Tracing language on 2D screens*

“Love is a striking example

of how little reality means to us.”

-Marcel Proust

*Note- Endless;

book: Analog by Rajula Shah from 'KEYwording' series by Madhushree Dutta and Ines Schaber.

Keenly aware of the various processes occurring and recurring at the shore where the screen persists, the two-dimensional press on the faculty of touch of the 21st century global citizen. The usage of the word ‘global’ is a ‘double bind’, to be immersed in the affairs of the world one must lose access to the immediate reality that enwraps, twists and folds. 

double bind- a psychological predicament in which a person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made.

Documenting of hunger and thirst is not possible only because it seems unnecessary the second it is quenched. The senses radiate in a pool of ephemeral, infinitely. 

As ‘global’ products promise to provide local solutions, the action and words sit on asymptotic paths, driven with sentiment and reaction, the word ‘touch’ has come to mean something negatively personal. It has divorced itself from poetry and folds to become an identity marker, a necessary faculty to enter the detached, ‘perceived global’ on a 2D screen. This hands us a second-hand life.

A second-hand life is a synthesis of reality-woven beings (us) trying to find difference with reality, as lightning does from thunder; Earth's crust does from the core- separating itself from where it has occurred into being. The trained mind withers in mute, endless pain to find formless engulfing most of it despite all the education. The stomach acid may regurgitate, the fingernails, the hair, the belly - every impotent, limp part of the human body when allowed to grow, grows endlessly; very unlike the mechanism of the phallus on which much of the structures are predicated: the infinite is within and without, but it is not us.

“The general future of mankind has nothing to offer to individual life, whose only certain future is death.”

-Hannah Arendt

The individual stands in between two infinite flows of time, as Hannah Arendt notes in Between Past and Future. 

This existing is much more than a direct interaction with reality, which is action based. The thought-machines spur, spin and collide with various joints, folds and materials to invent a small fragment in line with schizo-legacies. As the Western canon splits into various lines, as unused information is unearthed by a consciously aware thought-machine, the legacies have become ‘double bind’. In a post colonial era where every information be treated as diabolical, every aspect examined: no examination seems to be taking place.

Every Deleuzean flow that consists of pauses and rushes seems to have both the pause and the rush simultaneously. The drive to do and the tendency to contemplate, when both collide as two tectonic plates- what may the synthesis be?

New continents come to existence. A volcano or several, may erupt. The lava mixes with ocean water. All of this occurring as on Earth’s crust- on the surface of the thought-machine’s mind. 

Greek | (But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent?-- this isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himeros, the more burning desire for the present being) 

-Roland Barthes

The disconnect accelerates as the connections go deeper. A partner tends to cheat to fill this maddening difference between self and the romantic partner: “Why can’t I get closer, as close as I wish?” A different being (absent) gives the feeling of filling up that difference between self and lover, but there another difference is created. This gap will always exist and cannot be filled in by another person or another desire. That difference is where self finds mirror image. And has reactions to it. The aloneness in that reflection despite having a lover is overwhelming. It is the closed image of lover playing out, a lover conceals in itself what the seer wants it to conceal; an openness is missing from subject and object alike.

In post colonial, languages separate themselves from the origin. While the origin reveals what cannot be replaced by fragmentation, the assemblages reveal what in turn, origin cannot.

The mud lines on a sculpture are revealed only when the light falls sideways, the top-down light seldom unearths the gaps and realistic stickers that bring one back from imagination to reality- this movement between imagination and reality contorts in the light thrown at it- or the lack of light itself.

A moratorium transforms movement into stillness.

The knowledge of Greek and Latin when understanding English may be imperative; knowing Hindi, English and familiarity with bits of regional, colloquial languages is non-imperative; a condition of post-colonial where the Tamil population cannot read or write their language, just speak it; where Hindi populations cannot weed out ideology from the ‘source’ texts and Sanskrit language.

When the potter demands the mud to adjust to their sense-imagination; the mud does not submit without respect to its own form.

In submission exists a folding of material and spaces…

1.         Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifles it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.

• Ronald Barthes 

In noise I can engage in an observation of sliding from one sound to another, only when the language remains unknown to me: the cries of a baby are slides to thoughts that are philosophised through the baby’s curious actions. Language may begin as textures, a tracing of geography that eventually makes its way from tactile to oral.

“Love is space and time measured by heart.”

-Marcel Proust

Love is larger than mere category of emotion. It exists foremost in creation.

Telepathic receptors submerge in bluetooth connectivity. Love swims in and out; 

The fused, fusing, disconnecting, connecting rhythms in between senses, war-torn generations, destroyed origins yearn to decapitate the need of an origin.

Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak’s ‘Cognitive damage’ affects generations as we move in waves, perceiving a linear ladder up the clouds. Post-colonial has come to mean staunch nationalism based on coloured versions of texts that might not have been saved if not for the colonial masters. 

English for the colonised is not stemming from Greek and Latin; but orders and commands.  It is 26 letters that connect the global and disconnect the origins. 

And now we use the same 26 letters to separate us from them, Greek and Christianity. 

So what is language? We put language in the mouths of children exactly the way shovels and picks in the hands of workers. Which doesn’t mean language is an infrastructure, but that relates to the field of orders.  When the schoolteacher explains an operation to the children, or when she teaches them grammar, she does not, strictly speaking, give them information, she communicates orders to them, she transmits ‘order-words’ to them, necessary conforming to dominant meanings.

- Gilles Deleuze

The affirmative sabotage is hopefulness in an increasingly hostile civilisation, the heat increases not just in climates but in our hearts, and love has come to feel like something else….

Objects of symbol stand distorted, a displacement of aesthetic education from the bourgeois, a mutilation of the avant garde in guise of mainstream, a drifting away of gender images from gender realities.. A testament to the mass hysteria that has held most of humanity as poets and workers slough away in the underground.

A fold aids a magnification, unwanted till it surfaces/ reveals from the under on a desolate night that makes every movement feel the same, only to be broken by an image-sound block that attracts away from what is.

Objects are still for the human eye. As Gilles Deleuze mentions under ‘Towards a Gaseous Perception’ in Cinema 1 ‘The Movement Image’, 

“For, although the human eye can surmount some of its limitations with the help of contraptions and instruments, there is one which it cannot surmount, since it is its own condition of possibility. Its relative immobility as a receptive organ means that all images vary for a single one, in relation to a privileged image. And, if the camera is considered as apparatus for shooting film, it is subject to the same conditioning limitation. But the cinema is not simply the camera: it is montage. And if from the point of view of the human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one; it is the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things.”

On the terrace of a house a few metres away from where I sit, a lady dressed in a red saree and a thin man wearing a striped shirt are talking. There is a bird cage at my feet, made up of  four rectangular see-through parts constructed with wires. Half a coconut shell sits on one of the many squares the imperfectly lined up wires make- it retains some water. 

The sound of their words travel through this cage. The water in the shell vibrates to reflect the part of the roof it could not reflect before the voices travelled through it.

Cinema is as much sound as it is image.

'Midmorning on Easter Monday of 1960, the French composer Jacques Besse, thirty-nine years old, newly homeless and mostly penniless, steps out into the slowly moving traffic at the busy intersection known as Carrefour de l’Odéon, nestled in Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement. Far from intending suicide, Besse, by his own account, is merely responding to the “incipient musicality” of all the motors joined with the footfalls of pedestrians—“Everything waits for something to organize it into music that could make the greatest concerts in our tradition pale by comparison,” he believes. This task of bringing out those “already-symphonic qualities launched by their bodies and mechanisms” falls to him. And, sure enough, his intervention produces “a dancing, bacchic allegro” and a “flight of surreal clarinets punctuated by great stabs of accelerating car brakes.” '

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-hallucinatory-walk-through-paris-that-inspired-deleuze-and-guattari 

Cinema is less a language, more a medium; its form inculcates the senses that are touch-less and taste-less, the subtraction of the touch is deliberate and in fact necessary in image-making processes.

If the pin-hole camera containing a piece of photo-sensitive paper/film is touched while the picture is being registered on it, the image might not emerge when the material is being treated chemically in the dark room. 

In a room full of touch screens and controllers, cinema taps into a moving-stillness within, making the Deleuzean ‘schizo-walk’ possible within the form of ‘sitting down’ as a spectator of moving-image.

Cinema, as an inward and outward process, makes use of seemingly opposite movements - as Bresson mentions in Notes on Cinematography-

"When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralise it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer."

The seemingly contradicting movements of the ‘outward’ eye and the ‘inward’ ear, fit together to make an extraordinary perception-part that connects to our mind.

Sense-engagement without touch can be perceived philosophically as well as politically. The ethical concerns that surround cinematic practices tend to arise when cinema as a medium is treated as something more than it is, as (or larger than)  life, separate from art and inter-disciplinary practices, and theory.

Image-sound making is a practice in gaseous perception-

“Gaseous perception is the genesis of all perception-images where there are a multiplicity of images with no centre; with liquid perception multiple centres form and flow from one to another; while solid perception composes a unitary subjective centre to which all other images relate.”

-Gilles Deleuze

Thus, deletion of touch is to see flat surfaces without a hierarchical structure, as Laura Mulvey does in ‘The Riddles of the Sphinx’, her cinematography is circular without a stoppage. Her camera does not move to stop at an object, undermining the visuals that are looked at in movement, but to make movement the experience of her cinema. 

The human eye tends to prioritise its own height, its own fixation. It is in poetry we see this discussed; for example a lover is always seen in fragments; never whole. The backside is the backside, not the lover themselves; the bosom is the bosom and not the lover.

The lover is many and one, like the images of cinema.

“The Cinema implies a total inversion of values, a complete upheaval of optics, of perspective and logic. It is more exciting than phosphorus, more captivating than love.”

-Antonin Artaud

The race to solidify the images has produced a nearly anti-accidental infinity with digital equipments- the accidents with chemical processing of material film, with taking images without a viewfinder have reduced significantly. In a time when iPhones are just as capable of creating cinema as is the film camera, the handicam as well as Artificial Intelligence; where does cinema mutate into another form?

Cinema is necessarily in a rectangular box. 

It is never only movement-image layered with sound, but is set in a story, poetry or anti-story. It is never a vacuum, or explanations. The discourse around cinema has seldom to do with it- films exist in the spaces words cannot.

“The power of the questions always comes from somewhere else than answers, and benefit from a free depth which cannot be resolved. “Suffering” is the only response to a question which in itself is endlessly shifted, to a problem which in itself is endlessly disguised.”

-Gilles Deleuze

As soon as I look away it moves…. It is in this knowledge of the unknowable, in examination of the nature of that one cannot see that cinema comes in, to portray among other things, the lack which we so intrinsically are aware of.

-oshee