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The traces of Jacques Derrida's cinema

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The traces of Jacques Derrida's cinema

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Content THE TRACES OF JACQUES DERRIDA’S CINEMA by Timothy Holland A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CINEMA & MEDIA STUDIES) December 2015 December 2015 Timothy Holland ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project is primarily indebted to the generosity and support of three individuals. First, Akira Mizuta Lippit, who I’ve been following around since 1999, has been and continues to be an inspiring and calming voice. His avant-garde cinema course at UC Irvine radically altered my professional and personal trajectories, and it was he who first urged me to attend Jacques Derrida’s public lectures. The gifts that Aki has given me are too numerous to account for here, so I’ll humbly say thank you and reiterate that it has been an unforgettable privilege and pleasure to work under his supervision. Second, I owe much to James Leo Cahill, my fellow Discourse editor and dear friend, who I’ve also known since our days at UCI. James is the first person whom I seek for professional guidance. His careful attention to my scholarship and concerns, as well as any other document that is fortunate enough to get sent his way, always reveals his brilliance, inventiveness, and commitment to his craft. Third, it is impossible to begin to thank Peggy Kamuf for all that she has done. If I tried, I could begin by expressing my endless appreciation to her for having twice invited me to the Derrida Seminars Translation Project workshops in France as well as nominating me for the French department’s teacher exchange with the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3). But that would just scratch the surface. I can always count on Peggy’s honesty, wisdom, and her capacity, as Michael Naas pointed out while introducing her at the 2015 Collegium Phaenomenologicum, to constantly re-amaze those who read and listen to her. Peggy’s commitment to students, scholarship, the university, and Derrida’s work forms a model that I can only hope to imitate. iii I would thank Kara Keeling for welcoming and encouraging my theoretical pursuits and for always posing difficult, yet essential, questions. I am also grateful to the other members of my qualifying exam committee, Tara McPhereson and Steve Anderson, and to the members of USC’s Cinema and Media Studies staff, especially Bill Whittington, Alicia Cornish, and Christine Acham, for their support and patience. Michael Naas and David Wills took the time to read chapters of this dissertation and to offer insightful feedback that reminded me that there is more work to be done. Among those who have left indelible marks on the shape of this project, I’d like to express my gratitude to Rene Bruckner, Kir Kuiken, Samuel Weber, Elizabeth Rottenberg, Geoff Bennington, David Rodowick, Fatimah Toby Roning, and Bliss Lim. There are simply too many friends, colleagues, and loved ones to thank. Alison Kozberg, Brian Jacobson, Katie Chenoweth, Carlos Kase, Kristen Besinque, many of those who participated in the 2015 Collegium, Chris Ramsdell, Scott McDaniel, Marc Harpster, Ashley Lewis, Scott Hopkins, Sophie Jousse, Sergio and Elisa Lima, and Graham and Ellen Turner all deserve more than just a mention here. To my family, particularly my mother and father, you have believed in me without really knowing what I’m doing or where I’m headed. Nonetheless, when I left a previous career to pursue the PhD, I received nothing but encouragement. Your unconditional support demonstrates the value that you all place on education, learning, challenging conventions, and discovery. We’re often referred to as a “family of teachers,” and although I’ve actively resisted that designation in the past, I’ve come to embrace it through a certain countersignature, an affirmative inheritance that remains forever indebted to you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii List of Figures v Abstract vii Introduction 1 Leaving No Traces Chapter 1 20 Making a Case: The Timeliness of Deconstruction for Film and Media Studies Chapter 2 95 Ses Fantômes Chapter 3 158 Ghost Belief, Fantômachie, and Cinema’s Spectral Grafts Chapter 4 239 Deconstructive Applications: “Crazy Clown Time” and David Lynch’s Parties Conclusion 295 Il faut qu’il reste cela… Bibliography 297 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Establishing shot. Figure 2. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Ogier in close- up, eye-line match. Figure 3a. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Dolly-in, close-up w/ brief eye-line break. Figure 3b. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Dolly-in, close-up w/ brief eye-line break. Figure 3c. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Dolly-in, close-up w/ brief eye-line break. Figure 4. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). A different scene and setup at Le Select. Figure 5. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). An interruption from the outside; Derrida breaks the eye-line. Figure 6a. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Improvisation delivered, now what? Figure 6b. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Improvisation delivered, now what? Figure 7. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). On the way to reestablishing the eye-line, briefly breaking the “third wall.” Figure 8a. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Marked continuity break: a dissolve between two takes, the same is double(d). Figure 8b Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Marked continuity break: a dissolve between two takes, the same is double(d). Figure 8b. Frame grab from Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983). Marked continuity break: a dissolve between two takes, the same is double(d). Figure 9. Frame grab from the music video “Crazy Clown Time” (David Lynch, 2012). The backyard ennui of “Crazy Clown Time.” vi Figure 10a. Frame grab from the music video “Crazy Clown Time” (David Lynch, 2012). Television head: establishing shot to close-up. Figure 10b. Frame grab from the music video “Crazy Clown Time” (David Lynch, 2012). Television head: establishing shot to close-up. Figure 10c. Frame grab from the music video “Crazy Clown Time” (David Lynch, 2012). Television head: establishing shot to close-up. Figure 10d. Frame grab from the music video “Crazy Clown Time” (David Lynch, 2012). Television head: establishing shot to close-up. Figure 11. Frame grab from the music video “Crazy Clown Time” (David Lynch, 2012). Television head: Tele-Transfixed. Figure 12a. Frame grab from The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980). White light cleanses the Elephant Man from the industrial waste below. Figure 12b. Frame grab from The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980). White light cleanses the Elephant Man from the industrial waste below. Figure 13a. Frame grab from Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001). Dream and nightmare in Mulholland Drive: two possible burrows Figure 13b. Frame grab from Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001). Dream and nightmare in Mulholland Drive: two possible burrows Figure 14a. Frame grab from Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986). Parties facing fun. Figure 14b. Frame grab from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992). Parties facing fun. Figure 14c. Frame grab from Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001). Parties facing fun. vii ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the relative lack of reference to Derrida’s works in contemporary film and media studies. It makes three main interventions. First, by excavating and reexamining both Derrida’s published corpus and archives, the project demonstrates that cinema occupies an overlooked yet crucial place within his oeuvre, thus calling into question the relative absence of reference to it in the field. Secondly, it develops a film theory project Derrida proposed on cinema and belief while exploring deconstruction’s applicability to moving image media through the films of David Lynch. Thirdly, the dissertation argues that Derrida’s analyses of the university are exceptionally timely for the field as it encounters the ascendency of digital technologies and the ensuing instability of its objects and methodological commitments. In probing the relations among deconstruction, film and media studies, and media works, this research contributes to the intellectual history of the field and to the lively exchange between contemporary French philosophy and cinema. Moreover, the project engages current debates about the institution of contemporary film and media studies after the so-called digital, post-theory, and historical “turns” within them. Following recent scholarship on the topic, the dissertation contends that the lures of progress promised by the technological milieu are calls to revitalize film theory as well as the philosophical meditations, such as Derrida’s, that cinema mobilizes. INTRODUCTION Leaving no Trace The initial question posed to Jacques Derrida in “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” his 2001 interview with Cahiers du cinéma, concerns his earliest memories of movies. 1 In response, Derrida recalls that cinema entered his life “[v]ery early,” and that during a span in the 1940s he “saw everything.” 2 Having stated this biographical fact, as well as the names of the establishments in Algiers where he watched these movies—“I can see them still,” he says of “The Vox, The Cameo, The Noon-Midnight, and The Olympia”— Derrida goes on to admit that he “would be totally incapable of listing the titles of the films.” 3 At first blush, there is nothing extraordinary about this confession: how could Derrida be expected to remember all of the films that he watched over sixty years ago, especially if he “saw everything?” As he tells the Cahiers editors about his early experiences with cinema, Derrida “went to the movies without being very selective.” 4 For him, a self-described “sedentary little kid from Algiers,” the film to be watched mattered less than the escape offered by going to the cinema; “[i]t was a vital way of getting out,” he discloses, “[t]o go to the movies was an emancipation, getting away from the family.” 5 1 Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” translated by Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37, nos. 1-2 (2015): 22-39. 2 Ibid., 23. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 24, 23 2 Although Derrida’s acknowledged incapacity to name the films he saw as a youth appears unremarkable, and even expected given his motivations for going to the movies, as well as the sheer quantity of films he must have encountered as a result, his ensuing comments in the interview clarify that this particular “memory lapse” is not just an effect of distant, past memories, but intimately tied to his consideration of and relation to cinema. In other words, it is not that Derrida’s earliest memories of films are too numerous and/or too removed to recollect comprehensively; rather, he tells Cahiers editors Antoine de Baecque and Theirry Jousse that this apparent lapse relays a more general condition, a kind of cinema allergy: “I have not the least memory for cinema,” he confesses, “[i]t’s a culture that leaves no traces in me.” 6 Notwithstanding his professed “passion for the cinema…a kind of hypnotic fascination,” which allows him to “remain for hours and hours in a theatre, even to watch mediocre things,” Derrida reveals to his interviewers that “a constant repression erases the memory of these images.” 7 The power of cinema as Derrida sees it is its facility to at once fascinate and efface the traces of its fascination—it is as if Derrida leaves the movie theatre knowing that he was entranced by the cinematic experience, but nonetheless remains “totally incapable” of accounting for it, powerless to assimilate and “make sense” of the event of cinema. Transient moving images fascinate Derrida while leaving no traces in him. In this sense, the singularity of cinema for Derrida—perhaps Derrida’s cinema—arrives through the traces of the absent trace (not) left in him. He describes the specific symptoms that can arise from the general special effect of cinema—simultaneously, then, Derrida’s 6 Ibid., 23 (emphasis added). In the original: “Mais je n’ai pas du tout la mémoire du cinéma. C’est une culture qui, en moi, ne laisse pas de trace.” 7 Ibid. 3 account denotes both the particular and universal. In contrast to reading, which he concedes “imprints a more present and active memory in me,” Derrida proclaims that films make “an impression on something in me…[through] another form of emotion that has its source in projection, in the very mechanism of projection.” 8 According to his interpretation in “Cinema and Its Ghosts” of cinematic spectatorship, the moving images projected for a collective of viewers engage and catalyze the projections emitting from each viewer. Each viewer among a given collective possess a singular relation to what she encounters on the screen. Multiplied in this scene of double projection, the traces of cinema, Derrida’s description suggests, are too excessive and fleeting to be stabilized and retained; the plurality of traces that distinguishes cinema resists transforming into a left, identifiable trace. For the “actual” projected movie prompts spectators into projecting and viewing another, secret film that is properly their own—Derrida’s secret cinema, without a trace. The excess and play of traces in and at the movies means that Derrida’s cinema continues to provide for him an escape from the pressures of what he calls the “work” (le travail) of actively holding and rearticulating traces. “You are there,” he says, “before the screen, invisible voyeur, permitted all possible projection, all identifications, without the least sanction and without the least work.” 9 Cinema is a reprieve from the labor associated with travail, or the work that attempts to put traces in order and “make sense” of them. A vital loss of order thus marks Derrida’s cinema and its scene of multiple projections. Uninhibited by the burdens of sanction and travail, “permitted all possible projection, all identifications,” Derrida finds himself lost at the movies. But this 8 Ibid., 24 (emphasis added). 9 Ibid., 24. 4 discovery of loss, he claims in “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” is not just particular to him: a certain passivity marks the cinematic experience, and each viewer’s powerlessness or incapacity to control and fully account for cinema’s traces undoes her or his own self- enclosed presence and the processes through which viewers establish their place or locality. “[T]he very mechanism of projection” of and at the movies momentarily unanchor viewers from their own, proper traces. Cinema for Derrida liberates one from the pressures and prohibitions under or through which she or he is found and located as a proper self, him- or herself, an identifiable “who,” un travailleur. It is this resistance to the end-oriented work of travail that leads Derrida to avow that “cinematic emotion cannot, for me, take the form of knowledge, or even real memory.” 10 An investigation into the traces of Derrida’s cinema, such as the one undertaken in the study to follow, must therefore examine not only that which is overlooked or marginal, but also the presence of something fundamentally resistant to self-presentation. This is not to suggest that there are no traces of Derrida’s cinema, nor is it to say that the surfeit of traces that he detects at the movies is resolutely untraceable. The traces of Derrida’s cinema are those that leave no traces, and in so doing, in leaving no trace, they (re)mark their very absence. Their resistance to becoming the ossified remnants affiliated with work as travail, forms of knowledge, and/or “real”(or accessible) memory traces of them. The traces of Derrida’s cinema can therefore be understood as properly cinematic. According to Joana Masó, Derrida’s concession that cinema leaves no traces in him indicates “the very singular role of the cinematic image within the deconstruction of 10 Ibid. 5 visual arts.” 11 This singularity, Masó suggest, comes from the emphasis Derrida gives to the concept of the trace throughout his oeuvre, particularly as it pertains to the visual arts, and what appears to be his contention that cinema represents an exception to it. But as Masó points out, Derrida’s cinema is not simply foreign or opposed to his articulation of the trace; on the contrary, cinema rearticulates the plurality at the heart of the trace, as well as the difficulty of explaining exactly what it is. Derrida’s cinema retraces the trace and its inherent resistance to its concept or conceptualization. In other words, attempts to corral the trace as a traditional philosophical (i.e. metaphysical) concept are disrupted in advanced by the structure of the trace and its deconstructive, de-institutionalizing force. The traces of Derrida’s cinema as trace are thus precisely what distinguish it from conventional practices of reading, work as travail, forms of knowledge, and present, active, or “even real memory.” This traceless “emotion”—and as Masó recognizes, the etymology of emotion links the term to movement—signals for Derrida that the cinematic experience cannot be “formulated in the manner of scholarly or philosophical culture.” 12 In leaving no traces, Derrida’s cinema renders the trace otherwise as trace. This point is made explicit in “Cinema and Its Ghosts” when the Cahiers editors ask him to explicate the affinity of cinema and ghosts: “The cinematic experience belongs thoroughly to spectrality, which I link to all that has been said about the specter in psychoanalysis—or the very nature of the trace.” 13 Cinema remarks the absence of its retainable traces in Derrida due to the “very nature” to which it “belongs thoroughly.” It 11 Joana Masó, “Derrida and the Cinematographe: Or the Culture That We Don’t Have,” Discourse 37, nos.1-2, (2015): 64. 12 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 25. Masó explores the etymology of emotion and the term’s recurrence in Derrida’s comments in his interview with Cahiers du cinéma. See Masó, “Derrida and the Cinematographe,” 68. 13 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 26 (emphasis added). 6 is as if Derrida evokes “the very nature of the trace” through cinema, as if his account of the cinematic experience leaving no traces in him conjures the essential unruliness of the trace, and as such, the trouble of defining it through pre-given forms of knowledge. The traces of Derrida’s cinema can be seen to harbor and reignite the challenges that the trace, one of the earliest deconstructive spatio-temporal figures, presents to orthodox methods of accounting and “making sense.” As he puts it in Of Grammatology, the trace denotes a passive: relationship to a past, to an always-already-there that no reactivation of the origin could fully master and awaken to presence. This impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what authorized us to call trace that which does not let itself be summed up in the simplicity of a present…[I]f the trace refers to an absolute past, it is because it obliges us to think a past that can no longer be understood in the form of a modified presence, as a present-past. Since the past has always signified present-past, the absolute past that is retained in the trace no longer rigorously merits the name “past.” Another name to erase, especially since the strange movement of the trace proclaims as much as it recalls: differance defers- differs [diffère].” 14 A reference to “an absolute past,” the structure of the trace, as Derrida conceives of it, leaves no traces as itself. The trace implies the absence of a self-referential trace. Because it was never simply present as a self-enclosed subject or thing, and because it is not an identifiable entity that can be pinpointed in the past, the trace is not classifiable as a past- present. Derrida’s development of the word trace, J. Hillis Miller observes, is therefore “antithetical” to its “unambiguous set of meanings.” 15 As a noun, “trace” commonly designates the mark or marks left behind by an entity that previously occupied or passed 14 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 66-67. 15 J. Hillis Miller, “Trace,” in Reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology, edited by Sean Gaston and Ian Maclachlan (London: Continuum, 2011), 47. 7 through a given space; the verb “to trace,” Hills Miller notes, is to delineate “a route on a map beforehand, or to make a tracing on a piece of paper of an already present design.” 16 Both noun and verb forms of the word rely on, as well as redeploy, the stability and “sense” of chronological time—there is someone/something that precedes me and leaves traces that I can then retrace. Derrida’s take on the trace reads or writes it alongside or through its common usage as a countersignature. For if the accepted meaning of the trace signals the marked preexisting presence of someone or something, then the deconstructive trace refers to both the radical absence that conditions any preexisting presence or origin and the inescapable mediation that accompanies any reanimation of a past-present. Not only does this mean that a past-present “origin” cannot be “fully master[ed] and awaken[ed] to presence,” but also, and more radically, that the origin is a fantasy. The so-called origin, as that which traced and preexisted in a past-present in full presence, was always already in reference to something else, already traced by its proper, constitutive traces. Every supposed origin is, in Derrida’s view, always already conditioned and marked by more than one trace, and so, it is not entirely an origin. In sum, the trace comes from the traces of a trace without an origin. By declaring that cinema leaves no traces in him, and then comparing this absence to other practices and modalities affiliated with different, “unambiguous,” or chronological accounts of temporality, Derrida summons the trace’s “strange movement…[that] proclaims as much as it recalls.” In many ways, this demonstration of the “strange movement” of the trace within “unambiguous” or “sense making” philosophical conceptualizations of time and space initiated what we now refer to as deconstruction. Insofar as the traces of Derrida’s cinema pulls on “the very nature of the 16 Ibid. 8 trace”—the trace as absence, an absolute past, and that which he says, “does not exist…[as] a being-present outside of all plentitude”—it returns to the very root of deconstruction; cinema takes us back to its heart. 17 And so, in spite of appearances, Derrida’s concession that cinema leaves no traces in him indicates a vital correspondence between some of his most central, well-known meditations and his less frequent allusions to cinema. Derrida’s professed inability to retain and recollect systematically the traces of cinema, his own powerlessness when faced with the power of movies, speaks to both the singularity of these absent traces and the crucial place of cinema relative to “the very nature of the trace.” Derrida’s assertions in “Cinema and Its Ghosts” help explain the surprising fact that, despite the range characterizing his oeuvre, he did not produce a sustained written work on cinema or films. To be sure, and as I elaborate in greater detail in Chapter 2, plenty of “marginal” interventions into the question of cinema mark Derrida’s published and unpublished corpus, including his appearances in a number of films. In addition, he wrote a host of texts that brush up against, or exist in close proximity to, cinema and its topoi, such as the discussions of: mnemotechnics in “Freud and the Scene of Writing”; the parergon in The Truth of Painting; drawing in Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins; photography in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Copy, Archive, Signature, “Aletheia,” and Athens Still Remains; video in “Videor”; the visual arts as collected in Penser à ne pas voir; and storage, inscription, and archives in Archive Fever, to name a select few. However, and in the words of Robert Lapsely and Michael Westlake, there is no denying that cinema serves as a sort of “structuring absence” within 17 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 62. 9 Derrida’s oeuvre, especially if one determines absence through “unambiguous” and empirical traces. 18 It is precisely this apparent nonappearance of cinema in Derrida’s corpus that is often, if implicitly, used as the explanation (or excuse) for the relative lack of reference to his works in contemporary film and media studies. The proceeding study thus engages and is motivated by the questions that resound within this “double absence.” From the outset, this project encounters three main obstacles. First, it must not only attempt to account for the significance of something that Derrida does not rigorously address himself, but also that which, according to him, essentially resists this mode address. “[W]hat I get from cinema,” Derrida tells de Baecque and Jousse, “is a way of freeing myself from prohibitions and especially a way of forgetting work…In this sense, it often acted on me like a drug, entertainment par excellence, uneducated escape, the right to wildness” 19 Cinema is his “hidden, secret, avid, gluttonous joy—in other words, an infantile pleasure”; as stated above, it is specifically reserved for breaking loose from the oppressive labor of travail and the active memory work of knowledge formation. 20 In short, the catharsis offered by movies seems to preclude Derrida from intervening into their discourses “in the manner of scholarly or philosophical culture.” In “Cinema and Its Ghosts” Derrida argues that his commitment to the wildness, infantile pleasures, and anesthesial qualities of cinema contrasts with the venue of his interlocutors, which, he says, “signifies a cultivated, theoretical relation to cinema” that 18 Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction, 2 nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 65. 19 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 24. 20 Ibid., 25. 10 he can be heard to refuse and guard against. 21 Derrida’s preemptive defense of his relation to cinema, in combination with his portrayal of Cahiers, hints at a certain tension underpinning the interview. For example, after de Baecque and Jousse reply that the historical “base of Cahiers” shares a similar commitment to the movies as an escape and entertainment, Derrida counters that journal does so “out intellectual dandyism, out of cultivated nonconformism” while he “surrender[s] out of more childish enjoyment.” 22 Citing the lack of prohibitions essential to cinema, a sort of liberty or accessibility that promotes diverse viewers and singular viewpoints, Derrida goes on to say that this diversity also transpires within each viewer, and that within him there is “a competition…between at least two ways of looking at film.” 23 The first is his avowed and celebrated “childish enjoyment” of movies. The other, he says, “is more scholarly and strict, deciphers the signs emitted by the images in function of my more ‘philosophical’ interests or questions.” 24 Derrida’s defense of the cathartic effects of cinema stems from both the cultivated external threat Cahiers poses to it and this more rigid “way of looking at film” within him which his interlocutors seek to unveil and amplify. Derrida’s preemptive resistance or discomfort can be heard to sniff out the motivations of de Baecque and Jousse, as if he senses that his interviewers intend to tempt his “more scholarly and strict” side at the expense of his admitted “hypnotic fascination” with and “passion for the cinema,” however infantile and uncultivated it may be. Throughout “Cinema and Its Ghosts” one picks up the tensions of this “competition” between 21 Ibid. After stating that cinema is “an infantile pleasure” Derrida says: “This is what they must remain, and no doubt it is what bothers me a bit in talking to you…” (ibid., emphasis added). 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 26. 11 interlocutors (a trait that is common to Derrida’s interviews, as explored in Chapter 3), as well as between the positions within the interviewee. In the end, to do justice to Derrida’s cinema, to encounter and address what he says and what he would have said had he written about it, demands that one work through this “competition” without effacing either “way of looking at film.” One must not assume that Derrida’s reluctance to address cinema in a sustained and categorical manner suggests his absolute aversion to film and media studies; instead, cinema’s “structuring absence” appears to be a kind of planned calculation on Derrida’s behalf—it is a response (or lack thereof) that protects the life of his cinema and its relationship to his own travail. The slight tension that permeates “Cinema and Its Ghosts” also frames the second obstacle of the proceeding study. Specifically, this hurdle relays the lack of reference to Derrida’s works within contemporary film and media studies together with the absence of an explicit renunciation of deconstructive thought in the field. While I develop this point in greater detail in Chapter 2, it’s worth noting here the opening line of the preface of “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” ostensibly co-authored by de Baecque and Jousse: “It is not obvious that a journal such as Cahiers du cinéma would interview Jacques Derrida. Above all because, for a long time, Derrida seemed to be interested only in the phenomenon of writing, in its trace, in speech.” 25 The commencement of “Cinema and Its Ghosts”—undoubtedly Derrida’s most overt and methodical intervention into the relations among cinema and deconstruction—can be heard to announce a sort of latent suspicion, or the residue of resistance, between the commitments of the interviewee and those of the interviewers. Despite the fact that de Baecque and Jousse applaud what they 25 De Baecque and Jousse,“Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 22. 12 see as Derrida’s recent turn towards the neighboring fields and discourses of cinema, as well as his ability during the conversation to revisit “the ontology of cinema while shedding new light on it,” their preface briefly illuminates the indirect and general avoidance of Derrida’s works throughout the history of institutionalized film and media studies, and perhaps most remarkably, within film theory. Their account suggests that Derrida instigated this avoidance by not addressing, or perhaps not taking seriously, the passions of cinephiles, such as those affiliated with the massively influential Cahiers du cinéma. The opening remarks of “Cinema and Its Ghosts” thus echo the second obstacle of the present study: there appears to be an unspoken, but foundational or institutional, tension, suspicion, or resistance within film and media studies in relation to deconstruction, and this implicit discord uses Derrida’s supposed silence about cinema as an alibi. A major portion of the next four chapters therefore endeavors to name and call into question this alibi, as such. It should be stated up front that there are important exceptions to the general elision of deconstruction in the field, as the works of Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Peter Brunette, David Wills, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Miriam Hansen, David Rodowick, and Tom Conley, to list but a small group, suggest. 26 And as Lapsley and Westlake observe, 26 According to the bibliography available at http://www.marie-claire-ropars-wuilleumier.fr, Ropars- Wuilleumier authored eleven books and sixty-eight articles/chapters and edited or coedited a multitude of publications, including the journal Hors cadre that she cofounded at Université Paris-VIII Vincennes. Only a fraction of Ropars-Wuilleumier's work has been translated into English. See also Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56, special issue on Theodor W. Adorno (1992): 43-73; D.N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press, 1994); and Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 13 Derrida was “initially cited by the post-1968 theorists as support for the materiality of language…[but] references to his work became subsequently less frequent.” 27 On one hand, the gradual infrequency of reference to Derrida’s works in film and media studies (and film theory, in particular) is unexpected given the endurance of so-called “French theory” within the field, including the work of those who never addressed cinema at- length, as well as the reception of and abiding attention to deconstruction throughout many departments of the humanities. On the other hand, and following the hypothesis put forth in Brunette and Wills’ Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory, the first and still only direct account of deconstruction and cinema, the neglect of Derrida’s work in film and media studies deserves to be considered alongside the misconceptions of deconstruction as apolitical and/or ahistorical and the dominance of Marxist-Lacanian- Althuesserian film theory during the field’s institutionalization. For their part, Lapsley and Westlake support the position of Screen/Play when they cite both the well-known prominence of Lacanian psychoanalysis during film theory’s “post-structuralist phase” as well as the counter “political effectivity” sought by theorists and filmmakers at that time. 28 As I describe in Chapter 2, film theorists during this era stayed clear of Derrida’s work in order to maintain their oppositional theoretico-political agendas, and this omission continues to inform the relative absence of deconstruction in the field today. Engaging Derrida’s relation to film and media studies therefore obliges the critical analysis of their institutional place(s). In addition to the obstacle of Derrida’s cinema, the following study also examines the institutional grounds upon which its analysis seems 27 Lapsely and Westlake, Film Theory, 65. 28 Ibid. 14 housed—that is, an investigation into the place of deconstruction in the field probes the institution and institutionality named film and media studies. Thirdly, and keeping in mind the previous two hurdles, the proceeding study must not presume the self-evidence of significance and/or timeliness that it wishes to claim for itself. Addressing this point appears to be exceptionally critical in this case given the risk of misconceptions concerning deconstruction in the field, especially the misguided belief that the relative lack of reference to Derrida’s works within in it is a consequence of his avoidance of cinema. In other words, redressing this “double absence”—cinema for Derrida; deconstruction for the field—presupposes that Derrida’s works matter for contemporary film and media studies (and vice-versa), and the reasons that undergird this presupposition should be made explicit. As its title proclaims, Chapter 1 focuses on this very task. Rather than declaring the applicability of deconstruction to film and media works, or simply arguing for the placement of Derrida’s reflections on cinema within the film theory canon, I assert that the timeliness of deconstruction for the field hinges on the critical questions it poses to those within or affiliated with film and studies about their commitments to the Humanities and the university. While Derrida’s meditations on cinema no doubt contribute to the theoretical pursuits of the field, advocating for his works’ addition to a set of theoretical paradigms awaiting deployment (and application) would completely miss what is at stake in the timeliness of deconstruction. Exploring the absence of reference to Derrida’s works within the field opens a window onto its past and current institutional status as well as its trajectories. To appeal for the timeliness of deconstruction not only requires that one build and make a case on its suitability and pertinence for that which it encounters; this appeal also necessitates that the 15 determination of the timely, not to mention the processes through which cases are made, be critically analyzed. Simply put, it is not enough to present the facts that Derrida’s work has been (and continues to be) neglected in film and media studies and that his attention to cinema is relevant for those in field due to its overlooked existence. As a result, Chapter 1 pronounces a certain belief in what deconstruction does and could make happen in contemporary film and media studies if it was further performatively affirmed with them. Moreover, I also appeal to the practitioners of deconstruction from other fields and departments to take up the questions, concerns, and objects of film and media studies in light of the field’s privileged place in the university that, as Derrida descibes, is there, “in the world it is attempting to think.” 29 Having attempted to make the case for deconstruction’s timeliness for contemporary film and media studies, I return to the first two obstacles in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. “Ses Fantômes,” the second chapter, amplifies the aforementioned tensions in “Cinema and Its Ghosts” in order to explore the avoidance of Derrida’s works in 1970s film theory. Following this historical analysis, I then return to some of Derrida’s earliest publications, such as “Force and Signification” (1963) and “Writing Before the Letter” in Of Grammatology (1967), which include empirically minor, yet crucial, mentions of cinema. As I move chronologically from Derrida’s initial essays to one of his last seminars he delivered on the death penalty, the recurrence of cinema in his works that are ostensibly not about film or movies demonstrates a sort of peripheral centrality. Cinema, I contend, was not just on the horizon as a project to come for Derrida; even though he claims it to be a “hidden pleasure,” its reappearance plays a decisive role throughout his 29 Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” in Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 236. 16 corpus and the inventiveness in particular in the spatio-temporality of deconstructive thought. In a similar manner, Chapter 3 returns to Derrida’s 1982 improvisation in Ken McMullen’s film, Ghost Dance, to develop a project he proposed in “Cinema and Its Ghosts” on cinema and belief. Through a close reading of this improvisation, which contains Derrida’s first sustained and categorical statements about cinema, I attempt to trace the contours of this unwritten project as a confrontation with the “ghost belief” he discuses in the film as he “plays” himself, or as he puts it, his “proper self.” Although the Ghost Dance monologue functions as the organizational spine of the chapter, I begin by suggesting the properly unwritten state of Derrida’s theory of cinema, and as such, the project’s affinity with the “competition” of film appreciation that he says ensues “within” him. Because the vast majority of Derrida’s reflections on cinema occur in interviews in one form or another, beginning with the “interview scene” in Ghost Dance, the chapter also surveys Derrida’s commentary about or deconstruction of these conversations and the improvisational mode of address they seek to elicit. Lines of correspondence to a cluster of Derrida’s works emerge during the reading of his Ghost Dance improvisation, especially his discussions of science or knowledge and religious faith. The fourth and final chapter addresses the applicability of deconstruction in two interrelated ways. First, I work through what Derrida and others have said about application as it pertains to where and what deconstruction “is”—which is to say, that “it” is always already applied and therefore not a separable or self-enclosed thing to be applied. Along these lines, I gloss Derrida’s reading of Lacan in Le Facteur de la Vérité in which he sees the latter only searching for the proof and Truth of his own 17 psychoanalytic hypotheses in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter.” According to Derrida, Lacan and all those who seek to “apply” theory in a traditional manner do so at the expense and through the reduction of the text to which it is applied. Derrida’s analysis of Lacan’s psychoanalytic application in the latter’s reading of “The Purloined Letter” serves as a bridge to the films, media, and music of David Lynch, whose work is frequently deployed in film and media studies as a prime example of Lacanian discourse, thus mimicking the very move that Derrida deconstructs in Le Facteur de la Vérité. After making the jump from Derrida to Lynch, the chapter attempts to read the parties and fun of the former’s films in a “deconstructive manner” that labors to avoid rote application that Lynch’s works often endure. The result, I believe, is an analysis of Lynch that proliferates the dichotomies and possibilities at work in his films rather than a reductive explanation or final decipherment of them. Lynch’s own commentary, particularly his steadfast resistance to determining the meaning of his works, supports the “open-ended” analysis of the chapter. At bottom, Chapter 4 provides an example of what deconstructive film and media analysis may resemble without using a given text to repeat and/or testify to the Truth of the application. In probing the relations among deconstruction, film and media studies, and media works, “The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema” contributes to the intellectual history of the field and to the lively exchange between contemporary French philosophy and cinema. It also participates in the current debates of the field about its direction after its so-called digital, post-theory, historical, and cognitive “turns.” As I argue in Chapter 1, the lures of progress promised by the technological milieu, of which film and media are fundamental parts, demand to be heard otherwise; following Derrida and other 18 deconstructive analyses of the modern university, one hears in these utopic promises another call to revive the field’s theoretical pursuits as well as its commitment to the unconditional resistance or autonomy that should distinguish the Humanities and the university. In many ways, this dissertation can be read through its belief in film and media studies’ critical place within the theoretical Humanities and the efforts undertaken there to affirm both their and the future—their future must be thought together with the future in general. Through these contributions, alignments, and commitments, “The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema” can also be seen to partake in what Michael Naas calls the inevitable “full reappraisal of Derrida’s work and of his place in twentieth century philosophy and literary theory” that will result from the posthumous publication of his seminars. 30 Despite the fact that this project does not draw heavily on Derrida’s seminars, Naas’s general point that the enduring discoveries within Derrida’s published and unpublished oeuvre will usher the arrival of “what can only be characterized as a wholly other corpus besides the one we already know, a second corpus that will no doubt cause us to reconsider everything we know or think we know about Jacques Derrida” seems nonetheless applicable given both the aims of and findings discussed in this dissertation. 31 The coming of Derrida’s “wholly other corpus” that will upset all that we “think we know” about his work and the scope of his archive is made possible by the trace. The trace, Naas writes, “is always testamentary, destined for a future beyond both the addressee and the addressor, its fate is always uncertain, a living on that is always to 30 Michael Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 2. 31 Ibid., 1. 19 be determined.” 32 If a few of the traces of Derrida’s cinema congeal in this project, if a handful is brought to light in the following pages, then these traces speak to those beyond the limits of the frame constructed here; they suggest that Derrida’s cinema, like his corpus, “is always to be determined” by the traces that live on within and through cinema. And so, it is not only Derrida’s cinema that remains to come, but also cinema itself that awaits discovery. 32 Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 8. 20 CHAPTER 1 “Making a Case”: The Timeliness of Deconstruction for Film and Media Studies Saying “I don’t know” about fantasy and revenants is the only way to take them into account in their very effective power. If I said “I know,” “I am sure and certain,” clearly and distinctly, not only that I am affected by spectral fantasies, but that there are really such things outside of me, I would immediately dissolve spectrality, I would deny without delay, I would contradict a priori the very thing I am saying… “I don’t know” is thus the very modality of the experience of the spectral, and moreover the surviving trace in general. —Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 [N]umbers, we believe, do not narrate, interpret, invent, or make up figures— unless they do sometimes…Verification is always possible, at least in theory… “Put your faith in numbers,” in other words, in that which presumably makes no claim on faith or belief, except, of course, the belief that numbers, counting, or quantification triumphs over belief. —Peggy Kamuf, “Accounterability” To Open Again the Closing Argument At bottom, this dissertation is animated by the belief that contemporary film and media studies and deconstruction are remarkably timely for each other, notwithstanding the evident distances between them and the relative absence of each within discourses of the other. These shared timelines, however, do not simply reference the concordance, suitability, and favorability that accompanies the word “timely” and a short list of its common synonyms, such as “relevant,” “applicable,” or “appropriate,” to name just a few. For if deconstructive thought and film and media studies are indeed timely for each other, then I’d like to suggest that their timeliness is instead forged through the ways in which they evoke considerations of untimeliness today. Whether overtly or implicitly, 21 both can be seen to render a certain timeliness to the untimely; both can be characterized by what they offer to thinking through the untimely’s timeliness today. At once, this similarity relays their singularities and inassimilable differences, as well as their ghostly folds into each other: simultaneously, the specter of deconstruction haunts the field like the phantoms of cinema within the heart of Derrida’s corpus. While the next two chapters take up the latter theme—that is, they develop and amplify the cinematic ghosts within Derrida’s oeuvre—what follows in this chapter, along with the final chapter about “deconstructive applications,” pursues the concerns attending to the former. Specifically, despite the fact that Derrida never directly addressed the field, nor taught, wrote, or spoke from within its institutional frameworks, the following endeavors to “make a case” for deconstruction’s timeliness for contemporary film and media studies by advancing something like an appeal. No doubt, making and placing an appeal here at the outset, in addition to insisting that this appeal and the belief it professes catalyzes this dissertation project, will be a curious move for some readers and utterly presumptuous for others. And yet, this risk seems indispensible if one aspires to affirm rigorously the timeliness of deconstructive thought. Encountering deconstruction and responsibly engaging the force of this encounter involve risk because these acts call on one to test and exceed the order of J.L. Austin deems “constative utterances,” or the descriptive language of facts. 33 In other words, doing justice to deconstruction’s timeliness entails a certain performativity, which includes appeals, pledges, professions of faith, and commitments that can always be renounced, dismissed, or fall on deaf ears. Although this performativity will be elaborated in greater detail in the 33 See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2 nd ed., edited by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbrisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 22 following pages and addressed throughout this dissertation, it should be noted that the performativity entreated by deconstructive thought is hyperbolic and excessive in comparison to its Austinian definition as the utterance of a subject that enacts or activates something recognizable, possible, and/or within pre-established conventions. Deconstruction’s hyperbolic or excessive performativity, the performativity it performs and calls on to be performed, attempts to inaugurate an event worthy of the name, an event as and from the unforeseeable future—an invention that does not conform to existing rules and expectations. 34 These performative appeals, pledges, professions of faith, and commitments thus respond from within pre-given or pre-set frameworks to that which not only exceeds and opens them, but also makes possible their (or any) inauguration. 35 As J. Hillis Miller puts it: “My response to the call made on me is essentially a reciprocal performative saying ‘yes’ to a performative demand issued initially by the wholly other. My ‘yes’ is a performative countersigning or the validating of a performative command that comes from outside me.” 36 I am entreated to say “yes” by and to what Hillis Miller calls, following Derrida, the “wholly other,” but my affirmative response does not simply accept, incorporate, and assimilate the other’s call 34 For Derrida’s reflections on invention, see his essay “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” translated by Catherin Porter, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2007). 35 In his discussion of Maurice Blanchot’s essay, “Marx’s Three Voices,” Derrida points out that this excessive or hyperbolic performativity is a force that simultaneously disrupts foundations and establishes them. “[T]he originary performativity that does not conform to preexisting conventions, unlike all the performatives analyzed by the theoreticians of speech acts, but whose force of rupture produces the institution or the constitutions, the law itself, which is to say also the meaning that appears to, that ought to, or that appears to have to guarantee it in return. Violence of the law before the law and before meaning, violence that interrupts time, disarticulates it, dislodges it, displaces it out of its natural lodging: ‘out of joint.’” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, (London: Routledge, 2006), 36-37. 36 J. Hillis Miller, “Performativity as Performance / Performativity as Speech Act: Derrida’s Special Theory of Performativity,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, Vol. 2, (Spring 2007): 232. 23 into the frameworks and institutions in which I am embedded. Saying “yes” in this way means that I commit to making “reciprocal” or countersignatory performative appeals within these structures in order to disrupt and open them in the name and to the future of those calls. The appeal to and for the timeliness of deconstruction is therefore inseparable from the ethicopolitical pledge to the justice of the wholly other; it demands that one work performatively on and within the institutions and conventions in which she inhabits in order to make them more hospitable to incessant disruptive calls and untimely de- institutionalizing forces. Not surprisingly, and as Derrida observes in one of the key texts of the following study, “The University Without Condition,” the university—or the place from and to which this chapter’s appeal is made—is not, in principle, openly welcome to performative utterances, even if they are tacitly made there all of the time. Within the university, and thus, within the dissertations and other forms of scholarship and research that appear to take or have their place within this institution, one is expected to employ: theoretical and constative [utterances], even if the objects of this knowledge are sometimes of a philosophical, ethical, political, normative, prescriptive, or axiological nature, and even if, in a still more troubling fashion, the structure of these objects of knowledge is a structure of fiction obeying the strange modality of the “as if” (poem, novel, oeuvre d’art in general, but also everything that, in the structure of a performative utterance—for example, of the juridical or constitutional type—does not belong to the realist and constative description of what is, but produces the event on the basis of the qualified “as if” of a supposedly established convention). 37 Putting forth an appeal today, here (and) now, one not only risks that it will be ignored or contested, but also that its potential break with institutional conventions as performative will trigger a sort of a priori denunciation. This is another way of saying that the 37 Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” in Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 218. 24 disruption of certain traditions and protocols often causes automatic, reactive defenses in the name of those very traditions and protocols. Although these risks certainly threaten the reception and impact of performative utterances, particularly those made from within and addressed to the university, they are also precisely what make utterances such as appeals and pledges possible. The risks that threaten an appeal call on it to be made and affirmed; they are the condition of the appeal’s possibility as the very condition of impossibility. Advancing an appeal, in combination with Derrida’s biographical disconnection from film and media studies and the insinuation above that untimeliness characterizes deconstruction’s timeliness for the field, are undoubtedly complications of the typical provisos of “case making” and establishing proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Given these complications, and momentarily setting aside Derrida’s disciplinary affiliations, a couple of points about timeliness merit elaboration. First, as Geoffrey Bennington observes, there is nothing that announces timeliness more than what is currently held to be untimely. “Any talk about the moment suggests that it really is the right moment to talk about the right moment, that its time has come,” he says, “and explicit claims to untimeliness or intempestivity are, one might expect, no more than a further twist of this structure.” 38 According to Bennington, when one announces the untimeliness of this or that one “adds a supplement of timeliness to the untimely”; such proclamations thus enact or perform the always-fashionable practice of being unfashionable, which, by defying trends, “hope[s] to set the [former and untimely] trend again.” 39 Declaring the untimeliness of someone or something can be seen, therefore, as the most fashionable, 38 Geoffrey Bennington, “Is it Time?,” in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), 129. 39 Ibid. 25 trendy, and timely thing one can do. Secondly, Bennington notes that while the pronouncement of the untimely can be viewed as a scheme for the (re)birth or (re)emergence of a profitable trend, it also demonstrates that “the timeliness of the timely is no longer secure.” 40 The potential timeliness of the untimely denotes that the “right time” arrives through a sort of non-synchronization, or a discord, as Bennington puts it, “between the time that has come and the time in which it comes, between the moment as container and the moment as arrival.” 41 Instead of the unabated continuance and logical development of “the moment as container,” the “right time,” that which is considered timely, comes. Timeliness thus occurs through the incessant disruption of untimely arrivals; “it is time,” Bennington says, “only when in some sense it is untimely.” 42 Comparable to the passé coming back into fashion and setting off the latest fad, the untimely irrupts into the present before “the moment as container” closes its lid, prior to the untimely’s subsequent assimilation and monetization as a trend within the “container.” Haunted by untimely irruptive arrivals, the future present remains open to what comes as and from a future that is prior to identification and domestication within the terms of the container’s contents. Bennington’s comments suggest that the timeliness deconstruction for contemporary film and media studies (and vice versa) must entail, almost by law, a certain untimeliness. It is as if this time, today, could be their “right time” only insofar as this “right time” is either no longer and/or not yet: even if they already had some previous time or times (one could here cite deconstruction’s initial reception in the field, for example, as discussed in the 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 26 next chapter) their timeliness still remains to come. The “right time” for deconstruction and contemporary film and media studies can be said to be happening and not happening now; perhaps if it’s to happen it must not be happening. However tempting the applicability of this argument may be for the present study, I will not advance the assumption that deconstruction’s timeliness for contemporary film and media studies hinges solely on their erstwhile and prevailing distances, although Bennington’s analysis speaks to the unavoidability of this assumption and will be indispensible for my argument. In a different register, one should also notice another presumption that may trail and attempt to discredit the stated aims of this chapter. For example, even if one accepts that Derrida’s works have played an objectively minor role in the study of cinema within institutionalized film and media studies (due to factors that will be addressed at length in the next chapter) and that this absence runs counter to the enduring reflection given to contemporary French thought within the field to both those who have and have not discussed cinema at length (such as, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciére, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, to list a small sample), one could nevertheless conclude that the timeliness I am suggesting lacks “real” substance because it pursues non-constative modalities. Insofar as the grounds of deconstruction’s timeliness for contemporary film and media studies are approached through speculative and performative approaches rather than the supposed anchoring of evidence and “case making,” one may view the proceeding intervention as an arbitrary injection of another, albeit less trodden, theoretical avenue and popular proper name into the field. Put differently, one may (wrongly) assume that this timeliness comes by virtue of the name “Derrida” alone; one may assume (again, wrongly) that the 27 uncritical reverence for this name and the works that it signs legitimizes the correction of its nonappearance within a given canon. This is all to say that one would be mistaken if he believed that the mere lack of reference to Derrida’s works within the field instigates deconstruction’s timeliness for it. And yet, if my belief in the bearing of deconstruction for contemporary film and media studies appears (or will appear throughout this project) to advocate rather credulously for their import or discovery within them, if what I am putting forth seems more of a profession of faith than the rational, disinterested, descriptive, and objective discourse expected from doctoral dissertations specifically and academic scholarship more generally, then this belief, the belief on the part of the reader concerning my beliefs, would not only be accurate in a certain sense, it would also relay a key feature of deconstruction as a case to be made. The obstacles of this chapter—what I have designated in the title with the colloquial phrase “making a case”—are thus inseparable from my beliefs about what deconstructive thought could do for or make happen within contemporary film and media studies. And instead of letting this point pass by more or less tacitly under the auspices of indifference and/or self-evidence, it’s necessary to state it here, I believe, without alibi. These beliefs, which constitute an appeal for a kind of deconstructive film and media studies that are not yet here, mean that constructing this case is not an easy and/or straightforward venture; given the expectations of case making, it may even be impossible. Such difficulty, it should be said, does not mean that deconstruction is metaphysical, empirically non-provable, or totally speculative. As the third and fourth chapters will elaborate more systematically, deconstruction is neither a method nor a 28 thing that can be simply believed in, if the process of believing in dictates an investment in someone or something identifiable and localizable, such as a place, institution, code, or set of instructions. 43 At the same time, deconstruction is nothing but demonstrable because what it “does” is akin to attesting to its singular activity already at work within a specific work or text. 44 The “already” of the “already at work” and the “already there” signals its non-being as a self-determined and -enclosed entity, or its being as some phantasmatic existing absolutely apart from where it works. It is precisely this always untimely “already” that makes deconstruction such a difficult (or impossible) case to be made under the orthodox practices of case making. 45 For how does one prove the timeliness of that which resists separation from the locales it always already inhabits and undoes? What does preparing and deploying this type of case demand from its maker? How can one affirm her or his faith in something that fundamentally resists the stasis implied by preposition “in”? 43 My emphasis on the preposition “in” references Samuel Weber’s remark to Peggy Kamuf about believing: “To ‘believe’—however overdetermined and ambiguous the word—implies (I believe) a belief ‘in’ someone or something, and therefore presupposes the localizability of the ‘one’ or ‘thing.’” See: Peggy Kamuf and Samuel Weber, “Double Features: An Interview with Samuel Weber,” Discourse 37, nos. 1-2 (2015): 154. 44 Bennington suggests that deconstruction implies demonstration with the following: “What has become famous as ‘deconstruction’ involves less an operation on than a demonstration about such hierarchised binaries in the history of Western thought,” Bennington says, “and Derrida has found occasion in the demonstration to examine in some detail most of the established masters of the tradition.” Geoffrey Bennington, “Jacques Derrida,” Interrupting Derrida, 8. 45 Deconstruction’s resistance to what I’ve called “the orthodox practices of case making” recalls Bennington’s observation that it “gives no grounds for any doctrinal ontology, epistemology, or ethics.” The impossibility of deconstruction’s “grounds,” in addition to what it makes tremble within the posited grounds of any “doctrinal” program, leads Bennington to add the following caveat: “It is perhaps, then, not surprising that to date no remotely convincing philosophical critique of deconstruction has been forthcoming (the attempts by Searle and Habermas are risibly ill-informed, and other critics have carefully avoided all normal philosophical precautions before issuing unargued condemnations), perhaps because it is simply not susceptible to such a critique. Derrida’s work seems to have managed the exploit of being intensely philosophical and yet impervious to any imaginable philosophical refutation. But it is also a mistake (made most notably by Rorty) to assume that Derrida is to be praised insofar as he is doing something simply non-philosophical (story-telling, literary invention), and criticised to the extent that he cannot help himself sometimes getting involved in philosophical argumentation.” Geoffrey Bennington, “Jacques Derrida,” 16. 29 Although Derrida returns to these questions and complexities throughout out his oeuvre, he delivers a particularly appropriate allusion to them near the end of his 1982 improvisation about ghosts and cinema in Ken McMullen’s film, Ghost Dance: And I believe that modern developments in technology and telecommunication, instead of restricting the space of ghosts, as one might think—one might think that science, today technology leave behind the era of ghosts…in a kind of bygone era…Whereas I believe that on the contrary the future belongs to ghosts and that the modern technology of the image, of cinematography, of telecommunication, multiplies tenfold the power of ghosts and the return of ghosts. These comments, I believe, sum up the exceptional timeliness of deconstruction for contemporary film and media studies—that is, its relevance here and now—because they intimate their shared investment in and access to untimeliness today. Derrida suggests this not only through the reference to “cinematography,” “the modern technology of the image,” and “the future,” nor the fact his words are uttered on film, but also what seems to be the more general imbrication he envisages between the techno-scientific and the ghostly. In addition to effectively calling out the hubris of the reason and knowledge associated with the Enlightenment and the historicizing that brushes aside ghosts as relics from a primitive and ignorant past, Derrida is also summoning a theme that he will develop more than ten years after his Ghost Dance cameo when he explores together the alleged “irrationality” of religious or supernatural faith along with the “knowledge” affiliated with techno-scientific. 46 A crucial observation pertaining to this theme is that the same performative “core belief” required by any religious faith must also be extended to every scientific proposition, no matter how quantitative, provable, or “open and shut” its case may seem. So, whether it is a ghost story, an account of the resurrection, or a set 46 See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” translated by Samuel Weber, in Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 30 of mathematical proofs demonstrating the properties of protons, belief is at work, Derrida demonstrates, because one must testify to what she alone perceived in the absence of her listeners or readers; as a witness, she must implicitly ask that the other believe what she presents. Because I wasn’t there to see a religious miracle or the evidence of a black hole, I must take the other’s word for it if I’m told that these phenomena are there beyond me, that they exist or have taken place without my having witnessed them. I am obliged to believe that something or someone exists and takes or has its/her/his place outside of my own proper experience and perception. We are therefore endlessly granting others credit because we are without omnipresence and the absolute proof or presentation of having been present in another’s place. This means that we are constantly without, as Derrida puts it, “probative demonstration to which one has no choice but to subscribe to the conclusion of a syllogism, in the course of argumentation, or indeed to the display of a thing present.” 47 The automatic belief that I extend to the other is a window that opens up a new world like a miracle. 48 By imbricating the supernatural and scientific, Derrida is not saying that both deal with the same sort of phenomena or that they are equally non-provable. His claim is that before one can even consider the effectiveness and evidence of any phenomenon, 47 Jacques Derrida, “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” translated by Rachel Bowlby, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 76. 48 “Clearly,” Derrida says, “if I place so much emphasis on the miracle and on the fact that one sees the miracle on stage, it is because the primary miracle, the most ordinary of miracles is precisely ‘believe me!’ When one say to someone, ‘believe me!’ the appeal to proof is itself not provable. What I think in my head, in my inner sanctum, will, for infinite structural reasons, never be accessible to you; you will never know what’s going on on the other side. You can simple ‘believe…’ Everything that exceeds the order of orignary perception or of proof presents itself as miraculous: the alterity of the other, what the other has in his head, in his intention or in his consciousness, in inaccessible to an intuition or to a proof; the ‘believe me’ is permanently inhabited by the miracle.” See: Jacques Derrida, “Above All, No Journalists!,” translated by Samuel Weber, in Religion and Media, edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 76. 31 marvelous or mechanical, banal or miraculous, one must give an elementary credit to the speaker—whether a “qualified” scientist, authorized by the scientific community, or wandering prophet—and avow “I believe what you tell me.” Science and religion, faith and knowledge, as Micahel Naas explains of Derrida’s analyses of the topic, “share a common source” because “an originary or elementary faith…is anterior to every science and is the quasi-transcendental condition of all knowledge.” 49 Science promises to tell the truth and its publics believe that it will do as promised; “the promise of performative faith,” Naas says, “makes science itself performative.” 50 In spite of the violent reduction I have made to Derrida’s works that take up these matters (which I’ve done liberally since the third chapter explores them in greater detail), a principal conclusion to be drawn from this discussion is that Western secular culture, a culture that values proof and the end results of evidential case-making, is still exceedingly credulous, and therefore, not so far removed from the past that it recurrently deems primitive in order to differentiate and legitimize itself. Derrida’s Ghost Dance monologue, along with the numerous works that either follow it or address these themes, avers that the techno-scientific drive, the race to become technical, rational, and logical of the Western world, is doubly haunted by the specter of belief: on one hand, the daily dissemination of moving images, other kinds of recordings, and media contests the location and presence of things in the world, which we either doubt or believe; on the other, the technologies that we don’t understand, that we can’t stop to see and scrutinize, the devices which operate in the absence of our knowledge and command, require blind faith that they will work as promised. We trust, 49 Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 86. 50 Ibid. 32 or are expected to trust, the authority of others who have (hopefully) verified and vetted their proofs among their peers and made their cases beyond a reasonable doubt. But even then and there, amongst the most esteemed communities of public and private techno- scientific accreditation and development, Derrida maintains that belief undergirds each and every process, claim, and invention. At bottom, we must believe. If Derrida’s argument is taken seriously and generalized, then one can no longer presuppose that case-making protocols and the constative speech acts constituting them are belief- and/or performative-free; in the end, there is nothing absolutely knowledge- based, nothing entirely grounded on reason alone, including the university, film and media studies, and the objective, empirical, and historical scholarship and dissertations that are said to come from within those places. And so, to posit deconstruction’s timeliness for contemporary film and media studies under the presupposition that it could or should be done through belief-free protocols and grounds, to believe that its suitability, relevance, and applicability could or should come through juridical logic alone, would both neglect the necessary risk of deconstruction’s performativity and deny what Derrida’s works make tremble within supposedly disinterested frameworks of calculation. It is for these reasons that the title “To Open Again the Closing Argument” was chosen for this section instead of something such as “Opening Statement.” While “opening statements” always occur at the beginning of a trial, they are, in principle, limited to an exhibition of facts and without a categorical argument; an “opening statement” should be, again in principle, restricted to constative utterances that outline and describe the generalities of the proceeding case. On the other hand, “closing 33 arguments” are persuasively deployed in order to make the jury believe in what they declare. Unlike “opening statements,” “closing arguments” proclaim belief and beseech those within an earshot to accept them as the truth or allow these beliefs to disrupt those that may be held by listeners. No doubt, Derrida’s designation of an originary performativity as the source of all constative statements, no matter how factual and objective they may sound, muddles the clear division between what is said (in principle) to take or have its place at the beginning and the end of a trial; despite contrary assumptions and expectations, both “opening statements” and “closing arguments” are performative. Momentarily setting aside this originary entanglement, it seemed appropriate to “open” this chapter’s case in a manner and under a heading announcing forthcoming professions of faith. Opening with a closing statement suggests that one jumps right to the case’s core belief without delay or alibi. It says up front that the advancing case will broadcast a profession of faith at the beginning, and that this case, as the inserted word “again” suggests, is not necessarily the first time it has been made. By foregrounding the processes through which explicit beliefs “officially” enter the courtroom, the title “To Open Again the Closing Argument” also nods to the appeals process associated with appellate courts—as if the claims of the case had already been heard elsewhere and a previous ruling erred in its findings. To open a case again stresses a certain dissatisfaction with the way things have been set by those possessing the power to judge and make decisions. The appeal that follows is, then, also an appeal in this sense; it intimates that this isn’t the first case (or appeal) that argues for deconstruction’s timeliness for film and media studies, and as such, it at once inherits and is galvanized by past judgments while taking on the risk that it will only reaffirm them. 34 This chapter emphasizes belief’s performative modality because its disavowal would not only miss what deconstruction does and calls on its readers to do, but also because such an effacement would neutralize deconstruction’s untimely timeliness for contemporary film and media studies. Although Derrida does not mention them by name in his Ghost Dance cameo, would it be too farfetched to view contemporary film and media studies as a (if not the) privileged site in which the critical analyses of ghosts and belief would take or have their place? By virtue of its positions, objects, thematic focuses, and discourses, the field would appear to be—or else could be—singularly equipped to probe and address the untimeliness of the future, the phantoms empowered by technical media, and the role and function of belief today. Can one deny that Derrida’s impromptu remarks in Ghost Dance implicate that the rigorous study of film and media should, like deconstructive thought, avow ghosts and their activity everywhere, including the places, institutions, and discourses that either proclaim themselves or are assumed to be ghost- free? This avowal would not consolidate into an ossified knowledge of or even a concrete belief in ghosts; in the place of a knowledge and a belief in, this profession of faith would resonate with Derrida’s comments from the epigraph concerning the “modality of the experience of the spectral.” 51 Through their commitment to ghosts and to the future, film and media studies would safeguard a place within the university for the “I don’t know” as the proper response to “fantasy and revenants… [as] the only way to take them into account in their very effective power.” 52 Those within the filed would also ideally remain on vigilant watch for declarations of the contrary; as a counter-institution, film and media 51 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 137. 52 Ibid., (emphasis added). 35 studies would seek out and take on announcements proclaiming both the determined effectiveness and absence of ghosts. “I believe that…the future belongs to ghosts [je crois…que l’avenir est aux fantômes],” Derrida says on film. Perhaps, then, the institution called “film and media studies” should (re)affirm its right and singular facility to think the future that will be and will have been ghostly or cinematic. This (re)affirmation would indicate that now is the “right time” for this institution to embrace and perform “deconstructive practices,” as Derrida calls them in “The University Without Condition,” which would engage the scholarship and pedagogy populating it and the place and/or places from which they emerge. 53 Perhaps a certain untimely arrival has or could come to and for film and media studies and this untimeliness has (or will have) had the effect of ripening their time for deconstruction. 54 In the spirit of case making—and after hearing an important parenthetical remark, “[w]hy not just say it directly and without wasting time?” from “The University Without Condition” as a not-so-subtle insinuation that things get moving— I would like to put forth, as directly and clearly as possible, what I’ve been referring to as this chapter’s 53 Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” in Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 208. 54 In many ways, the “returns” to classical film theory and the media “archaeologies” currently taking place in the field suggest a certain deconstructive engagement with history and/or historiography, although these studies have not turned to Derrida’s work in a sustained manner. For a brief discussion of deconstruction’s relation to these trends, see James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland, “Double Exposures: Derrida and Cinema, an Introductory Séance,” in Discourse 37, nos.1-2 (2015): 2-22. For a few examples of these returns and archaeologies, see Dudley Andrew, Anton Kaes, Sarah Keller, Stuart Liebman, Annette Michelson, and Malcolm Turvey, “Roundtable on the Return to Classical Film Theory,” October 148 (2014): 5-26; Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert- Laurencin, eds., Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” CiNéMas 14, nos. 2-3 (2004): 75-117; and Naoum Kleinman and Antonio Somaini, eds., Notes pour une histoire générale du cinéma (Paris: AFRHC, 2014). 36 appeal. 55 The appeal that makes and undoes this chapter’s case goes something like this: Derrida’s works and deconstructive thought are not only timely for contemporary film and media studies for what they offer the analysis of cinema and media, but also, and perhaps more significantly today, for their call that the field critically examine its place or places within the university in general and relationship to the Humanities in particular. Derrida’s profession of faith “in the university and, within the university…in the Humanities of tomorrow,” a profession that typifies deconstructive ethicopolitics, beseeches those who work and think within film and media studies to contemplate their institutional future with the future—that is to say, the crucial role played by the field and those within it in determining the future that they and others (inside and outside of the university) will inhabit. Deconstruction, as an appeal and a profession of faith, always, if indirectly and elliptically, tests the commitments of its readers and listeners. Its timeliness is therefore summoned by its call that the field and those within it respond from where they are and address their place or places through what is today taking or having place there. This does simply produce a “state of the field” overview. In addition to calling on those apparently within a place to examine critically the frameworks and directions of said place, an appeal to and for deconstruction also seeks to ignite inventive practices that exceed pre-given configurations. In other words, Derrida’s appeal to and for deconstructive performativity in “The University Without Condition” speaks to an inventive modality that opens containers (or institutions) to the arrival of the unprecedented or that which comes as and from the future. Such performativity thus 55 Ibid., 204. Indeed, Derrida’s use of the word “appeal” and performative mode of address from that same essay animate that term’s repetition and the modality undertaken throughout this chapter. For example, on the tone and ambitions of “The University Without Condition,” Derrida says that “it will be less a thesis, or even a hypothesis, than a declarative engagement, an appeal in the form of a profession of faith: faith in the university and, within the university, faith in the Humanities of tomorrow” (Ibid., 202) [emphasis added]. 37 exceeds everyday performatives that enact something within the realm of the possible; it requires untimely inventiveness. Hopefully, by now, the contours of this particular appeal are coming into sharper focus: to profess faith in the timeliness of deconstruction for contemporary film and media studies involves examining that which they broadcast as timely. In addition to critically probing the institutional place(s) and conventions of the field, this appeal, as a deconstructive response to deconstruction, in a way confronts its own untimeliness, relative nonappearance, and/or perceived irrelevance within this broadcast. This is not meant as a condemnation of those within or affiliated with the field. For it would be absurd to presuppose that the commitments transmitted by the field today as a field speak for all of those therein or nearby, just as it would be equally absurd to consider the appeal to and for deconstruction as some salvation for them and/or contemporary film and media studies—as if the proceeding case had some promised land as its target. Rather, and as I will explore below, by confronting its relative absence within contemporary film and media studies, this appeal examines its institutional neglect without proffering itself as an antidote or path to redemption. While this relative absence recalls Bennington’s remark that untimely arrivals haunt and generate the “right time,” the case for deconstruction’s timeliness also seems connected to past and possible resistances to it, whether these oppositions take the form of passive neglect or outright denunciation. “Making” this case requires the adoption of a sort of dual approach: one must take on the roles of the prosecutor, who shoulders the burden of proof, and the defendant, who, in standing accused (or already judged in the case of an appeal) before his or her peers, resists the charges of the prosecution. If I am 38 here suggesting that the case for deconstruction’s timeliness demands an engagement with its resistances from both ends of the courtroom, it is because I believe that deconstruction should be taken, understood, and characterized as a kind of resistance and that resistances to its resistance disclose commitments that deserve elaboration. In short, and as I hope to demonstrate throughout this chapter, to appeal to and for deconstruction is to commit to resistance; the untimeliness of this resistance is precisely what catalyzes deconstruction’s timeliness for contemporary film and media studies. Understanding the case for deconstruction’s timeliness as resistance at once returns to the challenges it presents for both case making protocols and constative utterances and alludes to what can be seen as deconstruction’s general resistance to resistance, or put otherwise, and in the modality favored by Maurice Blanchot and repeatedly deployed and examined by Derrida, its resistance without resistance. 56 Building on these concerns of reception and defense, “resistance to resistance” or “resistance without resistance” draws on the key theme pursued and named by Peggy Kamuf in her “Introduction: Event of Resistance,” which, following a long foreword by Derrida, introduces his 2001 book that she translated and edited, Without Alibi. In a manner that I’ve been more or less referencing implicitly in the preceding pages, Kamuf arrives at theme of resistance through her address of the “imagined or anticipated objections” of English-speaking readers upon their encounters with Derrida’s essays in the volume, and particularly their frustration with the recurring non-translated (or 56 Derrida spends considerable time with Blanchot’s formulation “X without X” in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2000) and Parages, edited by John P. Leavy, translated by Tom Conely, et al. (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2011). 39 translation-resistant) French word œuvre. 57 In the place of deploying a litany of possible resistances to be opposed, Kamuf undertakes an analysis of “a figure of resistance to address it as such, as resistance…not to abandon resistance—what would life be without it?—but rather to sharpen it, test it, focus it, learn to know what it is that must be resisted.” 58 The problem with addressing “resistance as such,” as Kamuf soon points out, is that it resists conceptualization. After elaborating numerous occurrences of the word “resistance” in Derrida’s essays, Kamuf insists that we cannot know what it means in general. “[W]hose resistance? To what? The resistance of what to what?” she asks; such questions of and brought about by resistance are, according to her, interminable and therefore without an “end of response.” 59 For Kamuf, resistance, or better, the resistance that deconstructive thought engages and commits to affirm, does not entail the generality of a concept, but the singularity of response, which, in turn, precludes its conceptualization, generalization, and prefiguration as a program that would render resistance no longer endlessly resistant. If each and every response possesses and/or poses some resistance through its singular spatiotemporal position, “as this one and no other,” as Kamuf portrays it, if the acts of reading, speaking, listening, and perceiving are made possible by the differential and selective processes associated with writing, as Derrida elaborates throughout his corpus, then resistance as response “does not mean cancellation, annulment, destruction, or negation…” 60 In other words, deconstructive thought opens or releases resistant forces 57 Peggy Kamuf, “Introduction: Event of Resistance,” in Without Alibi (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 7. 58 Ibid., 7. 59 Ibid., 12. 40 that counter the negativity often allied with resistance. Kamuf’s analysis of resistance as response enables one to consider deconstruction’s “resistance to resistance” and/or “resistance without resistance,” insofar as the latter terms within these two formulations refer to a more common negative response. Resistance, says Kamuf, “means resistance (whatever that means).” 61 What this means is that resistance, as a singular response, “as this one and no other,” cannot be bottled-up and contained within or under a single meaning; to say resistance “means resistance (whatever that means)” is to call forth the impossibility of appropriating, knowing for certain, and thus, generalizing the singularity of each and every response. One cannot know, in all certainty, the locales of response and the identities of responders. For who or what responds/resists? Is it a legal subject, an “I” or “me”? Doesn’t the resistance as response evoked here at once interminably expand who or what responds beyond the human subject while rendering untenable the enclosure and certainty of that very subject? Without invalidating or canceling the “I’ or “me,” wouldn’t resistance to resistance and/or the force of resistance without resistance also contest the grounds of that subject’s erasure or refutation? Such resistance, Kamuf emphasizes, must be understood as “infinite or abyssal”; as such, it is (whatever “it” is) non-opposable and without contrary. 62 Surpassing, dismissing, or even ignoring resistance are all responses elicited by and to another response, some resistance, however passive or active, secret or public, complicit or defiant. There would always be some response—and thus, some resistance—somewhere. 60 Ibid., 13, 15. 61 Ibid., 15. 62 Ibid., 12. Kamuf is here citing and working through Derrida’s use of the phrase “abyssal and infinite resistance” in an essay included in Without Alibi. See: Jacques Derrida, “‘Le Parjure,’ Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying” translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf, in Without Alibi (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 177. 41 One could imagine here a growing list of possible objections: Why underscore the figure and force of “abyssal or infinite” resistance as the unassimilable singularity of each and every response? How does deconstruction’s resistance to resistance and/or resistance without resistance figure into the aims of this chapter and project? What does all of this have to do with Derrida’s works timeliness for contemporary film and media studies? What about the university and the Humanities? Enough already, get to the point… With these concerns in mind, allow me to state this without further delay: If the preceding discussion of deconstructive thought’s relation to resistance not only announces its attention to the singularity of response but also an unmistakable commitment to its taking up of resistance, then this particular relation, I’d like to suggest, both figures deconstruction as resistance (as resistance to resistance and/or resistance without resistance) and constitutes the force of its timeliness today in general and for contemporary film and media studies in particular. The appeal to and for deconstruction’s place within contemporary film and media studies responds to their potential as crucial sites of resistance. These sites would support and be supported by the university and the Humanities, the places that Derrida affirms as resistant in “The University Without Condition.” And so, this chapter’s appeal to and for the ongoing deconstructive engagement of contemporary film and media studies and their place or places within the university and the Humanities—which, includes the analysis of the field’s sundry frames and foundations that disturb the stability of its place/places and those of the institutions (i.e. the university and the Humanities) that provide its place(s)— believes in the urgency of instituting resistance today and in the university as a (if not the) decisive site wherein this resistance can and must foster. The resistance that can and must take or have its place 42 in the university (and by extension, in the Humanities and in contemporary film and media studies) needs to be incessantly resisted. To foster this kind of resistance in the university is not a commitment to perfection (insofar as one may wrongly assume that perfection is possible or attainable) but perfectibility—their permanent imperfections call forth the urgency of each, and at the same time, the university as a site of resistance. For Derrida, this urgency demands that the university: be granted in principle, besides what is called academic freedom, an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even going still further, the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth…The university professes the truth, and that is its profession. It declares and promises an unlimited commitment to the truth. No doubt the status of and the changes in the value of truth can be discussed ad infinitum (truth as adequation or truth as revelation, truth as the object of theoretico-constative discourses or as poetico-performative events, and so forth). But these are discussed, precisely, in the university and in the departments that belong to the Humanities. 63 The “unconditional university” for which Derrida pleads would be buoyed by the questions and assertions that are proper to and engaged within the Humanities and the departments that comprise them. According to Derrida, the “new Humanities” that accompanies, gives rise to, and is produced by the “university without condition” would continue its traditions of critical questioning and protecting canons, while expanding to “include law, ‘legal studies,’ as well as what is called in this country [the United States of America], where this formation originated, ‘theory’ (an original articulation of literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and so forth), but also, of course, in all these place, deconstructive practices.” 64 The Humanities of today and of tomorrow embody the key sites within the university where deconstruction takes or has its 63 Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” 202. 64 Ibid., 208. 43 privileged place; along with a certain spirit of the university and the Humanities departments in which it is “practiced,” deconstruction asserts that these places exist and operate without conditions. This is another way of saying that the university and the Humanities demand and should be granted a right to unconditional resistance, and that the very seeds of this right to resist without condition are already there within them. The possibility of the “unconditional university” and the “new Humanities” to come therefore responds to and affirms these seeds of resistance always already there. Within the university and the Humanities, then, one hears the appeal to affirm their right to unconditionality. If traced to its source, this appeal, following Derrida, would lead to the university’s profession of and to truth. What takes or has its place within the university’s “unlimited commitment to the truth” can be seen as an unyielding deconstructive resistance to the truths imposed on and inherited within it. The pledge to the truth is, in this way, a promise to “unlimited” resistance, to resist ceaselessly Truth and its guises in the name or principle of truth, and to struggle to do so without conditions. While the recurrence of and insistence on truth in “The University Without Condition” may startle some readers who have hastily accepted misconceptions about deconstruction’s relation to this word (that is, that deconstruction opposes and/or destroys truth, or that it declares that nothing is true, etc.), Derrida maintains that the university’s profession to pursue the truth without condition, a pursuit which takes or has its most proper place within the Humanities, involves “not only a principle of resistance, but a force of resistance—and of dissidence.” 65 Derrida’s distinction here of “a force” from and in addition to “a principle” underscores the kind of resistance (and dissidence) that deconstruction seeks and affirms within and through the university. A resistant and 65 Ibid., 206-207 (emphasis added). 44 dissident force signifies that it resists its containment within the presumed limits of any institution; this force thus productively contaminates the proverbial “ivory tower” often affiliated with the activities and places of “higher learning.” Instead of re-inscribing institutional borders, “a force of resistance…and of dissidence” takes or has its place on and at these borders, which is to say that university’s institutionalization, the positing of its limits that determine its inside and outside and itself as an autonomous and self- contained entity, institutes its de-institutionalization. An automatic, autoimmune deconstructive force can be seen to complement each and every institutionalization; each and every positing of supposedly indivisible divisions divides from within, and for Derrida, the Humanities provide the places for the thinking and deploying of this deconstructive force in the university. While I will return to this point later, this does not spell the destruction of the university, nor does it signal Derrida’s desire to renounce and move on from it. On the contrary, the university has never been, nor will it ever be, closed off from that which is considered beyond it; the Humanities are the places ostensibly within the university that reaffirm explicitly its relation to the outside. But in doing so, Derrida contends that the Humanities must not only uphold the university’s vital connection to its outside “by allying with extra-academic forces” and “organiz[ing] an inventive resistance” with them through scholarship, research, and activism that would exceed constative and quotidian performative modalities; they must also refuse to cooperate with “all attempts at reappropriation (political, juridical, economic, and so forth)” from predatory “figures of sovereignty.” 66 Because its borders are always already divisible, the university remains vulnerable to these figures. And so, its resistance must selectively oppose “all the powers that limit democracy to come” as well as “current and 66 Ibid., 236. 45 determined figure[s] of democracy” in the name of this futural and impossible democracy and its profession to the principle of truth. 67 The force of endless questioning and critical analysis that exceeds both criticism and analysis takes or has its place in the Humanities that Derrida affirms. In this way, they are both there and not there, at once, geographical sites tethered to virtual places. The affirmative inheritance of the Humanities that Derrida performs in “The University Without Condition” and throughout his oeuvre therefore discloses their promise to the future, which is not the revelation or transmission of a program. Rather, what is disclosed is a call to (re)propose this inherited promise to the truth, to the future, to democracy, resistance, and so forth, and to do so in manner that takes on the inventiveness that the Humanities bequeaths to their inheritors. To do justice to the Humanities is to appeal to and for their place(s). Taking or having place there, in the Humanities, in the places that have and must continue to resist sovereign emplacement and indivisibility, means the necessary and productive disruption of the in and place where one thinks one is in the world. There and not there, the Humanities today and to come, according to Derrida’s profession of faith in them, promote the loosening and/or loss of one’s bearings in the world through the resistance they generate and confirm; in turn, this disruption and loosening of the in and of place means that the university without condition, as that which gives and ensures the places of unconditional resistance to emplacement, “is less a place” says Kamuf “…than a doubling or thinking of place.” 68 The “doubling or thinking of place,” which Derrida would likely associate with the thinking that is most proper to the departments comprising the Humanities, signals that “[t]he university without 67 Ibid., 205. 68 Kamuf, “Introduction,” 16. 46 conditions…takes place, it seeks its place wherever this unconditionality can take shape.” 69 On one hand, then, there is already this “doubling or thinking of place” occurring within the university and the Humanities today. Both sites, in their own ways and in one shape or another, implicitly or overtly, have resisted and continue to contest both their emplacements as places and the figures of sovereignty that supposedly take or have their places beyond them. On the other hand, the “unconditional university” and the “new Humanities,” which do not exist today and remain pragmatically and strategically impossible, would explicitly take up deconstructive resistance and this “doubling or thinking of place” with what Derrida calls an “abstract and hyperbolic invincibility.” 70 Unlike the known figures of the university, the university that we have inherited and work in and for today, the university without condition would harbor a certain indestructible protection, perhaps an undeconstructibility, through its commitment to the truth and the force of its resistance and dissidence. As neither a method nor an institution, the university without condition seeks and finds its places everywhere, “wherever this unconditionality can take shape”; it takes or has neither a single nor proper place, only places where it “takes shape” in order to resist some phantomatic figure of sovereignty. “Abstract and hyperbolic invincibility” would thus stem from the a priori placelessness or groundlessness that always already characterizes both deconstructive thought and what it discovers already at work within the places that assume the sovereign indivisibility of their borders. 71 69 Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” 236. 70 Ibid., 206. 71 One could feasibly forge a link between the unconditional university’s “abstract and hyperbolic invincibility” and the call to justice that Derrida explicitly addresses in “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” translated by Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice 47 Put differently, the resistance that the university and the Humanities catalyze—a resistance that would be infinitely accelerated and expanded with the arrival of something such as the “university without condition” and the “new Humanities”— exposes and deconstructs the concept and practices of indivisible sovereignty in the world, including those that threaten the very places that support this resistance and commit to its unconditionality. If indivisible sovereignty, which Derrida calls a “phantasm” at three points in “The University Without Condition,” already encounters a deconstructive force in and through places such as the university and the Humanities, if the figures of this phantasm in and as the world summon an urgent commitment to unconditional resistance from these places, then the university’s right to unconditionality must be affirmatively disassociated from “sovereign mastery.” 72 Affirmatively because an effective deconstruction of indivisible sovereignty, a deconstruction worthy of the name, implies that its force opposes replicating the exclusionary, and thus, negative tactics of the sovereignty it engages, even if Derrida accedes that the “unconditional independence” or unrestricted academic freedom of the university without condition “claim[s] a sort of sovereignty.” 73 The university without condition asserts its independence through a sovereignty without sovereignty, an autonomy evoking not the myth of mastery or self- edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gary Carlson, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3- 67 and Specters of Marx. The university’s protection would be constituted by the inexhaustibility of the injunction that calls on it and to which it commits. This injunction or call of justice necessitates, “the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who already dead” (Specters of Marx, xvii). It would be as if ghosts manned the university’s defenses and ensured its frontiers and future through what Derrida calls the “visor-effect” (Ibid., 6). Ghosts from the future and the past (not yet born/already dead) would endlessly protect the university through their resistance to being seen, identified, and localized. Their call to the university and the university’s pledge to it would render its defenses elsewhere, immune to counterattack, invincible. 72 Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” 235. 73 Ibid., 206. 48 enclosure, but what Derrida insists on as the essential “powerlessness of unconditionality.” 74 Sovereignty without sovereignty’s “powerlessness” indicates both the impossibility and necessity of the university’s “abstract and hyperbolic invincibility.” Because unconditionality exposes, as Derrida says, “the weakness or the vulnerability of the university…its impotence, the fragility of its defenses against all the powers that command it, besiege it, and attempt to appropriate it,” the right to unlimited academic freedom must be actively fought for and carried out not only in principle; to reiterate a point made above, the university without condition activates and demands “a force of resistance—and of dissidence” that protects itself as it seeks out the phantasms of sovereignty. 75 Dissociating sovereignty as a political onto-theological fable from the university’s independence constitutes one of the most pressing and outwardly political concerns of “The University Without Condition.” He views the university’s relative “weakness or vulnerability” as its all too fragile autonomy, and it is this passivity, this power of powerlessness—at once the university’s ability and liability, its facility to resist and be overrun and assimilated—that calls for defense. In short, if the university is to resist sovereignty in the name of democracy, justice, and the truth, then it must embrace and affirm the fragility of its independence and the suppleness of its rigor. 76 After 74 Ibid., 232. 75 Ibid., 206. 76 The phrase “the suppleness of its rigor” refers to both Kamuf’s deployment of the word “supple” in “Introduction: The Event of Resistance,” 20, and Derrida’s characterization of the term as “essentially and by vocation not very rigid” in his foreword to Without Alibi. In the fourth endnote of “Provocation: Forewords,” Derrida further explains that his usage follows and is indebted to Kamuf’s. “As one might suspect,” he says, “‘supple’ carries no negative connotation.” Instead, Derrida stresses that the suppleness that he and Kamuf describe must be thought of as kind of rigorous “plasticity” that exceeds the “indetermination, fuzziness, [and] lack of rigor” often associated with “suppleness,” while, at the same 49 acknowledging that this indispensable powerlessness leads to the university occasionally selling itself to the highest bidder and “becoming a branch of conglomerates and corporations,” Derrida remarks that the demand of unconditional independence amongst increasing corporate and industrial sponsorship represents “today, in the United States and throughout the world, a major political stake.” 77 Whether or not this sponsorship implies the indirect or direct influence of corporate/industrial/military interests, Derrida observes that this intermingling happens through the university’s inherent porous borders and frequently results in the Humanities being “held hostage to departments of pure or applied science in which are concentrated the supposedly profitable investments of capital foreign to the academic world.” 78 Instead of the Humanities taking or having an essential place in the university, they are often viewed today as if they were the university’s supplemental “pet projects” because they lack the capital-making potential of other departments; this observation goes hand-in-hand with what Derrida describes in “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” namely, the university’s “end-oriented” drive to produce graduates with marketable competencies and/or skills. The Humanities and the university (and by extension, democracy, justice, and truth) must endure and actively take on these risks; rather than defending their worth by adopting the market idiom and extolling their students’ marketable skills and abilities to produce useful commodities, the Humanities must affirm the urgency of their right to unconditional resistance, and as Derrida avers, “be quick about it.” 79 time, opposing the “rigidity” aligned with rigor. See Jacques Derrida, “Provocation: Forewords,” translated by Peggy Kamuf, in Without Alibi, xxii, 282 (endnote 4). 77 Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” 206. 78 Ibid., 206. 50 Given the preceding reductive and schematic sketch of Derrida’s profession of faith in the university and in the Humanities, in addition to the ongoing appeal to this profession for contemporary film and media studies, I’d like to offer rapidly the following (perhaps contentious) observation, accusation, and/or belief, which foregrounds the themes of the ensuing section and will be substantiated later in this study: The exceptionality of deconstruction’s timeliness for contemporary film and media studies seems inseparable from the field’s vague affiliation with and commitment to the Humanities today. Deconstruction can be viewed as asserting its timeliness for the field because the former’s unmistakable pledge to the Humanities and to the university as sites of resistance diverges from the unclear commitments of the latter. While I will elaborate in greater detail the stakes of this “vagueness” and how I’ve arrived at this distinction, exceptionality (or more precisely, deconstruction’s exceptional timeliness for contemporary film and media studies) is here, once again, produced by dissimilarity and a certain untimeliness. In other words, the field’s murky affiliation with and commitment to the Humanities today indirectly summons deconstruction as a kind of “timely disruption” to the affiliations and commitments it broadcasts. Contemporary film and media studies can thus be seen to conjure (in the double sense of the word) deconstruction’s ghost through their relative avoidance of Derrida’s works, as well as what seems to be their beliefs in what counts as timely today. A “timely disruption” to these beliefs designates that which comes or arrives as untimely, to return to Bennington’s analysis. Not only is this a disruption worthy of the name; it is also conjured and produced through the non-closure or divisibility of things such as programs and institutions, which include beliefs, affiliations, and commitments that, despite their 79 Ibid., 237. 51 attempts or dreams to the contrary, are unsealed from within and always already open to the future. Deconstruction’s timeliness for contemporary film and media studies is therefore exceptional because their vague affiliations with and commitments to the Humanities today remain open to critical questioning and as such, transformation. Of course, this claim of exceptionality could be countered by citing the unfortunate fact the field’s vague relations with the Humanities today represent a more general condition felt throughout the university landscape. Theoretically, then, the appeal to and for deconstruction’s timeliness could be made throughout the university, even within those departments that take or have their places beyond the commonly conceived borders of the Humanities— in this light, contemporary film and media studies wouldn’t be so exceptional after all. Although this counterargument is correct, and although I believe in the generality of deconstruction’s exceptional timeliness, the field’s abovementioned privileged position(s) in regard to the analysis of (media) technology, ghosts, and belief today highlights what seems to be the singularity of this exceptionality. Contemporary film and media studies proximity to and intimacy with these themes relays, I believe, their critical importance to the future of the Humanities. In the same breath, the urgency and timeliness of these themes demand performative modes of inquiry that, as Derrida points out, are proper to the Humanities and the resistance that they can foster. Rather than diminishing deconstruction’s general exceptionality and/or its specific timeliness for contemporary film and media studies, I’d like underscore the significance of the second title Derrida gave to the lecture that became “The University Without Condition,” which Kamuf tells us was: “Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take 52 Place Tomorrow.” 80 The conditional mode of the lecture’s original title speaks to the potential of what could happen or take place in the future if something else was done today. What could take place if contemporary film and media studies and those affiliated or within them proffered a more affirmative commitment to the Humanities? What would happen to the field if those within or affiliated with it increasingly took up deconstructive practices? And how would this engagement effect, appeal to, or resist those who currently engage deconstruction in other departments, disciplines, fields, and practices? Perhaps film and media studies would not only become more openly deconstructive, and thus pledge a more pronounced commitment to the Humanities and to the university as sites of resistance, but also, perhaps they would directly impact and elicit responses from other practitioners of deconstruction, which necessarily implies the response from those who work and practice elsewhere, that is, beyond the field’s presumed institutional limits. Perhaps those practitioners from elsewhere would be encouraged to encounter and/or embrace the discourses of film and media studies in ways that both parties could not have expected. Perhaps, then—and this is the point—film and media studies would assert an exceptional timeliness for the disciplines of the Humanities that are frequently associated with deconstructive thought—such as philosophy, comparative literature, legal studies, English, religious studies, architecture, and French studies, to name a select group— through a shared commitment not only to deconstruction, but also the university’s unconditional resistance. Without a doubt, these other departments are grappling with the ghostly future they’ve inherited and have found themselves in today; they too are dealing with sweeping technological transformations and the accelerating redefinition of the university’s borders, texts, and objectives. 80 Kamuf, “Introduction,” 21. 53 If, as Derrida suggests in Ghost Dance, the future belongs to the ghosts multiplied by media technologies, then what could take place tomorrow in and through film and media studies, thanks to the Humanities? To begin with, the wider incorporation of deconstructive thought into contemporary film and media studies could lead to unforeseen dialogue with the disciplines deemed external to them by activating new avenues of interdisciplinary contact. Deconstructive interdisciplinary contact should not only cultivate novel cross discipline interaction, but also intradisciplinary reflection and analysis. This is what Derrida has in mind when he claims that “[the] Humanities to come will cross disciplinary borders without dissolving the specificity of each discipline into what is called, often in a confused way, ‘interdisciplinarity’ or what is lumped with another good-for-everything concept, ‘cultural studies.’” 81 Following Derrida, interdisciplinary contact should be reformulated in the wake of cultural studies as a process that does not signal the total dissolution of a given discipline’s boundaries, but rather profits from their essential opening and closing. Acquiring knowledge, as Samuel Weber describes, always involves “an openness to the unknown…in order to move beyond a given state of knowledge” and, at the same time, the identification and localization of that which is other and/or hitherto unknown. 82 According to Weber, this latter “tendency” of knowledge acquisition means that the encountered unknown must be assimilated into the grounds of the known for it “to be recognized as knowledge, as valid…[and] reliably distinguished from error or illusion.” 83 If interdisciplinarity names 81 Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” 230 (emphasis added). 82 Samuel Weber, “The Future Campus: Destiny in a Virtual World,” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 21, no. 2 (1999): 153. 83 Ibid. 54 the meeting of entities presumed to be dissimilar, and if this meeting has as its goal the exchange of knowledge, broadening of disciplinary borders, and inevitable and hopefully productive resistance, then this encounter, Weber suggests, also discloses an acquisition or consumption process that is much older than both the modern university and the latest interdisciplinary agendas. Weber’s observations aver that the future of interdisciplinary exchange (deconstructive or not) demands the protection and nourishment of disciplinary differences, instead of their collapse into an umbrella field or discipline. Such a collapse would (which paradoxically could/does happen in the name of a certain misguided concept of difference) hinder the discoveries made possible by the unknown through assimilating different into a phantasm of the same or an all-inclusive community. This is not to say that a given discipline should assume and defend the sovereign indivisibility of its borders—as if each discipline wasn’t always already conversing with and acquiring from what takes or has its place beyond its presumed limits, as if this outside wasn’t both a possibility and a threat. Deconstructive intradiscplinarity acknowledges an originary interdisciplinarity and its history of consumption. For disciplines, just like every institution, open and close as if they are mouths enticed by bait. They may chomp and swallow the lure if it’s found to be generally beneficial (and not a hallucination). And so, after prying into the dietary practices of a particular discipline, a deconstructive intradisciplinary analysis would not only reveal the strangeness of what has been consumed and the effects of its intake and expulsions, but also that the grounds of this discipline are always already fractured and composed by difference. It would insist that the unknown does not arrive from afar but from an elsewhere already within, a mysteriously consumed elsewhere here, inside the limits delineating the proper. 84 84 This formulation of an elsewhere within, or that the only proper elsewhere comes from a beyond within, 55 Under Cross Examination To be clear, the “vagueness” that I’ve suggested characterizes the position of contemporary film and media studies relative to the Humanities is not simply a personal observation, nor is it an impulsive conclusion stemming from my limited time within them. While my experiences in and out of the field, inside and outside academia, and within other institutions and departments certainly color the preceding characterization (or allegation), it’s hardly a secret that contemporary film and studies, like all university departments that have, at one time or another, taken or had their places in the Humanities, have reached a critical crossroads in their institutional existence and evolution. However, and unlike other university departments firmly tethered to the Humanities, such as non- English language departments, philosophy, classics, and comparative literature (to list just a few that are frequently the first to the chopping block), the crossroads at which one finds contemporary film and media studies do not form an explicit junction between the life and death of the field bearing that name. For reasons that I’ll soon explore, contemporary film and media studies seem, at least on an institutional level (and at the time of this writing), particularly robust given the rather dire situation of the university today, where foreboding symptoms are often experienced most acutely in the Humanities. And yet, since its institutionalization, film references Derrida’s comment about the French word ailleurs (elsewhere) in Safaa Fathy’s 1999 film, D’ailleurs Derrida. “It is a matter of thinking from this limit-crossing. The ailleurs, even when it is very nearby, is always the beyond of some limit but in oneself, one has the limit in one’s heart, in one’s body, that is what ailleurs means, the elsewhere is here. If the elsewhere were elsewhere, it would not be an elsewhere.” Translation from Peggy Kamuf, “Stunned: Derrida on Film,” in To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 113. 56 and media studies have grown and continue to grow rapidly. 85 Although it remains to be debated whether or not the field’s explosive institutional rise benefits the university, the Humanities, and the students who pursue graduate work within its domains, the sustained growth of film and media studies signals that their outlook is less grim than many “neighboring” fields, departments, and disciplines traditionally bound to the Humanities. Keeping in mind the relative security of the field’s future place in the university and the obligatory support that attends to such a place, I’d like (re)emphasize that what seems to be at stake within contemporary film and media studies’ crossroads is their commitment to the Humanities and thus, to a certain idea of the university as a site of resistance. Like every crossroads, the field encounters questions concerning direction, destination, and the future—or more specifically here, which future to affirm. If I’ve repeatedly invoked the field’s unique position in relation to other Humanities departments, it is due, then, not only to its discourses and proper objects, but also its relative, contingent, and fragile security in the university today—a place tenuously ensured, no doubt, by the exceptional timeliness extended to the work produced and objects analyzed within its frames. Given the current state of affairs in the university and the well-known predicaments experienced by the Humanities, one may therefore wonder why contemporary film and media studies are thriving and how their exceptional timeliness has been determined. Beyond uncritically pointing to timeliness and its commonplace 85 I’m advancing this fact on the observations documented by the field’s U.S. based professional society (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) and multiple histories of film and media studies. See for example: “Society for Cinema and Media Studies: Organizational History,” accessed September, 11, 2015, http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=org_history; Dudley Andrew, “‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come,” PMLA 115, no. 3 (200): 341-351; Inventing Film Studies, edited by Lee Grievson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); and Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000). 57 synonyms, one may ask what else attends to institutional vitality and less-than-grim outlooks within the university today. Along these lines, one may find it implausible to disassociate neatly contemporary film and media studies’ relative institutional “success” (and/or exceptional timeliness) from the alleged “objective” and “evidential” value assessments that have been increasingly deployed within universities in an effort to measure worth and gauge timeliness. Eliciting Peggy Kamuf’s decisive work on the topic in her essay “Accounterability,” one could, within reason I believe, deduce that the field’s endurance in the university— especially today amidst the unprecedented obstacles the Humanities face from these very assessments—is perhaps in part attributable to its “accountability,” as ascertained through market-driven appraisals of research and teaching. 86 Hence, the particularity of the “vagueness” characterizing the field’s affiliation with and commitment to the Humanities today: although I cannot account for its institutional durability, this endurance opens onto the frameworks and agendas that both enable it and impede or seek to eradicate the resistance found within the university in general, and the Humanities, in particular. In short, contemplating institutional growth and endurance within the university today demands that one take stock of those procedures and practices that permit such vitality. Before further examining contemporary film and media studies’ relatively favorable place within the university, it is imperative, I believe, to outline the insidious stakes of the “accountability movement” and its impact on the educational landscape, 86 See Peggy Kamuf, “Accounterability,” Textual Practice 21.2 (2007): 251-266. 58 especially in the United States. 87 To do so, I’ll exclusively rely on Kamuf’s detailed analysis of the rhetoric and sources underpinning the movement. Namely, my focus will be her engagement with “accountabilist” texts, or those documents and reports written and signed by the most visible accountability advocates, which have and continue to inform policy and public opinion regarding higher learning. A group of them include: Richard H. Hersh, who previously served as a university president, trustee, vice- president, provost, dean, and professor, and directed the College Learning Assessment Project (an offshoot of the RAND Corporation’s Council for Aid to Education) at the time of Kamuf’s writing, which she cites as one of the key developers of “value-added” testing; former U.S. President and Governor of Texas, George W. Bush; Margaret Spellings, the current President of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, who was the U.S. Secretary of Education during Bush’s second presidential term, the Domestic Policy Advisor during his first, and his Senior Advisor during his gubernatorial reign; Geri H. Malandra, present member of the Board of Trustees for Ashford University, a for-profit higher educational institution operated by Bridgepoint Education, Inc., and former provost of and senior advisor to the President of Kaplan University, a for-profit branch of Kaplan Higher Learning Education LLC, a subsidiary of Kaplan Inc., itself a subsidiary of the conglomerate, Graham Holdings Company (Kamuf notes that Malandra was “Associate Vice Chancellor for Institutional Planning and Accountability at the University of Texas” at the time of her writing, which was preceded by both Malandra’s tenure as an associate provost at the University of Minnesota and as an advisor to the 87 Despite the deployment of analogous assessment programs in many different countries (Kamuf mentions Canada, Britain, Australia, and France by name), accountability’s roots are distinctly American. Kamuf goes on to remark that some of its advocates believe that the movement is spreading like a disease, meaning that “it is clearly positioned for export to the world market,” Kamuf, “Accounterability,” 254. 59 then-U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education); and finally, Charles Miller, an investment manager and entrepreneur who—following his appointment to a six-year term of The University of Texas System Board of Regents by then-Governor Bush and subsequent chairing of the Board for nearly four years—former Secretary of Education Spellings named Chairman of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education (popularly referred to as the “Spellings Commission”), in which, along with Malandra and others, he produced the commission’s 2006 report, and thereafter federal educational policy, “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.” 88 The purpose of submitting these incomplete biographical profiles is to introduce not only the figures, architects, and proponents of the accountability movement who populate Kamuf’s essay, but also what will soon become clear about this discourse: the accountability movement is an ideological endeavor to resist preemptively that which does or could resist the powers it protects. Threatened by the dissidence that could take place within and through the university, the accountability discourse, unsurprisingly, has focused its targets on the Humanities and those departments that refuse or lack the capacity to speak the obedient quantitative language it desires. This language speaks under the guise of neutral numbers, “to the accounting of accountancy,” says Kamuf; it “bespeaks the will, or rather the wish, to replace thinking by counting, to displace the responsibility of decision and judgment from the ‘subjective’ 88 Kamuf, Accounterability, 264. For the citations to these texts, see pages 263-266. For more on the Spellings Commission, including meeting transcripts and all published reports, see the U.S. Department of Education’s webpage “A National Dialogue: The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education,” http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/index.html, accessed September 11, 2015. 60 place of thought to the balance sheet of summary numbers that, as we also say, ‘speak for themselves.’” 89 In practice, the accountability discourse assumes, as Kamuf explains, “the quantitative measurability of the value of research and teaching. 90 Wedded to the popular conception of the college years as a financial investment for future capital gain (on both a personal level—i.e. for the student—and a more general market level—i.e. for the unrelenting growth of industry), accountability assessments proceed in a more-or-less straightforward manner, according to Kamuf. Testing, or some other form of numeric evaluation, retrieves “hard data”; the data is then compared with other sets of data, resulting in a determination that provides the ostensible evidence of value. 91 For instance, and to repeat the example from “Accounterability”: students will be given a test at the beginning and end of their studies, which will supposedly illustrate the skills (i.e. “factual knowledge” and/or “critical thinking capacities”) they have gained during their time at a given institution. These result are then compared with results from different institutions (or departments), with their attending tuition costs and fees, leading to a best-value list, in which institutions are ranked by their cost relative to skills acquired (again, “factual knowledge” and/or “critical thinking”). The problem with these sorts of tests isn’t their disclosure of educational costs (after all, this already invites a certain ranking), but the violent quantification of the other variable, which I’ve been calling “skills” with both “factual knowledge” and/or “critical thinking” in parentheses. Although Kamuf points out that test designers defend their assessments by insisting that they evaluate “thinking” 89 Kamuf, “Accounterability,” 252. 90 Ibid., 253, 254. 91 Ibid., 255, 256. 61 and therefore surpass the mere measurement of a tester’s memorization of facts, these tests, as the essential feature of the accountability number crunch, still must translate “thinking” into sets of data—as if “thinking” (whatever that may be or mean) did not inherently resist its quantification, and as if “factual knowledge” and “critical thinking” could be neatly compartmentalized and subsequently compared. Kamuf contends that the impossible quantification and delineation of “thinking” doom in advance any attempt to account completely for it through numeric evaluation, and/or as that which exceeds or opposes “factual knowledge.” Whether the results from accountability assessments are prepared, collected, and appraised by administrative review committees, or proffered from a proud institution to “the skeptical, potential investor, [or] in other words, ‘the parent,” its promise is the same: evidence neutralizes belief. 92 The accountability movement, Kamuf says, “offer[s] the end of belief.” 93 In other words, there is no longer any need to believe in the merits of a particular discipline, for example, because numbers supposedly speak for themselves. Evidence seeks to eradicate doubt; it presumably closes the gap between the experienced and the unknowable that catalyzes belief. Of course, as Kamuf goes on to elaborate—and as I’ve discussed through Derrida’s comments on the topic—evidence is not proof. One must believe in evidential findings and interpretations, even if they hide under the cloak of quantification, even if test results attempt to efface their mediation and production through qualifications such as “direct evidence.” The originary performatives, “believe me,” and “I believe you,” remain necessities. 92 Ibid., 256. 93 Ibid., 257. 62 There are (at least) two critical points from “Accounterability” that warrant attention given the proceeding consideration of contemporary film and media studies’ relative institutional robustness. First, by noticing an uncanny resonance between accountabilist rhetoric and the George W. Bush administration’s controversial pursuit of the “Faith-Based-Initiative”—Bush’s first executive order as president that allowed faith- based organizations to apply for and receive federal aid to provide social services and community aid—Kamuf uncovers that, despite the veneer of incompatibility, the accountability movement and the well-documented attempts of the American rightwing to dissolve the separation of church and state “trace their impulse to the same source.” 94 This source is none other than the Bush administration itself: not only did it establish the “Faith-Based Initiative” but also, as Kamuf notes, it was during Bush’s term as Governor of Texas (1995-2000) when the accountability system “had its test run in the University of Texas system” and began to pick up its advocates (i.e. its believers). 95 According to Kamuf, this explicit link suggests that beyond (or within) the accountability movement’s misguided beliefs about evidence and belief—its belief in the end of belief vis-à-vis hard numbers and evidence— it likewise harbors and converges with a conservative ideology that is explicitly faith-based. For those who partake in this ideology, faith-based institutions (namely, politically conservative and Christian) merit a more pronounced public role, which, in turn, necessitates that they place in their crosshairs the “faith- neutral policies of public agencies, including those with purview over education in 94 Ibid., 258. For the Bush administration’s description of the initiative, see the archived webpage “Compassion in Action: White House Faith-Based & Community Initiative,” http://georgewbush- whitehouse.archives.gov/government/fbci/president-initiative.html, accessed September 11, 2015. 95 Kamuf, “Accounterability,” 258. 63 general, higher education, in particular.” 96 The presence of this latent ideology cannot be wholly dissevered from right-leaning accusations that disparage the university’s liberal bias as the chief factor inhibiting its potential value; nor can it be set aside when those accusations directly inform federal, state, and local policy. Accountability’s promise of the “end of belief” through the artificial neutrality of numbers and evidence is therefore haunted by both its performative-structural impossibility (evidence demands belief) and the traces of its own pledge to a particularly American form of faith-based ideology. Furthermore, and following Kamuf, if the accountability movement has the “faith-neutral policies of public agencies” in its crosshairs, then one can safely assume that the departments of the Humanities occupy the very center of this figurative scope—they are caught in the bulls-eye of calculative assessment, always already on the clock, seconds away from the “value-added” chopping block. 97 And so, under the “cover of so-called objective measurement and ‘direct evidence,’” the powers behind the accountability discourse, Kamuf contends, unleash its testing and counting on the university because they believe that institutions such as it need to be “corrected”—that is, made more available for “students…whose views are ‘faith-based’ and/or conservative.” 98 One can easily guess which departments (will) have suffered the most through such “corrections.” They will have been the departments in 96 Ibid., 258. 97 The clock, calculation, exactitude, the figurative “chopping block,” and their importance in U.S, especially Texas, are key themes in, if not some of the motivating factors of, Derrida’s seminars on capital punishment, which he delivered in Paris (at École des huates études en sciences sociales) and the U.S. (at the University of California, Irvine and New York University) from 1999 to 2001. See Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol. 1, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) and the forthcoming The Death Penalty, Vol. 2, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 98 Ibid., 258. 64 which these supposedly objective “corrections” are questioned, resisted, assessed, and found to support phantasms of indivisible sovereignty. If the union between the accountability movement and conservative, overtly faith- based politics represents the first point of emphasis, the second concerns the resistance to this ideological framework that passes itself off as neutral and in pursuit of justice. What is at stake in this discussion Kamuf says, “is precisely whether or not there is analogy between the university and the market”; in other words, is the university today still like the market, or has the gap of difference to which analogies speak closed? 99 Is there left, she asks “a little time to think, to stop calculating and listen at another rhythm for something else, for an incalculability and unforeseeability that cause the accountability programme to stammer or stutter: account, er, ability?” 100 “Accounterability” thus names the questionable capacity to counter the accounting force of accountability and the market’s saturation into every remaining and potential gap (“er”), such as the one provided by the university. As Kamuf asserts, this dilemma is particularly pressing in the U.S. for two reasons: first, the exorbitant costs of American higher education signals massive and discriminatory “unequal access”; and second, the lack of control over the unwieldy post-secondary landscape, while a strength in certain respect as it pertains to institutional diversity and specialization, means that “ even to speak of ‘the’ university in the U.S. is to commit something like a category mistake” since there is no single university model. 101 The accountability movement simultaneously seeks to control and profit from the capital flows and disorder of the post-secondary landscape by finding and 99 Ibid., 254. 100 Ibid., 253 (emphasis added). 101 Ibid., 254, 255. 65 fashioning the university as a business that sells degrees. It is, therefore, no longer a case of speaking about the university as if it were like a market: “The university must be said, must be found, in other words, must be made to occupy a space…which simply is the market.” 102 And as an integral part of the marketplace, the university must be judged and regulated accordingly, or accountably, so justify the accountabilists; it must be held accountable through means proper to the market because the university is there as one business among others. The faith-based source of the accountability movement (and its belief in the end of belief via quantitative evidence) indicates that both market deregulation and the “corrective” measures currently levied against the university, of which the Humanities naturally bear the brunt, share a similar ideological anchoring. The dissimulated unfastening of the “faith-neutral policies” that should belong to and guide the university leads Kamuf to make the following avowal: “accountabilism deserves to be countered in the name of the oldest principles of the post-Enlightenment, non-faith-based university. It deserves to be, that is, it ought to be, it should be, and I believe it must be.” 103 For some, professing a necessary belief as the countering resistance to the encroachment of this faith-based ideology and its guises (as the market, as the accountability movement, and as suspicious federal initiatives and commissions) may seem an odd or even contradictory maneuver. “To speak of a necessary belief,” she says, perhaps in anticipation of possible resistances, “is to cross, it seems, two orders that ought to remain utterly heterogeneous with each other.” 104 The appearance of this heterogeneity or contradiction, the necessity 102 Ibid., 255. 103 Ibid., 259. 66 of believing and the necessity of belief, summons a point made repeatedly throughout this chapter and developed at-length in the conclusion to “Accounterability”: demanding belief, insisting that one not only be believed, but on the very necessity of belief, is what we are doing all of the time when we encounter the testimony of the other or assume the role of the witness. We are tacitly required to believe and we demand that we be believed. In short, belief, as the originary performative of every claim, however banal or extraordinary, is always conditioned by its necessity; it is necessary, one must believe. By professing belief in the countering force of “the post-Enlightenment, non-faith-based university,” Kamuf is not advocating for some nostalgic return to a previous university that would magically neutralize faith-based politics. In a similar gesture to Derrida’s affirmative inheritance of the university and the Humanities as sites of unconditional resistance in “The University Without Condition,” Kamuf’s belief in the “Enlightenment…as the historical counter-force to ‘faith based’ social and political institutions” hinges on the fact that its arrival remains an “encounter to come.” 105 An effective deconstructive resistance to the figures of indivisible sovereignty requires the affirmative inheritance of something from the past that has not yet arrived; it demands those in the university, and particularly in the Humanities, to defend and think these places in the name of what the Enlightenment introduced but did not fully realize. At the same time, resistance to the encroachment of faith-based politics into the university would also insist on a certain non- or impossible total arrival of the “post-Enlightenment, non-faith based university,” which is to say that its virtuality would continue to necessitate an affirmative and performative inheritance, even if its principle enacted 104 Ibid., 259. 105 Ibid., 260. 67 “material” changes and/or effects. Not only does this non-arrival mean that non-faith based university remains and will remain perfectible, but also its virtuality demands work just as much as the material institutions it informs. This virtuality also awaits invention; its disruptive performativity calls for the performative appeal of its advent. To be clear, my attention to the scaffoldings of the accountability movement and the numeric assessment of educational value is not motivated by a belief in contemporary film and media studies’ direct complicity with them. Rather, my interest stems from the fact that the field seems to be doing something “right” in the face of these pressures, that is, film and media studies continue to attract students and therefore “justify” their financial and institutional support. Perhaps, then, it is within reason to assume that the field is weathering the figurative numeric storm through the buoyancy of its determined value and the strength of their numbers. If this assumption is fair and/or accurate, the crossroads at which contemporary film and media studies finds themselves (if they’re still there) implies the prospect or threat of their attenuation, notwithstanding the present comparative security of their institutional future. This secure future—which is closer to the calculations, methods, or programs of assessment—represents one possibility or direction for the field in which value serves as the chief barometer of timeliness. The other future, with its call to make an explicit commitment to unconditional resistance, would no doubt lead to critical questions about the explosive growth of and relative security afforded to contemporary film and media studies within the university. And so, it almost goes without saying that committing to this future would be a risk. As mentioned above, deconstructive resistance engages the placement of one’s place, and in so doing, performatively displaces institutions and conventions in the name of justice and 68 democracy. This displacement does not arise from some exterior threat, but from a virtuality, an elsewhere, an autoimmune division, and/or some untimeliness that both makes possible the very placement or institutionalization of a place and the disruption that always already divides it from within. To choose the calculated programmatic future can be viewed to efface an institution’s inherent call to and for the other, unforeseeable future, however risky it may seem. Which Film and Media Studies? For Whom or What? Perhaps the following questions are arriving too late in the present study: What, then, are “film and media studies?” What have they done, what do they do, and from where have they arrived? Are “film and media studies” completely synonymous with what I’ve been calling the “field?” And finally, if the insistence on their/its “contemporary” formation highlights their/its relative institutional security and expansion in comparison to the current predicaments faced by the Humanities, then what has accompanied and engendered this “relative security and expansion?” What accounts for their/its places within the university today, and how does deconstruction figure into this scene? Allegations that these essential questions have been delayed too long, that their timely, proper place should be the front and center of this chapter, are certainly not without reason. And yet, symbolically “closing” the case for deconstruction’s timeliness for contemporary film and media studies by (albeit briefly) addressing their history and current state is not only an attempt to remain consistent with this chapter’s structure and logical flow, but also to open onto a certain mode of questioning (let’s call it “theoretical”) and the activity of this mode of inquiry within the field. On one hand, and 69 despite its occlusion thus far, the topic of theory within contemporary film and media studies announces the general focus of the next three chapters of this dissertation and the genre under which this project falls. On the other hand, to reflect on the current place and state of theory in the field alludes to what may be viewed to inform stakes of their relative institutional security and expansion. In other words, and as I will attempt to demonstrate in the concluding pages of this chapter, the cost of film and media studies’ growth and comparative safety within the university, the expense of their value, seems tethered to the systemic devaluing of theoretical questioning and pursuits that are proper to the Humanities. To be clear, by “systemic devaluing” I don’t mean the flat-out departure from or unyielding resistance to what is called (for better or for worse) “theory.” It is fact that many of those within or affiliated with contemporary film and media studies continue to produce scholarship that is undoubtedly theoretical and/or speculative, and film and media theory courses remain pedagogical mainstays at both undergraduate and graduate levels. On the contrary, the broadly acknowledged devaluing of theory in the field, I believe, reflects, accompanies, contributes to, and/or is symptomatic of the field’s aforementioned vague affiliation with and commitment to the Humanities and the university as sites of resistance. 106 106 The “broad acknowledgement” of theory’s devaluation within contemporary film and media studies was a recurrent subtheme at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ (SCMS) 2015 Annual Conference in Montreal, Canada. This was highlighted by D.N. Rodowick’s Elegy for Theory receiving the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award (the top book award given by SCMS) and Tom Gunning’s acceptance speech for the Distinguished Career Award. In particular, Gunning, whose work is often aligned with critical historiography rather than theory, expressed his “worry” that the field’s recent “historical turn” is leading to a “long-range stunting of the basic questions” that animate it. He then calls for a “return” to these basic questions while incorporating “historical research and close-analysis”; such return to theory (and not “Theory”) and movement away from purely historical research, claims Gunning, will “revitalize” the field. See Tom Gunning, “SCMS 2015 Award Ceremony Distinguished Career Award Winner Tom Gunning,” YouTube.com, last modified March 30, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5kuSHZMJx0. 70 This claim does not depend on empirical evidence of the field’s affiliations and commitments (assuming that gathering such evidence would be possible); rather, it relies on (i.e. believes and reaffirms) observations about them from those long embedded within or near film and media studies such as D.N. Rodowick, who argues in his 2007 essay, “An Elegy for Theory,” that “the evolution of cinema studies since the early 1980s has been marked both by a decentering of film with respect to media and visual studies and by a retreat from theory.” 107 Rodowick’s attention to this trend—which animates his three most recent books, The Virtual Life of Film (2007), Elegy for Theory (2014), and Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (2015)—does not directly indicate that this “decentering of film” and “retreat from theory” has in fact insured film and media studies’ institutional value and relative security; instead, he repeatedly emphasizes that the field’s devaluing of theory relays its movement away from and questionable commitment to the Humanities. For Rodowick, this tendency is tied to the alarming propensity of those affiliated with analytic philosophy and science to dismiss or reject the status of the work that takes or has it is place the Humanities. As he succinctly puts it “An Elegy for Theory”: The conflict over theory in film studies thus reproduces in microcosm a more consequential debate, one that concerns both the role of epistemology and epistemological critique in the humanities and the place of philosophy with respect to science. Analytic philosophy wants to redeem ‘theory’ for film by placing it in the context of a philosophy of science. At the same time, this implies that the epistemologies that were characteristic of the humanities for a number of decades are neither philosophically nor scientifically legitimate. And so the contestation of theory becomes a de facto epistemological dismissal of the humanities. 108 107 D.N. Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” October 122 (Fall 2007): 91 (emphasis added). 108 Ibid., 98. 71 Rodowick is here referring to the aftereffects initiated by the well-known “Post-Theory debate” in the field that, according to his account, began in the 1980’s and reached its apex (or nadir) with the 1996 publication of Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. While he salutes the fact that “salutary effects” of the “reinvigoration of historical research, more sociologically rigorous reconceptualizations of spectatorship and the film audience, and the placement of film in the broader context of visual culture and electronic media” that sprang from the field’s “retreat from theory” and fueled Post-Theory, Rodowick takes a more critical stance than do the book’s co-editors, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. 109 As many within film and medias studies are well aware, Bordwell and Carroll took issue with what the former famously classifies in his contribution to Post- Theory as the dominance of “[s]ubject-position theory and culturalism” in the field. 110 To summarize, these classifications more or less refer to the Lacanian/Marxist/Althusserian approaches of film theorists associated with the journals such as Cahiers du cinéma, Screen, and Camera Obscura throughout the 1970’s and 80’s (whose politics and positions will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter), and cultural studies, the burgeoning “postmodern” rival to “subject-position theory,” with their Frankfurt School influences and avowals of multiculturalism, respectively. 111 In the place of these two supposedly totalizing “Grand Theories,” Bordwell and Carroll, claims Rodowick, attempted to “[anchor] the discipline in film as an empirical object subject to 109 Ibid., 91. For the record, Rodowick praises Bordwell in “An Elegy for Theory” for not “retreat[ing] from theory” and his “commitment to good theory building” (95). 110 David Bordwell, “Film Studies and Grand Theory,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, (Madison, W.I.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 3. 111 It is interesting to note that Bordwell aligns Derrida with both tendencies, as if the threat of deconstruction to the former’s project necessitated a double mention and targeting of Derrida. See Bordwell,“Film Studies and Grand Theory,” 6 and 10. 72 investigations grounded in natural scientific methods,” which necessitated “a discipline modeled on cognitivist science and historical poetics”; theory thus became realigned with “the epistemological ideas of natural scientific reasoning.” 112 Their assertions joined up with a chorus of other theoretical Humanities detractors who hailed from analytic philosophy and the social sciences. In short, “bad” or “Grand” Theory had to be stopped in the name of rational discourse, and one of the aspects in doing so included that theory’s restoration as the proper property of scientific methodology. The point of drawing on Rodowick’s reading of Post-Theory is neither to rehash thoroughly the arguments of the latter, nor to outline the numerous debates and counter- claims that these arguments generated, and still generate, within the field. Like Rodowick, I’m also not proposing “a return to the 1970s concept of theory,” as if Bordwell and Carroll did not have good reason to challenge the totalizing claims that frequently came along with it and/or cultural studies. 113 As I’ll explore in the fourth chapter, the texts taken up by 1970s film theory often became merely illustrative of said theory or theories; whether the text under analysis was a film, video, work of literature, or an art object, its singularity was often reduced through theoretical applications that ultimately sought to reflect the Truth of the applied. Instead, I’m interested in the privilege the post-theorists extend to reason (through historical, scientific, and/or analytic philosophical trajectories) as the stable grounds through which one counters theory and eventually resuscitates it from the “irrational” Humanities. By highlighting the “implicit alliance” of the historical analyses Bordwell advocates with cognitivism and analytic philosophy, Rodowick demonstrates that the 112 Rodowick,“An Elegy for Theory,” 92, 94-95. 113 Ibid., 92. 73 resistance to theory within contemporary film and media studies discloses an appeal to the empirical evidence affiliated with science, and thus an encroachment of science into domains where its methods and logic do not apply. 114 Rodowick’s project defends against this encroachment by arguing (namely, by way of Wittgenstein, Deleuze, and Cavell) that the phenomena proper to the Humanities fundamentally resist and should be distinguished from scientific evaluation. To dismiss the theoretical pursuits of the Humanities in the name of science (and scientism) is thus not only to implicitly side with science, but also to misunderstand fundamentally what both of them do; in sum, the value of the Humanities cannot be properly assessed by scientific methodologies and reasoning. One cannot underestimate the importance of Rodowick’s explication of these issues and his defense that the Humanities and science be distinguished through the phenomena proper to them; without a doubt, he has been and continues to be a chief advocate for both the place of film and media studies within the Humanities and the vitality of theory with them. And yet, his defense of the unbridgeable gulf between the Humanities and science would seem to be put to the test if Derrida’s mediations on belief, science, and reason were brought into the equation. For example, one could turn to “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” in which Derrida probes the modern university’s “raison d’etre.” For Derrida, to inquire into the university’s “reason to be” or “reason for being” demands the questioning of the “cause, purpose, direction, necessity, justification, meaning and mission of the University; in a word its 114 D.N. Rodowick, Philosophy’s Artful Conversations (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 8. Following the work of British philosopher, Peter Hacker, Rodowick will refer to this encroachment as “scientism,” which the former defines as “the illicit extension of the methods and forms of explanation of the natural sciences” See P.M.S. Hacker, “Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding,” in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, edited by Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (New York: Routledge, 2001), 42. 74 destination.” 115 And in order to examine any destination (perhaps the direction announced in a “mission statement”), one must begin with the very grounds from which that destination departs or heads out; to consider the university’s destination thus obliges one to investigate its “footing and…foundation, [its] ground to stand on.” 116 The modern university’s being, its foundation as a place with a purpose or destination, is, Derrida claims, irreducibly (and predictably) linked to reason. The university’s raison d’etre (reason to be/for being) is built upon the principle of reason. “As far as I know,” Derrida says, “nobody has ever founded a university against reason. So we may reasonably suppose the University’s reason for being has always been reason itself, and some essential connection of reason to being.” 117 Staying with his intention to probe the university’s raison d’etre, Derrida subsequently wonders about the forms or directions that questioning the principle of reason might take. That is, if one applies pressure to the reasons of or for the principle reason, if one attempts to account for reason’s reasonable grounding, or more precisely, to think the ground that enables reason to give one grounds as reason, is this thinking, he asks, “dealing with a circle or with an abyss?” 118 What Derrida means with the words “circle” and “abyss” in relation to the questioning of the grounds of reason is whether this pursuit would resort to a “circular” argument that draws on reason to explain reason—which, he argues following Heidegger’s claim in Der Satz vom Grund (The Principle of Reason, 1958), “says nothing about reason itself”—or an acknowledgment that, in the end, the principle of reason lacks stability or grounds. 115 Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” translated by Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris, Diacritics 13, no. 3 (1983), 3. 116 Ibid., 3. 117 Ibid., 7. 118 Ibid., 9. 75 Instead of reason as grounded grounds, there is only “[t]he abyss, the hold, the Abgrund, the empty ‘gorge.’” 119 In short, Derrida insists that the grounds of reason are a necessary phantasm upon which institutions (such as the university, the Humanities, and science) construct themselves while effacing the groundless grounds that ground and unground them. Without proof or verification, one must therefore believe in the principle of reason’s unbelievable grounds, including and especially those within the sciences who commonly insist on the stability of them. After discussing the groundless grounds of reason, Derrida goes on to ask: “Who is more faithful to reason’s call, who hears it with a keener ear, who better sees the difference, the one who offers questions in return and tries to think through the possibility of that summons, or the one who does not want to hear any question about the reason of reason?” 120 This question seems to lead back to (or forward, since “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils” chronologically precedes it) “The University Without Condition.” The Humanities, as Derrida affirms them in the latter essay, would seem to provide the places in the university through which one could “offer questions” and attempt “think through” the “summons” of the principle of reason as an abyss, even if the one offering questions and thinking through the summons was technically ensconced within the sciences. This thinking would appear to take or have its proper place there, in the Humanities, despite the possibility of one’s disciplinary location elsewhere. Without the stable, rational grounds to stand on, this mode of questioning would be explicitly theoretical and in the absence of supposedly “direct evidence,” while concurrently disturbing those pursuits which claim to be otherwise. In this way, 119 Ibid., 9. 120 Ibid., 9. 76 Rodowick’s insistence on the epistemological distinction between the Humanities and science, his admirable defense against the improper infiltration of science’s reason and what it holds as the university’s raison d’être, misses an opportunity to call into question reason’s proper place and grounding—as if science represented the exception to the abyss, as if science wasn’t based on belief. If one believes, like Derrida, that the Humanities are essential to resisting the phantasms of indivisible sovereignty (such as scientific reason), both in principle and with a dissident force, then film and media studies’ devaluing of theory, as outlined by Rodowick, seems to imply a reciprocal correlation to broader ethicopolitical investments. 121 This is not say that the field’s “retreat from theory” and vague relations with the Humanities signal its overt and/or resolute alliance with science and non- democratic forces, or that science is inherently non-democratic; nor is it to deny the significant contributions from those within the field (and science) to democratic causes, justice, and resisting sovereignty, no matter the elliptical, indirect, and overt forms of these resistances. Furthermore, this implication presupposes neither a past nor present form or idea of the Humanities as autonomous bastions of resistance with which contemporary film and media studies should align. Rather, I endeavor to reassert deconstruction’s timeliness for the field and to call on those within it to (re)evaluate where they think they are and the implications of what today is taking or having its place there. For it is a deconstructive thinking of the field’s place or places, the Humanities, and the university through which the could or perhaps of them, that opens to an elsewhere that has never been simply beyond them. To think these places today is to 121 In Philosophy’s Artful Conversation, Rodowick makes a similar claim about the ethical commitments of the Humanites, albeit primarily through his readings of Wittgenstein, Delueze, and Cavell. 77 encounter them as always already displaced: not only the permeability of the borders that appear to divide them from an outside, but the other non-localizable places dividing them from within. Similar to Rodowick’s, then, this call for revaluation does not intend to dismiss research within the field that aligns with certain strands of historicism, cognitivism, the sciences, and/or analytic philosophy. It asks instead for rebalancing, and thus, an engagement that would necessarily require contemporary film and media studies to rethink their commitment to the Humanities. Furthermore, and despite the fact that the explicit expense of the field’s security and growth remains implied in Rodowick’s recent works, this reevaluation also points to the this “retreat from theory,” the larger institutional critiques levied against the Humanities, and the current emphasis on assessed value within the university in order to suggest the costs of this expense, and if its worth it. At this point in the chapter, it’s critical to take a step back and consider the arrival of what I’ve been calling “contemporary” film and media studies, and as such, the naming and historicizing of something as unwieldy as an academic field, with its inevitable overlapping pre-histories and vicissitudes. This compels one to begin with the words “film and media studies” and their attempt to contain and name something that is not simply a self-enclosed entity. In other words, one must first attempt to account for a certain unaccountability produced by the multiplicities that this name flattens, gathers up, and seeks to placate under a phantasmatic whole called “film and media studies.” Such unaccountability explains my preference to refer to film and media studies in the third person plural, rather than reducing the name to a singular noun, notwithstanding the frequency of the latter practice. This plurality also leads to their characterization as an academic field and not a particular discipline. Although this preference may appear to 78 indicate a belief in their anti-disciplinarity, or in film and media studies as that which paradoxically declares its self-enclosure along with its limitlessness (as if this was a totally new occurrence), I’m not seeking to advance their resistance to or lack of an institutional identity. 122 Insisting on their plural form and figuration as a field does not contest the fact that “film and media studies” name(s) particular university departments and divisions; nor does it oppose the fact that they are/it is commonly considered a discipline. I’ve referred to film and media studies in the plural and as a field in order to evoke both the phantasm of the name (i.e. that film and media studies, as a named thing, is a whole, and/or that they can be rolled up into a single indivisible “it”) and the diversity of the university formations that can be viewed to operate under some variation of that name. For instance, and to list just a few of the many deviations of “film and media studies” in a handful U.S. universities today: what used to be called “Critical Studies” at the University of Southern California recently changed to “Cinema and Media Studies,” while Brown University has “Modern Culture and Media,” University Iowa offers “Cinema and Comparative Literature,” University of California Santa Barbara uses the name “Film and Media Studies,” and University of Michigan calls theirs “Screen Arts and Cultures.” While this small sample of programs, departments, and divisions are more or less taken to be institutional equivalents (despite their innumerable dissimilarities and the singularities of each), their nominal deviations, however slight and contextually 122 This clarification responds to a few of the issues of cultural studies, as discussed in Peggy Kamuf’s “The University in the World it is Attempting to Think,” Culture Machine, Vol. 6 (2004) http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/3/2. Kamuf points to a general tendency of those within cultural studies to posit the domain as an “entity or unity” without boundaries. Instead of “achieving some new arrangement that can dispense with all that old talk about, for example, this discipline or that one,” cultural studies repeatedly perform(s), according to Kamuf, “a self-positing that is immediately a self- canceling.” 79 contingent, indicate a certain disharmony among them about what they are up to within their respective institutional places. Using “film and media studies” in their plural form and referring to their status in the university as an academic “field”—which connotes a looser organizational landscape than the structure, repetition, and definition associated with the term “discipline”—attempts to convey the concord and discord marking this terrain, whatever moniker(s) they/it prefer(s). For these names do not appear to be chosen haphazardly or solely in the spirit of one-upmanship and/or institutional competition. Even if they are hotly contested and/or rejected by those within or affiliated with the named place, these institutional labels announce a sort of double consistency: on one hand, there exists, and one can almost expect, a consistent, institution-specific variation of something like “film and media studies”; on the other hand, there is a definite consistency within these variations because their repetitions and minor differences expose resemblance. The particularity of these differences discloses proximity and shared sources. For Dudley Andrew, this tendency is due to the “rambunctious,” fundamentally anti-disciplinary nature of cinema as film; according to him, “the subject that was initially discussed by universities as film” has and continues to wreak havoc within the walls of the university, as well as any other effort to categorize, domesticate, or institutionalize it. 123 Andrew compares the rowdiness of contemporary film and media studies (a “disciplinary imposter” he calls them) with more entrenched, recognizable, and “putatively stable” university disciplines, such as English. Despite its relative stability, English, Andrew readily acknowledges, is “expanding from a core of Anglophone 123 Dudley Andrew, “The Core and the Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 881, 882. 80 literary classics” and increasingly taking up what were once considered unorthodox or non-disciplinary texts. 124 The expansion of English exhibits for Andrew the field-like traits that often arise within academic disciplines when they are enticed by the trajectories of new materials. Disciplines, as he points out, are therefore constantly reevaluating and deregulating the parameters of their legitimized discourses while balancing the demands of their traditions. Unlike film and media studies, however, those in English fall back on “a set of reading practices, a kind of schooled attention that distinguishes itself whenever faculty from around the university happen to get together to discuss some common topic” because the latter is a discipline, or more precisely, more disciplinary than contemporary film and media studies. 125 While an English professor will be expected to echo his or her detectable disciplinary conventions, Andrew believes that film and media studies’ amorphous landscape, wrought by the disagreement “about the shape and size of its territory…[and] about [the] pertinent work that should be undertaken there,” means that “the promise of a discipline [for the field], no matter what we name it, has become rather fanciful, the rhetoric of academicians.” 126 He even goes on to suggest that because film and media studies’ “horizon line now extends as far as ‘audio-visual culture,’” their borders hardly delimit an academic field; according to his tacit categorization, the organizational unit referred to as “a field” requires more definition than contemporary 124 Ibid., 882. 125 Ibid., 882. 126 Ibid., 883. 81 film and media studies’ scattered outlines and endless horizons. 127 For Andrew, the field is without discernable formation: it “was never properly walked, as farmers say.” 128 Whether or not one agrees with Andrew’s assertions and classifications, the crux of his argument is that the general unruliness of film marshaled the indeterminate limits of contemporary film and media studies. As such, his proposal is guided by a belief that cinema’s institutional resistance to the university frames film and media studies institutional history, and it is this view or version of cinema that urgently needs to be affirmed today. Film, if one follows Andrew closely not only here, but throughout his published work on the topic, is a productively improper object for and within the university because, at its best, it showcases itself as “an object of gaps and absences.” 129 Cinema’s “delay and slippage,” or what Andrew calls its inherent “décalage,” separates it from both technological media’s (such as TV and digital media) “promise [of] immediacy” and the transmissible discursive methods necessitated by more stable 127 Ibid., 883. 128 Ibid., 883. Following these comments, Andrew notes that the panel topics and presentations given at contemporary gatherings of the SCMS Annual Conference “may be subject to debate, but nearly everyone recognizes that the debate itself takes place within a legitimately constituted disciplinary field” (883, emphasis added). Andrew’s earlier statement about film and media studies’ undefined “horizon line” suggests that he does not include himself as part of this “nearly everyone” (whatever that designation means and whomever it implies). As such, if “nearly everyone” indeed believes that what takes or has its place at the SCMS annual conference happens “within a legitimately constituted disciplinary field,” then “nearly everyone,” according to Andrew’s logic, appears to be mistaken. “Nearly everyone” believes in the phantasm of the field of film and media studies, and this belief, it seems, should be reevaluated precisely because what this group holds to be a field is not really a field, at least not in the way that Andrew defines one. However, isn’t a field (and all the other organizational strategies in and of the university), even in Andrew’s terms, generated by a certain consensus or recognition of something that is, technically speaking, non-phenomenal, abstract, and therefore without proof? Don’t these delimitations necessitate belief just as much as the proclamations that seek to call them into question? In other words, Andrew doesn’t take issue with the belief in delimitation, categorization, and disciplinarity in general (it’s clear that he believes in such things—take English, for instance); instead, his discourse seems based on his belief about the beliefs of “nearly everyone” and in film and media studies’ exceptional resistance to the university’s attempts to contain, name, and methodologize them. 129 Ibid., 914. 82 academic disciplines. 130 Film scholars, especially during the film and media age, should therefore seek to affirm the singular unruliness of cinema and its essential resistance to being tamed by institutionalized discourse and corporate powers. 131 Originally dragged (feasibly against its will) into the post-secondary landscape by those entrenched within hardened disciplines, film, Andrew argues, today risks being “subsumed by some larger notion of the history of audio-visions…into the foggy field of cultural studies, for instance, or [becoming] one testing ground among others for communication studies.” 132 Following his logic, what is at stake within contemporary film and media studies is precisely their threat to the singularity of film and its rendering improper of the university. 133 Of course, if one assumes that film and media studies contribute to the rendering improper of the university, one may correctly suppose that certain objects and methods are more or less considered proper to it, while also mistakenly believing that the university is itself is a proper, self-enclosed place, or that it is not, as Derrida suggests, founded upon a necessary fiction, i.e. the principle of reason. In her discussion of literature’s impact on the limits of the university, Peggy Kamuf affirms the former supposition by pointing out that 130 Ibid., 914. 131 Andrew further emphasizes this this point, particularly in relation to advertising-based film aesthetics and narratives, in What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Change (Malden, M.A.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 132 Ibid., 913. 133 Although Andrew’s discussion focuses on cinema, I’ve used the word “contribute” in order to allude to many other objects and practices that can also be viewed as disrupting the university of reason and fact; in other words, film and media studies are certainly not alone and in many ways, owe their institutional existence to other “non-factual” disciplines in which they were held to academically viable. For an in-depth discussion of literature’s place within the modern scientific university, see Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997) and Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 83 “[w]hile no doubt the historical and scientific disciplines (the disciplines of “fact”) have undergone considerable shifts in the determination of their own boundaries, the fact is that, since the establishment of the modern, scientific university, none of these redefinitions has been understood or perceived as touching upon some essential foundation of the university institution. However profound the reordering of these disciplines has been, the principle of universitas has accommodated, indeed welcomed, the innovations as proof of the soundness of the central tenets of its own credo: the advancing frontiers of knowledge, the retreat of error, the objectivity of science, and so on. When there has been public debate about what should or should not be taught in these disciplines (creation science, negationist history, branches of sociobiology), scientific criteria are generally thought to remain in place to adjudicate the dispute…But in all these cases—and this is the point—the division of intra- from extra- by which the institution is established is not itself in question. 134 Science and history, “the disciplines of ‘fact’” have undergone significant shifts, but have remained the university’s bedrock, the first layers above, and in intimate relation with, the (phantasmatic) principle of reason. For Kamuf, these historically “proper” university objects and disciplines mean that those taking or having their place(s) elsewhere—that is, not as ostensible “disciplines of fact,” such as literature and a certain study of cinema— open a space “for the remarking of institutionality in general, a space that is neither inside nor outside some pre-given (instituted) boundaries.” 135 To return to a point made earlier in this chapter, non-factual or what I’m referring to as “improper” objects, disciplines, fields of study, and/or departments do not inaugurate the divisions of the university, as if it once possessed indivisible borders and complete autonomy. “[N]either inside nor outside some pre-given (instituted) boundaries,” the so-called “improper” objects and discourses disclose the always already division of the university’s pre-given boundaries; they remark its originary openings to that which supposedly takes or has it place outside 134 Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 3. 135 Ibid., 4. 84 of the university, “against which” Kamuf says “it may be articulated as a cognizable entity.” 136 By stressing Andrew’s core belief in film’s resistance to institutionalization, I don’t mean to infer that contemporary film and media studies represent an ideal platform or vehicle for unconditional resistance today, or that if they’re appropriately affirmed through the Humanities one can expect or bring about the arrival of a democratic future. However, I do want to make the modest suggestion that the combination of contemporary film and media studies’ 1) relative institutional security and ungovernability (which, in addition to financial support, also prefigures ongoing expansion), 2) concord and discord that names and unfastens their disciplinarity (and field, according to Andrew), and 3) specific objects and the debates they generate means that the field is singularly placed to engage today what Kamuf calls “the remarking” of the university in particular and “institutionality in general.” In addition to the list above, and perhaps in conflict with Andrew’s beliefs in cinema, the exceptionality of the field for this “remarking” seems directly tied to what Samuel Weber designates as the contemporary “tension between closure and openness…[that] characterizes the university both in its social function and its epistemic practice.” 137 As previously discussed, this flickering process for Weber depicts knowledge acquisition/consumption and the functioning of both disciplinary and institutional boundaries. While he concedes that there is nothing necessarily new about this “tension,” Weber also observes that it has been “given…an unprecedented intensity, and perhaps, new significance” in recent times through “the globalization of the 136 Ibid., 28. 137 Weber, “The Future Campus,” 153. 85 economy” and “the virtualisation of reality,” which are both, he adds, “closely bound up with the rapid development and proliferation of the electronic media.” 138 These factors, as most who work in the university will agree, indicate, says Weber, “that the traditional sense universities have had of themselves as constituting a privileged and self-contained space, a kind of womb in which intellectual and social maturation takes place, is becoming ever more tenuous.” 139 If contemporary film and media studies today represent an exceptional site through which the “remarking” of the university and institutionality can and should take place, it is because they are not only profoundly affected by virtualization, digitalization, and globalization’s “progressive intrusion of the economic rationality of a profit-drive system into areas that had hitherto not been entirely subordinated to such constraints,” as Weber defines it. 140 They are also, I’d like to contend, precisely a type of product of them. Certainly, these factors can be viewed to effect and produce contemporary film and media studies just like every other field, discipline, department, and/or division that takes or has a place in the university today; there is, in this view, no exception, and therefore nothing exceptional. On the other hand, to consider the invention of cinema with the institutional history of film and media studies is to encounter an unmistakable acceleration of “the virtualisation of reality” and 138 Ibid., 154. 139 Ibid., 155. I’ve emphasized the preposition “in” as a nod to Weber’s attention to the ways in which the English-speaking world, and specifically Americans, often speaks about the university. He notes that the common expression “to work and/or study in the university” reveals a tacit belief that the university is a self-contained or sealed-off place, away or separated from the world, “in which we not only work and study, but also in a sense, reside” (153). Students enter the university to be developed as if “the embryo of the social being is brought to fruition before being expelled, i.e. born(e) – into the world” through “commencement” ceremonies where one begins to think of the university “as an alma mater” (ibid.). For Weber, the university’s social function “as a kind of womb” relays its tension with its supposed outside— that is, the university is never completely sealed-off and apart from the world, but rather constantly negotiating the openness and closure of its borders. 140 Ibid., 154. 86 the “development and proliferation of the electronic media.” For example, and at the risk of summarizing, the cinématographe introduced a novel electrically powered virtualization of reality and, as Andrew articulates, the designation “and media” today represents an enormous threat to the institutional peculiarity of “film.” Moreover, and as I’ll develop at length below, institutionalized film and media studies are also inseparable from the explicit “intrusion” of private industry into the university. All of this returns to a point made repeatedly throughout this chapter concerning the field’s privileged place or places for practitioners of deconstructive thought, as well as for the resistance and transformation deconstruction pledges to and performs. My insistence on film and media studies’ exceptional place(s) for deconstruction, in addition to the latter’s timeliness for the field as it pertains to its vague relations with the Humanities today, is not founded on a belief that deconstruction can “save” cinema from media. Rather, the singularity of contemporary film and media studies’ places, wherever they are, “as this one and no other,” as a place that is not simply one but a singular configuration of a multitude of places, destabilized from within just like every other, are marked by an exceptional proximity to or intimacy with the factors identified by Weber, and thus exceptionally equipped to remark their places and place today. The contours of this singularity can be traced to the earliest documented examples of university film instruction. If one chose to move chronologically rather than nationally through these examples, the “history” of film’s explicit incorporation into the university would likely begin with the events exhaustively detailed in Dana Polan’s Scenes of Instruction: the Beginning of the U.S. Study of Film. As Polan’s research showcases, film first entered the U.S. university in the mid-1910’s, thus debunking what he 87 euphemistically calls the “abbreviated history [that] has taken its place and tenaciously become the standard narrative for the field.” 141 This “abbreviated history” refers to the myth of film studies’ birth in post-war France with the filmologie movement, which, after crossing the Atlantic through Britain, culminated with the establishment of the Society of Cinematologists in 1959 in the U.S., and then its international “flourishing in the media- explosive and express-yourself-through-new-arts context of the 1960’s.” 142 For the purposes my argument, I’m less concerned with debating and/or defending the historical stakes, birthdates, and Anglophone biases of Scenes of Instruction, than pointing out what seems to be two tendencies that mark Polan’s institutional cases studies (these include: Columbia, the New School for Social Research, Harvard Business School, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, Syracuse University, St. John’s College, and New York University). Although I’ll refrain from naming and overtly judging them, both of these tendencies seem to orbit around the singularity of film and media studies’ place or places within the university. The first of these can be portrayed through the belief in film’s affirmative disruption in and for the university during the era when it was first incorporated into academic curricula. “Affirmative disruption” does not only refer to the negative, and at times, vociferous, reactions of those who saw film as too deleterious and/or immorally popular for institutes of higher learning. Although Scenes of Instruction mentions numerous denunciations of film that accompanied its early import into the university, as well as defenses of high culture brought about by cinema’s alliance with the popular, film 141 Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginning of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 3. 142 Ibid., 4. 88 instruction in the U.S., at least during the time frame of Polan’s study, was not ceremoniously renounced as one might expect. The relative absence of resistance to the academic film study no doubt stemmed from its limited impact in the university and the fact that “these random ventures in film instruction did not coalesce into a coherent field solidified around fixed questions and sets of practices.” 143 From an institutional standpoint, though, many U.S. universities at that time were under the influence of Progressivism, or responding to a certain Progressivist spirit that, despite its undeniable theological roots and rhetoric of reform and morality, “sought out and promoted the potentially beneficent aspects of everyday culture,” says Polan, “which helps explain the increasing positive acceptance of film as an object of academic study.” 144 This suggests that film instruction was both a symptom and further instigator of the shifting landscape and priorities of U.S. universities at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its “disruption” was, therefore, not necessarily taken to be an affront to the university; as Polan repeatedly points out, at that time, film instruction was more or less well-received, if not ignored, and so it played a relatively minor role in the era’s reexamination of what should constitute the purview of higher learning. However, a number of Polan’s case studies illustrate that some early film instructors embraced the study of cinema because they believed that its attendent challenges and encounters were in the interest of the university’s future, as well as its potentially central role in taking up the nation’s socio- political matters. Between the mid-1910s and 1935 (the timeframe of Polan’s research), 143 Ibid., 6. 144 Ibid., 24. For more on the American university during this era, including the influence of Progressivism, see David O. Levine, The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915 - 1940 (Ithica, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1965); and Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 89 university film courses were offered not only to debate the merits of cinema, but also as a way to confront the popular as a cultural object to be studied, appreciated, debated, dismissed, and assimilated. In addition, film courses were a method through which the university could reach out to and attract new constituencies and prospective students, especially from urban areas. As one might expect from these descriptions, Polan’s picture of early U.S. university film instruction contains many so-called “democratizing” traits, whether they included the redemption of cinema as a non-deleterious art (thus challenging presumptions of those in the university and elsewhere), the promotion of film’s “social responsibilities with its aesthetic potential,” or the creation of new educational access points for those who were frequently assumed to be located below the intellectual heights of the university and its canons. 145 Though certainly marginal, the academic study of film prior to 1935 in the U.S. contributed to the broader reevaluation of the university’s commitments, borders, and mission, or, in short, its raison d’être; as a “popular art,” cinema was affirmed as a necessary disruption to what had been perceived as the university’s status quo, and this affirmation can be viewed as having been made in a certain name of democracy and the university’s vital place in making this democratic society possible. 146 145 Ibid., 11. 146 While early film instructors strongly believed that the U.S. university needed to expand beyond its proverbial ivory towers, and that cinema was a key aspect of such an expansion, their belief and ability to incorporate film into their pedagogical agendas signals that the university’s borders were already porous and divided, despite assumptions of their closure and/or stability. The U.S. university, as mentioned above, was under the influence of and attempting to account for what seemed to take or have place outside of it (i.e. Progressivist programs, popular culture, film, etc.), but this apparent outside, and those things that seemed proper to it, resonated with something already within its institutional walls. The possibility of disruption and institutional transformation comes or arrives from a kind of space, to return to Kamuf’s 90 Secondly, and building off the previous tendency, Polan also articulates the film industry’s unmistakable influence on many of these same pedagogical forays. This influence was also tethered to Progressivist-based lobbying for universities to further open their borders and expand through increased offerings of vocational training and professionalization. The partnership between universities and Hollywood (Polan spends considerable time with Will Hays and others from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, film producer Joseph Kennedy, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) was clearly a crafty public relations campaign on the part of the industry to affiliate with the university’s high culture “and present itself in the best moral light” to both impressionable college students, influential faculty, and the public. 147 Hollywood’s P.R. campaign in the university not only sought to redeem its virtues, but also attract new talent to its studios. From an institutional standpoint, the film industry’s financial backing was warmly welcomed by many universities and even led to the first film production courses at the University of Southern California (USC) and plans for them at Stanford University. Students, under the sway of professionalization programs, would ostensibly be trained as Hollywood’s future workforce. According to Polan, the film industry particularly valued these vocational partnerships for both their “symbolic prestige” and the “practical benefits that would accrue from outsourcing a central part of its own training to academic institutions.” 148 In sum, it was good for business, and not only for film industry. Polan explains that USC prized their well-advertised film industry designation, “neither inside nor outside” the university; this force takes or has its place on and as the limit that divides—not a localized place, but a space through which it made localization possible. 147 Ibid., 10. 148 Ibid., 177. 91 relationships because they secured capital, glamor, institutional viability, and jobs for graduates. 149 Given the call during the era that universities prepare graduates with marketable competencies, the technical training of film production meant that institutions (such as USC) could sell themselves to potential students under the promise that their potential investment on campus would be time and money well spent. As a result, some of the first instances of film instruction in the American university—particularly those institutions that sought the vocational training of film production—must be thought along with the conception of the university as the place responsible for professionalization and the intrusion of private commercial interests onto university campuses. Both of these traits, as previously discussed, explicitly inform the impetus of the accountability movement and the predicaments faced by the Humanities today; in addition, they may also offer insight into the aforementioned relative institutional security and expansion of contemporary film and media studies. I make this point neither to disparage film production programs, nor to imply that the academic study of film initiated any of these things, nor to suggest that the field’s stability and growth is directly linked to film production training in the university. While “academic-based” film and media studies can be viewed to anchor a film production program’s place within the university (in contrast to the for-profit academies and trade schools that also offer film/video production training), my point is that the import of film into the university, along with the development of institutionalized film studies and contemporary film and media studies, cannot be separated from certain industrial and marketplace relations that inform their past and persist today. Notwithstanding its overdetermination, ubiquitous deployment, and vexed origins, the term globalization as Weber sees it (“progressive 149 Ibid., 177. 92 intrusion of the economic rationality of a profit-drive system into areas that had hitherto not been entirely subordinated to such constraints”) resonates with the earliest adoptions of film instruction within U.S. universities, and perhaps shines light on where the field is today, how it got there, and where it’s headed. To consider film’s (and therefore, film studies’ and film and media studies’) history of institutional resistance as purely affirmative, democratic, committed to the Humanities and to the unforeseen future would be both naïve and a disavowal of what seems to be its attendent resistance to these de- institutionalizing resistances. Film’s “rambunctious” nature, to borrow a descriptor from Andrew, is therefore not only related to its unruly décalage, but also its place within the sweeping and disruptive (not to mention devastating) economic forces of globalization. To be sure, I’ve focused on a very narrow and exclusively American example of early film instruction. There are undoubtedly other instances that are just as, if not more, important for film and media studies’ contemporary formations. For instance, rather than amplifying the pressures found within the first documented American models, I could have followed Andrew’s discussion of film studies in France, which, after the relative disappearance of film studies in the United States in 1935, became the principal influence for both its American and British counterparts. 150 Although I won’t belabor the point, the development of film studies in France varied significantly from Polan’s account of film’s first entries into U.S. universities. These variations are attributable to a host of 150 According to Polan, the absence of university film instruction in the U.S. after 1935 stemmed from the larger reaction within universities to the movements and beliefs that brought cinema to campuses in the first place. Polan aligns reactionary spirit with the “Great Books proponents,” who, after initially warming to film education, “came to harden their faith in high culture in ways that increasingly left little room for an appreciation of the more popular art of cinema. By the end of the 1930s there appeared the glimpses of a mass-culture critique that took the popular arts to be the enemy of cultural uplift and that retarded the serious academic study of film for quite some time” (ibid., 14-15). As Polan suggests, Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” can be seen as the academy’s “[declaration] of war on mass culture…[which] became only one in a series of fervent missions launched against popular culture” (ibid., 374). 93 institutional, political, cultural, and economic reasons that go far beyond the modest aims of this chapter. A point worth underscoring in this quick comparison between film studies in France and the United States, however, is the comparative absence of Hollywood’s direct or hands-on influence on the former. No doubt, it almost goes without saying that French film critics, filmmakers, scholars, and culture-at-large have long been enamored with Hollywood films, and that the specifically Parisian cinephilic consumption of these film helped spawn institutionalized film and media studies vis-à-vis influential journals such as Cahiers du cinéma, the films of the Nouvelle Vague, and later, the political turn against Hollywood and its illusions as expressed in French film theory from the 1960s to the 80s. As histories of film and media studies continually remind us, it was precisely the excitement over, and subsequent translation and import of, this French anti-Hollywood (Lacanian/Marxist/Atlthusserian) film theory that lit the fuse to the film and media studies explosion in Britain and the United States. It is as if this event constituted film studies’ figurative “Big Bang,” and just like the universe (so we’re told), the field is still expanding. Excluding the popularity and eventual criticism of Hollywood culture and films, French film criticism and theory developed in an institutional context that was relatively unencumbered by the financial tentacles of the American film industry, especially if it’s compared to the U.S. model, as articulated by Polan. Of course, the critics associated with French film theory weren’t immune to the effects of globalization, but their comparative autonomy from Hollywood, in addition to their virtual engagement with its films and ideologies from within this relative autonomy, led to critical scholarship that relayed certain beliefs about what film and media studies should be and what type of work should take or have their place within them. These beliefs resonated 94 (and still resonate) with scholars throughout the world, and no doubt greatly contributed to film studies’ institutionalization and the enduring expansion of the field today. The scattered movements of this final section hopefully intimates a question posed some pages ago concerning the future of the field. For if the preceding account combines film and media studies’ affirmatively disruptive potential with their trends and sources that appear to resist this very potential disclose anything substantial about them, it is that they remain, despite beliefs to the contrary, unsettled and transformable. Perhaps the field, with its many histories, trajectories, and voices, can be heard to ask those who engage it about their beliefs—not only about or in the field, but also its place(s) relative to the Humanities, the university, the future, and insitutionality in general. Perhaps the vagueness that characterizes film and media studies’ relations with and commitment to the Humanities, perhaps the devaluing of theory occurring within them, their correspondences with globalization, accountability, and “turns” towards historical and empirical research can be seen or heard as an performative appeal to inherit and affirm a constitutive elsewhere already within them. But this may presuppose that we know what and where they are, not to mention what they stand upon—as if there is only one field, stable and secure, as if this sort of identification and localization did not demand the necessity of belief. 95 CHAPTER 2 Ses Fantômes Thinking in Ones “Le Cinéma et ses fantômes” (“Cinema and Its Ghosts”): the French title of Jacques Derrida’s interview with Cahiers du cinéma is appropriately haunted by the play within the French possessive adjective ses and the traces that both generate it and that are left in its wake. In French, ses encompasses all third-person singular possessive adjectives (her, his, or its); its usage creates a direct relationship between two nouns by supplanting the potential repetition of the first. Les fantômes becomes ses fantômes, and two distinct nouns are transformed into a possessive relation through substitution—ses, in this formation, retains the virtual presence of the preceding term after the conjunction et. It is this virtual presence, trace, or specter in the ses that makes the title more appropriate to the interview’s content than meets the eye. At first glance, most will read ses as a substitution for the preceding noun le cinéma, hence the English translation “Cinema and Its Ghosts.” Yet, it is possible in the context of the interview to hear the possessive adjective ses not as just an antecedent for le cinéma, but also for some other, unknowable “thing,” a phantom it, she, or he (her or his), or as I’d like to suggest, a nod to deconstruction (it), Derrida himself (his), and the undecidability that arises when one begins to think about ghosts. 151 It is unclear and perhaps irrelevant whether the Cahiers’ 151 There is an important distinction to be made between this invocation of interpretative or structural undecidability and what Derrida says of the undecidable in his “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority,’” translated by Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gary Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992) 3-67. “The 96 editors or Derrida himself had this structural ambiguity in mind. Nevertheless, that they refrained from using the French possessive de with the definite article noun le cinéma, which would have reconfigured the title to “Les fantômes du cinéma,” or “The Ghosts of Cinema” is significant, for the genitive de wording would also relay cinema’s “possession” of ghosts, except in a more decisive and inflexible manner. “Le Cinéma et ses fantômes’” avoidance of the genitive construction causes slippage between someone or something’s spectral possession. The title consequently stresses the relations between cinema and someone or something’s ghosts (but whose exactly? cinema’s? is “it” masculine or feminine? Are these ghosts proper to deconstruction? Or perhaps to Derrida?) rather than entirely merging them: it tells us that someone or something has its ghosts in relation to cinema and that it, she, or he is, in this configuration, permanently veiled. She, he, it (hers, his, its)—ses— cannot be identified, assembled, or rolled up into a defined who or what. Partially suspended, the title oscillates between possibilities and one is obliged to read it in the plural. This irreducible syntactical plurality forms a parallel with Derrida’s recurrent use of the French expression plus d’un which, like a number of his neologisms and other idiomatic examples of untranslatability, illustrates the differences between the written and spoken articulations of the same utterance, even if they occur in the same language. As Peggy Kamuf points out, the meaning of plus d’un in French depends on undecidable, a theme often associated with deconstruction is not merely the oscillation between two significations or two contradictory and very determinate rules, each equally imperative….” he writes, “… it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged…to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules” (24). In other words, the undecidable cannot simply be considered an ambivalent encounter with two (or more) distinct possibilities within the realm of the calculable; it is the aporetic “experience” of a decision in the radical absence of precedence. For a more sustained reading of Derrida’s take on the undecidable, see: J. Hillis Miller, “Who or What Decides, for Derrida: A Catastrophic Theory of Decision,” in For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009) 9-27. 97 the pronunciation of the s in the word plus: if stressed, the expression means “more than one,” if silent, “no more one.” Clearly a challenge for translators and readers, the expression speaks about the mobility of meaning and delivery through its own type of lexical kinesis—it speaks through its silence, in other words. Derrida draws on the written form of plus d’un because when spoken, the expression loses its plurivocality. In the absence of vocal enunciation, with its audible form suspended, the plural grapheme plus refuses to line up with its singular phoneme, which, as Kamuf observes, causes the expression to “[shift] registers from that of counting by ones to that of counting without number one, or of taking account of the other than one.” 152 For translators such as her, this usage of plus d’un must therefore take into account both meanings and sounds concurrently and generate a conjunction that broadcasts their reckoning with a language deprived of any one voice. 153 The phrase thus finds an apposite venue in the opening pages of Specters of Marx (1993), Derrida’s most explicit treatise on ghosts and haunting. It is here that he calls on the plurality of plus d’un to describe Marx’s manifold specters, and more generally, to condense the dispersive logic of the spectral and haunting by, as Kamuf says, “posing at the same time the other time that is not counted by beginning with one.” 154 “The same 152 Peggy Kamuf, “The Ghosts of Critique and Deconstruction,” in Book of Addresses (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 219. 153 For Kamuf, the English translator of Specters of Marx, plus d’un exposes translation as type of volume control, or better, sound mixing: “I said that this phrase (plus d’un) mutes its voice as soon as one attempts to translate it. But one could have said just as well that translation is straining there to hear a voice, so it can decide which of all the possible plural translations is closest to the original, supposing always that the original is a single voice. In this way, translation is also a philology of voice…” (ibid., 235). The translator encounters a plurality of voices and must attempt, as impossible as it may be, to “tune in” to one at the expense of others. If the double meaning of plus d’un is to be retained, a listening translator must mute any one voice speaking the phrase, or on the other hand, hear and transcribe a plurivocality pronouncing two things at once, plus/plus. 154 Ibid., 219. 98 time [of] the other time that is not counted by beginning with one” describes spectral temporality: overlapping, multiple, and no longer one, temporalities that cannot be accounted, calculated, or evenly spatialized along a grid or projected into the horizon of a telos. In his book on Marx, Derrida will call the study of this effect “hauntology.” This term names a multiplicity that is not just additional or supplementary (“more than one”), but also indicates, simultaneously, a primary heteronomy that comes before the one from which defined differences and separations would be successively deduced (the “no more one”). The plurality of plus resonates within the possessive adjective ses and together they name and perform, as developed in this chapter, a type of cinematic haunting, a scene of cinema perhaps, of watching, of being watched, a fantômachie where ghosts return and battle amongst each other. Cinema, as Derrida sees it, is a séance where one discovers oneself already lost, more than one/no longer one, viewer and viewed, already ceded to the specters on the screen and those in the cinema. 155 A scene of cinema loops throughout deconstruction like a film. “Cinema and Its /His (Derrida’s) Ghosts”: while the title evoked here summons rather than exorcises the possessive adjective’s other possibilities, I’d like momentarily to suspend it, as if in a freeze frame, because this particular plurality serves the fortunate purpose of characterizing—through both its action as interpretive gesture and what it names—Derrida’s thinking of cinematic spectrality as well as cinema’s spectral relation to and place within what is called deconstructive thought. By offering for consideration 155 The neologism fantômachie comes from Derrida’s well-known improvisation about cinema and ghosts in Ken McMullen’s 1983 film, Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself, or what he calls during his improvisation playing his “proper role.” “Cinema is an art of fantômachie,” he says in the film, “it’s an art in which ghosts are allowed to return.” Fusing the French terms fantôme (ghost) and the suffix -machie (-machy or –machia), coming from the ancient Greek suffix -µαχία, meaning battle, contest, or labor, Derrida’s sees cinema as a battle of phantoms, a type of contest or clash between them. Cinema stages and provides a stage for the return of ghosts. 99 cinema’s “relation to” deconstruction, my point is not to analyze, however plausible or alluring it may be, filmmaking’s rejoinder, absorption, or resistances to Derrida’s work. “Relation to” and “place within” alternatively seek to develop an underlying concern of the Cahiers interview (which constitutes Derrida’s most explicit and sustained comments about cinema) and the impetus driving the concerns of the following chapter: the general absence of Derrida’s work in contemporary film and media studies in combination with, or as a reaction to, his ostensible “silence” concerning cinema, meaning the lack of a rigorous deconstructive textual work on or about it. 156 This chapter argues that both of these absences are haunted, albeit differently, by the other’s phantomlike presence, by the other being, there. “Le cinéma et ses fantômes” understood or translated for the moment as “Cinema and Its/His (Derrida’s) Ghosts” names and performs this figure of the absent presence twice: cinema (read here as institutionalized film and media studies and theory, a place currently marked, for the most part, by the scarcity of reference in and to Derrida’s work) haunted by deconstruction; cinema’s ghosts located in the heart of deconstructive thought. At once, the title tells the reader something about Derrida’s thinking of cinema as fantômachie and that someone/something (who? what?) has its 156 Derrida frequently insisted on the insurmountable differences between his written works and interviews, beginning with the remark to Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta published in 1971: “The improvised speech of an interview cannot substitute for the textual work” in Jacques Derrida, Positions, translated by Alan Bass, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61. Throughout his published and filmed interviews, Derrida cites the technical conditions, temporal pressures, and general “scene” of the interview—having to summarize quickly, not being given the time and space to elaborate, especially in front of recording devices such as cameras and the speed and acceleration induced by “new” media technologies. See: Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, translated by Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002); Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, edited by John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997); and Peggy Kamuf, “‘Tape-Recorded Surprise’: Derrida Interviewed” in To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2010). During an interview for the film Derrida (Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, 2002), he associates an interviewer’s command to summarize quickly and explain his work (or his “take” on themes) with a quasi-abusive “American attitude.” This attitude, says Derrida, cannot be disassociated from the global spread of American culture through cinema and American culture as a sort of cinematic production that commands performance or “ready-made” discourses from those who may be unwilling, cautious, or critical participants. 100 ghosts, that certain ghosts belong to this subject/thing and only to it/her/him, and that this subject/thing is multiple. Ses cannot be conceptualized by thinking in ones. Derrida’s Legacy in Film Theory In the preface to the interview, Cahiers writers Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse briefly refer to cinema’s nonappearance in Derrida’s oeuvre and how this presumed lacuna led to the journal’s earlier avoidance of his work. They write: “It is not obvious that a journal such as Cahiers du Cinéma would interview Jacques Derrida. Above all because, for a long time, Derrida seemed to be interested only in the phenomenon of writing, in its trace, in speech.” 157 While the imperfect verb “seemed to be” (ne semblait) evinces a kind of concession in advance, or the implicit admission of a misguided presupposition, Cahiers’ opening statement helps illuminate the reasoning behind what can be seen as contemporary film and media studies’ general reluctance to associate Derrida’s works with cinema. This reluctance is not entirely without cause. Although his corpus is marked by a wide-ranging interdiscplinarity that challenges the traditions, limits, and reach of philosophy, and has recurrently touched on cinema’s “neighboring” fields, such as literature, music, photography, and painting, to name a few, there are few references to films and cinema in Derrida’s published and translated works. Additionally, Derrida’s output on the topic is dwarfed when compared to the well-known cinematic forays by other French philosophers more or less of his generation and often clumped together under the loose banners of “post-modernism,” “post-structuralism,” and/or “French Theory,” namely Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciére, and Alain 157 Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” translated by Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37, nos.1-2 (2015): 22. 101 Badiou. From this perspective, it would seem that the lack of a categorical “cinema text” by Derrida feasibly initiated a passive, quasi-mutual avoidance between contemporary film and media studies and deconstruction, much to the surprise of those cognizant of his works’ diversity and the consistency of its interdiscplinarity. What I’m characterizing here as contemporary film and media studies’ general avoidance of Derrida’s works should not be conflated with some unyielding resistance, nonexistent reception, or strict mutual exclusivity between them. Indeed, numerous film and media scholars have taken and continue to take up the question of deconstruction and cinema in one way or another, and Derrida’s larger influence in the field, however indirect, complex, symptomatic, and spectral, should not be dismissed in proportion to the titles, themes, and keywords populating its scholarship. If, for example, an inquiry into deconstruction’s initial reception in film studies was pursued in the latter “key word” manner, it would likely begin with Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier and her numerous French publications revolving around the theme of cinécriture. 158 This inquiry would also 158 According to the bibliography available at <http://www.marie-claire-ropars-wuilleumier.fr>, Ropars- Wuilleumier authored 11 books, 68 articles/chapters, and edited or co-edited a multitude of publications, including the journal Hors cadre that she co-founded at Vincennes-Saint-Denis (Paris 8). Only a fraction of Ropars-Wuilleumier’s work has been translated into English, and my attempt to account for them all in the following chronological list should not be considered exhaustive: a chapter from her book, Le Texte divisé: essai sur l’écriture filmique (Paris: PUF, 1981) on Marguerite Duras entitled “The Disembodied Voice: India Song” translated by Kimberly Smith appeared in the Yale French Studies No. 60 “Cinema/Sound” (1980): 241-268; an essay on Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1959) entitled “The Graphic in Filmic Writing: À Bout de souffle or The Erratic Alphabet” was originally published in English in the now defunct University of Minnesota journal, Enclitic 5.2/6.1 (1982): 147-61 and partially re-printed as “The Graphic in Filmic Writing” in the anthology Breathless : Jean-Luc Godard, director, edited by Dudley Andrew (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988) 224-234; “Le film lecteur du texte” Hors cadre 1 (March, 1983) was translated by Kimball Lockhart as “Film Reader of the Text” in Diacritics 15, vol. 1 (Spring, 1985): 16-30; “The Cinema, Reader of Gilles Deleuze,” translated by Dana Polan in Camera Obscura 18 (September 1988): 120-126 was originally published as “Le cinéma lecteur de Gilles Deleuze” in Cinémaction 46, “Les theories du cinema aujourd’hui” (February 1988) and later published in Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Routledge, 1994); “How History Begets Meaning: Alain Renais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959),” translated by Susan Hayward in French Film: Texts and Contexts, Vol. 1, edited by Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 1990),173–86; “The Dissimulation of Painting,” translated by Laurie Volpe and David Wills in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, and 102 need to take note of Peter Brunette and David Wills’ co-authored book from 1989, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory, as well as their 1994 editorial collaboration, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, which includes an interview with Derrida where he considers the specificity of cinema at some length (among a number of themes concerning the visual arts), along with several essays on deconstructive thought and film. It would finally have to reckon with a cluster of more recent scholarship, such as that of Akira Mizuta Lippit, among others. 159 These scant examples are in no way exhaustive, and the complexity of their arguments will not be developed at length in this chapter. They merely serve to highlight or sketch a few of the most visible cases of Derrida’s influence in a field that, while certainly not symbiotic with deconstruction, developed and accelerated in a parallel fashion with it (as well as the multifaceted body of work known as “French Theory”) beginning in the mid to late 1960’s. Both deconstruction and film and media studies benefited from shared, contingent circumstances stemming from a milieu of burgeoning academic interdiscplinarity and pioneering scholastic, artistic, and Architecture, edited by Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1994) was originally written in 1990 and published as “La Dissimulation de la peinture” in Littérature 93 (February 1994): 99-112; “On Unworking: The Image in Writing According to Blanchot,” translated by Roland-François Lack in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996) from “Sur le désœuvrement: l’image dans l’écriture selon Blanchot,” in Littérature 94 (May 1994): 113-124; “Image or Time? The Thought of the Outside in The Time-Image (Deleuze and Blanchot),” translated by Matthew Lazen with D.N. Rodowick in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, edited by D.N. Rodowick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 15-30, was originally published as “La ‘pensée du dehors’ dans L’image-temps (Deleuze et Blanchot)” in CiNéMAS 16, vols. 2-3 (Spring 2006): 12-31; “On Filmic Rewriting: Contamination of the Arts or Destruction of Art’s Identity?” translated by Malcolm Phillips in Porous Boundaries: Texts and Images in Twentieth-Century French Culture, edited by Jérôme Game (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007) 63-80 was also reprinted online in Rogue 11 (2007) <http://www.rouge.com.au/11/filmic_rewriting.html> and later posthumously published in French in Le Temps d'une pensée : Du montage à l'esthétique plurielle, edited by Sophie Charlin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2009); “A Cinematic Language,” translated by Adrian Martin and published online in Rogue 11 (2007) <http://www.rouge.com.au/11/cinematic_language.html> was an early text entitled “Un langage cinématographique” in Esprit “Cinéma Français” issue (June 1960): 960–67. 159 Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Reflections on Spectral Life,” Discourse 30, nos. 1-2 (Winter/Spring 2008): 232- 254. The article was reprinted and expanded in Lippit, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 103 political work in the humanities that sought to reassess the limits and reach of the university. Both were not simply outgrowths of this milieu, but constitutive of it. In short, it would be remiss to assume that film and media studies have completely ignored and today wholly dismiss deconstruction. And yet, although Derrida’s influence has had a direct and lasting impact in related fields, such as comparative literature and other humanities disciplines, it seems to have waned precipitously in film and media studies since what is often considered the heyday of film theory, particularly if one investigates the scholarship coming out of the field that is more or less concretely “about” Derrida’s work and/or deconstruction. One could credit this abatement, at least in the United States, to a multitude of interdependent factors orbiting around the field’s shifting theoretical landscape, as discussed in the previous chapter: the theory “boom” and “wars” that erupted throughout 1970s, 80s, and 90’s and their aftereffects; film and media theory’s movement away from the strict semiotic and structuralist analyses (like Metz’ early publications which were heavily informed by Barthes and Saussure) that were often erroneously correlated with Derrida’s work; the intensification of rigorously historical, social science-based, audience-based, and quantitive scholarship in the field; the explosion of professional film and media production degree-granting programs (from both for-profit and traditional non-profit institutions) at the expense of analysis and criticism and the field’s affiliation with the humanities; and the ominous funding issues, debilitating cuts, and austerity measures currently levied against the humanities that have terminated language departments and other avenues of theory. In the face of these hurdles, or perhaps because of them, theory still remains a vital component of film and media studies, as the previous chapter and 104 recent work on the topic suggests. 160 It is this vitality, as well as the abiding attention given to French thinkers who also never devoted what could be considered “substantial” and “direct” time to cinema, such as Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault, for example (and not to mention Saussure, Marx, and Freud), which makes the infrequent mention of deconstruction in contemporary film and media scholarship perplexing, and in the end, perhaps unjustly anchored to Derrida’s perceived avoidance of cinema. Beyond the claims of Derrida’s avoidance of the subject of cinema, there appears to be one plausible hypothesis that explains the lack of reference to deconstruction in contemporary film and media studies and this hypothesis is, not surprisingly, put forth in the early pages of Brunette and Wills’ Screen/Play, which is still the only direct account of the relations between film theory and deconstruction. For Brunette and Wills, the general absence of Derrida’s work in film theory is inseparable from “the supposed apolitical and ahistorical nature of deconstruction” and the dominant influence of Marxist-Lacanian interpretation prevalent in film studies at the time of their study (1989). 161 Because there exists no overt rejection or refutation of deconstruction in the body of work commonly called “film theory” (at least not a well-known attempt that I can locate or that Screen/Play cites), one can conclude that the neglect suggested by Brunette and Wills was and remains indirect, implicit, and contingent upon Derrida’s distance from the hardline followers of Marx and Lacan (and particularly, Althusser’s 160 See D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2007); An Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2015). 161 Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 20-21. 105 reading of them). This distance meant that the film theorists who undertook the Marxist- Lacanian-Althusserian mode of critique and who saturated the venerated and polemical publications of the era, namely the French journals La Nouvelle critique, Cahiers du cinéma, Cinéthique, and the British Screen, had little use for deconstruction, and in many ways, had to maintain their distance from a serious consideration of Derrida’s work in the interest of their own projects. The impact of Derrida’s absence from these publications cannot be underestimated because they ostensibly governed the field’s production and reception of “theory” during what would become the institutionalization of film studies. 162 Screen, in particular, as Brunette and Wills observe, functioned as “the crucial mediators between French and American film theorists,” and similar to others affiliated with the Marxist-Lacanian-Althusserian camp, probably suspiciously viewed Derrida’s work as part of the conservative and apolitical “Yale School,” whose members (such as J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Paul de Man) seemed more dedicated to formal, textual analysis than interrogating dominant ideology, the demands of historical materialism, and establishing a decisive alternative to the illusions of Hollywood cinema. 163 According to Brunette and Wills, the reason behind the rapid, overt, and quasi- militant politics of 1970’s film theory “makes sense considering the close relationship 162 While other English language journals of the day, such as Canada’s Cine-Tracts, and the American journals October, Wide Angle, Film Quarterly, and Camera Obscura, all played significant roles in the development of the field and film theory, Brunette and Wills primarily draw on Screen’s position because it functioned as the hub for the importation and translation of French film theory into English. 163 Brunette and Wills, Screen/Play, 21. For further reading on Screen’s history and crucial place as mediator between English and French-speaking audiences, see: Philip Rosen, “Screen and 1970s Film Theory,” in Inventing Film Studies, edited by Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). For an account of Derrida’s absence from Screen, see: Antony Easthope “Derrida and British Film Theory,” in Applying: To Derrida, edited by John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wolfreys (London: Macmillan Press, 1996). 106 between film and certain economic realities, especially embodied by Hollywood, as well as the obvious sociological questions film raises as one of the mass media.” 164 The de facto imbrication of film—and by extension, film and media studies and theory—with the realities of the film industry and the mass media also explains, Brunette and Wills suggest, a few of the chief differences between film theory and literary theory, as they pertain to their engagements with deconstruction. Specifically, when viewed from the self-righteous quasi-militancy of the former, literary theory appeared politically ambivalent, at best, and aligned with “ideology,” at worst. This view, combined with deconstruction’s general reception in literature departments and related disciplines and fields, accounted for what Brunette and Wills saw as the “surprising” lack of reference to Derrida’s works in feminist film theory “[g]iven the interest shown in Derrida’s work by French feminist theorists.” 165 1970s film studies and theory was thus eagerly receptive of the era’s most militant, radical, and innovative scholarship that would assist in disclosing the “realties” underpinning cinema, and it seems that it was indeed this eagerness that led to the initial attention the field received as well as the subsequent lukewarm reception of deconstruction. 166 The relative absence of reference to Derrida’s works in contemporary 164 Brunette and Wills, Screen/Play, 21. 165 Ibid., 20. 166 A number of important references to Derrida’s influence on 1970’s film and aesthetic theory are made in D.N. Rodowick’s The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press, 1994). In particular, Rodowick expands on the efforts by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Louis Baudry (and others associated with the Tel Quel group) “to use Derrida to renovate the vocabulary of dialectical materialism and to justify the division of an avant-garde aesthetic practice from ideological or metaphysical forms of discourse” (274). Rodowick goes on to say that while these commentators attempted to adopt deconstruction in order to “ameliorate” their critiques based on dualisms, such as reality and illusion, they were “ultimately compelled to entertain rather than criticize those concepts” because their arguments relied on the stability of their opposition (275). In other words, and as Rodowick explains, deploying deconstruction in this manner backfired; not only did they violently 107 film and media studies can therefore be traced to the ways in which Derrida treats terms like “politics,” “history,” and “reality” and the differences between his engagements with these terms and those within the film theory explicitly aligned with Marxist, Lacanian, and Althusserian discourses. Deconstruction did not fit in with the evolution of institutionalized film theory because, at bottom, it complicated and made untenable the latter’s deployment of oppositional logic, such as reality and fantasy, illusion and truth, etc. Contributing to the agitation of his detractors, Derrida did not propose recognizable political programs, concepts, and conventional alternatives to the structures or paradigms under deconstructive analysis; the “politics” of his works could not be gathered into and located within a polemical position to simply “counter” something else. In sum, the disposition and de-positioning force that characterizes deconstructive thought resisted the demands of 1970s film studies and theory as the latter pursued both institutionalization and the stability of its grounds. In his narrative of Screen in the 1970s, Philip Rosen indirectly corroborates this explanation and fills in the details of Brunette and Wills’ gloss of the journal. Rosen clarifies that Screen not only served as an Anglophone platform for French film theory and criticism through its translations, but also sought to become, in lockstep with colleagues and academic trends in France, “deliberately positional...[and] to develop certain lines of argument and inquiry with political rationales in mind.” 167 To acommplish this, Screen set the current methods of film studies—film appreciation, “simple, automatic critiques of mass culture,” “auteur criticism,” and dominant theories of realism (mostly inherited from André Bazin and the other previous Cahiers editors)— reduce Derrida’s work, but also implicitly reasserted logocentric discourse through a supposed escape from or alternative to it. 167 Philip Rosen, “Screen and 1970s Film Theory,” 266. 108 in its crosshairs; its intervention during this time, says Rosen, “was a grand project that was theoretical and practical, philosophical and political…promoting alternatives to currently dominant cinemas.” 168 Screen’s goal, and by extension, that of 1970’s film theory, was the realization of a decisive alternative to Hollywood cinema that would be founded on, as Rosen describes, the deliberate position necessitated by a “radical materialist rationale.” 169 In short, Screen’s theory and practice required double categorical grounding: the localization of its own position and the other, former position to be overthrown. Although a comprehensive history of Screen and the evolution of 1970s film theory goes beyond the scope of this chapter, it should be noted that the journal’s theoretical positions and affiliations were not entirely established in advance, but instead, and as Rosen notes, derived and progressed from a critique of realism (through semiotics and structuralism), to investigations of alternative filmic textuality, and finally, to the subjectivity and psychology of the spectator. This condensed development helps explain some of the passing references to Derrida’s work in Screen in the early 1970’s, which took place during the journal’s period of investment in textuality and the structures of filmic enunciation. It also elucidates the eventual absence of reference to deconstruction as the theory in the field became inseparable from the study of spectatorship, and with it, Lacan’s reading of Freud, and Althusser’s reading of Lacan and Marx. Keeping in mind the observations of Screen/Play and Rosen’s chronicle of Screen (and thus the main trends of 1970s film theory as they moved west from Paris, first across the English Channel and then the Atlantic), one can conclude that Derrida’s absence in contemporary 168 Ibid., 268. 169 Ibid. 109 film and media studies was caused by a negative, if latent, perception of his early work, and most glaringly, the place, figure, and politics of “the text” by crucial French and English interlocutors who more or less operated as the field’s trendsetters. Like a series of hollow echoes, the eventual lack of reference to Derrida’s work in French cinema journals in 1970’s, and consequently, in the pages of publications such as Screen, reverberated within the burgeoning American film studies movement and traces deconstruction’s general absence there today. 170 Whether embraced or contested, the argument put forth in the preceding pages casts a new light on Derrida’s Cahiers interview and the significance of its inaugural sentence: “It is not obvious that a journal like Cahiers du cinéma would interview Jacques Derrida.” 171 It seems “not obvious” because, as de Baecque and Jousse go on to say, Derrida has not pursued the critical and/or academic study of cinema. He is, they explain, “neither a specialist nor a professor speaking from the height of commanding knowledge, but very simply… a man who thinks and who goes back to the ontology of cinema while shedding new light on it.” 172 Cinema, Derrida later admits, represents for 170 Obviously, the account given here primarily relies on Brunette and Wills’ observations, and since they were made over 25 years ago, a more thorough investigation into the archives of Screen and the French journals mentioned, such as Cahiers du cinéma and Cinéthique, should be conducted. The present study does not respond in-depth to this demand. Instead, it accepts (and repeats) the general understanding in film and media studies of film theory’s development and the attachments of particular journals to certain theoretical and political frameworks. This “consensus” is not only reaffirmed by the content of some of the renowned essays from those venues, which continue to be republished in anthologies and included in film theory syllabi, but also the growing body of scholarship about the histories of these publications, namely Rosen, “Screen and 1970’s Film Theory”; Philip Rosen, “Screen and the Marxist Project in Film Criticism” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 2, no. 3 (1977): 273-287; Emilie Bickerton, A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma (London: Verso, 2010); Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Historie d’une revue, Vol. 1, A l’assaut du cinema, 1951-1959 and Vol. 2, Cinéma tours détours, 1959-1981 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991); and Patrcik ffrench and Roland-François Lack, eds., The Tel Quel Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998). 171 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 22. 172 Ibid., 23. 110 him “a hidden, secret, avid, gluttonous joy—in other words an infantile pleasure”; it is his blissful, yet underdeveloped and non-specialist relation to cinema and movies that seemingly prompted Cahiers to remark a silence—an implicit, mutual preclusion founded on Derrida’s preference to let his cinematic pleasures remain clandestine and possibly all the more insatiable. 173 Keeping in mind both Screen/Play’s hypothesis about film theory’s “neglect” of deconstruction and the tumultuous political history of Cahiers du cinéma, one can read de Baecque and Jousse’s passive, idiomatic negation “it is not obvious” (n’est pas chose qui va de soi can be also be translated as “it is not something self-evident” or “that goes without saying”) as an alibi, a type of self-vindication on Cahiers’ part in distancing itself from Derrida’s works and the ripple-effect of this exclusion, however incidental. At the very least, Cahiers’ opening account glosses the journal’s influence on and fraught history within contemporary film and media studies and the politics of film theory; in the same breath, it intimates the resistances to and rejections of deconstruction that accompanied its spread and acceptance in the academy and beyond—the figurative battle lines that were drawn in unison with its impact. 174 Although Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake have labeled Derrida’s presence within film theory as a “structuring absence,” one could forge an empirical argument for Derrida’s work to be included in the field that would, concomitantly, demonstrate that 173 Ibid., 25. 174 For Derrida’s thoughts on this simultaneity within the American academy, see: James Creech, Peggy Kamuf, and Jane Todd, “Deconstruction in America: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Critical Exchange 17 (Winter 1985): 1-33 (available online at http://societyforcriticalexchange.org); see also Michael Naas’ development of this topic in “Derrida’s America” in Derrida From Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 96-111. 111 cinema exists at the heart of deconstruction. 175 This argument could emerge in two ways, and de Baecque and Jousse, to their credit, allude to both in the preface. The first would, as does the quotation above, hinge on periodizing Derrida’s thought by considering its evolution or movement from a perceived exclusive focus on writing and speech to other themes, fields, or topi allied with or in close proximity to cinema, such as those named in the interview: the 1990 collaboration with the Louvre that resulted in Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, first published in French during the same year by Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux; the 1993 filmed conversation with Bernard Stiegler about the global mediascape, transcribed in the 1996 Éditions Galilée- Institut national de l’audiovisuel publication Échographies de la télévision: Entretiens filmés; his performance as “subject” in Safaa Fathy’s 1999 film, D’allieurs Derrida and the corollary book he co-authored with her, Tourner les mots: Au bord d’un film, published by Éditions Galilée/Arte Éditions in 2000. One could also include Derrida’s appearances as “himself” in Ken McMullen’s 1983 fictional film, Ghost Dance, and in the 2002 American documentary about him, Derrida directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, as well as a host of texts of his that engage with photography, video, literature, architecture, and painting. As the Cahiers writers assert, these events prove that Derrida is now an apt interviewee for their cinema-centric/cinephilic publication, notwithstanding the subject’s avowed, unorthodox cinephilia (or perhaps “cinemania”) 175 Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction, 2 nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 65. “Although initially cited by the post-1968 theorists as support for the materiality of language, references to his work [Derrida] became subsequently less frequent,” they write. While the authors cite “a serious incompatibility” between Derrida’s work and film theory’s hardline structuralist phase, they concede that the post-structuralist “grounds for maintaining a distance” from deconstruction “were less evident.” Like Brunette and Wills’ analysis in Screen/Play, Lapsley and Westlake suggest that this distance “may be traced to a general preference for a Lacanian perspective” (ibid.). 112 and seemingly unbridgeable distance from the passions of his interviewers. 176 To this end, they write: “That’s all we needed to go and ask some questions of a philosopher who, even though he admits he’s not a cinephile, nevertheless has truly been thinking about the cinematographic apparatus, projection, and the ghosts that every normally constituted viewer feels an irresistible urge to encounter.” 177 For many, this first method of examining deconstruction’s affiliation with cinema through Derrida’s (close) encounters with it makes sense: it seems that he has finally come around to cinema, or at least close enough to warrant the attention of the cinephiles who manage one of the most esteemed film journals, whose reputation, Derrida remarks later in the interview, “signifies a cultivated, theoretical relation to cinema.” 178 Although for others who are critical of schematizing Derrida’s work in such a progressive and evolutionary manner, this first method of approach may resemble both the allegations of his early political disinterest and the declarations by some commentators of his later ethicopolitical turn pronounced after the publications of “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority’” (1989), the aforementioned Specters of Marx (1993), and the 176 “I’m not at all a cinephile in the classical sense of the term.” Instead,” says Derrida in the interview, “I’m a pathological case” (de Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 23). The use of term “pathological” here describes his occasional or conditional cinephilia, or perhaps a type of “cinemania,” in opposition to “the classical sense of the term,” which relates to a more chronic compulsion or obsession. Indeed, Derrida’s relation to cinema is not cinephilic in what can be considered the “Cahiers tradition,” as popularized by the early editorial board and contributors, such as André Bazin, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut. Derrida’s movie ingestion also appears to differ significantly from the previous list of contemporary French philosophers who have written extensively about cinema and particular films, (i.e. Deleuze, Rancière, and Badiou). However, one cannot deny Derrida’s (mad) love for cinema after reading the Cahiers interview; one also must take into account the place(s) and influence of cinema in Parisian culture (which spawned and exacerbated the Cahiers cinephilia), especially in the student-saturated Latin Quarter where Derrida and his Lycée Louis-le-Grand and later, École Normale Supérieure classmates regularly went to the movies, as mentioned in “Cinema and Its Ghosts”; see as well Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, translated by Andrew Brown (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2012). 177 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and It’s Ghosts,” 22-23 (emphasis added). 178 Ibid., 25. 113 French edition of The Politics of Friendship (1994). To be sure, there are wide and evident dissimilarities among these two assertions, particularly in their approach to deconstruction and the circumstances of their expression, which range from commentary to blatant attack. Still, both of them can be seen to judge Derrida’s works through their explicit signposting (or lack thereof) of terms, proper names, and concepts, such as “justice,” “Marx,” and “hospitality,” for example, in addition to the unconventional ways in which they deliver their analyses—which is to say, what they do with and to language. 179 Counterarguments against these two claims assert that the absence of such signposting does not necessarily preclude ethicopolitical activity nor positioning, and that within Derrida’s indirect and elliptical references and textual performances there are indeed elaborate and radical ethicopolitical stakes. 180 These defenses also maintain that deconstruction’s calculated resistance to traditional ethical and political programs, activities, and theories frames its political and ethical implications. In other words, claims that Derrida’s early work was apolitical, as well as efforts to detect a sharp ethicopolitical “turn” in his later texts, however fair or expected given the conventions of classical philosophical language and argumentation, as well as the chronology and causality associated with traditional historicity, both similarly miss what deconstruction is up to. 181 179 As Geoffrey Bennington observes, even in Derrida’s texts that contain this signposting, or more direct elaborations on political and/or ethical issues vis-à-vis accepted and anticipated proper names and terms, have been likewise assailed by critics for not being political and/or ethical “enough” See: “Derrida and Politics” and “Deconstruction and Ethics,” in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), 18-33 and 34-46. 180 For a detailed historical account of Derrida’s place within the politics of French philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s, see Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 181 Derrida denies this turn: “I recall…that there never was in the 1980s or 1990s, as has sometimes been claimed a political turn or ethical turn in ‘deconstruction’ at least not as I experience it. The thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political, of the contour and limits of the political, especially around the enigma or the autoimmune double 114 It would be rash to equate cinema’s role and function in Derrida’s oeuvre to that of the ethicopolitical, but the example of overlooking the latter’s place, specifically within his inaugural publications, in combination with the reasons given for deconstruction’s exclusion from film theory, exemplify two important points about the affinity between cinema and the ethicopolitical that merit elaboration. First, the absence of proper names, other explicit markers, and/or terms of delineation does not necessarily inhibit the presence or functioning of those very things that appear to be missing; nor does the overt presence of them guarantee their complete grounding, transmission, and arrival without leakage, excess, or errancy. The logic of spectrality, a logic that characterizes the deconstructive gesture, calls on writing, reading, and thinking otherwise. 182 Second, if one accepts Brunette and Wills’ proposition about film theory’s elision of deconstruction, one would be forced to accept that this absence was truly, if implicitly, “neglect” and not wholly predicated on Derrida’s reticence about cinema. Instead, and as I stated above, Derrida’s absence from film and media studies was (and perhaps to a lesser degree still is) engendered by his politics, or rather, the flawed view of his initial non-engagement with the burning political issues of the 1960s and 70s, as well as his well-documented discomfort with and distance from the hegemonic politicized bind of the democratic.” Derrida goes on to say that his resistance to claims of the ethicopolitical “turn” in his work does not signal deconstruction’s absolute immobility or the absence of new events. His issue is with what he calls the “figure of a ‘turn’” as a radical departure or veering away from not only what has come before but perhaps more importantly, what is to come. That is to say, deconstruction has been always been and continues to be committed to and directed towards the ethico-politics of an undeliverable justice and democracy to come. See Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 39. See also: Bennington, “Derrida and Politics” and “Deconstruction and Ethics,” in Interrupting Derrida. 182 For a rigorous account of Derrida’s treatments of spectrality and its relation to the image, mimesis, and terms by which philosophy defines writing and the image, see Kas Saghafi, “The Ghosts of Jacques Derrida,” in Apparitions—of Derrida’s Other (New York City: Fordham University Press, 2010), 65–82. 115 communities that arose in response to them. 183 That said, it would be precisely Derrida’s political misalignment that kept the pioneers of film theory, and therefore contemporary film and media studies, away from deconstruction and not the other way around; the misreading of this misalignment is also what led to the speculation of both his ethicopolitical and cinematic “turn.” As I touched on above, no categorical denunciation or other treatise on or against deconstructive politics exists in the film theory canon (although Derrida’s name is usually thrown in with general denunciations of all “theory,” French or otherwise). 184 However, a 1984 essay by Dana Polan on the work of Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier offers what could be considered a potentially telling, if oblique, exception to this absence. 185 Near the end of the piece, and after an in-depth examination and celebration of Ropars- Wuilleumier’s analyses—immediately following the proclamation that “[n]o one in film studies has so brilliantly realized the potentials of deconstruction as Ropars”—Polan says that what he “would like to see” from work such as hers is closer focus on the ideology of filmic textuality and enunciation. 186 While he points out that Ropars-Wuilleumier has indicated the importance of attending to ideology in her works (and thus addressing it through her readings of deconstruction), Polan also states that her analyses of film and film language have not, thus far and according to him, effectively broached the topic. 183 For a general understanding of Derrida’s “position” in these political battles see Derrida, Positions; Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy; and Jacques Derrida and Élisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…, translated by Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). For an account of Derrida’s break with the Tel Quel group, see Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography. 184 For an example from film and media studies, see Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 185 Dana Polan, “‘Desire Shifts the Difference’: Figural Poetics and Figural Politics in the Film Theory of Marie-Claire Ropar-Wuilleumier,” Camera Obscura 12 (Summer 1984): 66-85. 186 Ibid., 83. 116 Resembling the conventional rhetoric of deconstruction’s detractors, Polan suggests that Ropars-Wuilleumier’s work is too centered on filmic “writing” specically and the formal analysis of texts in general. In the last paragraph of his article, Polan moves from specific claims about the publications of Ropars-Wuilleumier (claims that go beyond the scope of the proceeding) and explicitly addresses the political position of deconstruction: In Marxism and Deconstruction, Michael Ryan suggests that deconstruction take a needed place within a different approach (in his case, Marxism). Similarly, we might envision deconstruction as a local tactic of a broader, multivalent critical theory. In the United States especially, there is all too obviously the danger of deconstruction becoming an academic exercise or a method apart from all others. In its contradictions, the work of Marie-Claire Ropars suggests what we perhaps have need of to avoid that consequence, while it also demonstrates how far deconstruction at its best can go. 187 Although Polan stops short of agreeing with Ryan’s recommendation (or with what he says Ryan advocates in Marxism and Deconstruction), his concerns about deconstruction can be seen to revolve around the locality of its political positions (“a local tactic”), and so, its places, trajectories, alignments, and allegiances (“[in] the United States especially”). Polan therefore suggests that the “danger” of deconstruction is precisely what I’ve been referring to as its political misalignment. That is, because it currently avoids addressing ideology in conventional terms, deconstruction may come to exist “apart” from the other “academic exercise[s]” or “method[s]” constituting the multivalence of what it commonly called “critical theory.” By declaring that ideology is a vital component of cinematic textuality and a topic worthy of further analysis (which Polan mentions prior to his comments I’ve inserted above), Ropars- Wuilleumier, so argues Polan, relays one of her works’ “contradictions”: calling attention to the significance of the very thing (ideology) that they neglect. According to Polan, this 187 Ibid., 83-84. 117 particular contradiction “suggests” two crucial points about deconstruction and its political position(s) and/or positionality. To begin with, it illustrates that the “danger” or “consequence” of deconstruction—what I’ve been calling its political misalignment—is avoidable if its practitioners tackle ideology head-on and determine a clear political locality through signposting and the assertion of orthodox methods. Second, Ropars- Wuilleumier’s failure to adequately address ideology gives Polan the opportunity to posit an image of deconstruction “at its best,” which is to say its most appealing, applicable, useful, and politically viable. This insinuates that deconstruction’s durability, effectiveness, and future are (not surprisingly) predicated on the avoidance of its dangers: it should therefore render its political alignment recognizable within the broad limits of critical theory in the interest of both theory’s general political efficacy and its own livelihood. In order for deconstruction to survive and be at its strongest, it needs to get in line and orient itself through an engagement with ideology. On the contrary, and for those committed to affirming deconstruction, Polan’s diagnosis of this “danger” signals its ethicopolitcal force. The real danger would be following Polan’s proposal and attempting to placate the singularity of this force vis-à-vis institutionalization and/or other form of assimilation. “[A]t its best,” then, deconstruction remains dangerous in this double sense: its destabilizing gestures that threaten the sanctity of methods, systems, and programs lead these and other structures to seek protection. In short, the risk of loosening or trembling can also instigate the reinforcement of the frame and foundation, however incomplete, phatasmatic, and impossible this sealing off and indemnification may be. No doubt, Polan’s passing reference to the politics of deconstruction through Ropars-Wuilleumier’s (in)attention to 118 ideology should not be read to encapsulate the position of the entirety of film theory—as if “film theory” was and is synonymous with a kind of fictional political and/or ideological consistency. Nonetheless, these comments support Wills and Brunette’s explicit observations and those which I’ve advanced through Screen/Play and Rosen’s work on the politics and positions of Screen. If Polan’s take is read as a symptom of film theory’s beliefs about deconstruction and politics—that is, deconstruction lacks a traditional political praxis and cannot be implemented against dominant ideology—then his account, even as it extols Ropars-Wuilleumier’s innovations, would support the claim that Derrida’s work was simply too unsettling and politically unsettled, too suspicious of any one position or locale, and, therefore, too non-localizable in conventional political terms to be incorporated within film and media studies during its institutionalization. Deconstruction was simply too deconstructive to contribute to the foundation of the field and its political platforms. While I stated above that it would be a mistake to simply equate the ethicopolitical and cinema and to insinuate that they share the same conceptual space and time in Derrida’s oeuvre, Polan’s comments, the argument of Screen/Play, and Rosen’s condensed history of Screen suggest that these topics are, in fact, intertwined and that there exists an ethicopolitical/cinematic knot in Derrida’s corpus. This entanglement loops through the political reasons behind deconstruction’s absence in contemporary film and media studies, the politics of the film theory boom in France, Britain, and the United States, and thus, the politics of politics, but also what can be seen as the cinematic features distinguishing and pursued by deconstructive ethicopolitics. Although this chapter will not thoroughly explore these features, a critical fact is that their key concept, 119 if not the main crux, is the figure of the specter and all that comes with thinking through and with spectrality and being with ghosts, including mourning, inheritance, heteronomy before autonomy, justice, democracy, the undeconstructible, and the future/past orientation of l’avenir (to come), and so on. 188 This is not to say that the deconstructive conception of the ethicopolitical is a movie, nor is it to imply that cinema is the source of these concepts—as if cinema is somehow the origin of Derrida’s treatment of spectrality, and thus, deconstruction. Rather, I’d like to suggest that this knot denotes that cinema inhabits a more privileged place within deconstructive thought than assumed. Moreover, and if this is the case, if cinema is in some ways at the core of deconstruction, then contemporary film and media studies’ relative lack of reference to Derrida remains linked to a fundamental misunderstanding about deconstruction just as much as (if not more than) his explicit address of cinema. What is left to be debated is whether Derrida’s take on spectrality and the ethicopolitical would have been possible in the total absence of a certain idea or dream of cinema that is nonetheless informed by and inseparable from the practice of it. Can haunting, or “hauntology” for that matter, be imagined or conceptualized without a certain conception or image of cinema or the cinematic? 189 Just where and when does cinema and/or the cinematic begin and end? 188 See: Derrida, “The Force of Law” and Specters of Marx. 189 In an interview about Derrida’s relation to cinema, Samuel Weber draws attention to what he sees as an essential theatrical quality of spectrality. Weber points to a scene in Hamelt that exposes “the material opacity of the stage” and suggests “a certain complicity between the materiality and corporeality of the theater and the ambiguous localizability of the ghost.” The theatre stage is therefore an integral site of ghostly apparitions, fluctuating between the visible and the unseen, the on and off (or below) stage, which Weber points out, predates and conditions the cinema. See Peggy Kamuf, “Double Features: An Interview with Samuel Weber,” Discourse 37, nos. 1-2 (2015), 153. 120 Cinematic Traces If the first method that links together deconstruction and cinema relies on Derrida’s categorical discussion of or “turn” towards or return to movies or filmmaking, the second would claim that cinema, though mostly unmentioned or called by name, has an influential place in his corpus. To their credit, de Baecque and Jousse gesture toward this latter tendency when they describe Derrida as “a philosopher who, even though he admits he’s not a cinephile, nevertheless has truly been thinking (a pourtant une véritable pensée) about the cinematographic apparatus, projection, and the ghosts that every normally constituted viewer feels an irresistible urge to encounter.” 190 Despite their acknowledgment, the contours of this “a pourtant une véritable pensée” are murky, and the saying itself is a challenge to translate precisely into English. 191 In order to follow this second method, to argue for deconstruction’s affinity with or even inseparability from cinema and to resist the comforts of positing another historical “turn,” it’s necessary to look back into Derrida’s oeuvre and to locate empirically the traces of cinema, those shadows cast by “the cinematographic apparatus,” however marginal, fleeting, and/or cinematic. What emerges in the following pursuit of the “a pourtant une véritable pensée” is neither a developed discourse nor simply conjecture; one instead discovers a sort of ghostly genealogy of cinema—a small, discounted, yet repetitive presence of the very thing that has long been considered to be absent. The remaining pages of this chapter will explore and amplify the traces and echoes of cinema that mark Derrida’s corpus but have been, for the most part, omitted 190 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 22-23. 191 The phrase “a pourtant une véritable pensée” has been translated in the present perfect continuous form, which works best given the context of the preceding sentences and both French and English idioms. A more literal and awkward translation could be “nevertheless has a true thinking of.” 121 within institutionalized film and media studies. While the next chapter will seek to develop Derrida’s more explicit and sustained comments about cinema and other forms of technological media on the way to a sort of deconstructive film theory, the proceeding will note and magnify a few of the passing occurrences in his oeuvre that were made before and in addition to his more well-know and direct remarks about film. Despite its marginal status and position, cinema plays a significant role in some Derrida’s earliest and most celebrated works. It has a place there and stirs in waiting, remaining to be read, haunting both film and media studies and deconstructive thought. This section does not claim to be exhaustive. If there is a clear lesson to be gleaned from this particular chapter and perhaps this dissertation as a whole, it is that much of Derrida’s oeuvre remains to be read and calls to be reread. At once this speaks to the sheer volume of Derrida’s unpublished materials and the multitude of themes and subjects in them and his published works awaiting discovery. It thus speaks to the activity and future deconstruction today. A first stop in this investigation would likely be Derrida’s mention of “cinematography” in the opening pages of Of Grammatology’s “Writing Before the Letter,” which was originally published in the French journal Critique in December 1965, nearly two years before the release of the book. Now we tend to say “writing” for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself. And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing.” 192 192 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 9 (emphasis added). 122 Derrida uses cinematography in this passage as an example of a word and practice that contains the suffix “graphy,” and thus refers to writing, but does not straightforwardly correspond to alphabetic writing as it has been positioned within the history of Western logocentric metaphysics, that is, as a degraded supplement to the presence of “the order of the voice.” 193 Along with multiple terms and practices that imply writing (with or without the “graphy” suffix) in their name, “cinematography,” Derrida contends, demonstrates the general inflation of the term “writing” in culture, or the process by which that term is increasingly supplanting the word “language” to describe the essence and activity of certain practices (as well as “things,” like the face) in Western culture. This inflation of writing-as-language into domains that appear disassociated from its standard alphabetic and supplemental form—through what Derrida describes as a “slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible”—is not just a passing fad or trend; “this situation” he says “has always already been announced.” 194 In sum, the idiomatic substitution of the word “writing” for the word “language” is symptomatic of something much more revealing about the concept of writing and its relation to and status within language and signification. 195 Of Grammatology proposes that the inflation of writing is indicative of the performance of what has been called “language” in general: “‘signifier of the signifier’ [i.e. the conventional concept of writing] no longer defines accidental doubling and fallen secondarity [from the assumed full presence of speech]… [but] describes on the contrary the movement of language.” 196 Writing, Derrida says, 193 Ibid. 194 Ibid., 6, 9. 195 Ibid., 6. 196 Ibid., 9. 123 “comprehends language”; language and all of signification can be understood as forms of writing. 197 What is called “language” is nothing but writing—veiled, fundamental, originary writing—that does not reinstitute the presence associated with speech, thought, or eidos by predating them, but rather renders untenable their demand for presence by haunting them. Language, Derrida proposes, as speech, thought, and/or eidos, is “always already” mediated, which is to say engaged in editing, selection, tracing, projection, and other differential acts of writing. Cinematography thus serves as a vital and especially contemporary practice of a form of writing whose name can be seen to announce rather than efface the primary inscription (or “archi-writing”) of which Of Grammatology speaks. 198 In its name, cinematography calls out to a practice of writing that is not a derivative or degraded supplement to something more pure or immediate like speech, but an activity that, unlike Western metaphysics, reveals its condition as writing. Of course, the question or challenge ensconced within Of Grammatology’s passing mention of cinematography is precisely the latter’s non-development, especially in comparison to the relative nuance Derrida provides in the section’s remaining pages when discussing molecular biology, cybernetics, theoretical mathematics, and phonography. Cinematography is clearly included in a general sense, as an example among a group of activities that a) are not beholden to the imitative speech model and b) announce an indebtedness to writing in their name. Although an explicit theory of film is not to be found in Of Grammatology, these observations of writing’s inflation—of the 197 Ibid., 7. 198 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first documented use of the English word “cinematography” was 1897, while the use of “choreography” is traced to 1782. Le Grand Robert indicates that the French term cinématographie was derived from the term cinématographe in 1895, the date frequently referred to as cinema’s birth year. 124 term “writing” progressively supplanting the term “language” to label what he deems the broad “action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc.”—do offer a theory of “the now,” a reconsideration of what is appearing to happen presently in the world in which Derrida is writing. 199 Cinematography, while certainly a modern invention that, as a practice, is much newer than Western metaphysics, illustrates in its name the spectral place and function of writing, as such—as it has always been. The name given to this relatively contemporary technical operation thus exposes something extremely old, even originary (although thinking the origin of the trace nullifies the clear inauguration of any one thing): phonocentrism and what lies underneath, unspoken—the always, already of language as a type of writing. It is only now, Derrida suggests, that writing’s spectral place is coming to be recognized where it already was through names and practices such as cinematography. Its arrival has been delayed; it has developed like a photograph. 200 By tracking this spectrality through modern practices such as cinematography, Derrida’s early work sets out to show that Western philosophy has been ceaselessly attempting to exorcise writing and the disruptive supplements, ghosts, and traces that accompany it and sully the “full presence” supposed by metaphysics. In many ways, deconstruction’s first specific aim was therefore to challenge philosophy’s writing witch-hunt by revealing a new perspective that was, paradoxically, already present and operative; it is in this way that deconstructive thought and its ethicopolitics are essentially commitments to 199 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 9. 200 For more on Derrida’s thinking of delay as it relates to photography, see Michael Naas, “When it All Suddenly Clicked: Deconstruction after Psychoanalysis after Photography,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 44, no. 3 (September 2011): 91-98 and “‘Now Smile’: Recent Developments in Jacques Derrida’s Work on Photography,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no.1 (Winter 2011): 205-222. 125 spectrality in general, to the affirmation of delay, the “time out of joint,” and to the enactment of a type of “zooming effect” that snarls the operations of institutions and other formulations of power from the inside. It is precisely this commitment to spectrality that complicates the traditional conception and practice of a deconstructive ethicopolitics: whereas politics, in the conventional sense of the term, usually denote some sort of defined position and assume a type of “macro” applicability, spectral, deconstructive ethicopolitics pursue the zoom and the analysis of the grounds on which “macro” positions erect themselves. The “zooming effect,” “extreme close-ups,” and enlargement of elided detail found within these commitments recall both cinematic and psychoanalytic processes, in addition to Derrida’s frequent references to Walter Benjamin’s take on their relationship in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” 201 As his comments in “Cinema and Its Ghosts” demonstrate, what interests Derrida is Benjamin’s thinking of the “direct relation” between cinema and psychoanalysis as “contemporaries,” which not only cites the overlapping public announcements or arrivals of each (August and Louis Lumière’s first screening of the cinématographe in 1895; Sigmund Freud’s early publications at the same time) and the similar duration of an analytic session and feature-length films (not to mention the French term séance that describes both), but the investment each take in unearthing and magnifying forms of subterranean life, desires, details, and drives. Conjuring the comments of Jean Epstein and Béla Balázs on the 201 Derrida develops the claims of Benjamin’s essay in multiple works, for example “+ R (Into the Bargain),” The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 149-82; The Right of Inspection, translated by David Wills (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998); and “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” The Work of Mourning, translated and edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 3-67. 126 close-up, Derrida says that these disclosures, “[give] access to another scene, a heterogeneous scene,” as they find something new in the world that was already there; they turn the world upside down and inside-out, showing it to be haunted, a world of plus d’un (more than one world/ no longer any one world). 202 Similar to deconstructive thought, both psychoanalysis and cinema uncover that which often goes unnoticed; they disclose the imperceptible, repressed, forgotten, or unconscious elements of the world that were there all along, and thus suggest that discoveries remain to made. Although these comparisons may lure one into lumping cinema, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction together, it’s important to keep in mind that on numerous occasions Derrida unambiguously denied that his work was a variety of psychoanalysis; he also, just as unambiguously, rejects in the Cahiers interview the suggestion of “synchronization” between film editing (montage) and “writing of the deconstructive type,” in spite of their resemblances and his declaration of their “essential links.” 203 Four years before the publication Of Grammatology in France and two years before the appearance of “Writing Before the Letter,” Derrida made another passing reference to cinema in the pages of Critique. Published in 1963, “Force and Signification,” was Derrida’s first publication in that journal; it would later serve as the opening essay in Writing and Difference (1967). In “Force and Signification,” Derrida 202 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 26. 203 Ibid., 33. In his introduction to “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” written for the 1967 publication of the essay in Writing and Difference, Derrida sought to establish the distance between his project and Freud’s with the unequivocal assertion: “Despite appearances, the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy.” Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196. For Derrida’s complex relation to Freud’s work and the numerous places he rejected deconstruction’s “synchronization” with psychoanalysis, see: Geoffrey Bennington, “Circanalysis (The Thing Itself),” in Interrupting Derrida, 93-109 and Peggy Kamuf, “The Deconstitution of Psychoanalysis,” in To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 178-186. 127 examines the implications of Jean Rousset’s 1963 book, Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel and what he sees as Rousset’s structuralist effort to divest a literary work’s force through the strict and determined measurements of form. Force can be understood here as the quality of language’s incessant movement and differential tension, which guarantees the un-governability of meaning for author and critic alike. Like the relation of writing and speech in Of Grammatology, Derrida’s project in “Force and Signification” is not simply to privilege force over form, nor is it to oppose them dialectically; instead, he insists on their spectral fusion, inseparability, and on the fact that the irreducible pressure they exert on each other cannot be discarded, stabilized, identified, and/or exactly defined. “Force is not darkness,” he says, “and it is not hidden under a form for which it would serve as a substance, matter, or crypt. Force cannot be conceived on the basis of an oppositional couple.” 204 Unlike the binary opposition of form to content, force can be seen as that which constitutes the play of language and signification through and within form, but also as that which cannot be contained or directly articulated, as Derrida remarks, “under a form”; it is not something that can be unveiled. 205 Even while praising the rigor of Rousset’s project, Derrida’s analysis in “Force and Signification” advances that the structuralist mission as a whole risks reducing and neutralizing the singular movement of a given literary work by nullifying the difference, nuance, and invention at work in the work of its language. At the heart of Derrida’s argument is his observation that structuralism reduces and ignores force though its reliance on an inherent metaphoricity 204 Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification,” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 28. 205 Ibid., (emphasis added). 128 that it must not recognize as such; to function as such, structuralism must, in effect, efface its own structuring devices. Although this claim may seem more innocuous than incriminating, it has profound and irreparable repercussions for projects—structuralist or otherwise—that attempt to take account of the totality of a text, especially if they believe that meaning and intention can be determined through formal patterns. Rousset, according to Derrida, fails to take up the literary text on and through its own terms, and so he cannot stabilize the play of force and form without supplementing his analyses with crude spatializing metaphors that, “stricto senso…[refer] only to space, geometric or morphological space, the order of forms and sites.” 206 Structural analyses such as Rousset’s attempt violently to condense literary works into immediate and stable spatial metaphors without recognizing these figures as, precisely, figurative, and in the end, historically determined, deficient, and supplementary. It is in this discussion of structuralism’s reliance on and effacement of spatialization that Derrida turns to cinema, or more precisely the term “cinematic”: Hence, for as long as the metaphorical sense of the notion of structure is not acknowledged as such, that is to say interrogated and even destroyed as concerns its figurative quality so that the nonspatiality or original spatiality designated by it may be revived, one runs the risk, through a kind of sliding as unnoticed as it is efficacious, of confusing meaning with its geometric, morphological, or, in the best of cases, cinematic model. One risks being interested in the figure itself to the detriment of the play going on within it metaphorically. 207 Resembling the list-and-example structure that included “cinematography” in Of Grammatology, this fleeting cinematic allusion is not further developed in “Force and Signification”; it will represent Derrida’s only explicit mention of cinema in Writing and 206 Ibid., 15 207 Ibid., 16 (emphasis added to “cinematic”). 129 Difference. Notwithstanding the seeming triviality of this reference, it is in fact pivotal in this essay’s deconstruction of structuralism (and therefore, metaphysics), and furthermore, points towards what Derrida will soon call différance with his 1965 publication, “La parole soufflée” in Tel Quel. The significance of the “cinematic model” is tied to how it tacitly opposes or surpasses the preceding terms, “geometric” and “morphological,” which imply measurement and shape respectively, as well as a certain momentary stasis that can be exacted as and through form. As “the best of cases,” the very term cinema or the “cinematic model” can be heard to conjure the contrary. Deriving from the Greek words κίνηµα and κινηµατ or kinema denoting movement and motion, cinema is typically distinguished—as it is in its etymology—by a primary resistance to stasis and what can be considered, in both practice and theory, as its complex rendering of temporality and duration. “[I]ts vernacular name makes the relation explicit” says Akira Mizuta Lippit of the term, “‘movies’—images that move, that produce and reproduce movement from life itself, animation.” 208 A reader of “Force and Signification” is led to assume that the movement or duration proper to the “cinematic model” is precisely what differentiates it from the immobile abstraction and pure spatialization proper to geometry and morphology; this distinction is presumably what makes it “the best of cases” in comparison. And as the best case, the “cinematic model” would seem to be the closest one could get (at least compared to the other two examples) to the total capture and reanimation of the literary work; the result being its moving image or movie—a total film of force and form. 208 Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Digesture: Gesture without Bodies,” in Ex-Cinema, 119. 130 By designating the “cinematic model” as the “the best of cases,” Derrida certainly is not saying that cinema provides an ideal, pure, or otherwise simple replication of a literary work. No doubt, such a figureless or literal metaphor entails the complete absence of any analogical relation, the disappearance of all difference and mediation, or exactly what deconstruction deems unfeasible with the often-misused statement, “there is no outside-the-text” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). 209 Derrida also does not seem to be referring to a filmed adaptation of a novel. Despite its status as “the best of cases,” the “cinematic model” is still a risk. “[O]ne runs the risk,” he says, in equating it or the sound and images that it produces, its model, with the complete (re)presentation of the recorded thing, or here, the union of force and form. In short, one risks believing in the “cinematic model” too much and accepting its movie for the thing it captured and projects. The risk of cinema is therefore believing it not to be cinema; one thus runs the risk of cinematic disbelief. As the most proximate metaphor to the absent thing, the “cinematic model” is the riskiest of all and the best: it is the best precisely because it is the riskiest. Because a viewer often easily skips past “the play going on within” a cinematic production and because the classical, narrative-based cinema depends on this form of spectator belief to succeed (aka transparency), one ventures putting too much faith in the “cinematic model”—one may accept it as such. The thought that accumulates around cinema’s risk—the risk exclusively afforded to cinema as “the best of cases”—signals an embryonic film theory in Derrida’s earliest published work, a sort of deconstruction of the apparatus that would predate and exceed those associated with Baudry or Heath (but also trace back, albeit in a completely different way, to a reading of structuralism and to the influence of Althusser). The seeds of this theory, the theory itself as a seed, are 209 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. 131 awakened in Derrida’s hypothetical cinema project he proposes to de Baecque and Jousse, almost 40 years later: “If I were to write about film, what would interest me above all is its mode and system of belief. There is an altogether singular mode of believing in cinema: a century ago, an unprecedented experience of belief was invented.” 210 The singular mode of believing in cinema is the singularity and stakes of its risk. Its danger makes it the best. The “cinematic model” comes from a fantastical metaphor-machine that, like a monstrous variant of cinéma pur, produces images (and metaphors) constituting an absolute formalism beyond form, mimesis, or imitation; cinema, in this sense, does not render likeness, or anything else for that matter—it creates nothing, or rather, everything. Evading abstraction by immediately reflecting “the union of form and meaning,” the image or object of the “cinematic model” seems to exist, as Derrida positions the implicit metaphysics framing the structuralist mission, in “a theological simultaneity” together with the work, text, or object under analysis (or before the lens). 211 The mention of the “cinematic model” as the “best of cases” thus implicitly alludes to a certain failure of cinema, or any other fantastical device, metaphor, writing practice, or critical method, to achieve total immediacy and obliterate différance. Rousset’s attempt to account for literary works through form conjures the unaccountable ghosts of force. On Wednesday, February 26 th 1969, approximately six years after the publication of “Force and Signification” in Critique and less than two years removed from the French releases of La Voix et le phénomène, L’écriture et la différence, and De la grammatologie, Derrida presented an untitled paper in Pairs at a meeting of the Group 210 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and It’s Ghosts,” 27. 211 Derrida, “Force and Signification” 20, 24. 132 d’Etudes théoriques, which was organized by and consisted of those associated with Tel Quel. Before beginning his reading, each attendee was given a sheet of paper containing a selection from Plato’s Philebus and a short text by the French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, called Mimique: ostensibly philosophy on one hand, literature on the other. In addition to the handout, a number of quotations from other works by Mallarmé were handwritten in white chalk on a blackboard facing the audience, contrasting with the black typeface on the distributed white sheets of paper. Derrida would go on to deliver the second portion of his presentation (or session) on March 5 th , the following Wednesday evening. Tel Quel subsequently published the two sessions in sequence in 1970 (nos. 41 and 42) and gave Derrida’s two-part piece the title “Le double séance” (“The Double Session”). From and/or before its outset, “The Double Session” was already (re-)marked by and embedded within a series of doubles. Appropriately, then, the figure of the double, doubling, mimesis, and duplicity would also serve as the main topics of Derrida’s analysis, which, at its core, says Geoffrey Bennington, “interrogate[s] the relation between literature and truth and…show[s] how literature escapes (or can escape) the hold of the ontological question (‘What is…’) in a way which can nonetheless provide something like a ‘formalisation’ of the question of truth” 212 It is perhaps also appropriate that cinema is directly mentioned, or more precisely, written, twice in the publication of “The Double Session.” If one accounts for these as they appear in succession, the first occurs about halfway through the first session in a footnote (no. 26 in the 1981 English edition; no. 20 in the French) that cites Mallarmé’s response to a survey about illustration conducted by André Ibels (which was later published in the former’s Œuvres Complètes, page 878). In this particular footnote, Derrida comments on and provides the remaining 212 Geoffrey Bennington, “Derrida’s Mallarmé,” in Interrupting Derrida, 47. 133 portion of a quotation from Mallarmé that he had only partially cited within what can be considered the “main text” of “The Double Session.” This means that the mention of cinema can been seen to operate as a part of and apart from Derrida’s text— that is, because it is contained within a footnote and within a quotation attributed to Mallarmé, this first reference to cinema is not only not Derrida’s “own,” but also presumably went unspoken during his presentation on February 26 th . In short, one can assume that it was subsequently added for the written publication. And yet, I’d like to suggest that the undecidability that accompanies this first occurrence of cinema in “The Double Session” (to whom and where does it belong? Is it proper or in excess to the text? How are these distinctions made and sustained?) animates and encapsulates (or remarks) a certain movement of Mallarmé’s syntax that Derrida cites as exemplary in relation to mimesis and truth. Derrida also (re)marks Mallarmé’s exemplarity by performing it himself, in his own idiom, as a kind of mimicry that is not simply imitation. The status, place(s), and/or position(s) of this first quotation (neither inside nor outside of the text, neither directly attributed to Derrida, nor neglected by him) and the attention that Derrida assigns to it in the margin as marginal, calls for a reconsideration of “The Double Session” (and perhaps all of Mallarmé’s work for that matter) with cinema in mind. Derrida writes the following in a footnote: The context of this quotation should be here restituted and related back to what was said, at the start of this session, concerning the book, the extra-text [hors- livre], the image, and the illustration; then it should be related forward to what will be set in motion, in the following session, between the book and the movement of stage. Mallarmé is responding to a survey: “I am for–no illustration; everything a book evokes should happen in the reader’s mind; but, if you replace photography, why not go straight to cinematography whose successive unrolling 134 [déroulement] will replace, in both pictures and text, many a volume, advantageously. 213 It should be pointed out that, in the main body of the text, Derrida only uses the portion of this quote prior to the first semicolon (“I am for—no illustration”) in order to accentuate Marllamé’s challenge to and displacement of the mimetic system and therefore truth, as they are traditionally conceived in the history of philosophy. Through its description of a mime miming without discernable referent, performing a kind of mimicry in the absence of an identifiable thing imitated, and thus drawing an undecidable relation between the acts of reading and writing, Marllamé’s Mimique, Derrida says, “no longer belongs to the system of truth” because it “does not manifest, produce or unveil any presence; nor does it constitute any conformity, resemblance or adequation between a presence and a representation.” 214 Mimique simultaneously performs in the sense that its mime has no fixed or identifiable signified and mimics mimesis through this very performance. For Derrida, it is this mimicry through and as performance that exceeds the philosophical doctrines of mimesis and truth. “Mallarmé thus preserves the differential structure of mimicry or mimēsis,” Derrida argues, “but without its Platonic or metaphysical interpretation.…Mallarmé even maintains…the structure of the phantasma as it is defined by Plato…[w]ith the exception that there is no longer any model.” 215 What 213 Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” translated by Barbara Johnson, in Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 208 (emphasis added). In his 1968 seminar on Mallarmé and Antonin Artaud, entitled “L’Éciture et le théâtre: Mallarmé / Artaud” (which was conducted in the United States at Johns Hopkins and in Paris), Derrida spends considerable time with this same quote in relation to Artaud’s well-known dislike of synchronized sound in cinema. Artaud’s denunciations of synch-sound were due to his general belief in the reductive and representational force of words; this leads Derrida to put Artaud’s beliefs in conversation with Mallarmé’s comments on illustration and mimesis. 214 Ibid. 215 Ibid., 206. 135 Derrida means by this is that Mallarmé displaces and exceeds (or deconstructs) mimesis from within. In other words, Mimique is not a pure performance in the sense that it posits “its presence, its truth, as idea, form or matter” as a sort of revelation; its performativity stems from the way in which it takes on mimesis and truth without proposing an alternative to or simply refuting them. 216 It is precisely the way that Mallarmé’s text “takes on” the mimetic structure without simply opposing it that interests Derrida. Mallarmé’s embededness and singular reproduction of “the differential structure of mimicry” leads to both Derrida’s inclusion of the former’s quote about illustration as well as the commentary and follow-up in the footnote. On one hand, Mallarmé, in Derrida’s view, contests the illustrative-model, whereby the term and act of illustration denotes the reference to something beyond the text, something that the text itself cannot account for in and through itself—as if Mimique served to merely illustrate something else, beyond and thus in the effacement of itself, as if it only reinforced the derivative model of writing as illustration. On the other hand, Derrida “preserves” Mallarmé’s necessary place within the mimetic system. He does so by insisting that Mallarmé does not oppose the process of illustration vis-à-vis the purity of textual performative language or the proposal of some sort of immediate beyond. This double necessity or dual call of Mallarmé’s writing is what seems to motivate Derrida’s footnote and his declaration within it to contextualize Mallarmé’s quotation, which, it should be noted, is explicitly about his opinion of graphic illustrations accompanying written texts. One will likely notice that Mallarmé sounds more equivocal, ironic, and in the end, undecidable in the complete quotation contained within the footnote than in the extract cited in the main text of “The Double Session.” For J. Hillis Miller, Mallarmé’s 216 Ibid., 207. 136 aversion to illustrated accompaniments is related to their attempt to make present in and of themselves the “performative power” of words. 217 In short, the distaste that Mallarmé suggests (“I am for—no illustration”) relays a belief that illustrations diminish the evocative power of words; he is for “no illustration” because illustrations deliver one particular and condensed representation as reductive renderings of “truth.” Eroding the words and the play of language that generate them, illustrations in this sense would be one possible outcome among a multitude of readings that remain virtual and at work in the language of the text. In the same breath, by situating photography, and then cinematography, as subsequent replacements for graphic illustrations, Mallarmé ironically alludes to a certain incapacity of media accompaniments through their imminent obsolescence. That is, Mallarmé interrogates the truth or authority presupposed by a graphic illustration by not only stating that said illustration provides merely one possible reading (and with it an inevitable reduction of the text), but also that illustrations as media are replaceable and in the process of being substituted by other technologies; the reign of illustration, in other words, will be short-lived and its power should be called into question. Mallarmé’s take on media obsolescence and the reductive effect of them complicate his remarks about cinema. On one hand, he seems to mistrust any sort of graphical or pictorial rendering of literature for the reasons mentioned above (their reduction of language and historical impermanence); on the other, he says that cinema’s “successive unrolling [déroulement] will replace many a volume, advantageously.” Of course, Mallarmé’s consideration of cinema hinges on the tone of this “advantageously”: is it ironic, serious, or both? What does he mean or intend to say? Is Mallarmé, as Hillis Miller contends, recognizing “that 217 J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 67. 137 there are many books which in no way exploit the particular evocative power of the printed word and therefore might as well be replaced by the ‘movies’”? 218 Or, as other work on the topic suggests, was Mallarmé tacitly celebrating the newfound power of cinema and its affinity with and influence on the “successive unrolling [déroulement]” that characterizes his poetry? 219 Or was his ironic “advantageously” a dismissal of cinema and thus consistent with its unpopularity amongst the literati of the era? These questions hang in the air, and have been put there, it seems, on purpose (perhaps). Conjuring this undecidability, an undecidability that is precisely bound to cinema, seems to be a motivating factor of Derrida’s footnote, in both his commentary and reproduction of the quote from Mallarmé. Upon providing the complete quotation and its context (as Mallarmé’s response to a survey about graphic or pictorial illustration), Derrida effectively claims that what Mallarmé says in it not only relates to everything that has passed and is to come in “The Double Session,” but that these comments move back and forth through Derrida’s text like cinema and its “successive unrolling [déroulement].” The undecidability aligned with Mallarmé’s discussion of cinema “should here be restituted and related back to what was said,” Derrida says, “then it should be related forward to what will be set in motion, in the following session” (my emphasis). After reading this quotation from Mallarmé, we should rewind, Derrida suggests, and allow this cinematic undecidability to unroll forward as if it were a film; we should go back to the beginning, start again, and notice the cinematic unrolling in what has already been said. Derrida’s point here appears to be directly tied to how Mallarmé 218 Ibid., 68. 219 For the affinities between Mallarmé’s poetry and early cinema, see: Christophe Wall-Romana, “Mallarmé’s Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the Cinématographe, 1983-98,” PMLA 120, no.1 (2005): 128-147. 138 contests the reductive illustrative model and the truth claims associated with mimesis through this cinematic metaphor. Mallarmé advocates for a plurality of readings and the potential or virtuality of words to evoke what they will for readers. He sends his words off and insists that they disperse or unroll (disseminate) accordingly, that is, without the authority, restraint, or diminution of one pre-set reading or meaning, such as those offered by illustrations. The text should therefore uncoil like a filmstrip; like the chain of endless technological substitutes that all claim to do provide the truth. As part of the technological and illustrative (mimetic) systems that Mallarmè inhabits and critiques, cinema, his logic implies, potentially disrupts or deconstructs these systems through its unique spatiotemporality—its successive unrolling that works against the positing of a single and stable truth. “The Double Session” harnesses and accentuates the deconstructive force of Mallarmé’s work that tests the mimetic structure from within; in this particular footnote, Derrida—through Mallarmé—seems to suggest that there is something properly cinematic about this force, even though they both refrain from admitting or declaring as much. Despite the fact that he does not make such a proclamation, Derrida overtly mentions cinema (again) in “The Double Session” and does so in direct reference to Mallarmé’s dizzying prose in his Crayonné au théâtre (1887). Specifically, Derrida makes this comment following his reproduction of a particularly complex paragraph from Mallarmé in which the latter discusses the “allegorical” characteristics of ballet. 220 As a spectator of a ballet recital, Mallarmé notes how the performance of the dancers “enlace[s] as well as animate[s]” all of the “correlations” of its references “to such an 220 Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1945), 382, quoted in Derrida, “The Double Session,” translated by Barbara Johnson, 240. 139 extent that the figurative representation…by the Dance contains a test relative to their degree of esthetic quality.” 221 For Mallarmé, the ballet dancer translates, transfers, and embodies a plurality of undecidable “correlations” or references through her performance; she becomes a type of medium, a liminal and moving figure of the dance whose “impersonality is located…between her feminine appearance and some mimed object.” 222 Between “feminine appearance” and “mimed object,” and so neither human nor inhuman, neither actual nor virtual, the dancer, and thus the “text” of the ballet, renders untenable a clear “philosophical point” or otherwise final deduction and/or meaning: To deduce the philosophical point at which the dancer’s impersonality is located, between her feminine appearance and some mimed object, for what hymen: she sticks it with a confident point and sets it down; then unrolls [déroule] our conviction in a cipher of pirouettes prolonged toward another motif… 223 Such a deduction would require, as Mallarmé appears to suggest, the presupposed stability of a “proper” philosophical proposition or the stasis associated with knowledge; “the philosophical point” would, in this sense, demand the text’s closure, indivisible borders, and auto-affection. Instead, everything moves, including Mallarmé’s text; it dances along with the dancer, translating, transferring, and embodying her singular movements in space and time though its own singularity. The spacing or difference between the array of texts at play here (for example, those which the dancer embodies, the dance that Mallarmé describes, etc.) are demarcated by a “hymen”: a membrane that is not simply opened or closed, but folded inside and out, opened and closed. The hymen 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid. 223 Ibid. 140 enables what Derrida calls “the determination of each textual unit…while referring each time to another text, to another determinate system.” 224 Truth, as a classical philosophical deduction and closure, cannot grasp the logic of the hymen and cannot be grasped itself. “Let us freeze for a moment,” Derrida says after citing the above extract, “just at this point, these cinematographic acrobatics” (Immobilisons un instant, en ce point, la cinématographique voltige). 225 Derrida’s use of the word “cinematographic” here immediately recalls, and to certain extent, mimics, Mallarmé’s description of cinema and its “successive unrolling [déroulement]” through the use of the French verb dérouler. 226 To characterize something “cinematographic” in this way is to remark its restlessness, progress in motion: a movie. Derrida implores us to immobilize [immobilisons] when faced with the mobility, instability, and perpetual unrolling of Mallarmé’s cinematographics: at the point where Mallarmé suggests that locating the precise point is impossible, that the thresholds delimiting points are undecidable, that they are, at bottom, unsettled by a cinematic déroulement or uncoiling, Derrida puts Mallarmé in freeze- frame. Mallarmé is, at this indiscernible point, walking a high wire between unhinged points or platforms like an acrobat, another figure of a body in motion. On Mallarmé’s cinematic balancing act, Derrida says: 224 Derrida, “The Double Session,” 202. 225 Ibid., 240 (emphasis added). 226 However, if we assume that the main text of “The Double Session” functioned as more or less a transcript of Derrida’s presentations to the Group d’Etudes théoriques on February 26 th and March 5 th , then this second reference to cinema would have been, in some ways, the first. That is, Derrida’s comment or description of Mallarmé’s “cinematographic acrobatics” (if it was indeed uttered on March 5 th , during the second session) would have been made following the unspoken first reference to cinema that not only precedes it in the publication of “The Double Session,” but also in many ways serves as an explicit reference to it. The question of cinema’s absence/presence (feasibly unspoken in the first instance as a footnote, while mentioned in the second) here characterizes the traces of Derrida’s cinema: it is a topic or theme that seems to be live on the horizon, without original reference and clear source. 141 This entire paragraph is woven like a textile…a vast and supple fabric being spread out before us, but also being regularly stitched down. In the play of this tacking, there is nothing but text…The text—for what hymen—is at once cut through and gathered up. The “cipher of pirouettes prolonged toward another motif” is, like the whole of text, ciphered to the second power. 227 Derrida’s allusion to stitching—which follows his call to immobilize “for a moment, just at this point, these cinematographic acrobatics”— further describes Mallarmé’s cinematic machine. For film-based cinema, like stitching, also functions by its momentary capture of photographic “stills” from a particular “point of view,” which are then “woven” or wound on reel and unfurled or “spread out before” a viewer by a projector. A camera functions as if it were a type of text in this sense—“at once cut[ting] through and gather[ing] up” pieces of another text—and Mallarmé describes the ballet scene like a movie camera captures its images: neither totally still nor in motion, closed and open like a hymen-shutter, an undecidable momentary immobilization (or divided point) in the service of movement, moving exponentially “toward another motif” or frame. 228 In a certain way, then, Derrida’s recognition of Mallarmé’s cinematographics is precisely what makes works like Mimique exemplary, and in the end, deconstructive of the mimetic system and the philosophical deduction of truth; it is thus Derrida’s detection of similar yet singular cinematic features of deconstruction within Mallarmé’s corpus, I’d 227 Ibid. 228 Derrida discusses the concept of the point of view along with the divisibility and disunity of the instant in relation to photography in Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, translated by Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); and “The Deaths of Roland Barthes.” 142 like to suggest, that produces one more double of “The Double Session.” Two cinemas, then, Derrida’s and Mallarmé’s, one through the other, une double séance. 229 The privilege that Derrida assigns to the mobility of cinema in “The Double Session”—which can also be traced back to his comments in “Force and Signification”— figures prominently in his 1990 interview with Peter Brunette and David Wills about the spatial arts. 230 In one question, Brunette asks about the “thereness” and potential “phenomenological presence” of wordless visual objects and if film represents “an intermediate area because it is sort of present like a visual object, yet it has to be read through like words.” 231 Derrida responds with the observation that silent spatial works of art are, on one hand, absolutely mute, and therefore “completely foreign or heterogeneous to words.” 232 This muteness, Derrida suggests, is inherently political; it informs a resistance to explanation, a force “against the authority of discourse, against discursive hegemony.” 233 Art’s muteness, its refusal and inability to speak, reveals the oppressiveness of discourse (or speech) and its demand that one talk, explain, publicize, compartmentalize, conquer a subject, and so on. And yet, on the other hand, Derrida 229 In her translator’s introduction to Dissemination, Barbara Johnson begins the section “Derrida’s Styles” by reproducing what he says about reading Mallarmé in “The Double Session”: “But a reading here should no longer be carried out as a simple table of concepts of words, as a static of statistical sort of punctuation. One must reconstitute a chain in motion, the effects of a network and the play of syntax” (194). Johnson goes on to note that Derrida’s “warning applies equally well to [his] own writing” because “it constantly frustrates the desire to ‘get to the point’” (xvi). She goes on to describe (without directly saying it) Derrida’s writing as if it were the successive unrolling of Mallarmé’s cinema: “Derrida’s writing mimes the movement of desire rather than its fulfillment, refusing to stop and totalize itself, or doing so only by feint” (ibid.). 230 Peter Brunette and David Wills, “The Spatial Arts: An Interview With Jacques Derrida,” translated by Laurie Volpe, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, edited by Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9-32. 231 Ibid., 12. 232 Ibid., 13. 233 Ibid. 143 notes that art’s silence or muteness is not so absolute: “these silent works are in fact already talkative,” he says; they are soundlessly “full of virtual discourses, and from that point of view the silent work becomes an even more authoritarian discourse…” 234 Silence is, in this sense, exponentially imposing and authoritarian through its virtual discursivity (“in the sense of theologically authoritarian,” Derrida says). Silence speaks, in other words: it says everything precisely because it is actually unheard and vocalizes nothing. 235 Silence claims a sort of hyperbolic discursive authority through a potential to say anything and everything. “Thus,” Derrida discerns, “it can be said that the greatest logocentric power resides in a work’s silence, and liberation from this authority resides on the side of discourse, a discourse that is going to relativize things, emancipate itself, refuse to kneel in front of the authority represented by sculpture, or architecture.” 236 One encounters the silence of art through a sort of discursive autoimmunity: an object’s resistance to speech renders it a tyrannical discursivity, and vice versa. Speech or discourse is therefore haunted by what escapes it, which is to say, that which remains unspoken; because there is always something left to say, always something unaccountable or not accounted for, a possible discourse can never completely corral the totality of a subject or object. In its effort to explain and present, discourse, no matter how thorough and calculated, can never fully saturate a context. Its supposed power is always circumvented from within, from its own incapacities to accomplish what it says. 234 Ibid. 235 Ibid. 236 Ibid. 144 After elucidating the aporia between discursive and non-discursive arts, mutism and discourse, and by extension, presence and absence, Derrida moves to a fairly substantial discussion of cinema’s relation to words. He calls film “a very particular case…because the effect of presence is complicated by the fact of movement, of mobility, or sequentially, of temporality.” 237 While his discussion of cinema and discourse is relatively substantial given his own supposed “silence” about cinema, everything that Derrida says about film can be traced back to his first observation: cinema’s particularity is founded on its mobility (or its successive unrolling) and, as I’d like to suggest, what its déroulement illustrates about spatiotemporality in general. Following his first statement concerning the specificity of cinema, Derrida compares the differences between sound and silent film with the impossible delineation of the discursive from the non-discursive. Although he doesn’t say it, the point he makes here alludes to a fact that many film and media historians know well: silent films were never silent. 238 Derrida’s supplement to the histories of silent film sound is that cinema, prior to synch-sound technologies and the inclusion of recorded speech, carried virtual spoken discourses, and as such, was authoritatively discursive—in a certain sense, massively more so than the “talkies.” After remarking the complications of categorizing sound and silent film through their “relation to the word,” Derrida makes a number of complex observations about cinema, which I will include at length: 237 Ibid. 238 For more on the sounds of silent film, see Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) and The Sounds of Silent Films, edited by Claus Tiber and Anna Katharina Windisch (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 145 Obviously, if there is a specificity to the cinematic medium, it is foreign to the word. That is to say even the most talkative cinema supposes a reinscription of the word within a specific cinematic element not governed by the word. If there is something specific in cinema…it is the form in which discourse is put into play, inscribed or situated, without in principle governing the work. So from that point of view we can find in film the means to rethink or refound all the relations between the word and silent art, such as they came to be stabilized before the appearance of cinema. Before the advent of cinema there was painting, architecture, sculpture, and within them one could find structures that had institutionalized the relation between discourse and nondiscourse in art. If the advent of cinema allowed for something completely new, it was the possibility of another way of playing with the hierarchies. 239 It is difficult not to notice the privileged place or role of cinema for Derrida in these comments, for, at bottom, what he appears to be describing here is nothing short of its essential and singular deconstructive capacities. While he stops short of identifying and localizing its specificity, cinema, Derrida contends, is “foreign to the word.” This foreignness is not a result of its avoidance of “the word” or its “mutism,” like the other visual arts; instead of assuming either a discursive or non-discursive position, cinema explicitly displaces the words it speaks and conjures the words it doesn’t say or those words that remain to be said. Prior to “the advent of cinema,” Derrida notes that “painting architecture, [and] sculpture…had institutionalized the relation between discourse and nondiscourse in art,” that is, these practices, as well as their creators, commentators and publics, had essentially assumed art’s stable relation relative to the word. According to Derrida, if cinema “allowed for something new,” then it would be through its own foreign relations to the word, its status as neither discursive nor nondiscursive, which introduced “the possibility of another way of playing with the hierarchies.” Cinema therefore upset or deconstructed the categorizations and hierarchies of the arts it followed through its idiom, its foreign language. 239 Ibid., 13-14. 146 Derrida is not suggesting that these hierarchies were ever completely stable entities or that this pre-cinema categorization was essentially self-evident; his previous point about virtual discursivity in silent art works underscores that this classification was always already undone from within. However, like deconstruction (and psychoanalysis), it took the singularity of cinema’s idiom to reveal the play always already at work within these structures; cinema spoke to and with the words that the visual arts didn’t or couldn’t say. As Derrida suggests in this interview, cinema resists its grouping and institutionalization with the terms or systems that were in place before it. This resistance is not generated by a static, dialectical opposition to either discourse or silence, but literally mobilized (“movement…mobility…sequentiality…temporality”) in its déroulement as articulated through Mallarmé’s idiom in “The Double Session.” Cinema’s restive mobility and resulting plasticity can be seen to inform Derrida’s statement in the interview that it is perhaps impossible to speak about it “in general” and thus to identify, once and for all, the specificity any one art. 240 “[I]t is probable that we are dealing with many different arts within the same technological medium,” Derrida says of cinema, “perhaps there is no unity in the cinematic art.” 241 Through its own radical disunity, its play with and appropriation of the other arts through what Derrida calls “given cinematic method[s],” or conventions, styles, and genres, cinema has a hand in rendering the arts foreign, as if they were just like it: similarly singular, equivocal, and in the end, resolutely non-localizable. Cinema for Derrida shows the world to be already undone; it hears and speaks its own foreign language in and through the voice of the other. 240 Ibid., 14. 241 Ibid. 147 Although the aforementioned traces of cinema have been collocated from Derrida’s written texts and interviews, one would also need, in keeping with this chapter’s empirical pursuit, to contend with its presence and place within his published and unpublished seminars. Most visible among them (because it is published) would be cinema’s significance in The Death Penalty Volume I, in which Derrida argues that films, along with television and other media, function as contemporary supplements to the essential theatricality and visibility of the death penalty. 242 “The spectacle and the spectator are required,” he says of capital punishment, “[t]he state, the polis, the whole of politics, the co-citizenry…must attend and attest, it must testify publicly that death was dealt or inflicted, it must see die the condemned one.” 243 Seeing the condemned die, witnessing that he or she has been put to death at the hand of the state as the ultimate penalty for a crime, reveals the sovereign power of the state like a mirror image; the sovereign demonstrates its power through the bodily sacrifice of its citizenry, and this sacrifice must be seen, broadcast, or otherwise rendered public for the death penalty (and sovereignty) to function as such. Derrida continually underscores throughout the seminar that “[t]his act of witnessing must be visual: an eye witness. It thus never happens without a stage and lighting, that of the natural light of day or artificial lighting.” 244 Historically, this meant that executions—at least throughout the documented Western tradition of them—took place in public, pre-designated spaces, where the public could watch. The “success” of execution and the resulting phantasmatic image of state 242 Michael Naas remarks that Derrida’s first seminar of The Death Penalty, Vol.1, unfolds as if it were a film, see Michael Naas, “Philosophy and the Death Penalty,” (2011) http://derridaseminars.org/pdfs/2011/2011%20Presentation%20Naas.pdf. 243 Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol.1, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 2 (emphasis added). 244 Ibid., 3. 148 sovereignty therefore explicitly depends on the theatricality or visual scaffolding of the death penalty as spectacle-punishment. As Derrida succinctly puts it: “No death penalty without the phenomenality of appearance.” 245 In other words, if one seeks to analyze the death penalty, one must take into account the exhibition of cruelty, the state-sanctioned putting on display and spectacular visualization of killing. The question of cinema’s role within the death penalty’s theatrical framework arises for Derrida through his engagement with contemporary forms of capital punishment that remain bloodless, supposedly more humane, and operate according to what he calls an “anesthesial logic.” Derrida develops this logic as it concerns the apparent disappearance of cruelty vis-à-vis certain so-called “refined” applications and less visible spaces of execution (for example, lethal injection and the restricted visibility of “live” execution, which is limited in the United States to non-public premises and certain witnesses) instead or in the place of the death penalty’s abolition through its precarious (and deconstructible) principle of exchange or jus talionis. In other words, efforts of anesthesial logic to ease and/or erase cruelty skip or do not rigorously take on the sovereign phantasm at the heart of death penalty. Furthermore, Derrida repeatedly emphasizes that cruelty’s complete erasure through the spatial/visual restriction of executions and the ostensibly bloodless or gentler procedures is impossible because cruelty is also “essentially psychical,” and so, essentially invisible and operative without empirical evidence. While the term cruelty, as Derrida points out, comes from the Latin word cruor, which designates blood flowing from a wound, it also refers to the pleasure afforded by seeing or making suffer, and this suffering may be both psychological and 245 Ibid., 31. 149 physical in nature. 246 Despite its affiliation with spilt red blood, one can be cruel, cruelty can indeed occur, without physically rupturing the skin and causing blood to flow; cruelty also takes or has its place in the absence of visible flesh wounds because it results from the physical and/or psychical suffering of the other and the pleasure that this seeing- suffer provides witnesses. By developing cruelty through its visible and invisible properties, Derrida reads the gory, tortuous public executions of the past along with contemporary capital punishment protocols, especially the anesthetically evolved cleanliness that supposedly marks lethal injection. Derrida’s description of anesthesial logic also extends to abolitionist doctrines that oppose capital punishment on the grounds that the practice is unnecessarily cruel. His point is that abolitionist arguments against cruelty, no matter how well intentioned, can inversely and unwittingly encourage and accept newer, apparently non-spectacular methods of the death penalty (for instance, supplanting “bloodless” execution with leaving one to die in prison) that have been instituted as less cruel methods and in response to concerns over certain forms of punishment. In this way, non-deconstructive arguments against capital punishment’s cruelty can be seen to contribute to and be complicit with certain dissimulated or virtual forms of the death penalty. 247 Cruelty, Derrida suggests through Freud and Nietzsche and in a numerous texts, “has no 246 In addition to The Death Penalty, Vol. 1, Derrida spends considerable time discussing psychical cruelty during his transcribed discussion with Élizabeth Roudinesco in the eighth chapter of For What Tomorrow, entitled “Death Penalties,” as well as “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty,” in Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 238-280. 247 Derrida’s argument that cruelty exists within even the most “forgiving” and nuanced abolitionist discourses extends beyond the scope of this chapter. His development of the ubiquity of cruelty through Nietzsche and Freud in the sixth session of The Death Penalty, Vol. 1 is essential in this regard. 150 contrary.” 248 Without a discernable non-cruelty, and therefore in the absence of an opposable term, logic, or philosophy that could overcome it, an end to the reign of cruelty is a fantasy. It occurs here and there, now and then; produced by its opposing discourse, cruelty survives and remains active in spite of appearances. By developing the analysis of cruelty in this way, Derrida’s argument is that, at bottom, the anesthesial logic that drives contemporary practices of capital punishment, these cannot be said to be any less cruel than those of the past; restricted visibility and claims of more humane techniques still participate in the inescapable economy of cruelty. Despite acknowledging the “process of devisibilization [and] despectacularization” 249 of live execution (which, he also acknowledges, echoes what Foucault observes in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison as the “progressive disappearance of spectacular visibility” 250 of punishment), the death penalty is still put on display today, Derrida argues, “thanks to television and cinema”: [O]ne sees more and more films that, under the perfectly good pretext of abolitionism, exhibit not only the condemnation to death, but the process of execution, up to the last moment. Visibility is thus deferred. The transformation of the media makes it so that one should speak not simply of invisibility but of a transformation of the field of the visible. Never have things been as “visible” in global space as they are today; this is itself an essential element of the problem— and of the struggle. 251 The cruelty of capital punishment has been effectively virtualized today through anesthesial logic; “we can no longer speak of crime and the death penalty without film and television,” Derrida adds in The Death Penalty I, “we have proof of this every day 248 Derrida, The Death Penalty, 168. 249 Ibid., 284. 250 Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 159. 251 Ibid. 151 and it is an essential change in the given state of affairs.” 252 This “essential change,” which recalls “the essential element of the problem” cited above, is that the death penalty, in its current despecactular and anesthetic form, has not disappeared, but has become virtually visible (or simply virtual) through practices such as cinema. One now sees the “deferred” visibility of the death penalty, a symptom of the “transformation of the field of the visible” where mediated renderings supplant “live” co-present witnessing. Derrida’s point is that when movies depict scenes of the death penalty, they do not only signal the progressive invisibility of punishment and cruelty, as Foucault sees it. “Television and cinema” instead provide stages for cruelty’s virtual life, and this virtuality, while qualitatively different than bloody cruelty, cannot be said to be any less cruel. The apparent progressive disappearance of the cruelty of capital punishment has accompanied a virtual reappearance of it. All over the world, audiences watch films that portray crimes, courtroom scenes, prison sentences, and executions; these films, in turn, give spectators a voyeuristic glimpse into all the stages of punishment, as if they were witnesses to the actual event. Cinema helps present what Derrida remarks as the essential visibility of the death penalty; it fulfills a certain fascination with watching another suffer. In many ways, this global, albeit virtual, visibility of the death penalty through cinema and television makes punishment and cruelty more “visible” today. From a safe distance, one can now bear witness to the details of capital punishment’s protocols, including the prolonged suspense of events “behind the scenes” or beneath the scaffold that adds to the payoff of the resolution and the final spectacle. Derrida’s logic suggests that the contemporary visibility of the death penalty through cinema not only speaks to its 252 Derrida, Death Penalty, 247. 152 continued appearance within anesthetic aesthetics, but also the ongoing symptoms of a type of passive, silent, or psychical cruelty on the part of the filmgoer or spectator. His attention to cinema and television, to their recurring spectacles of punishment and cruelty, implies that audiences still want to see, that they take a type of pleasure or are endlessly fascinated by the act of witnessing the condemned punished, even if the condemned one is an actor and the punishments are staged. Movies that re-present or depict capital punishment thus allow spectators to bear witness from afar; they provide a virtual witnessing that relays an enduring desire to see, and perhaps the voyeuristic drive underpinning all spectatorship, cinematic or otherwise. 253 On one hand, then, suffering, distress, and cruelty can be “directly” represented in a film through the dramatic rendering of something such as capital punishment, for example; on the other hand, cruelty can also be seen to take place through the implicit or overt (unconscious, negated, effaced, or conscious) pleasure afforded to film spectators when they seek out and watch any film that depicts suffering. 254 This secretive, 253 Derrida’s implication that the voyeuristic impulse of the filmgoer ties in with a certain dissimulated form of cruelty deserves to be put in conversation with his more in-depth comments about spectatorship in “Cinema and Its Ghosts.” In the latter, he insists on the singularity of the experience through the acti- passivity of the spectator as she receives projections and projects back onto them in secret. As I develop in the third chapter, spectators, according to Derrida, flicker along with the films they watch; they identify with what they see and hear and, at the same time, are undone by their suspension of belief in what is not wholly present or, in other words, ghostly. It seems that the psychical cruelty of viewers, as it is articulated in The Death Penalty, Vol. 1, can also be seen to dislodge or upset their locality and self-enclosed identity insofar as the scopic drive (and thus, psychical cruelty embedded within) to see and watch suffering remains unbeknownst to them—that is, they believe that their beliefs are otherwise, and that they are not complicit with or desire to witness the spectacular visibility of the death penalty. For Derrida, cinema forces one to encounter his beliefs and the fact that belief operates without the agency of an actor. See de Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts.” 254 This is another point that goes well beyond scope of the present chapter, but this characterization of cruelty and pleasure signals the difficult delineation of pleasure from pain, or perhaps the sadomasochistic experience of spectatorship in general. Following Freud and Nietzsche in this regard, Derrida points to an essential affinity between one’s own inner pleasure and the infliction of psychical or physical cruelty as a kind of sovereign positionality in The Death Penalty, Vol. 1. There is a perverse gratification at work when one sees another suffer because this visibility insidiously confirms a remove from one’s own proper experience of suffering, even if this suffering is “self-inflicted.” To see-suffer implies a distance from the 153 disavowed, or celebrated visibility and fascination form what Derrida calls the “essential element[s] of the problem—and of the struggle today.” This “struggle” is not simply the problematic battle against cruelty, of which there is no contrary; it is instead a struggle against the assumption of one’s non-complicity with or consistent opposition to certain forms of cruelty. In other words, many filmgoers, I suspect, would probably assume that their cinematic viewing habits and tastes have nothing to do with cruelty and are in no way complicit with something as serious as the death penalty. The problem and the struggle would thus entail upsetting such an assumption. Moreover, “the problem” and “the struggle” do not mean that it’s possible to make one aware of his cruelty so that he may identify and discontinue it; rather, Derrida’s phrase speaks to the very impossibility of such actions—as if we could be stirred from our cruel slumber by those who are already awake and then proceed to stand guard without rest, under the influence of an unrelenting vigilance. No: cruelty’s non-opposability through its activ-passivity, its virtual acts, means that that the dream of finally waking up into full consciousness and hyper-awareness of cruelty, illuminated by the light of an endless day, remains something unrealizable, a thing of dreams. And yet, if “an essential element of the problem—and the struggle” suggests the negotiation with such a dream, as opposed to its outright dismissal as reverie, fantasy, or fiction, then perhaps the “problem” of dreaming incites the very “struggle” of awakening to the first light of a new dawn. sufferer. Witnessing from this position, the seer stresses the gulf between his position and the seen, and it would be this distancing that leads to a certain pleasure, a pleasure taken by the fact that the one who suffers is not me. Taken this way, watching another suffer, even if this suffering is completely staged, offers one the pleasure or satisfaction of seeing his or her own non-suffering; even if an other’s suffering repulses or disgusts me, even if I choose to ignore or renounce films that contain suffering, I would be able to do so because it is not me who suffers and my sanctity, or that fact that I am not there, provides me with a psychical (re)investment in my own status as the one who remains unscathed. 154 In other words, although anesthesial logic sidesteps the principle of the death penalty and generates a transformed and/or deferred spectacle of suffering through its attempts at concealment, its desire to mollify cruelty can, at the same time, motivate and lead to the practical abolition of capital punishment. Derrida makes this point in The Death Penalty, Vol. 1, during his reading of Clint Eastwood’s 1999 film, True Crime. According to Derrida, True Crime represents a typical example of what he sees as a burgeoning genre of movies and novels about the death penalty and under the influence of anesthesial logic, as the film tells the story of a newspaper journalist (played by Eastwood) who proves that a condemned man is actually innocent of his crime immediately before his execution. Derrida’s goes on to base his discussion of the film on what could be seen as the two general characteristics of this new genre. First, True Crime does not openly oppose or criticize the death penalty’s rationale; it “conducts,” Derrida says “not out of a taste for justice but out of the journalist’s passion for information, a meticulous counter-inquiry…and ends up proving the innocence of the accused.” 255 Second, the film provides a rendering of an interrupted execution “with all the suspense you can imagine of the cinematic exploitation, which shows all the operations, all the moments of the progression of the fluid, the phone call at the last second.” 256 Within this second example, Derrida notes, “are the remains of cruelty in the most medically refined modes of putting to death and what is exploited is the voyeuristic and ambiguous enjoyment of the spectator, the filmgoer who trembles up to the last second as he or she 255 Derrida, The Death Penalty, 84. Interestingly, Derrida does not remark Clint Eastwood’s well- documented pro-death penalty beliefs. 256 Ibid. 155 sees the liquid flow into the veins of the condemned.” 257 Films such as True Crime thus typify anesthetic aesthetics by appealing only to the veracity of the accused’s guilt and not to the “principle” of the death penalty; they produce a virtual spectacle of execution, which perversely draws on “the voyeuristic and ambiguous enjoyment of the spectator,” or the pleasure of seeing another punished. 258 If there is an abolitionist position to be found in movies like True Crime, then it would be located, Derrida contends, through its visualization or invocation of cruel punishment within supposedly the most advanced, humane, and anesthetic protocols of execution: “the filmgoer who trembles up to the last second as he or she sees the liquid flow into the veins of the [wrongly] condemned.” 259 By way of visceral, cinematic suspense, engendered through the classical protocols of filmmaking, viewers encounter the cruel remnants of the death penalty, and this encounter, says Derrida, may amount to “[a]n argument against the cruelty rather than against the principle of the death penalty [that] is both strong and weak.” The argument against cruelty is at once “strong” because it draws on the spectator’s pathos and “provides a good psychological motivation for the abolition of the death penalty”; however, it is also “weak” because the argument against cruelty sidesteps the general rationale of capital punishment that Derrida seeks to deconstruct. 260 Although arguments against cruelty may have a profound practical impact—without a doubt, they have led and continue to lead to the abolition of death penalty—they are not, in the end, rigorous (or “strong”) philosophical arguments that 257 Ibid., 85. 258 Ibid., 50. 259 Ibid., 50. 260 Ibid. 156 counter the supposed “principle” of the death penalty through the terms (and principles) that are proper to its foundation and persistence. In order to provide a thoroughly “strong” argument against the death penalty and not just an anti-cruelty campaign, the phantasmatic principle or scaffold will need to be deconstructed. And if one engages this more rigorous abolition, properly called the deconstruction of the death penalty, then cinema and the essential spectacle of execution will need to be key elements of such an analysis. As Derrida’s seminars from 1999-2001 demonstrate, cinema will have been a crucial element of this particular deconstruction. Developing these traces of cinema in Of Grammatology, “Force and Signification,” “The Double Session,” and The Death Penalty Vol. I will likely do little towards repudiating the periodization of Derrida’s thought and conceptions of his previous silence and subsequent movement towards cinema. Looking back to some of his initial publications, one can see that he mentions briefly both “cinematography” and the “cinematic method” and that cinema, in both cases, serves in a supplemental role and as an example. In “The Double Session,” cinema is literally located on the margins of his text and those of Marllamé. And although the cinematic spectacle of the death penalty is mentioned repeatedly throughout Derrida’s seminars on capital punishment, explicit and sustained discussions of it are relatively minimal, particularly if it’s compared to the attention Derrida gives to literature. Yet to find cinema there, not just anywhere, but in the heart of his arguments about the spectral place of writing, the impossibility of immediacy, the mobility of textual performance, and the resistance to the phantasm of indivisible sovereignty seems to be enough to give one pause before accepting Derrida’s distance from cinema and the justification for his works’ relative absence in 157 contemporary film and media studies. Especially with the richness of works such as Cahiers’ interview in hand, maybe there is now enough to warrant further investigation into the “has truly been,” and to ask what thinking the ses and plus d’un reveal about both the study of cinema and (its) ethicopolitics today: not only to pursue the question “Why not Derrida in film and media studies?” but to affirm the injunction of this specter and all that it (but who? what?) conjures. 158 CHAPTER 3 Ghost Belief, Fantômachie, and Cinema’s Spectral Grafts If I were to write about film, what would interest me above all is its mode and system of belief (croyance). There is an altogether singular mode of believing (croire) in cinema: a century ago, an unprecedented experience of belief was invented. —Jacques Derrida, Cahiers du cinéma, 2001 I was there, as an actor, playing the role of a philosophy professor to whom an anthropology student came to ask if he believes in ghosts. The first scene was that of the meeting with the student in a café in Paris. Then there was another scene in my office in Paris, where the student posed the same question: “Do you believe in ghosts?” I then improvised some things that related to the film situation. —on his role in Ghost Dance, 1987 And you, do you believe in ghosts? —to Pascale Ogier in Ghost Dance (1983) Given deconstruction’s eternal returns to recurrent tropes and themes, it is perhaps not too surprising that Jacques Derrida’s hypothetical project on cinema’s “mode and system of belief,” which he proposed in a 2001 interview with Cahiers du cinéma, corresponds directly to his first sustained and explicit reflection on film. The reflection that I am referring to is Derrida’s now well-known and widely discussed improvisation in Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983). In the film, a single, scripted question posed to Derrida by the actress playing his student, Pascale Ogier, provokes his impromptu comments that The second epigraph is from Mark Lewis and Andrew Payne, “La Danse des fantômes: entrevue avec Jacques Derrida,” Public 2 (1989): 68, (interview took place in 1987). I’ve modified the translation. The original reads: “J’étais là, comme acteur, jouant le rôle d’un professeur de philosophie à qui une étudiante d’anthropologie venait demander s’il croyait aux fantômes. La première scène était celle du rendez-vous avec l’étudiante dans un café de Paris. Ensuite, il y eût une autre scène dans mon bureau à Paris, où à la même question posée par l’étudiante: ‘Croyez-vous aux fantômes?’ j’ai alors improvise des choses qui avaient rapport justement à la situation cinématographique.” 159 touch on, but are not limited to, ghosts, cinema, and psychoanalysis. Although it sparks what can be considered Derrida’s first explicit remarks on cinema, Ogier’s question, by all appearances, is not concerned in the least with her interlocutor’s opinions concerning film, media technologies, or a particular movie—she utters none of those words. Rather, Ogier asks Derrida about his belief in ghosts: “Do you believe in ghosts?” (“Est-ce que vous croyez aux fantômes?”) she says. As many now know from Derrida’s transcribed conversation with Bernard Stiegler about his experience in Ghost Dance— published as the book Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews—the same words (“Do you believe in ghosts?”) also represent his only scripted line in the film. After finishing his improvisation, Derrida was instructed, as he tells it, to repeat the question to Ogier like an echo, as if his improvisation was meant to influence her one way or another about her own belief in ghosts, as if the question she asked him was actually meant for her; a question posed to oneself as another, through the voice of the other. “And you? Do you believe in ghosts?” Derrida asks Ogier’s character; she then responds with the scripted lines, “Yes, certainly. Yes, absolutely. Now, absolutely.” The reverberations of this question and answer continue to be felt after the end of the film and well before their return in Derrida’s 2001 interview with Cahiers du cinéma. One occurrence, Derrida tells Stiegler, happened “two or three years later [following the filming of Ghost Dance], after Pascale Ogier had died,” during a screening of Ghost Dance that Derrida attended at the behest of his students in Texas. 261 With Derrida watching as a member of the audience, Ogier (re)appears on screen, thousands of miles from France and the place and time of the scene’s physical production; she looks at her 261 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, translated by Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002), 120. 160 interlocutor and addresses him again (“[p]ractically looking at me in the eye,” he tells Stiegler), and this address sets off another volley of the same question, “Do you believe in ghosts?” in another place and moment of time. 262 Derrida says that this experience gave him “the unnerving sense of the return of her specter, the specter of her specter coming back” to reclaim her belief in ghosts (as a ghost) and to ask him, once again, if he too believed. 263 Jump cut to 2001: this question and the themes that Derrida attended to it in his 1982 improvisation reemerge throughout his interview with Cahiers du cinéma and correspond almost uncannily to what he says there about cinematic belief and spectrality. “On the screen,” Derrida explains to Cahiers editors Thierry Jousse and Antoine de Baecque, “whether silent or not, one is dealing with apparitions that…the spectator believes.” 264 For cinema to function, Derrida says, the spectator must temporarily believe in its apparitions, the projected ghosts that return to him or her through the mechanics and expectations of cinema. Following Derrida’s logic, the spectator must not only suspend her or his disbelief in ghosts for a movie to function as such, but also, prior to this suspension of disbelief, reply, albeit unwittingly, to a question—that question— concerning her or his belief in ghosts. 265 In other words, the very question Ogier put to 262 Ibid. 263 Ibid. 264 Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” translated by Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37, nos.1-2 (2015): 27. 265 Derrida’s interest in cinema and belief recalls and electrifies Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” in Chapter XIV of his Biographia Literaria. As Peggy Kamuf points out in an interview with Samuel Weber about Derrida’s reflections on cinema, Coleridge’s “famous phrase was coined…to meet the demands of ghosts and specters.” In other words, Coleridge’s phrase at once recognized the fundamental doubt of readers when they encounter supernatural elements in fiction and poetry and attempted to overcome (or suspend) their disbelief by assigning to the supernatural “a human interest and a semblance of truth.” “[P]oetic faith,” as Coleridge calls it, is constituted by the reader’s 161 Derrida in 1982, the words that catalyze his response and first explicit address of cinema on film, can be seen to be the automatic and mechanical question cinema poses to every spectator. Cinema does not begin when its spectators suspend their disbelief in front of the screen and before its moving images; prior to this, I’d like to suggest through Derrida’s formulation, cinema addresses its spectators and asks them about their belief in ghosts. Left suspended, the cinema project “on belief” that Derrida proposes in the Cahiers interview (“If I were to write about film…”) seems to be itself another iteration of this question, recast as a singular and different repetition of it—a virtual repetition, one might say, emitted elsewhere. It is in this way that Derrida’s proposed cinema project also evokes or embeds itself within what he calls in the interview cinema’s manifold “‘grafts’ of spectrality.” 266 At every level of cinema, in every fold or trace of it, there are ghosts—even, as Derrida’s comments intimate, within cinema’s initial address to its viewers. Its beginnings are already spectral and therefore non-localizable. Like cinema, then, Derrida’s project on cinema’s mode and system of belief can be viewed as appropriately incomplete, suspended, and haunted as if it were not only a question (what would he have said? What would this project look like?) but that very question, a film theory condensed into five words that say everything: “Do you believe in ghosts?” His proposed cinema project and his first appearance within the cinematic frame reflects cinema as if they were dissymmetrical mirror images—singularly the same. Derrida’s suspension of disbelief, but this can only occur if the author conditions the supernatural in such a way that it appears natural for readers. The suspension of disbelief would thus depend on rendering believable that which is considered (by most) unbelievable. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketeches of My Literary Life and Opinions, Vol. 7, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 6; Peggy Kamuf, “Double Features: An Interview with Samuel Weber,” Discourse 37, nos.1-2 (2015): 156. 266 Ibid. 162 film theory thus remains unwritten in the sense of a properly unfinished projection and project, a cinematic remainder of cinema itself, a question that remarks its question. It is a kinetic theory of cinema yet to be read and deferred elsewhere, to some other time and place to come. While the preceding gloss elaborates only a few recurrences of this question in Derrida’s oeuvre as they exclusively pertain to cinema (to be sure, there are many more that this chapter will investigate), these specific resurfacings indicate that his proposed cinema project on belief was not a type of unplanned or haphazard projection, but an interminable line of thought already alive and active in his oeuvre. The most pronounced and visible sections of this line extend back to and out of his improvisation in Ghost Dance, and so in and out of cinema, from actor to spectator to commentator on film. And, as I’d like to suggest, they persist today. A spectral circuit of lines continue to swirl around the traces of the question, the traces of Jacques Derrida’s cinema. To explore the contours of Derrida’s project on cinema and belief is to repeatedly circle back to that question as if it was on a loop. One hears its ricochet again (and again) not as an evasion of the question with a question but as the words that always arise when one encounters figures that cannot be officially verified, calculated, assimilated, or authenticated. For if ghosts do exist, they do so in the absence of proof in the juridical sense of the term, and as such, they must be avowed otherwise and affirmed in the absence of evidence and all provability. It is precisely the improvability of the presence of ghosts—or the thinking that considers rigorously the possibilities and implications of their absence/presence—that always forces one in the end to confront her or his belief in the form of a question and pose it to another, even if the other is found within the limits 163 presupposed by the proper self. Cinema causes one to ask and address oneself as the other: “Do you believe in ghosts?” 267 Itinerary Taking into account the general periodization and thematic commonality as outlined above, the aims of a chapter on Derrida’s unfinished cinema project may appear to be reachable, its path presumably straightforward and laid out ahead. One would proceed down this path under the assumption that it is forged by two discrete texts—Ghost Dance and its commentary, on one hand (but even here things already begin to multiply and get complicated); the interview with Cahiers du cinéma, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” on the other— that bookend what I’ve called Derrida’s most “sustained and explicit reflections on cinema.” Appearances, though, can be deceiving. After planning to set down this path, one may veer off course and discover a cluster of unexpected paths and routes; one may stumble upon another phantom graft; original directions and destinations may be interrupted. In sum, one may experience the loss of one’s bearings because an origin and destination will have been determined in advance. While this sort of experience would seem to be anathema for traditional scholarship, and particularly for work aligned with the expectations of conventional historicity, chronology, and causality, such errancy, or what Derrida has called in a number of his works, destinerrance, is arguably the 267 My emphasis here on a phantomatic second-person within the “proper self” is in reference to Akira Mizuta Lippit’s development of “you” in his essay “Plus Surplus Love: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift,” Discourse 37, nos. 1-2 (2015): 87-116. Regarding Derrida’s improvisation in Ghost Dance, Lippit says that cinema “is the advent of oneself as another, as a phantom second person ‘you’… In those phantoms, I see myself adrift” (88). For Lippit, Derrida’s narcissistic cinema relays or places “one” (me) in a perpetual mentonymic process with the other, in an economy between “me” and “you”; one (in the sense of a proper “me”) is shown to be metonym through cinema—already exchanged, replaceable, supplanted, lost through the echoes of narcissism. What is thus proper to cinema, what is perhaps found through and within it, Lippit suggests, is the dispossession of one’s “me,” myself; the “me” is handed over to the other, the other finds and shows “you” elsewhere, adrift. 164 experience most proper to deconstructive thought. Composed of the French words destin (destiny) and errance (wandering), Derrida’s neologism speaks to the contingency and futurity involved with intention, sending, and starting down a path with a specific address in mind. It says, in a word, that predetermined destinations may not be reached as planned (a letter may never arrive, for example), even and especially if these plans appear achievable. Not only does the term, or what J. Hillis Miller calls one of Derrida’s numerous “spatiotemporal figures,” condense the deconstructive gesture—that is, destinerrance tells us what deconstruction finds within texts that intend clear paths from beginning to end, or otherwise assume that their errancy can be minimized or eliminated—it also describes what takes place when one attempts to survey and account for Derrida’s work in a “bookend” manner. 268 One finds the path ahead to be multiple; the origin and destination are no longer (nor were they ever) wholes. 269 In the place of beginnings, middles, and ends, one discovers knotted trails and intersections that are twisted and interconnected like vines or nerves. And so, with this in mind, it would seem that this plurality, this experience of the destinerrance particular and proper to deconstruction, would render untenable the assumed aims of a chapter like this one. It would seem that linking two discrete texts together in Derrida’s oeuvre, using one to exclusively inform the other (and vice versa), could emerge only if a certain amount of errancy was left unacknowledged, passed over, or effaced—as if one could disassociate, first of all, one text from another without remainder and progress by tying these stand- 268 J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida’s Destinerrance,” For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 29. 269 This logic of an original plurality, multiplicity at the beginning before the accounting of a quantifiable multiplicity, references Derrida’s use of the French term, plus d’un (more than one / no more one), which I articulated at length in the previous chapter. 165 alone works to others only like them, thereby ignoring the inevitable outgrowths and wanderings already at work not only within deconstructive thought, but what deconstruction shows to be at work in every text. “Destinerrance,” explains Hillis Miller about the term’s genealogy and connections in Derrida’s oeuvre, “is like a loose thread in a tangled skein that turns out to lead to the whole ball of yarn. It could therefore generate potentially endless commentary.” 270 Hills Miller suggests that the term itself opens up everything in Derrida’s work if one follows it to its ends and affinities with other deconstructive spatio-temporal figures, which include spectrality, iteration, and différance, to name just a few. It is endless because it leads one everywhere. Destinerrance can also be seen to encapsulate the differential force that makes this sort of eternal journey possible: the movement or wandering it pronounces is precisely how its traces are found endlessly everywhere. By acknowledging rather than effacing destinerrance, one concedes, as I am attempting to do here, to a law of errancy and to the fact that a pre-set objective may be unfeasible. In other words, arrival, in the sense of an obtained target, is not a guarantee. And yet, this experience of the possibility of non- arrival, of arrival as an interminable question (for who can say that he or she has arrived?), is a general symptom of encountering and traveling with deconstruction. Describing “it” therefore already begins to frame the shape of Derrida’s project on cinema and belief and the wandering that will occur in the following pages. 271 In the 270 Ibid. 271 When asked about the “origin of the idea” of deconstruction in an interview from Derrida (Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, 2002), Derrida responds: “Before responding to this question, I want to make a preliminary remark on the completely artificial character of this situation. I don’t know who’s going to be watching this, but I want to underline rather than efface our surrounding technical conditions, and not to feign a ‘naturality’ which doesn’t exist. I’ve already in a way started to respond to your question about deconstruction because one of the gestures of deconstruction is to not naturalize what isn’t natural—to not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions, or society is natural.” Before responding, Derrida, 166 same breath, if one has already begun to frame the shape of Derrida’s cinema project by placing its shape under analysis and by yielding to the more or less amorphous nature of this shape under a certain law—that is, one must accept its constant shape-shifting or resistances to static shape—one must also begin by interrogating the shape of the project’s frame. The frame: not just the path(s) between but the fixed points that activate path-making in the first place, the points or the frames that are shown to be always already undone by the destinerrance preceding them and making possible their foundation. To this end, the historical significance I’ve allotted to Derrida’s improvisation in Ghost Dance, what I’ve privileged as “his first sustained and explicit reflection on film” and a figurative bookend of his unwritten project—a type of beginning or first plank of the frame let’s say—requires further substantiation. Given this requirement, my reasons for privileging Ghost Dance in this way are due to what seem to be two interdependent cinematic appearances contained in the film. 272 First, as stated above, until McMullen’s in fact, responds. He responds by remarking from within the film frame about the film frame itself: its artificial nature, the demand to summarize quickly something like “deconstruction,” the pressures that accompany any and every “frame.” 272 It was not until 1979, less than three years before production for Ghost Dance began in 1982, that Derrida permitted the publication of photographs bearing his image. As he clarifies in an interview with Kofman from the 2002 documentary, his concession was tied to his very public role in organizing and participating in the Estates General of Philosophy at the Sorbonne during the late spring of 1979. Derrida realized then, as he tells it, that the media attention generated by the Estates General made it “impracticable to enforce and to confirm the interdiction” he had maintained concerning the distribution of his photographed image. In an ironic twist, he had to acknowledge that a public figure could not totally control the dissemination of his or her image. Forming the “absolute interdiction,” Derrida says, were the social and political commitments of his work, particularly its “defetishization of the author.” According to Derrida, it would have been absurd for him to acquiesce to the “photographic code” often associated with the images of published and distinguished authors. The feigned images of the writer with pen in hand or behind a typewriter, engaged busily with his or her craft, reading, or posing in front of a massive bookcase, were, precisely the artificially produced “natural” conditions his work sought to deconstruct. In addition to this quasi-militant and political motive, or what can be seen as his desire to remain pragmatically consistent with his work’s theoretical investments, Derrida tells Kofman that his prohibition against photography also came from a mix of his vexed relationship, and even aversion, to seeing images of his face, which he calls a “narcissistic horror” inseparable from the “death effect of photography.” 167 film, Derrida had not addressed cinema in what many would consider a consistent or direct manner, that is, in a manner or method grounded upon commonplace signposting and categorical propositions. 273 Second, while audiovisual images of Derrida had appeared on television before the production of Ghost Dance began in 1982, McMullen’s film was (indisputably, I believe) Derrida’s first experience as a participant in what can be considered a “genuine” cinematic setting. 274 This “first appearance” predates and informs Derrida’s succeeding roles as the featured “subject” in Safaa Fathy’s D’allieurs, Derrida (1999) and Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s Derrida (2002), among others. Moreover, this suggestion of the “first” implies that Derrida’s performance in Ghost Dance can be considered the debut of his proper cinematic role, a type of filmic 273 As Akira Mizuta Lippit observes, Derrida’s proposition about cinema and psychoanalysis in Ghost Dance (“cinema plus psychoanalysis equals a science of ghosts”) invokes a “spectral dialectic,” or an irresolvable and non-oppositional formulation (an aporia) because the variables of the equation “remain without reference both within and without the equation, suspended in a state of animated variability” (87). The variables, in other words, cannot stand on their own as self-contained wholes or as references to something whole beyond their inscription; they exist only in relation to one another, each one spectral. Derrida’s categorical address of cinema is, following Lippit’s logic, an endless deferral that “never leaves the realm of pure algebra…a formula without ends, destined to return time and again to the site of its own irresolution” (ibid.). For Lippit, the irresolution of this formulation is key to understanding that Derrida’s thinking of cinema seems to (re)occur within its frame, but continually refers to an elsewhere while enacting a type of erasure of the subject. Derrida’s theses on film seem to rely on his placement within the frame and the dissolution of himself through himself that happens there. Lippit, “Plus Surplus Love.” 274 In the interview entitled “Unsealing (‘the old new language’),” in Points…Interviews, 1974-1994, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 115-131, Derrida says that the “very first time” he spoke “before a television camera” occurred soon after he was released from his twenty-four hour imprisonment in Prague. According to his account, he was returning to Paris and aboard a train in Germany when a French news team found him and conducted a quick interview about his detainment. (In his biography of Derrida, Benoît Peeters adds detail to this “first” encounter: Peeters tells that it occurred at Stuttgart with an Antenne2 news team and the journalist Sylvie Marion. See: Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, translated by Andrew Brown [Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012], 338). While there is much more to say about the circumstances of this interview, and particularly the difficulties Derrida says he experienced under the lights and pressure of the news media looking for the latest “scoop,” my interest in relaying this story is related to Derrida’s use of the words “very first time” (la toute première fois) (Points, 129) to mark the singularity of this event. The precise date of this first encounter with the news media and the eventual audiovisual record that would come from it is either the late evening of January 1 st or early morning January 2 nd 1981, and so, barely a year before the production of Ghost Dance. I’ve attempted to underscore the Ghost Dance experience in a similar manner: as an event, a certain “first,” and thus, “last” time, but also initiation of something or someone that was already there, a discovery of someone or something already active and acting, the first repetition of a new role. 168 persona or character particular to him and one that will recur, albeit differently, each time he is filmed under cinematic conditions. While I will develop what is at stake in this role and the word “proper” in the ensuing pages, suffice it to say here that Derrida’s filmic persona is characterized by his constant analysis of his own performance as performative within the film frame, although his performance may appear to be factual, real, or marked by a non-performative position, an authentic “him.” Even in the latter two films, which are often considered quasi-documentaries and therefore signal a distinct titular or generic claim on authenticity and facticity, Derrida declares that he is playing his role, the role as himself. 275 It is due to his performances (and what he says about his performances) in both the 1999 and 2002 films that complicate their categorization as purely “factual” documentaries and the belief that the filmmakers captured the “actual” Derrida. Along these lines, his improvisation and role as the “philosophy professor” in Ghost Dance also muddles its generic classification as simply “fictional.” This is to say that Derrida’s appearances in all three films places or finds them within a spectral graft; they are between definitive layers of legibility and genre. This is not to say that there exists a radical consistency within each of his roles and throughout the three films; all are singular and informed by singularities, marked and re-marked by their own event. But it is Ghost Dance, I argue, that showcases the arrival of a certain cinematic character, Jacques Derrida, who appears to be or as himself in films, and who addresses his performance, and thus performance of the “subject” of cinema within their frames. Together, Derrida’s two cinematic appearances in Ghost Dance seem to catalyze his 275 Derrida discusses this at length in his essay “Lettres sur un aveugle: Punctum cæcum,” in Tourner les mots: Au bord d’un film (Paris: Éditions Galilée/Arte Éditions, 2000), 71-126. 169 movement toward more direct and explicit meditations on cinema that occur through interviews in one form or another. My point in offering for consideration Derrida’s cinematic debut in Ghost Dance is not meant to suggest the existence of a “cinematic turn” in his oeuvre. Making this declaration would obviously conflict with and blatantly contradict many of my project’s primary claims about deconstructive thought and cinema, specifically the centrality of the latter within the former despite a relative absence of explicit markers and signposting. Instead of a “break,” or defined starting point or direction, Derrida’s experience with Ghost Dance accelerated his forthcoming meditations on cinema and media technologies in general; it tempted or induced a distinctive rhythm that was already present in deconstructive thought. In short, Ghost Dance occasioned the notion that deconstruction was always already cinematic. In his recent “retake” on the book he co-authored with Peter Brunette in 1990 about deconstruction and cinema, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory, David Wills alludes to the beginnings and ends of Derrida’s cinema when he considers “how differently a book on Derrida and film theory might be written today, given the full range of material now published.” 276 Wills notes that the relative wealth of resources that now exist about deconstruction’s relation to cinema and the visual arts, including those signed by Derrida, would not only represent a potential boon for a new and revised Screen/Play; this vast and growing archive would also constitute a potential risk: A different approach would be to ignore, more or less studiously, all of Derrida’s essays on the visual that do not relate either to photography or cinema. But, in the first place, that separation would be exceedingly difficult to delineate: doesn’t the detail necessarily imply a photographic visuality related to psychoanalysis— which might also mean that psychoanalysis necessarily and conversely implies a 276 David Wills, “Screenreplay,” Discourse 37, nos.1-2 (2015): 75. 170 type of photographic visuality—and doesn’t every single reading by Derrida constitute an explicit mobilization of forms of detailing? Might not the same be said of the frame, and of every more or less formalist reference to framing such as permeates Derrida’s writing; can the frame be rigorously circumscribed as a pictorial question without bleeding into a photographic or cinematic question? 277 The difficulty (or risk) that Wills identifies while describing the frame of a new Screen/Play is the lure of focusing too closely on Derrida’s (and his commentators’) growing archive on or about the visual arts. One risks myopia or tunnel vision, Wills suggests; one risks a certain blindness to the cinematic everywhere and thus elsewhere in Derrida’s oeuvre. The danger is ignoring that which is endemic to deconstruction: the radical consistency and interconnection of Derrida’s works with their equally radical singularity and the spectral network of themes, tropes, and causes that join across them like a constellation. “[E]very single reading by Derrida,” Wills implies, can be linked to cinema. Derrida’s comments on or about film are thus not only exclusive to those works that address cinema and call it by name, but generalizable to his whole corpus—through destinerrance one finds cinema everywhere, everything is cinematic. At bottom, the point of this preamble about “itinerary” is to declare that one must not only proceed with this risk in mind, but also attempt to embrace it. To return to Hillis Miller’s analogy of destinerrance, the following will not only accept that pulling on a single thread of a text by Derrida (whether this “thread” is a word, phrase, or concept) will inevitably put pressure on the fabric of the others, and in so doing, subsequently tug on general, philosophical propositions that his works displace from the background into the foreground; it will also consider the performance of this process as the essentially cinematic spatio-temporality of destinerrance. What follows are just a few of the 277 Ibid., 79. 171 branches or paths that emerge as one sets off towards Derrida’s unwritten project on cinema and belief. Following Catherine Malabou’s preface to Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, this journey with and through deconstruction can be characterized by the double meanings at work in two key French verbs, dériver and arriver. Akin to the English verb “to derive,” dériver typically signals what Malabou calls “a continuous and ordered trajectory from origin to an end,” just like “the etymological derivations of a word.” 278 Paradoxically, its Latin roots dērīvāre (to lead or draw water off) and rīvus (brook, stream of water) mean that dériver and derive can also denote the less systematized and predictable movement of liquids and fluidity that come with terms like flow, drifting, deviation, or “skidding.” 279 Arriver, or “to arrive,” as Malabou points out, descends from the Latin words arribāre and arrīpāre, which come from verb adrīpāre, a combination of the prefix ad (to) with rīpa (shore). “To arrive,” she explains, “is first and foremost to reach a destination and attain one’s goal, reach the end of one’s voyage, succeed.” 280 In addition to the “shoring up” often aligned with arriver and arriving, both French and English terms are also used to describe something that befalls, comes, or surprises one during a journey causing it to divert elsewhere. Like destinerrance, the spatio-temporality of arriver simultaneously entails progress towards a telos, a forward march with an outcome or goal in sight, the achievement of “success” at the end, and that which appears, comes, or falls upon one unexpectedly during such a journey, that which “contradict[s], upset[s], or prevent[s] arrival in the sense of the accomplishment or 278 Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, Coutnterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, translated by David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 1. 279 Ibid. Malabou draws on the French maritime idiom for a deviation of the verb dériver: “A boat that is à la dérive is drifting off course, losing its way” (1). 280 Ibid., 2. 172 completion of a process.” 281 Given the problematic nature of “filling in the gap” of Derrida’s unwritten film theory, the following will endeavor to welcome the derivations and arrivals to come as it sets off toward this project on cinema and belief. Final arrival will thus be properly interrupted by arrivals. 282 In spite and because of this, I offer here a kind of retroactive itinerary that will be formed through and continue to instigate networks of departures, derivations, and arrivals from and within Derrida’s improvisation in Ghost Dance. The following will pursue what is commonly called a “close reading” of said improvisation. At and in the end of this close reading, after the end of it, readers may be left to wonder whether or not we have even begun to address or move closer to Derrida’s proposed project on cinema and belief. Perhaps what follows is nothing more than a looping-effect of that question. If this chapter’s main argument posits that the final arrival of Derrida’s unwritten cinema project is properly unwritten in the sense that it has yet to be read and remains to come— and this occurs, I’d like to suggest, for reasons unrelated to Derrida’s absence today— the following may be seen to comprise only a type of prelude before (and thus, after) Derrida’s own project or projection. In contrast to the previous chapter, which sought to counter assumptions of Derrida’s silence on cinema by magnifying its traces throughout his work in a historical and empirical manner, the following advances with a vigilance against the complete delivery and therefore, end, of Derrida’s film theory. Just as the preceding chapter claimed that there is no “cinematic turn” in Derrida’s corpus, this chapter not only insists on the proper non-arrival a wholly formed and written film theory 281 Ibid. 282 A key term or figure Derrida develops in this context is the coming and futurity associated with the arrivant. See: Derrida, Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (one another at) the “limits of truth,” translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 173 signed by Derrida himself, but also that this non-arrival, or better, its appearances and disappearances—its flickering let’s say—does or enacts what it says. Similar but not equal to cinema, Derrida’s unwritten film theory on belief loops us elsewhere. Ghost Dance In a recent essay, Akira Mizuta Lippit observes that Derrida’s comments on cinema have often emerged from within the very medium that they address; his comments thus provide what Lippit calls a “theory of film [that is] inseparable from its practice.” 283 Partially produced by and rooted ins his appearances in films, Derrida’s theory of cinema (“a site-specific theory of film that occurs on screen,” says Lippit) is, in this way, meta- filmic and the films that include scenes of his participation become sort of hijacked meta- films, films about film, regardless of the filmmaker’s intention. 284 Following Lippit’s observation regarding the general scene of Derrida’s comments on film, one also notices that, beginning with Ghost Dance, Derrida’s “on-site,” meditations, theses, hypotheses, and reflections about cinema have mostly occurred as improvisational comments in interviews, whether filmed, transcribed, translated, or not. 285 Since this chapter takes 283 Lippit, “Plus Surplus Love,” 95. 284 Ibid. 285 Lippit alludes to this fact in a brief, but performative parenthetical remark: “The trope of belief returns in Derrida’s interview (always interviews) on cinema” (ibid., 105, emphasis added). This tiny parenthesis is remarkable despite and because of its brevity—the way it reads and almost passes the reader by when it is read. It captures and performs a certain affect effect? (and repetition of that affect effect? that constructs its affectivity effectivity) associated with any investigation into Derrida’s remarks on cinema. As this chapter and Lippit’s article illustrate, such inquiries must continually return to Derrida’s interviews (to the absence of a properly written text on cinema and thus the implicit “justification” for his neglect in film and media studies), to his improvised remarks in a number of different places and contexts, to his transcribed speech and thus the inscription of the word “interview” everywhere: (re)reading and (re)writing it, hearing its echoes (both as a transcription from the event itself, that is, when it is spoken there and then and written after the fact to describe the event as such). The word arrives and attempts to pass quietly but not without a sound. 174 Ghost Dance as a point of departure on the way to the cinema project that he proposed in his 2001 interview with Cahiers du cinéma, it seems necessary to begin not only with the specific scene thought to be the “first” of these remarks (the improvisation in Ghost Dance), but also, as advanced by Lippit, the more general scene of almost all of Derrida’s comments about cinema, along with the mode of address often demanded by them: the interview and improvisation, respectively. Before embarking on a close reading of Derrida’s improvisation in Ghost Dance and the correspondences that shoot out of it, my initial step will explicate the gesture found in most, if not all of Derrida’s early interviews—what Peggy Kamuf calls in her essay, “‘Tape-Recorded Surprise’: Derrida Interviewed,” his “meta-interviews”—by heeding the conditions of his remarks on cinema instead of letting them pass unnoticed. 286 Crucially, the “pause” feature that Kamuf identifies as the “meta-interview” gesture, “in which the interviewee switches the machine’s gears or rather points to the gears of the interview mechanism that is usually kept out of sight,” also describes the maneuvering that typifies Derrida’s embedded film theory as articulated by Lippit, that is, the inseparability of Derrida’s reflections on cinema and the place or scene of their theorization. At first glance, Derrida’s meta- interviews may seem an unlikely or curious starting point for his hypothetical project on cinema’s “mode and system of belief,” but it is what Derrida says about interviews and speech, or more precisely, the way in which he remarks the interviewed position as interviewed and under the pressure and expectations therein, which links these themes to his remarks on cinema and belief. And so, before beginning with Ghost Dance, we are already, in a way, beginning with its scene as a type of staged interview, an “interview 286 Peggy Kamuf, To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 21. 175 scene” between student and professor, a scene that will come to typify all of his subsequent appearances and comments on film whether they are before a camera or not. Derrida’s comments about cinema have been, like his written works, rejoinders to what he has calls “an external provocation…some request, invitation, or commission…[demanding] an invention that defies both a given program, a system of expectations, and finally surprises me myself—surprises me by suddenly becoming for me imperious, imperative, inflexible even, like a very tough law.” 287 Notwithstanding the fact that he made the preceding remarks in response to a question about the “ideas” behind his written texts (in an interview, no less), and although he repeatedly sought to differentiate his written works from the temporal pressures, publisher expectations, technical surroundings, and other conditions of his interviews, a similar logic exists beneath, and thus fuses together, the invention associated with calculations of writing, on one hand, and the spontaneity of verbal improvisation, on the other. My point is not to propose equivalence between what Derrida says about his written works and his more extemporaneous statements in interviews. Rather than attempting to refute the difference that he repeatedly ascribed to these modes of address, I’m suggesting that the invitations for Derrida’s engagements that enjoin written invention are, by extension, connected to what happens and arrives during his improvisations that are frequently “about” improvisation. At stake in both invention and improvisation is, as Derrida points out in his work on both of the topics, a break with commonplace expectations and therefore the advent of the unexpected, a sort of first and inimitable exposure, appearance, or revelation. 287 Jacques Derrida, “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch Over Thinking,” translated by Peggy Kamuf, in Points, 352. 176 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “improvisation” comes from the Latin word imprōvīsus, meaning “unforeseen and unexpected,” while the etymology of “invention” links it to the Latin word invenīre, “to come upon, discover, find out, devise, and contrive.” Both words signal, albeit differently, a surprise arrival, or the “coming” (venir in French from venīre Latin) of something that cannot be predicted in advance or “foreseen” (prōvīsus in Latin); together, these terms reference the spatiality of the incoming or an arrival, and a futural temporality, the unanticipated, or the unanticipatable. The key difference between the two terms and the ways in which Derrida activates or deploys them is also correlated to their spatio-temporality and context, specifically their speed and places of enunciation. In “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” Derrida suggests that improvising means “to invent on the spot.” 288 Comparable to any invention that claims to have engendered the entirely new, improvisation implies one’s spontaneity and originality within a particular place occupied by others who serve as witnesses to it; it’s live, “on the spot,” unrehearsed, perceived, recorded (written, remembered, spoken, etc.), and judged to be an improvisation according to what has come before it. On one hand, then, invention can “take its time” and patiently unfurl elsewhere or even in a multitude of places before it is revealed, while invention as improvisation is expected to happen immediately within a certain proximity to other live witnesses. In the interview context, the improvisation expected of the interviewed subject feasibly exposes, as Kamuf notes, “the writer himself, or his thought itself, without the cover of the complexities of writing, in a presentation through the naked voice that allows 288 Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” translated by Catherine Porter, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1. It should be mentioned here too that many of Derrida’s written works like “Psyche” were read or publically presented as lectures before they were re-worked and published as written texts. 177 no delay.” 289 Improvisation is, in this sense, the immediate invention and revelation of one’s self or thought before the interviewer and the audience; it is the debut of the exposed subject through the medium of the naked voice. Improvisation, however, and as Derrida says in one of his meta-interviews, “is never absolute, it never has the purity of what one thinks one can require of a forced improvisation: the surprise of the person interrogated, the absolutely spontaneous, instantaneous, almost simultaneous response.” 290 Derrida will go on to remark in this particular interview the multiple “delaying devices” and “slowing down procedures” that are always, already at work in the interviewee’s (or for that matter, any speaker’s) supposed improvisation and speech; his point is that one always responds from within a language and as such automatically draws on prescribed discourses, clichés, and proper names that come from elsewhere, beyond the speaker’s own lived experience. 291 Improvisation therefore offers no escape or true break in Derrida’s view; it encloses as much as it discloses, recedes into prescriptions as much as it advances into the unexpected. For Derrida, these factors make pure improvisation (and invention)—the total “on the spot” arrival of the absolutely unforeseeable, complete revelation— impossible or always to come. There is always some sort of mediation interrupting, informing, and otherwise rendering incomplete the arrival and identification of the new. Mediation or différance transforms what may be seen as the new into the “not-so-new”; it signals that the recognition of the new comes from the terms of the past. The new, or improvisation, is haunted by the past through its “newness.” Derrida’s critique of 289 Kamuf, “Tape-Recorded Surprise,” 22. 290 Jacques Derrida, “Ja, or the faux-bond,” translated by Peggy Kamuf, in Points, 49. 291 Ibid. 178 “absolute improvisation” obviously returns to some of deconstruction’s initial, pioneering claims about the always, already differential acts of writing in speech and the impact of an “originary” mediation on the history of metaphysics, as discussed in the previous chapter. Nonetheless, the “provocations” for response, Derrida says, transform into injunctions (“like a very tough law”) that seek to displace the anticipations and conventions of his interlocutors, whether they are constituted by the philosophical canon, conference organizers, interviewers in the typical sense of the term, an actress playing a role in a film, or, as Peggy Kamuf describes, “the dialogic or polylogic form of texts published under Derrida’s name alone.” 292 In the texts that fall into the latter category, Derrida appears to be in conversation with himself one might say, as he dictates and responds to a plurality of voices that seem to originate from within and without a clear source, or rather, they are in the absence of a named, physically localizable, and speaking external subject. A reader is thus left to guess which speaker assumes Derrida’s actual voice in these texts as well as wonder about the identities of the others. The polylogic works “often proceed as most interviews do,” Kamuf notes, “through questions and responses, with the ‘interlocutors’ sending the ball back and forth”; they not only challenge readers to reconsider the presupposed boundaries and generic characteristics of interviews (do they constitute interviews? What exactly constitutes an interview?), but also the very composition of one’s voice. Instead of reinforcing a claim about an author’s identity, solitary, self-enclosed inventiveness, or the conventional “back and forth” between two (or more) self-present human speakers, Derrida’s polylogic texts demonstrate through their performativity that writing, speaking, and thinking are always 292 Kamuf, “Tape-Recorded Surprise,” 20. 179 responses to and negotiations with voices of virtual interlocutors or ghosts that arrive from elsewhere. The voices that constitute one’s own voice are not necessarily present when they are heard, processed, and repeated; moreover, they are not wholly identifiable. They are aggregates from elsewhere. One selects and is selected by these voices, even when one is supposed to improvise, and this is the point to which many of Derrida’s “meta-interviews” return. These voices come from somewhere else; they may materialize, take over, disappear, or remain unconscious; they are not, in the end, the sole creations or under the control of the author whom they encounter, but their arrangement, activity, repression, repetition, and deployment—in short, how they are read—make possible both the thought of invention and improvisation. “[T]he very concept of improvisation verges upon reading,” Derrida says in his improvised performance-interview with Ornette Coleman, “since what we often understand by improvisation is the creation of something new, yet something which doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible.” 293 Improvisation, Derrida claims in this improvisation, always refers to the pre-established “framework” within which one is situated and from which one supposedly breaks with her or his improvisation. It is only within this situatedness, this sort of embeddedness inside and amongst what Derrida calls in another interview, “the more or less informed mass of possible discourses,” wherein an invention or an improvisation can be declared to have taken place; in other words, what is called invention always takes or has its place within a text. 294 Following Derrida’s argument, one’s inescapability from the “pre-written 293 Jacques Derrida, “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Colemen, 23 June 1997,” translated by Timothy S. Murphy, Genre 36 (Summer 2004): 322. 294 Derrida, “Ja, or the faux-bond,” 50. 180 framework” signals that any improvisation (or invention) will always come up short if one expects the arrival of a true revelation. Improvisation relays a certain failure to provide what it seems to propose in advance. Destined to fail, the interviewee cannot realize, bring about, or see his or her own revelation because one’s exposure is handed over to the other; it is out of one’s own control. This is why Derrida says that the interviewee is blind, that one is unable to see oneself while engaging in the improvisation process. Instead of autonomously controlling, guiding, or guarding against his or her own exposure through improvisation or a shield of readymade clichés, the interviewee, Derrida avers, is penetrated and made vulnerable by other, spectral voices which command a speaker’s voice immediately. Mediation happens immediately and without one’s choice: this is the revelation of an interview. Derrida’s improvisation in Ghost Dance—he continually calls it an improvisation, improvisational remarks, a scene in which he improvises—occurs during an interview scene, a sort of fictional depiction of an interview. In film and media studies idiom, it begins with a quick over-the-shoulder establishing shot of Derrida facing the film’s protagonist, Pascale Ogier, as he leans back in a chair behind a desk (figure 1). He holds a wooden pipe near his lips; stacks of paper and notebooks can be seen strewn about the office. For a brief moment before their exchange commences, the two characters face each other in silence. The scene is lit inconspicuously, “naturally.” Derrida’s eyes are directed at Ogier; she is seen from behind, her body position implies that she is facing him; they appear to be the only characters in the office. The establishing shot is cut to a close-up of Ogier as she looks towards Derrida’s direction, following the eye-line match. She then asks the question that will provoke Derrida’s impromptu remarks: “Je voudrais 181 vous demander une chose. Est-ce que vous croyez aux fantômes?” (“I’d like to ask you something. Do you believe in ghosts?”) (figure 2). Figure 1. Establishing shot. Figure 2. Ogier in close-up, eye-line match. The scene then cuts back to the establishing shot of Derrida, who is again positioned beyond Ogier’s right shoulder and head, occupying the left foreground of the frame. A slow tracking shot, commonly called a “dolly-in,” creeps past her right shoulder and towards him; Derrida is soon framed in close-up (figures 3a, 3b & 3c). The question hangs in the air for a brief moment before the camera begins moving toward its subject. One notices that Derrida’s pipe is now further removed from his mouth; he makes few small turns in his chair, and his eyebrows lift as he looks at Ogier and begins to reply with his improvisation. The short duration between question and answer, the seeming “naturalness” of Derrida’s non-verbal response and gestures, prior to the patient dolly-in, combined with the lighting and the fact that the next sequence is composed mostly by a single long take (there is only one cut away, a reaction shot of Ogier), emphasize certain “non-staged” conditions of the interview scene. If, for example, the first close-up of Ogier was cut to Derrida in close-up, and was followed by a shot-reaction-shot volley between the two as he spoke, with long suspense-filled silences and breaks—a style 182 emblematic of many contemporary on-screen conversations—the scene would not only leave the viewer with a different impression of the monologue, but also would imply that more directing, staging, editing, and rehearsal contributed to it. Besides the first close-up of Ogier and a single inserted reaction shot of her later on, McMullen labors to efface the mise-en-scène as such. Figures 3a, 3b, & 3c. Dolly-in, close-up w/ brief eye-line break. One could compare these formal qualities to those that mark Derrida’s preceding appearance in the film at the Parisian café, Le Select. In comparison to the interview scene at Derrida’s office, this scene has not garnered much critical attention because it is relatively short, forgettable, and basically serves as the causal link between Ogier’s character and Derrida. In other words, the café scene’s purpose in the film is functional and schematic: like a silent film intertitle, it precedes and sets up the pair’s subsequent conversation in Derrida’s office. The café scene begins about thirteen minutes into Ghost Dance with a shot of Derrida sitting alone in Le Select, drinking coffee while African music blares on the soundtrack. Ogier and a male acquaintance she encountered in the previous scene, who turns out to be her teacher, arrive and greet Derrida as “Jacques” (in the previous scene, both Ogier and this character refer to him as “Jacques Derrida”). According to the plot, the unnamed teacher has a meeting scheduled with Derrida and has 183 invited Ogier’s character to join them so she can talk to Derrida about her “idea.” Although I’ll refrain from protracted plot summary and developing the details of this scene at length, its important to underscore the formal set-up of the café scene and what these conditions announce about its status in film, especially the ways in which these conditions contrast with the upcoming office/interview sequence. What unfolds once the Ogier and the teacher are seated near Derrida in the café is a conventionally staged, and rather unremarkable, conversation between the three characters (figure 4). It is composed through the hallmarks of classical narrative filmmaking technique: scripted lines, shot- reaction-shot cutting, close-ups, and painfully evident eye-line matching. 295 Along with the non-diegetic music that began the scene, these techniques, which are deployed to provide narrative continuity and contiguity among characters within pro-filmic space, demonstrate deliberate structuring or production on the part of the filmmakers and actors before the camera. Scenes such as this require their complicity; they are collaborators unified by their roles in the production of cinema. Due to its apparent construction, the scene at Le Select seems to be, on the surface, “more” performative, rehearsed, scripted, and produced than the upcoming interview scene. While the viewer is certainly aware of some necessary staging in the interview scene—that is, she or he is cognizant of the fact that they are watching a film with a plot and that this scene is constitutive of said plot, that it is has arisen through the conventions, causality, and expectations of narrative filmmaking, and that it is not an inserted, non-diegetic lecture, seminar, or interview— McMullen’s formal choices and Derrida’s improvisation in it broadcast a certain affinity with “actuality,” or a different type of “on the spot” or unmediated performance. But as 295 In his conversation with Bernard Stiegler in Echographies of Television, Derrida speaks about the numerous “takes” of this scene which, he says, were “repeated, repeated, repeated to the point of exhaustion” (117-118). 184 Derrida explains through his analysis of improvisation and interviews, believing in this immediacy would (in addition to simply looking past the formal set-up of the interview scene and the fact that it is a film) entail disavowing what actually occurs during all speech, including improvisation. For one to believe in immediacy this way she or he would need to deny, whether tacitly or explicitly, that one speaks within a language that is more or less familiar or understandable to an audience; one is always responding to the expectations of the other. The speaker’s performance, even if this performance is an improvisation within an interview scene shot and composed to look as natural as possible, is always already mediated and conditioned by other voices. Like the scene at the Le Select, the interview scene is a production, but one which lacks the same visible and audible constructs and other formal markers. Figure 4. A different scene and setup at Le Select. “Do you believe in ghosts?” she had asked. With camera edging closer, Derrida breaks the momentary silence in a voice and speech rhythm that contrasts with the clarity and volume of Ogier’s scripted question and with his own lines from the café scene. This slight difference further announces the improvisational conditions of the scene. He answers: Je ne sais pas, c’est une question difficile. Est-ce qu’on demande, d’abord, à un fantôme s’il croit aux fantômes? Ici, le fantôme c’est moi. 185 I don’t know, that’s a difficult question. First of all, does one ask a ghost if it believes in ghosts? Here, the ghost is me. 296 After having been asked the scripted question about his belief in ghosts, Derrida begins his improvisation, or what can be seen as his “instructed” improvisation, with two intertwined and elaborate claims. 297 First, in addition to noting the question’s difficulty, Derrida’s statement that he does not “know” if he believes in ghosts will likely be heard as an automatic (and understandable) reflex to a complex question, and thus an example of one of the aforementioned “delaying devices” of responding. While Derrida’s “I don’t know” is certainly an example of this reflexive tendency, his claim directly ties into what he says next, namely that there is something spectral about him, or that he, himself, is a ghost there in the film scene. At this point, and as I will elaborate later, Derrida’s own ghostliness seems to render undecidable his ability to know whether or not he believes in ghosts. Underlying both of these claims (“I don’t know about my belief in ghosts” and “Here, the ghost is me”) is therefore what allows and/or compels Derrida to say that he is a ghost: 296 I am thankful to Peggy Kamuf for reviewing my transcription and translation of Derrida’s improvisation in Ghost Dance. 297 I’ve used the word “instructed” here to signal that McMullen and Derrida formally anticipated or planned for the latter’s improvisation. This deduction is based on Derrida’s account of or testimony concerning the scene as he tells it to Stiegler in Echographies of Television (118-119). He makes it clear that the only scripted lines of the scene were Ogier’s question, along with his repetition of that question following his improvisation, and her subsequent affirmative responses to it. All of this leads me to believe that McMullen had formed or written the interview scene around the improvisation in advance and had allotted the space and time for its enunciation, which was likely written into a shooting script like an unfilled gap, void, or question mark. Of course, this observation raises the issue of Derrida’s preparation for the scene, and the extent to which his impromptu remarks—he insists on their improvisational nature— were pre-formed or if he was given an idea about what he was to be asked. It is hard to imagine that he was completely “in the dark” about these matters. These deductions also call into question how many takes were shot for this scene. While Derrida tells Stiegler that Ogier repeated her response to Derrida “at least thirty times” (119), one assumes that Derrida’s improvisation, as an improvisation, occurred in one take; as an improvisation, it would be the first and last take. Because Derrida insists that his remarks were improvisational, one assumes that his comments were not a repetition in the conventional sense or the product or aggregation of rehearsal. 186 Dès lors qu'on me demande de jouer mon propre rôle dans un scénario filmique plus ou moins improvisé, j'ai l'impression de laisser parler un fantôme à ma place. Paradoxalement, au lieu de jouer mon propre rôle, je laisse, à mon insu, un fantôme me ventriloquer , c'est-à-dire parler à ma place . Et c'est ça qui est peut-être le plus amusant. Since I’ve been asked to play my proper role in a more or less improvised script, I have the impression of letting a ghost speak in my place. Paradoxically, instead of playing my proper role, unbeknownst to me, I let a ghost ventriloquize me, that is to say, a ghost speaks in my place, and perhaps that’s the most amusing thing. According to Derrida, the spectrality incited by playing what he calls his “proper role” in Ghost Dance is (perhaps) more amusing than merely answering yes or no to her question. In the place of offering an unambiguous response to Ogier’s question, before responding to the question put to him and then supporting that answer with evidence or an anecdote (maybe a ghost story), Derrida, in a gesture that closely resembles the “pause” feature of his meta-interviews, figuratively calls “cut” on the interview scene and turns the camera back on the conditions of his performance in the film and the act of playing oneself. The key pivot in these remarks is Derrida’s use of the term “proper” and its significance throughout his oeuvre. Mon propre rôle can be, and often is, translated directly as “myself” (as it is in English subtitles for Ghost Dance); however, Derrida’s use of the French propre is, unsurprisingly, not so simple. As Alan Bass observes in his translation of propre in the essay “Différance,” Derrida “most often intends all the senses of the word at once: that which is correct, as in le sens propre (proper, literal meaning) and that which is one’s own, that which may be owned, that which is legally, correctly owned—all the links between proper, property, and propriety.” 298 Although Bass does not mention it here, propre can also be used in French to say “clean” or “tidy,” and generally 298 Alan Bass, Translator’s note in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Brighton, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1982), 4. I’ve thus followed Bass’ example here and elsewhere (namely, in Writing and Difference) to treat the French word propre as “proper.” 187 refer to the toilet- and house-trained. In sum, propre indicates a type of definitive spatial arrangement or placement; things are in their “right” place—an object or thing owned (including myself) before and legitimized by the law, a tidy house, a toilet flushed, or the habits of a well-trained dog—and the temporal immediacy of such proximity vis-à-vis what is commonly understood as the access to one’s own consciousness. “Proper is the name of the subject close to himself,” Derrida remarks in “La Parole soufflée,” one of his first published essays, “—who is what he is—and abject the name of the object, the work that has deviated from me.” 299 The state of being proper, non-abject, clean, “the nonpollution of the subject absolutely close to himself,” allows a subject to stand upright in absence of excess, malady, madness, and the destinerrance historically associated with writing. 300 Writing, as it has been positioned within phonocentric thought “dispossesses me and makes me remote from myself,” Derrida contends, “interrupting my proximity to myself, [it] also soils me: I relinquish all that is proper to me.” 301 Writing makes one improper; it is the process that soils the proper. As Derrida demonstrates throughout his corpus, but particularly in his early works such as Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology, what often appears to be most “proper” is one’s own speech; one is supposedly immediately present to his or her own thoughts and words through self-consciousness. Since the voice has been historically considered the most “live” and auto-affective medium, a “proper role,” in this sense would be a role that presupposes the self-evidence of this living proximity. Opposed to a 299 Jacques Derrida, “La Parole soufflée,” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 183. 300 Ibid. 301 Ibid. 188 theatrical role or acting, the property of the proper role, its proper propriety, is founded upon the belief that one speaks for her- or himself; one believes that the voice belongs to and is constituted by that very same one who speaks it. And yet, after having been asked if he believes in ghosts, Derrida promptly evokes an exteriority to the supposed properness and propinquity of his proper role on film by claiming that a ghost has commandeered his words; the voice with which he speaks, or that which institutes the proper as such, is precisely what is improper or makes his role improper. What is “proper” to this role, his role there (ici), on film, is therefore a certain impropriety. The supposed proper role, Derrida as himself, is improper. Derrida is possessed by ghosts at the very moment he is expected to be his own proper self and to possess this self, himself, as his own ghost-free property. Possessed, the proper role dispossesses; Derrida avows that he has been dispossessed. His voice is always already displaced as an aggregate within a given language. Like his comments on improvisation, his words—what seem to be the most interior to a speaking subject—belong to and come from the other, from elsewhere, even if they are believed to be one’s own. Precisely because he has been asked to play, act, and speak as and for himself, and to remain, in acting parlance, “out of character,” to do nothing except “break character” and resist every other character—barring his actual self in this particular scene—, a ghost has taken and speaks in Derrida’s place. “Here the ghost is me”: words spoken as a medium within the medium who/that declares that, in the place of being and acting as a self, it/she/he is, unbeknownst to himself, always already a type of spectral circuit board or channel. It is important to note that Derrida’s early remarks about spectrality in Ghost Dance are not just limited to this singular experience of the film, to this scene, that day 189 with Ogier in his office; they are thus generalizable beyond cinema. Assuming one’s “proper role,” being oneself, as Derrida explains throughout his meta-interviews, always demands that one unconsciously channel or broadcast ghosts. This not a choice of some self-acting agent: in order to speak, one must always engage the selective acts of writing as one receives ghosts, hears their voices, and repeats and reinterprets their messages. Both constative and performative modalities are thus always at work when one speaks (and writes); it this singular performance within what is already there which marks the proper role as properly improper. All of this complicates the general distinction between acting and non-acting, and as such, the classification of Derrida’s cinematic “roles.” On the experience of playing what he calls “the Actor” in the film D’ailleurs, Derrida (Safaa Fathy, 1999) he says: Le divorce entre l’Acteur et moi, entre les personnages que je joue et moi, entre mes rôles et moi, entre mes “parts” et moi, il a commence en “moi” bien avant le film. Et il s’est multiplié, il a proliféré durant tout “ma-vie.” Cela ne m’est pas propre, j’en suis bien convaincu, “nous” pouvons tous en dire autant, tous et toutes en souffrir autant, en jouir autant, mais chaque divorce a son histoire, son style, sa langue, son visage, ses noms propres, ses signatures, et si le film a donné à entrevoir mes divorces, les noms de mes divorces, il aura dit vrai, pour cette “part,” il aura fait la part des parts, il aura fait vrai à la fois pour les divorces qui nous sont communs et vrai pour les irremplaçables et irréversibles divorces qui furent mon lot, qui furent les miens propres… The divorce between the Actor and me—between the characters that I play and me, between my roles and me, between my “parts” and me—began in “me” long before the film [D’allieurs, Derrida]. And it has multiplied, it has proliferated throughout “my-life.” This is not the case only for me—I am convinced of that, “we” can all say as much—everyone suffers from it as much, enjoys it as much, but each divorce has its history, its style, its language, its face, its proper names, its signatures, and if the film gave a glimpse of my divorces, the names of my divorces, it will have told the truth; for this “part,” it will have allowed for [or made room for] the parts [il aura fait la part des parts], it will have seemed true at once for the divorces that are common to us all and true for the irreplaceable and irreversible divorces that were my lot, that were properly mine… 302 302 Derrida, “Lettres sur un aveugle,” 75 (my translation with assistance from Peggy Kamuf). 190 Derrida here notes the general condition of wrestling and writing with the ghosts that haunt all of us and the ways in which each “role” or “part” is still singular, proper to each “me” with “its own history, style, language, face, proper names, signatures.” Each one has his or her own ghosts, Derrida suggests, and so, each one is haunted in a singular way; this particularity produces a different role, an “irreplaceable” divorce from the expectations of the proper. Each “me” possesses and is made so by a proper impropriety. One’s possessed dispossession makes possible one’s singularity as plurality. Most would likely agree that Derrida is not invoking a “typical image” of haunting and performance, although he deploys the words “roles,” “parts,” and “play” in the sense of acting. By comparison, the interview scene in Ghost Dance (and all of Derrida’s appearances on film) is probably the furthest one can get from well-known cinematic sequences of dramatic possession or “proper dispossession,” such as those from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) or Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), for example. Against prevalent versions and renderings of ghosts and haunting, Derrida’s initial comments in Ghost Dance are precisely about what many would consider the most ordinary and usual of circumstances— speaking as, and thus, being oneself. Haunted and displaced by the selection and differential acts of writing, the place of one’s proper role, oneself, myself, Derrida’s logic asserts, is a kind of spectral cinematic scene, a performance with ghosts as a ghost, even if this performance is involuntary, unconscious, forgotten, or routine. He continues his response to Ogier: Le cinéma est un art de fantômachie, si vous voulez. Et je crois que le cinéma, quand on ne s’y ennuie pas, c’est ça, c’est un art de laisser revenir les fantômes. Cinema is an art of fantômachie (a battle of ghosts), if you wish. And I think that cinema, when it’s not boring, is that—it’s an art of letting ghosts come back. 191 Derrida follows his comments concerning his own spectrality and the inherent ghostliness of every “proper role,” with two sentences that will constitute his first public and categorical statements about cinema. Cinema, for Derrida, is exceptionally suited for the neologism, fantômachie, a fusion between French fantôme (ghost) and the suffix -machie (-machy or –machia), the latter of which comes from the ancient Greek suffix -µαχία, meaning battle, contest, or labor. As Derrida sees it, cinema is a battle of phantoms, a contest or clash between them; it stages and provides a stage for their return, a place for their work or encounter amongst one another. 303 It is this concept of fantômachie that Derrida conjures in his 2001 interview with Cahiers du cinéma when declares that “[t]he cinematic experience belongs thoroughly to spectrality” and that “[c]inema thus allows one to cultivate what could be called ‘grafts’ of spectrality.” 304 Marked only by returns and arrivals, cinema spawns and is suffused with spectral transplants, grafts, and supplements from elsewhere. However, for Derrida, this confrontation or splicing together of elsewheres does not imply that they simply originate from an “over there” beyond and/or outside; on the contrary, the elsewhere lives and is active within the supposed limits of the proper. The true elsewhere for Derrida is an interior elsewhere, an otherness within what seems to be wholly self-contained and self-referential. On 303 The only other occurrence of fantômachie that I am aware of is found in Derrida’s Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006), where he calls Marx’s The German Ideology “the most gigantic phantomachia (fantômachie in the original) in the whole history of philosophy” (150). I am thankful to Micahel Naas for pointing out that Derrida’s neologism is haunted by, and in many ways, responds to Plato’s Sophist, in which the Eleatic Stranger speaks of the “gigantomachia” (translator Nicholas P. White renders this as “as battle of gods and giants” in Plato, The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper [Indianapolis, I.N.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997], 716) among the Pre-Socratics over the question of being. Derrida’s reference in Specters of Marx to a “gigantic phantomachia,” seems to confirm this association. Interestingly, “gigantomachia” follows Plato’s discussion of imitation as either eikastiké (copying or rendering an imitation as closely as possible to the imitated) or phantastiké (more fantastical renderings unconcerned with likeness). “Gigantomachia” thus seems to come from or is tethered to a certain fantômachie, or a clash between degrees of imitative likeness. 304 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 26 and 27. 192 encountering the elsewheres that mark and compel all of his work, he says in D’allieurs, Derrida: Il s’agit de penser à partir de ce passage de la limite. L’ailleurs, même quand il est très près, c’est toujours l’au-delà d’une limite, mais en soi, on a l’ailleurs dans le cœur, dans le corps, c’est ça que veut dire l’ailleurs, l’ailleurs ici, si l’ailleurs était ailleurs ça ne serait pas un ailleurs. It is a matter of thinking from this limit-crossing. The ailleurs, even when it is very nearby, is always the beyond of some limit but in oneself, one has the limit in one’s heart, in one’s body, that is what ailleurs means, the elsewhere is here. If the elsewhere were elsewhere, it would not be an elsewhere. 305 This consideration of an elsewhere here (l’ailleurs ici) resounds with Derrida’s declaration in Ghost Dance that he is the ghost there (le fantôme ici) and that his ghostliness comes from that which seems most proper and within—the very condition of his “proper role,” his own voice. Cinema’s singularity, its power let’s say, stems from its enlargement and excitation of these elsewheres: its proper discovery and re-presentation of ghosts within in the heart of the proper. This enlargement, Derrida tells the editors of Cahiers du cinéma, “does not only enlarge; the detail gives access to another scene, a heterogeneous scene…[b]y blowing up a detail one is doing something else besides enlarging it; one changes the perception of the thing itself. One accedes to another space, to a heterogeneous time.” 306 In uncovering a trace elsewhere, Derrida, who is drawing on Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the affinities between cinema and psychoanalysis in “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility,” says that the enlargement proper to cinema “gives us access to another structure of the real…[a]nother structure, a form or 305 I am here using Peggy Kamuf’s translation of the same monologue from Kamuf, “Stunned: Derrida on Film,” To Follow, 113. 306 De Baecque and Jousse,“Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 26, 38-39. 193 a causality that was hitherto unknown.” 307 Like psychoanalysis, cinema reveals details that expose new worlds within the known, accepted, or surface world; its lens discovers a plurality of subterranean worlds, and these elsewheres defer elsewhere, they imply that there is always another spectral graft. Since, Derrida states following Benjamin, the enlarged detail divulges “a transformation that is qualitative rather the quantative,” the fragment, and by extension, the trace and the grafts that accumulate and are composed by the detail-fragment-trace, cannot be calculated, wrested, completely explained, saturated, or exorcised. 308 What occurs and what is discovered is a fantômachie: an imbrication of specters, their battle for the spotlight and their escape from it. These disclosures of what was already there but previously unseen, repressed, or forgotten, “permits a different reading of the whole (whether open or closed),” Derrida says. 309 Through cinema and its mode of enlargement, one finds the world always already haunted, estranged from itself through itself, uncanny (more than one world/ no longer any one world). Returning to the Ghost Dance improvisation, the phrase “letting ghosts come back” (laisser revenir les fantômes) articulates cinema’s ghostly economy, the interactions of its phantomatic exchange. As the art that explicitly lets ghost come back, cinema illustrates the spectrality always at work in one’s own voice through its staging, archivization, and eventual re-presentation of this process; at once, it is set-up to provide an audiovisual record and relies on the return of these archived traces to function as such. The economy or functioning of cinema adds yet another layer to Derrida’s announcement 307 Jacques Derrida, “Above All No Journalists!” translated by Samuel Weber, in Religion and Media, edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 87. 308 Ibid. 309 Ibid. 194 that he is a ghost there and thus serves to double his own ghostliness, or more specifically, doubly tie it to what is happening on film in Ghost Dance. In other words, while Derrida explicitly bases his ghostliness on the assumptions undergirding his “proper” role and the supposed auto-affectivity of the voice, what goes practically unmentioned in this scene, or what can be overlooked since it remains implicit in the improvisation, is the very condition of cinematic inscription (and re-inscription) and the relation of this mode of inscription to its spectral economy—making and letting ghosts come back. As Derrida tells Stiegler in Echographies of Television, all imaging and photographic processes, despite the “live-ness” and likeness that they seem to provide, are (like all modes of inscription) thanatographic: “once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our disappearance is already here.” 310 Echoing Roland Barthes’ thoughts on photography and death in Camera Lucida, Derrida conceptualizes the recording at work in every scene of inscription through its potential survival (or survivance) in the absence of the photographed subject. By telling Ogier that he is a ghost, Derrida is therefore not only alluding to the ghosts that ventriloquize him and make his proper role improper, but also, at least implicitly, the spectral death-effect of the camera and other recording devices that surround them in his office. These devices capture their images and voices, their movie, which can then be shown or re-viewed in the future when the actors (and filmmakers, for that matter) will be dead. “We are 310 Derrida, Echographies of Television, 115. 195 spectralized by the shot,” Derrida says to Stiegler, “captured or possessed by spectrality in advance.” 311 In turn, this “spectrality in advance,” the capture and deposit of the trace or mark, and the destinerrance, dissemination, and futurity of inscription, signals a film’s iterability; it is constructed and signed by another. In both D’ailleurs, Derrida and the 2001 film, Derrida makes a point of stating that his roles in the films are the sources of material for the filmmakers; he must therefore relinquish a certain amount of control over it to them because the films are more properly their productions since they will bear their signatures. In D’ailleurs, Derrida he makes this claim explicit: Vous êtes en train, vous, d’écrire, c’est-a-dire d’inscrire des images que vous allez à votre tour, comment dire, monter, éditer, comme on dit dans ce pays, sélectionner, couper, coller. Et donc on est en train de façon très artificielle de préparer un texte que vous allez, vous, écrire et signer, et moi je suis là, une espèce de matériau pour votre écriture. You are in the process of writing, that is to say you are creating images that you will, in your turn—how to put it?— edit, as we say in this country, select, cut, paste. And so we are, in a very artificial way, currently preparing a text that you are going to write and sign, and me, I am there, a type of material for your writing. Not only has Derrida been “spectralized by the shot” as it relates to implicitly inscribing his future death; he has also, in his appearances on film, become the material for the filmmakers who will more or less do what they wish with it and whose signature necessitates the construction (“edit…select, cut, paste”) of Derrida’s audiovisual archive. Derrida on film is the ghost material for the filmmakers who have captured him—his is a parasited voice that will itself become parasitical, reconstructed, (re)produced, and projected in his absence. Notwithstanding his status as “subject,” Derrida is with these 311 Ibid. 196 comments calling attention to a kind of passivity that imbues all his filmic roles, to his status as the passenger in the film, both during its production, construction, and its destinerrance to come. “When you will be editing all that,” Derrida says to the filmmakers of Derrida about his various interviews with them, “you will keep exactly what you think has to be kept, OK? It will be your signature and your autobiography in a certain way.” Derrida’s movie will be signed by another and a reflection, a “role” or “part” of their life through the depiction of his; like all actors and documentary “subjects,” his words, roles, and parts are the fodder for the cinematic inscriptions of another, producing not a biography but a type of critical autobiography, an account of the autos and the bios of and through the means of -graphy. Derrida continues in Ghost Dance: Alors c’est ce que nous faisons ici. Donc si je suis un fantôme, je veux dire si actuellement croyant parler de ma voix, précisément parce que je crois parler de ma voix, je la laisse parasiter par la voix de l’autre, pas de n’importe quel autre mais de mes propres fantômes si on peut dire, à ce moment-là, il y a des fantômes. Et ce sont eux qui vont vous répondre, qui vous ont peut être déjà répondu. So that’s what we are doing here. Thus, if I am a ghost, I mean if I believe that I am currently speaking in my own voice—precisely because I believe I’m speaking in my voice—I let the voice of the other to parasite it. Not just any other, but my proper ghosts, so to speak. At that moment, there are ghosts. And it is they who will answer you. Perhaps they already have. What they are “doing” or making happen there is cinema, Derrida tells Ogier: “cinema is what were are doing here (ici),” he seems to say, “what is called cinema is occurring now because we are letting ghosts come back through our speech and because we will return as ghosts in future on the occasion that this film will be viewed in our absence.” Cinema is happening there because Ogier and Derrida are archived and spectralized, deferred elsewhere, to the future, while they are ventriloquized by ghosts from the past. Ghosts 197 arrive, Derrida says as it relates to his own voice, “precisely because,” one does not believe them to do so, one assumes through the propre that one is ghost-free. The act of believing one’s voice to be “proper” is precisely the action that summons ghosts and displaces one’s own speech; one’s blind belief in a world without ghosts is the act that conjures their return. This belief institutes the moment of haunting: “at that moment, there are ghosts.” Derrida’s point here does not concern the reversal of one’s state of blind belief, as if one’s blindness could be alleviated by showing this belief otherwise, as if one could then, with open eyes and a different set of beliefs, pursue the identification and acknowledgment of ghosts. Rather, Derrida is insisting on the impossibility of completely overcoming this belief and blindness to haunting; hence, the initial complexities of his response to Ogier’s question direct question, “Do you believe in ghosts?” For if the moment of one’s belief against and blindness to ghosts is the very condition of their activity, how could one either absolutely affirm or deny their existence? Following Derrida’s logic here and elsewhere, the one who says that they do not believe in ghosts, the one who says that ghosts do not inhabit and make possible her or his own speech for example, is precisely the one who conjures them up. The moment of ghostly return is the moment one disavows them, whether intentionally or not. On the other hand, if we accept Derrida’s description of the voice as always already parasited by ghosts, his saying that it is already exteriorized prior to one’s enunciation, and that voices arrive from elsewhere, who would be the one, in the end, to say, “yes, I believe”? By definition, belief must contend with, and be an act of faith in, that which is not wholly provable; it arises from and is called on by a certain lack of presence. At the same time, as Samuel Weber says of Derrida’s comments on cinema and 198 belief, “[t]o ‘believe’—however overdetermined and ambiguous the word—implies…a belief ‘in’ someone or something, and therefore presupposes the localizability of the ‘one’ or ‘thing.’” 312 Weber’s take on belief implies that believing in someone or something necessitates the quasi-predetermination of the “one” or “thing” vis-à-vis the spatial coordinates of the “in,” even though that in which one believes must be absent. The believed one or thing must be relatively localized or localizable prior to one believing in it—“relatively” because this localization cannot be complete for belief to operate as belief. Ghosts, as Derrida conceives of them, fundamentally resist this prior localization and any sort of quasi-identification or assimilation because a ceaseless destinerrance marks their spatio-temporality. Present and absent, the ghost is at once a who and a what according to Derrida; “it” is someone and something that fundamentally resists localization: It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence…One does not know if it is living or if it is dead. Here is—or rather there is, over there, an unnamable or almost unnamable thing: something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some thing, “this thing,” but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us [qui nous regarde], comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy. 313 “Between something and someone, anyone or anything,” Derrida says of the ghost; it is only ever someone and/or something unidentifiable. This is all to say that the difficulty of localizing, confining, and identifying ghosts, even at an incomplete or quasi- “relative” level, not only complicates the act of determining and delimiting the spectral “I” who 312 Peggy Kamuf, “Double Features: An Interview with Samuel Weber,” 154. 313 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 5. 199 would avow belief in them, but also what lays beneath the very act of ghost belief—the assumption that ghosts are things one can indeed believe in. It would thus appear that affirming one’s belief in ghosts in this sort of manner, by stating “yes” unequivocally, would inversely signal one’s own exteriority from ghosts through the autonomy presupposed by the “I.” In other words, the “I” would need to be ghost-free. Derrida summarizes the address of the “I” as it relates to ghosts in the form of a question near the end of Specters of Marx: “Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back?” 314 This is another way of saying that the inclusive and indivisble sovereignty of an “I” is a phantasm because autonomy can only occur within a preceding heteronomy. In this light and taking into account his comments elsewhere on the opic, Derrida’s preliminary and “automatic” response to Ogier’s query—“I don’t know, it’s a difficult question”—appears to be more attentive to the complexities that arise when one addresses the belief in ghosts than at first glance. Derrida speaks about the activity of and belief in ghosts while refraining from proclaiming his own resolute belief in them. And yet, Derrida does in a certain way, relay to Ogier a form of belief—a ghost belief of rather than in ghosts—that is not based on localization, and thus, the property of his own self as someone/something conventionally propre. His is a belief in what seems to be the impossibility of positing a belief in ghosts. The “I don’t know” informs Derrida’s ghost belief; it is a belief haunted by ghosts, a belief in their arrival through one’s disbelief in them, and so an incomplete negation of the “in” (in without in) that affirms the activity and power of ghosts without attempting to seize and restrain them. As he puts it in second volume of The Beast and Sovereign: 314 Ibid., 221. 200 Saying “I don’t know” about fantasy and revenants is the only way to take them into account in their very effective power. If I said “I know,” “I am sure and certain,” clearly and distinctly, not only that I am affected by spectral fantasies, but that there are really such things outside of me, I would immediately dissolve spectrality, I would deny without delay, I would contradict a priori the very thing I am saying… “I don’t know” is thus the very modality of the experience of the spectral, and moreover the surviving trace in general. 315 Derrida’s “I don’t know” in Ghost Dance can be heard to affirm Ogier’s question without declaratively stating a belief in ghosts as identifiable and relatively localizable entities. Ghost belief therefore professes a certain faith in the modality of the “I don’t know”; it believes in it as the experience that takes ghost “into account” without accounting for them—it is a kind of accounting without accounting. Although this portion of Derrida’s Ghost Dance improvisation does not contain his first utterance of the French verb croire (to believe), and despite the fact that he is using the term as it relates to the phenomena of the voice, his deployment of the term at this point in the improvisation aligns with the theme of his hypothetical project on cinema. This “alignment” or correspondence is forged through Derrida’s critique of the immediacy, “live-ness,” and presence supposedly engendered by technological media and the alleged auto-affectivity of the voice. As I explored in the last chapter, the seeds of Derrida’s project on cinema and belief can be traced as far back to his 1963 essay, “Force and Signification.” At one point in that essay, Derrida notes the “risk” involved with structuralist literary criticism and its attempts to associate the meaning of a literary work with what he calls “its geometric, morphological or, in the best of cases, cinematic 315 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 137. 201 model.” 316 Derrida’s logic in “Force and Signification” suggests that cinema is the “best” case of the group because its model (or movie) would be riskiest of all; that is to say, cinema presents the greatest risk because one may mistakenly assume that its means of archivization and reanimation capture and re-present the totality of the pro-filmic object—the thing itself. The risk of cinema is therefore doubly tied to belief: one risks believing too much in its model as the thing itself, and therefore, believing the process that produced this “movie” not to be cinema—a gesture that disavows the cinematic model as model. Derrida’s early comments on cinema and belief thus predate and can be seen to forecast what will eventually be called “apparatus theory” in the film theory canon; however, his comments on cinema and belief that emerge later in his corpus will deviate greatly from the hardline ideological critiques levied by the apparatus theorists. 317 To gloss this difference quickly, many film theorists associated with “apparatus theory” inversely reaffirm the opposition of reality and image, authentic and illusion, etc. through their critiques of the fantasies of mainstream cinema and their own privileging of the avant-garde. For many of them, classical Hollywood cinema obscures the truth of material reality, while other, usually more difficult, formalist, and esoteric works expose and lay bare these conditions, delivering reality as it is and operates; in doing so, these alternative cinematic practices and films propose a clear counter to the ideology of the film industry. It perhaps goes without saying that Derrida’s thinking of cinema in relation to ghosts and belief will profoundly diverge from the boundary reifications found within 316 Jacques Derrida “Force and Signification,” in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 16. 317 Many of these accounts can be found in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 202 much of apparatus theory. “The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic,” Derrida says to Stiegler, “it regularly exceeds all the oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible. A specter is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal: a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance.” 318 The spectral logic, a logic that is particular and proper to cinema and to deconstruction, signals that Derrida’s cinema and “its mode and system of belief” cannot be explained away or conceptualized by re-inscribing limits between the actual and illusion. Like a ghost, cinema remains phantomatic itself, composed of too many spectral graphs to be localized. Perhaps the only way to take it into account is also through the “I don’t know.” If “Force and Signification” is taken as one of Derrida’s earliest articulations of his project on cinema and belief, and a sort of answer in advance to Ogier’s question, or better, a type of re-articulation of it, an echo in advance of her articulation, then it becomes clear that his project’s preliminary concern would be upsetting—or deconstructing— the assumptions of (or belief in) an immediate and live “cinematic model” in a manner similar to that of the ghostliness of “proper” voice. Whereas Derrida certainly does proceed in such a way throughout his remarks on technological media, he notes cinema’s initiation of a singular type of belief: there is, for Derrida, a form of belief that accompanied the advent of cinema and this belief proliferates today through television and other networked audiovisual technologies. Deviating a bit from the sort of blindness that marks the belief of speaking in one’s own voice, cinema’s mode and system of belief, as Derrida sees it, is not predicated on a viewer’s acceptance of the pro- filmic’s immediacy. So, unlike the idea of transparency put forth by many of the apparatus theorists, the belief that cinema invents does not suppose the spectator’s 318 Derrida, Echographies of Television, 117. 203 credulity; spectators, according to Derrida, do not accept the immediacy of the “cinematic model.” As Derrida explains to the editors of Cahiers du cinéma: At the movies, you believe without believing, but this believing without believing remains a believing. On the screen, whether silent or not, one is dealing with apparitions that, as in Plato’s cave, the spectator believes, apparitions that are sometimes idolized. Because the spectral dimension is that of neither the living nor the dead, of neither hallucination nor perception, the modality of believing that relates to it must be analyzed in an absolutely original manner. This particular phenomenology was not possible before the movie camera because this experience of believing is linked to a particular technique, that of cinema. 319 Resembling the suspension of ghost belief outlined above—what can be considered the belief of rather than in ghosts—Derrida says that one “believe[s] without believing” while watching a film, “but this believing without believing remains a believing.” 320 What makes cinema extraordinary for Derrida is this suspension of belief: the spectator knows when he or she enters a theatre, or when one plays a film at home, that she or he is indeed watching a movie; thus, one assents and participates in the conditions of its (re)production. According to Derrida, a spectator accepts, first of all, that the reality a movie depicts is artificial, illusionary, staged, and produced, etc., but then, in spite of this knowledge, he or she can still be enthralled by a movie, invested in it emotionally and physically. By positioning the spectator as a type of participant in cinema’s artificiality, Derrida is not simply saying that raw, “actual,” unmediated reality exists outside of movies, or that cinema corrupts or artificializes reality. To be sure, Derrida’s conceptualization of the ubiquity of the ghost and the haunting that occurs always already everywhere means that the entirety of so-called “reality” is conditioned and composed by virtuality, staging, and modes of writing. What interests him most about cinema is not 319 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 27. 320 Ibid. 204 delineating the differences between reality and artificiality but the fact that spectators accept cinema’s virtuality and yet, still believe. The belief afforded to cinema thus arises through a primary disbelief—not in its own mediation, such as that of the voice, but in its immediacy. This initial skepticism or disbelief, Derrida suggests, cannot be disassociated from the “irreducible mistrust of the image in general and the filmed image in particular” within “Western law” and the “Western idea of belief.” 321 By drawing on “Western law” and the “Western idea of belief,” Derrida, through a move that can be seen as the deconstructive gesture par excellence, conjures the languages and terms underlying those laws and ideas in the West, namely (in this case) Greek, the “original” language of philosophy and Western metaphysics. “In Greek,” he tells Jousse and De Baecque, “and not only in Greek, fantasma designates the image and the revenant. The fantasma is a specter.” 322 Derrida’s comments about this etymological relationship just scratches the surface of an intricate connection between the terms “ghost” and “image” that he develops elsewhere in his oeuvre concerning the languages of Western philosophy. For example, Derrida has elaborated on the connection between words such as eidolōn, phantasma, phasma, psuchē, skia, and oneiros with terms like figura, forma, simulacrum, effigy, and imago in order to demonstrate that Western philosophy’s conflation and denigration of ghosts, writing, and the image begins with Plato and thus the very “beginning” of philosophy. 323 Ghosts, in these accounts, are fused to the dangerous doubles of mimēsis and all of the 321 Ibid., 30. 322 Ibid., 38. 323 For a thorough condensation and discussion of these terms as they relate Derrida’s work, see: Kas Saghafi, “The Ghost of Jacques Derrida,” in Apparitions—Of Derrida’s Other (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 65-82. 205 judgments passed on the mimetic throughout the history of philosophy; they are not considered the “thing itself,” but shadows, inexact and/or lesser copies, and fragments that serve to point back to the actual thing, and as such, their own lack of full presence. Not only does this fundamental mistrust institute metaphysics, as Derrida argues in his early work; it is also precisely what continues to function within practices of Western law and its ideas of belief. The activity of these practices and beliefs is most notable within the Western courtroom, where Derrida observes, “the film document does not have the value of proof…only perception, speech, or writing in their real presence have the right to belief, are credible.” 324 Although filmed recordings may be used as pieces of evidence or exhibits, Derrida remarks that they cannot replace “live” first- person testimony within the space of the courtroom itself, where a human subject presents her or himself before the law and verbally swears to tell the truth. For Derrida, “this juridical mistrust of the filmed images takes account of the modernity of the cinematic image, the infinite reproducibility and editing of representations”; images, in the way Plato conceived of them that continues today, are held to be malleable, potential illusions, and threats to the “truth.” 325 One’s testimony may corroborate or contradict evidence, such as a filmed or other recorded event, but testimony and its reliance on live speech cannot be wholly replaced by a technical recording, Derrida points out, even if this recording is a filmed testimony. Testimony, as it is conceptualized and treated within Western law, must be publicly presented, ghost and technics-free, by a proper speaking subject in control of his or her own voice and “operational” under all of the assumptions 324 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 30. 325 Ibid. 206 that Derrida makes tremble throughout his work on the voice, self-presence, testimony and fiction. 326 Otherwise, it is not legally admissible as testimony. Even with this disbelief and skepticism built into the perception of images in the West, viewers nonetheless watch a film as if they believe, or perhaps more precisely, they are expected to believe despite their disbelief, and this is what fascinates Derrida about cinema. Given a viewer’s initial disbelief, his or her automatic mistrust of images (and ghosts)—which also founds Western philosophy and law—she or he just as automatically believes. Throughout a number of Derrida’s texts, one finds traces of and allusions to cinema’s particular mode and system of belief—but in the end, this topic remains within the un-fillable unwritten gap of his unwritten and hypothetical cinema project. In other words, the subject of cinema’s ghost belief is a phenomenon he will reference or point to, but continually defer to the future, as something that “must be analyzed in an absolutely original manner.” 327 Because Derrida never wrote on cinema in a direct manner, and because he only alluded to its mode and system of belief in passing, the closest one can 326 Derrida addresses testimony, technics, and fiction in a number of his texts and seminars, most notably as it relates to this chapter in his reading of Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death in Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” translated by Rachel Bowlby, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 65-96; and “The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence,” Echographies of Television, 82-99. In these texts, Derrida insists that while testimony must separate itself from, or be pure of, technics in order for it to be considered testimony, it is always already is impure due to its iterability. The reproducible structure of testimony (testimony can be repeated after it is spoken, but it also must be the very thing that would be reproduced by another witness placed in the same place and time as the testifier—the testimony must be a viewpoint that another would share if she or he were there to bear witness) inherently fuses testimony with technics. Moreover, Derrida observes that testimony’s “truth value” is conditioned by the fact that a witness may be lying, mistaken, producing false testimony, or relaying fiction instead of the “truth.” Similar to its relation to technics, testimony (as it is treated in the Western juridical tradition) is considered to be separate from fiction, “[a]nd yet,” as Derrida points out, “there is no testimony that does not structurally imply the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury—that is to say, the possibility of literature, of the innocent or perverse literature that innocently plays at perverting all of these distinctions” (Demeure, 29). Proper testimony is thus haunted and made possible by its ghosts: technics and fiction. 327 Derrida, “Above All No Journalists!” 85-86. See also: De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 27; and Derrida, Echographies of Television, 118. 207 get to his specific articulation seems to be his more elaborate descriptions of television, particularly the attention he gives to “live” televisual events and the ways in which they are produced to appear live and efface their own construction. While fictional, narrative- based cinema and live television are certainly dissimilar and carry different sets of viewer assumptions, especially as they relate to their own composition and latent or overt fictionality, believing without believing in cinema and television for Derrida seems to loop back to the structural or formal properties of each that were “perfected” in conventional, narrative filmmaking. That is, for a movie or live television program to function as such, for the spectator to believe in the projection or broadcast in spite of their mistrust of the image and knowledge of its construction, the emissions must be constructed as invisibly as possible. Cinema’s (and by extension, television’s) ghost belief is thus connected to what is commonly called continuity editing and the formal filmmaking practices that were more or less standardized during the institutionalization of the Hollywood studio system. One could easily and directly trace these conventional filmmaking practices to not only contemporary cinema, but also to the fashioning of “live” television; these methods would obviously predate and inextricably contribute to the development of televisual techniques, through the former’s terminology and praxis. In addition to the so-called invisible editing practices (better known as the “transparency” of cinema) that seek to efface filmic construction, Derrida suggests in his comments about television that the viewer overcomes, temporarily sets aside, or suspends his or her ingrained mistrust of the image through the credit one automatically affords to the recording and synchronization of sound, and specifically, the “naturality” of the living voice. Even if a viewer accepts that a film or live television broadcast is made possible by 208 staging and editing, their suspended disbelief is accelerated by, as Michael Naas observes of Derrida’s writings on television, “from the voice’s ability not only to neutralize or overcome the suspicion that is always cast on the image but actually convert that suspicion to belief as the voice is reattached via the image to what seems to be the place of its production.” 328 Of course, the immediacy of this “reattachment,” and the viewer’s belief that they are beholding the action within “what seems to be the place of its production,” are qualitatively different in cinema than they are in television (the latter medium is the topic addressed by Naas with these particular comments). However, Naas’ observation about the voice is precisely what seems to connect both televisual and cinematic experiences; the recorded and synchronized voice solidifies cinema’s ghost belief chronologically prior to the invention of television. The synchronization of sound in cinema, Derrida states in “Cinema and Its Ghosts” is simultaneously a great accomplishment but also not a true “addition, a supplementary element, but rather a return to the origins of cinema allowing it to be still more fully achieved.” 329 By Derrida’s account, the impetus behind cinema (and one could here link all of the proto- cinematic inventions and toys, along with the well-know early scientific experiments by Marey and Muybridge) was and remains a general and all-encompassing “ recording of the world’s movement,” and this impulse includes the capture of sound and the voice together with moving images. 330 The (re)presentation of moving images and sound, 328 Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 143. 329 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 32. 330 Ibid., 33. One could link Derrida’s thinking of the “non-addition” of synch sound in cinema to André Bazin’s thesis in his essay, “The Myth of Total Cinema.” Like Derrida after him, Bazin points out that cinema’s “basic technical discoveries…[are] essentially second in importance to the preconceived ideas of the inventors. The cinema is an idealistic phenomenon.” André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in 209 particularly recorded speech is, Derrida describes, “of the same essence, that of a ‘quasi presentation’ of an ‘itself there’ of a world whose past will be, forever, radically absent, unrepresentable in its living presence.” 331 Although most cinema viewers accept this premise—that the recorded past will remain “radically absent” and that this recording was staged and produced—one cannot overcome what Derrida calls in another interview “the transcendental illusion of the media,” or the fact that the “effect of presence cannot be erased by any critique.” 332 Cinema’s ghost belief takes or has its place when a given spectator involuntarily relaxes his or her critical lens; this suspension of disbelief occurs, Derrida suggests, through cinema’s audiovisual “effect of presence” that (re)presents structurally absent specters that are, nonetheless accepted by spectators for the moment. 333 This is what can be considered cinema’s testimonial effect: spectators do not What is Cinema? Vol. 1, translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press, 2005), 17. The dream of complete cinema, the total replication of life, means that cinema for Bazin remains unfinished, to come; “[i]n short,” he says, “cinema has not yet been invented!” (21). Bazin’s claim particularly resounds with Derrida’s comments in the Cahiers interview about the “cinematic experience” that was “anticipated, dreamed of, hoped for by the other arts, literature, painting, theater, poetry, philosophy, well before the technical invention of cinema. Let’s say that cinema needed to be invented to fulfill a certain desire for the relation to ghosts. The dream preceded the invention” (de Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 29). Although there is much to say about their correspondences and differences, Derrida and Bazin both understand cinema as a symptom of or product formed by an impulse related to capturing a certain aspect of life that is unavailable to all the other arts and available discourses. 331 Ibid. Derrida’s comments here allude to a fact that many film historians have pointed out, namely that “silent cinema” was never totally silent. While one can point to musical accompaniments, voice over narration (such as benshi practices), and other sounds that were frequently played during silent film exhibition, Derrida would also likely point out the virtuality of the voice, or its specter, in silent film vis-à- vis intertitles and characters “mouthing” words to one another, along with the imposing discourse of silence as elaborated in the previous chapter through his comments in Peter Brunette and David Wills, “The Spatial Arts: An Interview With Jacques Derrida,” translated by Laurie Volpe, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, edited by Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9-32. In this way, cinema was never voice-less; the voice was there, even if it wasn’t heard as it was after the invention of synch sound. 332 Derrida, “Above All No Journalists!” 85. 333 There is an interesting comparison to be made between Derrida’s account of a spectator’s belief in narrative cinema and Tom Gunning’s description of the “incredulous” spectator in “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing, edited by Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114-133. In his essay, Gunning 210 simply believe, but they do not entirely disbelieve either; similar to testimony, the temporary “I don’t know” of ghost belief is impure. For Derrida, the “unprecedented experience of belief” invented by cinema is this automatic suspension and implicit confrontation with belief; cinema requires and spawns ghost belief, a remnant of belief, but neither belief nor disbelief. It is belief without belief. 334 explores what he calls the “myth” of the “panicked and hysterical” audiences who witnessed the very first films, including the Lumiére’s Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895). According to Gunning, the commonplace description of early film spectators as naïve and credulous dupes frightened and physically overwhelmed by movies equates them to “savages in their primal encounter with the advanced technology of the Western colonialists” (115). While Gunning does not deny that these audiences were astonished and perhaps occasionally terrified by the first movies, he contends that early film spectators were much more discerning than previously thought (or mythologized). Depicting the myth of the first audiences not only discredits their contextual positioning and the documented facts of their viewership, but also privileges the position of contemporary audiences and critics as advanced and evolved. Drawing on historical testimonies from early film spectators, Gunning argues that the shock experienced by film spectators at this time came not from their confusion of actual and real (that is, their total belief that the projected moving images were the thing itself or a magical transplant), but “from an unbelievable visual transformation occurring before their eyes, parallel to the greatest wonders of magic theatre” (119). Audiences, Gunning says, went to the cinema to be shocked, as if it was a magic show; they went to have their belief challenged by what they knew was illusion—to experience the thrilling doubt of their faith in the rational through an encounter with what appeared to be the miraculous: cinema. This all occurs precisely during an era marked by “a widespread decline in belief in the marvelous” and the rapid acceleration of technology and scientific rationality (117). Gunning’s argument thus aligns with and develops Derrida’s description of cinema as an experience in which audiences could finally face ghosts. For these comments, see de Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 29. 334 The last portions of this paragraph that evoke in consecutive fashion both of the formulations “neither…nor” and “X without X,” refer to Derrida’s readings of Maurice Blanchot found in Demeure, and Derrida, Parages, edited by John P. Leavy, translated by Tom Conely, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). In Demeure, Derrida’s close reading of Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death, the former develops the latter’s use of both formulations as they relate to, or encapsulate in language, an affect of remaining [demeurer] and delay that is nonetheless marked by a certain “after the fact,” or the imminence of something to come (in this case, death) that has paradoxically already arrived, but remains incomplete. The thinking of the “neither… nor” and the “X without X” thus renders negation and limitation incomplete; it announces instead a type of non-dialectic neutralization between poles. To consider this type of neutralization, the belief without belief marking cinema’s ghost belief is, for example, following Derrida, to go “beyond all dialectic, but also beyond the negative grammar that the word neuter, ne uter, seems to indicate. The neuter [in Blanchot] is the experience or passion of a thinking that cannot stop at either opposite without also overcoming the opposition—neither this nor that”(90). Like the thinking of the ghost, Derrida’s consideration of the neuter in this case (as it condenses the “neither…nor” and “X without X”) exceeds oppositions by moving through and testing them almost ceaselessly, back and forth amongst their already porous and divisible borders. All of this happens without negativity, negation, and finally, resolution; the traces of the terms remain traces. From Parages: “It [the condensation vis-à-vis Blanchot’s syntactical formulations] neutralizes without negativity, while affecting the neutral with an absolute heterogeneity, and from first approach regarding what, in the language thus neutralized, could have riveted it to the negative of the ‘neither one nor the other’” (“Pace Not(s),” translated by John P. Leavy, 78). Derrida also develops the spatio-temporality of suspension and affirmative neutralization in Blanchot’s récits through the French word pas, which means both “pace” (or, as it is frequently translated, “step”) and 211 Tout ça, c’est une…Aujourd’hui ça doit se traiter me semble t-il dans un échange entre l’art du cinéma dans ce qu’il a de plus inouï, de plus inédit finalement, et quelque chose de la psychanalyse. Je crois que cinéma plus psychanalyse égale science du fantôme. Vous savez, Freud, toute sa vie a eu affaire aux problèmes des fantômes. (telephone rings) Voilà le téléphone c’est le fantôme. Je vais répondre Allô… All of this is . . . It seems to me that today this has to be dealt with in an exchange between the art of cinema, in its most unheard-of aspect, and something of psychoanalysis. I believe that cinema plus psychoanalysis equals science of the ghost. You know that Freud, all of his life, was dealing with the problems of ghosts. (telephone rings) There’s the telephone, it’s the ghost. I’m going to answer. Hello . . . Everything that Ogier and Derrida are doing there, in front of McMullen’s camera within this improvised scene, articulates an exchange between the particularity of cinema on one hand, and “something of psychoanalysis,” on the other. One can assume that this “something” of which Derrida speaks is linked to Freud’s conceptualization of the experience of the uncanny as unheimlich, a point that returns in his interview with Cahiers du cinéma: “Every viewer, while watching a film, is in communication with some work of the unconscious that, by definition, can be compared with the work of haunting, according to Freud. He calls this the experience of what is “uncanny” [étrangement familier] (unheimlich). Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic reading, is at home at the movies.” 335 Putting the Ghost Dance improvisation into direct correspondence with “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” one can fill the gaps: The “something of psychoanalysis” that “is at home in the movies” (est chez elle au cinéma) is Freud’s development of the uncanny as the “strangely familiar” (étrangement familier) that seems to inform Derrida’s “not.” For Derrida, the French pas signals a non-privative advance and arrest at the same time—a sort of progression and rewound movement of a step/not. Derrida considers the non-negativity of the “without” (in French as sans sans sans, translated as “negativity without negativity”) in “The Parergon,” The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15-119. 335 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 26. 212 discussion of his “proper role” in Ghost Dance. It is interesting to note that Derrida uses the words “at home” to describe psychoanalysis’s relation to cinema and the original German “unheimlich” for the term uncanny. With these words, Derrida alludes to Freud’s opening gesture in the latter’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny” and his exploration of the etymological conflation and usage of heimlich and unheimlich through their supposed “proper” spatiality as “homely” and “unhomely,” respectively. As Freud illustrates, heimlich, in addition to meaning “homely,” typically denotes that which is familiar, friendly, and appropriately “a place free from ghostly influences.” 336 Freud’s analysis of heimlich also reveals that the same word is deployed to describe something concealed, private, secret, and/or even mystical. The term thus comes to align with its apparent antonym, unheimlich; and as negation of heimlich, the term unheimlich also takes the form of its antonym. For Freud, like Derrida and his interpretation of the impropriety of the proper, the uncanny leads back to something previously thought to be known and familiar. An uncanny experience takes or has its proper place where and when one discovers his or her own impropriety precisely “at home”; it names the disclosure of a dispossession already at work within the familiar, an original possession in the ghostly sense of therm. All of this occurs, and this is what makes the experience uncanny, exactly where or within what was considered to be the proper. Freud’s point is that this lexical conflation derives from and is a symptom of the ambivalent experience of the uncanny as an estrangement arising within an expectation of safety or an otherness encountered within those spaces that are presumed to be homely. Like the moment of haunting as 336 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Uncanny, edited by Adam Philips and translated by David McLintock (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 133. 213 Derrida describes it to Ogier, the uncanny names the feeling one experiences at the moment one finds oneself lost within one’s own, proper elsewhere; when one hears a ghost speaking in one’s own voice at the moment one believes oneself to be ghost-free. Cinema, “in its most unheard-of aspect,” which signals at once its singularity and the general oversight of or deafness to this singularity, should be dealt with through its exchange with this feature of psychoanalysis, Derrida contends, because the uncanny, as Freud articulates it, is not simply the universal return of the repressed, but one’s encounter with the belief that he or she has surpassed or “surmounted” something from the past, whether this something constitutes one’s infantile complexes, or the “primitive beliefs” of the human species, such as animism, the omnipotence of thoughts, and/or magic. 337 Notwithstanding all of Freud’s equivocation and backtracking in the essay, particularly as he endeavors to triumph over the problems literary fiction and its ghosts present in his account of the uncanny—that is, Freud uses literature to designate a psychoanalytic understanding of the uncanny while simultaneously denigrating fictive renderings as mere representations that deserve to be distinguished from reality, thus reasserting the Western mistrust of mimesis—this account of the uncanny can be characterized as a fundamental clash of past and presently-held beliefs. 338 This clash or confrontation forces one to question the totality of his or her beliefs and the laws that are said to govern the world. It is in this way that the uncanny relates directly to ghost belief: the subject is conflicted and at times invested in contradictory beliefs; she or he has lost 337 Ibid., 155. 338 Freud proposes many different interpretations of the uncanny. For a detailed account of Freud’s equivocations, see Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 214 the rational grounding of locale and localization. The “in” of belief is upended and one is forced to respond equivocally with “I don’t know.” Adding cinema’s fantômachie to Freud’s take on the uncanny equals a “science of the ghost,” Derrida says in Ghost Dance. In Echographies of Television, Derrida confesses that his phrase “science of the ghost” was an unplanned, impromptu remark, and, after thinking through it, he’s not so sure that he would “keep the word ‘science.’” 339 His reconsideration, as he explains it to Stiegler, is based on the fact that “dealing with ghosts…exceeds, if not scientificity in general, at least what, for very long time, has modeled scientificity on the real, the objective, which is not or should not be, precisely, phantomatic. It is in the name of the scientficity of science that one conjures or condemns obscurantism, spiritualism, in short, everything that has to do with haunting and specters.” 340 He then follows this statement with “there would be much to say about this,” which insinuates the depth and complexity of the given topic—of science and ghosts, of a “science of the ghost”—while recalling his allusions to the profundity of cinema’s mode and system of belief that deserve to be analyzed in an original manner. 341 Although Derrida’s reconsideration of the word “science” is understandable given the distance science must attempt to take from ghosts in order to maintain and reaffirm the limits of rationality, his deferral here is perhaps more revealing than it seems. Comparable to ghost belief’s belief without belief, a “science of the ghost,” Akira Mizuta Lippit notes, “determines an impossible science (and illicit technology), an unscientific science, or 339 Derrida, Echographies of Television, 118. 340 Ibid. 341 Ibid. 215 science without scientificity.” 342 For Lippit, a “science of the ghost” does not therefore suggest the annihilation of science or its complete negation; its logic pushes up against the limits and conditions of science, exposing its limit-condition as neither science nor magic nor mysticism, but something of each. A “science of the ghost” proposes a type of science in the absence of observable and provable scientific phenomena, a science that cannot be a known science, but a practice that still carries the name of science. Only in the name of science can there not be “a science of the ghost.” This science, a “science without scientificity”—and this is the point—echoes Freud’s own project to render scientific that which remains outside it and resists clear demonstrable proof, observation, and verification, the unconscious. When Derrida follows his spectral equation in Ghost Dance with a biographical remark about Freud and his problems with ghosts—when Derrida names him and not the body of work called psychoanalysis—he does not seem to be referring only to psychoanalytic theories of the uncanny, haunting, and ghosts. Derrida also cites Freud’s own struggle (“all of his life”) to legitimize psychoanalysis as a proper science, even though his “science” interprets the unverifiable and deals with ghosts. Like cinema, psychoanalysis is “a science of the ghost” and what haunted Freud, Derrida suggests in Ghost Dance, was the ghost of science, the scientific shadow of doubt cast on psychoanalysis. Derrida’s biographical remark about Freud implies that the latter’s ghosts extended from the “material” of psychoanalysis (the unconscious or psychic life of the patient) to those that kept his work from becoming a proper science. Impossible to test and unfalsifiable, the very material of Freud’s science—ghosts—prevented its receiving the seal of scientficity. Only the authority of the established scientific and medical 342 Lippit, “Plus Surplus Love,” 88, (emphasis added). 216 community can legitimize new avenues of science, and it’s well known that these communities viewed Freud’s work with suspicion, precisely because it could all be untrue: it was too speculative and perhaps fictional. Despite the fact that the supposed outcome of Freud’s project of conjuring or discovering ghosts was always their origin, localization, identification, explanation through analysis, and the logic behind their repetition and return, psychoanalysis (and Freud) was excluded from science because it dealt with “problems of ghosts.” Freud was doubly haunted: first, by the ghosts of his work or those he dealt with as the unconscious material of his patients, and second, by the ghost of science as the scientific community denied his claims as to psychoanalysis’s scientificity. Those who bestow scientficity refused to believe his science of the ghost was properly science. Just as Derrida finishes his sentence about Freud, his actual office telephone rings. In keeping with the spirit of his improvisation and playing his proper role, he answers it after joking with Ogier that the telephone’s interruption is the ghost. Before he picks up the phone to answer, Derrida quickly breaks his eye contact with Ogier and glances toward McMullen or another member of the crew [FIGURE 5]. He answers, “allô.” On the other end, we hear the faint voice of an English speaker with an American accent. This person is obviously unaware (or doesn’t care) that a film shoot is happening in Derrida’s office that day and/or that Derrida is occupied playing his proper role in a film. As Derrida listens to the caller intently and answers “yes” a number of times, the camera “dollies back” to the original establishing over-the-shoulder shot that contains Ogier in the left foreground. Derrida opens a planner on his desk and then invites the caller to attend his seminar in the Salle des Résistants, located at the École normale 217 supérieure in Paris. Caller and called exchange pleasantries and goodbyes and Derrida hangs up the phone. Figure 5. An interruption from the outside; Derrida breaks the eye-line. The break or lull in the diegesis that transpires during the telephone call may seem unexceptional, but under closer analysis, it serves as a reminder to the viewer, and surely to the filmmaker and the actors at that time, of the conditions of their improvisational scene. It reads as a break or lull (which the dolly back accentuates) because this telephone conversation is extra-diegetic; it appears to be an unplanned interruption and not part of what was planned to be included in the film, even if this particular scene was structured by “making space and time” for improvisation. McMullen’s choice to retain the entire telephone conversation in the film, while presenting it as a sort of uninterrupted interruption, effects the spectator’s belief in two direct ways. First, the conversation verifies the improvisational conditions of the interview scene—the telephone call, in other words, manifests a type of “truth effect.” Because the shot remains uncut, the scene seems to be truly unplanned, an authentic improvisation we believe; in this way, the “interruption” is read as a possible and actual contingency, which the film, as improvisational, is open to capturing and is obliged to retain uncut. Second and simultaneously, the telephone call also announces the staging of the scene, or better, the degree of its staging, by relaying this interruption as such. In this 218 light, the telephone call pierces the film set from the outside; the non- or extra-diegetic arrives as if it were an alien. The call comes from another world: not from “reality,” but another scene or text, elsewhere. Derrida’s quick glance towards McMullen (or crew member) as he answers the telephone, which breaks the eye-line continuity between the actors, subtly exposes the scene’s artificiality and set-up. The glance tells us that everything there is arranged to appear natural. And so, Derrida’s look within the scene to unseen or non-featured others there (ici) within it relays their positions outside. There is an outside-there, a general positioning of the scene and bodies off-screen that makes the scene’s naturality possible. As such, the interruption of the phone call produces a kind of improvisation within an improvisation, broadcasting the scene of, or the time and space afforded to, the first layer or degree of improvisation. While this second reading constitutes only one possible reading (and this in addition to many other possibilities, including a reading or belief that the whole thing is staged), perceiving the phone interruption as an interruption causes a reconsideration of what has come before it in the film and what will follow. By “reconsideration” I don’t mean to suggest that spectators are forced to judge the scene one way or another, that their belief will lessen or increase; rather, the telephone interruption can possibly lead viewers to consider how they have been believing, whether or not they have accepted what the scene proposes, and if they’ve automatically relaxed their mistrust and surrendered to the “transcendental illusion of the media.” By displaying Derrida’s telephone call in its entirety, Ghost Dance can be seen to efface its own effacement; it announces the belief one must invest into the diegesis, even if it is improvisational and appears natural. After finishing his telephone conversation, Derrida tells Ogier: 219 Alors ça c’était une voix fantomatique. C’est quelqu’un que je ne connais pas, qui aurait pu me raconter n’importe quelle histoire, qui venait des Etats-Unis, bon, se présentant de la part d’un ami etc etc. Bon, ce que Kafta dit de la correspondance, des lettres, enfin, de la relation épistolaire, ça vaut aussi pour la relation téléphonique. Well, now that was a ghostly voice. It is someone whom I don’t know, who could have told me any story whatsoever, who’s come from the United States, introducing himself on behalf of a friend, etc. etc. Well, what Kafka says about correspondence, letters—that is, the epistolary relation—also applies to the telephonic relation. With these comments, Derrida implicitly returns to the trope of belief. Someone unknown has called and has “localized” himself through identifiable names and markers—a friend of a friend from the United States, “etc. etc.”—and the one who answered the phone appears to have taken his caller at his word; in short, Derrida believes the American caller. As he will go on to explain throughout his oeuvre, and especially in his works on testimony and the relationship between religion and science, the fundamental, immediate, and implicit belief that he has extended to the caller captures the essential reliability or faith one must extend to another prior to any sort of relation, contract, or address between parties. “I cannot address the other,” Derrida says in Islam and the West, “whoever he or she might be, regardless of his or her religion, language, culture, without asking the other to believe me and to trust me. One’s relationship to the other, addressing the other, presupposes faith…when someone is speaking to us, he or she is asking to be believed.” 343 No transaction (actual or symbolic), Derrida argues, is possible without this anterior belief, this elementary credit extended to another speaking subject through the supposed property of one’s voice. 343 Mustapha Chérif, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 57-58. 220 If this form of belief undergirds and precedes every action or address, if one extends belief automatically to the other before anything else can take place, then cinema’s ghost belief, the belief that cinema requires and invents, can be seen to originate through a type of a priori suspension of this fundamental belief. Cinema’s mode and system of belief would begin, as I explored above, with primary doubt and suspicion, an anterior mistrust due to the uncertain localizability and general malleability of the image. Ghost belief would begin to function in spite of this suspicion and mistrust; one would loosen (without annihilating or completely losing) her or his doubts and suspend disbelief after initially not completely believing. Unlike the way one believes in another speaking human prior to any form of address or transaction (even without explicitly asking for it, like the American caller), one believes in cinema in the absence of this prior belief— ghost belief comes about without an originary belief. Derrida’s logic suggests that a filmgoer will always encounter the cinema with some doubt, even if he of she is watching a documentary. Cinema ends up disclosing the very automaticity of the belief process by reversing it through suspension or its initial question about belief in ghosts; it asks its viewers to believe after and with the maintenance of their fundamental doubt. As Derrida tells the editors of Cahiers du cinéma, this type of investment in cinema, the believing without belief of ghost belief, causes “a fundamental disconnection” among the spectators in a movie theatre, wherein he says, “each viewer is alone” despite the “collectivity” and “communal spectacle” associated with traditional cinema spectatorship. 344 In addition to receiving projected images from the screen, each viewer, Derrida observes, projects his or her own proper ghosts into a film through the processes of transference and identification, which “combine into a collective 344 De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 29. 221 representation,” or a kind of re-presentation/reverberation of ghosts from each spectator back into the film; the film projects and receives projections from its viewers. 345 The collective coherence of the movie audience is thus “neutralized,” according to Derrida; it is a collective without collectivity, a community without commonality, because each spectator is re-presenting his or her own ghosts back on the screen. Derrida underscores that the spectator’s solitary state and mode of projection is not an “individuality” but a mode of “singularity” made possible by one’s proper ghosts. His resistance to the former term stems from the assumptions that accompany thinking the proper and property affiliated with individuals—“too solitary,” he says, which is to say not properly ghostly relative to cinema’s fantômachie. 346 With the words “too solitary,” Derrida summons his discussion in Ghost Dance of the impossibility of a wholly proper role, a role without a trace of impropriety, and/or a ghost-free self-enclosed subject alone before the law. Contrasting with individuality, “‘[s]ingularity,’” he remarks, “displaces, undoes the social bond and replays it otherwise. It is for this reason that there exists in a movie theatre a neutralization of the psychoanalytic sort: I am alone with myself, but delivered over to the play of all kinds of transference.” 347 Alone and together, the singularity of the film spectator is made possible by the proper ghosts of each—the ghosts that one carries, that arrive only to her, and that are, in turn, projected into a film as the film is projected. The theatre itself is another scene of fantômachie, another spectral graph of cinema. According to Derrida, cinema undoes the supposed self-enclosed autonomy of a spectator and therefore the inclusive exclusivity necessitated by the terms “individuality” and 345 Ibid. 346 Ibid. 347 Ibid. 222 “community.” This logic suggests that one finds one’s self lost at the movies; each spectator is a spectral node, analyst and analysand, projector and screen. Derrida’s conceptualization of the film spectator obviously differs from the chained, passive, and readily “identifying” viewers imagined by many apparatus theorists. What takes or has its place at a movie theatre, in Derrida’s description, can be seen as a type of collective “loss without losing” of the self through cinema’s ghost belief—a suspension, loosening, or flickering (like cinema, like Derrida’s film theory) of individuality through singularity. This experience or encounter produces a “psychoanalytic neutralization” Derrida adds; it is thus neither the complete unmooring or erasure of one’s selfhood, nor the comprehensive investment or identification in one thing, character, or viewpoint. Of course, the practice of a “psychoanalytic neutralization” speaks to the detachment and objectivity that the analyst is instructed to exercise with the analysand, despite the transference and projection of the latter. By drawing on “psychoanalytic neutralization” to describe cinema spectatorship, Derrida does not seem to be suggesting the explicit neutralization proposed by Freud the scientist (absolute impartiality vis-à-vis scientific objectivity and unbiased observation). Instead, he appears to offer the affect of an ambivalent suspension as it moves between multiple and incomplete investments. This suspension and neutralization can be seen as that which arises when one confronts cinema’s ghosts and their question that obliges the response “I don’t know.” Derrida’s follows this implicit discussion of belief in Ghost Dance with a gloss on the contemporary technological milieu wherein ghosts are believed to belong to a “bygone era”: 223 Et je crois qu’aujourd’hui tous les développements de la technologie des télécommunications, au lieu de restreindre l’espace des fantômes, comme on pourrait le penser, on pourrait penser que la science, aujourd’hui la technique, bon, laisse derrière eux l’époque des fantômes qui était l’époque des manoirs, d’une certaine technologie de fruste, enfin d’une certaine époque périmée. Alors que je crois qu’au contraire, que l’avenir est aux fantômes et que la technologie moderne de l’image, de la cinématographie, de la télécommunication est, décuple le pouvoir des fantômes et le retour des fantômes. And I believe that all of the developments of telecommunications technology today, instead of restricting the space of ghosts, as one might think —one might think that science, today technology, leave behind the era of ghosts, which was an era of manor houses, of a certain primitive technology, in the end a certain bygone era… Whereas I believe that on the contrary the future belongs to ghosts and that the modern technology of the image, of cinematography, of telecommunication, multiplies tenfold the power of ghosts and the return of ghosts. One may believe that contemporary science and all the apparent progress that comes with the techno-scientific “leave[s] behind the era of ghosts,” says Derrida, but, as he asserts, “modern technology,” especially imaging and telecommunication technology, excites ghosts and summons their return by opening space for them. We are bombarded everyday with telephone calls, written texts, emails, moving and still images, etc., containing voices, sounds, words, and pictures that come from elsewhere; we are thus constantly, in Derrida’s view, dealing with the arrival and dispersal of ghosts in a manner that unfastens not only their spatial restriction, appropriation, and territorialization, but “ours” as well. And if the future “belongs” to the rapid acceleration of the techno-scientific, then it will also necessarily belong to ghostly arrivals and haunted spaces. Through its attempt to leave behind the era of ghosts, science, Derrida claims, has enhanced their power. 348 348 In Echographies of Television, Derrida addresses the dislocation, deterritorialization, and potential “democratization” that are often affiliated with media technologies. One can think here, for example, of images of Western culture penetrating the supposedly closed borders of a totalitarian state through television or the Internet. “[A]nchoredness, rootedness, the at-home [le chez-soi] are radically contested. Dislodged,” he tells Stiegler of this process (79). While Derrida quickly follows these remarks with the observation that there is nothing absolutely new about the other tormenting, dislocating, and constituting the “at-home”—and one can draw a direct parallel from these comments to his discussion of his proper role 224 Derrida’s remark about the future belonging to ghosts through the sundry techno- scientific modes of inscription builds off his previous reference to Kafka (“Well, what Kafka says about correspondence, letters—that is, the epistolary relation…”) as it “applies to” the ghosts of “telephonic relation.” His allusion to Kafka at this point in the improvisation hinges on the latter’s comments on ghosts, letter writing, and the postal system, which were often expressed in the form of a letter. One of which, addressed to Milena Jesenská, I cite here at length: The easy possibility of writing letters—from a purely theoretical point of view— must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one's own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness. How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter! One can think about someone far away and one can hold onto someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power. Writing letters, on the other hand, means exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting precisely for that. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way. It is this ample nourishment which enables them to multiply so enormously. People sense this and struggle against it; in order to eliminate as much of the ghosts' power as possible and to attain a natural intercourse, a tranquility of soul, they have invented trains, cars, aeroplanes—but nothing helps anymore: These are evidently inventions devised at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal system, the ghosts invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. They will not starve, but we will perish. 349 in Ghost Dance—he says that what makes the this process remarkable (“radical” is the word he uses) today is the rhythm and speed at which these events take place (ibid.). At the same time, Derrida points out that this “threat of expropriation…is the same movement” that leads to “what is currently called a ‘return of nationalisms,’ a ‘reappearance of fundamentalisms,’ twitchings around the phantasms of soil and blood, racisms, xenophobias, ethnic wars or ethnic cleansings” (ibid.). Taken this way, the future that belongs to ghosts can be seen as a future in which the “objective” aims of science align with the theocratic, nationalistic, and other “phantasms of soil and blood” in their efforts to exorcise ghosts. The ghosts engendered by the techno-scientific feed off and comprise the ghosts of fundamentalisms. See also Michael Naas’ elaborate discussion of religion and media in Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 349 Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, translated by Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), 223. 225 The affinities between Derrida’s depiction of ghosts, media, and the postal—of their arrival and excitement through media—and Kafka’s description of dealing with ghosts in letter writing, of the development of modern transportation as a way to avoid the ghostly, and the future sustenance of ghosts through the technological, are obvious and probably too numerous to cite in a single chapter. An almost uncanny relation between the two, particularly as it pertains to what Derrida says in Ghost Dance about his “proper role,” is found through Kafka’s statement that an author encounters her or his own ghosts while writing (in addition to writing to a ghostly addressee), which thus generates his or her own plurality and the plurality of voices that appear under one name over and through a series of letters. A clear dissimilarity between the two could be found, at least in this short excerpt, through Kafka’s privileging of the immediacy of thought and touch and the melancholy he expresses of their loss through the technological and/or postal. For Kafka, at least as he puts it in the citation above, writing letters will never entail or relay the proximity involved with thinking of someone who is far away or touching that person if near; “everything else,” which is to say everything that is not touch or thought, is “beyond human power,” he says. One loses control, according to Kafka, the moment one, who is beyond the physical reach of the addressee, writes or externalizes a thought. One is thus obliged to give oneself over to the inhuman, the ghostly, and the technological in the form of a letter. This is all to say that, despite his similarity to Derrida and the thinking of the ghost, Kafka, in a certain way, repeats the logocentric version of writing that Derrida seeks to deconstruct; the former believes in a type of immediacy (i.e. ghost- free) of touch and thought that Derrida would say is always already engaged with the selection, censoring, and technē of writing. 226 “…The future belongs to ghosts,” Derrida had said. This phrase premonition not only remarks the conjuring of ghosts through the mediascape, but also rebuks the assumed simplicity and periodization of ghosts through the denigration of the belief once extended to them. In other words, science typically considers ghosts to belong to a time without modern technological developments, measurements, and knowledge, and thus a product of an ignorant and credulous culture. While it is certainly true that belief in a certain type of ghosts was more acceptable and widespread during the “era of manor houses,” or feudal (or medieval) Europe, Derrida is, with these comments, relaying the haughtiness of the “reason” and “knowledge” associated with the Enlightenment and the Western conviction in the science, positivism, and empiricism that deems ghosts to be relics from a primitive past. Derrida will further develop this theme in his works that explicitly address the connections between religion and scientific knowledge, in which he develops the performative “core belief” that must be invested in scientificity at-large prior to the periodization and denigration of all things “supernatural,” including religion. Science is no exception to the necessity of belief Derrida observes; belief must be given to scientific claims in the absence of first-person experience and/or proof: The development of the science or of the techno-scientific community itself supposes a layer of credit, of faith, of credibility—which is not to be confused with Good News or a determinate religious revelation, but simply reintroduces the necessity of faith in its most rudimentary condition. To take techno-science into consideration, in a word, means to be attentive to the incontrovertible fact that there is no science without technical apparatus, no separation possible between science and technology, which is to say, without a profound and essential “performativity” of knowledge. This only confirms that an element of the fiduciary remains essential to all shareable knowledge, which is to say, to all knowledge as such. Even in the most theoretical act of any scientific community (there is no science without scientific community), every organization of the social bond appeals to an act of faith, beyond or this side of every species of proof. 350 350 Derrida, “Above All No Journalists!” 63. 227 Although Derrida’s points and language are unmistakable in this quotation as they concern the fundamental “layer of credit, of faith, of credibility” that presupposes the development of the scientific community and any and all knowledge-sharing, there are two topics in this same quote, two “watch words” one might say, that warrant further attention given the context of ghost belief in cinema. The first of these is Derrida’s separation between the content of the techno-scientific community, on one hand, and of religion, on the other. It is important to note this difference and the fact that Derrida is not evoking a parallel between the specific phenomena presented by science and that which is proper to religion, like the Gospel or other “determinate” revelations. “Determinate” would here refer to those revelations, for instance the ascension, which religions believe to be factual and final, even though they cannot be proven. We should make no mistake, Derrida seems to say here, that religion and science present different content to be “relatively” localized and subsequently believed. What therefore fuses religion and science is not the content of their claims— Derrida is not proposing an equivalence between a molecular compound and the immaculate conception—but the presentation, sharing, and performative act of claiming to possess the truth, which necessitates the prior, tacit appeal to be believed (i.e. “You need to believe me because I’m telling you the truth”). This leads to the second, interconnected point: science may pass itself off as given, objective, purely constative, and separate from the belief required by something ostensibly faith-based, such as religion, but, as Derrida contends, it still must perform its knowledge vis-à-vis technology (or through supplements), whether these demonstrations are the actions or 228 products of some new device or the mathematical figuration of quantum mechanics. Science must appeal to an audience and attempt to prove something without proof—that is, it must rely on evidence and testimony because its findings are not universally given or perceptible for each person. Science must make general claims about phenomena in the absence of general consensus through first-person experience. The most secular scientific and historical claims must therefore appeal to belief and perform its findings for an audience before it is legitimized and authenticated by this community as knowledge. This originary belief is what links religion and science or knowledge according to Derrida; it is what leads him to say that “[e]verything that exceeds the order of originary perception or of proof presents itself as miraculous…the ‘believe me’ is permanently inhabited by the miracle.” 351 Derrida uses the word “miracle” in this context to signal what Michael Naas calls, “the extraordinary relationship to an absolute other, not some miraculous event within the world but the miracle by which a world first opens up.” 352 Without direct access to the other’s consciousness and its/her/his former placement as the witness to some event or phenomena—whether it is the appearance of a messiah, the instability of a particular electron field, or a banal story about waiting in line at a grocery store—one must believe the other “as one believes in a miracle” if one is to accept that something exists outside her or his own “proper” experience or perception. There is, Derrida suggests, “continuity…in this homogeneity between the ordinary miracle of the ‘believe me’ and the extraordinary miracles revealed by all the Holy Scriptures” because both “ordinary” and “extraordinary” miracles present one with an alterity that cannot be 351 Ibid., 76. 352 Naas, Miracle and Machine, 98. 229 fully appropriated in advance. 353 If one witnesses an “extraordinary” miracle, then one is presented with someone or something otherworldly, someone or something arrives that could not be expected or conceived of in advance of its miraculous appearance. Derrida’s point is that one’s belief in this type of miracle, in the possibility of someone or something extraordinary arriving, mirrors the belief that is extended to an “ordinary” miracle. In both cases, one believes in someone or something in the absence of prior experience, which includes immediate access to the other’s position. “A world opens up,” says Naas of the miracle; this “world” could be one of scientific discovery, religious revelation, or constituted by the most ordinary (and boring) story. Derrida’s discussion of the miracle of belief, his characterization of belief as “the ether of the address and relation to the utterly other,” and his point that belief exists at the core of science, prior to the scientificity of science, seems to “spiritualize” the scientific—or better, muddle science with its supposed opposed term—insofar as science can no longer claim pure objectivity and calculation. 354 Science cannot, as Derrida conceptualizes it, outwardly depend on the rudimentary faith that also founds religion; and so, science, like religion, cannot completely indemnify itself and its believers from its ghosts. In this way, Derrida’s claim in Ghost Dance that “the future belongs to ghosts” not only speaks to the ghosts produced and brought back by “the modern technology of the image,” but also to the ghosts that haunt science and make it possible, its own proper ghost perhaps—the miracle of belief. The rise of the techno-scientific causes the 353 Derrida, “Above All No Journalists!” 77. 354 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” translated by Samuel Weber, Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 64. 230 intensification of the very thing that it wishes to exorcise, historicize, contextualize, restrict, and position itself against. Science or knowledge generates its own ghosts. 355 The ghost of faith, trust, and belief is also, as Derrida explains to Stiegler, “summoned by technics itself, by our relation of essential incompetence to the technical operation.” 356 Even if we understand how a particular machine works, such as a film projector, for example, Derrida says, “our knowledge is incommensurable with the immediate perception that attunes us to technical efficacy, to the fact that ‘it works.’” 357 In other words, knowing and seeing, processing and experiencing, cannot occur simultaneously. To see, in this sense, is to be blinded by faith in the machine as it works; to see and claim “it works” requires a certain blindness to its “inner workings” during the performance of its working. Absolute knowledge, Derrida’s logic suggests, is a phantasm necessitating the eternal dissection of the machine, piece-by-piece, element by element. As a sort of sovereign all-seeing eye, knowledge in this sense would therefore demand the machine’s arrest, infinite disassembly, and non-functioning. For Derrida, our inability to ever truly see how something such as cinema “works” as “it works,” in both its machinic (techno-scientific devices related to capture and screening, etc.) and fictional (script, acting, set dressing, composition, etc.) capacities, is what generates its proper 355 Following Derrida’s discussion of the “sources” of religion in “Faith and Knowledge,” one could conclude that the drive of science to indemnify itself constitutes another shared characteristic with religion. Science, like religion, attempts to rid or purify itself of the contaminations proper to it: ghosts and belief. While Derrida’s argument in “Faith and Knowledge” holds that religion must court and harness the techno- scientific in its very attempt to exorcise it, science, in a similar gesture, continually positions itself against and condemns the phantomatic through its objective results and calculations; science therefore not only opposes ghosts, but also incorporates them into its inquiries and models as that which it negates. Ghosts are put to use in science in order to extinguish them in the name of science. There would be, according to this logic, an autoimmunity in and of science vis-à-vis its relation with ghosts that resembles the autoimmunity of religion as it pertains to the techno-scientific. See Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” and Naas, Miracle and Machine. 356 Derrida, Echographies of Television, 117 (translation modified). 357 Ibid. 231 miracle in the form of ghost belief. 358 Cinema gives spectators “something to see, as admirable as it is incredible [incroyable], believable [croyable] only by the grace of an act of faith.” 359 We believe cinema to be working because, if it indeed works, we cannot see it working as it works. Cinema happens and our suspension of disbelief requires the belief that it works; in order “to work,” cinema demands a certain non-knowledge of its working. Derrida finishes his improvisation in Ghost Dance with the following: C’est au fond pour tenter les fantômes, que j’ai accepté de figurer dans un film en me disant que peut-être on aurait les uns et les autres la chance de laisser venir à nous les fantômes, les fantômes de Marx, les fantômes de Freud, les fantômes de Kafka, les fantômes de cet américain…vous ! En revanche je vous connais depuis ce matin mais déjà vous êtes traversée pour moi par toutes sortes de figures fantômatiques. Donc je ne sais pas si je crois ou si je ne crois pas aux fantômes mais je dis: “vive, vive les fantômes!” Et vous, est-ce que vous y croyez, aux fantômes? At bottom, I agreed to appear in a film in order to tempt the ghosts, telling myself that perhaps we—both us and them—might have the chance to allow ghosts to come to us. The ghosts of Marx, the ghosts of Freud, the ghosts of Kafka, the ghosts of that American…you! I’ve known you only since this morning, but already for me you are traversed by all sorts of ghostly figures. So, I don’t know if I believe or if I don’t believe in ghosts, but I say “long live ghosts!” And you, do you believe in ghosts? Like the beginning of his impromptu remarks in the film, Derrida here deploys an overt autobiographical mode of address as he states that his appearance in Ghost Dance was based on his desire to “tempt the ghosts” or to entice their arrival. Although this autobiographical remark appears to reassert the improvisational conditions of the scene as exterior to or in excess of the plot and all of the fashioning that comes with it, Derrida 358 Of course, this also implies that these capacities—“machinic” and “fictional” or “performative”—are not simply opposable. Derrida’s recurrently addresses this theme throughout the essays included in Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 359 Derrida, Echographies of Television, 117. 232 muddles this distinguishability when he address Ogier as “vous,” which designates singular and plural forms of the second person pronoun. At bottom, we cannot know which “you” he is referring to here. Is this “you” Pascale Ogier herself, the well-known French actress, or “Pascale,” her character in McMullen’s film? Who or what is this figure, this “you…traversed by all sorts of ghostly figures?” Derrida seems to be addressing a ghost with vous—an addressee that is more than one. We know from his testimony in Echographies of Television that he had supposedly, in fact, first met Ogier that morning at the shoot for the Le Select scene; we know, too, that her character in the film is haunted by her thinking of ghosts; finally we know, again from Derrida’s confessions to Steigler, that McMullen had, allegedly, only given him one scripted line (“Do you believe in ghosts?”), and that his first address of Ogier as “you” immediately precedes the line’s enunciation. In the end, which “you” do we hear and believe? Can we ever know the limits of Derrida’s improvisation and role? This undecidable mode of address also informs Derrida’s next two statements. First, and as I explained above, declaring “yes” or “no” to a question about one’s belief in ghosts can be read as an attempt to restrain them through the presuppositions of the localization of the “in” and the autonomy of the “I.” In addition to what he later says about the modality of the “I don’t know,” it is for this reason, I believe, that Derrida not only tells Ogier, “So, I don’t know if I believe or if I don’t believe in ghosts,” but also never proclaims throughout his oeuvre, as far as I can tell, that he “believes in ghosts.” Affirmative deconstruction, as Derrida performs it, can be encapsulated by his subsequent avowal to Ogier (her or her character?) of ghosts in the place of a categorical and knowledge-based “yes” or “no.” In other words, Derrida’s “long live ghosts” (vive 233 les fantômes) performatively affirm ghosts while resisting both explicit and/or unwitting attempts to exorcise them through the positing (and thus, positioning) of a definitive answer. It was “the chance” of performing this non-exorcism and/or tempting of ghosts on film that led Derrida, as he tells it, to agree to McMullen’s request that he appear in Ghost Dance. Derrida then reposes the scene’s initial question to Ogier: “And you? Do you believe in ghosts?” As soon Derrida speaks these words, and while he is still squarely framed in close-up, we hear Ogier say, as she faces him, “Yes, certainly,” (Oui, certainement). We thus hear Ogier say these words but we don’t see her doing so—the formal techniques of continuity editing and cinema’s form of belief promote this implicit assumption. In short, we believe without seeing. Of course, this unseen line, which ostensibly matches the pre-established tenor of Ogier’s voice, may have been added during post-production; there exists the possibility that she may not have uttered them at that moment, with her back turned to the camera, and that their addition occurred after the fact (or shoot). Upon feasibly hearing Ogier’s affirmative response, Derrida quickly looks away from her, and glances once again towards McMullen or some crew member(s) who are positioned to his left or screen-right (figure 6a). As he glances in this direction, Derrida silently expresses completion (after all, he’s finished the improvisation and delivered the line, as instructed) with a hint of apprehension about what comes next. He seems to await further instruction or some other sort of feedback, and this reveals a certain naiveté that links to the fact that Derrida is a nonprofessional actor (figure 6b). McMullen’s choice to include Derrida’s eye-line break and reaction at the end of the improvisation thus offers another subtle formal marker of the scene’s produced 234 “naturality.” In sum, by displaying Derrida’s “break” with the scene, McMullen further positions the preceding improvisation against the formal conventions associated with traditional fictional cinema; this “positioning” is therefore made to impact the viewer’s belief. At once, then, this verifies the scene’s improvisational conditions and exposes the very production of these conditions. Figure 6a and 6b. Improvisation delivered, now what? Derrida has looked away from Ogier, while temporarily fixing his gaze on what seems to be some unseen person or persons, or some off-screen phantom. But in a flash, his eyes quickly unfix from this unknown target(s) and dart back to Ogier, or more precisely, back to the eye-line match that he says they had practiced for hours. 360 A cornerstone of continuity editing, the eye-line match gives the effect of direct and “natural” address between filmed parties. However, in practice, and as Derrida tells Stiegler, eye-line matching is highly unnatural due to the locked-in staring that it can require (“an experience of strange and unreal intensity”), which is foreign to the commonplace operations of looking at another during conversation, as well as the fact that certain compositions and camera angels demand that actors look away from their interlocutor(s) in order to give the appearance of looking at them. In other words, beyond 360 See Derrida, Echographies of Television, 119. 235 locking eyes for uncomfortable periods of time, actors often need to feign looking at their onscreen counterparts and to stare off as if gazing into the eyes of a ghost. 361 Ignoring the audience in the room during production (the director, camera operator, soundman, etc.) compounds the eye-line’s “unreal intensity.” When Derrida breaks his line of sight with Ogier (as he does a number of times during the improvisation, especially towards its conclusion) and then quickly looks back to her, it is as if he jumps in and out of cinema, from the diegesis to the world outside or around the scene, from an active participant in, to what would be, in another context, a saboteur of cinema’s belief built around continuity editing (figures 6b & 7). McMullen’s decision to leave this portion of the scene intact shows that Derrida’s acting foibles are fodder for establishing the particular belief of this scene and the critique or deconstruction of this belief. And yet, despite this supposed “insight” into the formal operations of the scene, Derrida would likely contend that we remain, at least partially, “in the dark.” Our non-knowledge is not simply due to our disbelief in or looking past the scene’s fashioning (under further analysis, we can accept that the scene is set-up to appear completely improvisational), but our inability to see and to know at once. Cinema exposes an inability to remain doggedly critical while watching something working as it works, and so we, as spectators, are always partly passive in our critical activities; no matter how illuminated, we are still sitting in the dark, blind to our belief. 361 Derrida, Echographies of Television, 119. 236 Figure 6b (again) and 7. On the way to reestablishing the eye-line, briefly breaking the “third wall.” Derrida’s swift return to the eye-line match with Ogier suggests that his glance away from her was met almost immediately by a command (from McMullen or other crew member; perhaps Derrida recalled his intense training with Ogier, etc.) that he look back. No matter how improvisational the scene may appear, the (re)direction of Derrida’s eyes towards Ogier provides a critical casual link, which reinforces the scene’s carefully planned production and adherence to the conventions of narrative filmmaking. In short, Derrida’s eye-line match allows the scene to cut to Ogier without a significant loss of continuity. Given Derrida’s question to her “And you, do you believe in ghosts?,” a reaction shot of her in close-up is not only logical, it’s expected. Retaining Derrida’s break and return to the eye-line thus allows McMullen to tread between improvisational and conventional filmmaking modalities while progressing the plot. After the cut from the close-up of Derrida to the familiar close-up of Ogier, she proceeds to affirm this question with two two-word phrases—“Yes, absolutely. Now, absolutely.” (Oui, absolument. Maintenant, absolutement.)—which add to her initial heard, but unseen, confirmation. In a style that sharply contrasts with what has preceded thus far in the scene, McMullen does not present Ogier’s double affirmation in one take. Instead, he breaks Ogier’s two affirmations in two by filming the two lines at different 237 focal lengths and combining them with a dissolve in post-production. Taken together, the dissolve, the two different statements, and the altered composition provides an intertwined effect and affect—an effect that causes a certain affect, but also an effect that seems to be in response to, or a condition of, the affect of ghosts as Derrida articulates it in his improvisation (figures 8a, 8b, & 8c). And so here, at the end of Ghost Dance, when Derrida sends the question about belief in ghosts back to Ogier, when he is no longer the framed subject in the film, a strange doubling effect or an uncanny echo of the double occurs: Ogier’s two affirmations—which are composed by two-word phrases and are cut, shot, and presented in two—generate an interconnected effect and affect, a sort of doubling without clear origin. Figures 8a, 8b, & 8c. Marked continuity break: a dissolve between two takes, the same is double(d). This double is composed firstly by the marked formal break between Ogier’s lines, which announce to the viewer that this portion of the scene was, perhaps in contrast to Derrida’s improvisation, rehearsed, repeated, captured in different takes, and noticeably edited. All of this relays an unmistakable cinematic effect, a special effect particular to cinema. Secondly, Ogier’s different repetitions provide a type of plural ghostly affect, as if the one phrase and utterance dissolves into something similar but not exactly identical: “you” but not “you,” a “now” that is repeated—as if McMullen 238 formally expresses the undecidabilty of Derrida’s address to Ogier, and thus, the logic of the ghost vis-à-vis cinema’s mode and system of belief. There is, at the end of Ghost Dance, an eruption of doubles, an exposure of pluralities that have been more or less effaced so far in the scene: from the second articulation of the initial question (no doubt, echoed from the script from Ogier to Derrida and back from him to her), to a cluster of two’s—phrases, words, shots, cuts, focal lengths, glances, “nows,” and voices, shoot through on and off-screen, the two spaces in and of cinema. The dissolve, one of the oldest and most quotidian “special effects,” replicates Ogier’s affirmation, as if McMullen, following Derrida, also affirms that ghosts must be avowed through plural articulations and in a plurality of voices. This plurality displaces the in from any one location and the “now” from an one instant. Derrida’s “you” is neither you nor me; it is you without you. Ghost belief entails an “in” under erasure, a locality and a “now” overrun by the logic of spectrality and the destinerrance and disunity proper to ghosts. 239 CHAPTER 4 Deconstructive Applications: “Crazy Clown Time” and David Lynch’s Parties Apply, v. ap- + -plicāre (to fold). Classical Latin applicāre to bring into contact, to place near to, to lead, drive, bring, to bring (a ship to a destination), to land, to add in speech or writing, to bring to bear, to assign, set, to devote oneself (to), to accommodate, adapt, in post-classical Latin also to put to a special use or purpose. Application, n. applicāt- + -iō, past participial stem of applicāre. Classical Latin applicātiōn-, applicātiō action of attaching or joining, in post- classical Latin also action of a celestial object in approaching another (4th cent.), action of putting into practice (from 12th cent. in British sources), administration of a medical treatment (1363 in Chauliac). —Oxford English Dictionary If the previous chapters examined respectively the timeliness of Derrida’s thought for contemporary film and media studies, the overlooked ghosts of cinema within his corpus, and the contours of his unwritten project on cinema and belief, one would likely assume that the “logical” next step in this trajectory would be an analysis of film through a kind of deconstructive lens—“a putting into practice” or demonstration so to speak, an application. Such a step, however logical or expected, would also therefore require a certain departure from the preceding chapters because it would necessitate moving from one corpus to another, from a particular set of proper names, texts, and concepts to different and even unexpected ones. Among other things, it would require the inscription of divergent and previously unmentioned names; it would appear that new objects would now be under analysis. 240 The following “logical departure” will entail a movement from Derrida’s works to those of the American filmmaker, David Lynch. Although the motivations enacting this specific leap are manifold, subjective, and perhaps unknowable and secret (Derrida never wrote about Lynch; Lynch has never publicly discussed Derrida), this chapter, at its core, attempts to stir the deconstructive gestures already at work in Lynch’s film and media texts and their discourses; in doing so, the following also attempts to demonstrate deconstruction “at work” within film and media studies—an arena, as I have argued, that has largely, albeit passively, assumed its investments and concerns to be unrelated to Derrida’s works specifically and deconstructive thought more generally. In an effort to remain consistent with the tone already taken throughout the preceding chapters, the following will begin by exploring what is at stake when deconstruction encounters its applications and what these encounters force one to ask about the process of being applied or “put into practice.” By suggesting that deconstruction is not only already at work in Lynch’s films and media but that his works are also deconstructive, I will seek to address the general applicability—as well as the consequences of disregarding the questions generated by the subject “applicability”—of Derrida’s works for the field. The risk involved with this activity should be stated clearly here, at the outset: I do not wish to simply “use” Lynch’s work to explicate Derrida’s concepts, nor do I want to “apply” deconstructive strategies in an effort to explain Lynch’s films. While admirable in a certain respect, this sort of enterprise (one to one application; using a theory to decode a film, etc.) occurs (too) often in film and media studies, and does so, I believe, at a detriment to both “theory” and “practice,” a dichotomy that, after Derrida (and perhaps Lynch), this chapter holds to be a false one. 362 Whether scholarship of this kind makes 362 As explored in the first chapter, deconstruction has affinities with a certain spirit of critique that 241 use of films in order to rearticulate philosophical works, or applies certain concepts to films in an effort to render their meaning more legible, the cumulative result tends to be the reinforcement of the theoretical text (called here the “applicant”) at the expense of the film work—as if a particular film simply distilled and replicated theory or a set of concepts and therefore served the fortunate purpose of “putting it into practice” for all to see, clear as day. The challenges that deconstruction and Derrida’s works bring to practices of “application” and conceptions of “use-value” have long been a topic of debate. 363 What continues to stir this debate, what makes it at once abiding and aporetic (abiding precisely because it is aporetic), is something Derrida summarizes in an interview conducted at a 1995 conference called “Applied Derrida,” which was transcribed and included in a book published a year later with the name Applying: to Derrida. Deconstruction, on one hand, Derrida says “cannot be applied because [it] is not a doctrine; it’s not a method, nor a set of rules or tools; it cannot be separated from performatives, from signatures, from a given language.” 364 These comments touch on a point that I have continually returned to in this dissertation, especially as they concern what I claim to be deconstruction’s essential cinematic features: this resistance to indoctrination and methodology comes from occurred in film and media studies during in the 1990’s that sought to counter the “Grand Theory” trend of cinema studies. Although Derrida’s name was often erroneously included within these critiques, that is, his work was often assumed to be “Grand Theory” at its worst (French, opaque, performative), it’s clear that the (grand) inquisitors of film theory spent little time actually reading him. See: Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, W.I.: University of Wisconson Press, 1996). 363 The most pointed and public example of this debate relates to Derrida’s politics, as disucssed in second chapter. See: Jacques Derrida, in Positions, translated by Alan Bass, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). 364 John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wolfreys , “As if I were Dead: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Applying: to Derrida, edited by John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wolfreys (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 217. 242 deconstruction’s uncanny spatiotemporality; the destinerrance that it performs, seeks, and responds to does not prescribe a methodus, path, or way. Deconstruction is not an “it.” Lacking stasis and an adherence to metaphysical conceptions of positionality, political or otherwise, deconstruction cannot be fashioned into “a set of rules or tools”; it has and generates no program to be replicated. To “do” deconstruction as Derrida conceives of it, one must “perform something new,” he says in the same interview, “in your own language, in your own singular situation, with your own signature, to invent the impossible and to break with the application, in the technical, neutral sense of the word.” 365 “Doing” deconstruction, “deconstruct-ing,” if there is such a thing, begins where one is, which is to say within a given locality or institution and with an idiom unlike any other, just like every other. The call “to invent the impossible” cannot be prepackaged into a prescribed knowledge or calculated response, and thus deconstruction “break[s] with…application,” if the term “application” is deployed in its common and contemporary usage.m 366 On the other hand, the mobility and invention (terms that will be discussed later in this chapter in relation to Lynch’s works) characterizing deconstruction also signal that it is “nothing by itself,” Derrida notes; thus, “the only thing it can do is apply, to be applied, 365 Ibid., 217-218. 366 As Peggy Kamuf notes in her contribution to Applying: to Derrida, deconstruction’s call to invent and do the impossible “activates one of the paradoxical implications of the structure of responsibility… A consistent trait of this structure is that responsibility cannot be engaged programmatically, wherever it is simply a matter of unfolding in an application already decided with known consequences” (197). Although “received opinion” holds that acting responsibly entails that one exercise a particular knowledge, Kamuf elaborates Derrida’s conceptions of decision and responsibility in order to show “that applied knowledge does not decide anything and begins to be irresponsible” (ibid., my emphasis). Responsibility demands that one confront the undecidable with a decision that is incalculable or without some prescribed knowledge; it calls for the impossible, the invention the other. See: Peggy Kamuf, “Derrida on Television,” in Applying: to Derrida, 195-211. 243 to something else, not only in more than one language, but also with something else.” 367 Because deconstruction has no proper object, because it solidifies into no-thing and cannot be institutionalized, it can “only refer to, apply to,” he says, “[i]t can only apply.” 368 The non-applicability of deconstruction, its “non-being” in the sense of the impossibility of its “it,” comes from its applications everywhere—that is, an inherent dispersal, embededness, or what Peggy Kamuf has called its “inhabitation” within what it deconstructs. 369 Application in this sense counteracts applying “in the technical, neutral sense of the word,” wherein the applicant must be not only be an identifiable and localizable “it,” but also, a priori, be wholly exterior to the body, text, or given thing to which it is added or applied. Here the applicant takes the form of an intruder, a foreign invader, whose incursion inversely reaffirms the limits of the proper and the thresholds of the inside and outside. Against this model of application, and all of the metaphysical suppositions that are attached to it, deconstruction’s fundamental referentiality, its “inhabitation” as always already applied, takes or has its place within the body, text, or thing at the moment the body, text, or thing is presumed to be self-identical and established as some who or what. The act of self-enclosure is an undoing, a phantasm. In short, the “non-neutral” application, reference, or contamination pursued by deconstruction does not occur after the fact of delineation; on the contrary, application is originary. Deconstruction sniffs out the outside, external, supplement, or applicant 367 Brannigan, Robbins, and Wolfreys, “As if I were Dead,” 218. 368 Ibid, my emphasis. 369 Peggy Kamuf “A Certain Way of Inhabiting,” in Reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology, edited by Sean Gaston and Ian Maclachlan (London: Continuum, 2011), 36. Kamuf continues: “If indeed everyone always inhabits—and who could deny that?—then the question is how one inhabits there where one finds onself and that in which one is already inscribed” (37). 244 already applied and operational, however virtually or actively, within the proper; it renders improper by enlivening a haunted impropriety, an application already applied. Derrida’s portrayal of this paradoxical figure of (non) application, of nothing but the applied and the impossibility of application simultaneously, summons the term’s Latin roots that consist of the “ap-” prefix (which derives from “ad-” and generally signals, according to OED, “to” or “toward”) and the verb “plicāre,” or “to fold.” As he states in the same interview about application, Derrida made extensive use of the noun French word pli (“fold’) and the verb plier (“to fold”) in his meditation on Mallarmé in “The Double Session,” and, according to him, it was partially through this term that he was led to a certain usage of “dissemination.” Following this recollection, which was originally delivered in English, Derrida says: Pli is a French word with which there is an enormous set of associated words. Of course, you can translate pli with “fold,” but you can’t follow the semantics of “fold” with explication; explication has nothing to do with unfolding; or complication: from the beginning I was interested in what I call the “originary complication,” or contamination, implication…So the Latin family of pli is untranslatable as a family, into English, for example. You can translate one word, pli, by fold; you can translate explication as explication; but you cannot keep the whole Latin family together. 370 Pli, in other words, and like so many words that invite Derrida’s analyses, performs what it says; it works by folding and unfolding, singularly. Like every word, pli is a particular fold within a language that, in referring to itself, immediately opens up and unfolds onto other words, networks, and families. 371 The singular folding and unfolding of pli unties 370 Brannigan, Robbins, and Wolfreys, “As if I were Dead,” 214. Following these comments, Derrida remarks that “apply” and “applicability” are today unthinkable outside of the “double hegemony…of Latin and Anglo-American” or what develops through the term “mondialatinisation.” (214-215). 371 Derrida’s longstanding attention to the fold has an affinity, point of contact, and is in virtual dialogue, at least in name, with Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 245 its “own” family (it is undone and dispersed like every family). The action/name pli implicates the general kinesis (or différance) of language and meaning and all of the other folds occurring therein. It is this general condition of dissemination through the particular, the fold as a name and process, a name that names the very process it undertakes, and thus the always already of the applied, that Derrida captures in some of his more enigmatic and untranslatable statements in “The Double Session,” such as: “[t]he fold renders (itself) manifold but (is) not (one)” [Le pli (se) multiplie mais (n’est) pas (un)]. 372 Reading one of Derrida’s most cited (and misunderstood) assertions another way, perhaps one can say that there is nothing outside of the applied and therefore, nothing simply applicable. 373 Conventional applicability, “the technical, neutral sense of the word,” presumes the absence of the pli and dissemination, and this presumption or disavowal renders application, at least in this “sense,” impossible because it has already occurred. In addition to evaluating deconstruction’s relation to method and application throughout his oeuvre, Derrida frequently scrutinizes texts that attempt to perform an application, especially those that seek to apply some conceptual framework to literature as validation of that framework’s proof. For Derrida, this process always occurs at the expense of the recipient literary text, which he often “defends” against the charges and 372 Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 229. 373 In his contribution to Applying: to Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington illustrates the untenable distinction between theory and practice—and thus the aim of conventional application—through Kant’s attempt to distinguish the transcendental from the empirical in the first Critque. The effect of this indistinguishability, Bennington explains, is a generalization of the “quasi-transcendental,” which is “not a middle ground, but a sort of necessity…[that]…affects all philosphical thinking of sufficient complexity” (18). The quasi- transcendental describes a type of movement “whereby apparently transcendentalising terms are constantly pulled back down into the finite facticity and contingency of the texts they are also used to read” (16). One could add that “the finite facticity and contingency” of texts, and perhaps what is often called “materiality” or the applied, also necessarily pushes out onto the transcendental. See: Geoffrey Bennington, “X,” in Applying: to Derrida, 1-20. 246 immobilizations of its supposed applicant. Although these readings are found throughout Derrida’s corpus, and are particularly numerous among his earliest publications (for example, his argument in “Force and Signification” that contests structuralism’s spatialization and reduction of literature’s differential force, as outlined in the second chapter), one of his most appropriate texts in this vein, given the stated concerns of this chapter, is undoubtedly “Le Facteur de la Vérité,” which was given the English title, “The Purveyor of Truth.” My insistence on the relevance (or applicability) of “Le Facteur de la Vérité” is drawn from the specific object of Derrida’s assessment there: psychoanalytic applications to literature in general through Jacques Lacan’s specific explanation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story from 1844 “The Purloined Letter.” Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s reading, which is foregrounded by a shorter meditation on Freud’s analysis of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (1837), not only provides an example of what I’ve called above Derrida’s “defense” of literature against rote theoretical application, but also lets one see that there are direct and irreparable consequences for strict, applied psychoanalytic (and/or Lacanian) film theory as a whole. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, “Le Facteur de la Vérité” has not figured within broader critiques of psychoanalytic film theory, nor have Lacanian and/or psychoanalytic discourses on film and media responded to it in a deliberate fashion. The combination of the intricate arguments of “Le Facteur de la Vérité” with this chapter’s investments in Lynch’s works (or “applied deconstruction”) will not allow for the adequate reconstitution of Derrida’s engagement with Freud and Lacan. To make a rather violent reduction, “Le Facteur de la Vérité” takes issue with psychoanalytic applications to literature because they seek to exemplify, prove, and replicate their 247 discursive programs, rather than take up the singularity of a given literary work. According to Derrida, this sort of application claims to reveal the “truth” (meaning the operation of certain psychoanalytic theories) in fiction by essentially locating itself there in the work. “From the outset,” Derrida says of Lacan’s construal of “The Purloined Letter”: we recognize the classical landscape of applied psychoanalysis. Here applied to literature. Poe’s text…finds itself invoked as an ‘example.’ An example destined to ‘illustrate,’ in a didactic procedure, a law and a truth forming the proper object of a seminar. Literary writing, here, is brought into an illustrative position…The text is in the service of truth, and of a truth that is taught, moreover. 374 With the word “truth,” Derrida is not presupposing some unstated or implied goal of Lacan’s reading; instead, he is deliberately taking Lacan at his word by citing the numerous places where the latter unambiguously declares that fiction harbors the truth, and that this “truth” is demonstrated through the unveiling powers of his own pre-given discourse. The truth in question during Freud and Lacan’s “pedagogical literary illustration…is not…this or that truth,” Derrida claims, “but is truth itself, the truth of the truth.” 375 The “truth of the truth” proposed and found by psychoanalysis in these examples ordains it as not just a psychological endeavor, nor a behavioral study of this or that person, figure, or story, but a classical philosophical and metaphysical undertaking, a philosopheme that is just as deconstructible as works by Plato, Kant, or Hegel. Psychoanalysis is here the methodus in the sense that it is system that follows a clear way or path—a map without possible dissensus. What Derrida calls the “classical landscape” of application evokes his remark about “the technical, neutral sense of the word 374 Jacques Derrida, “Le Facteur de la Vérité,” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 425-26, (first emphasis added). 375 Ibid., 426. 248 [application]”: at its worst, “applied psychoanalysis” does not receive a work of fiction (or patient for that matter) as a singularity, but as a piece of evidence awaiting assimilation into its universal doctrine of truth. Literature serves as a screen through which applied psychoanalysis finds itself already at work as itself everywhere, which annihilates in advance the consideration of any elsewhere. The literary work becomes merely illustrative in the way that Mallarmé conceived of the term in the 1897 survey conducted by André Ibels (and cited by Derrida in “The Double Session”), that is, “illustration” signals the placation and reduction of writing’s movement and force. It posits, assigns, and delivers the final explanation that has been there all along; it provides a telos as itself. 376 Among other things, Derrida maintains that Lacan, in his demonstration of the truth in Poe’s text and exclusive focus on the story’s content, wholly neglects its writing (“its signifier, and its narrating form”) and consequently, its inventive play of language, address, signifier and signified, and their compound, undecidable effect on the text’s meaning. 377 Derrida’s conclusion is certainly not that some complete reading is achievable or that all of the moving pieces in “The Purloined Letter” can be accounted for by heeding its written form; rather, this conspicuous gap in Lacan’s application, and 376 Lacan’s projection of his system onto Poe’s story also risks reducing the inventive force of psychoanalysis that figures prominently in Derrida’s oeuvre. Of course, the pre-determined structure, program, and ubiquitous application of the oedipal triangle as the “truth” is one of the major points taken up by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in L’anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et schizonphrénie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972), and so, at least in this sense, Derrida’s reading of “The Purloined Letter” puts his remarks in conversation with theirs. In an anecdote published in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, edited by Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), Derrida is quoted as saying that he “resisted” Deleuze and Guattari’s attack on psychoanalysis because he thought the book “would help the resistance to psychoanalysis, and [he] didn’t want to help” (3). Derrida’s inheritance and affirmation of the psychonalytic enterprise, however complex and overdetermined, exemplifies that his readings of Freud, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari occurs through a certain name and spirit of psychoanalysis and its unmistakabe bearing on deconstructive thought. 377 Derrida, “Le Facteur de la Vérité,” 426. 249 perhaps most glaringly, his disregard of the story’s narration from the perspective of a narrator, means that his rendering of truth depends on the reduction, neutralization, and exclusion of a crucial and truly manifold element of Poe’s story. Lacan’s abandonment of the frame and the signature of “The Purloined Letter” permits his reading, following Derrida, to extract what it wants from the story, piece by piece, proof by proof. Only by “putting aside the scene of writing…that which almost always in and of itself permits itself…to be put aside, apart,” can Lacan claim to have immobilized Poe’s text and deciphered its truth as a reflection of his own program. 378 In this way, Lacan seems to perform his own sort of exorcism with “The Purloined Letter,” and it is precisely this “putting aside of the scene of writing” that brutally contracts the singularity of Poe’s fiction and furnishes the discovery of psychoanalysis already at work in all of its theoretical exactitude. The analyst who finds his discourse replicated and ready for exposure assumes the position of the purveyor of truth, Derrida argues; she or he spreads the good news of another example, another piece of evidence that speculative truth claims are in fact Truth. This finding, revelation, or location leads to Derrida’s untranslatable reflexive phrase: “one text finds itself, is found [se trouve] in the other.” 379 In finding itself in the other, psychoanalysis here finds that there is, in the end, no other; it locates 378 Ibid., 436. 379 Ibid., 418. A crucial distinction should be made here regarding the formulation “one text finds itself, is found [se trouve] in the other” between deconstruction and applied psychoanalysis. Although I’ve stated at numerous points throughout this dissertation that deconstruction searches for and discovers deconstructive gestures in other texts, especially literary works, Derrida always insists, unlike Lacan in this case, on the singularity of a given text and idiom. Instead of diagnosing in advance or simply replicating some discourse, Derrida works through and with texts as singularities that cannot be assimilated into a program. When Derrida reads Mallarmé, Artaud, certain works of Freud, Ponge, Joyce, and Genet, to name just a few, he does so in a way that does not eclipse their signatures or idioms. If he finds or traces deconstructive elements and gestures within these works, these discoveries do not reaffirm deconstruction, which does not exist in the first place as a thing; instead, such affinities are the levers by which programs veer towards unforeseen directions and others. This “recognition,” for lack of a better term, leads one elsewhere. The discoveries within a given work that echo deconstructive gestures bring about a similarly singular veering. 250 no-thing (besides itself). It finds itself through the assimilation of the other into the same, and so it applies itself at the expense of the other, its Truth comes about through sacrifice. I’ve briefly drawn on Derrida’s “Le Facteur de la Vérité” before discussing the films and media of David Lynch for a number of reasons. First of all, Derrida’s argument signals precisely what the following will try to avoid, namely practices of procedural and “classical” application. Instead of seeking to use Lynch’s works as an example of deconstruction (which, following Derrida would be impossible since there can be no example or thing of deconstruction) and/or employing Derrida’s concepts to subdue Lynch’s singularity, my intervention will attempt to accentuate rather than reduce Lynch’s exemplarity through deconstructive gestures. The “goal,” then, will not be explanation, nor will it be the truth. Rather, I aim to investigate the kind of work that Lynch’s works are up to by emphasizing what might be called the “deconstruction” already active within his works. Specifically, this activity reads things such as oppositionality, tradition, invention, and signature in ways that are, I’d like to suggest, deconstructive. By developing Lynch’s take on these things, my reading endeavors to avoid neutralizing Lynch’s signature as a sort of deconstructive example; following Derrida, I will explore the contours of this particular signature, the “Lynchian,” and thus attempt to countersign with Lynch and with Derrida. If I am overly deliberate in my resistance to the model suggested by “the classical landscape of applied psychoanalysis” as it pertains to Lynch’s films, it is due to the unfortunate fact that the majority of popular scholarship on or about Lynch’s work has assumed this mode of application and the most visible of these are often rote repetitions 251 of Lacan’s discourse. 380 On one hand, this scholarship signals the demand Lynch’s works place on their viewers, listeners, and commentators; these works, however predictable, show that Lynch’s audiences actively pursue critical avenues for grappling with and making sense of the strange worlds in his works. On the other hand, the recourse to make meaning out of Lynch’s corpus, the drive to decipher the truth of this or that film through Lacanian or other authorial discourse, while not surprising, also exhibits a certain critical laziness, and perhaps, a compulsion to master and extinguish Lynch’s inventions vis-à- vis explanation and the arrival of truth. Notwithstanding the ongoing interest of Lacanian discourses in Lynch’s cinema, the following will not seek explicitly to refute them; instead, these interpretations will be held at bay, suspended as the path not to take or replicate, as the following strives to give a more just rendering of Lynch’s works through the application of deconstruction dispersed within them. Of course, Derrida has not signed the “application” to be demonstrated, and there is no evidence that he ever saw or reflected on Lynch’s films. And yet, what follows will be carried out under a certain shadow of his signature, a shadow that Derrida evokes over his own signature when he signs and reads a particular text, a shadow that situates the explicit location and identification of that signature elsewhere. I’d like to suggest that it is precisely the elsewhere of the signature, locality, property, and the name that connects Derrida and Lynch. An elsewhere can be seen to bring their signatures into a kind of contact; an elsewhere is also what keeps them separated by an abyss. 380 I am here speaking about Todd McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) and to lesser extent, Slavoj Žižek’s frequent dicussions of Lynch, namely in The Art of the Ridculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). 252 It’s Crazy Clown Time Figure. 9. The backyard ennui of “Crazy Clown Time.” On November 7 th 2011, David Lynch released his first full-length studio album, Crazy Clown Time, on Sunday Best Recordings. Like many of his projects, and notwithstanding the presence of producer/engineer/co-performer Dean Hurley, as well as the guest vocals from Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the opening number, “Pinky’s Dream,” Crazy Clown Time functions as an expansive authorial vehicle, with Lynch’s credits ranging from the categorically musical (lead vocals, guitar, synthesizer, percussion, and the Suzuki Ominchord) to album mixing and artwork. As fans, followers, and critics are well aware, there is nothing necessarily new about Lynch assuming various and sometimes surprising creative duties within, and even in the absence of, a given project; in many ways, his oeuvre can be characterized by the constant movement through different media and his display of the skills (or lack thereof) demanded by them. Since an exhaustive list 253 detailing all of these assorted commitments and roles could easily fill the space of a chapter, my focus will be a single thread of Lynch’s first album, namely the title track and the music video he directed for it. 381 Running roughly seven minutes long, the music video “Crazy Clown Time” premiered on Vice Magazine’s YouTube channel “Noisey” on Monday April 2 nd , 2012 and depicts what Lynch calls, “intense, psychotic backyard craziness, fueled by beer.” 382 Contrary to the flickering, formalist, albeit more recent music video he directed for the Nine Inch Nails’ single, “Came Back Haunted” in July 2013, “Crazy Clown Time” represents, as of this writing, the clearest and most compelling link between Lynch’s current musical output and his feature-length films; both music videos follow the wake of approximately ten video shorts, as well as numerous other projects, that have filled a seven-year hiatus from filmmaking. At first glance, bridging “Crazy Clown Time” and Lynch’s film corpus may seem to hinge solely on the former’s depiction of a party and the frequency of that motif in the latter. However, I want to suggest that underneath such an obvious connection resides something more granular and elementary in Lynch’s work, and further, that these foundational characteristics carry a particular resonance with the party’s reappearance in his films. More specifically, I contend that the language, or rather, the dearth of spoken language and explanation, a type of muteness one might say, links Lynch’s feature-length films, as well as his own commentary on his work, to both the party and the 381 On July 15 th , 2013, Lynch released his second full-length album, The Big Dream, also on Sunday Best Recordings. As of this writing, he has not directed a music video for it. There are rumors, however, of a new, unnamed feature-length project mentioned in a recent New York Times Magazine article, and a recent confirmation that Lynch will revive and direct more than nine episodes of Twin Peaks for the premium cable network, Showtime. See: Claire Hoffman, “David Lynch Is Back…as a Guru of Transcendental Meditation,” New York Times Magazine, February 24, 2013. Accessed October 11, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/david-lynch-transcendental-meditation.html?_r=0. 382 David Lynch, “We’ve Got the Exclusive Premiere of David Lynch’s New Video For Crazy Clown Time,” Vice, accessed October 27, 2013, http ://noisey.vice.com/watch/david-lynch-crazy-clown-time. 254 synchronization of image and sound in “Crazy Clown Time.” Examples of this reticence from his films are, of course, plentiful: there are characters like Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) in Eraserhead (1977) who are frozen before language, without the words to confront someone/something indescribable or otherworldly, or those like John Merrick (John Hurt) in Elephant Man (1980), whose speech is not just hindered by physical deformities, but by the burden of unspeakable traumas; there are also scenes organized around silent remainders and the canned noises that fill the intervals, “Club Silencio” in Mulholland Dr. (2001) and the rabbits of Inland Empire (2006), for example. Lynch’s films are consistently accented by a lack of speech, an incapacity or refusal to clarify and establish meaning and causality, “to make sense” in the most typical fashion. It is this laconism that recalls, but not necessarily mirrors, Lynch’s notoriously concise speaking and writing patterns, which are showcased in interviews and his 2007 book, Catching the Big Fish; Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. What is not said in Lynch’s films, what is left out or open, what is kept secret or inside, unfinished, unknowable, or perhaps all together unutterable, seems to be supported and enacted by Lynch’s own commentary of silence and deferral. And yet, one certainly does not find in this silence, his particular silence, a complete rejection of discourse, an absolute “keeping quiet,” or otherwise total absence of language. Alongside the impression of his old-fashioned, good-natured cheeriness, one hears a brutal literalism and directness emitting from Lynch’s words, a terseness signaling an aversion to the belabored processes of prolixity and requests for, as well as claims of, ultimate decryption. His words and phrases appear to dwell resolutely on the surface of things, and it is there that they spin around, engendering a lure of depth, defying interpretation in advance. As one 255 interviewer observed: “Mr. Lynch could never be accused of overthinking things. Or of overtalking them. In discussions of his work he reverts to stonewalling tactics, deflecting detailed or analytical probes with a knowing vagueness.” 383 This rigorous anti- hermeneutical method (if this approach can indeed be called a method), which this interviewer perhaps mistakenly aligns with “thinking,” may take the shape of silence, but it is not soundless, nor is it wordless. “As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way,” says Lynch. “And that’s what I hate, you know. Talking— it’s real dangerous.” 384 The danger of (over)talking, of saying too much, is for Lynch the threat of a final exegesis that would preclude a future unique experience with or reading of a particular work; such a “dangerous” act, “putting things into words,” would not simply symbolize the end of depth by providing its precise measure or calculation—it would not constitute a type of surfacing movement, the solution to a puzzle, or the exposure of an inside. Rather, explanation in this sense would be a catastrophic flattening gesture or collapse that would feasibly annihilate the surface/depth dichotomy all together. In opposition, and as this analysis weaves through “Crazy Clown Time” and the party scenes that have preceded it, Lynch’s work is distinguished by the exacerbation of and resulting discourse on dichotomies and oppositionality; the refusal, in other words and as Lynch’s logic suggests, of talking (too much). The following proceeds from this language of silence down three intertwined avenues: the inseparability of the aural and the visual in Lynch’s cinema, which traces a general theory of his creative process and notions of sound and image; the “matching” 383 Dennis Lim, “David Lynch Returns: Expect Moody Conditions, With Surreal Gusts,” New York Times, October 1, 2006. Accessed October 11, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/movies/01lim.html?pagewanted=1 (emphasis added). 384 Ibid. 256 lyrics and images of “Crazy Clown Time”; and finally, the few short flashes and fragments of language that he has used to describe the music video’s main event, the party. Taken together, these paths reveal the internal conflict and exclusions at play within the parties and fun of Lynch’s worlds and develop the tensions of the ubiquitous, but slippery term, the “Lynchian.” This is a term that cites the name of a man and with it, the nature of his disturbing, offensive, mesmerizing, and confusing films. Although conventional usage of this descriptor quickly, and sometimes rather recklessly, names a proximity, affinity, or even fusion between the extremely bizarre and the utterly commonplace, the following treatment of “Crazy Clown Time” pursues in its act of listening a turbulence within the common or recognizable “Lynchian” usage that reflects both Lynch’s literalism and his stance on firmly establishing what his films, or any creative work for that matter, properly “mean.” As the product of cinema on one hand, and an idiom both of and about that cinema on the other, the “Lynchian” is theorized here as a catalyst to think critically about the act of grouping and naming; it illustrates the work of an improper name and improper naming. For if it does anything at all, the “Lynchian” undoes itself through its doing or being done: its echoes speak of nothing but incapacity, failure, and endless reverberation, which prevents fully delimiting or ascribing the “-ian” suffix to someone or something without leakage or misappropriation. 385 The “Lynchian” is precisely “anti- Lynchian.” Similar to the severed ear in Blue Velvet (1986) and Laura Palmer’s corpse in 385 In many ways this essay can be viewed as a preliminary treatment on the suffix “-ian” which, as the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, conveys “of or belonging” to the proper name or noun that precedes it. With this in mind, we can ask what “belongs” exclusively to Lynch? What are the properties that bundle together under his notorious name, and further, what is proper to these properties? What do they effectively do? Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "-ian, suffix," accessed October 28, 2013, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 257 Twin Peaks (1991-2), the term reacts like an orifice or body that rebuffs or cannot properly respond to the questions addressed to it. Persisting in abeyance, this corpus is practically mute—questions disappear into it like a detached ear. Occasionally, after swirling around the outer folds of the pinna, single words clump together and ricochet out into the world, but the language is sparse and fragmented; it speaks (in)directly to its interlocutors. The “Lynchian” says very little. And yet, through its silences, it says everything: this stoicism does nothing but speak about speaking and the processes of reception and naming, declaring in the process an essential postponement in and of a language and reference, telling only of waiting for the right words. Primary Dictation Repetitive, syncopated, at once austere and excessive, the construction and mood of “Crazy Clown Time” immediately conjures some of Lynch’s most notable music-for-film forays, especially the songs “The Pink Room” and “Blue Frank” performed by the group Fox Bat Strategy and produced by Lynch for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), as well as a number of other collaborations, beginning with the one he forged with composer Angelo Badalamenti for Blue Velvet. These songs share slow, heavy, and steady drums, sparse bass lines, and dissonant, more improvisational electric guitars filtered through delay, tremolo, and reverb pedals that culminate in the American blues- infused seediness so often associated with Lynch’s films. It is as if this musical formula evaporates the darker imagery of Lynch’s cinema into purely aural registers—as if the visual completely transforms into the sonic. Yet for Lynch, sound does not simply succeed a pre-existing filmed image; it is not hastily produced to match or underscore. “It 258 is difficult not to notice that the ear and hearing are at the core of Lynch’s cinema,” says Michel Chion. “Even if he made silent films, his films would still be auditory. For Lynch, sound is the very origin of certain images.” 386 “Auditory,” suggesting sensorial perception (audition)—both the action of hearing and the organs of the ear—“even if” his films were technically silent, sound for Lynch, according to Chion, is at the heart of his cinema, at the “origin of certain images”; it is “at the core.” Chion’s assessment not only speaks to the figures of ears and acts of listening replete within these films, but also Lynch’s affirmation in countless interviews of the centrality of the aural in his creative process and the essential inseparability and interdependence of sound and image. 387 In an interview for the documentary Secrets from Another Place: Creating Twin Peaks (Charles de Lauzirika, 2007), which was occasioned by the Twin Peaks Definitive Gold Box Edition DVD’s “Special Features,” Angelo Badalamenti presents a dramatic account of Lynch’s treatment and conception of sound and image. When asked about their collaboration in writing “Laura Palmer’s Theme” for the television series, Twin Peaks (1990-91), the composer says that their scoring process began with Lynch first “verbaliz[ing] a mood,” which would then inspire the composer’s notes on his Fender Rhodes keyboard. “What do you see David? Just talk to me,” Badalamenti remembers asking Lynch. Lynch would respond, Badalamenti recalls, by conveying little vignettes, types of mental moving images that crystallized the mood and sound of the scene in development. Invoking the phantoms of silent cinema, Badalamenti played a live accompaniment to Lynch’s description of what he saw as “Laura Palmer’s Theme”: a 386 Michel Chion, David Lynch, translated by Robert Julian (London: British Film Institute, 1995),169 (my emphasis). 387 In particular, Chion begins the section of his “Lynch-Kit,” entitled “Ear (orielle)” with one of Lynch’s aphoristic disclosures: “People call me a director, but I really think of myself as a sound-man” (ibid.). 259 dark, cold night in the woods and a young, sad, and lonely girl walking from the forest line in the direction of the focus field of an imaginary camera. As Lynch spoke of the girl’s haunting, floating approach, and of the nightfall and shaded moonlight that rendered her only partially visible, Badalamenti responded with the low drone of the song’s ominous opening chords. After approving of the notes’ alignment with the first images of his imaginary scene, an increasingly animated Lynch, says Badalamenti, informed him of the girl’s gradual approach towards the foreground of his invisible composition, from darkness into light. This description led Badalamenti to play the beginning swell of a crescendo. In reaction to this ascending moment prior to the climax, to the expectation of the girl’s arrival and complete exposure in focus under the brightness of key and fill lights, Lynch, Badalamenti recalls, swiftly diverted the movement of the scene—just as she is about to appear, Lynch sees the girl vanish like a wraith back into the sycamores, her traumas too great to be fully disclosed, her pain inexpressible. The Fender Rhodes’ chords followed suit. In a circular fashion, “Laura Palmer’s Theme” never reaches its expected apex; its buildup recedes back to the inaugural refrain, the sound of a half-hidden girl in the woods—where she was will be where she remains—opaque, unknowable, secret. On the development of sound in his films, Lynch says, “a picture gives you an idea of what sound should go with it. So that’s really the place to start. And then, once you start, its action and reaction and you start seeing the picture change because of the sounds you put with it. It’s a magical thing.” 388 Taken together, the preceding quote and Badalamenti’s story suggest that an invisible picture may indeed be Lynch’s starting 388 Larry Sider, Jerry Sider, and Diane Freeman, “David Lynch: Action and Reaction,” in Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 49. 260 place, but the sound generated by its verbalization provides feedback that changes the picture like an actor’s face in a reaction shot. After verbalization and translation into the sonic form by a musician, the picture, now as sound, folds back into itself, affecting itself through what it simultaneously contains and lacks, or what it gave and what it now receives. Since it is partially soundless, but also conditioned by its own type of sound from which the eventual song is derived, the original picture is essentially pliable and thus incomplete. It is not, in other words, an origin. “I feel the mood of a scene in the music,” says Lynch in a People Magazine interview from 1990, “and one thing helps the other, and they both just start climbing.” 389 For Lynch, this escalation is the aforementioned “magical thing”; cinema, this thing of magic, announces itself or comes into being retrospectively, for it is only after replaying a taped recording of their session of “Laura Palmer’s Theme” and reviewing their audiovisual interaction that Lynch, Badalamenti says, embraced him and exclaimed: “Angelo, that is Twin Peaks...I see Twin Peaks!” Through the ear portal, as Chion would have us believe, there is an eye. And from the ear to the eye and back again, Lynch’s cinema has eyes that hear as they see and see as they hear. A song in this sense is isolated from the mood of a scene before it formally exists; it is already there in silence for Lynch, audible in secret. Badalamenti’s music animates Lynch’s secret cinema; it is sound that makes cinema visible as kind of audio-visuality: “That is Twin Peaks...I see Twin Peaks.” Existing as itself before it is technically written or played, and even occasionally, as the previous story illustrates, before a scene is staged, lit, rehearsed, and photographed, Lynch discovers his secret 389 Andrew Abrahams, “His Haunting Mood Music Makes Composer Angelo Badalamenti the Lynch-Pin of Twin Peaks's Success,” People, Vol. 34, no.10, September 10, 1990. Accessed October 27, 2013, http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20118665,00.html. 261 cinema as it is, from elsewhere. The feedback produced from the emergence of sound is not secondary—action and reaction, sound and image are conflated and undecidable. Sound, as a kind of feedback, only exists with and as an image, and vice-versa. 390 Lynch takes dictation from a secret already written elsewhere. “[T]he ear functions here as a passageway,” Chion says about Blue Velvet, “the symbol of communication between two worlds.” 391 Badalamenti translates Lynch’s verbalized dictation, and together he and Lynch subsequently evaluate the sound for its accuracy with what was already there, prior to verbalization: cinema before cinema, cinema discovered elsewhere, a heard vision of the world. Wedded to an image that comprises the “mood” of a given scene, the music or song is before itself otherwise; it follows from and communicates with itself from a type of incomplete private soundlessness into public audibility. Sound passes through the ear to and from the eye and loops in such a way that every source is rendered already partially written. Creation is dictation. As a result, the supposed structure or work flow of what comes first, what follows, and what is finally produced—or in other words, the creative labor necessitated by some destined end result (such as a film or a song)—breaks apart in Lynch’s secret cinema of extraction and recombination. Images and sounds are not simply abstractions from an original, complete mood, or a sealed-off internal or private psychological realm; they are not deductions from some phantasmatic whole. Speaking of the inspirations for Blue Velvet, Lynch says that the pieces comprising the elements of his films are already 390 Throughout numerous interviews, but most forcefully in the chapter on Blue Velvet in Lynch on Lynch, Lynch admits that while most directors work on sound/scoring in post-production, he prefers to do so during production. He even laments scoring after the editing, as if revisiting the film’s images with a composer destroys the essential synchronization of invisibility and silence. See David Lynch and Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 125-154. 391 Chion, David Lynch, 97. 262 present as bits, portions, and chunks of the world: “I started getting these ideas for it in 1973, but they were just fragments of interesting things. Some fell away, others stayed and began to join up. It all comes in from somewhere else, like I was a radio. But I’m a bad radio, so sometimes the parts don’t hook together.” 392 Incoming “fragments…from somewhere else” accumulate to form Lynch’s acti/passive cinema that creates through extraction and broadcasts the reception of alien signals. 393 Lynch’s cinema comes in from somewhere else and it relays its circuitry and processes back to the world as one cinematic machine amongst a multitude of others. Demonstrating these same uncanny characteristics of primary dictation, reception without signal origin, and acti-passivity, the music video for “Crazy Clown Time” amplifies Lynch’s writing process through the speech acts of the song’s lyrics and the matching images that they simultaneously describe and invent. Here are some lines from the song taken at random from the album insert: Paulie had a red shirt Susie, she ripped her shirt off completely Buddy screamed so loud an’ spit Danny poured the beer all over Sally Timmy jumped all around so high Petey he lit his hair on fire We all ran around the backyard 392 Lynch and Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 135. In connection with the radio and antenna analogy, Lynch admits that Bobby Vinton’s 1963 rendition of song “Blue Velvet” inspired the idea of the movie. 393 The term acti/passive is borrowed from Derrida’s discussion of photography in Copy, Archive Signature: A Conversation on Photography, edited by Gerhard Richter and translated by Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Derrida deploys this term in order to condense the framing and processing (and thus, the technics and activity) that always, already effect photography and photographic processes. This activity, however minimal and effaced, intervenes with photography’s supposed mechanical passivity and mode of reference. Lynch returns to this acti/passivity in Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, where the radio metaphor morphs into analogies of “fishing” and “catching” (i.e. one “fishes” and “catches” ideas). “Fishing,” it should be said, does not occur during meditation; Transcendental Meditation only makes the “waters clearer,” according to Lynch. Meditation calms the seas (or the exchange of signals) so that “big fish” (i.e. fruitful ideas) can be caught/received. See David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (New York: Penguin, 2006). 263 It was “Crazy Clown Time” “Crazy Clown Time” It was really fun It was real fun As most viewers of “Crazy Clown Time” will quickly notice, what you hear is what you get: Paulie is identified by his red shirt, like topless Suzy, screaming Buddy, and Petey, who lights his hair on fire. On one hand, Lynch’s lyrics function as a narration of the diegesis, as if they were a kind of live stage direction or a scene/music video treatment in advance. Taken this way, the music video would be the immediate audio-visualization of the verbalized mood, a direct song and image of Lynch’s primary picture, or perhaps, the complete transposition of the primary picture itself. Yet, Lynch’s presence within the diegesis troubles such a smooth reading; his image is literally broadcast on a small television monitor placed on a patio table between seated Paulie and Petey (figures 10a, 10b, and 10c). 394 Partially hidden behind sunglasses, Lynch’s face flashes up in canted angles and blurred compositions on the tiny screen, and shots of the party and its revelers are frequently cut to extreme-close-ups of the images of his head. These quick cuts (from the party to Lynch’s head as a televised image) siphon attention away from the partygoers and inserts or asserts the director and his words from the periphery to the center. Through the voice and tele-technology Lynch possesses an unequivocal, even mystical, power 394 Lynch’s placement within a TV monitor speaks to an intermediality that has characterized his work since his first film, Six Figures Getting Sick (Six Times) from 1966, which he said was an attempt to animate a painting. Other early works like The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970) combined both live action and animation, while The Amputee (1974) was an early experiment with video. Lynch has worked most notably with 35mm film and feature-length movies, but also has or continues to experiment with serial television, painting, photography, furniture design, and of course, music. Inland Empire (2006) was shot completely on digital video, prompting Lynch to declare that he would never return to the film medium. 264 over his actors. 395 Recalling the Wizard’s behind-the-curtain spectacular potency from The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), one of his most recurrent intertextual references, Lynch casts a bewitching spell over his characters; they are visibly entranced by the song’s rhythm and beat, and under the hypnotic suggestion of lyrics [Figure 3]. “Crazy Clown Time” is a séance and Lynch is the wizard-medium. He is also the ghost who/that arrives and summons the deleterious effects often associated with television and pop culture (fascination, worship, and addiction). As a telephonic or televisual deity, his words are their commands. Lynch is the (dis)embodiment of what Chion calls the acousmêtre, or the omniscient off-screen voice. 396 His is the voice-over. 395 In the first volume of The Death Penalty, Derrida draws on Nietzsche’s passing description of the telephone in The Genealogy of Morals in order to discuss the device’s “technics of transcendence, and…the technics of this teleferic relation to the sovereignty of the absent other, of the absent God” (145). Following Nietzsche’s characterizations of Schopenhauer and Wagner, Derrida says that the musician functions as “an orcale, a priest, a mouthpiece for the in-itself of things, a ventrlioquist of God (Bauchredner Gottes), who, on the telephone, ‘speaks metaphysics’… and this metaphysical idiom is a telephonic language, the telephonic language of the ascesis that rises above sensible or sensual touch”(146). In other words, the telephone (and tele-technics in general) connects mortals with a transcendent, distant sovereign voice from beyond, such as the one that pardons at the last second the condemened awaiting execution. With this desciption in mind, one could say that it is as if Lynch acts as a mouthpiece for himself in “Crazy Clown Time”; as the ultimate soverign power, as the muscian/author/director on television, he summons and is summoned by himself; he channels himself beyond himself and as himself, ventriloquized by his own will as God, immediately through media. See: Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol. 1, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 396 Michel Chion develops the acousmêtre in The Voice in Cinema, edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). According to him, the term (which combines acousmatic and the French verb être or “to be”) refers to an offscreen voice that is heard and not visualized. This disembodied voice, which is in and outside of the image, “becomes invested with magical powers as soon as it is involved, however slightly, in the image. The powers are usually malevolent, ocassionally tutelary. Being involved in the image means that the voice doesn’t merely speak as an observer…but that it bears with the image a relationship of possible inclusion, a relationship of power and possession capable of functioning in both directions; the image may contain the voice, or the voice may contain the image” (23). Lynch, as a sort of televised image within the “Crazy Clown Time” image is, at the same time, outside of the image—the capture and broadcast of his image takes place elsewhere; it is extra-diegetic, and despite its appearance there on a monitor, he remains partially concealed and hidden. It is in this way that Lynch can be seen to retain and even supplement his acousmêtric power while being seen within the frame: his disclosure leads elsewhere. 265 Figures 10a and10b (above), 10c and 10d (below). Television head: establishing shot to extreme close-up. Figure 11. Tele-Transfixed. In this same high-pitched, nasally octave, and with his typical, naïve idiom, Lynch’s lyrics jeopardize this absolute, transcendent authority because they are descriptive in the past tense and hinge on the first person plural: “We all ran around the backyard; it was crazy clown time; it was really fun.” “Crazy Clown Time” can therefore be read as a kind of reminiscence or testimony. Taken this way, Lynch is not only an 266 author or supreme creative force who stands apart from his work on the outside, but also a participant and/or a witness. He implicates himself there and then with the revelers; he is embedded with them, perhaps as them or one of them off-screen, and thus woven in as an accomplice. Conveying both the assumed activity of an accessory and the passivity of a witness, Lynch creates a conduit or umbilicus to the events of “Crazy Clown Time” precisely through his frankness, generating a type of testimonial-effect or the appearance of a having-been-there. In other words, the brevity, flatness, and dispassioned simplicity of Lynch’s lyrics complicate the assumptions of mimetic depiction and “creative” or literary works in general, which are supposed to be distinct from testimony in Western law. 397 The past intrudes into the present from the account of the witness/participant, and this testimony establishes Lynch’s intimate co-conspiracy with the characters, as a character; here, there is no difference between the ostensible creator and his original picture and signals. It is as if through the lyrics and by extension, through the mouth, these characters, including Lynch himself, have literally spilled out into the world. Everything has been translated and released by a voice that has been hijacked and ventriloquized—by a voice that is no longer one. Thus, the property of “Crazy Clown Time” is claimed or re-claimed. It belongs to the characters as their soundtrack, party anthem, and story. They are the authors. Lynch serves as the transmitter-medium with their actions as his signals and words; his sovereign activity as telephonic or tele- technical deity, therefore, assents to a more passive form of transcription. Somewhere between these two accounts, between Lynch’s mystical alchemy as creator and machine- 397 As discussed in the previous chapter, Derrida illustrates in his short book on Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death in Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) that testimony is always conditioned by its repeatability and is therefore technical and/or machinic, even if it is assumed to free of these supplements within Western law. 267 like conveyance as witness-participant, we experience “Crazy Clown Time” as the multilayered transpositions and translations of writing in general. Crazy are the intricacies, repetitions without clear origin, supplements, and temporal loopings of creation and discovery, invention and duplication. Perhaps this craziness can be called “clown time.” Following the speech-act theory set forth by J.L. Austin, one could say that the double valence of Lynch’s lyrics convey both contstative and performative qualities, that is, they concurrently “’describe some state of affairs, or ‘state some fact,’” and forcefully make some action happen through “the issuing of the utterance” itself. 398 While much criticism has been levied at Austin’s attempts at segregating the constative from the performative, and especially the “infelicity” he aligns with the literary object, and as such, fiction’s “necessary” exclusion from his categories, my interest in turning to his terms is not explicitly invested in analyzing How to Do Things with Words’ premises, nor thoroughly restating or reconsidering the debates that were activated by it. 399 Rather, by way of this debate, Austin’s idiom segues to Derrida’s “Psyche: Invention of the Other” and his treatment there of Francis Ponge’s poem, “Fable,” which, like Lynch’s lyrics in “Crazy Clown Time,” asserts, Derrida says, “a sort of poetic performative that simultanesouly describes and carries out, on the same line, its own generation.” 400 For Derrida, the opening words of “Fable”—par le mot par commence donc ce texte (“With 398 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2 nd ed., edited by J.O Urmson and Marina Sbrisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvrard University Press, 1975), 1 and 6. 399 For Derrida’s crucial place within these debates, see: Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, translated by Samuel Weber, et. al (Evantson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988) and J Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 400 Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” translated by Catherine Porter, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 11. 268 the word with begins then this text”)— are a citation of its incipit and thus render the poem’s constative and perfomative utterances undecidable and inseparable. “[I]ts constative description is nothing other than the performative itself,” Derrida says of the phrase “par le mot par.” 401 This “originary reflexivity” is, according to Derrida, “at once the inventive event and the relation or archive of an invention…in order to say nothing but the same, itself, the dehiscent and refolded invention of the same, at the very instant when it takes place.” 402 The first use of the preposition “with” in “Fable” obviously indicates a “with-ness,” an accompaniment or dependency one might say of any inaugural event or utterance on what has come or been established before it; invention in this sense of the term requires supplementation and iterability. As a quotation of the first par, Ponge’s second “with” displays these metalingustic features through a specificity to or reliance on itself. Whereas the first “with” tacitly gestures towards the larger functioning of language, the second singularizes this metalanguage, making it, Derrida says, both “inevitable and impossible…[since] there is no language before it, since it has no prior object beneath or outside of itself.” 403 At once “Fable” describes the laws governing language and performs them through its syntax— its invention, in other words, is its singular or idiomatic performance of performance as constative. According to Derrida, this “infinitely rapid oscillation between the performative and the constative” exemplified by “Fable” alludes to the double meaning of the word “invention” through the Latin invenīre as “to come upon, discover, find out, devise, and 401 Ibid. 402 Ibid. 403 Ibid., 13. 269 contrive.” 404 On one hand, invention suggests an act of discovery, or finding something new that was previously unnoticed or undocumented; on the other hand, the word also refers to creation of the enitrely new, the fabrication of the completely unforseeabe. However, as Derrida explains in his discussion of invention, and as it was discussed in the previous chapter in relation to improvisiation, novelty must conform to the conventions that make its newness recognizable as such; any imaginable invention must be configured into and through the terms of the past. “Pure” invention thus remains presently impossible; its possibility is to come. Derrida’s treatment of the inseparability of the constative and the performative within the word and concept of invention finds a parallel with “Crazy Clown Time” and Lynch’s own creative process of reception, extraction, and recombination. There is, following Derrida and Lynch, no pure performative, no utterance, creation, or “original picture” and outcome; there is no song or film, no scene or image, for example, that is not, in some ways referential or descriptive of some other scene before it. This inherent deferral also means that an uncontaminated constative statement, a complete replication of some past event beyond the singularity of mediation is also an impossibility since any depiction or utterance is made within an idiom, a singular “position” in the world at a given instant, and through the point of view of perception and enunciation. Every constative is framed. “Lynchian” Traditions 404 "invent, v.". OED Online. June 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.libproxy2.usc.edu/view/Entry/98960 (accessed July 23, 2015). 270 When asked by Interview Magazine about the origins of the title “Crazy Clown Time,” Lynch responded with his expected, unassuming coyness: “The lyrics tell the story of the time...It’s a traditional backyard story that involves girls and guys and beer.” 405 Who (or what) we may ask would call the events of “Crazy Clown Time” traditional in the typical sense of the word? If the music video depicts something traditional, what then is Lynch’s take on tradition? Lynch’s comment presumably acknowledges that many of the music video’s visual cues and archetypes will be recognized as a suburban, adolescent backyard party (perhaps of the Southern Californian variety) driven to or exposed at its extremes. There is something therefore eerily familiar about “Crazy Clown Time”—its setting will be the most “normal” for some viewers—and, at the same time, it resists a kind of normalization because the party remains completely singular and bizarre, full of niche and/or unimaginable activities, pleasures, and desires. In a word, and as one reviewer for the online magazine Slate attempts to make clear, its balance and exhibition of tradition and the traditional is precisely what makes the music video “Lynchian”: The video is as Lynchian as any of Lynch’s movies, and not just in being a little terrifying and not a little bit nonsensical (which it is). As with any powerfully Lynchian piece of work, it takes wholesome-seeming Americana circa the 1950s (here, a backyard barbecue, names like Susie and Danny, and a football player in full uniform) and perverts them until they’re discomfiting and downright disturbing (Susie takes her shirt off, Danny lights his hair on fire, and the football player keeps running in place). 406 405 Matt Diehl, “David Lynch,” Interview Magazine, January 25, 2012. Accessed October 11, 2015. http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/david-lynch#. 406 Forrest Wickman, “David Lynch Debuts a Frightening Music Video,” Slate, April 2, 2012. Accessed October, 11, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/04/02/david_lynch_s_crazy_clown_time_music_video_imagin es_a_lynchian_lawn_party.html 271 Following this logic, one could say that the “Lynchian” is the affect associated with the displacement of values; Lynch takes what seems “wholesome” on the exterior (backyard barbeque, All-American names, etc.) and shows it to be internally “perverted” and this “disturbing” invention provokes “discomfort” and “terror.” Pushing this characterization further, Lynch appears to expose the dichotomies in and of the world that sometimes, or for him, always mask or contain the other; the ambivalent presentation of and reaction to witnessing these dichotomies— shock and farce, familiarity and novelty—is what seems to characterize the “Lynchian.” This sentiment is supported by Todd McGowan’s work on Lynch, and in particular his articulation of the latter’s uncanny treatment of normality vis-à-vis his acceptance of and enthusiasm for the style, well-worn iconographies, and therefore, traditions of Hollywood. “[Lynch] reveals the radicality and perversity of the mainstream itself,” McGowan argues, “He is too mainstream for the mainstream...[he] reveals that the bizarre is not opposed to the normal, but inherent within it.” 407 Taking a not-too-subtle jab at academia, David Foster Wallace echoed McGowan’s observations some years before while writing a piece on 1997’s Lost Highway. “An academic definition of Lynchian,” he says, “might be that the term ‘refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.’” 408 Although Foster Wallace’s glib performance of the academic idiom displays his resistance to what he would have likely seen as its stuffy and gratuitously complex lexical traditions, it should be noted that both he and McGowan build their descriptions of the “Lynchian” on two shared words: 407 Todd McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch, 12. 408 David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” originally published in Premiere Magazine, September 1996. Accessed October 11, 2015, http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html. 272 “reveal” and “within.” Lynch uncovers something inside for both Foster Wallace and McGowan, inside and internal; something is revealed within that should supposedly, and by most accounts, exist or be kept outside like an enemy or potential intruder. A constitutive contamination, not infection or other type of foreign invasion, perverts the wholesome in Lynch’s worlds; something inside destabilizes the neat division of internal and external. Lynch reveals the difference in the heart of the same. These characterizations of the “Lynchian” circle back to Lynch’s use of the word “traditional” which, as Svetlana Boym points out, has its roots in the Latin trāditio, - ōnem and carries with it both a sense of, “delivery, handing down...the action of handing over to another” and also “giving up, surrender, and betrayal.” 409 Eerily similar to tradition’s inner-resistance to its commonplace meaning, “[t]he word revolution,” Boym says, “means both cyclical repetition and the radical break. Hence tradition and revolution incorporate each other and rely on their opposition.” 410 Tradition, often thought of as the uninterrupted continuation of the past, and revolution, the event that usurps and forever redirects this flow of time towards the predictable, elicit the characteristics of their alleged opposite; under the pressure of further analysis, tradition and revolution are shown to be codependent terms, naming their contrary through the roots that make their contemporary variances possible. Moreover, to adhere to tradition in the name of recognizing or repeating the past (tradition), and to declare a cataclysmic break from such stagnation and repetition (revolution) requires a similar conception of successive temporality that presupposes the stability of the past. Both tradition and revolution must therefore disavow not only the mobility that surely marked the past 409 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 19. 410 Ibid. 273 during its time, but also the life and activity of the past in the present. Lynch’s take on the traditional can thus be viewed as an exposure of the word’s dual meaning. It is an affirmative inheritance of tradition (perhaps a “traditional” one): simultaneously the act of successful transmission, of a completed passage of rituals or rules, laws, behaviors and practices and the possibility of this transmission missing its mark and going awry. If the word traditional typically speaks to the former sense, to the completed transposition and legitimized reiteration of a set of practices, doctrines, doxa, or institutions, Lynch reminds us through “Crazy Clown Time” that this understanding is haunted by its other, more sinister or playful side. The rigidity, rigor, and ritual ordinarily affiliated with tradition encounters something mischievous from within—a dormant untraditionality is excavated by unorthodox methods of reading and writing the tradition. For McGowan, Lynch paradoxically engenders proximity between his films and spectators, a result, in other words, tethered to the formal transparency associated with the conventions of “invisible” continuity editing. According to the parlance of 1970s film theory, especially work invested in the terms developed through Louis Althusser and Lacan, transparency names the spectator’s disavowal or blindness to the material construction of a film, which generates an illusory and insidious propinquity between their bodies and the screen. Like the characters of the first reading of “Crazy Clown Time,” spectators are transfixed by highly structured moving images that control them. Transparency also implicitly signals a filmmaker’s submission (whether conscious or not) to Hollywood’s formal rules and the pantheon of “great”—i.e. usually financially successful and decidedly normative—directors. By focusing on Lynch’s embrace of transparency, McGowan’s point is that he contradicts this tradition in a style unlike that 274 of Jean-Luc Godard and other alternative filmmakers, who strove in a Brechtian manner to draw attention to the supposed “reality” of transparency’s ideological underpinnings through formal opposition. Without mimicry, acquiescence, or denunciation, Lynch, McGowan alleges, “revels” in the illusory transparent force afforded by cinema in such a way that oppositions, such as fantasy and reality, are “sustained” throughout his films as irresolvable; this prolongation or maintenance, in turn, signals that Lynch does not posit or privilege the truth of one over the other. 411 Instead, his is a cinema of the mainstream and of tradition that cultivates the festering (and perhaps false) antagonisms inside of it to such an extent that they no longer seem properly normal or de-limitable. While McGowan will rely on Lacanian descriptions of fantasy and desire in his account of Lynch’s excessive and uncanny normality, my interest in this traditionality orbits around how Lynch’s formal processes amount to an internal transvaluation, or perhaps deconstruction, of transparency. Formal alienation, or some other alternative practice (as exemplified by Godard, according to McGowan) that attempts to generate spectator distance from a given work does not simply expose illusion as an artifice by proposing an alternative or escape; rather, these formal practices inversely re-inscribe the illusory and actual opposition. They propose the Truth. Lynch, on the other hand, draws on cinema’s power to create and reflect, to perform and describe as illusory in order to exemplify cinema as another singular mediation among a multitude of others. It is as if Lynch claims that there is no escape from opacity through the language and tradition of transparency; there are neither complete answers nor truths, only a mise-en-abyme of shades and blinders, folds after folds. Finding or rendering the Truth is not just another 411 McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch, 12. In a certain way, then, McGowan already implicitly suggests that his Lacanian discourse contradicts the work of Lynch’s work. 275 illusion but the very illusion (and perhaps the truth) that can be accomplished through cinema. If film form is indeed a type of language, Lynch’s idiom speaks with and within it (par le mot par) as a cinematic metalanguage of and on tradition. Like Derrida’s fascination with cinema’s “mode and system of belief,” Lynch “revels” in the belief that the world invests in the illusory rather than positing an alternative to it or offering a realization of Truth. 412 Observing the abundance of dichotomies that saturate Lynch’s films, Akira Mizuta Lippit extends McGowans’s analysis by saying that they: are neither halves nor pieces of the same; rather they are proliferations that do not originate in any source. Nor do they converge, ever to form a whole…They are autonomous, each one its own threshold. What distinguishes Lynch’s worlds are their incommensurabilities; the divisions are never dialectical (however symmetrical they might at times appear to be), they can never be reformed, restored, and repaired; they are unwholesome, which is to say they never form wholes or totalities. (They become complete and discrete entities in and of themselves, but they never merge with other worlds to create one set of laws, one unified universe.) 413 In Lippit’s reading, there is no world posited against another in Lynch’s cinema, nor is there any cohesion among the parts; there is no one world, no world that entirely envelops or opposes the other, no world to be called whole or wholesome. Lynch’s “proliferations” are not stable, self-identifiable entities. They are dissymmetrical (despite their symmetrical appearances) and non-dialectical partitions, on the edge of the other, “each one its own threshold.” Rather than sides, Lynch’s worlds function like shards and splinters, as if they were explosive debris and shrapnel without source and terminus. 412 Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, "Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida," translated by Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37, nos. 1-2 (2015): 27. 413 Akira Mizuta Lippit, “David Lynch’s Wholes,” Flow 15, no. 3. Accessed October 19, 2015, http://flowtv.org/2011/11/david-lynchs-wholes/. 276 They are the shades of limits, limitations, and singularities that do not form wholes by conjoining with each other; they are “unwholesome,” allergic to wholes. “In the place of wholes,” says Lippit, “are holes.” 414 Drawing on Lynch’s concession in an interview that “between opposing things… there’s something in the middle,” 415 Lippit develops the space of this “something” as a meeting point or interface of holes, “a threshold between sides, the beginning of one before another, but also a place itself, an interstitial place without place.” 416 It is on or within this middle ground of the something where Lynch admits that reconciling “opposing things is the trick… the middle isn’t a compromise, it’s, like, the power of both.” 417 Lynch’s recourse to this excess or “trick” of “opposing things” amounts to an insistence on impurity; his cinema takes place in and on the middle, in a perverse amalgam of centers, a hole or holes. The reconciliation that takes place in Lynch’s works is a non-synthesized co-presence of incomplete and autonomous halves, a dismissal at once of assimilation and clear division; there is a refusal to flatten differences and subsume them into an image or phantasm of the same and a parallel repudiation to firmly demarcate one world from the other. Difference and tension prevail in Lynch’s worlds, difference not only from the same, but the difference at work inside of what is expected to be the same. Without absolute autonomy, the same is not the same. What seems to encompass the avowed irony, terror, recognition, and strange twists on and of normality—in short what is often called “Lynchian”—is an exposure to the fantasy of 414 Ibid. 415 Lynch and Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 23 (emphasis added). 416 Lippit, “David Lynch’s Wholes.” 417 Lynch and Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 23. 277 sameness, the incapacity of the “-ian” suffix to perform its proposed erasure of difference and create unconditional consistency and assimilation. Lippit sees Lynch’s middle as a composite world, a fluid assemblage that disperses at the same rate it is arranged, a fleeting set of incomplete hollow worlds or orifices that are strung together momentarily by a lynchpin. It is a cinema of holes. In his films, Lynch unveils a multitude of different worlds that exist close to or within the next, different worlds that refuse to clearly separate or converge as one, worlds that resist both their own self-identity and complete absorption into the other. In The Elephant Man (1980), John Merrick (John Hurt) bathes in the sun’s white, salubrious light that bounces off the sterilized walls, sheets, and gowns at Treve’s (Anthony Hopkins) hospital. Such cleansing Victorian politeness seems to be a world away from the shadows, dinginess, and carnivalesque exploitation of London’s back streets, but the Night Porter (Michael Elphick) already inhabits the hospital, stalking the grounds after the lights are turned off and bringing with him Merrick’s inescapable nightmare (figures 12a and 12b). Blue Velvet famously begins with dreamy, unhurried shots of the Lumberton’s idyllic suburbia with Bobby Vinton’s song in the background, recalling the all-American manicured lawns, picket fences, and obedient familial hierarchies of television programs like Leave It To Beaver (1957-1963). Lynch’s camera then punctuates Lumberton’s tranquility as it dives not below the town’s surface, but precisely to its surfaces, the grounds that support its plastic worlds. On these surfaces, one encounters frenzied insects feeding and crunching weaker, outnumbered prey, as well as the severed ear that leads to Jeffrey Baumount’s (Kyle MacLachlan) descent into the world’s wickedness. By day, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With 278 Me is the blond, virginal, homecoming queen, but by night, she is every parent’s worst nightmare: promiscuous, addicted to drugs, and filled with unknowable traumas and unspeakable desires. 418 In Lost Highway, we are introduced to the dark-haired, demure, and mysterious Renee Madison, played by Patricia Arquette, through her impotent husband, Fred (Bill Pullman) and their cold, minimalist midcentury home. After appearing to kill her, Fred transforms into the young and virile Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) whose brightly lit world is thrown back into Fred’s disarray and darkness upon meeting the now blond, equally mysterious, pornographic actress, Alice Wakefield, also played by Arquette, and her dangerous world of filmed sex, violence, and deception. Like Arquette’s double role in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive (2001) presents Naomi Watts as the buoyant, painfully cheery, Hollywood neophyte, Betty Elms, and the thoroughly defeated, heartbroken, and vindictively desperate veteran actress, Diane Selwyn. Following Lippit, we might say that Watts’ characters negotiate Hollywood’s holes; Hollywood perhaps itself as a kind of hole—a void or pit (or a vacuum as it is commonly thought) but also a larger opening or crevice distributing the various holes that populate the world and configure its whole (figures 12a and 12b). 418 Following Twin Peaks, Lynch’s lead women characters seem to physically manifest the shifts or differences that were previously sequestered to the mise-en-scene and achieved by lighting, acting, editing, music, set dressing, and composition. While Lynch continues to formally mark these ruptures and variations, since about 1990 his women characters have taken a crucial role in illustrating his dichotomies; oftentimes they either physically absorb and/or catalyze these changes with and through their bodies and interactions with other characters, as if they were infected and/or contagious. 279 Figures 12a and 12b. White light cleanses the Elephant Man from the industrial waste below. Figure 13a and 13b. Dream and nightmare in Mulholland Drive: two possible burrows. 280 On presenting these divisions and sides, Lynch says that, “just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force—wild pain and decay—also accompanies everything.” 419 Like the phantom of betrayal in the word tradition, “wild pain and decay” fester not only underneath the veneers of tranquility for Lynch, but along with them— together, they are accompaniments, unthinkable in the absence of the other. Cinema is the instrument that gets “just beneath the surface” and unearths other worlds (not just one), like the microscopic layers explored in the opening of Blue Velvet, or the complex infrastructure depicted in Franz Kafka’s short story, “The Burrow” (1931). The endless and intricate network of “The Burrow” recalls Lynch’s take on tradition as a porous, malleable body comprised of infinite chambers and cells, a body that, when thoroughly investigated or dug into, is shown to lack the assumed organization, closure, and identity composing and justifying it as such. Through one of these tunnels, we discover “Crazy Clown Time” with its events (or event) that do not counter the normal world, but reflect the symptoms of naming a single world normal. Parties and Fun In Lynch’s cinema, parties are melting pots unlike any other; they are figurative cauldrons where the fringes of his film worlds, elements of different layers, sides, and margins, interact in shared spaces under the auspices of fun; they are the places that can be seen to compose his “middle ground.” Following Lippit, this is a groundless ground, a meeting place characterized by “a threshold between sides, the beginning of one before 419 Lynch and Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 8. 281 another, but also a place itself, an interstitial place without place.” 420 Lynch’s party scenes take place elsewhere and between places. They are marked by intersections, failed connections, and encounters where, more often than not, major diegetic disclosures or puzzles are divulged or set into motion. They constitute some of the most infamous “Lynchian” moments, as indicated by their popularity on YouTube and notoriety in popular culture. What takes place at or during Lynch’s parties recalls the Anglo-Norman and French roots of the word, partie, pertie, and partie. These roots all connote the noun’s mixture of division, abstraction, and specificity: “part of a larger unit, part of the body, part of a larger space, side, faction, a group of people, territory, country...A part, portion, side...A division of a whole.” 421 A party in this sense draws on the contemporary and common political use of the term, as in a “party politics,” and refers to what seems to be a more formal method of naming a group of people banded together for one reason or another: a hunting party, a dinner party of five, the Donner Party. Since it shares its etymology with the noun, the verb “to party,” according to OED, also evokes separation from the whole and an allegiance to a group: “to side with, to take the part of, to take sides, to form a party”—the very parting required, in other words, by the demands of a party. 422 Through its French roots, this parting draws a homophonic link with the past participle of the verb partir (to leave), parti. 423 And so, the party parts, est parti (c’est 420 Lippit, “David Lynch’s Wholes.” 421 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “party," accessed October 28, 2013, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 422 Ibid. 423 While the French parti indicates departure in the past tense (Je suis parti(e), “I left” for example), the expression/interjection c’est parti, which literally translates to English as “it left,” also commonly declares an entrance or the emergence of someone/something. English equivalents would be expressions such as, 282 parti): a gathering of a portion separated from the whole, which bases its departure on some kind of common ground or unification among the party members. In this sense, “party” implies the impermanence and residues of parting, of something (a former group or cause perhaps) left behind, one party for another, parts. It is not until around 1920 that the colloquial, specifically North American use of the intransitive term “to party” was associated with general entertainment, amusement, and having a good time. While most characters in Lynch’s films tend to busy themselves with these common activities of “partying” during their time at a party—drinking, laughing, swearing, smoking, dancing, and telling stories—others experience these events as through their own awkward place outside the party, that is, as the party’s internal parted parts. For these characters, parties are experiences of non-belonging, being apart, and witnessing their own departure or distance from the world of the party. Lynch’s parties are never wholes: they are impossible parties (in the accumulated, communal sense of the term) or holes because they are infinitely riven by parting and non-assimible parts. In a certain way, then, there are only parties at Lynch’s parties, a total party of parts and departures—nothing but parties. Perhaps this exposes the law or physics of Lynch’s cinema: the rate of formation is matched by dispersal. In a 2012 interview published on Vice Magazine’s “Noisey” site, the same YouTube channel that premiered “Crazy Clown Time,” Vice co-founder and interviewer, Eddy Moretti, addressed the apparent disparity between the extremity and destruction depicted in Lynch’s parties and their more popular function as methods of what he calls “stress relief.” Upon hearing these words, Lynch swiftly interrupted Moretti: “They’re “Showtime!” “Here it goes/we go!” and “We’re off!” C’est parti thus evokes a type of beginning or propulsion marked by dissolution or parting; departure, in this sense, is generative, just as the collecting, grouping, or merging of parties implies their future disintegration. 283 [parties] not about relieving stress! Nobody says, ‘let’s have a party so we can relieve some stress.’ [They say] ‘let’s have a party so we can have some fun.’ And fun is like everything; it’s a relative thing. What’s fun for one may not be fun for another.” 424 Taken in combination with his party cinema, Lynch’s brief comments portray parties as events where fun is or can be experienced at the expense of others, fun as the party line, its threshold and determining factor: “what’s fun for one may not be fun for another.” As the party’s impetus, fun is therefore not necessarily purgative or cathartic; in Lynch’s cinema, it figuratively stresses and fractures the partygoers between those who are experiencing it and those who are not, between those on the inside and those on the outside of fun. The exclusion operating within Lynch’s version of fun is, like the word party, consistent with the term’s historical meaning, “to cheat, hoax…to cajole.” 425 Obviously, this take on fun is closer to the expression, “to be made fun of,” than it is to any sense of pure happiness, enjoyment, or collective “stress relief.” To be sure, one certainly can, and many do, take pleasure in “making fun” of another or others; as we are well aware, these acts are frequently innocent and harmless with even the befooled having a laugh at their own expense. “Making fun” can surely be “funny” as in “affording fun, mirth-producing, comical, facetious.” 426 But what also remains undeniable is that fun, at least in this sense of it, is conditioned by a type of victimhood, of another being duped or preyed upon despite intention or reception. Fun makes another “funny,” as in its colloquial meaning “curious, queer, odd, strange,” and in so doing, signals agency or 424 David Lynch, interviewed by Eddy Moretti, “David Lynch on Twitter, Partying & Being Free,” YouTube video, 13:45. Posted by “Noisey,” April 6, 2012. Accessed October 21, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwPprWxt9oo (emphasis added). 425 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fun," accessed October 28, 2013, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 426 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “funny," accessed October 28, 2013, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 284 dominance over another, as well as knowledge of this others’ separation and ignorance of their place on the outside. Fun partitions and makes parts through the positions and places that can only be established by those inside, those “in on the joke.” Similar to the term party, fun posits a certain spatiality and localization of those inside and outside; fun adjudicates the position and ranking of a particular party. In Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) Joe Pesci provides a celebrated reflection on this definition of fun after his character, Tommy DeVito, is called “funny” by fellow low-level mobster, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). After Tommy recounts a humorous story about a recent arrest to fellow gangsters and sycophants, Henry tells him that he is “really funny,” that Tommy, in the terms established above, is comical because he produces fun’s inherent division himself. In other words, Tommy positions himself on the outside with his story, as the laughed-at, the funny object. Tommy, of course, appears to take offense to Henry’s assertion, which sets off his well-known interrogation of his fellow mobster. Reflecting the non-knowledge of the befooled with his cross-examination (“why am I so funny?”), Tommy effectively reverses fun’s exclusion back to Henry; he insists that his funniness be defined or that Henry effectively admit to fun’s dependency on exclusion. Tommy demonstrates the uncomfortable position on the outside by pushing Henry and all of the rest within an earshot out with him; now, nobody is having any fun. Despite the apparent gravity of the situation, the suspense of the scene eventually dissipates when Henry realizes that Tommy’s interrogation is a ruse. And yet, the significance of this scene is not only funny: by contesting who can be the laughed-at, 285 Tommy establishes himself at the top of group’s pecking order. 427 It is he who decides who is in and who is outside of fun; Tommy is the one who sanctions his own funniness and his sovereignty is drawn from his position inside, as always the laughed-with, even and especially if he makes himself the laughed-at. Only he can make exceptions. Henry’s first comment was in some ways correct: Tommy is funny in the sense that he generates fun for others by instituting the limits and the permitted spaces of fun, but he also refuses to be funny in the sense that he is the outsider, the one who does not belong as the “curious, queer, odd, [or] strange.” Resembling this scene in Goodfellas, Lynch’s parties are almost always accentuated by fun-deprived characters who are left looking in at others having some fun. Oftentimes, and echoing the “Lynchian” take on oppositionality, fun irreconcilably separates attendees and their respective parties; fun happens only over there, elsewhere. In Lynch’s cinema, fun is not necessarily had at the expense of the fun-deprived or dependent on making fun of another; directly “laughing at” is not a prerequisite. On the contrary, fun occurs in Lynch’s parties when a particular character, usually the protagonist, exhibits his or her detachment from it. This experience of fun at a remove discloses an insurmountable distance between inside and outside, rendering any negotiation or reconciliation between sides impossible; it is here, at the party and within the exclusions of fun, that one bears witness to Lynch’s “power of both,” a party made possible by fun, a “middle ground” of parts. The distance and activity of fun at Lynch’s parties are made visible by the faces of speechless outsiders who, as attendees, serve as guides, portals, or spectators to 427 Later in the film, Tommy kills a made-man, Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) for “making fun” of him, or making him and others aware of his lowly place in the mob world. Tommy’s act subsequently leads to his own murder, another re-organization based on who can laugh at whom. 286 sometimes hideous, twisted, and dreamlike forms and folds of amusement. Like the viewer, these characters are strangers at these gatherings; they are brought there by force, happenstance, or otherwise unwittingly. Classical shot-reverse-shot structure and extreme close-up framing, which frequently cuts from long shots of the party’s fun back to the outsider’s face and reaction to fun, reflect intra- party lines and what can be considered Lynch’s topographies of fun. For Gilles Deleuze, this variety of close-up displays the face’s more static “reflecting surface,” on its “two poles” (the other is characterized by what he calls “intensive micro-movements” or the more explosive gestures of paroxysm). 428 Deleuze says that the face’s reflecting surface pole exhibits the interval, gap, or in-between that follows the subject’s perception of stimuli and precedes their action to or because of it, creating a moment in a film that “tear[s] the image away from spatio-temporal co-ordinates in order to call forth the pure affect as the expressed.” 429 Following Deleuze’s account of the reflective face, the impact of Lynch’s close-ups at his parties serves to dislocate the scene’s proper place within filmic space and time—it is as if the film came to a standstill through the face and its witnessing fun, as if through the party a part separated itself from the very body and narrative of the film, enacting a type of film or singular moment within the film proper, a film inside and outside of the larger work, perhaps “an interstitial place without place.” For Deleuze, this displacement is unquantifiable because the face in this state, the face that reflects, transmits only the quality of the character’s “processing”; between perception and before an intended action, the face that watches Lynch’s parties is completely consumed in the process or 428 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 88. 429 Ibid., 96. 287 processing of fun. The reflective face is distinguished by its association with what Deleuze calls “wonder,” a word that in Difference and Repetition is connected to a “fundamental encounter” with someone or something prior to its identification, recognition, and assimilation. 430 The reflective face is therefore caught, trapped, or immobilized in the act of registering something absolutely foreign; it displays the moment prior to judgment and making sense, and thus, in this sort of suspension or neutralization, it appears vulnerable and undone—it is exposed by its temporary inability to diagnose and master the unimaginable. Lynch’s fun-deprived are parties of one, parties within parties; their faces speak only of the partitions, parts, and unassimilable portions that make any party and its fun possible. They are there at a distance from fun, outside-in, inside-out, looking-within from without, in wonder, enraptured. Faced with fun: from the revelers who drunkenly ascend into John Merrick’s quarters and force him to partake in their fun (kissing, drinking, and dancing) in Elephant Man, to Jeffrey Baumount’s (Kyle MacLachlan) descent into the kitschy interior of Ben’s (Dean Stockwell) place in Blue Velvet and the latter’s infamous “Candy Colored Clown” performance (figure 14a); from Sailor (Nicholas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) in Wild at Heart (1990) and their introduction to the inhabitants of Big Tuna, Texas, including the supposed rocket scientist, Bosey Spool (Jack Nance) and his invisible dog, the porno shoot or strip show happening just next door, and finally, the uber-villain Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) with his rotting gums, to Donna Hayward (Moria Kell), Laura Palmer’s best friend, and the access she provides to 430 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repitition, translated by Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004),176. For the link between the cinematc close-up/reflective face and wonder/the fundamental encounter I am indebted to Richard Rushton, “What Can A Face Do? : On Deleuze and Faces,” Cultural Critque 51 (Spring 2002): 219-237. 288 Laura’s secret world of prostitution, drug use, and exhibitionism in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Unlike Lynch’s other fun-deprived characters, Donna takes her exclusion from Laura’s world as a challenge to prove her worth to her friend as somebody “fun.” As Donna finally surrenders to and partakes in the drunken and drugged “fun” at the Pink Room, Laura’s position within fun is immediately compromised as she assumes the role of an observer looking-in (figure 14b). This reversal shows that for Lynch fun’s perception depends on a certain distance from it; the limit-condition of fun cannot be grasped from within. In Lost Highway, Fred Madison meets the grinning Mystery Man (Robert Blake) at Andy’s (Michael Massee) house party. Not only does this encounter further solidify Fred’s solitude at the party, but also shows him to be homeless and dispossessed by what he supposedly possesses. The Mystery Man’s phone call puts him simultaneously at the party with Fred and in Fred’s home (here and there, party and parti), wherein he claims to have been invited, as if he were a welcomed guest. This uncanniness estranges Fred from what appears to be his “property” (such as his home and his wife) and his proper self; he is more than one, and thus no longer anyone. At home, Fred Madison disappears into another inside himself, and this other, unknown or unnamed “Fred” has received The Mystery Man inside where Fred Madison resides as someone else, himself. In Mulholland Dr. Diane’s hope for rekindling her relationship with Camilla (Laura Harring) shatters at the dinner party where we learn that she has always lived in Camilla’s shadow; the latter’s climb and success in Hollywood has mirrored Diane’s obvious mediocrity. To make matters more unbearable, Diane’s invitation has not come as sign for her reconciliation with Camille, but as request to 289 witness and celebrate the announcement of what appears to be latter’s engagement to director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) (figure 14c). In descending order, Figures 14a, 14b, and 14c. Parties facing fun. Beyond the myriad differences between feature-length films and music videos, the events and fun of “Crazy Clown Time” are distinguished from the patterns of Lynch’s other parties through its ostensible lack of an identified and identifiable outsider. There is 290 no visible witness of fun at a distance, no definable partition besides the backyard walls. From this viewpoint, everything in this world is inside fun, every partygoer is in on the joke, all are “laughing-with” and interior to the sheer totality of fun. For his part, Lynch seems to support this reading when he tells Moretti that “for this bunch, this is what they call fun.” 431 Notwithstanding Lynch’s undecidable place within the diegesis as both creator and participant/witness, the only apparent outsider at this party seems to be the viewer. She seems to be the only one who remains at a distance and a place from which judgments of “Crazy Clown Time” can be passed; she is the one who is brought to or arrives at this party and witnesses its fun. The viewers of “Crazy Clown Time” are extras in the scene; they are unnamed, unheard, and unseen characters, perhaps disregarded or unaccepted onlookers who remain on the other side of the fun threshold. Observing from such a remove that they are rendered invisible and out-of-frame, viewers are left looking in on a “bunch” that calls this, whatever it is, fun. And yet, a short YouTube tube clip posted by Sunday Best Recordings entitled, “David Lynch-Crazy Clown Time (Making Of)” alludes to the possibility of another reading. In “behind-the-scenes” style, the video features Lynch directing “Crazy Clown Time” and interacting with the actors. At one point in the video, he yells at the cast: “This is not a fun night! All of you are filled with a kind of crazy anger. You’re trying to have fun… It’s like you’re crazy!” 432 Clearly, these words complicate assumptions of “Crazy Clown Time” as pure fun, but remain consistent with Lynch’s steadfast avoidance of assigning one true meaning to any of his works. In this case, the characters are stuck by 431 David Lynch, “David Lynch on Partying.” 432 “David Lynch—Crazy Clown Time (Making Of),” YouTube video, 1:49, posted by sundaybestrecordings, April 9, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zx3Ei0ObQo. 291 the limits of fun and their party line; perhaps they are attempting to get inside another party besides their own, into another inaccessible realm of fun. They are somewhere between total fun and its complete absence, agitated by the party over there or over here. “Filled with a kind of crazy anger,” and so a kind of fun-madness or a fun fever, they are unable or unwilling to escape the confines of the backyard and the fun that it encloses and allows. Despite their attempts, they cannot turn this party into fun. Their fun, or the absence of it, is an absolute party in the sense that everything dissolves, breaks apart, fissures, and disunites; each quest for fun, each name and action, is overpowered and restrained by some monstrous party elsewhere or to come that harbors the fulfillment of fun. And yet, in the end, perhaps this is what this bunch calls fun. Perhaps the pain or suffering caused by a radical absence of the conventions of fun catalyzes a certain pleasure that can assume the place of a certain fun; perhaps the inability to “have fun” and the stress wrought by such an incapacity is perversely delightful and even fun (“Nobody says, ‘let’s have a party so we can relieve some stress,” says Lynch). Fun would thus occur precisely through experiencing the sublimity of its absence. And so, fun is oppressive, stressful, and traumatic—it’s crazy. This characterization of fun recalls Nietzsche’s comments on festivals and celebrations and the history of suffering that continues to mark it. In short, Nietzsche recognizes that the “parties” of the past were often organized around scenes and spectacles of punishment and cruelty; according to him, a specter or a whiff of this cruelty can still be found in even the most solemn or celebratory gatherings. 433 Parties, in this way, contain or gesture towards a tradition of 433 See: Fredrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 292 cruelty and practices of suffering and/or seeing another suffer, which serve the purpose of pleasing attending onlookers and establishing memory through ritual and/or tradition. As Derrida remarks in The Death Penalty, “one doesn’t laugh at the festival [as described by Nietzsche], one isn’t having fun; one suffers and causes suffering in order to take pleasure.” 434 Lynch’s take on tradition would here activate the cruel festivals of the past in the most ubiquitous and quotidian parties of today; these festivals are parties wherein “one doesn’t laugh” and have fun in the conventional sense of mirth and joy, but nonetheless receives pleasure or a type of psychical reimbursement from witnessing suffering or suffering oneself. But just who or what is suffering in and with “Crazy Clown Time?” Is the viewer taking a cruel pleasure in watching Lynch’s characters’ attempts to party and have fun? Or are the partygoers reveling in their own incapacity and suffering like the sadomasochists that they seem to be? Just who or what isn’t having fun in the perverted sense of the word? In his interview with Lynch, Moretti asks if the clown in “Crazy Clown Time” relates to a chapter from Lynch’s book on Transcendental Meditation, Catching the Big Fish, entitled “The Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit.” The chapter’s title, as Lynch writes, serves as a metaphor for the typical array of negative emotions, such as anxiety, depression, and anger, that can inhibit one’s pursuit of tranquility, happiness, and creativity. “It’s suffocating and that rubber stinks,” Lynch says of the suit, which he later adds can be “dissolved” through “meditating and diving within.” 435 Rather than directly responding to Moretti’s question with a simple “yes” or “no,” Lynch redirects the subject 434 Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol.1, 149 (emphasis added). 435 Lynch, Catching Big Fish, 7. 293 to explore the clown trope. He notes that “clowns were meant really make kids happy, and there’s, you know, a feeling to a lot clowns—circus clowns—that actually produces fear in the kids, or some kind of anxiety.” 436 While Lynch’s comments skirt the long tradition of clowns as adult mischief-makers, never totally removed from evil or darkness, his response to Moretti hijacks or deflects another request for decoding into a discourse on or about meaning and intention. 437 His remarks repeat the misguided assumption that clowns originated as a way to entertain and humor children, and that they since become wicked and/or menacing figures. The point here is not to chide Lynch for his mischaracterization of clowns. Instead, it is indicate that he, even when he is factually wrong, challenges his readers, viewers, and/or listeners to ask what is not, at least partially, “funny” in the world. It is as if Lynch’s project and discourse about it always returns to the same questions: Who or what is immune to internal difference? Who or what is not, in the end, “curious, queer, odd, [or] strange?” Perhaps Lynch’s cinema, of which “Crazy Clown Time” is certainly a part, does little else than utter this question through its silences and wordless gaps. Taciturnity, deferral, brevity, and/or the refusal to produce quick and easy answers in a world that increasingly demands or expects them invents funny rhythms in that very world, rhythms that are already there comprising that which one names with the term “the world.” In their funniness, these rhythms often pass by unheard. If perceived, they are oddly recognizable, uncanny, and bizarre through their familiarity, at once of the world and otherworldly. Funny rhythms estrange the world 436 Lynch and Moretti, “David Lynch on Twitter, Partying & Being Free.” 437 For more on the longtstanding tradition of not-so-innocent clowns, and especially the designation “coulrophobia” as the clinical or pathological fear that they evoke, see Andrew McConnell Stott, “Clowns on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Dickens, Coulrophobia, and the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 12, no. 4 (2012): 3–25. 294 from itself as and through a kind of world music. They are there, always more than one: a sound, a scream, a sort of silence, words, an ear, burrows, holes. 295 CONCLUSION Il faut qu’il reste cela… In all likelihood, Jacques Derrida would have never produced a written work on or about cinema. In contrast to other topics or tropes—such as the question of the animal, ethicopolitics, sovereignty, and religion, to name just a few—that were interspersed throughout his early publications and to which he returned and developed at-length later in his life, it seems safe to assume, and it bears repeating, that cinema was not on the horizon as a project to come. This dissertation does not therefore presume to be the completion of Derrida’s “unfinished project,” nor the realization of some partially formed idea. The reasons for this are clear. As I point out in the introduction, Derrida, without a hint of hesitation, tells Antoine de Baecque and Theirry Jousse in “Cinema and Its Ghosts” that movies offer him a momentary respite from the pressures of work as travail; he describes the cinema as a haven where he can partake in certain voyeuristic pleasures and be entertained in a childish manner along with the masses. “This is what it must remain” (“Il faut qu’il reste cela”), he says. 438 And so, while the preceding study demonstrates the significance of cinema in Derrida’s oeuvre, the timeliness of deconstructive thought for contemporary film and media studies, as well as the contours of his hypothetical film theory, cinema remains, it must remain, an important, if unfillable, gap in his corpus, an absence that will not have been a coincidence. Writing critically about cinema, as Derrida suggests in his interview 438 Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” translated by Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37, nos. 1-2 (2015): 25. 296 with Cahiers du cinéma, annuls its cathartic, special effects. In order for Derrida’s cinema to remain just that—for one to consider his cinema in a way that is proper to the traces that it has left—it must remain somewhat resistant to its own theorization or projection; to speculate on the traces of Derrida’s cinema not only requires one to accept and embrace its non-arrival as a certain “structuring absence,” but also that the very impossibility of its arrival remarks its singularity. One must remain with something both unaccounted for and, in Derrida’s view, unaccountable—as if a viewer seated in a dark theater after the end of a film, before the raising of the house lights, still entranced by what appeared on the screen, and comfortably at a loss to explain or make sense of it. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Holland, Timothy (author)

Core Title The traces of Jacques Derrida's cinema

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies)

Publication Date 11/06/2017

Defense Date 10/21/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cahiers du cinéma,Cinema,deconstruction,film studies,film theory,Jacques Derrida,OAI-PMH Harvest,Philosophy,post-structuralism,spectrality

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Kamuf, Peggy (committee member)

Creator Email tholland@usc.edu,trobholland@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-197031

Unique identifier UC11278124

Identifier etd-HollandTim-4016.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-197031 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HollandTim-4016.pdf

Dmrecord 197031

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Holland, Timothy

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA