October 20, 2005
October 17, 2005
October 14, 2005
You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/rbotoole/entry/presentation_of_blogs/
October 07, 2005
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 09:23:22 +0100
Reply-To: "Discussion of J-F-Lyotard, Alain Badiou,the Event"
[THEORY-LYOTARD-BADIOU-EVENT@MAILTALK.AC.UK]
Sender: "Discussion of J-F-Lyotard, Alain Badiou,the Event"
[THEORY-LYOTARD-BADIOU-EVENT@MAILTALK.AC.UK]
From: "sdv@krokodile.co.uk" [sdv@KROKODILE.CO.UK]
Subject: [Fwd: [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: The Rebirth of the Author]
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Sadly the main thing wrong with this analysis is the mistaken idea that the author ever went away.... we tried and hoped to kill the
concept off, but perhaps it was only in the US that the idea was actually thought to be successful ?
I especially enjoyed this quote:
Jean Baudrillard who has pointed the way out. "As for ideas, everyone has them," he has written. "What counts
is the poetic singularity of the analysis. That alone can justify writing, not the wretched critical objectivity of ideas. here will never be any
resolving the contradictoriness of ideas, except in the energy and felicity of language." [9]
enjoy.
s
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: The Rebirth of the Author
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 13:34:55 -0700
From: ctheory@lists.uvic.ca
Reply-To: ctheory@lists.uvic.ca
To: ctheory@lists.uvic.ca
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 28, NO 3
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
1000 Days 016 06/10/2005 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
*************************
1000 DAYS OF THEORY
*************************
_____________________________________________________________________
The Rebirth of the Author
======================================================
~Nicholas Rombes~
Roland Barthes's famous prediction about the death of the author has
come to pass, but not because the author is nowhere, but rather
because she is everywhere.
Indeed, the author has grown and multiplied in direct proportion to
academic dismissals and denunciations of her presence; the more
roundly and confidently the author has been dismissed as a myth, a
construction, an act of bad faith, the more strongly she has emerged.
The recent surge in personal websites and blogs -- rather than
diluting the author concept -- has helped to create a tyrannical
authorship presence, where the elevation of the personal and private
to the public level has only compounded the cult of the author. We
are all authors today. We are all ~auteurs~. We are all writers. We
are all filmmakers. And we are all theorists, because what we make
theorizes itself.
Perhaps it was all a mistake, a terrible act of misreading. Rather
than a serious deconstruction of the author concept, perhaps
Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author" was ironic, a close
relative of Pop Art. After all, while "The Death of the Author"
achieved its widest circulation in the U.S. in its 1977 version in
_Image - Music - Text_, it is perhaps lesser known that the essay had
appeared previously in English in the Fall-Winter 1967 issue of the
avant-garde magazine _Aspen_: "each issue came in a customized box
filled with booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards" and
even a Super-8 film.[1] Contributors included Andy Warhol, John Cage,
Yoko Ono, Hans Richter, Susan Sontag, and others. Barthes's essay --
translated by Richard Howard -- appeared in a double issue (the
Minimalism issue) which explored "conceptual art, minimalist art, and
postmodern critical theory."[2] 1967-68: a serious time shaken by
violence and protest, yes, but also a time of great experimentation
and humor and absurdity. The pleasure of death; jouissance that has
been lost as career academics used Barthes's essay, stripping it out
of its playful dimensions, its at once urgent and resigned
manifesto-like quality.
The problem, now, is easy to see. Whereas Barthes (and others
including Horkheimer and Adorno, Andrew Sarris, Marshall McLuhan,
Robert Ray, Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Lester Bangs, Dick Hebdige,
Antonin Artaud, Richard Hell) offered theories in language that was
playful, slippery, aphoristic, and often poetic, the academics who
subsequently applied their theories often did so in prose that was
deadly dry, pedantic, serious, stripped of the slippages and humor
that made readers want to believe. While scores of academics over
the years have gloomfully attacked Andrew Sarris's Americanized
~auteur~ theory (first published in _Film Culture_ in 1962 as "Notes
on the Auteur Theory in 1962"), they did so by turning their backs
on the lively, self-deprecating qualities of his prose, as evident
in lines like "What is a bad director, but a director who has made
many bad films?" [3] or in lines where he directly addresses the
reader, such as "Dare I come out and say what I think it to be is an
elan of the soul?" [4] Such moments of excess style stand in stark
contrast to the deadly serious, rationalist rhetoric that has
infected so much writing in the humanities as the aesthetic
dimensions of academic writing -- especially in North America --
have been ignored for decades as a surplus with no value. If, as
Craig Saper has noted, "[I]n the academy, auteurism was considered
~passe~ at best" [5] in the wake of poststructuralism, then in
erasing the very personality of their own writing style film
scholars and theorists demoted themselves to a level of invisibility
and even obsolescence. Generations of graduate students trained to
strip all traces of bourgeois personality from their prose awake now
to find that they have no audience for their ideas, because their
ideas have no expressive confidence.
And yet, there is a gradual return to the pleasures of the text, not
as something to be studied merely, but performed. In his preface to a
collection of essays by Malcom Le Grice, Sean Cubitt demonstrates in
his opening paragraph an approach to writing that recognizes that
beauty and power in prose need not be something to hide:
Have we already forgotten? Why we got into this in the first
place? How it was that the moving lights, the washes of colour,
first brought us to this world and thanked us, with their
generous presentation of themselves, for being there with them?
Has the memory faded so radically of those first inklings of
beauty, scattering in all its ungraspable ephemerality across
our skins as much as our eyes, beams traversing and dragging
into motion muscle and bowel, as music drags us to dance? From a
politics of renunciation through an aesthetic of minimalism to a
phenomenology of ecstasy, Le Grice's films return us to a primal
encounter with the physical power of our first perceptions. [6]
Does Cubitt's prose here teeter dangerously close to nostalgia?
Perhaps, but this is a risk that pays off; his preface is a sort of
high-speed relay between content and the rhetorical framing of that
content. Like Dj Spooky -- whose writing is aphoristic and
unexpected, as in lines like "We have machines to repeat history for
us" [7] and "Sampling is like sending a fax to yourself from the
sonic debris of a possible future" [8] -- Cubitt recognizes that
humanities-based academic prose is better served by avoiding the
deadening safety and boredom of so much writing in the social
sciences today.
More than anyone else, it is Jean Baudrillard who has pointed the way
out. "As for ideas, everyone has them," he has written. "What counts
is the poetic singularity of the analysis. That alone can justify
writing, not the wretched critical objectivity of ideas. There will
never be any resolving the contradictoriness of ideas, except in the
energy and felicity of language." [9] Like the author, the ~auteur~
will not die. In fact, rather than discrediting the ~auteur~ theory
by demonstrating that, in fact, movies are made by many people, DVDs
and other forms of cinematic deconstruction only further strengthen
the ~auteur~ theory, as everyday viewers see and hear from previously
invisible film workers (editors, production designers, special
effects designers, cinematographers, screenplay writers) who are
themselves auteurs. Thus, a writer like Charlie Kaufman nearly
displaces directors Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry as the ~auteur~
behind ~Being John Malkovich~ (1999), ~Adaptation~ (2002), and
~Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind~ (2004), while cinematographer
Anthony Dod Mantle looms as the "author" of such films as ~The
Celebration~ (1998), ~28 Days Later~ (2002), and ~Dogville~ (2003).
Whereas in the past Orson Welles's cinematographer on ~Citizen Kane~
(1941) -- Gregg Toland -- would have been relatively obscure except
to film scholars and historians, industry insiders, and die-hard film
buffs, today Dod Mantle is known not only to people in these groups,
but also to more casual film watchers, who, because of mediums like
the Internet Movie Database and other websites, DVDs, and the
proliferation of cinema studies classes, are deeply literate about
cinema. Rather than extinguish once and for all the auteur, the rise
and hegemony of digital technologies and culture have only reinforced
the author concept, and have in fact helped to create new forms of
authorship that are being acknowledged in the broader public. A
recent article in the ~New York Times~ -- "The Powers Behind the
Home-Video Throne" -- begins: "When Steven Spielberg directs a movie,
he gets final cut. But the last word is more likely to come from
Laurent Bouzereau. Mr. Bouzereau, 43, is barely known to the world at
large. But in the clannish, status-obsessed corridors of Hollywood,
he has a growing reputation as Mr. Spielberg's personal DVD producer,
one of perhaps a dozen players who have mastered the young art of
turning the video edition of a film into a sui generis event." [10]
As what was thought of not too long ago as mere bonus, extra, or
supplementary material begins to equal and in fact take precedence
over the so-called "feature presentation" of DVDs, a new ~auteur~
develops as someone whose narrative contributions threaten to
overtake the pallid, homogeneous films now buried in hours of special
features. [11]
In the face of the digital code, there is an effort to reassert the
viability of hermeneutics, of interpretation. In "Metadata's Impact
on 'Artistic Intent,'" in _American Cinematographer_, Debra Kaufman
explores the growing concern among cinematographers that in our
digital, paperless era, details and records about how and why they
arrive at the decisions they make about how to shoot scenes are being
lost. Kaufman quotes Jim Sullivan, chief technology officer of Kodak
Entertainment Imaging Services, as saying that "When you disconnect
the image from a known medium like film and go into the digital
world, you end up with integers in a computer that mean nothing...
They're just storage locations. They don't carry any interpretation
with them about how [the footage] was captured or is meant to be
displayed." [12] When Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg published
the Dogma 95 "Vow of Chastity" in 1995, it was only appropriate that
they should sign their names -- as authors -- to the document, which
had as one its rules, "The director must not be credited." [13] And
yet, denunciations of authorship have always tended to strengthen the
cult and authority of those doing the denouncing. In fact, it was
Barthes who called the author into being and whose denunciations
helped create the conditions for the dictatorship of the author in
the digital era.
In any case, despite the good intentions of post-humanist academics
for whom the Author was symptomatic of a capitalist symptom to be
cured, now we witness the viral spread of the author concept into the
very structures of academic expression. Today, anonymity is a sign of
guilt, or failure. As academics embrace the web -- and blogs and
vlogs specifically -- as legitimate sites of knowledge creation and
dissemination, then resistance to the author function withers. For
wasn't one of the engines that drove the cult of the death of the
author the secret desire by academics to be authors themselves? Not
authors who wrote obscure articles that were inevitably consigned to
the dark stacks of enormous libraries, but authors who tested their
ideas in the public sphere, authors whose ideas mattered beyond the
narrow handful of specialists who would pass predictable judgment on
their work? Authors whose ideas mattered enough to be praised or
damned? Confronted with the specter of the public sphere, academics
are learning how to write again. The crisis of the scholarly
publishing subsidy system portends an enormous shift wherein the
discredited author concept is resurrected. Rather than the utopian
dream of collective, collaborative authorship that many theorists
first saw in hypertext and blogs, we see instead the proliferation of
~auteurs~ vying for public space in the public sphere.
Stripped of aura, of mystery, of distance, we are known today as
mapped elements in a database. Surveilled, recorded, and marked, we
are becoming the function of our components -- our decoded genes, the
number of hits (hourly, daily, monthly) on our websites, our on-line
purchasing histories. It is perhaps ironic that it is in the very
forms of authorship that post-humanist critics strove to erase that
we find our best chance of theorizing -- and resisting -- our own
disappearance. Donna Haraway's ironic prediction -- "By the late
twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras,
theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short,
we are cyborgs" [14] -- has assumed the shape of everyday social
reality. Is it any surprise that for every technological advancement
that renders a more perfect, flawless reality -- whether it be
classical Hollywood's invisible style, or new film stocks and lenses
that offer a cleaner and sharper image, or the hyperrealism of high
definition, or the clean, hiss-less ring of the digital code -- is it
any surprise that these are always accompanied by countermeasures
that preserve and introduce errors, mistakes, degradations of the
pristine image? Whether it be Italian neorealism, or ~cinema verite~,
or experimental films by the likes of Stan Brakhage, or the rough,
"amateur" look of the Dogma 95 films, or even the blurred, miniature
movies of web cinema -- all these serve as an antidote to the very
forms of perfection that we seek. The author is stronger than ever
today because she reminds us of an identity memorable for its utter
failures. And to be reminded of our failures is to be reminded that
we are human.
Perhaps it was easy to dismiss the Author when there was so little at
stake. But now, as we approach the time when it will be possible to
lift the veil on our very own codes, we find that it is precisely in
human authorship -- with its mistakes, its errors, its slippages, its
ambiguities, its reversals and contradictions, its irrationalities,
its surprises -- where we can reassert ourselves against the very
destruction that once, because it was myth, we so eagerly desired.
Notes:
------
[1] "Aspen: The multimedia magazine." www.ubu.com.aspen/intro.html.
p. 2.
[2] "Aspen: The multimedia magazine." www.ubu.com.aspen/intro.html.
p. 2.
[3] Andrew Sarris. "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962," in _Film
Culture Reader_, P. Adams Sitney, ed. New York: Cooper Square Press,
2000. p. 132.
[4] Andrew Sarris. "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962," in _Film
Culture Reader_, P. Adams Sitney, ed. New York: Cooper Square Press,
2000. p. 133.
[5] Craig Saper, "Arftificial Auteurism and the Political Economy of
the Allen Smithee Case," in _Directed by Allen Smithee_, Jeremy
Braddock and Stephen Hock, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001. p. 33.
[6] Sean Cubitt, "Preface: The Colour of Time," in _Experimental
Cinema in the Digital Age_, by Malcom Le Grice. London: British Film
Institute, 2001. p. vii.
[7] Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky), _Rhythm Science_. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. p. 9.
[8] Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky), _Rhythm Science_. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. p. 9.
[9] Jean Baudrillard. _The Perfect Crime_. Trans. Chris Turner.
London and New York: Verso, 1996. p. 103. Originally published in
French by Editions Galilee, 1995.
[10] Christian Moerk, "The Powers Behind the Home-Video Throne," ~The
New York Times~, 3 April 2005.
www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/movies/03moer.html. p. 1.
[11] For a good discussion of the emergence of DVD
"supplementary-ness," see Graeme Harper, "DVD and the New Cinema of
Complexity," in _New Punk Cinema_, Nicholas Rombes, ed. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2005. pp. 89-101.
[12] Debra Kaufman, "Metadata's Impact on 'Artistic Intent,'" in
_American Cinematographer_, December 2003.
theasc.com/magazine/dec03/sub/index.html. p. 1.
[13] For the Dogma 95 manifesto and "Vow of Chastity," see _P.O.V._
no. 10, December 2000, at
imv.au.dk/publikationer/pov/Issue_10/POV_10cnt.html
[14]Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in _Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature_. New York: Routledge,
1991. p. 150.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicholas Rombes is an associate professor of English at the
University of Detroit Mercy, where he co-founded the Electronic
Critique program. He is the author of _Ramones_ (Continuum 2005), the
editor of _New Punk Cinema_ (Edinburgh University Press 2005) and is
at work on the book _Digital Poetics_, forthcoming from Wallflower
Press in 2007.
http://professordvd.typepad.com/
http://professordvd.typepad.com/frame_by_frame/
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