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The machine makes us ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if electricity’s
unerring ways are more exciting to us than the disorderly haste of active men and the corrupting inertia
of passive ones?
Saws dancing at a sawmill convey to us a joy more intimate and intelligible than that on human dance
floors.
For his inability to control his movements, WE temporarily exclude man as a subject for film.
Our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric
man. […]
The new man, free of unwieldiness and clumsiness, will have the light, precise movements of
machines, and he will be the gratifying subject of our films.
—Dziga Vertov, WE: Variant of a Manifesto
Anti-humanism is necessary even when not used by filmmakers as a conscious concept.
—Peter Gidal
Dziga Vertov didn’t have a word for the ‘new man’ he was
creating through representation, but his contempt for the imperfections
of the human body and his lust for machinic existence might today be
described as ‘posthuman.’ Indeed, the social and political contexts of
futurism and constructivism from which he drew inspiration would have
new relevance if reexamined in light of the Utopic/dystopic binary that
undergirds much of contemporary popular discourse on the changing
relationship between humans and technology. In How We Became Posthuman,
N. Katherine Hayles theorizes this relationship as ‘posthuman,’ part of
an emerging cultural discourse that “configures human being so that it
can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.” The crux of
her argument is that “although in many ways the posthuman deconstructs
the liberal humanist subject, it thus shares with its predecessor an
emphasis on cognition rather than embodiment […] to the extent that the
posthuman constructs embodiment as the instantiation of
thought/information, it continues the liberal tradition rather than
disrupts it.”
This inherently contradictory nature of posthumanism, as both
humanist and anti-humanist, is the subject of its own theory. As Neil
Badmington puts it, “humanism never manages to constitute itself; it
forever rewrites itself as posthumanism.” By implication, posthumanism
is nothing new, but as Catherine Russell shows of experimental
ethnography, may be ‘newly visible.’
AS/SA nº 14,
p.69
Russell’s reading of Las Hurdes (Buñuel, 1932) suggests the
historical presence of anti-humanist strategies in documentary film.
Michael Renov further implicates documentary history with the
scientific project. In fact, to the extent that vestiges of Cartesian
subjectivity and semiotics can be deconstructed by film texts that
complicate their aesthetic or ideological relationship to realism,
documentary and posthumanism share a dynamic political relationship.
Some
critical points of intersection between non-fiction film and
posthumanist theory would include the cinéma vérité desire for
invisibility of the filmic apparatus/process in documentations of the
pro-filmic world, which corresponds to the posthumanist erasure of
embodiment, and the ‘right to know’ as a foundation of documentary
ethics and as a Western semiotic that holds all knowledge to be
representable and all representation to have a referent. Trinh T.
Minh-ha has criticized “the habit of imposing a meaning to every single
sign” and its implications for pulling the Other into discourse. Most
significantly, a posthumanist consciousness would contribute to the
existing body of feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques of
normative subjectivity and representation present in contemporary
documentary. The contemporary hybridization of documentary form
parallels this hybridization of human subjectivity, which a
posthumanist consciousness would expand to include the relationship
between human and machine – denaturalizing the human body as well as
the autonomous self.
Russell points out that
experimental film and ethnographic film discourse, born from modernism
and anthropology, take on new cultural roles within the contemporary
contexts of postmodernism and postcolonialism. I would thus suggest, as
does Rosi Braidotti, that the new cultural climate of unprecedented
technological innovation – and its necessary posthumanist critique –
must necessarily have new cinematic forms. What kinds of strategies can
non-fiction cinema employ in representing and negotiating a future that
greets artificial wombs, reproductive cloning and the birth of robot
rights? In keeping with the critiques offered by Hayles, Rosi
Braidotti, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, two measures by which one could
evaluate posthumanist film would be the extent to which it is complicit
with or critical of realism as an epistemology, ideology and aesthetic;
and how it addresses the issue of (dis)embodied subjectivity in
relation to biotechnological change and the tendency in documentary to
privilege what Bill Nichols describes as ‘disembodied knowledge.’
Two recent works offer pertinent and contrasting treatments of some of the social issues emerging in the 21st century. Cyberman
(Peter Lynch, 2001) explores one man’s bionic activism against the
growing widespread use of surveillance technologies on public space and
privacy, raising issues of control through vision and knowledge. The Settler
(Rian Brown, 2000) recasts issues of environmental exploitation in the
context of extraterrestrial landscapes, inviting postcolonialist
readings of space colonization. Both are complex, contradictory texts
that question humanist subjectivity and realist representation and thus
help to problematize the ideological foundation of the posthuman
subject as “an amalgam, a collection of heterogenous components, a
material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous
construction and reconstruction.”
AS/SA nº 14,
p.70
(Cyber)man With A Movie Camera
Cyberman is a multi-layered portrait of Steve Mann, a
professor of electrical engineering at the University of Toronto who is
recognized for his innovations in wearable, computerized cameras. The
film reflects on Mann as both subject and cinematographer, whose
footage forms part of the film we watch. But Cyberman also
deepens and deconstructs traditions of cinéma vérité and the
participatory ethnography of Rouch and Asch, as the nature of his
wraparound ‘videographic’ sunglasses presents a radical new paradigm
for documentary and embodied subjectivity. However, this deconstruction
is somewhat undermined by the centralization of Mann in a network of
apparatus, vision and environmental control. As I will suggest, Cyberman
remains complicit with the construction of the liberal humanist subject
as outlined by Hayles, despite the emancipatory potential for selfhood
and representation that its subject’s technology may provide.
Because
Mann’s own cinematography is used in the film, it is necessary to
consider the nature of his invention in relation to the film’s form.
The videographic sunglasses are an application of what Mann terms his
‘EyeTap’ technology – a wearable camera, or WearCam, that fits over the
head like a hat and directs a laser reproduction of pro-filmic imagery
into the eye. Mann has developed the EyeTap into a highly
sophisticated, covert recording system that serves both as a digital
camera and sensory filter – allowing Mann to view, create, record and
broadcast the pro-filmic world in real time as he experiences it.
Moving
dialectically through a Foucaldian signifying order that equates vision
with knowledge and power, the film heroizes its subject for the degree
to which he embodies all three. As the film’s title indicates, Mann is
both cybernetic and (hu)man – a male cyborg. Using his WearCam to
record himself being recorded, he writes for the viewer, “see me <
be me.” Director Lynch and cinematographer Blahacek follow Mann into a
variety of commonplace and spectacular settings – from Times Square to
his parents’ backyard – that demonstrate both the eccentricity of the
WearCam apparatus and the universal ‘humanity’ of Mann’s character.
A
trip to Wal-Mart provides a striking visual and ideological
mise-en-abîme of the film. Mann displays himself as a self-reflexive
spectacle, exemplifying Catherine Russell’s description of the
auto-ethnographic subject rather than a traditional one. Evoking the
confrontational, catalytic interview style of Michael Moore, Mann
lingers innocently inside the entrance and aims a handicam at the black
dome on the ceiling. A customer service representative dutifully
appears and demands that Mann turn the camera off.
I asked management why they were taking pictures of me without
my permission. They would typically ask me why I was so paranoid and
tell me that only criminals are afraid of cameras. Of course, I was
covertly recording this response using my own hidden EyeTap video
camera. Then I would pull an ordinary camcorder out of my satchel and
give them a chance to define themselves…Oddly enough, the same people
who claimed that only criminals were afraid of cameras had an instantly
paranoid (and sometimes violent) reaction to my camcorder.
AS/SA nº 14,
p.71
In Griersonian fashion, Mann likens his EyeTap to a Colt 45,
as a weapon that forcefully illuminates the social conditions into
which it enters. When Mann systematically offers the same indignant
response, a supervisor and manager are summoned to the scene. The
Wal-Mart employees become increasingly unsettled as they notice Mann’s
wife wandering around with a camera-like device on her head, and
moments later see the film crew in the distance.
The editing conveys the self-reflexive nature of the film and its
cybernetic subject. A split-screen technique provides three alternating
views of the event: as seen through his WearCam; through his wife’s
WearCam; and as recorded by the crew from two separate locations. When
the Wal-Mart supervisor notices a third camera pointed in his
direction, he turns his attention away from Mann, who follows the
action through the viewfinder of his handicam. Through the WearCam, we
thus see a doubly mediated image of the event, which is simultaneously
shot from a 180º perspective outside the store.
The
film is thus also about itself as a medium and the technological
processing of the image. The vision/apparatus/ body trinity is
celebrated endlessly in a pastiche of freeze frames, stills, stock
footage, digital, underwater photography, 35mm footage of Mann on
television, frame-by-frame displays of the film in a web browser, at a
lower frame rate fast-forwarded through the WearCam lens and ‘dusting’
(Mann’s own cybernetic colour technique). A visual and musical montage
sequence showing Mann in the dusting process throws together
voice-over, superimpositions, flash photography and slow motion toward
a climax in the symphonic style reminiscent of sequences in Man With A
Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929).
A scene of the
OCAP protests at the parliament buildings in Toronto clearly shows how
Mann’s WearCam gear furthers the technical and philosophical evolution
of cinéma vérité practice. Mann and his students use the ENGwear to
document and instantly broadcast rioting between police and students.
Wired through a computer, the ‘wearable production studio’ can
effectively post-produce its images before recording or exhibiting
them, eliminating the need for any crew. Mann describes the filming
process that formed the entirety of his 1996 documentary ShootingBack:
This process is a form of “personal documentary” or “personal
video diary.” Wearable Wireless WebCam challenges the “editing”
tradition of cinematography by transmitting, in real time, life as it
happens, from the perspective of the surveilled.
Although the EyeTap presents many new possibilities for the
production, distribution and exhibition of documentary footage, it is
important to note that it is constructed from the same epistemological
assumptions about the world that produced the rational Enlightenment
subject, on which cinéma vérité and ethnographic film practices have
depended. Trinh T. Minh-ha provides an incisive critique that
characterizes the projects of both Mann and Lynch:
AS/SA nº 14,
p.72
With the development of an increasing, unobtrusive technology,
the human eye is expected to identify with the camera eye and its
mechanical neutrality. The filmmaker/camera operator should either
remain as absent as possible from the work, masking thereby the
constructed meaning under the appearance of the naturally given
meaning, or appear in person in the film so as to guarantee the
authenticity of the observation. Such a boldness or a concession
(depending on how you interpret it) denotes less a need to acknowledge
the subjectivity of an individual’s point of view (if it does, it is
bound to be a very simplistic solution to the problem of subject and
power), than a desire to marry impersonal observation and personal
participation. This happy synthesis of the “universal scientific” and
the “personal humanist” is thought to result in a greater humanity and
at the same time a greater objectivity. In the progression toward
Truth, it seems clear that one can only gain, never lose. First,
conform to scientific demands, then show scientists are also human
beings.
This is a rational subject who comes to know and control his
environment through vision. It is not vision as a sensory modality in
itself that is problematic, but its equation in documentary with the
dissemination of knowledge links subjectivity to a Western semiotic –
what Trinh refers to as “the totalistic quest for the referent, the
true referent that lies out there in nature, in the dark, waiting
patiently to be unveiled and deciphered correctly.” To the extent the
visual specificity of film is conceived to be making an iconic or
indexical claim about a real-world referent, it has an inherently
oppressive capacity that has been attacked using counterstrategies
offered in Reassemblage (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1983) and Daughter Rite
(Citron, 1979). Cyberman’s use of the first-person voice over
represents Mann’s knowledge as subjective and situated. However, its
use in conjunction with the shaky, uncut, sync-sound aesthetic of his
WearCam also puts it in an objective, omniscient relation to the
material he is filming. This is unfortunate to the extent that Mann
asserts the increasing ‘cyborgization’ of identity as the only subject
position available in the coming future.
In addition to linking its signifying system to a referential reality, Cyberman
and its subject operate from a Cartesian mind/body dualism in which the
body (as apparatus) is made into an Other by the mind (equated with
vision). The body is both denied and considered inadequate. To the
degree that Mann’s WearCam is considered to offer an enhancement of
human vision and personal power, it is fetishized. But to the extent
the apparatus is considered to be ‘too visible,’ it is denied or
designed smaller in size. Editing and structuring techniques aside,
cinéma vérité films like Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967) and
the films of Frederick Wiseman displayed the trend to keep the techne
of film invisible, defended in the name of an aesthetic coded as
reality or ‘truth.’
At a conference in the film,
a corporate buyer tells Mann that there is “too much apparatus going
into your technology.” Mann echoes this concern in his remarks on the
tendency of camera technologies to shrink in size as they grow in
surveillance power. Having exposed the image of what he sees to
millions of viewers through his website, Mann says “the central object
of my exploitation wasn’t my physical presence, it was my interior, my
mental unconscious, a terrain arguably more valuable than the
exterior.” Thus it is only Mann’s mind on display, and constructed in
clear opposition to, or in absence of, its biological substrate. Mann
says, “I’ve stepped out of my body, in a sense. I was walking into my
own world like I was walking into myself and it’s this kind of
cybernetic feeling to be in the canvas that I’m creating as a visual
art.”
AS/SA nº 14,
p.73
Another
scene from the film illustrates the view of the body as apparatus —
“neither wholly human, nor just an organism.” Mann and his engineering
students take part in a wearable computer fashion show that powerfully
illustrates the intersection of apparatus and body as gendered
scopophilic technophilia. Against a wall-size screen in the background
that rolls through shots of Mann, the men sport such techno-gear as the
‘ShootingBack Pack’ and ‘ENGwear: the wearable production studio.’ In a
textured mix of gaze, spectacle and fetish, both the men and gear are
on display for a network of cameras. Later in the film, we see similar
fashion photography images of Mann on his website, modeling the
stylistic evolution of his WearCams. Here the biological retina is
considered insufficient in itself, in need of an appendage to
compensate for its limitations. The WearCam is flaunted for its visual
omnipotence, instantiating what Braidotti refers to as “the final stage
in the commodification of the scopic.” Mann conveys to what degree his
invention has become synonymous with his own body as a viewing machine
when he writes, “eye am a camera,” and admits to feeling naked without
his gear on. Explaining what he perceives to be his “role as a camera,”
Mann reveals that twenty years of wearing the WearCam has changed his
behaviour:
I changed my way of walking so that I was always conscious of
framing the shot, ensuring that I was moving down the center of
corridors and sidewalks in order to provide a cinematographic
perspective. I was, essentially, optimizing my gaze to give the viewer
the best possible view of the ‘scene.’ Even on those rare occasions
when I wasn’t wired (when I went swimming or took a shower) I persisted
in this behaviour, unwilling or perhaps unable to imagine the
unconnected life.
The important point in both cases here is the negation of the
body – conceived as an instrumental interface between ‘mind’ and
‘reality’, or a circumstance to escape from – and the ability to
experience the world without or in spite of it.
This “flight from the body,” as Braidotti calls it, “confirms
the most classical and pernicious aspect of Western phallocentrism.” It
thus points to the challenge that posthuman representations must
overcome: “identified with the rational mind, the liberal subject
possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body. Only
because the body is not identified with the self is it possible to
claim for the liberal subject its notorious universality, a claim that
depends on erasing markers of bodily difference, including sex, race
and ethnicity.” Braidotti offers a reading that can complicate the view
of Mann as a technologically enhanced human. Although she is referring
to the cyborg as it appears in popular culture, her criticism of this
conception of machinic existence reinforces Hayles’ comments.
The hyper-masculinity of the militarized aggressive cyborg is
another panic response of the male human trying to counteract his
growing obsolescence. It is also a misogynist reaction against the
potentially threatening role of electronic technologies that induce a
sort of passive consumption which is culturally coded as feminine or
feminized. The impenetrable metallic body defies the blurring of
boundaries, is impenetrable and uncontaminated: a sort of
techno-fascist fantasy of self-sufficiency. Constance Penley (1985) has
argued that this reconfiguration of masculinity as an aggressive
cyborg-killer indicates that patriarchy is more willing to dispense
with human life altogether, than with masculine superiority. In other
words, a culturally enforced paradigm such as the cyborg is
structurally ambivalent in terms of gender, but quite traditional in
its politics. Braidotti thus importantly contextualizes the desires of
posthumanism within an existing network of social relations, preventing
a blind, euphoric reading of its claims to ‘biological emancipation.’
Contributing to Hayles’ feminist posthuman critique, Paula Rabinowitz
wonders if, “in claiming space for the posthuman are we erasing yet
again women’s lives and stories?”
AS/SA nº 14,
p.74
In relation to Cyberman, the effacement of the body
also lies in the unquestioned, endless reproduction of the cinéma
vérité aesthetic and its equation through the WearCam with Mann’s
‘mind.’ This is strengthened by the fact that, as Mann says in the
film, he feels the apparatus represents reality more faithfully than
his own “naked” eyes. His friend says, “we all take our camera away to
see truth; he puts the camera in front of his eyes to see the truth.”
This recalls Jeanne Hall’s observation that Bob Dylan’s notion of the
truth as “just a plain picture” both saved Don’t Look Back from having
to make the same argument itself and reinforced the cinéma vérité
methodology. In the case of Cyberman, the film’s style and its subject arguably support each other in declaring technology’s superiority over the body.
Flesh and Blood Explorer: The Settler
Whereas Cyberman equates vision with knowledge and remains ideologically complicit with the realist aesthetic normalized by cinéma vérité, The Settler
rejects this equation and enables a critique of the ideology of realism
itself. Its ignorance of referential reality through the use of fictive
forms and a refusal to fix meaning within the text itself make a space
in which the humanist subject can be deconstructed to an extent not
achieved by Cyberman.
As a hybrid or experimental fictional ethnography, The Settler
blends the conventions and strategies of autobiographical, fictional
and surrealist film in its effort to represent future events and
extraterrestrial landscapes. To this end, it uses dramatization,
first-person voice over, flashback and digital image processing
techniques to represent dream and memory. The film presents an account
of one man’s emigration from California to Mars to help with a space
colonization project. Years after its development is complete and urban
life flourishes, The Settler (played by Jean-Pierre Gorin and
Baba Hillman) reflects on a dream that has continued to haunt him since
his first night on the new planet.
The dream
begins with a medium close-up of a woman holding a contact print of an
enlarged film frame. Behind her, a woman wrapped in white cloth
collects coconuts while she simultaneously appears in the contact print
performing a series of gestural movements. This is followed by black
and white, handheld shots of a rocky horizon across which a woman walks
examining the ground. In a voiceover, she questions progress, evolution
and species-definition, considering whether interplanetary travel is
not just another form of human conquest. She stumbles through
computer-generated sandstorms that blow across barren landscapes of
blue, purple and red. Stop motion photography animates rocks on the
ground, and the dream ends with the woman walking into the distance.
The
film thus celebrates the expressive capacities of vision, freed from a
connection to knowledge and reality, and uses it instead to express an
estranged subjectivity. Elsewhere in the film, negative prints and
colour-treated images are juxtaposed on film and video, enhancing its
unreal affect and indexing the film as ‘fictional.’
AS/SA nº 14,
p.75
Indeed, the voice of The Settler speaks from the year
2097 about events in his own past – still today’s future. Russell
notes, however, that such fictive representations are valid strategies
for documenting the self through memories, which “forsake the
authenticity of documentary realism for a fiction of forgetting. The
filmed memory situates the filmmaker-subject within a culture of
mediation in which the past is endemically fictional.” Russell’s point
reinforces Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s view that a distinction between factual
and fiction film becomes insignificant since they both depend on an
assumed relation to “the real world: so real that the Real becomes the
one basic referent.” Moreover, I would argue that the Future can be
understood to be as much of a discursive construction and
interpretation as is History. As such, representations of both sit
equally in their relative claims to referential reality and, in this
case, can be equally critiqued for a relative compliance or resistance
to ideologies that uphold the universal, unified human subject in
relation to an Other which it is not. Russell’s characterization of the
autoethnographic subject suggests how the dichotomies of self/Other,
real/unreal are dissolved in the figure of The Settler, who
“blurs the distinction between ethnographer and Other by traveling,
becoming a stranger in a strange land, even if that land is a fictional
space existing only in representation.” In addition, Paula Rabinowitz
suggests that in contrast to the “feminist-humanist project of
truth-telling,” a posthuman feminism may depend on “fantasy,
exaggeration and lies.”
In terms of its potential for a political foregrounding of posthumanist issues, The Settler
is significant for its fractured, incomplete, non-identificatory
structure which enacts Trinh T. Minh-ha’s advocation that “meaning
should be prevented from coming to closure at what is said and what is
shown.” The most salient example of textual ambiguity in the film
concerns The Settler himself, whose name we never learn and who
never comes to be fully situated socially or historically within the
text. Through voiceover he refers to other members of the colonization
team, ‘Zuburich,’ and ‘Mulholland,’ whose absence and relative
insignificance mirror the detached tone found in chains of disparate,
subjectless images of generic locales. We hear the voice of The Settler,
but do not see him until a close shot at the end of the film, where his
voice continues to speak on behalf of his silent image. The disjunction
between his disembodied voiceover and the uncontextualized significance
of its utterance destabilize and incite a re-reading of the text. The
identity of this man, why his bones are broken, what he is waiting for,
and the significance of the dream for him are not addressed.
As
Trinh suggests, however, these apparent gaps of meaning are actually
positive openings that allow a plurality and maximization of meaning.
Trinh speaks about the importance of such ambiguity: “If life’s
paradoxes and complexities are not to be suppressed, the question of
degrees and nuances is incessantly crucial. Meaning can therefore be
political only when it does not let itself be easily stabilized.” The Settler
has not yet figured out the meaning of his dream, in which an
unidentified female figure speaks on his behalf. The dream returns for
reinterpretation. The Settler’s relationship to his own past
and future is incomplete – an open text that is in the process of
becoming and can be written over, as his speechless image suggests. His
identity is not fixed, but is in a process of being determined. Trinh
suggests that this layering of subjectivity allows its illusion to come
into question and “may therefore help to relieve the basic referent of
its occupation.” In refusing to commit to referential meaning, the
contradictions within the subjectivities in the text allow the realist
ideology to come apart.
AS/SA nº 14,
p.76
Although it largely typifies Russell’s description of
autoethnographic film in its use of fragmented, dispersed subjectivity
for cultural critique, I would suggest that its hybridity can also be
read as an attempt to express the contradictions/ limitations of
organic identity and relationship in a transition to a posthuman era. The Settler
deconstructs the human subject into a hybrid self that encompasses
sexual difference, cultural displacement and organic inadequacy. The
disjunction between voice and its speaker(s) throws the Enlightenment
idea of embodiment as an autonomous, unified self into question. The
only unified, speaking subjects of the text – the NASA engineer and the
science teacher – stand in detached relation to imagination of The Settler
as part of a past on Earth that has no relation to the future in space.
In making such a transition, the human body is attacked as an
ineffectual or incomplete organism, in need of redefinition to adapt to
an extraterrestrial environment.
Despite its radicalization of subjectivity, The Settler upholds a view that the body is incompatible with existence in a technologically advanced era. In his dream, The Settler’s
body is compared with those of machines, and becomes the only
connection to a world that is not fully knowable through vision and
sound.
They called me a flesh and blood explorer. All the other
missions have only brought rovers. I bite my lip hard to draw blood…it
reminds me that there is plasma and saline surrounding a nucleus in my
cells as they course through my veins, a cyclone of pushing and pulling
through arteries and flaps, to bring the dwindling available oxygen to
a brain that recognizes that its chemistry and tissue aren’t equipped
to continue here.
The body is thus seen as inadequate and untrustworthy. The Settler
continues to question the emigration to space as a conscious, rational
endeavour, and wonders instead if it might be a ‘natural’ continuation
of humanity’s biological evolution. Through the figure of The Settler
as he looks back on the years following his dream, the film puts forth
the argument that such colonization attempts only transfer the problems
of post-industrialist society from Earth to Mars.
Formally and in the subjects they treat, Cyberman and The Settler
appear to be diametric opposites. But a posthumanist reading reveals
shared themes of escape (from the body or from the Earth) and the need
to protect the body or self against corporate control of private or
public space. Steve Mann’s motivation for developing the EyeTap and its
applications was to subvert surveillance technologies through the use
of more surveillance technologies. Similarly, The Settler
speaks of the smog and the “big wigs” that pushed him to leave planet
Earth and colonize Mars, “creating a super greenhouse gas effect to
hold in the heat and pressure-cook up a prosthetic atmosphere.” In both
cases, there is a sense of entrapment leading to the need to escape,
and a sense of capital interests taking over the spaces of the body or
the planet. These themes become posthumanist to the extent that the
body is considered as “the original prosthesis we all learn to
manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other
prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we
were born,” in the case of Steve Mann; or in the case of The Settler, where “embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life.”
Both
films step toward fulfilling what Braidotti sees is the need “to
deconstruct myths of wholeness and organicism,” but they don’t equally
refuse the “technocratic take-over of the body.” Nevertheless, I would
argue that the higher degree of semiotic complexity present in The Settler offers a more politically effective aesthetic for negotiating a posthuman future than does Cyberman.
Its refusal to simplify what is complex has also been identified as a
necessary representational strategy by Braidotti, Trinh T. Minh-ha and
Donna Haraway.
AS/SA nº 14,
p.77
It
is necessary to point out, however, that it is the filmic treatment of
Steve Mann’s device that is complicit with a realist ideology, and not
necessarily the WearCam itself. Indeed, Mann is quite aware and
concerned to highlight the contradictions and complexity of his
wearable camera project.
Due to the covert nature of the device, for example, the
potential to ‘capture’ the images of unconsenting, unknowing bystanders
increases exponentially, strengthening Vivian Sobchack’s account of the
violating potential of direct cinema. But if the WearCam exploits the
objects of its gaze, Mann suggests it equally exploits the wearer’s
subjectivity: “in allowing so many people into my head to see what I
see I was whittling away a little of myself, giving myself up for
free.” Mann’s position challenges the idea of the autonomous subject in
itself by suggesting the possibility of shared autonomy: “what we want
out of the new ever-shrinking wearable technologies is the right to
violate our own privacy for the sake of entering the larger feedback
loop of the media/cyborgspace.”
As it raises many
more questions that recast issues in documentary and subjectivity,
Mann’s technology could be considered further in particular
relationship to Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye; Tom Gunning’s “cinema of
attractions;” the “neoconservative nostalgia” current that Linda
Hutcheon identifies in postmodernist representation; Baudrillard’s
simulacra; and the extent to which Mann’s device verifiably challenges
representation “on a level of substance, not surface.” Indeed,
Braidotti cautions against the negative impact of the postmodern
privileging of the morphology of the signifier at the expense of the
signified:
one of the risks of the ‘hype’ that surrounds the
meta(l)morphoses of cyber-culture is that of a re-creation of a hard
core, unitary vision of the subject, under the cover of pluralistic
fragmentation. In the language of philosophical nomadism, this would
produce the deception of a quantitative multiplicity which does not
entail any qualitative shifts.
In a posthuman era, there is thus the danger of
flagrantly reproducing the humanist ideology through new forms, be they
aesthetic, machinic or displaced in new environments. The challenge for
documentary representation of these issues would be to inhabit old
forms and deconstruct their meanings from within, as Citron’s Daughter
Rite did with the home movie aesthetic.
Michael Renov
has explained how documentary in the late twentieth century experienced
a shift from the politics of social movements to those of identity.
Arguably, this “effusion of subjectivity” will continue from
self-definition to the politics of body-definition and ownership
rights, down to the level of the gene. New issues will need to be
represented, but the strategy will continue to be the dismantling of
Enlightenment subjectivity by – as Trinh suggests – releasing the sign
from its referent, and then ‘linking the semiotic to the material.’
Such representational attempts must therefore encompass feminist and
material film strategies if they are to create and maintain a necessary
critical distance from emerging conceptions of biological subjectivity
and autonomy/collectivity, and from conceptions of the posthuman itself.
AS/SA nº 14,
p.78
FILMOGRAPHY
Chronique d’un été. Dir. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. France, 1960. 90 min.
Videocassette. Corinth Video.
Cyberman. Dir. Peter Lynch. Additional Photo. Steve Mann. The Nature of Things. CBC
Television Network. Canada. 2001. Videocassette. CBC, 2003.
The Man With A Movie Camera. Dir. Dziga Vertov. USSR, 1929. 70 min. Videocassette.
Reassemblage. Dir. Trinh T. Minh-Ha. USA, 1981. 40 min. Videocassette. Women Make
Movies.
The Settler. Dir. Rian Brown. Perf. Jean-Pierre Gorin. USA. 2000. Videocassette.
Wandering Pictures.
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