Friday, November 30, 2012

This May Be English

You don't want to go too hard on someone who's writing in their second or third language. Jane M. Gaines studied and worked in Stockholm, which makes me think that she is one of those multi-lingual Europeans who can communicate more than effectively (actually, idiomatically!) in day-to-day situations, but could have benefited from a tougher editor. I say this while emphasizing my deep respect for such Europeans (and Africans and Asians). Most of my Indian friends speak 3, 4, 5 languages of which English is merely one. Still, when it comes academic writing, your second, third or fourth language may begin to sound like jargon. Help me out here:

"Certainly the comparison between images and terrorism tells us that this is a question of what could be called 'image knowledge.' Moving images that confirm what we already know are not 'the image,' are not 'too much image,' however, that which we reject--pornography, entertainment and television news-- is 'too much image.' When world-shattering knowledge appears to us in moving-image form it is received as 'too much.' And the moving image is easily dismissible when it delivers what we do not want to know--things unpredictable, incomprehensible and elsewhere, but so seemingly of the same world. But above and beyond new knowledge, it is significantly the massive scale--what is shared with modern warfare--that in 'the image' is so terrifying. (For it has never been the visage image of the treasured paintings in the Louvre that has terrified the protectors of elite culture.)"

I would be thrilled if anyone can tell me what "visage image" means--I have studied some visual culture, but this doesn't ring any bell but crazy. She seems to be arguing that there are three normative categories - maybe four:
  1. the image (has "massive scale"; "terrifying"; like "modern warfare")
  2. too much image
  3. moving images that confirm what we already know
  4. images we reject
We can summarize this as:
  • 1, 2 ≠ 3 (neither "the image" nor "too much image" are moving images that confirm what we already know)
  • 2 = 4 ("too much image" are images we reject. Examples include porn, entertainment, news, and "world-shattering knowledge" also called "new knowledge")
 The problem with each of these claims is that they all take the form of exclusions or negative definitions, which is confusing. Telling us what something is not proves to be of little help. In the came of the first definition (first bullet point, above), we are left wondering what kinds of images have the effect of confirming what we know, as well as what "the image" and "too much image" are. In the case of the second definition (2 is 4, the second bullet point) we learn that a category of images called "too much image" is rejected - leaving open the question what kinds of images we might accept. The two definitions don't speak to each other because the two functions (confirming knowledge and rejecting images) are of different kinds, creating additional confusion about the relation of the two definitions to one another.

It's possible that she wishes to distinguish between two pictorial media rather than develop normative categories for different kinds of images based on viewer responses. Thus "the image" might refer to still photography and "moving images" might refer to television and film. But the massive scale that is clearly important (enough to be italicized anyway), which she clearly wants to attribute to "the image" only, is not so clearly absent from "moving images." In any case, this separation is not maintained, since the sentence about "the image" and warfare seems to be used to amplify the claim made in the previous sentence, whose subject is different, that is, "moving images."

And then comes "visage image."

Gaines claims earlier on in her paper that she's interested in the relationship between images and history, and in particular, the way this relationship has been conceptualized by documentary filmmakers with political motivations. She is critical of iconophobia, iconoclasm, or the tendency of icono-paranoiacs (my term!) like Michael Ignatieff (if we believe her reading) to identify images with terrorism and pornography. The problem with this article is that it meanders and sometimes retraces its steps, so that the argument loses momentum. In other places, her claims are truncated, as if she is relying on her (expert) reader to fill in the concluding sentence.  In a paragraph outlining 1970s historiography of film theory, she claims "the new theory was not equipped to deal with documentary as mode or form." But then concludes the paragraph admitting that it is a "mystery as to why documentary, and political documentary in particular, would become the absolute antithesis of the new theoretical project." We are supposed to read this as stating, if New Theory had been more sophisticated, it wouldn't have made documentary its antithesis. However, this reads like the "mystery" of the last paragraph has already been solved in the discussion of the ways in which New Theory was "not equipped" to understand documentary. If you're not equipped to understand something, of course that thing will be a mystery.

If Gaines' goal is to illuminate the connection between leftist politics and documentary realism, the re-reading of Godard's Letter to Jane is at least coherent as a critical move. But the other examples she cites are too briefly analyzed, too thin in their visual analysis, to really convince us. Finally, there is nowhere a definition of documentary realism that is robust enough to make this article a real revelation. In mentioning Kracauer and Bazin, she writes: "theirs was a theory for an aestehtic of affinity between cinema and something they referred to as 'the real' but by which they meant much more." Much more needs to be explained, but nothing is. Gaines moves on to tell us what the 1970s thought of this theory, and her critique of the 70s critique.

Finally, terms that she coins like "body genre" and "same world sensation" need further elaboration. She seems to have a political agenda that fuses recent interest in Bergson and embodiment with older Marxist models of social activism - but these never become completely clear.

Visage Image.