Point of View: Ida

 It’s her eyes. In Ida (Pawel Pawilkowski, 2014), the novitiate’s eyes do not drink in the world so much as courageously remain open as the world pours into them. In cinematography reminiscent of Bergman, Bresson, and Kurosawa for its exquisite use of light and what I can only call its distant intimacy, the camera peers at Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) looking. We see her eyes over and again, large disks that barely betray any distinction between pupil and iris so that they seem to be two caverns opened onto the perplexities of Socialist Poland. And also onto the perplexities of her own biography. An orphaned convent girl just learning that she was born neither Anna nor Christian, Ida slowly absorbs the horrible violence that enshrouds her survival and her almost-relationship with her Aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), whose perpetual cigarette smoke and drunken stupors function as objective correlates of that shrouding history. Ida looks through the smoke and booze, or better, she looks aside from them, in what (riffing off of Berlant’s “juxtapolitical”) we might call a “juxtareligious” gaze. I cannot find a still of the very opening of the film, when Anna is millimeters away from the face of a statue of Jesus, an unblinking face that she (re)paints unblinkingly, as if her very relationship with God hinges on the intensity of her own gaze. This shot (below) is importantly the same and different; she is here staring openly to receive the latest offering of the world–this time the alto sax player, Lis (Dawid Ogrodnik), with whom any relationship must be framed (as here in the mirror) as partial at best.

The juxtareligious gaze is silent and inquisitive, neither submissive nor assertive. Anna-Ida is “taking as long as necessary”, as her Mother Superior mandates, not to judge the world or see God in the world, but simply to see, to see to the side of–not from but not without–her core constitutive Catholic formation.  Most of the film is shot in medium shots and close-ups, grouping the protagonists and other humans in portraiture-like arrangements (think Hopper as much as Rembrandt) with the occasional long shot provided almost as the relief of space more than as an establishing of scenario. Most of the film is shot in depth, so much so that when Ida is blurred out behind Wanda in the apartment complex, the effect is almost to remind me that this is a film and not a series of paintings. A few extreme long shots form the exceptions to filming within the human ambit. Two of these are high-angled and all of them seem to me to highlight the pathetically puny stature and consequence of humanity vis-à-vis the hugeness of God, the gaze of eternity that absorbs more than Ida’s own two disks, and redeems what it sees.

  That Ida’s gaze is neither submissive nor assertive does not compute to Ida herself avoiding this dichotomy. Yes, she acts and submits…and acts. I warrant the final sequence will generate ink enough without my spoiling it here with analysis. Suffice it to say that the power of this sequence, too, is in the difference of the gaze of both camera and girl. Perhaps for those who have gazed long into eternity, the offer of “you know, life,” is not quite enough.

 

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Bread-Making and Merleau-Pontyan Structure

Those of you who are bread-makers understand the affective compulsion and cognitive satisfaction of good bread making: it is like and unlike the body-zone of writing a very good paragraph or playing a Mozart quartet with very good friends. The work of elements or the elements of the work are both mine and not mine, both under my control and fundamentally exceeding my control. There is a science to this bread making, which I confess I enjoy knowing of without ever quite having learned. Take, for instance, the joy and tedium of kneading. I know that at some point the yeast and gluten develop enough to tip the structure of the rolling mass under my fingers into something else, something now called bread dough. I know this because I feel it about ten minutes into the kneading; I feel a subtle but distinct change. More, I know that even after this change I need to keep kneading for a bit. Not too long, but long enough—according to its feel. This knowing and feeling are not particular cognitive or affective states; they are not distinct. The zone of bread making dissolves consciousness into the sticky glob, wafts yeasty floury smells into my pores, sends my fingers out to catch escaping bulgur grains and fold them back into the mass, and sets my feet and legs and hips circling in a rhythm of response to the sort of living breathing thing before me.

I could talk about this experience as a kind of tacit knowledge, and I could discuss it through a detailed chemical analysis, but I’d rather explain it as structural. In his 1942 book, Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty sought a path between critical philosophy (Kant) and scientific naturalism (particularly behavioral psychologists). He writes in a dense and floppy way about bodies and consciousness and things as three “dialectics” in constant circulation.

For instance he notes that “the phenomenal body must be a center of actions which radiate over a ‘milieu’” (157), a phrase that posits the body as at once focused and diffused.

Earlier in the text he writes against mechanical causality, noting that, “Reactions [of a ‘body’ to an ‘environment’] are not therefore a sequence of events; they carry within themselves an immanent intelligibility. Situation and reaction are linked internally by their common participation in a structure in which the mode of activity proper to the organism is expressed. Hence they cannot be placed one after the other as cause and effect: they are two moments of a circular process” (130, bold added).

Later he clarifies that “physical laws do not furnish an explanation of the structure, they represent explanation within the structures” (192). Cause and effect are already rather derivative forms of receiving and perceiving the phenomenal world.

Near the very end of his text, MMP posits consciousness as often so sunk into the structure that gives rise to it that it is indiscernible from what (I think) Raymond Williams will later term “structure of feeling”, that is, as an affective economy that is, as Williams writes, “the thought of feeling and the feeling of thought”:

“Consciousness can live in existing things without reflection, can abandon itself to their concrete structure, which has not yet been converted into expressible signification; certain episodes of its [consciousness’s] life, before having been reduced to the condition of available memories and inoffensive objects, can imprison its liberty by their [these episodes’] proper inertia, shrink its perception of the world, and impose stereotypes on behavior; likewise, before having conceptualized our class or our milieu, we are that class or that milieu” (222).

In a similar way, I am the bread that I am making. And it, I suppose, is me.

All of which is to say that one of the fundamental problems with the OOO turn to the things themselves is that they assume things. They assume things exist. They assume a separability of things that, by MMP’s phenomenology, only arises in and through structures of existence, structures that give rise not only to the physical laws that explain and constrain things, but also give rise to the consciousnesses that diligently insist on their fundamental “withdrawal” from human consciousness. The yeast, the dough, its smell, and my cognizance of its yeasty mutations—all of this, by MMP, arises out of a structure that forms a milieu within which my consciousness and body emerge as conduits of phenomenal experience.

Cvetkovich and The Kingsman: On the Archive

Matthew Vaughn’s recent release, Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), is primarily a big-screen excuse for special effects. But in one rapidly narrated scene the film gestures to the founding of the Kingsman organization, or better put, the scene narrates the founding of an organization with a gesture that becomes its archive. In doing so, this rather forgettable film can serve to reveal the interconnections of myth, ritual, physical space, coded initiation practices, and forceful ascesis (technologies of self) that inhere in the production, sustenance, and use of any archive.

The words are simple: Harry Hart (Colin Firth) tells his working class charge, Eggsy Unwin (Taron Edgerton) that the Kingsman was begun by a generation of wealthy British industrialists who lost their sons in World War I. Not being able to archive their own lives through the ‘natural’ process of grandbabies and financial inheritance, these men decided to pool their great wealth to found an institution that would fight for global justice. The absurdity of this Hollywood story notwithstanding, the gesture is a salient reminder that archives require a bittersweet combination of social status and existential loss. Archives, first of all, require money, and such large or reliable flows of money arise either from a kind of quantitative social density or from a hard won social recognition. Second, it seems to me an archive coalesces only when the filaments of social regard come to thread around a loss or trauma that stands out of joint with that social status. In the silly example of the Kingsman, the hegemonic language of war-time sacrifice and national pride simply cannot seam over or redeem or lighten the particular tragedy born by each mother and father faced with the death of each particular son. Grief, loss, and tragedy: a set of affective markers out of step with the entitlement and ease usually enjoyed by the wealthy.

The Kingsman founding narrative is related when Harry takes Eggsy through the dressing room wall to the bowels of the Kingsman headquarters. It is an image that cites a thousand mythic portals, from Alice’s looking glass to the wardrobe entrance to Narnia, and from Aragorn entering the door of the dead to Harry Potter’s entrance to Diagon Alley. Here is a world that is both continuous and discontinuous from the everyday world: both here and not here, both tangible and askew. Archives, too, instantiate a space apart—what Foucault called heterotopias—and the simultaneously rich and casual textures, decor, smells, colors, and structures of access within archival spaces differentiate them affectively and phenomenologically from museum spaces. The point of an archive is not simply to collect and represent, but to mythically (perhaps nostalgically) instantiate the past in a way that makes it viable, still, again, for the present.

I have raised the bogeyman of nostalgia, but nostalgia does not have to be merely sentimental or reactive. In Kingsman, the agents each take on the code name of one of King Arthur’s knights. Harry Hart is, of course, Galahad, the knight of purity and gallantry. But the agents clearly are not “re-enacting” the Arthurian legends, nor do they think of themselves as somehow bringing the best of the “past” wholesale into the present. The nostalgic framing of Kingsman—its Arthurian tonality, its commitment to gentlemanly dress, diction, and manners—is instead a way of ritually weaving together what Cvetkovich calls “the structures of affect that constitute cultural experience” (An Archive of Feelings, 11). An active or generative nostalgia marks the subculture of Kingsman as distinctive, elite, and effective, and I’d submit it threads the affective economy (Ahmed) of all archives.

 Cvetkovich notes in An Archive of Feelings that she attends to publics that “are hard to archive because they are lived experiences, and the cultural traces that they leave are frequently inadequate to the task of documentation” (AF, 9). But it does seem to me that these are always the sorts of publics that generate archives, so long as someone somewhere also generates the financial resources to build the architectural, spatial and ritual borders around the loves and losses that ache to be remembered through them.

 

 

Liquid Form: Braidotti and Huffer

When Rosi Braidotti visited Syracuse University a couple of weeks ago, her presence during her lecture and morning workshop stirred up and drenched those in attendance. Like hanging out on the beach during a summer thunderstorm, the events were beautiful, elemental, and felt slightly dangerous in their chaotic spin. Braidotti speaks in blocs of becoming that sprawl rhizomatically. At dinner after her lecture she was asked how she approaches the task of such a lecture and she replied quite concretely. She writes out a paper, she noted, but then memorizes various small “blocs”, each of which can unfold into another “bloc” in variously nonlinear ways. The movements between the blocs are what seemed, to me, the rhizomatic becoming of her speaking. But within these blocs of becoming, Rosi noted, she takes conscientious lines of escape—detours that are inspired by the bodily presence of the audience itself. A number of heads nodding in reference to a certain book will galvanize more comments, while blank stares will push her on to another reference, a different example.

Here is intellectual production subordinated to the dazzle of performance and the intimacy of pedagogy. Braidotti’s lectures feel like a rollercoaster, a lightning storm, sledding down a high and crowded hill because instead of a linear argument she has building blocks that she tosses up and out and adjusts according to the audience’s material affective signals that they are with her (or not).

I could have wished that the more intimate morning workshop on her book, The Posthuman had practiced a different style. We were twenty around the table, faculty and graduate students, each with a copy of her book and our notepads and pens poised to register the profundity that can come from inquiry at close proximity. But Rosi appears to have only one public style of address (dinner conversation and tête-à-têtes are quite different encounters). It was engulfing and thrilling (again) but also slightly sad to me. I wanted her to let her performance guard down and become feminist with us in discursive solidarity. She is, I must say, a scholar vehemently committed to politics as ordinary and on the ground and to solidarity at all levels of personal engagement. It was only a tempo of quiet exchange that I missed, at least in her public (paid) obligations. Perhaps that tempo is the uncommodified for her, the site of zoë transversal to captured bios.

Lynne Huffer (Mad for Foucault, Are Lips a Grave?) visited Syracuse University just last weekend. Her lecture on “Strange Eros” was oozing with intelligent and sensitive analysis, respectfully bringing the audience into the ambit of her thinking by gently referring to and contextualizing her extant work, and then challenging us by her calm press into new areas of thought, new vocabularies and the juxtaposition (or juxtapolitics) of Foucault’s work on Eros with Anne Carson’s 2010 eulogy to her dead brother, Nox. Far from a rollercoaster or lightning storm, attending Huffer’s lecture was like getting pulled into a Kurosawa film with its stunning attention to framing, light, wind, and sound. It was affectively captivating. It was elegant and beautiful. Huffer ran her own technological feats, which kept her body static behind the technology station of the lecture hall, but during Q&A she sidled around and opened her mindbodywords to the audience. Braidotti responded to questions with more set pieces, I think, but Huffer gave us the gift of watching a beautiful mind think spontaneously, with all the risk and vulnerability that entails.

Both thinkers attend to form in the presentation of thought, and both forms flow.