from him and inserted in heightened form into what he is regarding, “writes”
what he sees through the intermediary of someone else’s hand-the director’s-
which guides his metaphorical pen. Sitting in a ferment before these images he
doubtless does not know or care why they are the way they are, nor why he is
responding so intensely. Entranced, his digimodernist autism overpowers his
individuality just as, functionally, industrial pornography relies on anonymity:
the obvious pseudonyms of the performers, and equally of the consumers
whose experiences contributed to Laurence O’Toole’s book Pornocopia. On his
acknowledgments page O’Toole thanks, increasingly ridiculously, “‘Nicholas
White,’ ‘Jonathan Martin,’ ‘Kate,’ . . .’Burkman,’ ‘Shamenero,’. . . ‘bbyabo,’
‘dander,’ ‘knife,’ . . . ‘Chaotic Sojourner,’ ‘Thumper,’ ‘Ace:,’. . . ‘thunder,’
‘Sacks,’ ‘Demaret,’ ‘Tresman,’ ‘der Mouse,’ . . . ‘billp,’ ‘Gaetan,’ ‘Zippy,’
‘Zennor,’ ‘Imperator,’”
1
. They resemble, tellingly, the names of Internet UGC
contributors or characters in movies heavy with CGI (computer-generated
imagery). O’Toole himself may well be a punning pseudonym for all I know.
Paradoxically, industrial pornography hides actual people away, and the reverse
is also true: for Michael·Allen it is the “great ‘unsaid”’ of Hollywood, while
academics have long complained of the impossibility of getting funding for
research for it.
2
The number of adults prepared to admit they enjoy it is a
fraction of the true figure. Socially, no other form is so omnipresently occluded,
so popular and disreputable, so centrally marginalized.
1 Laurance O’Toole, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire, 2nd edition. London:
Serpent´s Tail, 1999, p. vii. Both well researched and naive, O’Toole’s book reflects the immence
difficulties intelligent discussion of pornography faces, caused, to a great extent, by the form´s
digimodernist shattering of conventional meta-textual categories.
2 Michael Allen, Contemporary US Cinema. Harlow: Pearson, 2003, p. 162.
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The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond ………………………………………………………… Alan Kirby
Alan Kirby, Digimodernism. How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern andReconfigure our Culture. New York, London: Continuum, 2009, pp 75–80
Things are Circulating
Gil Leung
In 1971 Roland Barthes stated in ‘From Work to Text’ that the text, as opposed
to the work, “is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where
languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the term).” Text here has a
primary status as productive, a perpetual site of practice where things move
around, circulate, before they ossify in works. Whereas “the work can be held
in the hand, the text is held in language, [it]
1
only exists in the movement of a
discourse.” Though there are many works that can be enjoyed, Barthes’ claim
is that this pleasure is only one of consumption, whereas the pleasure associated
with the text is productive, “a pleasure without separation.”
2
Such a prioritising
of discursive production over material consumption replicates and deviates
some forty years later, Chris Kraus proposing in her essay ‘Indelible Video’, that
“the most desired plateau is not the stability once implied by the object, but
perpetual flux. Far more creativity goes into the marketing of products than into
the products themselves. Likewise, the fact of the disappeared object is key to
conceptual art, a term that is oxymoronic: all art now, is conceptual, deriving its
value only through context, at a second remove.”
3
In this sense, the circulation
and marketing, the discourse around a work is of more, let’s say, pleasure, than
the object work, a disappearance that could stand to constitute production itself
as a new object of consumption.
I was recently told by someone that their work, meaning their practice, was so
enjoyable that they had no need for leisure time. Work being this pleasurable also
seemed to necessitate that they were badly paid and, in fact, that they sustained
their practice by working another job. Such a logic tends to switch the positions
of production and consumption, paying to work rather than working for pay.
Obviously, in this scenario, there are just two types of working going on, paid
and bought, except what is being bought is production time. But perhaps buying
something, especially one’s own labour, doesn’t necessarily mean consuming
it. And in addition perhaps we shouldn’t immediately relegate consumption to
a position of futility or weakness. For Barthes, the lack felt in the pleasure of
consumption was linked with a realisation that works read could not be re-written.
The pleasure of the text was of this writing, of discourse and the circulation of
ideas. For the double labouring prosumer, and I use this term as a way of talking
about a sort of consumption that uses purchasing power to aspire to a profession,
these pleasures are bought together. Not just through the purchasing of their
own practice as consummate professionals, but also the inverse of this scenario,
Things are Circulating ……………………………………………………………………………… Gil Leung
http://openfile.org.uk/archive/gil-leung-things-are-circulating/
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the production of their own consumption, as professional consumers. This
configuration is not just to do with an immaterial and debt based model for labour
but also because of a rights led and expert model of consuming. The disappearance
of the object that Kraus links to video, necessarily promotes the utilisation of
existing materials, not in order to re-write but just write; video’s form is not in
circulation, it is circulation. Hence practice becomes a service and consuming
becomes productive.
The issue then is less of text over work, producer over consumer, practice over
distribution, but of the intimate relation between the two, between present objects
and future actions. This is not an advocation of some logic of juxtaposition that
premises itself upon a certain recognisability of reference, an appropriative claim
or a contrary attempt at re-writing. Whether consumption and production
are combined or sequential, the important thing is that their relation maintains
a certain discursive tension. When separate positions converge within a single
practice, the site of discussion can become increasingly insular; like a conversation
with several possible selves and the existent materials available. As Gertrude Stein
addressed in her 1925 text ‘Composition as Explanation’
4
the task of making work
is compositional, one of distribution and temporality, where and when rather than
what a work is. It is the composition of elements, their presentation or presentness
that will constitute the work as any sort of textual circulating thing. In this sense,
the perpetual attempt to materialise the pleasure of text is less about how many
different formal versions of a work exist but rather the way in which its presence
might stave off ossification. Counter intuitively, it seems as if the circulation of
language occurs at the point where the work stands its own ground. Circulation is
not a result of keeping the work moving but because we move with and against it.
1 Rivette, Jacques. ‘Interview with Jacques Rivette’, April 1973. Conducted by Bernard Eisenschitz,
Jean-Andre Fieschi and Eduardo de Gregorio. Translated by Tom Milne. Originally appeared in La
Nouvelle Critique No. 63 (244), April 1973. Published in Jacques Rivette: Texts and Interviews (British
Film Institute, 1977).
“A film is always presented in a closed form: a certain number of reels which are screened in a certain
order, a beginning, an end. Within this, all these phenomena can occur of circulating meanings, functions
and forms; moreover, these phenomena can be incomplete, not finally determined once and for all. This
isn’t simply a matter of tinkering, of something mechanical constructed from the outside, but rather—
to refer back to what I was saying at the beginning—of something that has been ‘generated’ which seems
to entail biological factors. It isn’t a matter of making a film or a work that exhausts its coherence, that
closes in on itself; it must continue to function, and to create new meanings, directions and feelings…
Here one comes back to the Barthes definition. I refer to Barthes a good deal, but I find that he speaks
more lucidly than anyone else at the present time about this kind of problem… and he says: there is a
text from the moment one can say: things are circulating. To me it is evident that this potential in the
cinema is allied to the semblance of monumentality we were just talking about. What I mean is that on
the screen the film presents a certain number of events, objects, characters in quotes, which are closed
in on themselves, turned inward, exactly as a statue can be, presenting themselves without immediately
Things are Circulating ……………………………………………………………………………… Gil Leung
http://openfile.org.uk/archive/gil-leung-things-are-circulating/
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