ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 11 number 1 april 2006

experience
n an essay published in 1918, Walter Benjamin sets forth a task that will concern him for the rest of his life:

The task of a future epistemology is to find for knowledge the sphere of total neutrality in regards to concepts of both subject and object; in other words, it is to discover the autonomous, innate sphere of knowledge in which this concept in no way continues to designate the relation between two metaphysical entities. (The Coming Philosophy 104)

warwick mules CREATIVITY, SINGULARITY AND TECHNE the making and unmaking of visual objects in modernity

Benjamin seeks an autonomous, innate sphere of knowledge that bypasses the Kantian dualism of subject and object to form a pure and systematic continuum of experience (105). He wants to break down the relation between subject and object that has led to the ossification of experience in fixed modes of life, in order to develop a theoretical thinking that grasps the world as such as an undivided whole (On Language as Such 73).1 As an absolute worldimmanence, experience is immediately given to thought: But there is a unity of experience . . . to which the concept of knowledge is immediately related in its continuous development (The Coming Philosophy 109). As immediacy, as immanence, the absolute collapses the concept into the experience it designates, rendering it immediately singular yet continuous, in direct contact with a potential to be something else. A creative potential. Benjamins arguments in these early essays are an access point to the issues discussed in this paper, concerning creativity, singularity and techne. They suggest a way of engaging with creativity that does not rely on a transcendental subject. They invoke the possibility of creation

according to laws of configuration which [are] experienced directly, and not mediated by means of form (Caygill 20).2 They divert our attention from a concern for good form or adequate representation, and open experience to the theme of endurance (becoming and fading away), as the speculative site on which objects appear and disappear. They indicate a materiality and plasticity to experience as the basis of the creative process within the scope of the absolute. And finally, they are a reflection on the singularity of experience itself, bereft of the certainty of formal knowledge, dangerous and ruined. But Benjamins work is also a speculation on language, where linguistic expression is bound up

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/06/010075^13 2006 Taylor & Francis Group DOI: 10.1080/09697250600797906

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in the very thing that it seeks to define:
All philosophical knowledge has its unique expression in language and not formulas or numbers. This fact might prove to be the decisive one . . . A concept of knowledge gained from reflection on the linguistic nature of knowledge will create a corresponding concept of experience which will also encompass realms that Kant failed to truly systematize. (The Coming Philosophy 108)

To seek the absolute in experience, one must begin within the discursive terrain of the already said and written. One must create a concept of experience as a way of opening linguistic expression to the absolute, by reflecting on the way knowledge is itself a product of unique expression, a moment or occasion of writing.3

singularity
Creativity is the release of singularity captured in form. To write this sentence as I have just done (but who is this I; at what time does this I write?) is to make a case for creativity. It is to invoke creativity as a category of thought something to be known conceptually. But at the same time, it is to suggest something else: a certain capacity of thought to exceed itself in its own expression, to create something beyond its conceptual limit on this occasion of writing it down. Thus creativity has a discursive moment as the topic of thinking, presented here as a way of beginning, to show, through the case, how such categories are exceeded by the very attempt to make them known. The problem of employing a categorical method is addressed by Alain Badiou in his book on Gilles Deleuze. Badiou alerts us to the way Deleuze always begins his analysis of cases with an initial formalism: Once this initial formalism is in place, the method consists precisely in fashioning its nomadic subversion and showing that every relation and every fixed distribution must therefore, insofar as they are indifferent to the terms that are arrayed within them, dissolve and cause thought to return to the neutrality of what Deleuze calls extra-being (34).4 The invocation of a term such as creativity

places a responsibility on the writer to account not only for its practice in the cases under scrutiny but also for the schematic logic in which it operates as a category of thought. One affects the other: creativity dissolves categories in thought as much as it does in the historical case, a dissolution that releases thought to think the unthought, and to see potentials within the case as so many interconnections that may or may not be made, to think extra-being. The schematic logic surrounding creativity concerns the modern philosophical project where human experience is transcended by a subject in relation to an object with respect to the possibility of knowledge. The exigency of experience becomes a specific time when the subject is tested for the capacity to know and to feel in such a way that an object can be apprehended as a formal unity. The unity of the object vouchsafes the integrity of the subject in the mode of reason, against the tendency to drift and dissolve into singular experience. Kants critique of reason clarifies this, as Samuel Weber explains: the essential function of form in Kants analysis resides in its power to demarcate an object of aesthetic judgement from its surroundings and thereby to define its internal unity in a manner that does not depend upon its conceptual content or material substance (22). In the Kantian scheme, experience is made subject to a judged perception.5 The aestheticisation of experience by training the senses to perceive the world according to its formal properties becomes the paramount means whereby subjects are tested for their suitability to demarcate . . . object[s], to make them appear as formal unities. Science becomes the working out of rules to overcome the contingency of experience to guarantee knowledge certainty from within experience itself (empiricism), while art seeks to produce aesthetic states (aestheticism), that is, art works whose formal unity guarantees the formation of subjective perception as fit for civilised (i.e., rational) society.6 Where does creativity fit into this scheme? Since the rules must already be known, either through reference back to a community of knowledge (Aristotle) or through an immanent

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relation with the objects themselves (Plato), creativity is reduced to innovation or the free play of form.7 Creativity as originary, the making of something out of nothing (ex nihilo), cannot be part of a scheme that constitutes its objects in a formal sense, because these objects are already accounted for through aesthetic judgement.8 Rather, creativity as originary activity would need to reverse the objectification of the world set up in the Kantian scheme. It would need to dissolve form in the exigency of experience, in the urgent immediacy of the event as becoming/fading away.9 To make something out of nothing is to make the nothing stand out to make it accessible as the material ground on which new objects might be produced (Mules 261). In this case, this nothing is not absolute nothingness (negation), but what remains in experience after the subject has taken leave of it.10 What remains is an originary event, an after-effect that paradoxically comes before the subject.11 Creativity concerns making this after-affect appear as originary, that is absolutely different in its difference from the object, to set it on another path, another direction.12 In effect, the subject cannot abandon experience entirely; it is always a matter of the subject being on its way without ever fully leaving. The problem then concerns a moment within experience as virtual or in flight. Creativity, in the sense that I am invoking here, begins from the contingent, the specific wherever one begins. It takes as its starting point the medium of expression in which objects are made apparent in their singular givenness to perception. Take the expression of horror on the face of a character in a film, leaning over a precipice. As Gilles Deleuze points out, the situation merely explains the expression, it does not create it (Cinema 1 102). As a creation, the expression must be released from its situation to become a power-quality, to use Deleuzes term (97), a pure affect that floats within the visual terrain of the film. In G.W. Pabsts silent film Pandoras Box (1929), the knife held by Jack the Ripper just as he is about to murder Lulu appears to glitter in his hand, making it stand out as an object of terror, as if it existed independently of the situation. Here is Deleuzes description of the scene: There are Lulu, the lamp, the breadknife, Jack the Ripper: people who we are assumed to be real with individual characters and social roles, objects with uses, real connections between these objects and these people in short, a whole actual state of things. But there is also the brightness of the light of the knife, the blade of the knife under the light (102). Here, the knife is not a real object, but pure affect a brightness that exceeds its formal properties as knife. As bright light, the knife murders Lulu, not Jack as if the film produced a life of its own in which the human and the non-human become part of a world of figures expressed by the film. Creativity is the capacity to bring such pure affects together, singularities in a virtual conjunction: Affects . . . have singularities which enter into virtual conjunction and each time constitute a complex entity (103). The singularity of the object, in this case the knife, is released from its place as an instrument in Jacks hand, and instead is returned to the materiality of the film.13 In the case of Pabsts murderous knife, the filmmaker writes directly onto the plastic material of the film. This writing with images allows film-objects to proliferate across the surface of the film, disrupting the causality of events and stitching the film together directly through its own skin. According to Jean-Luc Nancy, a singularity is that which occurs only once (Banks, Edges 41). But this once-ness is not unique in the sense of being discretely finite in its particularity. Rather, the once-ness of the singular proliferates within multiplicity, within a field of contiguities and interconnectivities, and offers potential for new kinds of assemblages and the creative production of new kinds of differentiated objects. The knife occurs once in Pandoras Box (it does not figure as a symbol for some overarching theme that the film is trying to express; it is not causally related to any specific narrative problem or character obsession that might explain why the film works in the way that it does). In its singularity, it does not belong to the film; rather, it belongs to a filmic multiplicity or filmic essence.

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We can detect the scattering of the bright light of knife-objects through the entire terrain of the film archive. For instance, in Roman Polanskis Repulsion, the knife appears as a glittering razor before Catherine Deneuves eyes as a threatening, excessive object. In the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho, the knife plunged into Janet Leighs body is a glinting blade more visible than the madman who wields it.14 As an art of the singular, creativity is related to the capacity of the filmmaker to reflect on the discourse of film, to make singular objects materialise as a glimmering or reflection within specific films. The essence of film is a poiesis or bringing forth, reproduced in myriad singular events scattered through the filmic field.15 the materiality that makes it visible and hence capable of being experienced.19 To expose the material terrain on which objects appear is to work with a medium against itself, to release the materiality of the medium from its capture in techne as learnt technique. These struggles with form have characterised modern artistic practice for some time, and indeed have been part and parcel of the creative process of making art objects. The case of the nineteenth-century English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner is of interest here. Turners art, especially the later works, is famous for its sublime vision, its incandescent qualities, where the art image seems to dissolve into pure colour. To achieve this effect, Turner had to unlearn his own training in academic art.20 In retrospect it is possible to see Turners work as an experimentation with the disjuncture between the planar effects of colour and the linear inscription of form (Gage 91). The result was the production of a new kind of visual surface on which the painterly material bursts free from linear inscription and becomes fully visible as pure chromatic affect.21 He plunged canvasses into water to make marblings and gradations (32) and allowed his own personal experience to enter into the painterly process by working directly with his subject matter in the field (35).22 But this direct contact with raw experience needed to be tempered by vision: Turner found himself unable in the field to use oil colours of sufficient purity to correspond to his later vision (39). Direct experience lacked vision, which needed to be drawn forth in the painting process as something pure pure colour as reflected light.23 Turners technique, especially in his later paintings, was to produce art works according to a chromatic principle of reflected light, influenced by Goethes theory of colours, to break through form in order to release pure unmediated experience.24 Turners application of Goethes ideas results in a dramatic expression of the surface of the painterly material as it interfaces with the eye; an experience of the absolute as immediately present. In Turners Rain, Steam and Speed The Great Western Railway (1844), a steam train approaches out of

technique
As the dissolution of form, creativity bears a special relation with techne and the technical.16 Modern techne as technique initiates a gap between experience and the absolute by inserting a plan or calculation between them. But at the same time, technology (the general logic of techniques) is the system-tool whereby this gap is overcome.17 Techne thus has a false relation to nature (physis) in that it initiates what Stiegler calls a flaw in being (193); an originary flaw that ungrounds experience in its groundedness.18 Techne feigns towards experience (things are made closer, experience becomes more real, more vital, more human), while simultaneously staying at arms length (experience is kept at a distance by calculation or the production of good form). In modernity, one cannot get around this flaw because it constitutes the very condition under which subjects apprehend the world as objectively given. However, one can work within it, as the terrain of a certain kind of experimentation. One can make this flaw apparent by exposing the surface effect of mediation brought to light in its alterity, as that which both produces and resists objectification. To do this is to raise the power of the false (Deleuze, Cinema 2 131) to the first degree, to make the spectrality of the object its illusory sense of absent/presence dissolve into

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the rain and fog, crossing a massive bridge. In the specificity of coloured brush strokes and markings on canvas, Rain, Steam and Speed expresses an idea the co-originariness of the past and the present causing the entire painting to tremble with the presence of an unstable yet dynamic force, and inviting a specific contact with the absolute through the dissolution of form. Turners breakthrough work in this and other paintings like it take[s] painting down a deserted path of no return that is indistinguishable from a final question (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 2). His paintings express a vision of a future whose form is not yet visible; a new way of seeing that creates pure vision of a nonhuman eye or an eye that we do not [yet] have (Smith xxxv). Turners art work indicates a way we might think of creativity, as the unlearning of trained technique, as a dissolution of form into materiality, and as a mobilisation of plastic material as a potential for new experience. In this case, what is at stake is seeing itself: the capacity to see in a different way, to produce a new perceptual apparatus (a new eye to see with) at the interface between the hand and the medium of expression. The body is immersed in a space-time continuum in which the punctuality of the present is collapsed to render experience absolute, as the all-at-once presence of the past and the present disjunctively synthesised within the singularity of the painting event. with visually experienced objects as singular things or virtual presences. My concern here is with the technical-material figurations that play themselves out in perception, as the work undertaken by the image when presented to experience as part of an historically conditioned apparatus. Behind every act of seeing is a struggle to see, involving competing technologies for making things visible. Benjamins writings on aura and technology provide access to the terrain of this struggle, through the exemplary modern object: the photograph. In his well-known essay on photography, Little History of Photography (1931), Walter Benjamin writes of the tiny spark of contingency that one looks for in old photographic images as the mark of a yet to be experienced future (510). His concern here is with the modality of the photographic image as a received historical object, whose historicity is marked by techniques of reproduction. What, then, is a mark in the sense that Benjamin proposes? In an earlier essay, Benjamin defines the mark as an effect drawn out through the medium on which the sign is inscribed: The first basic difference is that the sign is printed on something, whereas the mark emerges from it. This makes it clear that the realm of the mark is a medium (Painting, or Signs and Marks 84).25 Here we must be careful not to reduce Benjamins ideas to a crude materialism, where signs and marks are seen as part of a graphology of print or drawing. To account for this Benjamin makes a further distinction, between the mark in the narrow sense of graphology and the absolute mark as originary access both senses inhere in the mark in its singular occurrence. What is at stake here is the experience of the absolute within a printreproductive culture. The mark is the exposure of the sign to the surface material on which it is inscribed or printed. The mark thus has a disjunctive relation with the background to which the sign refers; it resists or stands out in its appearing: a blush, blot or stain that wont go away. The mark does not signify. Rather it communicates. What it communicates is its own originary condition, embedded in the endurance of experience. As I have argued, modern

photographic gestures
So far I have argued that creativity is bound up in technology as the means of making something present to experience. Technology grounds experience in the movement of ungroundedness, thereby rendering it vulnerable to the vicissitudes of becoming and fading away. Creativity involves access to this movement; to this restlessness in experience, as a release of the singular from its objectification in form. In this section I draw out the consequences of thinking of creativity along these lines through a consideration of Walter Benjamins concept of aura, as it relates to photographic images. My aim here is to develop what I call creative reading as a way of engaging

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experience is conditioned by an originary flaw where technology separates subject from object, thereby posing a problem (a gap in experience) which can be solved only through more technique (techne as the application of rational principles to achieve some end). But the application of technique simply serves to further reproduce the gap in attempting to overcome it. Benjamins answer to this conundrum is to make the gap visible as the temporal after-affect of technology (in Heideggers terms, the essence of technology); to make the surface of experience stand out as surface a surface of affectivity and not simply as a self-effacing medium. The mark, as the exposure of the sign to its surface, thus has a temporal dimension whereby it communicates this originary flaw, which, in Benjamins onto-theological phrasing at this early stage of his writing, is described in terms of guilt and redemption.26 In his later writings on technological reproduction, Benjamin renames the mark aura, as a redemption of experience from the flaw of technological mediation. Aura is the (false) essence or non-technological aspect of a technologically produced experience that opens access to originariness; a lingering prefigurement of obsolete technology emerging in a newer form: here, too, we see in operation the law that new advances are prefigured in older techniques (Little History 517).27 Aura is not wiped out by photography but actively produced in the mode of a loss or fading away, when one mode of perception is challenged by another and threatened with obsolescence. What is at stake in this struggle is the capacity to extend the experience of life-as-perception into the future, in terms of technologically conditioned social strata vying for visibility within cultural formations. Class becomes visible as a certain kind of auratic experience emanating from specific photographic images as if it were permanently and naturally present to the viewer (the very creases in peoples clothes have an air of permanence (Little History 514). But this experience is itself fraught with the trauma of the originary flaw defined historically in terms of competing techniques for making things visible. Benjamins readings here suggest that each photograph is a mark that reproduces the trace of previous techniques configured in the very form of the image itself, as aura or productive loss. Photographs allow us to see, but in order to do so they carry (communicate) traces of a struggle between competing visual regimes accessed in the moment of perception.28 For instance, the photographic mug shot, which emerged in the late nineteenth century as a means of identifying criminals, becomes visible in terms of a repressed figure of the studio portrait as its virtual other.29 As the expression of technological essence, the photographic mark that the mug shot carries with it cannot be effaced. Rather, its aura becomes the negative of the noble expression of the studio portrait. One must access this visibility through a genealogy of the photographic image, revealing its affective history as a series of technological and perceptual transformations with direct links to the social order. This involves a certain kind of rhythmic viewing practice that catches the image in flight, on its way to somewhere else, another time, another place. As Oleg Gelikman has noted:
[H]istory, as Benjamin understands it, emerges in the rhythm of observation that spans the temporal differential separating the moment of contemplation from the time of its object. Under the eye of such double insight, the facts and their narrative figures, singular events and their representations, pass into one another as each others limit of becoming. (48)

This kind of rhythmic viewing practice opens up the photographic image from representational closure and allows us to see the lingering obsolescence of an earlier technology traced across the surface of the image. We can see this effect, for instance, in the well-known photograph of Lewis Paine, executed in 1865 for complicity in the plot to assassinate the US president and others. In this photograph the young man, imprisoned deep in the bowels of a river hulk, condemned to death and awaiting execution, looks at the camera in a wistful, longing way, his youthful beauty accentuated by the chiaroscuro effect of light and shade that illuminates the upper part of his body.

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We know that in the weeks preceding his execution Lewis Paine was made to pose for photographic shots by the photographer Alexander Gardner, who had made his reputation during the Civil War.30 Gardner was commissioned by the US government to take the shots of Paine (a pseudonym), probably as an official record for posterity (Davis 165).31 But at the same time, Gardner was well aware of the potential to make money out of the photographs. The photographic session with Paine was thus inscribed with a double imperative, concerning on one hand the commercial production of honorific portraits of the rich, the famous, the notorious, and, on the other the recording of the condemned man to be filed away as a means of classification and inspection for future use by government authorities. The photograph thus captures two bodies in one: the noble and the criminal body, both of which are made visible in the single photographic image.32 Gardners photograph of Paine suggests a moment when the gestural function of the body exceeds its capacity to represent. This excess reveals itself retrospectively as the negative image of the criminal mug shot introduced some decades later, but prefigured in Paines pose both constituting each others limit of becoming. In looking at it today, and in the light of its historical and technical achievement, the photograph of Paine becomes a reversal of the criminal image that was to be the object of photograph taxonomy later in the century.33 The social reality of the photograph (its referential designation) is exceeded by the pose as a comporture to the future, which, when viewed retrospectively, reveals itself as a figuration that marks its futurity in the very gesture that the pose makes apparent. This gesture is the photographs aura, its unsettling effect in producing a false origin, an originary experience of life-in-death. To read photographs in this way is to read the mark of lingering technologies prefigured in them, as potential sites of transformation from one mode of seeing to another. Gestures expose the body of the object to a limit or edge, a point at which it risks letting go of certainty. Gestures test experience; they make the body go elsewhere.34 By seeing photographs as gestural rather than significant we can open them out to their technological limits and beyond, as part of a transforming field of techno-visuality whose movement is prefigured and entangled in the activity of seeing. My reading of the Lewis Paine photograph thus shifts from a thanatology of life-in-death to a bio-logic of image production, where life is borne along by perceptual experiences produced from within competing techno-visual regimes. By reading with the materiality of the photograph against the tendency to objectify its image as a signification, the image as body is opened to the outside, quickened by releasing it from techne. The image-body lives on (we see Lewis Paine today), thanks to a certain productivity and handing down, an archival imperative that carries with it the mark of its struggle to be seen. The practice of reading images can thus be informed by a certain kind of ethics, in which the good to be achieved is not guided by an eidos (good form, calculated analysis, representational adequacy) but an eventuating as a comingto-be-seen. To make this happen is to make the materiality of the coming-to-be-seen show itself in a flight away from itself, as becoming-other. I propose to call this creative reading: a practice of reading images as inhabited by an immanent force that carries them elsewhere. This practice is not aleatory but determined by historical factors concerning the struggles to be seen within social terrains (defined by type class, gender, race and so forth) and the technological formats to which vast industries commit themselves in their attempts to gain market share and to make the world visible as a natural experience, devoid of technological mediation. Creative reading draws out the event of this coming-to-be-seen, through a careful reflection and deconstruction of the disjunctive elements at work in the seeing itself, as it marks itself historically in the very fabric of the photographic image.

creativity and openness

I began this paper by introducing the theme of creativity through a discussion of Walter Benjamins theory of speculative experience. Benjamins complex and recursive arguments in

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his many illuminating essays indicate a way of reflecting on the temporality of being that cuts through the subjective moment of lived experience, opening thought to the material-absolute; to the virtual terrain of becoming. All experience is thus cast in the mode of a fragile endurance: a becoming and fading away within the material processes of conceptual, perceptual and sensory life. A struggle ensues. Thought cannot grasp experience in its absolute immediacy without at the same time confronting an originary flaw, a false origin brought on by the historical necessity of technological mediation. Modernity, as the symptom of this false origin, produces technical objects in the mode of presence, where a subject is formed in relation to its object. Technical objects are doubled by a sign and a mark. The sign leads to signification, representation and identification, whereas the mark communicates its own historicity as technological mediation. One relates to the other disjunctively, as the material potential for dissipation or dispersal at their point of mutual departure. My argument has been that creativity the making of something out of nothing is the release of this potential, either in specific acts of making (for example in Turners art practice) or through critical reflection on the objects themselves (the photographic portrait transforming into the mug shot), as they present themselves to us from within a cultural archive. In both cases, creativity involves a reflection on time, as the condition of being-human, that is, the finitude of human experience towards death. Modern technology offers a life, or life-afterdeath, that, taken in its broadest sense, involves a resurrection of the body within the dispersed terrain of material-archival experience. We continue to see and hear things from the past due to their archival survival, as enduring through time as audio-image events. The experience of intimate distance that characterises modern technology is fraught with the struggle to survive and to flourish at the interface between the actual and virtual experiences of technologically mediated life. Life can only go on, can only be lived through this struggle. Modes of living appear and disappear through time, through the ordering of archival material and the accessing of global events through their media circulation. In this terrain, life is constantly risked or tested. By this I do not mean the small domestic fictions of soap opera or melodrama, nor the momentous dramas of natural disasters or wars that take place on our television sets every day. Rather, I mean the risk that humans have taken in allowing themselves to be prosthetically linked to technology in a desire for power and control over experience. As I have indicated, this flaw in being cannot be avoided, but must be made to appear as the very site on which the human can be made again. To reflect on the human-technology problem requires an ontological turn that opens experience to the material-absolute, to the virtual conditions of endurance through space and time. A starting point is Heideggers ontological hermeneutics in which beings are separated from Being through techne or technological calculation. Heidegger attempts to reveal Being to beings as an unveiling or aletheia in the process of responding to the question that technological mediation poses to him (The Question Concerning Technology). However, as Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, Heidegger casts beings in the mode of their facticity as fallen (150), that is, already disposed to a task in which they are irretrievably committed. Being is already in place and in anticipation of beings which must obey its call. Instead, we need to think of beings not as fallen in their facticity but as the singularity of the multiplicity that is the One-All. In this case the absolute is not a final ground of Being in which beings dwell but a perpetuum mobile of immanent materiality, opening beings to the outside in a continual movement that changes and fluctuates within/outside itself. To think of the humantechnology problem in this way is to risk being in its facticity, not as a call to Being but as a potential for what beings might become, in the hope of another life, not the one that we presently have and are subject to, but something that we do not yet have, but which can be seen as a configuration within mediated experience. To create is to make this life apparent, to make it visible in the hope of a future whose time has not yet arrived: a future yet to come.

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mules notes
1 The distinction here is between experience as Erlebnis (subjective experience) and experience as Erfahrung (total or whole experience). In another early essay, Benjamin writes of experience as a return to a childlike state (Experience). This can be understood as a strategic refutation of Kants proposal that critical thinking in a political sense is characterised by a certain mature self-reflection, as a separation of thought from experience (What is Enlightenment?). Benjamin wants political thought to return to experience as the undoing of mature self-reflection. Throughout his career, Benjamin turns again and again to the experience of children as a way of thinking beyond self-reflection and grasping the world intuitively in terms of the absolute. See also Gasche (83ff.) for the dis tinction between the intuition of the absolute as transcendent (Kant) and grasping the world intuitively as an absolute (Benjamin). 2 See also Quadrio for a discussion of Benjamins theory of experience as a surface of affect. 3 Benjamin extends linguistic expression to include all forms of expression (On Language as Such 62), thereby making it possible to reflect on experience in a range of visual and aural modes. 4 For Deleuze, extra-being is univocity, or that which is already given to be said and thus must be invoked all at once (the One-All) for thought to think at all (Difference and Repetition 35^37). Univocity must be immediately present, as an absolute outside but embedded in thought itself: equal being [extra being] is immediately present in everything, without mediation, or intermediary . . . all things are absolute proximity (37). In this paper I refer to this kind of thinking in a range of writings including those of Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy and Walter Benjamin, as the thought of the absolute (Nancy Hegel 23). 5 See Kant,Critique of Judgement 73ff. 6 See Stolnitz for the inculcation of an aesthetic sensibility of the moral good in eighteenth-century European civil society, especially through the ideas of Shaftsbury. 7 For a full discussion of the difference between Plato and Aristotle along these lines, see Alan Blum, Theorizing. Blum shows how Platonic argument is concerned with how mind is grounded in that which it aspires to produce (138), whereas Aristotle removes this reflexivity in favour of categorical schemes for determining Being. For Plato, Being concerns how specific instances (expressions) aspire to the Good, guided by eidos (pure ideas), whereas for Aristotle, Being concerns the adequacy of language to a community of experts. Platonic critique risks Being in its very activity, whereas Aristotelian science confirms Being as that which can be expressed rationally. 8 Here we must consider aesthetic judgement not simply as that of good taste but as the reconciliation of perception with form. Aesthetics always tries to overcome the gap between subjective experience and objective knowledge by a certain training that effaces singular experience in favour of a detachment or disinterestedness. Aesthetic judgements are statements of sense in the mode of reason. Creativity is inimical to aesthetic judgement because, in the latter, nothing is risked. 9 This is the project set out by Walter Benjamin, to invoke the experience of archaic time (Erfahrung), or time in which the differences between the past and the present are collapsed by an originary configuration of inscribed materiality apprehended as a lightning flash (Theses on the Philosophy of History 255). For configuration see Caygill (23, 84 ^ 85). 10 Jean-Luc Nancy refers to this as abandoned being (Abandoned Being 38). 11 Merleau-Ponty writes of a certain sedimentation harboured in speech that holds itself back in order to reproduce itself as a kind of cultural life (Signs 92). Later in this paper I identify this sedimentation as the gesture of the sign, its body as disposition, as that which withdraws itself in being seen. 12 The absolute is affirmed as an immanence within exigent experience; the difference retained in its differenciation, as the restlessness of immanence (Nancy, Hegel 5). 13 Materiality needs to be distinguished from the concrete. The knife is not concrete but material. Concreteness refers to a particular instance of an immaterial form, whereas materiality refers to the affect-medium in which objects endure (appear and fade away). Unlike concreteness, which always signifies the form of which it is a particular instance, materiality is always in a resistive mode to the form embedded in it. Material is the plasticity of the immanent force of the singular

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expression of an object, its difference from itself in appearing singular. For an elaboration of the distinction between concrete and materiality, see Jean-Luc Nancys essay Identity and Trembling (22). For plasticity, see Nancy, On Painting (and) Presence (345); see also Rodowick (21 1^12 passim) for the plasticity of media in contemporary media contexts, and the need to develop an understanding of mediation as plastic material configured by immanent force. 14 The murderous filmic knife is thus attached to the figure of woman, as that which defines its limit; its fate in death as an absolute end, and the fascinating horror that comes from exploring its potential to this limit. The fact that the knife is nearly always wielded by a man returns this exploration to a patriarchal format, which it nevertheless traverses and exceeds in its manifestation (Repulsion is an exception. The woman kills the man with his own razor).To enter a film at the place where the knife is wielded is to be situated at a potentiality, where patriarchal power is at its most intense by also being at its most vulnerable (its extreme limit). In terms of the film, woman is fully affective when the knife appears. 15 A revealing or aletheia in Heideggers terms (The Question ConcerningTechnology 12). 16 Techne or technique is defined by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics in two different ways. One relates to the production of invariable things, which he defines in terms of scientific knowledge. The other concerns knowledge of variable things, which he calls practical wisdom (1140a: 25^35). Both forms of techne involve bringing things to their end by means of rational action or operation. Considered in this way, techne is the technique of applying means towards an end, an efficiency of thought and action. 17 Martin Heidegger identifies this tendency in modernity as the age of the world picture [in which] the world [is] conceived and grasped as picture (The Age of the World Picture 129). To experience life as a world picture is to be subject to a distancing effect that simultaneously makes things appear close at hand: intimate distance. 18 Stiegler is following Heidegger on this point. The originary flaw, in its primariness, necessarily comes last-but-most-recent, as coming-to-presence: All coming to presence, not only modern technology, keeps itself everywhere concealed to the last (The Question Concerning Technology 327). Originariness is thus a matter ofaccess from wherever one happens to be, and not a return to an original state. 19 This exposed terrain is not the technological medium as a functional operation or a means to an end but the nothing from which the object has been made: the after-affect which paradoxically precedes the object in its material presence, as that which makes the object visible in the first place.This terrain is the filmness of the film in its capacity to make a knife float across its surface; a mode of apprehending and exploiting spectral objects in their close proximity to the material in which they are embedded; a way of dissolving them into pure affect as singular to this or that particular event. 20 In his lecture series over the period 1810 ^25 Turner returned again and again to a number of fundamental problems . . . the development of habits of perception, and the relationship, often contradictory, between vision and measurable truth; the elemental nature of geometrical forms and of the will to form in art (Gage 108). The problem emerging for Turner was the relation between colour as sensation on one hand, and form and perspective on the other. In the latter stages of the lecture series, Turner was able to discuss colour in its own right (109), thereby breaking away from the subordination of colour to form in academic art practice. 21 Turner wrote of his own practice in terms of chromatic reflections that evade every attempt to reduce them to anything like rule or practicality. What seems one day to be governed by one cause is destroyed the next by a different atmosphere (quoted in Kemp 83). Even at an early stage, Turners art practice was characterised by experimentation, for instance by switching between watercolour and oil painting, so that one became an expression of the other (Gage 27). 22 In a well-known anecdote, Turner is said to have leant out of the window of a speeding train to have the direct experience of rushing air against his body, in preparation for painting Rain, Steam and Speed ^ The Great Western Railway (Lindsay 150). 23 Turners work thus prefigures that of the French impressionists by some decades (but see Serres).The work of John Constable, a contemporary of Turner, is also of note here. See my article In the Absence of the Human for further

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discussion of Constable and the production of modern art objects along the lines I am suggesting here. 24 See Jonathan Crarys discussion of Goethes theory of colours (67^74). 25 In Painting, or Signs and Marks, Benjamin proposes the distinction between signs and marks through the example of painting on a white canvas.The sign is a graphic line drawn on a surface that becomes its background: the background is conjoined to the line (83). The sign-as-line acts as a signifier, thereby conferring meaning or identity to the background (where the background is the reference to which the sign is aimed). But in this process the surface ceases to be visible, becoming hidden in the background. Benjamin wants us to consider the persistence in perception of the surface-as-hidden, which he describes as a surge of white waves (the residual effect of the white canvas). 26 In a similar move, Merleau-Ponty writes of an original stain (quoted inVisker 105). 27 See Gelikman for a discussion of Benjamins concept of aura in terms of historical perception embedded in differentiated modes of technologically produced imagery. 28 For a discussion of competing techniques in the development of photography in the nineteenth century and the effects of this on the perceptual regime, see Harris. 29 Alan Sekula has pointed to the doubled nature of the photographic portrait in the nineteenth century as potentially honorific and repressive, providing both a ceremonial view of the bourgeois self and a forensic record of the criminal body (6 ^7). He argues that the archival system of identification introduced in France by Bertillon late in the nineteenth century makes visible a criminal body that expresses nothing (30). The mug shot is thus the portrait photograph reduced to its minimum level of expression, its aesthetics neutralised into an identity-sign. 30 For a discussion of Gardners role in the photographic documentation of the American Civil War, see Davis (138ff.). 31 It should be noted here that these photographic sessions were subject to patenting (Davis 165). The photographer won the right to take photographs of important events over competitors, thereby enhancing his reputation as well as making money in the bargain. The intertwining of commercial and state enterprises is important here, and concerns the production of images valued for their scarcity, not their abundance. 32 In the nineteenth century the art of photography and that of science were intertwined. Studio portraits such as those taken by Gardner of Paine would have been considered both aesthetic and factual, in the sense that the noble portrait represented the true character of a subject. In particular, photographs of the face were regarded as evidence of good [or bad] character (Hamilton and Hargreaves 34) and coincided with a need for precise information (Davis152) as part of a seamless integration of art and information (Davis 171). Indeed, as Hamilton and Hargreaves point out,early scientificphotography concerned with the face and the body . . . seemed indistinguishable from current artistic or social photography (61). 33 In his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes reads this photograph in terms of what he calls the punctum, or the wound of time: an experience that collapses the distance between the subjectivity of the viewer and the objectivity of the image. However, against Barthes, I argue that the punctum effect can only occur because the photographic image is in essence a document of public gestures and not of private experiences. Photographs are gestural through and through, thereby opening the body out to disposition in temporal and spatial becoming.Rather than existential wound, the collapse of temporal distance produces a shuffling effect in which one pose can be seen as a transformation of another. 34 Gestures are tied to technique and the technical (Stiegler 152). One cannot gesture without invoking a technique for shaping the body as a pose.

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Warwick Mules Visual Media Studies Humanities Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Education Central Queensland University Bundaberg Campus Bundaberg Queensland 4670 Australia E-mail: w.mules@cqu.edu.au