Deleuze and the crystal-image

Just found this in my Google documents. Written about 3 years ago. But, it means I can put some more pictures here.

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Deleuze’s crystal-image purports to offer us an insight into the operation of time. In order to explore this claim I will provide a synopsis of Bergson’s though on time and memory, which informs Deleuze’s work concerning the crystal-image. The crystal-image is a logical culmination of a trajectory that Deleuze sees in cinema. This essay will deal with this trajectory that operates through the movement-image, time-image and into the crystal-image: the Second World War providing the paradigm shift in underlying cinematic style. Finally, and in order to determine how the crystal-image is delineated visually I will look at its portrayal in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

In each moment that we inhabit in the present there exists, for Bergson, a split between a present that passes, and a past which is preserved. Bergson’s description of time is derived from Xeno’s paradoxes of movement, and seeks to explain how we move through time. In order to make sense of this, Bergson ascribes to our subjectivities ‘duration’. “Pure duration is the form taken by the succession of our inner states of consciousness when our self lets itself live, when it abstains from establishing a separation between the present state and anterior states.”¹ This notion of duration provides the basis of Bergson’s work on memory and features in Deleuze’s analysis of the crystal-image; itself a portrait of duration, a depiction of “the foundation of time, non-chronological time”.² It is only through looking at Bergson’s work on memory that we can fully make sense of duration (and thus the crystal-image); though it is itself, a concept that superintends the memory schema.

In order to explain how the past survives in the present, and how the splitting of time is facilitated, Bergson divides the operation of memory into two distinct aspects. The two forms that memory takes are of spontaneous memory and habitual or automatic memory. Spontaneous memory deals with the past in images and representations; it is entirely virtual.³ Habitual memory, unlike spontaneous memory, engages with the present. In elaborating on Bergson’s work, Guerlac uses the example of driving a car and then failing to acutely remember the journey afterwards.⁴ The mechanism of habitual memory, through the learned skill of driving, engages with the present. The practical collaboration of the two types of memory can be referred to as actual memory and is necessarily expedient in dealing with the world.

Bergson illustrated this interaction between spontaneous and habitual memory, and perception through his inverted cone. What we see is a distinction between the virtual – that which is pure memory, and the actual – pure perception, involved with the present. This gap is bridged through the use of memory. The ellipse AB at the base of the cone is totality of memory. Point S is the body, the self, in contact with the present (shown as the plane P). What needs to be considered is that the diagram is not meant to convey stasis; point S is in constant motion, engaged in a perpetual surge towards an immediate future and linked with an immediate past. This is how time is experienced, through the mechanism of memory Bergson describes. Time is not linear, but amorphous and in flux. The past exists concurrently with the present and each point in the future splits into a present that passes and a past that is preserved, without this there could be no motion through time: time would not move if the present could not pass.

Deleuze suggests that Bergson’s philosophy has often, pejoratively, been reduced to the maxim that “duration is subjective and constitutes our internal life.”⁵ While there is no denying the truth of the statement it can only be made sense of in the wider context of Bergson’s philosophy. Through the schema of time and memory that Bergson outlines it is the constant production of ‘internal circuits’, the linking of present and past, which contribute to the subjectivity of duration. It is these internal circuits that Deleuze finds exemplified visually through the medium of cinema.

Deleuze argues that these internal circuits when delineated in cinema give us a picture of how we inhabit and move in time. ⁶ It is this that he terms the ‘crystal-image’ – a representation of the splitting of time, the movement of past and present reflected through these images. Deleuze states that “cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world.”⁷ He goes on to elaborate that cinema seeks to provide bigger circuits in order to link actual images with those of the past. This is the basis for what Deleuze sees as the cinema’s exposition of time. However, the purest form of the crystal-image, the manner in which we exist in time, constitutes the smallest possible internal circuit.⁸ What Deleuze seeks to provide is a taxonomy of the crystal-image. To look at the crystal-image in film we require its context in Deleuze’s cinematic trajectory.

For Deleuze the state of pre-war cinema is characterised by a portrayal of the movement-image. The movement-image arises from Bergson’s critique of cinema. Cinema “misconceives movement” in the same manner as natural perception. What it does is break down movement into a series of successive images, a misgiving that natural perception and cinema share.⁹ For Bergson a model in which things “constantly change, a flowing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor centre of reference would be assignable” would be preferable.¹⁰ It is this that leads to a plane of immanence, a universe, which is comprised in a set of movement images; everything reacts with everything.¹¹ It is this that Deleuze adopts as the basis of the movement-image.

The movement-image is fundamentally reactionary. Its archetype is in Hollywood genre cinema, built upon placing characters into situations in which they can immediately act and react.¹² Deleuze also states that the narrative of pre-war film, steeped in movement-image, carries little central to the main tenets of the plot. The construction of films is done with ease of accessibility firmly in mind. Cuts are made in order to advance in time towards the next stage of the story, which inevitably unfolds in a linear fashion, often signposted by elucidating flashbacks. It carries a sensory-motor schema through which action unfolds.¹³ The link between sense and motor, between perception and action, is unassailable. This is the basis of the movement image, the emphasis being firmly on spatial rather than temporal action.

The break with movement-image cinema originates in post-war cinema. The time-image is introduced. A method in which film-makers no longer sought to portray only the movement-image, a format that Deleuze asserts, exhausted itself of original content. It must be noted that the validity of Deleuze’s assertion – that the Second World War signalled a break in the ethos of filmmakers – is questionable. It is difficult to see just how a historical event (regardless of its size) could produce identical outcomes in a diffuse set of filmmakers spread globally. We are inclined to think of the time-image as born fully developed. This, perhaps, is a misconception. The Second World War can be said to have provided the catalyst for the development of the time-image, but this itself was a process that developed gradually: through the French new-wave, and the importation of an aesthetic from Japanese cinema. Post-war cinema did not suddenly lose its emphasis that had traditionally been placed on the movement-image, but embraced a blossoming new direction concerned with time over movement.

What the developed time-image does it to place characters in situations to which they are unable to react. The sensory-motor schema is dissolved, and prompt action and reaction consequently rendered unfeasible. Deleuze terms this type of image the opsign, and through it we gain cinematic glimpses of time in its pure state. Deleuze credits Ozu’s languorous style with the first major depictions of time in its purest essence. He notes that places devoid of people, lingering camera shots (prominently for Deleuze, of a vase in Late Spring) convey pure time.¹⁴ With time cinematically delineated, it is the work of the crystal-image to show us how we inhabit and operate within time.

Crystal-images, formed by the collision of the actual and virtual, allow us to see time. The limpid, actual image and the opaque, virtual, become accessible in the crystalline form.¹⁵ What constitutes the purest crystal image is when the “actual optical image crystallizes with its own virtual image”.¹⁶ This image that consists of the smallest internal circuit, where the actual image finds its own ‘genetic’ element, forms a pure crystal. The image becomes irreducible to the actual and virtual, the present and contemporaneous past. The image cannot be broken down into its constituent parts because they become indiscernible from each other. Deleuze even suggests that in the light of the actual, the virtual becomes the actual and the actual, virtual, in the crystal.¹⁷ There is fluidity in the crystal that means its parts cannot be demarcated.

The crystal-image is the present and past, co-existing. Bergson holds that this is evinced in the form of déjà-vu.¹⁸ The phenomena of finding a place familiar, of feeling as if we have been somewhere or done something before, is the simultaneous existence of the past and present: where the pure-virtual image interacts fleetingly with present. This virtual image, in its pure form, exists outside of the consciousness in time. In the crystal-image, in déjà-vu, we glimpse this vision of an anterior state in collaboration with the present. This, is for Deleuze, how we operate in time, time holds us in its interior and we move through it as such.¹⁹

There are only three films that Deleuze attributes with showing us how we move in time; of forming crystal-images composed of the smallest interior circuits: Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora, Resnais’s Je t’aime je t’aime and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.²⁰ It is telling that there are only three examples of the crystal-image for Deleuze. It is an image of unrivalled specificity whose potential we can see in many films, but whose existence is only available to us in few. The theory of the crystal-image and the intricacy of its composition, often lead to situations where a lacuna is required to complete the crystal. This means that although the theoretical apparatus of the crystal-image can be applied to many films, we can rarely use it as an explanatory tool. Indeed, for Deleuze, it is not the crystal-image that can be used to further our understanding of specific films, but that these films further our understanding of the fundamental metaphysics of time and memory.

In Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour, in the Casablanca bar, the memories of Elle are projected onto Lui, so that in conversation he becomes her German lover. The crystal though is not quite completed, as it lacks the synchronous unity of a moment shared through past and present. Similarly, Lynch often offers us images of a virtual past imposed upon the present (think of line “Dick Laurent is dead” in Lost Highway) that leads to an exploration of a fugue state with continual references to events both present and past. What Deleuze does not allow for in the crystal-image is the construction of an implicit state of reference that has the same temporal significance. What the crystal-image requires is an explicit exposition; a full visual representation of the workings of memory in time. It is for this reason that I shall focus exclusively on the portrayal of Deleuze’s crystal-image in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Chris Marker puts forward the idea that Scottie’s acrophobia in Vertigo is a “clear, understandable and spectacular” metaphor for the vertigo of time.²¹ What Scottie tries to overcome through his makeover of Judy into Madeleine is time itself. His obsession, born from his love for Madeleine realises itself in his project to makeover a small town Kansas girl into the lady he covets. It is this fight against time that Vertigo portrays. It shows how Scottie inhabits time, and the function of his memory in his interaction with the present.

Vertigo is constructed in a manner that betrays its ostensible fascination with spatial vertigo. Vertigo contains multiple instances of repetition, semiotics, mirror images and duplicitous appearances. Dialogue is repeated, most notably the line about ‘power and freedom’, first uttered by Elster as a lament for a San Francisco past. These are the concepts that underline Elster’s machinations. What we are witness to is an elaborate plot to rid himself of his wife, thus gaining freedom, retaining her money as a key to power. In the Argosy bookstore the line is repeated alongside the rather portentous statement from Pop Leibel (‘he threw her away’) about Carlotta Valdes. Something that Elster manages to do literally, discarding his wife from the bell tower while Judy stands complicit.

The spiral of the opening credits, Madeleine’s hair and the stairs of the bell tower symbolise the circular nature of time in Vertigo. Things are brought back to approach their origins but the circuits can never quite be completed: the death of Madeleine prevents the logical culmination of the love she shares with Scottie, a situation that repeats itself with Judy’s death in the finale of the film. All symbols for Deleuze, of the operation of time. Indeed the prevalence of ‘mirror’ shots and the duplicitous nature of Madeleine further blur the distinction between the actual and the virtual. A technique used in the construction of the film as a whole. The ending mirrors the start, Scottie hanging once literally and then metaphorically in grave danger, the first physical and the second psychological. The pattern of following Madeleine and her death mirrors that which occurs, in the second half of the film, with Judy.

As Bergson saw, time is often viewed as secondary in function to space: in noting that we count in space, not time; that each object requires juxtaposition with another to make sense of them numerically.²² It is this reversal that constitutes metaphor of acrophobia that Marker uncovers in Vertigo. Indeed Deleuze states that the crystal-image “does not abstract time; it does better: it reverses its subordination in relation to movement”.²³ This is what Scottie is seeking in making over Judy, to reverse this spatiotemporal hierarchy in order to recover what has been lost; Madeleine, but survives outside of his consciousness in time, in the realm of the virtual. The pure crystal-image – where the actual: the reshaping of Judy into Madeleine, meets the virtual: Scottie’s memory of Madeleine – is the zenith of time’s representation in Vertigo.

The pure crystal-image, where the actual meets its virtual image occurs in Vertigo, after Scottie has successfully remade Judy into Madeleine. In Judy’s room at the Empire Hotel, as her hair is twisted into Madeleine’s spiral, the transformation is completed. What follows is a kiss between Judy and Scottie. As they embrace in the room the camera begins to rotate around them, Scottie opens his eyes and the scenery changes. He is no longer in the Empire Hotel, but in the livery stables at the mission, with the memory of the kiss he shared with Madeleine before her perceived death. As the camera completes its circuit Scottie is returned to the hotel room.

It is this image, this pure crystal, which portrays time so effectively for Deleuze. What we are presented with is an irreducible image. The actual (the room in the Empire Hotel) and the virtual (the kiss in the livery stable) cannot be separated; there is no longer a distinction between the present and the past for Scottie at that moment. The virtual image becomes actual and limpid, while the actual becomes opaque.²⁴ This is evinced in Vertigo. As the camera rotates, the virtual is shown to us; Scottie’s memory becomes actual, while the present, the actuality of the hotel room, disappears into the realm of the virtual. What we see in the crystal-image is the “gushing forth of time”. ²⁵

It is through Scottie’s obsession and “thanks to the most magical camera movement in the history of cinema” that Vertigo portrays the crystal-image.²⁶ This image is a product of Deleuze’s wider philosophy and a belief that through art we are able to reconcile ourselves with an alienated world: to come to terms with our position within it, and attempt to understand it more fully. In film – through the crystal-image – we are able to see the “most fundamental operation of time”.²⁷ In Vertigo, we are shown time’s operation, how Scottie is positioned in time, and thus, how we inhabit time.

Bibliography

Barr, Charles, 2002, Vertigo, British Film Institute.

Bergson, Henri, 2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Data of Immediate Consciousness. (Pogson Translation) Dover Publications.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books.

Guerlac, Suzanne, 2006. Thinking In Time – An Introduction To Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press.

Marker, Chris, 1995 ‘A free replay (notes on Vertigo)’in John Boorman and Walter Donohoe (ed) Projections 4 ½, Faber and Faber Ltd.

Pearson, Keith Ansell, 2002. Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual. Routledge.

Filmography

Hiroshima Mon Amour. Resnais, Alain. 1959 Argos Films.

Lost Highway. Lynch, David. 1996. Asymmetrical Productions.

Sans Soleil. Marker, Chris. 1983. Argos Films.

Tokyo Story. Ozu, Yasujiro. 1953. Artificial Eye Film Company Ltd.

Vertigo. Hitchcock, Alfred. 1958. Universal.

1 Bergson, Henri, 2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Data of Immediate Consciousness. (Pogson Translation) Dover Publications. P. 100.

2 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 79.

3 Guerlac, Suzanne, 2006. Thinking In Time – An Introduction To Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press. P. 125.

4 Guerlac, Suzanne, 2006. Thinking In Time – An Introduction To Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press. P. 126.

5 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

6 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

7 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 66.

8 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 68.

9 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. P. 59.

10 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. P. 60.

11 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 61-63.

12 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 145-154.

13 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 159-163.

14 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 13-16.

15 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 69.

16 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 67.

17 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 68.

18 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 77.

19 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

20 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

21 Marker, Chris, 1995 ‘A free replay (notes on Vertigo)’in John Boorman and Walter Donohoe (ed) Projections 4 ½, Faber and Faber Ltd. P123.

22 Guerlac, Suzanne, 2006. Thinking In Time – An Introduction To Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press. Pp. 61-63.

23 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 95.

24 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 68.

25 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

26 Marker, Chris, 1995 ‘A free replay (notes on Vertigo)’in John Boorman and Walter Donohoe (ed) Projections 4 ½, Faber and Faber Ltd. P. 124.

27 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 78-79.

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It’s all in the spiral.

Architecture of destruction

I started writing this last week and then got sidetracked with a number of other things so an abridged version of what it was going to be (although having re-read that sentence there’s a certain ontological issue with abridging something before it fully exists, but hey), appears below. Essentially, a couple of interesting points that came out of a roundtable event on The Architecture of Destruction that the Museum of Non Participation – a project devised (I think) by the no.w.here art collective -facilitated.

Firstly, a mention of Eyal Weizman who works and helps run the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. What interested me about his contribution to the discussion was the repositioning of dialectical analysis away from the traditional oppositional binaries, preferring instead, to use language of flows; of a concept of dialectical unity. Admittedly, not a new concept (Huyssen argues it well in ‘High/Low in an expanded field’ in Modernism/modernity), but it’s illustrated well by the practico-material realisations of architecture. That is, it’s easier to conceptualise and show the influence of implications of dialectics within the context of the (materially) structured environment, I think, than through more abstract engagement with other aesthetic fields.

The not so spectral presence of Foucault’s meditations on power and control – most notably in the control mechanisms derived from medicalisation – were present in the analysis of the Haussmanisation of cities in areas of conflict. Where the presence of a military as de facto government allows for the structuring of future control mechanisms: the cultural centres (schools, roads, prisons) for the neo-liberal project of democratisation; the spreading of freedom (capitalism). Evident in Eyal’s assertion that the American Military is the biggest provider / funder of public building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The second significant thing that I’d like to mention, predominantly to question the efficacy of, is this series of photographs by Ken Gonzales-Day who has digitally altered images of lynchings in order to remove traces of the bodies and nooses leaving the “viewers attention, not upon the lifeless body of lynch victim, but upon the mechanisms of lynching themselves: the crowd, the spectacle, the photographer, and even consider the impact of flash photography upon this dismal past.”

I saw one of the images at the Spy Numbers exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in the Summer, and without the qualification of the title of the work – captioned to illustrate what was being conducted at the time of the photograph – I think the image lacks power. It relies on a disjunction between the seen and unseen in order for us to reconstruct the violence in our minds. This, in itself, is a standard cinematic trope that heightens the sense of disgust and disturbance linked to acts of violence by forcing us to engage with them more closely through an active cognitive reconstructive. Now, what troubles me here is that the disjunction is not easy to formulate. The unfamiliarity of the images and scenes that they portray requires further contextualizing or familiarity with the original image – and it’s only upon reading that and then reevaluating the image – that the artist’s desired point (quoted above) becomes apparent.

What he’s trying to do is situate the viewer with the crowd. But, it serves the negative purpose of objectifying and isolating the crowd from the viewer. I don’t think the images manage to transcend the constraints of a body situated to elicit negative representation: the ‘it’s them not me’ response to the crowd. For featuring the crowd but removing the result of the lynching it establishes viewer / subject oppositions on which to project distance; a way of removing any sense of complicity normally associated with assimilation of the gaze by image.

Falling Water

“Wagner, Behrens and Perret lightened the solid massiveness of traditional architecture; Wright dynamited it.” – Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style

On an unrelated to the picture note: everything that I seem to be reading at the moment comes back in some manner, whether circuitous or direct, to the Crystal Palace. Following on from the previous Pynchon and Benjamin related post (the second of which will follow shortly) it seems apparent that the structuring impulse of modernity, beyond the obvious architectural implications (in the Crystal Palace’s iron and glass architecture), is concerned with the mastery and manipulation of light. I’ll elaborate on this subsequently, but I wanted to stick a new picture up here to make me feel like I’d achieved something positive under the darkened skies of an October Tuesday. And, you know, it was mentioned in the best and newest 50p paperback I bought.

Against the Day: Benjamin, Pynchon and the Arcades Project. Part I

Ok, so this is what I was supposed to write before I got distracted with the post below. Pynchon’s Against the Day (that labyrinthine brick of a novel), Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, and Benjamin’s Arcades Project: what do they have in common? Well, firstly, I am going to pop a disclaimer on the following: I have not actually read any of the Arcades Project, but I have read about the Arcades Project (I shall be reading the Arcades Project in the coming months for those who are doubting whether this will contain anything relevant at all) in the Friedberg book which is one of those delightful academic texts that happens to be eminently readable and contain a large number of pictures. Secondly, this will be continued as a dialectical response to the lack of continuation of other posts further down this blog that have not been continued (so far).

In Adorno’s introduction to Schriften, he writes:

He correctly called the images of his philosophy dialectical: the plan for the book Pariser Passagen envisages as much of a panorama of dialectical images as their theory. The concept of a dialectical image was meant objectively, not psychologically: the preservation of the modern as at once the new, the already past and the ever-same was to have been the work’s central philosophical film and central dialectical image.

The first sentence, regarding the correctly called dialectic of Benjamin’s philosophical image is a softening of Adorno’s stance that Benjamin was not dialectical enough in his work: another fine example being his letter written in response to the second (?) draft of ‘The Work of Art’ essay. However, the key in this Adorno penned quotation, is the latter part, the dialectical image of the ‘new, the already past and the ever-same’.

What ties the Arcades Project and Against the Day together is that they are both studies of modernity. Freidberg, through studying Benjamin, gives a detailed account of the development of a mobilised gaze (structurally coerced gaze towards consumption) that develops through modernity, and capitalist compact at the end of the 19th, and beginning of the 20th centuries. I’m not going to provide a summation at the moment, but I will do in due course. The idea is then, that this development fascinates Benjamin, that the Arcades of Paris, followed by the qualitative evolutionary shift to the department store, are descendants in a lineage that takes into account the World’s Fairs of the 19th century, the mobilisation of women as consumers, and the shift in the gaze (and concurrently consumption) that accompanies the technological developments of the panopticon, through to the cinema. Similarly, Against the Day is concerned with the same period – that spans the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, to the end of the First World War – and the same themes: it’s a study of the development of modern capitalism, of the resistance of the Colorado Anarchists, and the insidious effects of the railroad on global commerce (the man to good transformative).

It becomes increasingly apparent when reading Against the Day that Pynchon has spent a great deal of time familiarising himself with the currents of critical theory. There are a number of references that make this clear through the text (again, more details to come), to the evolutionary development of its broadly Marxist approach, concerned, as it is, with the flow of history towards capital’s first significant destructive telos: that of the First World War.

I’m going to stop there for now. So, what I then propose to try and structure is some account of the broad structural similarities of the two projects towards the dialectical image of the whole that Adorno outlines. Whether Benjamin prefigures postmodernism with the Arcades Project? What can be derived from the shared thematic preoccupations of developmental modernity?

Dilapidated Dwellings / Uncanny Ikeas

I watched Patrick Keiller’s The Dilapidated Dwelling on Saturday, with this fellow, and courtesy of the Savage Messiah Film Day. Made for television in the year 2000 – which felt more exciting to write than the number would suggest – it’s an accurate dissection of the current (via 2000? – a neat reminder of a little substantive change in the nine years since it was composed), state of the housing market in the UK. The contention being, that the techniques of modern industry have failed to permeate the manufacture of housing in the UK – unlike in Japan, which Keiller illustrates with footage of the Toyota housing plant – consequently, there exists a dilapidated and insufficient stock to meet demand.

One intriguing aspect of the film was its choice of ‘dwelling’ as opposed to house or home in the description of subject. Keiller is perhaps playing on the meaning of dwelling as both a place of living and mode of thinking. Implying then, that the physical stock of housing is dilapidated, as well as the ossified thinking and techniques of the UK’s house builders. Illustrated by the current architectural and developmental tropes of mock period architecture, a direct eschewing of the productive techniques of modernism and the in contrast to commercial architecture’s drive towards efficiency in and of manufacture; a drive that is indebted to the prefabricated and mass produced components so inherent in the designs of the 20th century’s early utopian ‘more with less’ maxim.

Continuing with appraisal of language, is there perhaps a second layer of unburdening in choosing dwelling over home. Here, we can look at the appropriation of the latter by Ikea, who, for the last number of years (I fail to recall the exact duration, but the ubiquitous yellow Oyster card holders seem to exist indefinitely in my memory) have played on a total co-option of the notion of ‘home’ in order to peddle stuff. In choosing dwelling over home, Keiller is dispensing with the accumulated burden of a set of commodity relations that bear  on the internal configuration and accessorization (neologism of the day and watchword of the culture industry?) of a dwelling, as well as referring to the external structure. So, Keiller is dealing then with structural rather than social baggage. ‘What is the building there for?’, rather than, ‘What does your living room say about you?’.

In Freud’s The Uncanny, he puts forward a case for the ‘double’ as a trigger, as a source of the uncanny, that the uncanny derives from being “marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own”. Is this not made real in Ikea’s narrative fiction of the showroom: in the model rooms, the ideal homes, the private spaces located in the public? It’s here that the subject meets their double: in the uncanny pictures of idealised private spaces – these supposedly individualised spaces displayed as coherent commodity sets – the subject locates themselves. They identify then with the commodity sets, with what each set offers as an identity; within the mirrors of bathrooms next to bathrooms, of kitchens next to kitchens, of lambent rooms next to rooms; they become located in the familiar made unfamiliar, the heimlich made unheimlich. If home is where the haunt is, Ikea is where the haunt begins.

Pictography

Not technically a pictogram, but I like the way the word pictography sounds, which correlates loosely I guess, with my appreciation of objects such as keys that have been reconstructed with electrical tape, for the ensuing texture and the way they feel. Anyway, an exploration of languor: Tarkovsky (the polaroid), undisputed master of the photographic gaze; Terry O’Neill, explorer of the icons of the Hollywood gaze.

Right to the City

“Middle class scum. Fuck Off! Class War!” – Hackney graffiti

First up I’ll provide a couple of links which are worth perusing: the online version (well, part version) of the City journal, which contains a couple of articles that you can download for free, that are concerned with the current edition’s analysis of the effects of gentrification on the city and the response of the Right to City movement. The second is the No Longer Empty campaign (here) which I’ll get to later.

What prompts this post is Peter Marcuse’s public lecture entitled ‘From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City’ that was delivered at UCL’s Cruciform Building (I like that word and the form-based naming convention) last night. Firstly, for those expecting a significant difference in Critical Urban Theory, and Critical theory, you might be disappointed. What Peter Marcuse offered was a neat summation of the problems facing the city today – especially given the recessionary pressure – alongside a critical explanation of the crisis as counterpoint to the traditional versions currently offered. Secondly, and perhaps frustratingly for those looking for a practical, he went on to discuss – and I hesitate to use the word solutions – alternative responses to the problems of crisis.

So, the traditional explanations for the current recession can be characterized in a number of ways; banker’s greed, and by extension greed generally; the impact of speculation; too much money floating around; and so on. Peter Marcuse’s contention, and it’s here that the critical aspect of the Urban Theory comes in, is that it’s a crisis of capital that causes these problems. Explaining away recession and the burst in the housing bubble within the constraints of the capitalist system serves only to obscure the wider problem, the problem of a system whose totality is based around profit motive, that teaches the drive for profit as a good thing; that greed is good.

For Marcuse then, it’s not a significant, or even effective step to admonish bankers for greed: they are playing by the rules of the system, and simply have exploited them with are greater degree of efficacy than others. What’s needed is a wider framework for criticism that sidesteps the problems of immanent reformism in viewing the crisis as a symptom of capitalist operation as a whole.

The graffiti quoted at the top of the post (and viewable in the Thomas Slater essay from the link at the start) is a visual expression disgust at the slow creep of gentrification. A process that often acts with the kind of incremental quantitative change that is invisible when in constant contact with an area, but readily apparent as a significant change when encountered with longer intervals between observations. What’s occurring then, is an asymmetrical class war. A war of attrition that is creating a new set of displaced and dispossessed people.

Peter Marcuse discussed the impact of the foreclosure (or repossession) on areas. That those who had been sold mortgages without sufficient ability to repay them beyond the initial period – sub-prime mortgages – are faced with repossession and relocation. Brooklyn is notable for it’s hyperkinetic wave of gentrification that’s swept off the East River and left poorly constructed condo towers and half finished development projects littered in its path as it has rolled, albeit one imagines, temporarily, back. Indicators again, of the problems of excess capital. Repossessed or foreclosed homes, then become empty shells, and are returned to the asset roster of the banks that leant mortgages, often to stand empty, or be offered to cash rich buyers. One of the proposal’s made by Marcuse, and one that I think warrants significant consideration, is the nationalizing of repossessed homes. They are taken out of the housing market, and reinstated as a places for housing cooperatives, workers cooperatives and not-for-profit enterprise.

What this hinges on, is the divorce of exchange and use value from property. The need for systemic reform is partly born out in a Marxist critique through the removal of the right to land: to own property. It’s this right that provides the foundations for the problems of speculation, securitization, gentrification to develop. It’s this right that skews the balance away from the worker – where the right to housing should be viewed as a need, rather than as a commodity for exchange – and towards those aggregates of capital: investors, development organizations and multiple owners. In separating the use value from exchange value: in maintaining the function of the house, but not treating it as an asset, there exists an opportunity to start to restructure the network of social relations and stigmas that govern attitudes towards private property.

There’s the theory to back up the practice, but there’s little practice that makes sense of the theory. In some areas, and here I refer to the No Longer Empty campaign, there is something being done about the increasing number of empty storefronts (a sign of owners holding onto the property in order to gain larger rents when the recession ends) as they are appropriated as artistic space. As a place for communities to convene and engage in creative activity.

This brings me to the final thing that I’d like to mention; Marcuse’s deprived / discontented definition. In mentioning who the critical theory was for, he tentatively put forward the idea of two distinct groups; the deprived (the homeless, those on welfare, those in underpaid and low-wage jobs) and the discontent (those who are materially better situated, but unhappy with the systemic problems surrounding them). He noted that he wasn’t happy with the language of the categories but the problem is how to unite them. Talking of 68, Marcuse sounded relatively elegiac as he addressed the occupation of Columbia University by students of both categories, but in different buildings, and the workers and students protests dissolved into separate factions in the same year in France. So if we accept the Right to the City, the question then becomes: how do you bring together deprived communities and the discontented in a meaningful and significant way in order to enact change?

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Auto-Destruction

Gustav Metzger, pioneer of Auto-Destructive art, is the focus of a current retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery. A retrospective that’s actually rather good. I went along yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to see Gustav Metzger – now 84, and looking it – propped up against a wall in the East room of the gallery. Suspecting it was him, but not being sure, it became apparent when watching a video of his activities from the 60s – making his acid paintings, destroying buildings – that it was indeed him, and that a man who’s spent a life investigating the destructive contradictions of technological and mechanical progress, was not immune to the rather prosaic unfolding of nature’s auto-destruction.

Early on it becomes apparent that Metzger is an artist of displacement. Born in Germany, and moved as part of the Kindertransport child refugee scheme that relocated thousands of, predominantly Jewish children, prior to the Second World War, his work is concerned with the analysis of the destructive power of technology. There is his collection of newspapers – the centre of an interactive exhibit where visitors are asked to select articles that fit into topics of extinction, the way we live now, and the credit crunch – a mood of reflection on the current state of the global economy, the impact of recession and the underlying destructive nature of capitalism that confronts nature, to its detriment, on a daily basis. Again this is reflected in Metzger’s upturned trees, a response to Global Warming, and his Stockholm Project that concentrated the effects of pollution into a plastic construction over the course of seven days.

What underpins Metzger’s work is a sense of astonishment at the cultural superstructure. Adorno, writing in California during the Second World War, issued a number of often scathing attacks on American culture, the ersatz nature of Los Angeles, and the invasive urban and suburban planning that he equates to a a rape of nature. Adorno’s writing from this period should not be dismissed as a dismissal of American culture, but as an analysis of Western culture as a whole. There is a studied disbelief in a man who was witnessed the effects of concentration camps on the populations of Europe, and sees the same prefabricated structures used in huge housing tracts in suburban Los Angeles.

It’s this same disbelief in the inherent contradictions of capitalism that Metzger studies in his work. The most affecting aspect of the exhibit are his historical photographs, hidden from view by steel, bamboo screen, or part obscured by a mound of rubble. The large-scale photographs obscured by cloth, one hanging on the wall of the gallery, and one on the floor, forces visitors to confront the images with out the mediation of distance. In crawling under the cloth that covers the photo – an image of the ghetto with Jews being forced to clean the floors on hands and knees while others stand around watching – the scope and subject of the image is only revealed incrementally. To talk of empathy would perhaps be crass – being that crawling across the floor of the gallery would appear to bear little in relation to the situation of those in a similar bodily position in the image – but the impact is stronger for proximity and mode of the viewing.

Just a final note on a couple of the descriptions that Metzger offers for larger installations here. It’s a shame that the larger projects remained conceptual as opposed to concrete, hampered, I imagine, by a lack of funding available for expensive works that will destroy themselves and yield no return on investment. It would certainly have made my one-time commute to work more interesting to see Metzger’s monolithic cube engaged in the silent process of destruction from inside out.