Vilem Flusser – SJField – OCA Level Three Study Blog

From page 42 of the course folder:

A: Is there anything you feel compelled to do at this point in your work but you can’t figure out exactly how it will fit into your project? Talk to your tutor or write about it – perhaps it’s a change of direction.

B: Would you be comfortable using opportunistic encounters to create your art? In your view, has Calle been deceitful or intrusive in creating the works discussed here? How would you defend or criticise her approach?

I read in another student’s blog they had decided to leave CS aside for the moment and concentrate on the making. This worked well for that student. I, however, have done the opposite – certainly, in terms of images although I have concentrated on the ‘writings’ which I am likely to include in BOW (I do not like the word poems). Even so, one of the most challenging things with CS & BOW is doing them both together. And, I have really needed to understand – as best I can – some immensely complex ideas. So, the time taken to unpick these has been valuable and necessary – but I have reached a point where I really do need to start making imagery. However, when someone asked me what my subject was, I couldn’t give a concrete answer. (Not sure I can yet but perhaps getting there).
One of the first writings I pulled together was Orpheus in Homebase. At that point, I realised Consumerism was very much on my mind. but the work is not simply about that.
Reading the contributing essay’s in Edgar’s Martin Soliloquies book has led to finding some excellent quotations to add to the essay, and the whole book has given me a further understanding of how and why Martins’ is using multiple sources, which I feel compelled to do. I attempted to do this in A2 but for the submission, settled on a much simpler single series (original) to include although always with the idea that I might include that mini-series within the larger project – using multiple sources.
I will write up notes elsewhere but the following from Martins’ book is key and sums up my own intentions very well:
Roger Luckhurst (academic, writer, literature and science fiction) describes how Martins’ uses found, original, vintage, and parallel projects to ‘derail the over-coherence any series or display or exhibition or book inevitably imposes, fighting to keep the grid of meaning open, defying the dread determinism of the forensic field’ (2016: 118) This reminds me of Robert Wilson’s intentions to keep meaning open, to explore and even embrace ‘the terror’ rather than comfort his audience with trite reassurances. ‘I try to open up, not narrow down meaning’ (Holmberg, 1996: 7)
I have been trying to find ways of doing the above since UVC and not really understanding why – until recently when I think it has started to become clearer. Such experiments were sometimes received positively by OCA tutor guidance, but other times not so much. I see in photography (but not in some avant-garde theatre) a desire for simplicity and a rejection of complexity, which irritates me. It’s true, experimental attempts can be less successful when the outcome comes across as so incoherent there is nothing to grab hold of. (And I’m not saying my failed attempts were, in fact, anything other than that.) But there is something in academic photography that is stilted, conservative, and yes, ‘boring’ – which I find stultifying, overly myopic (ironically for a medium that is all about seeing) and smug. John Tagg talks about photography’s ‘fixity’ in his video on the cabinet and the Victorian desire to categorise and appoint value into the system (2011) – and it seems to me that photography is so mired in this urge – a systemic, ontologically encapsulated motivation, that it becomes almost impossible to avoid. And that even when photographers claim to be addressing the system by making work which is meant to query, unpick or criticise elements within the system, they invariably can’t help but confirm and reinforce the very thing they want to dismantle. (see Flusser 2012) I think Martins’ – and others such as Edmund Clark, Clare Strand and Joan Jonas, all people who work across mediums, are putting themselves in a good position to avoid the traps that working with an inherently isolating/othering medium sets for artists. These artists, to a greater or lesser degree, create rhizome-like systems of work which can respond to spaces or platforms as necessary, using multiple devices and materials. A single project might contain work from other projects and also appear in books, videos, galleries and online – and in each space it will be different and appropriate to the situation.
Indeterminism is the heart of reality, so Carlo Rovelli tells us (2016). We little humans can’t stand that. We want certaintity. We want fixity. Indeterminism terrifies us. Contemporary fluidity terrifies us (as well it might when utilised and taken advantage of by badly motivated actors).
The ‘habit of the Cartesian mind’ (Barad, 2007) dominates our consciousness and perception. This is something we humans need to begin to understand – that the habit is constructed and therefore it is possible to deconstruct it. We are in some ways beginning to embody it but without consciousness/cognisance. What informs this habit and the underlying and ‘intra-active’ processes that are emerging today (and have been for a century) are the impetus of my evolving project.
Wendy M said when I was doing S&O, think of what you want to say and say it. I have summarised my key statement in an earlier post – STOP CATEGORISING ME!! That’s at the heart of what I want to say. And then, from that springs a whole range of other topics which we cannot ignore – there is an urge to encourage others to consider the ‘habit of the Cartesian mind’ which spreads out and can be applied to anything and everything from feminism to economics to climate change to migration. By writing the small texts I hope to trigger thoughts and questions assumptions.
By refusing to work in the usual way – i.e. the Cartesian way (which is so often tautological) and embracing context, intra-action, relation, emergence and rejecting discrete isolated objects, I hope to address those assumptions. (I genuinely have nightmares about how this will be received by OCA assessors!)
The way I’ve been doing this to date is to write – and the themes that have emerged are as stated above consumerism (the modern religion) and mythology and ‘the simulation‘ (i.e. the spectacle, the panoply of visual and aural – moving – realities we live with and as). These are not singular nor are they isolated. They are intra-active and relational. They are lively and rhizome-like.
Finally, Martins manages to explore similar subjects through the doorway of ‘death’ and in particular violent suicide. At the moment I think my overriding subject is Entanglement and I am not sure that is as potent or direct. As mentioned the idea of the ‘agential cut’ and therefore ‘Cut’ and its various usages may serve as the title. The idea of lits of little micro-narratives in the form of the writings leads to me thinking about using ‘notes for a short story‘ or a variation on that as the subtitle persists in my mind. But I am aware it’s a bit nebulous for now – although this nebulousness is crucial to the message too.

B – Sophie Calle

I wrote about Sophie Calle during S&O (2017). It’s not really relevant or helpful for me at this point to cover her stalking or revelatory process again. But she is an interdisciplinary artist so a useful reference in that sense. I would, however, point to Sylvere Lotringer’s comments on revealing all in our capitalist culture – see Overexposed (2007) but will leave it to others to consider whether Calle is critiquing this aspect of our society or not by engaging in it. It’s interesting, however, to compare her to Lortinger’s ex-wife Chris Kraus who wrote I Love Dick (1997) and the comments about Calle being ‘exploitative, invasive, silly if not simply crazy,’ (Shilling, 2011) – sexist or accurate or double standards? (Think of the many, many violent and sick broken men out there whose behaviour continues unabated and excused constantly by a complicit society …)

Field, SJ. (2017) Self & Other Sophie Calle WordPress [blog] Available at: https://ocasjf.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/artist-sophie-calle/ (Accessed 03/01/2020)

Holmberg, A. (2004) The theatre of Robert Wilson. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.

Lotringer, S. (2007) Overexposed: perverting perversions. Los Angeles : Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by The MIT Press.

Martins, E. et al. (2016) Siloquies and soliloquies on death, life and other interludes. (1st ed.) Portugal: The Mothhouse.

Shilling, M. (2017). The Fertile Mind of Sophie Calle. The New York Times. [online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/t-magazine/sophie-calle-artist-cat-pregnant.html?_r=0 [Accessed 30 Apr. 2017].

While doing UVC in 2016, I was asked to look at Rhetoric of the Image and talk about a couple of advertisements, relating them to Barthes’ ideas. It’s really interesting to look back, as the examples I explored were to do with the yet-to-be-held referendum. Barthes’ style is so opaque at times, I am still not sure if I was making the right sort of connections, but I don’t think I’d change much of what I said as I view my blog in retrospect, with three years of history between the time I wrote it and today.

A slight diversion from Barthes’ essay but relevant and perhaps linked to another of his well-known essays: It’s interesting I picked up on the tautology in the advert – it seems to me (in my personal and most likely biased view) that Brexit and tautology are very closely related. “A vote is a vote” in the advert seems like a forerunner to “Brexit is Brexit”. Do we really need to be told a word means a word? Why must political ideas all be reduced to meaningless empty circular straplines? Does this negate meaning or invert it? Is the advertising industry guilty of dumbing us all down to such an extent, that we really are only capable of hearing and taking on board – ‘Apple means Apple’. See my Notes on Myth Today (1957) “Tautology – An ugly thing. One takes refuge in tautology as one does in fear, or anger, or sadness. Tautology creates a dead motionless world. See my blog post for Project 1 – Operation Black Vote advert” (Field, 2016)
From: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/25/eu-referendum-poster-minority-ethnic-voters (24/06/19)
Looking at the advert I originally, critiqued, I am also struck by the dreadful stereotypes it perpetuates. This is hardly surprising, given the advertising industry tends to be populated by people who might never have met anyone who exists outside their quite narrow circles. We must all fit into neat little boxes and woe-betide anyone who can’t. There is no space for anyone ill-fitting in the post-post-modern digital archive of consumers out of which our current reality is forced.
I have been stuck these last few years by how ignorant of others less fortunate than them, even the most well-meaning people can be. Friends who work in or near Whitehall might have the best ‘liberally’ minded intentions but simply have no idea of the suffering that is actually taking place in this country, of what drove people to vote against the ruling classes in 2016. The UK still seems shackled to a ruling class, many of whom are the great-grandchildren of those who ruled in centuries gone by. That British people aren’t more shocked by this is incredible. That people don’t see it or question it is extraordinary. However, I think and hope more and more people will be less satisfied and more incredulous by that reality, as social media reveals the extraordinary levels of incompetence amongst our rulers. Myths are being upended by social media, but sadly at the same time, new myths are being constructed. We are in a state of chaos and flux.
Yesterday, I saw Andy Holden’s Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape (2011-2016). In it, Holden compares Capitalism to a cartoon character who runs off the cliff but has no idea of the danger until it becomes conscious and then collapses. He likens this to the banking collapse but that might be seen as one wave in a succession of waves, to come. Perhaps society is becoming conscious of the myths we have lived with – what will it take to up-end them, or are they in the most horrific way upending themselves? The hivemind is far more complex than we understand – as a group, we do not seem able to take control of events until they have run their course, no matter how horrific or vile we understand them to be.

Some notes of my most recent reading of Rhetoric of the Image:

The Linguistic message

Linguists, we are told, were suspicious of the linguistic nature of the image. Surely, this can’t the case anymore as people use images and emoticons to communicate more and more, perhaps even usurping text. (33) See page 11 of Derrida’s Grammatology (tr. Spivak, 2016)… “[the] nonfortuitous conjunction of cybernetics and the ‘human sciences’ of writing leads to a more profound reversal”.)
Images and text, he states, are ‘antipathetic’ to lived experience. (33) Douglas Crimp also touches on this in The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, which I looked at previously. Again, Derrida writes “In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things, reflecting pools and images, an infinite reflection, from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring.” I wonder if this is why we’ve reached this place where tautology rules. We are just so far removed from the origin through layers and layers of representation – we cannot find it anymore.
Barthes then begins by staying he will use adverts to explain himself as meaning is intentional and frank. The signifiers are “full, formed, with a view to the optimum reading” (34) Barthes’ might have been interested to see the following adverts...

These adverts (regardless of one’s thoughts about the content) are tapping into society’s mistrust of advertising and consequently meaning. As the meaning of advertising signification is now suspected of being false, (and so much more besides) we might question Barthes statement in retrospect. Although unusual, these adverts do not subscribe to Barthes analysis so easily. Meaninglessness is a big issue today – also referred to as ‘fake news’. A century of being manipulated by advertisers might be responsible for this sense of society having been gas-lit, leaving us all in an unstable landscape (like the cartoon landscape of Holden’s film). Images, which can and do invite multiple readings, even with the tyranny of advertising slogans, but which ultimately lie to us have contributed to this.

(Below – my comments are in orange, otherwise quoted from Barthes)

Panzini – French and ‘Italianicity’ Denotational and connotational – in a single sign therefore seen as one message.
Image – not linear, order therefore not important
A return from the market = freshness (despite the dried and tinned aspects) and domesticity
Half open bag = shopping around for oneself as opposed to the hasty filling up of a more ‘mechanical’ civilisation.
Colour (which we don’t see in the reader) implies Italianicity. Stereotypes (based on the fact this is a French advert selling a product that is supposedly Italian. Is this another example of Tautology or reinforcing a message which has already been stated in the pastiche of a name, again underscoring stereotype of otherness – a different group)
The sign of the still life (nature-morte) – heavily cultural and reflects history of art in the advert (sales, mechanical, mass produced)
“A message without a code”? see below
The Panzini photograph/advert offers three messages – The linguistic message and two iconoc messages which Barthes’s suggest – we might have the right to separate: the perceptual message, and the cultural message. (Confusion comes about from function of the mass image).
Linguistic message – “today at the level of mass communications, title captain, accompanying press ect… we are still civilisation of writing”. Some suggest we are becoming less and less so – as iconic signs are used to advertise very well known brands more often than ever. (However, for now, at any rate, these images emerge from written code (the computer translates to another code which we don’t understand and cannot read and that too is a sequence of symbols))

billboard-ads-part2-25-1

Linguistic sign acts as anchorage and relay – the above images have very little or no writing (which Barthes’ says doesn’t matter, any presence acts as anchorage and relay) I wonder if the power contained within certain corporate non-linguistic signs are so great that it is able to operate as an anchor itself while being read by today’s consumers. If anchorage is control, and certain of its sign then this type of sign is possibly the most self-assured.
All images are polysemous – underlying their signifiers, a floating chain of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others. Polysemy poses a question of meaning and this question always comes through as dysfunction (note the language of Freud).
Societies ‘fix’ the floating signifieds to counter the terror of uncertain signs. Today, it might seem there are too many unfixed signs as we transition from one epoch to whatever is coming next, digital technology perhaps destabilises, the reaction against this (culture war, as it has been termed) is to head backward, to fix things down, to make things certain again. You see this is the rhetoric of Make America Great Again. A giant, global attempt to fix unstable, ‘flickering signifiers’ (Hayles, 1999). Additionally, all advertising then taps into this terror. Buy this thing and feel safe is the underlying connotated message. Powerful, beautiful, one of the crowd, above the crowd – all of these are second level messages which sit above the initial one – about keeping the ‘terror of uncertain signs’ at bay.
Linguistic signs have the power to suggest, “What goes without saying …” & “What is conspicuous by its absence” (Chandler, loc 1622) Anchorage banishes one possible signified…it acts a counter taboo. Anchorage can be ideological (and Barthes Myth plays a critical part in this), it remote controls, subtle dispatching, certain of its sign. anchorage is control
With respect to the liberty of the signifieds of the image, the text has thus a repressive value and we can see that it is at this level that the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested.

The Denoted Image

Barthes tells us – only the photograph is able to transmit the (literal) information without forming it by means of discontinuous signs and rules of transformation. Drawing is coded he says, i.e. the style of drawing transmits information. But he insists the photograph does not. Again, unless I’m really misinterpreting something, I find this difficult to accept. Photographic decisions, especially today, seem to contain all sorts of social and structural information – but then today’s photographs are more like drawing than ever as various levels of digital manipulation (or decisions to avoid it) impute information about the society – in the same way, perspective in drawing does in the West – and therefore, potentially say a great deal. The expertise and practiced execution of any drawing carry connotation and denote messages too. I cannot see why lighting, sets, film stock (or the digital re-enactment of it) don’t also carry such connotations. I don’t believe that just because something is mechanical, it doesn’t carry a code. In fact, it might carry a very specific code informed by ‘the apparatus’, which is very difficult to shrug off except by experimental photographers who are deliberately finding ways to debate with the code directly, as argued by Vilém Flusser (2000)
I wonder if today, our suspicions of photography negate this argument of Barthes of a photograph being without a code, and especially amongst tech-savvy sophisticated younger readers of images who have grown up with Snapchat and Instagram filters.
If I were to use a Snapchat style image of a woman with animated sparkly bunny rabbit ears in an advert – there are several possible readings (perhaps anchored by an ironic strapline for more sophisticated consumers or else reinforced by one aimed at teens who love that kind of thing) but the structural code is inescapable and only a Martian would find it difficult to read. There are quite specific codes in all of the examples I have included here – the overzealous processing in the Vote is. Vote advert speaks volumes, for instance.

Refs: All accessed 23/24 June 2019

Project 3.1 (b): Rhetoric of the Image

https://stylecaster.com/beauty/vintage-chanel-no-5-ads/#slide-11

http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk/2019/andy-holden-laws-of-motion-in-a-cartoon-landscape/

https://www.boredpanda.com/creative-billboard-ads-2/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/25/eu-referendum-poster-minority-ethnic-voters

Barthes. R (2013) Rhetoric of the Image in Visual Culture: A Reader, London, Open University, Sage Publications; 33-40

Flusser, V. (2000) Towards a Philosophy of PhotographyTrans. Mathews A. (Kindle Edition) London: Reacktion Books

N. K. Hayles. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Tag: Vilem Flusser

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