Film-Philosophy 19 (2015): Book Reviews
Review: Domietta Torlasco (2013), The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 160 pp. Ted Kafala College of Mount Saint Vincent, New York Domietta Torlasco has long been interested in inventive ways to subvert the normative and linear ways of presenting the conceptual image, or the narrative form in cinema, video and installation art. In the past many experimental media artists have employed a variety of formal devices and tropes in their work to create montages and new types of spatiotemporal configurations, oftentimes with avant-garde motivations and objectives. Examples from what P. Adams Sitney (2002) labels late twentieth century ‘structural cinema’ include the catalog, or loop in Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma (USA, 1970) and Roger Snow’s Wavelength (USA, 1967; see Peterson 1994). These films exhibit the use of repetitive devices and process-oriented schema that are sometimes equated with computational and database structures (see Manovich and Kratsky 2005). Rather than draw on the algorithmic nature of digital media as an salient feature, Torlasco instead presents the ‘digital archive’ as a psychoanalytic way of combining digital and analog still images and footage, past and present memories in media art. Torlasco began applying psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches to temporal movement in cinema in her earlier book, The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (2008). In her latest book, The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film, she continues this project, but readers may now observe the insertion of textual and archival inscription in her analytic and interpretive method. The book is organised into four chapters that interpret five digitally produced works, including Monica Bonvicini’s video installation Destroy She Said (1998), Agnès Varda’s video Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (France, 2000), Pierre Huyghe’s video installation L’Ellipse (1998), Marco Poloni’s installation The Desert Room (2006), and Chris Marker’s interactive CD-Rom Immemory (1997). Torlasco’s very well written introduction encapsulates her approach and introduces her most important theoretical and inspirational sources, such as Jacques Derrida’s notion of archiving as intervention, Elizabeth Grosz’s feminist theory of virtuality and temporal excess in the ‘future anterior’ from Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (2005), Judith Butler’s (2002) Hegelian interpretation of Antigone as scandal and impurity in relation to the archival impulse and death drive, and Kaja Silverman’s (2009) theorisation of the
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perceptual signifier of desire in the process of analogical discovery and identity construction. Perhaps the most important philosophical ideas behind Torlasco’s textual analysis are found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (1969), his late revision of phenomenology in which he presents his metaphysics of multi-perceptual relations and sensorial properties between objects, and the idea of the flesh/surface as a medium for communication between the visible and invisible. Torlasco emphasises Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh as fold, a surface of the inexhaustible depth of the visible and time. Memory is a folding between seen and unseen, a ‘chiasm of perception’, an excess or openness of heretical archiving with ‘unstable, mutating effects, and exhausting the materials at hand’ (xvii). Torlasco associates the archival trace with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the ‘invisible reserve’, an infinitely productive reservoir of memories that operates in the gaps and folds of the cinematic edit (59, 96). The edit as a fold may be fertile ground for many new forms of reflexivity, but when analysing digital objects I argue below that it also runs into limitations (for alternative uses of the concept of the fold, see: Deleuze 1993; Murray 2008; Kafala 2002). Although there is continuity in argument throughout the book, Torlasco’s discussion of psychoanalysis as a mode of archiving, Derrida’s archive as Freudian impression in deconstruction, and the method of archival folding/unfolding of memories in the reversibility of shots seems most pertinent to the analysis of feminist-oriented video in the first two chapters. Torlasco defines heretical archiving as a mode of writing that effaces the signs of the perceptual world and occurs in and through perception, within the threshold between visible and invisible (xvi). The ‘digital archive’, as the unexplained contemporary form of the unconscious repository, is identified as the memory mechanism and conceptual archive for the practice of revealing the ‘hidden and forgotten’, that which has been inscribed by unconscious repression (51-52). Referencing the process of archiving with new technologies, Torlasco makes a far stretch to salvage Derrida’s underused notion of virtuality in psychoanalytic digression that works to open up transgressive and politically transforming futures (in preference to Deleuze’s notion of a creative space). As per Torlasco’s earlier work on Italian neorealism (2008), time is equated with repetition and the movement of the death drive and by extension the conceptual archive operates between temporal moments of repetition and oedipal violence. In chapter one, Monica Bonvicini’s video installation is reinterpreted in respect to its rhythmic repetition of shot sequences and multilayered sound track, which intermesh footage of three paramount actresses of the cinema, Ingrid Bergman, Anna Karina and Monica Vitti. Their normative presence in film is subverted through erotic exchanges between female love-objects and the short-circuiting and denouement of narrative cinema in montage. Torlasco points out that Bonvicini’s attempts to undermine the patriarchal www.film-philosophy.com
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gaze of their companion husbands – Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni – reconciles the destruction of cinematic memory rendered by oedipal violence, the ‘supreme violence of forgetting’ (3). Consequently Bonvicini uses the aberrant and impossible archive and the anarchic dimension of the domicile to ‘unbuild’ the normative and legislative forces of place, patrimony, and lineage (18-20). Torlasco argues that Bonvicini’s video remixology unleashes Derrida’s archontic power: the heretical archive always works against itself through self-effacement and the perturbations of the death drive, through the dynamic and transgressive force of repetition, and through the rearrangement of the forms and rhythms of memory. In chapter two, Torlasco discusses Agnès Varda’s cinécriture method of cinematic work as both a kind of typographic, conceptual inscription and a mixed, or ‘heterodox’, form of archiving using digital technology that goes beyond inscription to emerge as a folding between the visible and invisible lingering in the edit. Torlasco suggests that Varda’s Gleaners and I circumvents the patriarchal logic enduring in the thought of dissemination as described in Derrida’s La Dissémination (1993) and Archive Fever (1998) (25-27). Torlasco makes comparisons between Varda’s cinécriture and Silverman’s study of the ‘caméra-stylo’ in Godard’s autobiographical films, as well as Merleau-Ponty’s radical interrogation of the visible as an affirmation of divergence in the metaphysics of presence. The gesture of the glaneuse, the gathering after harvest, which mimes Jules Breton’s famous painting, La Glaneuse (1877), is at once a gathering of images of the contemporary world (printmaking, painting, cinema) and a tracing of multiple figurations in the act of a cinematic writing (29). Torlasco contends and tries to demonstrate more or less successfully that Varda’s compositional patterns and editing style in the digital film unravel the distinction between subject and object in recording, classification and interpretation. Torlasco acknowledges the indirect and retroactive influence of Derrida’s ‘The Double Session’ on her own reading of Merleau-Ponty, implying that the ideas of dissolution, dispersion and dissemination in Derrida’s text fuse well with the generative multiplicity in Merleau-Ponty’s fold as a gap in perception. The use and effects of new digital cameras and digital montage enable in Varda’s cinécriture a style of cinematography as ‘invagination’, a movement of folding, or reversibility within the shots that undoes the distinction between subject and object contained within memory, writing and archiving. Gleaning as an act in Varda’s digital film enacts a kind of unruly archiving and writing of perception that operates somewhere in the zone of the death drive (34-35, 48). Torlasco’s use of opaque and difficult language here in the analysis of Varda’s cinematic work does not help convince the reader of the usefulness of an expanded grammatology (as an analytical tool) based on the blending of phenomenology and deconstruction. Drawing on the thought of Merleau-Ponty’s late writings to www.film-philosophy.com
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support the contention that Varda’s cinécriture actually undermines the Cartesian vision of mind and body (‘as old as Western metaphysics’) also runs Torlasco into some theoretical trouble (33-34), which she attempts to resolve in the second part of her book. In chapters three and four, Torlasco applies her version of phenomenological restoration to digital installation art, specifically Pierre Huyghe’s L’Ellipse and Chris Marker’s Immemory in chapter three, and Marco Poloni’s The Desert Room in chapter four. With only a brief mention of Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time (2002) that discusses the idea of an absolute present, or a singular moment in the cinematic instant as the ‘reification of time by modernism through technological means’ (48), Torlasco tackles the use of repetition in the collapsing of space and time as presented in digital installations. She does not deviate from the deconstructive-psychoanalytic model of archivalisation as a/the practice of revealing the hidden and forgotten (in repression and unconscious inscription), but now appropriates the mechanism of ‘digital memory’ as a pathway to the unconscious of the virtual in relation to (and accessed through) new technologies (51-52, 54). Rather than appropriate the distinction between the actual and virtual from Henri Bergson’s (1990) dissociative process of memory, as Grosz does in Time Travels, Torlasco remains faithful to the Derridean use of virtualities as open ended futures in relation to the past and the ‘unconscious virtual’ that emerges through digression and transference. In attempts to envelop the sense that time is kaleidoscopic in digital installation, Torlasco returns to the cinematic cut, or edit in memory, despite the diversity of compositional strategies put in motion in Huyghe’s L’Ellipse and Marker’s Immemory. The edit guarantees that contradictory, disparate pasts emerge from one self-differing time. Torlasco describes the virtual in the edit as the intertwining of the visible and invisible promising to release a past manifested by digital memory (54). Pre-existing materials replay under the sign of repetition, Huyghe’s piece intercuts hybrid reconstructions as incomplete configurations and uses existing films as transitional construction sites (54-55), but the interlocked sequences are also minimal and restrained. The use of jump cuts as suspensions and affective linkages contributes to the participatory strategy of the insertion of subjectivity into the editing of the narrative, a process where one ellipsis replaces another cyclically. Marker’s interactive Immemory, composed of a series of seven zones, which operate as fluctuating temporal constellations of still and moving images, sounds and texts, was authored with the simple tool, Hyperstudio®. Immemory is a piece that I was fortunate to experience for the first time at its premiere at the Body Mécanique exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, in 1998. Torlasco relates the tactile, interactive mouse-click to the ‘fluctuating openness of the flesh’ operating as the edit, www.film-philosophy.com
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fold, hinge and turning point in Marker’s installation art, where a random, unpredictable reversibility of the visible and invisible occurs (64). Torlasco again reads these reversals as anticipating the contours of an ontological psychoanalysis and the action of the death drive, where the drive works to jumble and degenerate the perceptual texture of the archive in digital memory (71-72). To illustrate this point, Torlasco references here MerleauPonty’s infrequently mentioned notion of the ‘punctum caecum’, the disappearance or radical fading that is associated with flesh but also the relentless erosion (and paradoxical fecundity and productivity) in archival memory (73). Similarly to other contemporary uses of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment, Torlasco draws on the ‘flesh’ as a communication medium, a texture, fold, nexus, plenum, the surface of a primordial depth which intertwines the visible and invisible in a causal interaction. For Merleau-Ponty and the carnal phenomenologists, the object, or thing subsists despite changes and modulations to its qualities through its sense of inimitable style, despite limitations set by a permissible range of possible physical, or material permutations (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 193).1 This problem of the body in relation to technological and natural experiences is raised again in the fourth and final chapter, where Torlasco interprets The Desert Room through a correction and critique of Bernard Stiegler’s cinematogram and télé-image as negative technologies of memory inscription. According to Torlasco, in Technics and Time 2 (2008) Stiegler makes the phenomenological argument that cinema as tertiary memory follows a stream of consciousness and, conversely, that consciousness is also cinematographic. Since the cinematogram and other ‘discrete’ temporal and intentional objects inscribe memory and produce an external memory archive, Stiegler laments that the contemporary technoculture that creates them impoverishes our synchronous perception of time, and that ‘programming industries’ pollute and disrupt the natural movement of time (78). The ‘industrialisation of memory’ profoundly affects the relation between consciousness and the temporal object (93). Poloni’s The Desert Room reuses and reworks the hotel setting of Antonioni’s Professione: Reporter/The Passenger (Italy/Spain/France, 1975), but also substitutes shots from the film with contemporary shots of the hotel as found in the Algerian Saharan village of Illizi. Stiegler would interpret the (re)appearance of phantasms as a ‘spectral effect’ that returns a specific temporal image-object: the appearing and vanishing phantasm composites the switching of identities and moments in time. In other words, the original film, The Passenger, woven in the fabric of time, exists only in its own flux and flow of presentation. This continuity, or staging matches perfectly the spectator’s real-time stream of consciousness, whereas the editing ‘coincides with the revision and rearrangement of memories themselves, in a play between recollection (secondary memory) and forgetting that always passes through tertiary memory’ (91-92). www.film-philosophy.com
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Contrastingly Torlasco reinterprets these ‘phantasmic appearances’ in Poloni’s installation as a contamination between life and cinema, between technology and perception, which operates in a deceiving self-enclosed space that exceeds the boundaries between individual and collective consciousness. While Torlasco shares Stiegler’s sense of urgency over the impoverishment and decomposition of the cinematic image by the culture industries associated with capital, she also acknowledges the potential of an expanded cinema, and a cinema of expanded memories. She suggests that The Desert Room and other digital installations create ‘an archive of media mutations’ and a discontinuous, heterogeneous flux of images in excess of the time of consciousness (94). Torlasco again relies on Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology of objects of the flesh to ‘reread’ Stiegler’s reading of Husserlian phenomenology. Torlasco applauds the folding and differentiation of the flesh of new cinema, an ‘archiving cinema’ that threatens to erase memory as it simultaneously inscribes it. She writes: ‘As Derrida reminds us, archival memory cannot be thought independently from finitude and forgetfulness’ (90). As an alternative to a positivistic representation of time, Torlasco embraces the radical discontinuity of the digital media installation to ‘coil’ and ‘fold’ the visible and invisible in open configurations of subjectivity and objectivity that occlude and collapse Cartesian mind and object distinctions; but does she overstate the potential to overcome mind-body dualism here? Is Merleau-Ponty’s thought the wrong choice to overturn the post-Kantian system’s phenomenological preservation of the self-enclosed Cartesian subject and the occlusion of the media object (as a nominal object) inside the realm of the mind? Readers looking for an alternative to Cartesian foundationalism and phenomenology are unlikely to find it in Torlasco’s book; The Heretical Archive’s theoretical premises reside well within the schools of phenomenology and deconstruction, which assert that the mediation of language becomes allencompassing and subjectivity becomes positioned within and invested with textual effects.2 While textual interpretations seem strong and valid in the first two chapters of the book, which pertain to installation pieces based on video montage, the incongruous merging of psychoanalysis (as read through deconstruction) and phenomenology seems to fall short of grasping the digital nature of the installation art discussed in chapters three and four. Although Torlasco makes many references to ‘new technologies’, the ‘audiovisual’ and to ‘hypervideo’, she makes only a single mention of the computer throughout the book. Some readers may find it problematic that digital memory is collapsed into generic archival memory. Torlasco seems to agree with Stiegler, who adopts the word ‘discrete’ to describe analog, electronic and digital media, dropping the need to make distinctions (93). Her notion of digital memory is derived from Derrida’s definition of www.film-philosophy.com
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archival memory in Archive Fever, which emphatically limits its modes of inscription. Torlasco states that Derrida is emphatically unambiguous on this point: there is no archive without exteriority, a paradoxical priority and technique of repetition, and a pervasiveness of erasure and finitude within the psyche. Although she writes that ‘[w]hat is at stake is the difference between mneme and hypomnema, between live, internal, natural memory and inert artificial memory’ (76), she never explains the nature of this difference outside of reifying the digital edit, or interstice, as a fold, a residual of condensation and displacement, the vicissitudes of memory and the ‘fluidity of shifters as a digital media practice’ (66).3 Without reducing digital memory to hardware and resorting to extreme forms of media determinism, Torlasco could still have better captured the nature of computer memory in installation art, perhaps as an ephemerality that is made to endure, as a repetition that operates according to the logics of programmability (using iteration, or recursion), or as a source of interaction and degenerative linking between humans and machines – as per the work of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2011) and N. Katherine Hayles (2012). The historical conflation of memory with storage (and by extension the archive) is problematic, and there are differences in permanence and erasure, notwithstanding the complexity of static and dynamic memories, which distinguish artificial and natural memory, as well as digital and analog memory. An historical trajectory between cinema (film) and digital media is often taken for granted, but few scholars have undertaken the work to demonstrate that there is a coherent genealogical relationship between them. Endnotes 1. More recently, Roy Bhaskar (1998) defines objects as generative mechanisms that behave differently in varying open and closed systems, something like the visible and invisible in memory, and which cannot be equated or reduced to events, actualities, or qualities, hence to their contextual conditions. 2. For one example of this critique, see Quentin Meillassoux (2008). In subverting the premises of absolute necessity and the static objects of transcendental logic, Meillassoux’s project points out the weaknesses of the blind alley of Cartesian-analytic foundationalism as embodied in Immanuel Kant’s first Critique (upon which he built his larger metaphysics and aesthetics). By providing the basis for a mind-independent reality and reinserting temporality as an absolute variable into materialism, Meillassoux guarantees autonomy and open determinacy for the arts through endless creative possibility, perpetual becoming and perishing, and other salient notions of ephemerality.
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3. Torlasco’s mention of the operations of contraction, condensation, expansion, dilation, and rearticulation in montage have strong Deleuzian overtones – not only of Deleuze and his insights into time-memory in Cinema 2 (1989), but also of the Deleuze who reconstructs Henri Bergson’s notion of memory as contraction and dissociation in Bergsonism (1990). Torlasco dismisses Bergson’s theories of time and reminiscence as ‘occultation’, but frequently references authors, artists, and directors who were strongly influenced by his ideas, including Grosz, Marcel Proust and Alain Resnais. Bibliography P. Adams Sitney (2002) Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 19432000, 3rd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhaskar, Roy A. (1998) The Possibility of Naturalism, London: Routledge. Bergson, Henri (1990) Matter and Memory, New York: Zone Books. Butler, Judith (2002) Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2011) Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Software Studies), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1990) Bergsonism (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam), New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta), London: Athlone Press. Derrida, Jacques (1998) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. Eric Prenowitz), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1993) La Dissémination, Paris: Seuil. Doane, Mary Ann (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (2005) Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (2012) How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kafala, Ted (2002) ‘Deleuze’s Aesthetics: Curvature and Perspectivism,’ Enculturation, 4:2 (Fall). Available at: www.film-philosophy.com
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http://www.enculturation.net/4_2/kafala.html. Last accesssed: 19 June 2014. Manovich, Lev and Andreas Kratsky (2005) Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1969) The Visible and the Invisible (trans. Alphonso Lingis), Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Meillassoux, Quentin (2008) After Finitude, London: Continuum. Murray, Timothy (2008) Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. James Peterson (1994) Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University. Silverman, Kaja (2009) Flesh of my Flesh, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, Bernard (2008) Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (trans. Stephen Barker), Stanford: Stanford University Press. Torlasco, Domietta (2008) The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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