and Beate Perrey (Music, Poetry, Psychoanalysis) are the instigators of the interdisplinary research project New Languages for Criticism: Cross-Currents and Resistances, which since 2002 has been under the auspices of CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge."

Chapter 1
What If? The Language of Affect

Mieke Bal

Imagine three huge video screens between which you are standing. For thirteen and a half minutes you are immersed in a world partly like your own — enough to fool you into considering what you see as possible — and partly radically different — enough to make you feel uneasy. The predominant colour is green. No music accompanies the single, female voice, which speaks without ostensive emotion. You don't understand the spoken language and so resort to the subtitles. I take this work as an entrance into the question of art criticism today.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila's three-screen video installation The House (2002) raises numerous questions, all of which ultimately concern the work's own status and modes of legibility. Together they ask what matters in the relationship between art and the world from which it emerges, to which it responds, and to which it returns its reflections. I will examine how this complex, multiple questioning is performed, then take this 'how' as a kind of model for the new language of criticism — in other words, I will take this work as a 'theoretical object'. In particular, I will explore how it proposes affect as a basis for interacting with art. This may seem paradoxical for a piece whose main character appears particularly affect-less. But I argue that this paradox is precisely the point of affect, as the basis for an art that heeds Brecht's lessons against identification and for commitment. Although the character's 'affect-less' diction and appearance preclude emotional identification and thoughtless empathy, this emptiness leaves the artwork open for an affective encounter of a third kind.¹

The legibility of this video installation is hampered by a kind of super-legibility. Straightforwardly accessible in imagery and soundtrack, The House speaks clear languages — but, indeed, in the plural. The sight of a toy car driving across a living-room wall, a cow walking into an unremarkable house, and a woman flying through the trees, it is easy to think of such fairy-tale-like stories as Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Långstrump (Pippi Longstocking). After all, Pippi had a horse in her living room. And Pippi's namesake, Pippilotti Rist, deployed this profoundly satisfying discursive mode in her 1997 video Ever Is All Over, where a dreamy-looking young woman smashes car windows with a huge flower. When we realize that this fairy-girl is Rist herself, and after we have seen a police officer turn from a threat into a winking, supportive woman, we know that, in their mode of representation, fairy tales can hide an undercurrent of darkness.²

This will be a useful reminder if we consider the fairy-tale genre as a code for Ahtila's work, and, conversely, if we consider her work as a commentary on that genre. This — the first of five readings that I will give of Ahtila's video installation — is obviously both right and wrong. It is right because it helps counter the darker mood that the work also elicits; as a recasting of a literary genre, it prepares us for the increasing complexity that its successive layers of meaning generate; and as an activation of a traditional linguistic genre, it raises the issue of interdisciplinarity. It is wrong, though, because this issue is raised with a specific clarity, in that the fairy-tale aspects of the installations are primarily visual, emerging more from what we see than from what we hear the woman in the video say, whereas the original fairy-tale genre belongs to the literary domain. Moreover, beyond the question of the imbrication of genre and medium, this installation's struggle with legibility embodies interdisciplinarity in specific ways that I hope to clarify. The various readings that The House elicits, then rejects as too limited, succeed, merge, contradict, and compete with one another all at the same time.

Each of the multiple layers of meaning, I will argue in presenting my own five readings, bleeds out of the previous one, which continues to flow in and through its successor. Together they thus build up to form, in the end, the political aesthetic of the work: its affect-based commitment. The question 'What if...?' sums up this aesthetic. Imagine this question as suddenly being uttered mentally by the viewer, who is holding her breath, while at the same time uncertainty about meaning and its displacement produce a suspense that is not about what happens next in the story but about what happens within us — we who are caught in the interstices between the image and the reality on which it impinges.

Affect as a Medium

'What if ...?' suggests play, play-acting, the unreality of fiction, a resonance of 'once upon a time'. As the polyphony of the installation's tone suggests, fairy tales should not be underestimated. The fantasy of being able to fly, with birds singing all around you, plays on an almost universal desire for liberation from all the natural and conventional restraints placed upon human life, such as the force of gravity. It both appeals to and activates deeply buried affective childhood memories in each viewer. The car that defies gravity and conspires with your contrary wish to defy your parents' sense of order is, likewise, so attractive that seeing such marvels on video screens can enable the viewer to enter the mind of the child within us all; what if the wished-for omnipotence of the child were to become real?

Mediating between the fictional figure on the screen and the viewer's own memories, desires, and disappointments, these images, which recall fairy tales, can be qualified as affection-images. This Deleuzian term need not be, as it often is, associated with the human — or digital, 'posthuman' — face. Rather, it refers to images which neither mediate (Deleuze uses the significant verb 'translation') between the viewer and the image nor lead to action but which elicit a temporary conflation of subject and object. As Mark Hansen argues in a different but related context, Deleuze identifies the affect-image he spotted in the close-ups of classical cinema not only with but as the face. Deleuze wrote:

There is no close-up of the face. The close-up is the face, but the face precisely in so far as it has destroyed its triple function [individuation, socialization, communication] [...] The close-up turns the face into a phantom [...] The face is the vampire.³

The view of the close-up image qua face, standing in as face instead of the human face, becomes increasingly relevant as Ahtila's installation continues. In this chapter I will suggest that the flying woman is just such a 'face', without even being a close-up of the object represented; it is a close-up of and to the viewer that collapses subject with object.

For Hansen, this Deleuzian view leads affect away from the viewer's body. In contrast, in what Hansen calls 'digital-facial-images' (DFI), the viewer's body is directly addressed and hence mobilized, not into action but into affective response. Regardless of the relevance of oppositional reasoning here, the viewer's body, although not forced into motion as in interactive video, is swept into the motion that is observed and within which the three-screen installation has positioned it. The sensations of flying among the treetops, of weightlessness, and of becoming a child again are (albeit very slightly) experienced as though real — at least by this viewer.⁴

Except that ... the narrator and central character of the story is an adult woman. This discrepancy between childish fantasy and adult presence is not easily overcome. Nor does the woman have the dreamy-eyed cheerfulness and ethereal appearance of Rist's character. But if the fairy tale disappears at the very moment it emerges, what, then, are we to make of these fantastic events? The fugitive nature of this interdiscourse — its inescapable participation yet minor role in The House — sets in motion an increasingly complex bundle of indexes of interdiscursive references that initially confuse the viewer, some of which remain literary. To start with, the house in The House is a haunted house. In this respect, it has something in common with the nineteenth-century genre of the fantastic, although it lacks the bleak darkness of that genre. Importantly for this installation, the fantastic is a genre that wavers between the real and the imaginary, the possible and the impossible, and which occurs outside subjectively imagined events.⁵

What, then, is the point, for a reflection on art criticism, of this invocation of 'alien' discourses? According to the published information on The House, the story emerged from something that is the opposite of childish wish-fulfilment in tales of wonders. The story is based on interviews with women who have experienced the trauma of psychosis. This makes much more sense, though not straight away, or unambiguously. Like the fairy-tale elements, the psychotic state is not revealed immediately. Both creep up on the viewer after a rather ordinary beginning — ordinary enough, that is, to reassure us, so that the expectation of 'naturality (that everything happens according to the natural flow) makes our understanding lag behind our perception. This discrepancy creates space for the operation of affect as a medium.

The status of affect as a medium in and of itself suspends the relevance, though not the presence, of the heterogeneity of visual imagery and literature. Instead, something like 'mood' becomes the 'language' through which the work speaks. For between the childhood memories invoked through the fairy-tale elements and the anguish that defines the experience of psychosis, an uneasy mixture of two opposing moods fills the interaction between the work and the viewer with affect. Affect as a medium, then, will remain in place throughout the installation.

The Camera as Narrator

The woman around whom the story evolves, Elisa, drives her car, parks it, and enters her house: all entirely ordinary, everyday actions. That the car drives back and forth for a while is strange, but whether this is a phenomenon from a fictional world or a disturbed perception of the real world is not immediately clear. At first, when the sound of her footsteps continues after Elisa has left the three screens on which her images are projected, even this appears quite normal. Keen to understand the installation as a work of visual art — as a work of, specifically, the digital moving image of video — we expect this continuation to be an aural transition that will allow the camera to pick up the image of the woman once she is inside. This video-technical response is one element in the interdisciplinary merging whereby it becomes impossible to respond to this work from a 'pure' visual-art perspective. That the transition, through a cutaway shot from the woman outside to the woman inside, does not happen, that the house is empty and the ticking of the clock takes over from the sound of the footsteps, is only the slightest bit odd; then it becomes normal again. After all, clocks do tick, whether someone is at home or not.

At this point, we can make a first leap to what would have been called, in the old days of methodological optimism, a 'meta-language' — a term that I will ultimately avoid. The 'meta-language' here would be the one not of literature itself but of the narrative theory deployed to analyse and understand literature. The reasoning would run somewhat as follows: so far, the camera functions as narrator; that is, the visual medium takes upon itself a role traditionally reserved for linguistic subjects, by whom narrative statements are uttered. The language of art criticism uses this term quite freely, in the same way as it deploys the terms 'visual language', 'idiom', and 'discourse'. Although this transfer from one discipline to another can be productively examined for its methodological consequences, for now I will simply point it out as a first site of theoretical reflection, and consider the term 'meta-language' as a conceptual metaphor.⁶

But such a meta-language is useful only if it helps us in our need to be specific — that is, to understand this artwork. How does the camera act here, in its role as narrator? The story unfolds with the woman, Elisa, at its centre. The camera represents her at a distance, whether the shots are long, medium, or close-up. The enduring centrality of one character is good reason to extend Deleuze's thoughts on the close-up as face to this work. Ongoing centrality can be considered a temporal version of the close-up. Even invested with narrative power, the camera obeys the rule of the 'affection-image' thus installed. With this initial situation in mind, the notion that the camera is a narrator becomes specific: its operation is drawn into the character's orbit.

This becomes clear as soon as we follow the video's lead, of which the camera is but one embedded element. The beginning of the video functions like a so-called 'third-person narrative' (where we follow a character who does not intervene in her own representation). She drives, walks, sits, lies down, and sews and hangs black curtains. But the conceptual metaphor of the camera as narrator takes a decisive turn when the camera and voice begin to intersect, in other words, when visuality gives way to intermediality. When Elisa's voice begins to tell her story, in the grammar of the first-person narrative, the distance that seemed so 'normal' is disrupted, broken.⁷

This is also the moment when the interdiscourse of psychosis enters the scene and a second reading of this installation becomes possible. While we see oddities happen, the woman tells us about things that only a state of psychosis can explain. Slowly, as she takes over from the distancing mode of narration, everything we consider 'normal' or 'natural' slowly falls away and Elisa's world comes to appear as delusional. She explains that her car and her garden enter her living room. The autonomously driven car becomes a character, which we can still accept if we activate the genre of the fairy tale, especially as the car crawling over the wall is given the miniature dimensions of a toy car. But a garden? Later, sounds and images enter her mind. Hearing voices, hallucinating, is, indeed, the key symptom of psychosis.

Elisa is quite lucid about what is happening to her: she is looking out of her window and sees her car and the trees. Then she takes a step to the left, behind a striped curtain, and, she says, can no longer see these things. Well, this is to be expected when your gaze is blocked by a screen, isn't it? Different places offer different views, or 'shots': long, medium, close-up, or even totally blank. Elisa's vision, far from incoherent, may appear psychotic precisely because it is so 'unnaturally' consistent here, and because vision acts as a narrator. It enacts a Deleuzian perception; far from being a passive absorption of the visual field, according to Deleuze's source Bergson, perception is an active selection and isolation of the interest of life.

The move behind the curtain, to 'explain' how vision is always actively limited, is, moreover, prepared by an earlier shot. There, a following shot across the space of Elisa's living room was necessary in order to keep centring on her as she gets up from the sofa and starts walking. The moving living-room space, set off against the central image of the moving body, entirely normal and routine for the experienced cinema viewer, becomes in retrospect utterly strange here, where Elisa proposes limited vision as a phenomenon of estrangement. Her move behind the curtain and the shot that makes the room in which she stands move behind her are partners in a discussion on perception. No wonder it is not so easy for the viewer to declare her 'mad'.

In this particularly striking shot — striking because we recognize it as normal cinema fare, suddenly estranging because it matches Elisa's experience of estrangement — the narrating camera espouses the Deleuzian movement-image as a literalized 'travelling concept'. The shot is conceptual because it theorizes perception; it travels because it transforms standard views of that act; the travelling is literalized through the background tracking of the next shot. But it is through the interaction with Elisa's analysis of her perception and its limits that the shot is endowed with this theoretical relevance. All fixity is gone. The shot comes to embody a de-naturalized, impossible perception. In the very act of centring, the image de-centres, unfixes, unmoors the 'natural' surrounding in which the figure bathes. To cite Paola Marrati, this is an instance where 'la mobilité de la caméra, la va...