Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 56, December 2003
Warwick Mules
The Figural as Interface in Film and the New Media:
D. N. Rodowick's _Reading the Figural_
D. N. Rodowick _Reading the Figural, or,
Philosophy after the New Media_ Durham: Duke
University Press,
2001 ISBN
0-8223-2711-2 276 pp. I In his recently published
book _Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New
Media_, D. N. Rodowick introduces the figural into the
analysis of film and new media. The book contains revised
versions of already published articles written in the 1980s
and 1990s, [1] together with new material, and takes
us on a journey through film theory and new media
technologies to draw out the power of figuration in the
coming digital age. Recognizing the 'tectonic shift' (205)
currently taking place from an analog to a digital culture,
Rodowick convincingly argues that we need a set of new
concepts and strategies capable of engaging with new media
forms and effects, in order to develop 'creative strategies
of resistance' (xvi) as part of a 'critical genealogy that
may liberate new concepts for critiquing the permeation of
capital into all areas of cultural experience'
(xii-xiii). Rodowick's project is to
re-introduce the figural into contemporary analysis, thereby
circumventing the reign of the sign in favour of the figural
as the virtualisation of the image within various modes of
temporal becoming: 'the era of signs is rapidly fading. We
have already entered the age of the figural' (46). Drawing
on Lyotard's early work on the figural in _Figure,
discours_, Deleuze's readings of Foucault and Nietzsche
(_Foucault_, _Nietzsche and Philosophy_), and Deleuze's
concept of the time-image developed in _Cinema 2_, Rodowick
traces a path through various writings in poststructuralist
film theory towards an elaboration of the figural as a key
concept in the new media age. [2] Rodowick wants us
to attend to contemporary media not as sign structures, but
as temporally oriented (audio)visual events: 'we need a
pedagogy of the image that critically evaluates its
relations with time and history' (198). Our task in film and
media analysis is not to evaluate the truth of the image as
a representation of the (past) event, but to draw out
pastness as a configuration of the text's potential
futurity. The figural defines 'a
distinct mutation in the character of contemporary forms of
representation, information, communication' (49), and
emerges in new media as the virtualisation of the real
through digital technologies which renders time
incommensurable with space: 'when time is rendered as
incommensurable with space in the interstice, a vast
territory of potentialities opens in every present that
passes. Through events, virtuality unfolds as an unlimited
reserve of future acts, each of which is equally possible in
itself, yet incompossible with all the others' (200).
Taking his cue from
Deleuze's time-image concept, which was the subject of his
previous book, _Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine_, Rodowick
comments on the new virtual regimes of multimedia and the
shift to an audiovisual culture where 'the visible and
expressible are bound up in a heautonomous relation' (7)
that establishes an entirely new order of consumption in
capitalist economies [3]. Here, Rodowick goes some
way towards elaborating a political economy of the figural,
broadening out Deleuze's examination of the time-image in
film to audiovisual culture in general
[4]. In the new media age,
figuration is not simply a textual formation, but
potentially a deformation in the discursive regimes that
control and direct individual desire within social and
cultural environments organised around the process of
capital exchange. As an excessive force inhabiting, yet
surpassing discourse, figuration involves a virtualisation
of the body that resists sign exchange and the formation of
social identity. In new media, the virtualised body becomes
a site of an illusionary freedom; freedom from the controls
and designations of the social, and thus bears the potential
for political change: 'the unforseen relations we fashion
out of these new relations of force that may augment our
bodily and mental powers and enhance our relations with
others' (221). However, as Rodowick's analysis indicates,
the anticipatory desire of capital (i.e. capital as a
Deleuzian abstract machine) captures the new resistive body
emerging in multimedia formats, and draws it into a regime
of consumption to form a contemporary version of the
consumer self based on utopian ideals of synaesthetic
experience. Advertising captures what
might otherwise have been a radical aesthesis of the body
within emerging virtual communities outside the range of
capital, and refashions it in answer to the desire of the
individual consuming self in terms of a total experience,
where distances in time and space are collapsed, and
everything magically appears at the command of the consumer.
[5] New media advertising does not sell products, it
sells itself in terms of a liberating technology built
especially for the consumer, and designed to virtualise her
body, to free her from the constraints of time and space,
and to place her in control of the resources of capital
(easy credit, fluid social arrangements, unlimited
opportunities for expansion, compliant technology, in short
a world without struggle or travail, a world especially
designed just for her). To counteract the power of capital
to capture the figural, Rodowick calls for 'a critical
philosophy of technology to unlock its historical image and
to make legible the strategies of resistance and lines of
flight that are created within it' (223). II What then is the
historical image of technology that Rodowick calls for, and
how can it be seen in terms of a resistive figuration? An
answer lies in the way the figural is produced, as the
interface between the plastic materiality of signs, and
their signifying content. Following Hjelmslev we might say
that semiosis involves an interrelation between a plane of
expression and a plane of content. [6] Expression
and content cannot be resolved into one another, but form an
isomorphic relation that actively produces semiosis. In this
case, the conventional Saussurean structure of
signifier/signified needs to be revised. In Saussure's model, all
semiotic content is resolvable into sign-code through mutual
transformations along the signifier/signified axis. While
demonstrating how a sign-code functions, the Saussurean
model elides the material force that makes the sign-code
happen. That is to say, it reduces the event of
signification to a matter of signs without materiality,
leading to a textualism arranged around the question of
discursive authority. Indeed, the first few chapters of
Rodowick's book are commentaries on film theory and analysis
published in the 1980s by writers such as Thierry Kuntzel
and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, and concerned with the
signifier as a destabilising force in film texts. Here the
film becomes a 'constellation' (84) of signifiers that
override narrational order, constituting a 'phantasmic
matrix that gives form and movement to the relations of
desire played out in the fiction' (88). In these terms, the
figural is a set of signifier-images excessive to the
narrative (their presence does not help to move the
narrative forward), constituting a matrix or archi-text
layered through the film (for instance in Kuntzel's analysis
of the film _The Most Dangerous Game_, the vector of images
following the appearance of a door knocker). By drawing out
the figural matrix of signifier-images 'the self-identity of
the text -- the integrity of its body -- must be placed in
question' (88). Here the figural is located at the level of
the signifier in its uneasy relation with narration.
Throughout Rodowick's book there remains a residual
commitment to this version of the figural. However, the figural is
not simply the set of signifier-images detectable in a
resistive relation to narrational structure, but the force
that draws signifiers into proximity with one another,
thereby making it possible for them to signify. This force
does not unify signs in a formal sense, rather it makes
signification happen. The figural is interfaced
heautonomically into the sign structure of the film, as the
virtualised (dis)connectivity between expression and
content, as the torquing of the image into a perpetually
opening outside. This new kind of interface is clarified by
Foucault in his neglected analysis of the calligrammatic
image in Magritte's paintings in _This is Not a Pipe_,
[7] which is also discussed at length in Rodowick's
book (60-68). In this case, the figural is not to be found
in isolated, resistive images spread throughout the film,
but as a productive principle of the film itself; as the
primary dimension of the (audio)visuality that the film
perpetually becomes. The figural opens film out
to 'monstration' [8] or gestural space, as the
perpetually deferred 'becoming unified' of a dislocated
space/time continuum of visual material (images). An
exemplary case of the figural in film can be found in silent
films, where the image matrix forms itself around gestural
space in the absence of voiced characters. For instance,
there is a remarkable scene in D. W. Griffith's _Way Down
East_ (1920) where Lillian Gish, who plays Anna, a poor
country girl seduced by a city cad, demonstrates
'abandonment' through a series of visual gestures (cradling
of arms with an invisible baby, direct look of surprise into
the camera, furtive glances around the room). [9]
Here the image is full of prescience, providing the film
with material to advance the idea of 'abandoned woman'. The
transforming images prefigure the sense of what the story
tells us through narrative action. In silent film, meaning
is written directly onto the film surface through visual
gesture without any detour through speech: a machine for
writing with film images. As the interface between
expression and content, figurality opens up the space of
temporal becoming that the film makes happen, thereby
clearing the way for an emergence of an historical image of
the film's own formation as a technological and cultural
production. This is not simply a matter of placing the
self-identity of the film in question, but of producing the
filmness that the film is. It's a matter of making the film
happen as an audiovisual event. In _Way Down East_ the film
'happens' in the gestural transformations of the images,
where ideas emerge directly through the body of the acteur
(as opposed to the positionality of the actant). Narrative
simply fills out what is constantly produced in the visual
gestures that the film is. Although linked back to stage
melodrama and the tradition of the tableau vivant in art,
the gestures of silent film introduce a new kind of
image-making through the film interface. This interface was
fatally modified with the introduction of sound in the
1930s, which, from the perspective of the silent image,
paralysed the camera in fulfilling its new responsibility to
the voice. The consequence of this
re-reading of the figural, away from signifier-effects and
towards the torqued image of the plastic material of film,
is significant. It overcomes the limitations of a critical
analysis always cast in the mode of resistance, where film
structure is 'placed in question' by the destabilising force
of figurality. As I have shown in the case of silent film,
if the figural places structure in question, it also affirms
the film in its filmness, thereby paving the way for a
positive engagement with the film text, bringing into view
new forms of connections and modes of becoming that films,
in their specific technological formats, make
happen. III As Bill Routt reminds us
in his admirable article on the figural in film, figural
analysis is a form of hermeneutics involving the historical
relation between signs and events, between the text's
present condition of meaning and its capacity to draw on and
summon forth the past through the power of signs.
[10] The figural opens up the historicity of the
film text so that the event's past is also its 'coming to
presence'. Reading the figural is to read the past in the
present; to read with the 'pastness' of the text as a
prefiguring of something beyond what the text says in its
normative, denotative mode of signification. All texts have
figures, since all texts have a past, or at least point to a
past as the very materiality of their
signification. The task of figural
analysis is not limited to describing figures in film texts.
Rather, it concerns the mapping of an abstract machine: a
machine for writing in images, composed of various
historically defined elements drawn synthetically into
particular arrangements and assemblages that make film
happen in the way that it does. Here I am not referring to
'context', but to a genealogical tracing of the lineages and
interconnectivities between older and more recent image
technologies, and their hybrid formations through time. Any
given film or media text will exhibit interconnections with
pre-existing modes (even if those modes have been pronounced
obsolete), which define and control the potential that the
film undertakes to make happen. In silent film we might
trace the transformation from a theatrical to a film mode of
appearance, where the former is prefigured in the latter and
vice versa, for instance in the coincidence of stage and
film gestures in Lillian Gish's performance in _Way Down
East_. Here we see the emergence of a new kind of film sense
vibrating in the uneasy conjunction of different
techniques. At stake here is the
proliferation of a technological apparatus for the
production of images, and the power arrangements that make
them appear historically. The technological apparatus is not
all of a piece, but is constantly riven with the effects of
an outside that produces transformational change. The image
machine lives on, not because of any over-riding structure
that it possesses, but through the contingent
interconnections that are activated in particular
image-productions. This is why it is necessary to attend
carefully to films themselves, to the detailing of their
mode of appearance and its relation to ideational content as
a particular moment in the image machine's transformational
history. Rodowick's book goes some way to an elaboration of
this kind of genealogy. Rockhampton, Queensland,
Australia Notes 1. See for instance
Rodowick's 'Reading the Figural' and 'Audiovisual Culture
and Interdisciplinary Knowledge'. 2. The figural bears a
strong resemblance to Deleuze's concept of the time-image.
Deleuze's theory of the time-image suffers somewhat from an
over-specification of its historical emergence. Deleuze
pinpoints the first sighting of the time-image with Italian
neorealism just after the Second World War. However, it can
be argued that the time-image is implicit in all film, from
its early actuality stage to the present. In a curious
oversight, Deleuze hardly mentions silent film and does not
deal at all with pre-narrative silent film, which, one might
have thought, would constitute the first emergence of the
time-image before film became waylaid first by narrative
structure, and then by voiced sound. 3. A heautonomous relation
is characterised by disjunctive synthesis, or the
paradoxical conjoining of actively differentiating elements
into a transformational synthetic whole. For a full
discussion of this important concept see Deleuze,
_Difference and Repetition_, especially chapter 2,
'Repetition for Itself'. 4. The figural economy
that Rodowick wants to uncover is not textual (as it is with
Lyotard in _The Libidinal Economy_), but extends into the
processes of commodity exchange within virtualised relations
of production and consumption. Possibilities of elaborating
such an economy can be found in Deleuze's proposal of a
control society: a cybernetic modulation of digital code
discontinuously located with respect to rapidly virtualising
materials of space-time distantiation (see Deleuze,
_Negotiations, 1972-1990_, pp. 177-182) 5. For more on this see my
2000 article, 'Lines, Dots and Pixels'. 6. Here I follow Eco, who
employs Hjelmslev to develop a theory of semiosis based on
the 'molecular landscape' of signaletic material that forms
semiotic codes (see Eco, _A Theory of Semiotics_, p.
49). 7. See Foucault's 1983
book _This is Not a Pipe_. 8. See Brooks, 'Consumed
by Cinematic Monstrosity' 9. For a more detailed
analysis of _Way Down East_ along these lines see my 2001
text, 'The Visuality of Film as Commodified
Excess'. 10. See Routt, 'For
Criticism'. Bibliography Brooks, Jody, 'Consumed by
Cinematic Monstrosity', _Art and Text_, vol. 34, 1989, pp.
79-94 Deleuze, Gilles,
_Nietzsche and Philosophy_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London:
Athlone, 1983) --- _Cinema I: The
Movement Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986). --- _Foucault_, trans.
Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986). --- _Cinema 2: The Time
Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989). --- _Difference and
Repetition_, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press,
1994). --- _Negotiations,
1972-1990_, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995). Eco, Umberto, _A Theory of
Semiotics_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1979). Foucault, Michel, _This is
Not a Pipe_, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983). Lyotard, Jean-Francois,
_Discours, figure_ (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). Mules, Warwick, 'Lines,
Dots and Pixels: The Making and Remaking of the Printed
Image IN Visual Culture', _Continuum_, vol. 14 no. 3, 2000,
pp. 303-316. --- 'The Visuality of Film
as Commodified Excess: Beyond Narrative and Text, _Redoubt_,
29, 2001, pp. 119-133. Rodowick, D. N., _Gilles
Deleuze's Time Machine_ (Durham: Duke University Press,
1997). --- 'Reading the Figural',
_Camera Obscura_, 24, 1991, pp. 11-44. --- 'Audiovisual Culture
and Interdisciplinary Knowledge', _New Literary History_,
Winter, vol. 26 no. 1, 1995. Routt, William D., 'For
Criticism: Nicole Brenez, _De la Figure en general et du
corps en particulier: l'invention figurative au cinema_',
parts 1 and 2, _Screening the Past_, March 2000
<http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/shorts/reviews/rev0300/wr1br9a.htm>. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Warwick Mules, 'The
Figural as Interface in Film and the New Media: D. N.
Rodowick's _Reading the Figural_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7
no. 56, December 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n56mules>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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