The Museum of Jurassic Technology: fantastical flutterings of real and distant space

March 29th, 2010 researchTags: contingency, experimental circus, machine, play, rhizome, space, time, uncanny, utopia

The obscure Renaissance scholar Athanasius Kircher’s fabulous system of magnetic divination: “The World is Tied with Secret Knots”

Hidden in sun-drenched Culver City, The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a hoax, an art installation of intimate and metaphysical magnitude, a labyrinth for the scholastic  imagination and anything else you can dream of or wish for. Founded by the enigmatic David Hildebrand Wilson in 1989, susbequent recipient of a Mac Arthur “Genius” Grant in 2001 for this puzzling and original endeavour, the Museum is a cabinet of curiosities that tantalizingly frames tidbits of historical minutiae in a fabulous context, very much in the spirit of Mark Z. Danielewski’s legendary House of Leaves, also an ironic mise en abime of scholarly critique folded into an impossible (alhough imaginary) geometric space. Minuscule steroscopic projections visible through copper-articulated glass plates, documentary films with convoluted mystical narratives, whimsically lit diaoramas and glowing orbs: such is that place of perfect delight and incomprehension, the Museum of Jurassic Technology

The micromosaics of Harald Henry Dalton, visible only through a microscope

from the exhibit Lives of Perfect Creatures: Dogs of the Soviet Space Program

from the exhibit Garden of Eden on Wheels: Collections from Los Angeles Areas Mobile Parks

from the exhibit Rotten Luck: The Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay

Kinesthetic Art: spatial vocabulary and the body ego

January 20th, 2010 researchTags: ambiance, architexture, body, experimental circus, haptic, immersion, inanimata, play, space, time, visceral

Matthew Barney, Cremaster I

text: Margaret Morse, Video installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between

Morse evokes a piece by Muntadas called haute CULTURE Part I, in which two monitors are placed on each end of a seesaw, thereby making an elegant point, couched in physical terms (physical even as in “physics”, since gravity is employed as an artistic device) about the act of comparing both sets of images. This piece offers an example of what Morse calls “kinesthetic” learning, or the kind of information processing and intuition specific to our perception of the organization of objects in space. Kinesthetic perception is synesthetic and active – it involves visuality, sound, and the haptic in a way that allows each sensorial input to complement, suffuse and correspond to another, and using the entire body, including its own position in space relative to other objects, as a sensory organ. The kinesthetic subject is always hyper-aware of her body/herself as key element in the epistemological puzzle posed by the installation piece: all the meaning that can be gleaned from a space must bounce off of her, her critical interpretation changes and accrues only according to her own changing orientation in space. This unfolding signification is also temporally grounded – in fact kinesthetic appreciation can be defined as a temporalized experience of space, a strange, subliminal experience in which we both critically stand outside ourselves to consider ourselves-within-the-world and have an acute consciousness of inhabiting our bodies, of being materially and psychically connected to the outside world. Morse’s term of “body ego” encapsulates this awareness of oneself as an entity, something that participates in both the object and the subject.

Going back to Muntadas’ seesaw, we can see how the artist’s physical demonstration of a conceptual relationship between the two objects/monitors offers us a uniquely visceral insight into an a priori realm of abstract and critical thought. The kinesthetic argument being made is playful – an analogy more than a declaration. Using the evocative power of objects and their wealth of cultural denotations, an artist can articulate kinesthetic phrases, in which different objects constitute a semantic content and their relative positions (taking into account the multiple trajectories of the visitor) operate as syntax. Objects are further mis-en-abime within the virtual windows of screens and video channels – kinesthetic art erases to a certain degree the ontological difference between what is represented (screen-based) and what is presented (anchored in physical space). The resulting aesthetic and epistemological experience is intuitive and multidimensional, blurring the boundaries between thinking and feeling.

Experimental Circus: Burning Man 2010 (Metropolis)!

December 20th, 2009 researchTags: architexture, city, experimental circus, haptic, haunted space, immersion, play, time, utopia

For those interested in interactivity not only as an art or industry practice but as a way of life and social experiment, Burning Man remains a visionary site where specifically space, in Lefevrian fashion treated as a shaper of social and cultural context rather than background, is radically explored and expressed. Taking its cue from the Situationists and their idea of a playful “psychogeographic” city, Burning Man is fun fair, ginormous art installation, multimedia playground, slum-mushroom, Fourrierian commune where the consequences of extremely minimal legislation (including a prohibition against the use of money) allow you to live the anarchist American dream.

If you could do exactly what you wanted to invest your time in, and give it some kind of physical form, what would you chose to do? This is the question answered by Burners…often giving rise to habitats, zones, and contraptions that you would only see in the virtual realms of computer games or from the sets of fantasy and science fictions movies. Loose in time, without any schedule (divorced from leisure and encouraged to participate), revelers spend it being in and feeling the weirdness and possibilities of space. From this radical redefinition of these basic parameters, sociality starts to mutate beyond recognition…

The theme for 2010 is METROPOLIS. I would think unavoidable research for anyone interested in dreams of future cities! “Every year a dense metropolis arises in the Black Rock Desert; every year it disappears without a trace. Tumult and change, churning cycles of invention and destruction – these forces generate the pulse of urban life. Great cities are organic, spontaneous, heterogeneous, and untidy. They are, like Burning Man, magnetic hubs of social interaction. This year’s theme will function as a micro and a macro-scope, an instrument through which we will inspect the daily course of city life and the future prospect of what we call civilization.”

Radiotopia: Imaginative Use of the Ionosphere

November 18th, 2009 researchTags: ambiance, espace heureux, haunted space, immersion, machine, music, play, space, time, utopia

Using Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities as virtual loci that gather individuals into a common cultural space,Susan Douglas (Listening In) reads radio in terms of its capacity, as a social practice, to uniquely constitute (American) subjectivity. Radio’s most obvious affordance is that it allows people separated in space to listen simultaneously, “to experience that very moment of (their) lives in exactly the same way” (p.24). Douglas argues the new medium gave rise to an unprecedented kind of intersubjective intimacy – a linking of inner worlds that occurred not through a meeting of the minds (radio listeners remain anonymous to each other) but by sharing a common (cultural, technological) platform for fantasy.

Radio listeners are bonded by a specific practice of self: as thousands tune in to the same Top 40 song, they cross over together and for a moment into a temporality different from their distracted, fragmented present and experience time as a (musical) signature, as an embodied flow. For the duration of a song, radio holds out the possibility to a fragmented collectivity to perceive themselves as a unique, flavorful being – the kind of communion achieved is not one that can gather a community (radio listeners are experiencing themselves, very closely, rather than experiencing others) but that produces similar and separated subjectivities. Radio-listening Americans live apart but dream together.

Here Douglas’ concept of “dimensional” listening, as radio’s purported affordance that encourages listeners to generate their own powerful imagery to compensate for the absence of a visual world, enters into play. If other media like cinema, where worlds are “given” to the audience for consumption, constitute a vault of imaginary material, then radio trains the subject in the practice of a specific type of imagination, setting up the scaffolding for an inner space that we can freely populate. To “develop an ear for radio” means to gain access to “a repertoire of listening styles and emotional responses”, to be attuned to different inner worlds that we can switch on or off (in this sense, prefiguring the advent of portable music players as mood-regulating devices). In the 20s before regular programming this might mean tuning in to imagine a ionospheric topology projected from the disparate stations the ham could reel in; in the 30s it could mean regularly conjuring the presence of an entire cast of fictional characters from a soap drama. Douglas argues that in exploring the “spaces” of sound – by promenading our consciousness through the rippling folds of rhythm or timbre in music, by stalking the unfolding story of a voice – we are really spelunking in our own depths.

The term “training” characterizes the kind of self-building radio enables in the sense that listeners (according to Douglas) become emotionally attached to broadcast material, especially if they hear it repeatedly: “the more we listen to certain kinds of music, the more we learn to like it.” (p. 32) – in a quite neurological way, Top 40 songs imprint themselves on our mind, giving shape to our subjectivity. This emotional sculpting modifies the listener’s sense of time in significant ways. Radio creates privileged temporal moments for the listener, a more intense experience of the present that accompanies the listener’s exploration of their inner space. Over the course of a life, these privileged moments call to and ricochet off one another – mental states or moods jump across one’s temporality, seeding the self with fragments of past incarnations, reliquary fantasies. Douglas emphasizes that radio almost from the beginning was marked by nostalgia, by the longing for a disappeared moment that a broadcast song could briefly bring back into the present. In this sense dimensional listening is not dissociable from another term Douglas uses, “associational” listening, or the forging of correspondences between the flow of our lives and the soundtrack that accompanies it, meaning that daily routines – e.g. doing laundry while listening to a jazz tune on the radio – are dyed with the color of a sound that can make an initially undifferentiated slice of everydayness remarkable. This quality in radio emerges from its difference from the gramophone as a listening practice – the fact that radio temporally mapped out a listener’s day (starting with regular programming) with scheduled sound. As manufactured sound and especially music became ambient (as consequence of ubiquity) they started exercising an unprecedented level of influence on people’s lives.

Douglas also investigates the fascinating history of the beginnings of radio and the social significance accorded the new technology at its inception, particularly around the relationship between radio and a collective desire for the existence of a tangible spiritual dimension, a longing for the unchartered and unknown that characterized both radio’s marketing as a mechanical “medium” (a notion that interestingly recontextualizes media in terms of spiritism) and the practice of DXing. Radio uncannily symbolized, more than the phonograph which was an inscription device, the utopian possibilities of technology as interface between different ontological realms, as a transducer that could allow for communication between what was previously considered incommensurable: the living and the dead, humanity and the extraterrestrial, invisible world of the airwaves, two individuals separated by vast distances. Douglas points out that in endowing radio with this mystique Americans were engaging in a search for meaningful connection, a sense of existential and communal belonging that, at least in the collective Western imaginary, had been lost in the turn to mechanized, serialized, fragmented modern life. DXers, poetically dubbed “distance fiends”, developed a form of radio practice that engaged the technology not only as a commodity fetish but also as, literally, a medium, a means of accessing different possibilities of signification through the exploratory use of the technology’s affordances. Before the more commoditized modes of dimensional and associational listening, tuning in to the radio was also a game played across the virtual landscape of the airwaves as DXers would fish for the disembodied voices that stood in for real-world localities.

Douglas’ discussion of DXing as a poetic practice weaves into her general investigation of radio not only as a locus for a cultural imaginary but as a technology that crucially enables imagination – which raises questions as to how other sound technologies have been and might be imaginatively used. If the commodity-use of the record, the tape, the MP3 player have trained us to meaningfully experience sound in certain ways that have constituted our subjectivities according to certain common cultural (capitalist) patterns, then what other cultures (and other subjectivities) with potential to challenge or re-organize capitalism emerge as a result of exploratory, imaginative use? Radio leads us into a consideration of contemporary countercultural (but also massively embraced!) practices around sound technology, namely DJ and remix culture…

Noise II: “…a wiry noise, with single barbs projecting, sharp edges running along it and submerging again and clear notes splintering off – flying and scattering”.

September 24th, 2009 researchTags: body, cyborg, haptic, kinetic, machine, music, noise, shock, space, time, visceral

Peter Bailey in Breaking the Sound barrier quotes Robert Musil on the ‘sonic shrapnel’ produced by the motor car: “…a wiry noise, with single barbs projecting, sharp edges running along it and submerging again and clear notes splintering off – flying and scattering”. Two synesthetic attributes stand out in this remarkable description. First, there are haptic qualities to the noise, translated in terms of texture: how the sound would feel (“wiry”) if you could probe / test it with your fingers, in effect uncovering an auditory topology by using the body as contact surface with the sound (“sharp edges running along it”). Then, Musil recognizes the noise’s kinetic attributes: the sound is in a continuous process of shattering, “flying and scattering”, throwing its components into the world (into the ear) like so many projectiles.

As Bailey notes, sound is vibration (“palpable”) – a series of minute but tangible displacements of matter. Unlike light with its strictly scopic / analytic affordances, the flow of sound modifies physical reality, rearranges the world. As such, the haptic domain – texture – already contains the possibility of sound; noise starts to exist when it can extend itself kinetically, across a spatial and temporal axis, when it becomes a conductor for change and entropy. Musil’s rapprochement between hearing and touch alerts us to the fact that sound unfolds in space concomitantly with its unfolding in time: it travels, working on the body as much as on consciousness.

Consequently, Noise (meaning sound in its raw form, an amalgamation and meshing of vibrations not synched into discrete units of order) seems to have an intimate relationship with affect that expresses itself in the body, namely (Bailey argues) laughter and terror / the instinct to flee-fight. Both of these proto-emotions (or simply motions) are brought together to powerful effect in the tradition Bailey calls “rough music”: “rough music was excessive, repetitive and sustained noise, combining high spirits with a sadistic edge”. Participating equally in a Bakhtinian culture of carnival and a history of institutionalized insanity (Bailey disarticulates the etymology of “bedlam” as the hubbub of the Bedlam inmates), rough music is produced for social purposes of ritual or regulation. Interestingly, Attali links music to the sacrifice of noise and its appendage of violence on the altar of (social, scientific) order. From there, one realizes that to listen to “rough music” is to witness noise coagulating into music or inversely, music decaying into noise – an exhilarating experience of liminality, teetering between forgetfulness (chaos) and culture.

Rough music has many splendid contemporary descendants (Noise, the more distorted forms of techno), thanks to the industrial revolution and the musical avant-garde that sought to rehabilitate or take control over the kind of sonic environment produced by the accelerated motion/collisions of more bodies and machines. The “future sound” that John Cage celebrates highlights the same attributes that Robert Musil discovered in sounds of technology: texture and kinetic force. Cage discusses these as “overtone structure” and “percussion music”, respectively.

“The special function of electrical instruments will be to provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones and to make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude and duration”: overtones are what gives each instrument its particular timbre i.e. the sonic texture that differentiates a violin from a piano; certainly electronic and digital music take advantage of the fact that they can give voice to an infinity of imaginary instruments, in effect to an uncategorizable cacophony of overtones. Allied to the emphasis on “percussion” (“a contemporary transition from keyboard-influenced music to the all-sound music of the future”), Cage’s future sound heralds key components of contemporary rough music in this evocation of tonal din and “repetitive noise” (repetition being primarily structured by beats/percussion). Compared to its 18th century manifestation, Noise engages the confused ear in the gears of a machine in order to better manufacture its violent/euphoric interface with the body.

Ghost in the Machine II: drum n’ bass, time and procedurality

September 17th, 2009 researchTags: body, haunted space, machine, music, noise, play, time

“The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.” (The Art of Noises, Luigi Russolo)

Remembering what it felt like dancing to drum n’ bass at club last week, I found it useful to consider the mental “attitude” at work in the activity of dancing to as opposed to listening to music, and, in the context of x’ “Music as Technology of Self”, to wonder what kind of mood-modifying agency is at work on the subject’s part in the act of dance, where the body seems to spontaneously achieve an intimacy and immediacy of communication with the mind’s capacity to recognize and organize aural patterns. In the specific case of electronic music, dancing seems to involve an enactment of the music, a physical tracing of the contours of the different elements at work in a sonic landscape: an inverted act of ventriloquism, where rather than giving voice to a (inanimate) body, a body is given to the voice. Drum n’ bass, with its rapid-fire snare drums and broken beats, subwoofers meowing like torpid, hungry cats, creates a kind of atmosphere that lends itself, if not to the spiritual, then to a form of spiritism – the dancers mechanically jumping from beat to beat are automata controlled by the poltergeist haunting the PAs.

Here the particular “aura” of machine-music, as envisioned by Futurists such as Russolo in The Art of Noises, is articulated: the distinction between euphony and disharmony breaks down in the face of the possibility of infinite variations in timbre (different species of noise) and the futility of any form of sonic taxonomy (and therefore, arguably, of categorical judgments about value or taste in music, but this opens up another can of worms). The programmability of the rhythm – bringing to us the hard fact that all digital music is the product of an algorithmic process – creates a backbone, a tensile, resilient structure that supports the volatility of tone and timbre, which is then free to open up a space of mobility, of play to which the body responds. One of the exciting things about electronic music is not that it always produces an arena for free play (most of its forms are subject to the same sort of cultural patterns embedded in other forms of popular music) but that, as a technology, its particular affordance is to produce experiments in procedurality / procedural forms of experimentation. Dancing to drum n’bass feels nothing so much like solving a problem, a result of harnessing the self to a technological framework which momentarily brings the dancer to a higher form of phenomenological enactment – solving the problem of time / temporal existence via body, allowing the body to function as an uncanny inscription device / Ouiji board.

Happy Hardcore: Air-Pedaling and Candy

September 10th, 2009 researchTags: body, experimental circus, haptic, immersion, machine, music, noise, time, utopia, visceral

Old Skool – mid 90s

new iteration of happy

J-Pop: happy and breakbeats

Over the past six months I’ve been listening about 3 hours a day to happy hardcore, a sub-genre of “rave”, “techno”, “electronic” music considered a spin-off from early 90s U.K. hardcore techno (which also evolved into other kinds of hyper-fast specimens such as gabber/speedcore, like happy hardcore distinguished by its four to the floor beat but without the synthy melodies and jungle/drum n’ bass, whose syncopated fury is driven by breakbeats). Happy Hardcore is a product of rave culture, which approaches music from a decidedly anti-aesthetic point of view: this is not music meant to be listened to /considered/tasted (nothing is more contrary to the notion of taste than the dirty, praxis-based logic of musical fodder, meant to be digested by your dancing), but to kick you like a soccer ball into a parabolic trajectory, with usually a 7-hour interval between the going up and the coming down. Your body suffers through the DJ set of happy hardcore – crushing waves of relentless beats pound a machine rhythm into your feet while the perpetually shifting, morphing timbres of the synthesizer travel up and down your spine, stretch out your skull from the inside, creating a space (grimy and vast, like a warehouse) for the free play of endless sonic variations. Happy Hardcore is brutal in the sense that it locks you into a logic of acceleration – like driving a car with your foot spastically pressing down on the gas pedal – and that, at least within the context of a DJ set, it never stops. Not delivered in discrete packets of consumable “songs” but turned on like a tap – for a given period of time you swim in it, fight with it, ride with it, drown in it; it becomes your medium, a total texture for a parallel reality, a cognitive landscape apart. When they turn the music off and the night is over, it’s as if  the air had gone out of the room – your ears, surreptitiously, have metaphorically started to function as lungs, allowing sound to bond to your bloodstream.

Why happy hardcore? If you look up happy hardcore on youtube, you’re likely to find tracks played to a still image that looks like a smiley face with angry eyebrows and a ferocious, toothy, grin – and that is exactly what it feels like. It can only be described as a mean joy, an apocalyptic celebration – the kind of happiness you would feel if you were being catapulted over a chasm, your feet treading air.

Daydreaming: “the shadow is then a rich and splendid being”

August 28th, 2009 referencesTags: amnesia, daydreaming, espace heureux, experiment, haunted space, maze, play, time, utopia

To precipitate the player into a daydreaming state – the goal of an immersive envitonment?

Bachelard, Poetics of Daydreaming: “daydreaming allows us to know language uncensored. In solitary daydreaming, we can say everything to ourselves. We still have a clear enough conscience to be certain that what we say to ourselves is for us and for us alone…To understand ourselves doubly as real and idealized beings we must listen to our daydreaming. We believe that our daydreaming can be the best school for a “psychology of the depths“.

“In our hours of happiness, our daydreaming nourrishes itself; it self-sustains the way life self-sustains.”

On alchemy: “The exaltation found in the names of substances is a preamble to experiments on certain “exalted” substances”.

un jadis a jamais disparu: a once upon a time forever dissapeared

l’ombre est alors un etre riche: the shadow is then a rich and splendid being

On loneliness and the condtional tense: “I am alone, therefore I dream of the being who healed my loneliness, who would have healed my loneliness”.

“What do we know about the other if we don’t imagine him/her?”

Shoah: time / void

July 30th, 2009 references, researchTags: amnesia, indexicality, shock, time

Jan Karski suddenly gets out of his chair and leaves the frame, crying. Abraham Bomba purses his mouth and compulsively licks his lips, breathes heavily as he cuts a customer’s hair (he is a barber). Before these incidents, before they break down, they tell us in great detail (prodded by Lanzmann) what they saw, what happened to them. Bomba gives us a dry, precise descripting of his “job” as a barber in the gas chamber in a loud, mechanical, declamatory style. This “job” of accounting to the filmmaker is a shield he holds up against the possibility of remembering. Karski’s voice rolling, regular diction, interrupted by nervous deglutitions, has hooked itself in our ear and we wait for him to come back, a feeling of expectancy – he must go to the end of his witnessing, he must, 30 years after and too late to prevent the disaster, complete his mission to testify about the truth of the Warsaw ghetto – weighted with anxiety, almost panic.

To listen to Karski’s accounting of his meeting with the resistance leaders and his excursions into the ghetto is not only to feel in oneself the imprint of terrible things, it is to know the inexorable quality of the past, to experience a sensation of nausea as the evidence is processed: this cannot be erased, this cannot be undone. The camera fixes and inscribes a second time that which is already, permanently indelible. Because of or in spite of the subjects’ inability to express the unameable, to only give us ellipses, fragments of a total, undescribable event – “there was no humanity” – their voice and their face seem to provide us with the most concrete of indexical relationships to the chronology (chrono- logos:etymologically, the speaking/wording of time) their testimony unwinds. Lanzmann is aware of this and insists that his subjects tell us a linear story, almost as if their words, as spectral camera, were meant to travel back in time to record a present anterior, the present that-lies-in-the past. The percussive quality, the aliveness, the presence of their speech makes it seem possible: “he tried to spend a few more seconds with them” – this minimal statement, made of lacunae, a veil for a reality he is not telling us, cannot tell us is also a screen, a window that points to a real all the more present (to us) for being indescribable. In this sense, this documentary more than others accomplishes the duty of proof, summons the audience’s belief.

We are faced with ineluctable presence, but it is of necessity the presence of a void. Void not only in the sense that the witnesses can, in the end, bring nothing back from the past – of the dead, only their shades can be evoked – but that this totality of events, the shoah, is the temporal place where reality, the world of sense we build around us, breaks down. To go back, to allow the witnesses to bring us back, is to become implicated, to share in the negation, the absence left by 6 million. What Shoah demonstrates is that this burden is much more than a duty to take on (one choses to accomplish one’s duty) but the burden of our past, which by definition is already with us, part of ourselves.

Waltz with Bashir: Caged by the Real

July 29th, 2009 references, researchTags: amnesia, shock, time, trap, trauma

haunted by the past - relentlessly pursued

Waltz with Bashir poses the question of the historical value of memory, beyond the “hard” evidence of historical accuracy and facts. Animated documentary opens up the possibility of representing a temporal dimension previously assigned to the strictly poetic: the interior past, the effect of the individual’s reflex to patch up the lacunae in the facts by inserting phantom scenes in her remembrance of what occurred. The move to give epistemological value to this unreliable past is an ethical one. In psychoanalytic terms, this other, virtual time bears the trace/ the index of actually happened – Ari Folman’s investigation into his post-traumatic amnesia is a search for the truth. Not so much the hard fact of the massacres, but the truth of the massacres that emerges from his act of bearing witness (and all the ambiguous moral ground implied in the act of bearing witness to the horrific – the bystander’s inescapable burden of complicity). This project is not unlike Lanzmann’s decision to give us a historical mapping strictly through the individual experiences of those implicated – only the recapitualation of an event that has been felt, lived, interiorized, indexed to someone’s specific historicity (in the Heideggerian sense) is capable of communicating the truth of the past, beyond mere fidelity to literal fact.

derealization - Ari means to "realize", to recognize

In this context, I found the final moments of the film particularly effective. Throughout, the filmmaker has been stripping away the layers of his and his fellow witnesses/accomplices’ memory in order to uncover a moment of truth, the moment in which the massacre and war revealed themselves to him, when the juxtaposition of traumatized temporal fragments crystallize into an incontrovertible evidence, the essential core of reality that cannot be gotten around. Folman in effect comes into contact with Lacan’s “Real” (Renov, The Subject of the Documentary) – a moment, a place, an occurence that escapes signification but that horrifically exists.

A crowd of wailing women pours through the streets, coming towards the camera. At his guard post with his comrades, weapon in hand – his presence in the camp testifying to the obfuscated reason: he is there to allow the Lebanese army to perpetrate the massacre – the young Ari sees these women coming towards him. The camera zooms into him; he is breathing hard, he is sweating, he is paralyzed, as the women’s crying (that hard sensory evidence of the unameable thing that was done) engulf him. There is no escape for Ari. The truth finally owns him more than he owns the truth, tripping up his initial goal to “have” the truth, to take it within him so he could heal. But there is no healing possible, the fissure in the world (the world that can be processed and assigned meaning) that was opened remains.

And, by extension, neither is there any escape for the spectator. The final shots of the actual footage documenting the massacres (the indexed faces of those wailing women) transfer Ari’s personal memory to a space of collective consensus – and ergo collective responsibility, burden. How different than if we had been shown this archival footage in the beginning, if Ari’s sensorially vivid (animated, visualized) journey had not already divested us, denuded us of our habitual siginifying framework, substituted his vision for ours.

Grey Gardens: Traces and Mystery

July 27th, 2009 references, researchTags: indexicality, mapping, time

Grey Gardens is being made into a fiction film. But to what extent are the two Edie Beals of the documentary irreducible to “characters”? Although the Maysles have abandoned the most purist codes of Direct Cinema – the pretense that the filmmakers are not also participants in the action unfolding in front of the camera – they still present the spectator with a pure form of actuality; nothing is proposed that is not the imprint of actions co-present with the intrusion of the camera. The Maysles refuse the facility of a diegetic space (although the drama certainly has an arc). These women’s past is puzzled out from tidbits that fall from their conversation: Little Edie’s failure to get married to a young émigré aristocrat, Big Edie’s relationship with the late Mr.Beale, both women’s ambiguous relationship to different men who come to live in the house (as companions, lovers, handimen or uninvited guests?), and, the only visual clue in the film, the women displaying photographs of their young selves for the filmmakers.

These photographs provide their own indexical link to another (private and yet spectacularly exteriorized) temporal frame that is independent of the primary temporal frame of the filmmakers. This ghostly temporality opens a door into the interiority of the Beale women – we understand that what the Edies say, what they act out for an audience is the labyrinthine trace of a past that remains very much alive in the women’s everyday enactment of subjectivity. Tantalizingly, this other time is something we are given only obliquely, allowed only partial access too.

And there lies the distinction that makes the Beale women into infinitely more than “characters” : their selves extend beyond the surface recorded by the camera into an imagined and imaginary but nevertheless indexically grounded depth (we are witnessing the trace of a true if obfuscated past). Their is no boundary to their mystery – what the film records and shows us seems to be just the tip of the iceberg of a mostly submerged subject. Which is also why, in spite of the exuberant exhibitionism of both women, they remain a secret: what is most important about them, about their lives, who they were, stays hidden from the spectator.

You Tube hommage to the Beale women...they have become figures
of literary imagination

79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh: acid rock starts your fight

July 27th, 2009 references, researchTags: kinetic, machine, music, politic, screen, shock, time, visceral

Alvarez's film is rare, but bombing footage is not...

Santiago Alvarez’s 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Min opens with a flower slowly blooming, followed by a shot taken from a plane overflying Vietnam. Just as slowly as the flower opened, two bombs drop to earth, becoming invisible until – we knew this would happen, but were subconsciously hoping it wouldn’t – the earth erupts into flames. The camera zooms into a photograph of Ho Chi Min as a young man until we see only his eyes. Then, through a series of photographs (Barthes: the poignancy of the photograph is that it is evidence of the certainty of death – a death that already occurred or a death to be), we see those eyes grow older, until we finally zoom out again – Ho Chi Min is an old man, his face and figure freeze into a negative. Here Alvarez brilliantly evokes the passage and passing of a life – a life that (according to the filmmaker) unfolded with beautiful purpose, the process of aging signifying the fulfillment, the blooming of the young man’s promise, rather than a descent or decay. Alvarez simultaneously ties the meaning of this life irrevocably to a place, Vietnam, an event, the Vietnam war and a mission, the struggle against the destruction of Vietnam, a struggle for life (- again, the flower, the earth). Ho Chi Min is embalmed in the negative flash, pharaonically preserved in celluloid to continue to inspire this purpose, ascending to some super-human plane where he is transfigured into ideality – resurrected as a symbol via the film.

Later, more footage of violence in Vietnam is cut with a woman singing in lyrical anguish, ecstatically, until, as she draws out a high note, she disappears, replaced by the explosion of another bomb. The dialectic between vibrant life and sudden anihilation is didactically picked up again, but this is didacticism of a purely emotional, even physiological order. This sequence increases (at least my) heart rate, makes me breathe more heavily, until the world, life, my heart beat is stopped by the arrival of the bomb hitting the singer’s high note.

To cite Jane Gaines’ article Political Mimesis: the spectator “bodies back” to the images on the screen, reacting to the projected world as if she were witnessing reality, something happening right now that calls for an immediate reaction – wherefore the adrenalin. Alvarez’ method is more Eisenstein than Workers’ League newsreel, however – we are not encouraged towards mimesis of the action on screen (no waves of bodies, no protesters arouse this response) but provoked to imbibe the political message being laid out in front of us, namely, that the destruction of life (as it shines forth in the face and voice of the singer, in the liquid harmonics of the synthesizer soundtrack, in the ravaged faces of napalm victims, in the eyes of the old Ho Chi Min) calls absolutely for counter-attack, a commitment of the whole body, a kinetic force of feeling directed against the destroyers. Ho Chi Min is at the center of the footage: he appears as the eye in the storm, the rallying point for everything that stands against the anonymous machinery of death.

more remains of Ho Chi Minh...

After his funeral, the world falls apart – first in the faces of his supporters, unmade by tears (again, a physical manifestation) and then on the arena of the war itself: the filmmaker mangles footage of gun machine fighting at close quarters so that the soldiers’ violence finds some physically authentic correlate in the violence done to the celluloid, causing epileptic flashes to periodically slice the action unfolding on screen. The lasting impression is one of sensually exprienced chaos, as if the sign – what is represented – had savagely leaped out of its ontological cage to manhandle the spectator, directly triggering the spectator’s self-defense reflexes. As a result, the war footage, the attack on Vietnam starts to feel intimately personal – the bombs dropping on Vietnam seem to be aimed at me.

Like Man with the Movie Camera, I found 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Min galvanizing, in its etymological sense of muscular stimulation by electric shock. As in Vertov’s film, we are lifted into a universe constructed by the Kino-eye – one where the juxtaposition of actuality coalesces into a higher meaning, a fullness of experience / life. This beautiful vision is then put under attack by the war footage – footage that, although posessing the aesthetic qualities that characterize the entire film, releases all its potential for shock value when considered side by side with the faces and bodies of children, masses, protesters and the compact figure of the deified Ho Chi Min. That the power of cinematic representation can be used so effectively to short-circuit the spectator’s critical capacities to plug in directly to her emotional core and stimulate a physical response (the catalyst for action) is, according to Gaines, the dream of the politically engaged documentarian. But the question of the political content being conveyed cannot be gotten around. The cinematic apparatus remains amoral.

Man on Wire: Hard Evidence of the Impossible

July 23rd, 2009 references, researchTags: city, kinetic, paroxysm, play, time, uncanny, visceral

evolution of in the retelling, the mythologizing, the re-presentation of the inefable: news report from 1974 to the documentary “Man on Wire”

Perhaps the documentary force of this film derives from the fact that it is about such a singular, unique moment – Petit’s 40 minute funambulism between the towers of the World Trade Center. Man on Wire gives us that which should be irretrievable, magicking us into the heart of an act meant to be ephemeral, carried through in order to vanish. We relive the feeling of astonishment we see reflected in the faces of the crowd staring out of the archival footage, their eyes fixed on something they will never see again. Are we touched by our sudden intimacy with a historical event? Only Petit’s act does not seem to participate in history but to stand out, timeless, as a flight into another order of poetic existence that supersedes both the mundane and the collective. The excitement of watching the footage (admirably build up by the filmmaker’s use of the narrative structure of the heist) stems from our witnessing this heart-stopping cessation of time, a more privileged mode of viewing/experience than the opportunity to resurrect the past.

Would Man on Wire be as effective if it were a film rather than a documentary? Apart from the irreplaceable presence of Petit himself, whose voice provides an almost kinetic impulse to the sequentiality of the entire film, a fictional reconstruction of the crucial moment (the wire walking), rather than what we are given, a lingering montage of stills and (frustratingly but concomitantly authentic) distant footage from the ground, would most certainly have broken the spell. After all, the premise of Man on Wire is that it gives us proof of the impossible and therefore accomplishes something of a metaphysical acrobatics itself. What we lose in proximity to the event itself is retrieved in the extensive archival footage of Petit’s rehearsals in the field, surrounded by his accomplices. The time of preparation unlocks the “real thing”, just as the reconstruction of the heist sets us up for the “real thing”, the archival footage, the indexical link to the miraculous.

Listen to Britain: resurrecting the faces of community

July 11th, 2009 references, researchTags: contingency, mapping, time

Jennings’ “Listen to Britain” (1942)  – the documentary as a form that allows one to tune in on actuality the way one tunes in on a radio station. We are presented with motifs of the everyday from the singular time and place that is Britain (London?) during World War II. The un-trumpeted meaningfullness of communal and cultural gatherings such as dinner-concerts, dances, or civilians and soldiers eating lunch on the steps of a museum appears more relevant to the idea of actuality as testimony or evidence than recognizable historical events. Far from the storied decision-making of national administrators, the sense of  “a people” emerges from the film, a national sentiment tightly woven around the life of “the people”, the working-class, the petty bourgeois, the soldiers. The film achieves a fine balance in its desire to address both the viewer’s individuality and his or her identification with a group – people are shot as groups of dancers, spectators, museum-goers, factory-workers but close-ups effectively personalize and humanize the crowd, bringing to the fore the notion that the subject/the film spectator is a unique and valuable being (irreplaceable because historically grounded, situated in actuality) who is thereby necessarily implicated in the greater effort to preserve their common humanity.

The concept of humanity that “Listen to Britain” worldlessly argues for is both evidence / a fact to which the film bears witness and, an ideal to be defended. Here the document nature of the footage  appears to organically justify the representation of these people, to bring proof to a properly indexical relationship between the two. From a contemporary perspective, it appears that the film is not only bearing witness for its own contemporary audience, but for the future as well, self-consciously remembering themselves in the moment, “embalming” themselves in time in Bazinian fashion: this is who we are, we lived here, we did this, we were here. We are struck with the photographic image’s capacity to resurrect the dead, to bring back something of the substance of life in the imprint of faces and familiar gestures.

Man with a Movie Camera: utopia arrives!

July 9th, 2009 references, researchTags: archive, body, city, contingency, Dziga Vertov, experimental circus, immersion, kinetic, machine, modernity, music, play, punctum, space, time, utopia, visceral

This film opens up a world, another level of “reality” that is more than the sum of its parts. Emerging out of a vision of other time – time mechanized, measured, dislocated, arrested, superimposed – is the vision of a other way of life, a life energized by the fullness of the juxtaposed moment, a society aligned with Vertov’s and the communist project’s ideal of a union of the activity of communal / industrial daily life and the vital élan, the joyful exercise of each individual’s humanity. The world invented / discovered by Vertov’s camera erases the division between labor and “one’s own time”, between citizens and the city, between the producers and the technological means of production, between products and their consumers. Every element that is captured by the apparatus meshes with a multiplicity of analogous moments or rather analogous vectors, snippets of temporal trajectories in which the world and all its inhabitants seem to freely throw themselves into each others’ paths.

Brecht-like, Vertov pulls down the wall between the screen and the audience, allowing the subjects-spectators possession of their photographed selves, assigning the camera (and the filmmaker) to be as much a participant in the buzz as its privileged observer. This move is incredibly satisfying and startling at the same time: I do not feel I am presented with an object, a result, a work out of or beyond actuality for me to consume but that the windows of actuality have been blasted open all around me and that I find myself almost on the same ontological plane as the (human, technological) population of the film. Rather than bringing the world to me, it brings me into the world – as a spectator I feel simultaneously transformed into an actor, an agent, part and parcel of the aliveness of the kino-eye. It’s the first time I’ve seen “Man with a Movie Camera” . I cannot remember having ever been so engaged (as opposed to engulfed, enchanted, immersed) by a work of art.

How is “Man with a Movie Camera” a documentary? Grierson’s “the creative treatment of actuality” seems too indeterminate a definition to characterize Vertov’s utopian project. Actuality here is certainly treated, openly, visibly mediated by a community of agents : by the apparatus (which eerily and comically becomes an animate character of its own)_ by the camera operator, the camera’s appendage or transport device whose main task seems to be to enable the camera’s heroic phenomenological agency_by the editor, who, in a sequence showing shots of frames on a film strip followed by shots of the same frames projected at their proper speed, finalizes the machine’s God-like powers to set time in motion. This candid mediation takes the sting out of “creative treatment of actuality”: we are informed as to the “how” and encouraged to jump into the project ourselves.

The filmmaker does cease to be a conjuror and becomes an epistemologist – rather than doling out a spectacle (even a spectacle structured by an argumentative, informative or ideological purpose, on the non-fiction side like Grierson or on the fiction side like Eisenstein) the kino-glaz (a gaze that is simultaneously the filmmaker’s, the spectator’s and the camera’s) inscribes a map of actuality, in fact writing by the exercise of looking / scoping /projecting.

Argumentation becomes problematic at such a level of investigation into the actual, not least because we are placed in a realm beyond language or discourse into something that is purely cinematic – if we are mobilized politically it is on a poetic level, where social issues cannot be divorced from their embededness in an entirety of human meaning.

Another epistemologist – phenomenological camera in Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil”. “Sans Soleil” also takes actuality as its material, but is it a documentary? When does not the poetic treatment of actuality but the poetic purposes of the filmmaker diverge from a “documentarian” purpose. “Sans Soleil” is about actuality, although a highly subjective one. Does it count? Or must a documentary necessarily address some form of consensus reality – must it necessarily inform in addition to express?

Yvonne Rainer: body and machine frame the play-space

July 1st, 2009 researchTags: body, kinetic, machine, play, structuralism, time

To what extent is Rainer performing for a camera rather than for an audience ? – here the structures of play at work in the dance interact with an automated gaze, one that marks time and maps space at a distance from notions of drama and affect. Recalling Bazin’s take on the ontology of the photographic image, we are denied the metaphorical, “falsifying” pleasures of montage in favor of the almost metaphysical satisfaction of reliving embalmed time. What is the relationship between time and play in this film? Choreographed movement appears at the bisection of these planes, tracing patterns that populate the metronymic (and quietly zooming) temporality of the camera. Time flows and organizes itself in the magic circle designed by the body’s machine momentum and the machine’s asubjective gaze. Filled space _ matter at play, matter spontaneously obeying rules for freedom, defeating contingency.

A polarity emerges with Muybridge’s Zoopraxographer, whose display of photographic contingency (mundane movement) is window-dressed by associative montage/metaphor.

from Wikipedia:

A turning point in Rainer’s choreography came in 1964, when, in an effort to strip movements of their expressive qualities, she turned to game structures to create works. All movement aimed to be direct, functional, and to avoid stylization. In so doing, she aimed to remove the drama from the dance movement, and to question the role of entertainment in dance. Throughout this stage of her choreography she worked towards movement becoming something of an object, to be examined without any psychological, social or formal motives. She opted for neutrality in her dances, presenting the objective presence of the human body and its movements, and refused to project a persona or create a narrative within her dances. In 1965, as a reaction to many of the previously stated feelings, Rainer created her “No Manifesto,” which was a strategy formulated to demystify dance.

This exploration in reducing dance to the essentials climaxed with one of Rainer’s most famous pieces, Trio A (1966), initially part of a larger work entitled The Mind Is a Muscle. Something of a paradigmatic statement that questioned the aesthetic goals of postmodern dance, Trio A was a short dance that consisted of one long phrase. In Trio A, Rainer intended to remove objects from the dance while simultaneously retaining a workmanlike approach of task performance.

Topo-analyse and happy space

June 24th, 2009 researchTags: ambiance, derive, espace heureux, space, time

Matisse, "red studio" : home as a hall of images

commentary and excerpts from: Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space”

On the possible phenomenological interchangeability of lived space and lived time – “living” as temporal endurance in space/of space, equally meaning the spatialization, actualization of temporality. The present is always a spatial configuration:

We sometimes believe we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in those spaces that offer our being stability _ a being who refuses to pass, to flow away, to run out and who, even when looking for lost time in the past, wishes to “suspend” time’s flight. In those thousands honeycomb cavities, space lends itself out as compressed time. That is the purpose of space.

How imagination uses space as a template for the building of being, in order to create a home out of one’s own mental processes:

We will see our imagination build “walls” with impalpable shadows, confort itself with illusions of protection – or, vice versa, tremble behind thick walls and doubt the solidity of a fortress.

On TOPOPHILIA / TOPO-ANALYSIS:

“we want to examine very simple images, the images of the spaces of happiness/fortunate spaces”, éspaces heureux. Fortunate/happy: the joy emerging from happenstance, from the present. In french, fortunate and happy are one concept: heureux.

On IMAGES and their resistance to psychoanalytic explanation, origination:

“The life of the image is all in its lightning brillance, in the fact that an image is the superseding of all sensible data.” _ “It is inversely not in causality but in the concept of resonance or impact that we think we find the true measure of a poetic image”

Victor Hugo's "haunted house" on the island of Guernsey...

“l’inconscient séjourne.”  The unconscious remains in places.

Space: the site of “imaginary” action (rèverie). “On oriente l’onirisme, on ne l’accomplit pas” / We can orient oniric states, not accomplish them.

Spatialization of Time: visual music and the film avant-garde

June 12th, 2009 referencesTags: haunted space, music, time, visceral

the parallel evolution/convergence of experimental animation and avant-garde film_from early attempts to visualize music (i.e. time) to full-fledged redefinition of time as the dimensional extension, population and processing of space…

Of note on Snow’s and Anderson’s piece_both seem to extend a strategy for freezing time or for triggering the present into a loop, through either the quasi elimination of bodies from space (displacing the human body onto the “body” of an empty room) or the annexation of space by a surfeit of body. Both absence and omnipresence fill time to the brim of the frame.

Hans Richter: Rhytmus 21, 1921

Disney: Fantasia, 1940

Michael Snow: Wavelength, 1968

Thom Anderson: Edward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, 1974

S

CINEMA: Haunted Time

April 7th, 2009 researchTags: amnesia, archive, cinema, contingency, flaneur, machine, modernity, shock, time

Texts:

Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive

Mark Shiel, Cinema and the City in History and Theory in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice.

Mary Anne Doane and Mark Shiel make arguments for opposing conceptions of cinema as escape valve for modernity’s alienation from “lived time” and as a postmodern transformation of simulacra into “lived space”.

According to Doane, “the technique of metropolitan life” implies the development of a consciousness regularly leached of meaningful experience by the systematic “shock” of paradoxically both the excessive presence of the present in the form of a barrage of urban stimuli and the alienation of subjectivity from its own present by the logic of capitalist labor. Doane’s essentially psychological (Freudian?) argument is that this constant condition of collective trauma is the origin of a schism in our conception of time – between a time characterized by “the most punctual integration of all activities and natural relations into a stable and impersonal schedule” (the time created by railroad logistics, punch-cards and wrist-watches) and the time that takes shape in the experience of cinema, which offers “the technological promise…of immortality, the denial of the radical finitude of the human body, access to other temporalities” and, contra the traumatized time of daily modern life, can be archived, re-captured, indexed, “rematerialized”. Cinema in this case become a collective prosthetic imitation of memory, a mechanized algorithm for the production of the lived time that has been lost in the business of a modernist logic that “spends” time instead of holding onto it.

This new or other cinematic time is constructed around a double absence: the phenomenological gap resulting from the fact that cinema is a juxtaposition of still frames, and therefore fails to reproduce (according to Bergson) true time/movement, and the diegetic gap constituted by editing, which dislocates the linear flow of time. This phantom, uncanny time, resurrected/ “relived”, “haunted” by its own fabricated past, becomes a site for experiments in fresh meaning-making, for the presentation and representation of the kind of life that “results from immanence and embodiment”. Out of perversity or driven by a utopian desire for the impossible, Doane argues that photography/cinema, or at least their proponents, seek to transform the contingent, the arbitrary (the non-contextualized moment, “that which is beyond or resistant to meaning”) into that which is most authentically (because instantaneously) meaningful. From a classicist point of view, this reconfiguration of time into a present of memory (and nostalgic memory of the present) is equivalent to attempting to achieve a sort of alchemy – in spatial terms, to conflate surface and depth.

This argument that cinema exists in a time of its own is curiously echoed (or produced in a postmodernist reverse/mirror effect) in Mark Shiel’s argument for the understanding of cinema as its own “spatial system”, a space that is present/constitutes a present rather than merely a “textual system”, a system of representation. Using the city as a metaphor for cinema as well as the site of (Hollywood) cinema’s very concrete expansionist/imperialist practices, Shiel points out that film has long ceased to be a factor amongst many in the progression of globalization, but constitutes its basic engine – that in a sense globalization is about the colonization of ‘real’ urban space by the space of cinema, by the imaginary of the cinematic presence / present.

Nomadology: “they arrive like destiny, without cause, without reason, without pretext.”

March 10th, 2009 researchTags: De Certeau, Deleuze, derive, geography, Guattari, narrative, nomad, postmodernism, space, theory, time, utopia

Commenting on:

Tim Cresswell, Imagining the Nomad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive (from Space and Social Theory, Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by George Benko and Ulf Strohmayer, Blackwell Publishers, 1997)

Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Harvard University Press, 1983)

Diana Fuss, Inside/Out (from Inside/Out, Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss)

Deleuze and Guattari imagining postmodern space as a desert, isotropic and boundless where mobility finds a home.

Tim Creswell, Edward Said and Dianna Fuss all seem to hone in on a key issue in the discussion of postmodern notions of spatiality (centering around the nomad, the tactician, the embodied self) and which Said specifically places at the heart of the theorist’s identity. To what extent do theorists, in making sense of their world, inevitably “reify” it, turn lived experience, and in this case, the experience of space/place into an abstraction, either by institutionalizing the theory and cutting it off from its social and historical context or by practicing theory “for theory’s sake”, as itself a form of literature?

Cresswell rightly points out that under the horizon of theorists’ successive attempts to either exalt or demonize the figure of the nomad, the nomad herself, as an embodied subject, remains unknown. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s nomadology subtracts the historical and economic substance of the nomad to extract an elegant and poetic ontology of postmodern society as a utopia structured by no-structure or freedom of movement. Lines of flight or trajectories through space replace a now intolerable fixity of points, of subjects rooted in place. In a revealing parallel with Lukacs, according to whom contemporary society has catastrophically abolished the historicity of subjects to better control them as empty objects circulating through empty space, Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysics imply that the postmodern subject/nomad only acquires total mobility in space by becoming immobile in time, unmarked by the passage of time. “Unmarked by the traces of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and geography” – Cresswell argues that it is precisely those markers that give reality and substance to a subject, a reality that theoretical obsessions with the nomad clearly lack.

Contra theorists of Deleuze and Guattari’s ilk, Said asserts the following: “the work of the humanist critic is to materialize rather than spiritualize the culture in which we live”. This notion travels closely with Lukacs idea that the practice of theory engages on a fundamental level our awareness with the material conditions of the world and therefore serves as a basis for social action. But does “materializing” versus “spiritualizing” culture necessarily go hand in hand, like Lukacs, with reestablishing the theoretical primacy of place i.e. a lieu, or proper place to quote De Certeau and all the historical, economic, political specificity that attach themselves to place, over the attention also due to space, which in its own way, also carries with it definite political and economic implications.

After all, the ideal of spatial mobility, of transience, of boundary transgression is one that carries, not only for Deleuze and Guattari, but for De Certeau (who is concerned with the condition of the consumer) and for Fuss (who is concerned with the theoretical context of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender – and by extension, ‘heterosexual’ – experience of sexuality) the promise of a social space that is no longer delimited and limited by hierarchy, by top-down design, by notions of inclusion and exclusion. We are invited to consider the theoretical transfer from a (modernist) society in which everyone has a place or stays in their place to a (postmodernist) society in which no one is chained to/oppressed by a “proper noun” (De Certeau), but instead is a “poet of their own affairs”, slipping in and out of places according to a logic of the opportune moment. In this sense De Certeau, contra Deleuze and Guattari, does not abolish the “place” of time in the human experience, but argues for a different notion of time, one that is not structured by narratives about past and future but that seizes the story (of life) in the present, in the moment of experiencing the world.