Neutral Views: “Philosophy”

Neutral Views: “Philosophy” – Collaborative Analysis / Discussion Panel
Chairs: Sunil Manghani and Gary Peters

Friday 2 September 2011 / 2.30-4.00pm / Room: Skell 037

Let’s start out from a “philosophy” (with scare quotes, since what is at issue is precisely that this be a philosophy)

…is expelled from philosophy, to the extent that it doesn’t retain the philosophical “imprint”: the concept.

This “im-position” (at least as seen from the Neutral) = philosophy’s arrogance

But this is not the Neutral’s “view” of philosophy … it doesn’t oppose it but distances itself from it…

…one must say no to the concept, not make use of it. But, then, how to speak, all of us, intellectuals? By metaphors.

Instructions: In preparation for the session participtants are asked to:

(1) read the following passage from Roland Barthes’ The Neutral, on ‘The Concept’, pp.156-157;

(2) submit a brief written response in the comments box below.

(3) attend the session!

The aim of the session is to garner a collective reading, all of which will be archived here.

(For further details of the conference and a full programme click here)

Neutrinos

Super-Kamiokande: neutrino observatory in the city of Hida, Gifu Prefecture, Japan.

The neutrino is a particle that travels close to the speed of light, has almost zero mass and is electrically neutral. Subsequently it is very difficult to detect. And yet, at any given second about 65 billion neutrinos (emanating from the sun) pass through every square centimetre of our planet. Gravity, strong atomic forces and electromagnetism have no real bearing on neutrinos. They interact only with ‘weak’ sub-atomic force, which means they pass through great distances of matter without being affected by it. Just as we can see through a thick piece of glass, the neutrino can ‘see’ or travel through a whole light-year of lead without much likelihood of being taken off course.

It is difficult to know what is more amazing: the fact the neutrino exists, or the fact we have found ways to detect it. For an excellent discussion of neutrinos listen to BBC Radio 4′s In Our Time…

Being for the Benevolence of August Sander

I recently visited Tate Modern’s collection display, Photographic Topologies, which brought together the work of artists whose use of photography presents a systematic, or ‘topological’ approach. Typically, these works show multiple images of similar subjects. On display were portraits of Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra and Paul Graham, and architectural subjects in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Through repetition these artists reveal subtle contrasts and similarities in their subjects.

Of course the typological method is most well known for its pioneer, the German photographer August Sander (1876-1964); whose work I specifically went to see. Examples ran along the central gallery, taken from Sander’s seminal ‘People of the Twentieth Century’, a vast collection of portraits documenting the society of the Weimar Republic according to profession and social grouping. It was great to see them up close. Many times I have looked at the ‘stiff’, ‘self-importance’ (to borrow Barthes’ words) of Sander’s Notary as it appears neatly on a page in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. The portrait shows a figure in a hat and buttoned-up coat, holding a cane. He stands before a brick building with a curved flight of steps and stares blankly away from the camera, perfectly perpendicular to that of a dog who stands before him. Given that Barthes in the relevant passage writes how the ‘Photograph of the Mask … [is] critical enough to disturb’ and that ‘[p]hotography is subversive …when it is pensive, when it thinks’, I have frequently considered the strict, cool-eyed work of Sander to relate in some kind of  ’zero-degree’ seeing. Indeed, according to the curator’s notes, ‘Sander’s process of analysing and ordering his images was matched by the rigorous, objective style of the photographs themselves. All of his subjects are observed by the photographer with the same neutral distance’.

Sander, then, has always been on my list of artists to include in a study of ‘zero degree seeing’. As I stood there in the gallery, peering at the pictures framed on the wall, I was still inclined to link Sander to the Neutral, yet not in the way I had first imagined… Let me first state the case for my original thinking on Sander’s work. Before coming to Barthes’ The Neutral, I had long thought about how images, and particularly photography, might be considered to undo categories and structures of meaning. I’ve read the passage on Sander in Camera Lucida countless times and every time I seem to have come away with a slightly different view. Even in itself, this suggested to me something about how ‘the image’ unmoors our thinking in ways that are seemingly productive, even cohesive, yet without properly ‘fixing’ (the word here has a nice irony since photograph are – or at least used to – ‘fixed’ in the darkroom to stop them from simply fading away). At the close of Camera Lucida, Barthes suggests in an epic, final line that there are two ways to look at the Photograph: ‘The choice is mine: to subject its spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality’.

Turning back to the passage on Sander, we can start by thinking that here is an example of pure, intractable reality. Barthes suggest this is in a sense the reason why Sander’s work was censored at the time, being ‘critical enough to disturb’. Sander’s photographs have no come-back. They are directly what they show. The notary, for example, is exactly as shown – yet in being shown, we suddenly realise we don’t know what this means. The code of perfect illusions is immediately revealed as a code and bursting through is the intractable reality of the man in the photograph, who we soon start to know less and less. Barthes remarks that in the commercial sphere ‘no meaning at all is safer: the editors of Life rejected Kertész’s photographs … because, they said, his images “spoke too much”; they made us reflect…’. The question is: does Sander’s work make us reflect? ‘Photography is subversive,’ Barthes argues, ‘not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks’. I have always looked upon the Notary as the embodiment of this ‘pensive’ image. We do not know what the man is thinking, but we believe he is nonetheless. He stares firmly into the distance, though seemingly at a brick wall (which perhaps adds to the strength of his stare). His hands are clasped tightly too and the dog adds further ‘bite’ to the composition. The notary’s stare then becomes our own as we start to think about the meaning of the image; why it was taken, who this person might be and what significance he holds.

This, I feel, is the effect of moving between the pages of Camera Lucida, and in many ways has remained my way of thinking about Sander, whether I like it or not! Yet, looking again (and again) at the text, Barthes is actually quite clear. He considers him a ‘great mythologist’, but whose work ends up an aestheticisation of the political:

Sander’s Notary is suffused with self-importance and stiffness, his Usher with assertiveness and brutality; but no notary, no usher could ever have read such signs. As distance, social observation here assumes the necessary intermediary role in a delicate aesthetic, which renders it futile: no critique except among those who are already capable of criticism.

Not only then a highly constructed image, but indeed a ‘spectacle’ which we submit to the ‘civilized code of perfect illusions’. Surely then, too full of ‘paradigm’ for anything of the Neutral?

One of the prints in the gallery was Sander’s ‘Victim of Persecution’ (c1938). He is a neat, well-to-do man. There are no immediate signs of being persecuted (though of course that is what the picture questions in itself). The man is a little sullen, and the framing of the image (the upper torso and face turned slightly to one side, his eye-line a little raised) evokes for me a man in the dock (though perhaps I’ve seen too many courtroom dramas!), yet there is really so little to go on. Yet what struck me was the feeling of a certain benevolence. The directness of the photograph and the succinct title gives no reason other than to believe this person is who they say they are. The man looks benevolent and I feel similarly towards him. But what do I mean by benevolence in this case? The man is not ‘real’ for me and I will never have to prove my benevolvence. He is only an image. He does evoke reflection in me, though in no way is this something I can easily articulate. If it were simply a ‘kindly feeling’ I held towards the image/this man it wouldn’t necessarily be of interest. In The Neutral, Barthes distinguishes between ‘dry and damp’ benevolence. Damp benevolence is ‘on the side of demand: “kindness” … diffuse aura of amiability’; so being the more common-place meaning of the word. Dry benevolence, however, refers to Taoist thinking: ‘A stiff benevolence, because rooted in indifference. For the sage, everything is equal. Refrains from exerting a function’.

Looking at the series of the photographs in the gallery, what I saw was simply a ‘batch’ of photographs. The stiffness, the exactness, the pensiveness – all as we associate with Sander – was not matched in the physicality of these prints. Some lacked focus, others the edges were not strict. I did not feel in the presence of some ‘intractable reality’ – there was nothing to puncture my world. However, these were not ‘tame’ images either. At the close of Camera Lucida, Barthes complains of a consumption of images, as some kind of ‘nauseated boredom, as if the universalized image were producing a world that is without difference (indifferent)’. On this count, what I saw in the images – as refraining ‘from exerting a function’ – would seem to place them under Barthes’ critical eye, so as to ‘subject spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions’. But I would prefer to appropriate his reading of a dry benevolence. As I stood in the gallery, wondering what to make of the photographs, wondering if others around me could see more than I might, I tried to grasp at what the sage might see: a radical vision, in which ‘everything is equal’. Standing before these photographs perhaps many of us could repeat Barthes thoughts: ’I feel this “benevolence” for people who are such strangers to me that I have no occasion for internal conflict with them = total and peaceable incommunication’.

Neutral Remains…

The salient feature of Gauguin’s Green Christ (1889) painting appears in the foreground: the mournful woman sat before a calvary, a sculpture of Christ’s crucifixion. Christ lies on a diagonal, with his arm extending straight down like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, forming a perfect triangular framing of the woman, whose body twists awkwardly.

However, when I saw the painting – in amongst the crowds – at the recent exhibition at Tate Modern I was immediately drawn to the small figure in the middle-distance. A lone, weary fisherman appears between the sand dunes; placed someway between the edge of the sea from where he has come (on the left of the painting) and the route which takes him beyond the picture frame (to the right)). He is returning from a day’s work (though being a fisherman the day no doubt stretches forth for the rest of us); upon his shoulder a rack of fish being the only, though surely significant ‘remains of the day’. I want to suggest this figure is a delicate sighting/siting of the Neutral. To develop this line of thinking I will take a literary detour, with Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day; to help work upon some of Barthes’ observations of a certain ‘neutral’ weariness…

The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro would seem an exemplary writer of the Neutral. His first-person narratives offer poignant revelations, yet generally only through suggestiveness and ambiguity. The pathos he generates typically derives not from a character’s action, but inaction. The narrator of his most well-known, Booker-prize winning novel, The Remains of the Day, is the butler, Mr Stevens. He is surely the epitome of neutrality both in the simple sense of his profession, as someone whose presence must never interfere, and with regards the more complex matter of being unable to reconcile his sense of service with his personal life (specifically his romantic feelings for housekeeper Miss Kenton).

Given Ishiguro’s storytelling is always based in a past history and through a private telling of that past, there is generally a melancholic air to his novels, and in fact his work is often described in terms of the Japanese idea of mono no aware, which literally means ‘the pathos of things’. However, it is easy to be heavy-handed with accounts of melancholia. Mono no aware is also translated as ‘an empathy toward things’ or ‘sensitivity of ephemera’. In Japanese it refers to the awareness of mujo, the transience of things coupled with gentle sadness or wistfulness. Thus there is beauty in transience and not least in the acceptance of transience.

It is easy to see only loss – of love and lives wasted – in Mr Stevens’ final reflections upon the ‘remains of the day’. As Miss Kenton utters the line ‘I get to thinking about a life I might have had with you, Mr Stevens’, it is as if gravity itself is lost. There then follows a seemingly vain attempt to look upon things happily; Mr Stevens seated alone upon a bench declares quietly to himself: ‘I should cease looking back so much … I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of the day’. However, the narrative of loss is perhaps too easily overlaid, and for two main reasons. Firstly, for Mr Stevens’ the sense of duty to his profession is genuinely as much a passion as he might hold for Miss Kenton. And in fact both passions are figured with a similar reserved quality; an ardent reserve even. His is an intense, strong quest both to define and live a life of dignity. Secondly, whilst Stevens himself might be said to repress his feelings, the narrative he tells offers insight to a heightened experience, or empathy towards things. There is tremendous beauty revealed through sustained, quiet discernment. His attention to detail: the quality of light, for example, the careful annotation of events and formations. Mr Stevens is attuned to many nuances of his day to day. The closing revelatory sequence, for example, takes place amidst rain and neutral toned light:

The light in the room was extremely gloomy on account of the rain, and so we moved two armchairs up close to the bay window. And that was how Miss Kenton and I talked for the next two hours or so, there in the pool of grey light while the rain continued to fall steadily on the square outside.

It is during this exchange that Mr Stevens considers a weariness that has come over Miss Kenton:

Miss Kenton appeared, somehow, slower. It is possible this was simply the calmness that comes with age, and I did try hard for some time to see it as such. But I could not escape the feeling that what I was really seeing was a weariness with life; the spark which had once made her such a lively, and at times volatile person seemed now to have gone. In fact, every now and then, when she was not speaking, when her face was in repose, I thought I glimpsed something like sadness in her expression. But then again, I may well have been mistaken about this.

The possibility of his having been mistaken is important here. On the one hand, both are older, slower with life. And, as the story unfolds, there is sadness at the root of this relationship. Yet, the uncertainty Mr Stevens notes of here is what allows for a remaining intensity (remnants of the volatile!). Barthes’ identifies a root to weariness that is related to the body (labour, lassitude and fatigue). Labor is, as Barthes suggests, easily associated with the rural and with manual work – it is a word we of course relate to class conditions. Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton are of a working class. They have labored all their lives cleaning and tending to the estate of a landowner. But weariness is harder to place; perhaps if anything, Barthes writes, ‘it is hard to connect … with the worker’s, the farmer’s, the employee’s manual or assimilated type of work’. He suggests the following experiment:

…draw up a table of received (credible) excuses: you want to cancel a lecture, an intellectual task: what excuses will be beyond suspicion, beyond reply? Weariness? Surely not. Flu? Bad, banal. A surgical operation? Better, but watch out for the vengeance of fate! Cf. the way society codifies mourning in order to assimilate it: after a few weeks, society will reclaim its rights, will no longer accept mourning as a state of exception…

What interests Barthes in weariness, then, is that it is not codified. Instead, it:

…always functions in language as a mere metaphor, a sign without referent … that is part of the domain of the artist (of the intellectual as artist) -> unclassified, therefore unclassifiable: without premises, without place, socially untenable -> whence Blanchot’s (weary!) cry: “I don’t ask that weariness be done away with. I ask to be led back to a region where it might be possible to be weary.” -> Weariness = exhausting claim of the individual body that demands the right to social repose (that sociality in me rest a moment … ). In fact, weariness = an intensity: society doesn’t recognize intensities.

In light of these remarks, we might say society does not recognize the intensity between Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton. The book ends, or delivers even this very sign without referent. It is held between these bodies who have labored and grown slow with life, but who equally still bear witness to a ‘neutral’ or unclassified state (‘without premises, without place’) – and this is what they impart still further (hence the intensity of the book itself).

Returning, then, to the fisherman in Gauguin’s Green Christ, I’m wondering if we can now see this neutral weariness in just a mere fleeting scene. There is the juxtaposition of what is heavy and angular in the foreground and the delicate S-bend of the fisherman. His is an existence of labor, he is a ‘tire that flattens’, returning from his work. Whilst in the foreground is the weight of a spiritual (intellectual?) realm. The latter is heavily codified. It inscribes one’s right to think. The former, however, is ambivalent. The fisherman walks  away (freely?) from his responsibility (if only until tomorrow). Is he content in his weariness? He seems to lead up to ‘a region where it might be possible to be weary’…

Net Neutrality (& other such noise)

Net neutrality means that the network should be agnostic about the content of the packets. It shouldn’t care whether they contain fragments of emails, web pages, instant messages, music tracks, porn videos – whatever.

John Naughton, writing in The Observer (‘Is this the beginning of the end for the open internet?‘, 26.12.10), explains how the ‘thorny “net neutrality question” now poses a palpable threat to online democracy’. Mid-December 2010, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has the power to set the rules for internet use in the US, issued a ruling which can be understood to defend neutrality for fixed-line broadband, but not for mobile services. The proposed rules suggest mobile operators can introduce pay-per-service charges, which could mean, for example, Skype or Facebook being charged to get their content on to the networks. In other words, the content of these services would no longer be treated in a ‘neutral’ way. As Naughton puts it:

the FCC seems to have endorsed net neutrality for the past (fixed-line internet connections) while abandoning it for the future.

In itself the question of net neutrality merely marks out one of the latest battlegrounds of late capitalism. But I find it suggestive of something more compelling; as a question of what Michel Serres would term multiplicity. In his book Genesis, Serres offers a ‘new object for philosophy’. Not something new as it were, but new for our ways of thinking:

The multiple as such, unknown and little unified, is not an epistemological monster, but on the contrary the ordinary lot of situations, including that of the ordinary scholar, regular knowledge, everyday work, in short, our  common object [...] We recognise it everywhere, yet reason still insists on ignoring it.

Typically we look for system, for principles, ‘we want elements, atoms, particles’. Against such totalising forces Serres considers multiplicity: ‘A lake at night, the sea, a white plain, background noise, the murmur of a crowd, time.’ At the time of his writing, in 1982, these remarks sat clearly within the tradition of poststructuralist, anti-foundationalist thinking. ‘We breathe background noise’, he writes.

Background noise is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and the cesspool of our messages. No life without heat, no matter, neither; no warmth without air, no logos without noise, either. Noise is the basic element [...] Noise is the background of information…

Like many such writers, Serres seems to call out to something never quite reached. But what of poststructuralist thinking today with our mundane cyborgs on the sidewalks tapping into all manner of noise? I don’t mean to make a simplistic equation that somehow this is all now poststructuralist living; a philosophy manifest. The Internet and mobile technologies are not de facto a radical exchange of new thinking. But I do feel our present conjuncture is both symptomatic of the underlying desires poststructuralists sought to identify and far more recognisable, ubiquitous even, relevant to many more constituents (see, for example, Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory, 2010, Polity Press). Taken in such ‘philosophical’ light, net neutrality takes on greater importance. It becomes a more pressing illustration of how we suck the life out of things; how we fail to hold onto neutrality, which, like natality, is surely where the heat is; the very grounds upon which we derive…

Serres writes the enigmatic line: ‘The multiple had been thought, perhaps, but it hadn’t been sounded’. What would he say today? Has the Internet, our vast ‘planetary’ wiring, offered some faint sounding? If so, do we really want to forgo its ‘noise’?

The Problem with Robinson…

The further exploits of ‘Robinson’ finally returned to the big screen with Robinson in Ruins, the third in a series of essayistic features by the filmmaker Patrick Keiller. We first learn of Robinson in the film London, and then Robinson in Space. Like the tales of Sherlock Holmes, the films offer the ‘factual’ account of an imaginary character moving about the real landscape of England.

They are deceptively straightforward: A series of field-notes voiced over the top of moving tableaux of urban landmarks. People occasionally appear in the frame, but it’s the spaces the camera trains upon. Keiller has been described a ‘poet of blank statistics’ and a ‘connoisseur of … housing estates, defunct factories [and] supermarkets’. And these we watch in lingering detail.

Robinson in Ruins is even slower than its predecessors, in part due to the demands of watching a rural landscape. In the manner of watching paint dry, a recurring motif is mottled green lichen growing above the reflective letters of a motorway sign. In close-up you begin to compare the shapes of a seemingly prehistoric nature with the tessellated hexagonal surface of traffic signage. We also watch, uninterrupted, as a spider spins its web and listen to a point by point narrative of the financial events of September 2008 when it seemed the web of global markets faced total collapse. The theorist Fredric Jameson provides the epigraph to the film: ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thorough-going deterioration of the earth … than the breakdown of late capitalism, perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations’.

During a Q&A session at the BFI, Keiler was joined on stage by three academics. They each expressed their belief in the film itself as a political act. An audience member asked heatedly: ‘but where are all the people?’ The question hit a nerve. Robinson is certainly no activist, indeed he’s nothing more than the figment of one’s imagination. But might he be the kind of imagination we need? Of all people, Robinson would know best. But that’s the problem with Robinson.

See also: Guardian / CinemaScope

Tele-gram!

I send these words from a distance (words I’ve been reading with a week’s detachment, those ever unmoored words/actions of the mind) because forces beyond my control STOP these little grams (of icing sugar as used in today’s cookery diversion?) from racing towards that secret, which escapes (Cixous, White Ink) – yet everything did STOP on a page of this book, which came through the letterbox only today, she began enthusing about Goya’s ‘Dog Head Buried in Sand’ and how it never seems to STOP “Do you know that painting? Have you seen it? It’s incredible. It’s vertical, and it’s as if it were the epitome of all of the spirit of painting. So, just part of a dog, and you can’t interpret it. You don’t know whether the dog is coming out of the sand, or on the contrary being buried in the sand. It is the most incredible picture you can see, and it’s so nothing because it’s really only infinites. The sky exchanges with the beach, but the beach… we usually think of beaches as long, wide and extending, whereas here, the beach is vertical. And for me, I could write a book on that.” STOP this is all too much, these should have been my words, how can I make them STOP the painting in question is one more thing to add to my collection on ‘murkiness’ – I hope one day I might write an entry in keeping with Barthes’ lecture notes on the Neutral, but with a Anglophone twist; I’ve noticed it in D.H. Lawrence’s interiors, and during the winter months in Saltaire – but I never find I have time to STOP although I did manage to get to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to see the works by David Nash and I couldn’t resist purchasing a little hardback book solely about his long-term engagement with the pyramid, sphere and cube, inspired by the Zen monk Sengai’s Circle, Triangle, Square, a speckled figuration of which appears in silhouette on the coarse material cover; each time I go to open this enticing volume something only leads me away to(o) STOP and besides, with my impending trip to the Chicago-based Art Theory Institute, I am supposed to be drowning in a thousand pages or more on the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic and on cue Jay Bernstein’s Against Voluptuous Bodies and Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetics and Its Discontents have made (it to) me STOP in my tracks; both these writers appeal to Adorno’s line ‘there is no system without its residue’ (the epigraph to Bernstein’s book), but here the comparison appears to STOP – how anyone can tell from Rancière’s opaque use of ‘this latter’ and ‘that former’ (as if the aforementioned former/latter had been clear vantage points!) is beyond me – I wish he wouldn’t STOP since these directed readings came under separate cover through the same said letterbox, with one special addition not on the official list, Maurice Senack’s In the Night Kitchen, for which everything had to STOP, but… before you assume this was bedtime reading for those under a certain age STOP! admittedly the little boy’s ‘willy’ prompted much amusement, yet it was my own primal phallus(y) that I couldn’t help STOP searching out this amazing tale of a boy who thinks nothing of shouting out in the dark, whose clothes slip off without any much ado and reappears in a suit of flour, before diving naked into a long, tall milk bottle: ‘I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me … Mickey in the Night Kitchen cried “Cock-a-doodle Doo!” And slid down the side, straight into bed, cakefree and dried’ …and that, if you remember, is how he ‘came’ to STOP the memory of the milk, it relates to my increasingly strong desire to make work, not simply write about it, and for which I have invested in a variety of inks (again appearing in my letterbox this week), including a milky, Sennelier white ink, which I couldn’t quite get over, really I couldn’t STOP myself, having picked up a dusty old hardback of Gombrich’s A Story of Art, I have set about erasing lines in the text (in preparation for the effect of all its ink having just oozed out)  – interestingly, having planned to do this, I really just had to STOP… I wondered if perhaps I ought to buy a second copy, reserved for the purposes of actually reading, which I just can’t help think to do, even though I want to STOP I should probably film the whole process, make that the ‘work’, rather than think it is all somehow going to magically come to STOP I have also now determined Indian ink, whilst an engulfing black, is quite different to Japanese calligraphy ink, prompting wild thoughts of further, grand installations, that only one’s imagination can STOP [gap] …finally evidence that Barthes’ late semiotician, the one who ought paint more than dig, must indeed roll their sleeves up and make their mark was no more apparent than in taking possession of my own bottle of Sennelier Neutral ink; like Barthes ‘I was both punished and disappointed because Neutral spatters and stains (it’s a dull gray-black); disappointed because Neutral is a color like the others, and for sale … the unclassifiable is classified…’ yet even this colours things, despite wanting to STOP the press(ing down of): this ink upon the page reveals not a dull gray-black, but a definite purple (with a satin finish no less) – seemingly a wild mistake to make if purposefully one were to STOP to think, using the ink thinly and letting it dry arguably gives something of a murky gray, yet more dramatically we might reveal Barthes’ indelible decision to look another way or even altogether to not STOP

Neutral Encounter(s)…

The following is an edited version of a letter sent to Sally Potter (via her online forum), director of Orlando and Rage (amongst other films).

Dear Sally,

Following the screening of Thriller (and shorts) at the BFI last Friday, I caught a brief word with you. You were most generous in response. I garbled something about neutrality, nascence and the image and we agreed it might be best I follow up in a more nuanced way here, online…

…I wandered into the bookshop at the Cornerhouse Cinema in Manchester and happened to spy Sophie Mayer’s book, The Cinema Of …. A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009). I felt an urge to buy it there and then, for it all became so obvious (why hadn’t I thought so before?!), your work is a vital source for a project I am slowly feeling my way around, called ‘Seeing Degree Zero’; a project, or an ethic (?) that is largely inspired by Barthes’ notion of the Neutral. I was very taken by your new work, Rage. It’s ultra-vivid, yet pared down aesthetic offers lots of interesting potential for a kind of visual equivalence to ‘degree zero’ writing. The latter being a form of literature that Barthes, writing at the beginning of his career in Writing Degree Zero (1953), describes ‘could no longer find purity anywhere but in the absence of all signs, finally proposing the realisation of this Orphean dream: A writer without Literature. Colourless writing like Camus’s, Blanchot’s or Cayrol’s, for example, or conversational witing like Queneau’s, represents the last episode of a Passion of writing’.

However, it is only towards the end of his life that Barthes returns to a more explicit concept (though that is too harsh a word) of the Neutral; defined as the suspension of binary oppositions. Barthes refers, for example, to the ‘indecision’ of pronunciation between the sounds ‘l’ and ‘r’ as they occur in the Japanese language as a position outside of meaning. He is interested in a ‘third term’, something that slips out of the system of symbolic meaning. When we read sentences upon a page our eyes are accustomed to glide over the empty spaces between characters. Yet those ‘neutral’ spaces are precisely what allow the collection of characters to become meaningful groupings; those burning white spaces are what force meaning to arise. To go beyond, outside of the structures of meaning – into those white spaces – can indeed be something far more destabilising, radical, experimental. As you write on your blog: ‘There is no zero point in writing a script, of course. Just the illusion of nothingness before the something appears. But confronting emptiness, a kind of void-state, whilst sometimes terrifying (will anything ever happen?) is also exhilarating. A long view opens up, where all seems possible. Not just fresh starts, freed from habits of all kinds, personal and professional, but even the horizon itself changes’ (From Zero).

I can’t begin now, here, to write about Yes, but yes!, your film is an obvious starting point (in more than one sense)… and similarly Barthes’ Neutral relates to ideas about affirmation, openness, nascence and ambiguities. Even on my first glance through Sophie Mayer’s wonderful book – as I still stood in the bookshop – I came across all number of related reference points (and an associated sense of an ethic), many of which appear in direct quotation. For instance, you speak of the importance of ‘transformation’ in your films, ‘Nothing’s fixed, everything’s impermanent, everything’s in flux … we can be part of the transformation’ (p.1); you raise (with an interesting reference to W.G. Sebald) the importance of slowness, ‘to the more sustainable long-term, difficult ideas of time, space, eternity, birth and death’ (p.72); you refer to colour on film as ‘flat, boring, neutral’ (p.104); you aspire to ‘create openness that might then have a small part in the transformation of the individual life of the viewer’ (p.138); you work from James Joyce’s use of the word ‘yes’ as a verb, (‘he asked me would I yes to say yes…’) (p.190-191); and you try to put ‘falling in love on the screen’ as a form of awakening (p.202). So many starting points, interstices, possibilities. And, of course, you don’t just suggest these things, you look for them through the lens, you place them upon the screen. I’m fascinated by the ability to genuinely, practically sculpt and choreograph a certain ‘seeing degree zero’.

Of course lexically, the ‘Neuter’ refers to ‘neither masculine nor feminine, and verbs … neither active or passive, or action without regime’ (Barthes). Here the connection to Orlando is an obvious one, both Virginia Woolf’s original book and your film. To this day, I distinctly remember the evening I watched Orlando on television, on Channel Four. It was then quite by chance I discovered there was to be a retrospective of your work at the BFI. It was quite off my radar as I came away from the Cornerhouse with Sophie Mayer’s book, but adding to the epiphany I had there, it felt more than coincidence that suddenly you were ‘everywhere’ at the BFI. I made my excuses and hurried down from York to attend the ‘In Conversation’ event you held with Tilda Swinton (BFI, 2.12.09). She came out with that wonderful line (and idea) about your work capturing something of the ‘soul’, or the core of identity, which we discover (in a celebratory sense) has no identity. It felt like a pilgrimage of sorts, to revisit the film that – as for so many others – had had such an immediate impact on me upon first viewing. But I was also drawn to see Tilda Swinton in person. In the flesh. In a commentary on the film, you describe her as having ‘an unencumbered face. A quality of almost transparency, not just in her skin, but in her performance’. It is a remark that makes immediate sense, yet how, why? What is this quality? I am led to wonder if the Neutral is something that can, must even, be embodied, or is of the body. This leads me to Emilyn Claid’s book, Yes? No! Maybe… : Seductive Ambiguity in Dance (2006), which intriguingly brings forth concepts of seduction, androgyny and ambiguity as ‘embodied strategies’. And a connection can be made perhaps with a comment you make on your blog, ‘The act of framing an actor’s face seems to activate a narrative, not one that exists in time, but out of time.’ It was wonderful to see the rapport between you and Tilda Swinton at the BFI. As you comment online, ‘the talk on the platform felt like a natural extension of our years of work together, shoulder to shoulder in England, Russia and Uzbekhistan’. Adding, then, to a ‘body’ of the Neutral, perhaps also there is something to be considered of a certain hospitality, friendship, love. The ability to pick up from where one has left off without a net of politics is surely a neutral quality that is the very definition of friendship – beyond need, want, possession etc. As you write: ‘collaborations in all their myriad manifestations are extraordinarily intense relationships. Work becomes love and love is in the work.’

‘In the end,’ Barthes writes, ‘[the Neutral's] essential form is a protestation … the Neutral is this irreducible No: a No so to speak suspended in front of the hardenings of both faith and certitude and incorruptible by either one’. Here Barthes opens out upon a sense of vitality, or vital force. This No is a Yes, for it is that which says Yes to life. It is about birth, not death. As an ethical injunction, the Neutral forces us to think anew and undermines what Barthes suggest we must work against: the dominant ‘will-to-possess’. The Neutral is, according to Barthes, ‘the difference that separates the will-to-live from the will-to-possess … as the drifting from arrogance,’ he writes, ‘I leave the will-to-possess, I move to the will-to-live’. Tired of the insistence to assert meaning, to impose critique, Barthes (in his late career) does not want or no longer believes in taking possession of what is before him. Understanding something is not to explain it, but to live with it. This is a difficult process, no doubt prone to failure (but that does not make it any less important). The fact we cannot fix locations of meaning in the Neutral suggests we cannot categorise, or possess it, only be in existence with it. To be touched by it and to reach out to touch it.

Rage…

Described as the world’s first multi-venue interactive premiere (having been broadcast live by satellite from London’s BFI Southbank to dozens of cinemas across the UK and Europe) and involving a ’revolutionary release strategy’, being simultaneously available on mobile, online, digital screens and DVD formats, Sally Potter’s Rage (2009) is supposedly a documentary made by a schoolboy who uses his mobile phone camera to shoot intimate interviews with people working at a New York fashion house. The result is a crisp expose of an industry and more importantly a critique of the fashion culture we have all come to inhabit. Arguably, its knowingly contemporary approach to a highly contemporary subject is ‘Ballardian’ in style. And the fact that the film has been made for release on both the big and small (mobile) screen results in a very specific, pared down aesthetic. Potter herself describes its ‘genre’ as naked cinema. It is her suggestion of a ‘neutral’ approach to, or rather neutral vision of, the fashion world (which we are purposefully never shown) that has really captured my interest.

There is no zero point in writing a script, of course. Just the illusion of nothingness before the something appears. But confronting emptiness, a kind of void-state, whilst sometimes terrifying (will anything ever happen?) is also exhilarating. A long view opens up, where all seems possible. Not just fresh starts, freed from habits of all kinds, personal and professional, but even the horizon itself changes.

After the long haul of a film (never less than three years in my experience) one needs to catch up, find out who you have become whilst immersed in the journey. Sometimes you can take the film with you as you change, but with others you must stay true to the original concept even if you feel you have moved on.

RAGE is an example of a film that has morphed continuously during its long evolution (I wrote the first draft after completing ORLANDO). Now, at last, its entry into the world has been made consistent with its themes and storyline.

A boy-child, who we know only as Michelangelo but remains unseen and unheard, interviews his subjects with a cellphone and posts his material on the internet over a period of seven increasingly catastrophic days. Now the film itself will appear, for the first time, on cellphones, in episodes day by day for a week (and then on the internet.)

Amazingly, it seems this has never been done before.
It is nice to be the first to take the leap, but even more gratifying is that there is a unity between the story itself and how it is released.

- Sally Potter (from Blog)

What a long way to have come… I still fondly remember the time I sat alone watching the majestic Orlando (1992).

…but in both cases, whether an adaptation of Woolf’s modernist ‘classic’ or in portraying (or betraying?) the postmodern heights of contemporary consumer culture, Sally Potter demonstrates an acute aesthetic that resonates with great emotion, just as choosing what colour to paint a wall arouses so much wonder and connection…

Zizek Love!