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Journal of Visual Culture
DOI: 10.1177/1470412905051162
2005; 4; 5Journal of Visual Culture
François Bucher
Television (an Address)
http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/1/5
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journal of visual culture
Television (an Address)
François Bucher
journal of visual culture
Copyright  2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 4(1): 5-15 [1470-4129(200504)4:1]10.1177/1470412905051162
Abstract
Television (an address) is a text that stems from an art project initiated
in 2002. The project is based on an operation that relies on the live
transmission of the image of television. The streamed image is accompanied
by a commentary given by an invited guest to different
audiences in theatres and galleries around the world. This paradoxical
transmission of a transmission seeks to create a disjunction that
positions the image in a place where it can speak about itself. The text
is intended to highlight a general platform of thought surrounding the
status of the image in contemporary culture. The general argument is
linked to the notion of the `death' of cinema in the hands of television,
as the latter relinquished its ethical/aesthetical function, positioning
itself instead in the realm of a purely social function. The writing is a
non-academic approximation on the part of an artist and writer. It
draws on notions worked by Giorgio Agamben around the Messianic
dimension of cinema and also Deleuze's diagnosis of a society of
control.
Keywords
cinema  Messianic  reality TV  supplement  surveillance  television
 year zero
Man is the animal who goes to the cinema. (Giorgio Agamben, 1998a)
We follow a narrative borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard, Serge Daney and
Gilles Deleuze. A plot that recounts the two deaths of cinema: the first one
at the hands of fascism and the second at the hands of television. A history
of death and resurrection; this might well be what Saint Paul's mysterious
phrase was already referring to: `the image will only come in the time of resurrection'
(Godard, 1989). Giorgio Agamben interprets Godard's Histoire(s)
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du Cinéma and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle as Messianic
works, in the sense that they push the image to its very limit, to its apocalypse
(its sadomasochistic moment, of catastrophe and jouissance, in the words of
Serge Daney). The image attains the dimension of a `communication of a
communicability' (Agamben, 2000a: 59); the subtle, yet definite movement
where a positive possibility in spectacle can be used against it; the instant of
its `revelation', which can only coincide with its end. Even though this `end'
cannot be understood chronologically and every moment in history, every
image, has a secret doorway to it.
This article presents cinema and television as two paradigms, separate from
their chronology, separate from the film and the monitor, exceeding the darkened
movie theatre and the blue light in the living room; exceeding the 20th
century. Cinema is, essentially, a silent possibility for thought, an `adventure
of perception' (Deleuze, 1998), a `de-creation of the real' (Agamben, 1995).
Television stands for our contemporary reality of un-thought and amnesia.
The first one produces and sets forth a world, the other programmes and
transmits a void; the first one invokes politics by its unspeakable gesture, the
other is pure social control that conjures up the technical eye of our time.
Punctuation of War
1945. It would almost be impossible to speak without the war, the historic
phrase would be too long. It is necessary to say `after the war' or `before the
war'. When Rossellini operates on the clean slate that the bombs have left, he
already understands the new phrase that we will be writing in our days. We
are, as a world culture, exactly in the despairing last scene of Germany ­ Year
Zero; you would have to be blind to miss it ­ the television cameras are
always positioned on the rubble, picturing the bomb that just went off (and
we still resort to the mystery of the gaze of a child as the only perspective that
can save us from the chaos of exploded fulcrums). But unlike Rossellini who
presented the despair of that boy amidst the ruins of his culture with an
ethical/aesthetical intent (Bazin, 1967: 37, had said, `to preserve its mystery'),
the media presents us with a tumult of unintentional, accomplished facts in
the face of which we are powerless: `the media dictatorship likes appalled
but impotent citizens' (Agamben, 1998b).
In the introduction to a compilation of his War Trilogy scripts, Rossellini
(1985) says that, as a filmmaker, he had wanted to `observe, to contemplate
reality morally' (p. xvi) ... so he proposed a world after the destruction.
`Proposed' is the key word here. He did not set out to transmit what was
happening, rather he understood himself as one who would set forth an
image for a culture that was in need of it. Speaking in the terms that Deleuze
invokes, this proposal is precisely what we may call a supplement, something
that is beyond the illusion of a technical one-to-one relationship of the world
and the image. It is interesting to emphasize the concept of a morality that is
employed as an adverb for the act of observing. It is a morality that is precisely
devoted to foregrounding the position of the camera in the world, the
journal of visual culture 4(1)6
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position of the work in history, the position of history in the story, the position
of the moving image in and of history. To `observe reality morally' is to
include oneself in the problem rather than ignore the ground where one
stands. Rossellini is not standing on ground three, or two, or one, he is
facing, thinking, filming Berlin, ground zero ... this is an ethical (moral)
observation, it is a proposal for thinking a nation after a radical dismemberment
of everything that it stood on. In the end it is an offer, a construction,
an act of love (a promise, and a projection). If we are to think about the difference
of the documentary camera of neo-realism and that of the western
media, we can find the clue to their difference. The media tacitly asserts, at
every step, that it is only presenting the news that has taken place, that the
camera is there to report: `it is the consensus par excellence, it is the technical,
immediately social, offering no possible disjunction with the social, it is
the social­technical in its pure state' (Deleuze, 1998: 18). To `observe reality
morally' is the work of cinema, to observe a moral reality (in the sense that
one observes the rule) is the dimension of the media. Deleuze, following
Daney's intuitions, punctuates this thought by emphasizing that television is
the stage where the world makes its own cinema, all on its own. It is a kind
of paradoxical keeper of a vacuum: a device for the endless deferral of
thought. `Cinema accompanied the world, but television pushes us out and
places us in a waiting list' (Godard, 1998). It installs an unquestionable truth
that implies that things are just like that; as if there were no decision
involved, no idea behind, no tracking shot, no zoom, no cutting, no studio,
no unidirectional microphone, no voiceover, no camera operator, no idea. In
ignoring its own history/histories, the image of television acts as if the syntax
of the moving image didn't have a development, as if its own common sense
had always already presupposed itself, as if the history of montage had not
been a craft that came to be progressively ... from A to B to C and back to A;
as if everything were external to television, to us, as if it weren't, as if we
weren't included in the ethical problem of the image that it constantly transmits.
This is what Daney points out when he says that the paradigm of
programming replaces the paradigm of production: a mechanism by which
nothing is offered and all is on offer. Deforming Bazin's famous phrase on
cinema, we can say that television substitutes for the world a world that is in
accordance with a false image of desire, which is no longer our desire, which
can't even be called desire any more and which is there merely to sell us
merchandise that was previously negotiated behind our backs. Taking into
account that transmission hides itself in the appearance, how are we to reveal
the obvious, that which is there as a constant dis-appearance? Maybe by
offering that which offers nothing; by transmitting a transmission, by entering
television in the realm of a projection.
1948. An `oniric leap' to another city at another time. Pier Paolo Pasolini
(1977) uses that expression ­ `oniric leap' ­ in his script San Paolo, to
describe his unexpected replacement of the German SS by the American
police. San Paolo is the never realized script of a transposition of Saint Paul's
life to a World War II context, where the apostle becomes a part of the resistance
after being a Vichy officer (at the end he is killed in the Memphis motel
where Martin Luther King was assassinated). 1947 is the year zero of the CIA,
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which took the relay baton after the war, like someone who occupies a house
because all its inhabitants are dead. There is a photograph of Bogotá where
a poster of Open City (Roma Ciudad Abierta) is visible amidst the ruins of
the city, destroyed by a despairing mob after the assassination of their leader
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. 1948 is the year zero for Colombia. In recent years the
CIA has been sued over and over to release the documents from an event that
took place now 56 years ago. But they keep using the Glomar response: `we
do not affirm or deny the existence of such documents.' The reason is
National Security: `the state of exception in which we live' (Agamben,
1998b). A Glomar image corresponds to our age: an image that doesn't
affirm or deny anything other than it being in force without significance: the
image of television.
1945.
Syberberg has pushed some remarks by Walter Benjamin very far: we
have to judge Hitler as a filmmaker ... You point out yourself that `the
great political mise-en-scne, the state propaganda turned tableaux
vivants, the first mass imprisonments' took charge of the cinematographic
dream, in conditions where the horror was penetrating it all,
where behind the image there was nothing else to be found but the
camps, and where the body had no bond other than its afflictions.
(Deleuze, 1998: 10)
Faced by this break between man and the world, Rossellini presents a fiction
in the setting of the devastation of a real war. No mise-en-scne, since the
scene is already there and there is no way around it. `Germany ­ Year Zero
was didactic, because I was making an effort ­ I am quite sure of this ­ to
understand events that had involved me personally, and that had overwhelmed
me' (Rossellini, 1985: xvi).
Berlin was to have been the site of one of Hitler's greatest mise-en-scnes.
`The old trade of the director (metteur-en-scne), you had said, will never
again be innocent' (Deleuze, 1998: 11). And now Berlin was an experimental
scratch film, randomly punctured by bombs, in the same way that acid eats
the celluloid in the militant East Coast school of material explorations on
Kodak film stock. Berlin's destiny was to have been a Universal Studio of
classic perfection. Hitler famously said, `just give me ten years and you will
not recognize your cities'; now it was material, not a stage, not a whole, but
a splinter, not an asserted site but `any place whatsoever', available to be
documented, undressed from its history, raw as stock. The theatre of war has
the amazing capacity of turning any site into a region. In the topography of
the contemporary city, what was to have grounded the eye in the monumental
montage of the Third Reich that never was, is not Hitler's planned
Führer's Palace (which was to be larger than the chancellery) but rather the
towering Soviet television antennae.
Change of scene. Paris, a deep focus city, a perfect narrative of shots and
counter shots, clean flashbacks and pantheons, correct exposures, a prewar
grammar of big avenues and monuments.
journal of visual culture 4(1)8
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1944. Paris was one step away from being Berlin. On 22 August Hitler
gave the order to destroy it, and someone disobeyed. I have heard a firsthand
account of German soldiers going around Paris with mines hidden in
executive-style suitcases, placing them in every monument, bridge and
museum. Suitcases that probably weren't too different from those of the
executives of Halliburton lobbying before the War on Iraq for a Baghdad year
zero where they could rebuild an oil industry in the likeness of the American
economy. If we are to believe Robert Fisk (2003), who brought up the comparison
in his article `Year Zero', someone did indeed try this: `Why? Who
sent the looters? Who sent the arsonists? Were they paid? Who wants to
destroy the identity of this country?'
1945. Back to the beginning of the phrase, in which we still find ourselves.
In Open City a new dimension of the future of the image is presented in the
most direct way, like a vision. Bergman, the Nazi SS officer, shows the grid
over the map of the city and explains how Rome, like other European cities,
is now divided into zones `which allows us to comb through large masses of
people scientifically, using the minimum effort'. He has to interrupt his
thought to command that they shut up a screaming professor being tortured
in the next room, and goes on to tell his interlocutor how `every afternoon I
take a long walk through the streets of Rome, but without stepping out of my
office'. Then he reveals the enigma by showing the street photographs of
which he receives copies every night: a succession of images, of couples
and people walking in the streets from where he can gather the faces of his
suspects. `I'm extremely fond of this type of photograph.'
The image has landed in the age of control.
The encyclopaedia of the world and the pedagogy of perception
collapsed and were replaced by a professional formation of the eye, a
world of the controllers and the controlled who communicate inside
the technical, nothing but the technical ... The technical­social eye
through which the spectator himself is invited to see, engendering
a perfection, fulfilled and immediate, instantly controllable and
controlled. (Deleuze, 1998: 19)
2004. Landing in America.
You read `land of the free' too many times as you walk into an airport in
America.
CAPSS II is about to be implemented in all the airports of America. The
second version of the Computer Assisted Passenger Screening System has
made its silent appearance. It is much scarier than Patriot Act II but it is passing
in front of everyone's eyes practically undetected. If you travel to
Colombia several times a year you are suspect. But the story won't be told
like that. Travelling to Colombia several times a year to see your mother is
called a `suspicious travel pattern', in the world of data. How can you refute
that? `CAPPS II will pull information from disparate sources, your credit and
financial information, public records information (like property taxes, or
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whether you vote), criminal records and intelligence information (ever been
to a political demonstration?). All of this information would be fed into a
database which would then perform a risk assessment on you' (Pierce, 2004).
The Kafkian experience is completed and perfected via the National Security
exception, the same procedure that doesn't affirm or deny anything:
Because you will never be able to see the information that was used to
construct the profile or risk assessment, if you're placed on a blacklist
or `no fly' list, there is effectively no way that I know of to get off such
a list. (Pierce, 2004)
If you want to understand what an image as a `surface without depth'
(Deleuze, 1998: 11) may be, you can consider that the most sophisticated
surveillance system in the world has come to a new level where the image
that this new vision machine produces is built, amongst other things, with
the numbers of an individual's credit card. If you are in the picture as a
consumer then you can be addressed, if not, then you are anonymous, you
can't be imaged, you are suspect, you don't fly; it is not about being in front
of the camera, it is about offering the coordinates by which you can be
mapped as an image. The conjunction of military equipment and the digital
world (or the production of the one by the other and vice versa) has come to
its logical conclusion: an image is a product of data. Humans are no longer
involved in the making of images (the world makes its images). The extreme
makeover that we have undergone (to invoke one of the most notable reality
TV shows of the moment) is not merely cosmetic; it is hidden in the fact
that our image is now built from digits, nothing that human fingers can
touch. Numbers are straight, why (y) is a crooked letter, I heard the other day
on the radio.
When surveillance becomes omnipresent and ever-more insistent
demands are made for an impossible degree of absolute security, the
perspective on reality turns upside-down, making every place a scene of
crime and every person a virtual victim or delinquent so that anonymity
becomes an offence against public security. (Frohne, 2002: 269)
State surveillance and reality TV are the two sides of the same coin. Think of
the pleasure that the Nazi SS officer, Bergman, in Open City gets from those
photographs that take people by surprise. As a culture today we seem to have
internalized his fondness, after having pushed away every adventure of perception
in the name of the professional eye. As Ursula Frohne (2002) puts it,
the menace of `you are being watched' has turned into the metaphysical
comfort of `you are not alone' so that the vacuum deepens to the point
where the other day I saw an image of a reality TV show where the participants
were examining each others' ears and mouths with specialized medical
equipment, desperately searching the last orifice of the image. This kind of
auscultation of the void has also led to the frantic search for all the TV shows
that were cancelled, what you weren't supposed to see. As Serge Daney had
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said, `nothing happens to humans anymore, things only happen to the image'
(Deleuze, 1998: 20). The anxiety of the disconnection is always increasing,
reality TV always finds that the virgin subject it desperately seeks has already
been produced by television; that not one of his/her gestures are pretelevisual,
even if he/she comes from the deepest palisade of the Garden
State. At the end television always gets the distressing shriek of feedback,
even when it places its subjects in the middle of the African wilderness.
From Here
Onto a sequence of stills of the concentration camps, taken from a television
network ­ Godard (1998) once wrote his notes: `Was it really indispensable
for a national network to print its copyright logo on these poor images of the
night?' (p. 160). The last still from the sequence is a close-up of the number
assigned to a prisoner ... nothing needs to be added.
There is an easy definition here for the technical eye of television: the technical
eye is the eye that doesn't see that logo. It is also the eye that can't see
the cut to commercials. Godard had also suggested a way to address this: in
an article published in Le Monde he suggested that the M6 network place six
commercial breaks in the broadcast of Breathless instead of the one they
were shyly asking him to authorize. He suggested that a commercial break,
selling insect repellent or laundry detergent, be inserted between the last
image of Jean Seberg and the word `end'.
No act of resistance, Agamben (1995) says, is possible without an act of
de-creation of the facts; otherwise the facts are too strong. How to resist the
embedded reporter of our days? If ever there was a possible straightforward
resistance to the suppression of facts during the darkest years of the Stalinist
Gulag, there is no possible resistance to the pixillated image that this
reporter brings to us from the desert. In the first case the meaningful image
is unavailable, in the second the image is totally available and absolutely
meaningless (think of the nature of the images that the current US administration
has been able to `spin', as they themselves like to call it). Behind
them, there is another image. If we postpone our task of resurfacing in this
vertigo we are fucked. `Beware of the dream of the other' ­ Deleuze (1998)
tells his students ­ `because if you are caught in the dream of the other you
are fucked' (p. 138). Television is the dream of the other in which we are
caught. If cinema became an organ of our body, television stands for atrophy.
What is the Messianic dimension of works like Histoire(s) du cinéma or The
Society of the Spectacle? The fact that they both show us that by stopping on
the image itself after running it over, we can subtract it from the spell of the
narrative power and expose it as an image, image of nothing, going nowhere.
Images of images brought to light again from the history/histories of cinema,
from the spectacle of the 20th century (Fox). Images having acquired the
capacity of `showing themselves as images' (Agamben, 1995). `The true
Messianic dimension is to throw again the image to its non-image which, as
Benjamin says is the refuge of all images' (Agamben, 1998b)
Bucher Television (an Address) 11
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Television (an Address)
Streaming is a new medium by which a moving image can be transmitted.
What takes place when the streaming camera focuses not on the world but learning
the lesson from Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma ­ it casts the image
of television itself? It doesn't matter what commentary is produced, the operation
is already taking place when a presence is felt in front of the screen ...
if only someone's breath ... live. A live transmission of live-ness, a breathless
image in a paradoxical back and forth. As in a Lutheran revolt, the hierarchy
of the image is symbolically overturned when the reception of one is highlighted
over that of the unified, anonymous millions. The image that is
already a thousand times folded is folded again; the un-addressable image is
addressed, given an address.
All images are sleeping, in the expectation of the moment of their awakening.
The fully realized nihilism of the spectacle of our age cannot be undone;
there is no unravelling its always already present presupposition. After the
prewar `encyclopaedia of the world' and the pedagogical adventure of neorealism
and the Nouvelle Vague (Deleuze, 1998: 15), the post-advertising
film has triumphed in the culture at large without the shadow of a doubt.
Films inherited the cliché that television inherited from the advertising clip
journal of visual culture 4(1)12
Figure 1 Television (an address), by François Bucher, 2004.
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(a frozen shred from the History of Cinema) and then the loop was looped,
as Daney (1989) would say. This leads him to repeat that in the depth of every
image there is always already an image. The sense of this diagnosis is not a
longing for a return to a pre-lapsarian connection to the substantial world of
early cinema, but rather a call to take the process further.
Thought is `defined by the very capacity to de-create the real'; memory is the
paradoxical power that makes `the unfulfilled fulfilled and the fulfilled unfulfilled'.
And here lies its potential for resistance; much in the same way
cinema `projects power and possibility towards where it is impossible by
definition, towards the past' (Agamben, 1998b: 84). And that is its Messianic
force. In his book on Saint Paul, Le Temps qui reste, Agamben (2000c) says
that Paul doesn't oppose the old Jewish law by introducing a new universal
principle to counter it. He does something else: he divides the division and
creates a supplement, a remainder, annulling by this subtle operation the
original division of the law. The law is considered here at its basic level,
precisely as something that divides. Paul checkmates the law of his time by
positing that if the law divides Jew from non-Jew he will offer another division
of that division line: the Jew by birth and the Jew by spirit. He thus creates
non-non Jews. He doesn't seek a substance or a new universal order to
replace the old one, but rather a separation of the separation. Every juridical
status is radically transformed or indefinitely suspended: after the calling a
slave remains a slave as if not a slave, a non-circumcised man remains noncircumcised
as if not non-circumcised.
The Christian tradition that Paul inaugurates sets forth the novel idea that the
Messiah has already come and the Messianic time is here; an image that is
here but cannot be seen (rather, a transformation that `happens in not
happening', something that takes place at the same time as it doesn't). In the
Messianic time everyone remains exactly where they were before their calling
but everything is different (the nothingness of revelation). How to invoke
this dimension? Not a left seeking to overthrow the images of the right in
favour of its own images, inside of the language game of information that
makes their discourses equivalent, but a stage on which those divisions
between right and left are called radically and incessantly into question. Not
a progressive group of liberal thinkers that fight in the name of a dispossessed
abstract viewer, for a better television (more moral, more interactive,
more progressive, more concerned with social issues) but the birth of a
viewer/reader that is done with the judgement of God and can face the image,
project himself onto it and see it in the now. Daney (in Deleuze, 1998) had
something definite to say about this: that television needed to be addressed
at the level of its perfection, not its imperfection. The perfection of television
has no supplement, no space for thought, no remainder. In transmitting the
transmission (which is equivalent to dividing the division between world and
image) there is a chance to create one: the image can be offered as such
`without allowing that which reveals itself to be veiled in the nothingness it
reveals, but bringing language itself to language' (Agamben, 2000b: 85).
Bucher Television (an Address) 13
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References
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Godard', Le Monde des Livres, 6 October.
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cinedebo.htm], consulted 15 February 2004.
Agamben, Giorgio (1998b) Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA:
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François Bucher is an artist from Cali, Colombia; he lives and works in
Berlin. Bucher's work investigates `the image' as it circulates in contemporary
culture. His reflection focuses on cinema and television, highlighting a
politics of the moving image. Bucher has initiated several projects and collaborations
that seek to open alternative spaces of thought, including Part
Two: A Network Event on World Conflicts, and Television (an address). His
essays and projects have been included in Saving the Image: Art After Film
(edited by Tanya Leighton and Pavel Büchler); Here and Elsewhere (OE,
Denmark); Revista Valdez; Files (MUSAC); and Artwurl, the online magazine
of PS 122 (August 2004) amongst other publications.
journal of visual culture 4(1)14
 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
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From 1999­2000 Bucher attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study
Program in New York. In 1999 he finished his MFA at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago where he received the MFA fellowship prize. He is a
recipient of the New York City Media Arts Grant of the Jerome Foundation,
2000. His critically acclaimed, award-winning work has been exhibited internationally
in group and solo shows and festivals. It is distributed by the Video
Data Bank and is included in the collections of Bard College, Princeton
University, University of Essex, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y
Leon (MUSAC) and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Bucher is a
founding co-editor of Revista Valdez presented at Centre d'Édition
Contemporaine, Geneva, 2003 and the Armory Show in 2004.
Address: c/o Naters/Lager, Mohrenstrasse 17, Berlin 10117, Germany. [email:
francois@location1.org]
Bucher Television (an Address) 15
 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
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