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Beyond breadth

2023; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 13; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/728426

2575-1433

Patrick Laviolette,

Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumBeyond breadth The tyranny of empty noise Comment on Schneider, Arnd. 2021. Expanded visions: A new anthropology of the moving image. Milton Park, Oxon and New York: Routledge.Patrick LaviolettePatrick LavioletteMasaryk University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreI don't wanna rant and rave, yeah alright, at all, fair enough innit …—Blur 1993, "Me, White Noise"1Mary Larson begins a short piece in The Oral History Review, with the following: "Over the last few years there has been an explosion in the amount of oral history material made available to the public through nonprint media" (1998: 129). Such a statement, part of a special issue on heuristic methods for educational research, still holds true a quarter of century later. In stumbling upon it, while reading Arnd Schneider's monograph, I was thrown into a sort of trance. Loads of questions filled my wandering mind as I tried to get through the rich visual and textual narrative of the book. In terms of the title, Expanded visions, one might first wonder in which ways does he intend vision to expand politically? A quick look at the table of contents gives plenty of clues to the initiate. Amateurs and professionals of the visual might immediately flip through the pages to discover the vast array of stunning illustrations. They will make out, perhaps more quickly, which political stance he has seized upon for this volume.Before engaging more carefully with the textual details, my mind jumped into Poirot, Holmes, or, maybe more accurately—Gaston Lagaffe mode. Was the book intended as a somewhat belated riposte to the legacy of George Bush Sr.'s million points of light? In attempting to rip it apart, would it be tripping the sight fantastic for a "thinginess" that reaches beyond vision? Was the allegorical lesson as straightforward as to instill emphatic feelings with wavelengths, which bounce into and off our weary sensorial receptors? Is Schneider, one might wonder, actually more interested in moving away from the anthropology of art, into some as yet poorly explored terrain of paranormal perception? Is he stretching to a multi-sided take on the ocular, within wider contexts for creative protest—reacting against a world going mad for the ether of virtual emptiness and pure white noise?Expanding the decolonialPutting aside such knee-jerk reactions, I continued excavating. Schneider sets off with many visual and intellectual sources. In the introduction, he commits to situating the rationale for the book mainly with Gene Youngblood, although numerous other anchoring points follow. For sure, our author is an anthropologist interested in disciplinary biographies, with an homage to the German artist Jürgen Schneyder as the "ancestor" to whom he dedicates the book; he also reproduces Schneyder's work entitled Filmtear (1971) in the acknowledgments. South Korean Yongseok Oh's work Siamese Montage (2008), the cover image, gives the volume a face within a masked set of eyes, which look back at the reader.2 I'd even hazard to say it's also a portal for looking into the volume's inner workings. The book's first figure is from a 2009 image by Parisian artist Emmanuel Lefrant. It addresses distorted/decaying celluloid representations of bodies under tension. Schneider uses these to bring into the second chapter other experimental video and film material. His artist/ethnographers there are Juan Downey, Sharon Lockhart, and Michael Oppitz.Chapter 7 offers a case study of the desert-scapes of Berlin-based artist Cyrill Lachauer. The idea there is to explore the phenomenon of film tourism. That is, to map out the links between people traveling to movie sets which have always been replications—empty to begin with—devoid of any "realness." In the author's own words: "these film sets were never meant to produce anything else than fiction; unlike the ghost cities they were fake all along" (p. 129). In entering into a discussion about authenticity, his analysis is indeed cutting edge. It anticipates, for example, a whole new level of Hollywood's genre of introspective, self-referential movie-making. It would thus be interesting to know what Schneider makes of the sci-fi thriller Nope (Peele 2022), the location for which is a film set ranch in Southern California.What I feel Schneider is ultimately getting at with these stratagems, at least in structural terms, is to tap into two metathemes: the invisible and the imagination. He tells us how he wishes to turn ruination theories into a not-so-morbid view for the future, without succumbing to a banal politics of hope. So there is quite a bit of peeking behind the scenes when thinking about this project. Stages, not just screening rooms, appear to scatter those rays of light that remain invisible to our human eyes. If this seems to resonate with Donna Haraway's intellectual projects, such as her many-tiered Anthropos-scenes, e.g., Staying with the trouble (2016), then the unsaid has been heard. In drawing a covert analogy between trouble and unseen things, some will be led to understand that the seesaw movement between our gazes and the representations we create have both constructive and disruptive abilities—nice for thinking with, but better for feeling through. In these terms, the paradoxes raised in Expanded visions are "depth" games. They are intended to breathe new life into a subdiscipline that some believe is too elitist and not particularly well versed enough to deal with real-world problems.In these terms, Schneider makes clear that his ambition is to arrive at a place where oppression and repression are no longer concealed. The sensuous materiality of film is his medium. It is a medium that he uses to exert critical force against what some have labeled the rather "paternalistic" view of someone like Bruno Latour in his Pandora's hope (1999). So maybe in this book the author is pointing us towards some double-trouble orbital?Now I'm highly sympathetic with these overall intentions. In my own recent thinking on the relationship between hitchhiking and Memento Mori (as a moving representation of experienced and reproduced fractional "images"), I'm compelled by the general argument of revisiting Jean Baudrillard's simulacrum and hyperreal formulations.3 Even though they are far from passé as concepts, Schneider's intention to unpack them is overdue, especially in an age of magnified virtual reality, when some anthropologists scoff at postmodernism's contributions.Other key anthropological debates inform Schneider's work. Namely, the reflexive poetic and political discussions over representation that took place in the 1980s. And, more implicitly, multisited ethnography. These are reaching various points and vantages of maturity, when it is time to reevaluate them—to weigh up their pros and cons in order to decide what still makes sense, as we soon reach the tertiary stage of the twenty-first century.Voicing sculpture to silence the apoliticalRegarding his filmic bibliography, Schneider starts by demonstrating an allegiance to Andrey Tarkovsky, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein. These are exceptionally appropriate for our television generation. Some may feel, however, that such a perspective is nevertheless too grounded in a visual epistemology that reflects the global North. Argentina, though, does serve as his main ontological case study. How non-Western or non-Northern Argentinian cinema is, is difficult for me to say. My point is not to undermine the decolonial agenda, quite the opposite. Indeed, the eighth chapter of Expended visions is entirely on this issue and generally the justification put forward for the book forms along these lines.The project equally grounds itself in opening up a third space between art and anthropology, between cognitive science and audiovisual/film research. Using "consilience" as the avant-garde entry point is a real step forward. It is most apt since it generates a cognitive framework for considering the bonds between neuroscience and film studies—providing the social glue, so to say. What some readers might miss, however, is an explicit reflection back to Homi Bhabha's (1994) influence on the anthropological theories of hybrid formulations. One cannot cite everyone, obviously. Gregory Bateson is there in full view, but others such as John Law and Annemarie Mol (2002), or Marilyn Strathern (2000), are hidden figures—kept quiet behind silk canvases.Personally, I'm most drawn to the fifth chapter, when silencio as an ethnographic reality is brought into the equation. I wouldn't have wasted the opportunity to drop in a more explicit Kierkegaardian sentiment here, however. Not as a means of obfuscation, but to build up towards the aforementioned eighth chapter, when Schneider asks us "can film restitute?" Since it is here, in chapter five, that he develops a fascinating conceptual melee on silence, we glimpse directly at how the terrain of colonialism relates to the "performativity" of public monuments, as Jeffrey Alexander might say (2020). Relying on the 1953 film by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die), Schneider outlines a framework whereby the porousness of monuments gives them lives and afterlives. In doing so, he also appears to be providing us with the fabric for understanding the social lives of trends.Now, death, rebirth, and reincarnation are maybe how Johannes de Silentio would have envisaged such an interpretation. Schneider is well acquainted with radical art and philosophical discourses. During his travels around Aotearoa/New Zealand he may even have discovered some of the fascinating work by Kiwi pop artist Billy Apple (1935–2021), whose vast repertoire of projects are a brilliant addition to this genre. Apple's protest installation in March 2009 over Wellington City Council's overzealous treatment of a Henry Moore sculpture in a public park was Newtonian as well as "Newtownian" in its simplicity. As an attack on the mirages of curatorial power, it both glossed over hierarchical governance and shimmered with referential meaning (see Apple 2009). I'd like to add my own voice to the mix by complementing these approaches with a duo-ethnographic example involving two public monuments. This is a pairing of static yet permeable informants, which I'd suggest mirror each other in several ways. Some people might even see them as doppelgangers to a different colonial past, as it were.In 2019, Chris Tilley edited a compilation of essays entitled London's urban landscape. His main chapter in this anthology is about Holland Park, located a little more than a stone's throw from his metropolitan "home away from home." At least it was for many years, since in this extended essay there is a sense that he's moving away from Notting Hill, at least in order to deconstruct some of its social flaws. Indeed, in his astute critique of corporate neoliberalism, we even glimpse some of his disgust at the veneer of nature that Holland Park conveys under the guise of cosmopolitan calm and serenity. At any rate, that's how I read what appears to be one of Tilley's most autobiographical texts. Now there's much to admire both in the prose of the piece, and in the merging of interview data with socio-material analysis and fieldwork photographs. Among the latter, my favorite is the staged selfie of Tilley "interviewing" a man of roughly the same height.4 He's of a rather larger build and appears to be a park groundsman. It is a painted bronze statue called Walking Man (1998) and is the work of artist Sean Henry. The symmetry in the selfie is more to do with the similarities between Henry and Tilley—artist/ethnographer—than between author/interrogator and subject, though they share certain features. As art historians have noted, flipping these categories around lies behind such thought processes. Whether we are conscious of this or not, and whether we choose to acknowledge or ignore it, such inversions become matters for further discussion (Filipová 2023).You'd be forgiven, perhaps, for thinking the originator of this public installation was J. Seward Johnson II, who has another polychromatic sculpture simply called Taxi along the Thames Embankment in the City of London. Here we find a suited businessman hailing a cab, his arm waiving in the air with a look of exasperation on his face. And this is where I want to shift gears in order to make an opportunistic connection to my own informant—Augustin Philippe Simon. Born in 1999 to artist Gigi Warny and engineer Paul Simon (a year after Henry's Walking Man appeared in Holland Park), Augustin is also hailing cars. As a student autostoppeur he walks, hikes, and catches lifts. He has been traveling around a fairly large catchment area of Belgium's multicultural Brabant province for nearly a quarter of a century now. As an experienced "tramper," he has had some accidents; some might even say some near-death experiences. Yet he is somehow still standing by the roadside, being watched over by shoppers and commuters, as well as students, and perhaps even some guardian angels. I'd guess he's watched over with less vigilance than his counterpart in Britain's sprawling urban capital, given that one difference between them is their levels of maintenance. We can certainly detect wear and tear on both. Augustin, however, seems to have more serious war wounds. And the more playful tricks done to test his journeying patience mean that he proudly reveals his tags and tattoos (Laviolette 2020, 2022). These are stories for another time, retold repeatedly in the modest style of shy student whispers.Body biogs, shrinkflation, and degendered visionariesAs Schneider illustrates, giving such voice to the material is not purely symbolic. It returns us to ideologies of cosmopolitan orders and globalscapes (viz. Appadurai 1996). And to Mary Larson's points noted at the start. That is, we are brought to the zigzagging biographical elements of moving images, to how they teach us new things. A question she could raise from an initial read of Expanded visions might be to enquire into the similarities and differences that exist with "Project Jukebox." This is one of the pedagogical initiatives that she describes, run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.5 Its significance is to reveal the historiographical facets of exchange when visually and acoustically recording the stories of First Nation and non-First Nation communities. Providing a more contemporary take on these matters, a debate in the very pages of Hau recently took place. In it, Jesse Shipley aired the idea that such representations "are modes of action that do not denote place or truth but are markers of circulation and of lifestyle" (2022: 933–34). Having maybe crossed ways in a dark night beforehand, Shipley and Schneider are certainly closely aligned in their intentions.In sum, Expanded visions does articulate these layered complexities. In my opinion, Schneider does so without falling down the "manhole" of overtly spoon-feeding us with endless sources. One could nonetheless always push such gender dynamics a bit more, to ask if this form of subtlety would be in keeping with (and/or approved by) the type of feminist critique that Rebecca Solnit (2014) has called for in some of her current biographical narratives. So, in playing her kind of devil's advocate for a moment, I'd say that Schneider has done himself somewhat of a disservice in jumping on the decolonial bandwagon—at least insofar as not directly highlighting the ways in which another significant contribution of his book is to help visual anthropology de-gender itself.It would be harsh to intimate that some readers might find Expanded visions's decolonial agenda to be mostly symbolic. In its considerations for moving beyond an old-school model of visual anthropology, one that will eventually pay attention to current fashions in AI-driven simulated moving images, the reflections backwards are certainly kaleidoscopic. Yet if our mission in these collective responses is to round off a 360-degree perspective, or even to imagine some three-dimensional one, then the crux of my critique has to do with uncovering a certain "male bias." It's unfair to do so in relation to the work of someone who has clearly made an effort to cite and engage with the research of many shining women in the field. But since Susan Sontag (1969) reminded us over half a century ago that silencing takes on many strange forms, I cannot resist wondering: what can her message teach us now? Who else is taking it on board in the current academic climate, when visual anthropology is becoming an expensive business? If her point was simply to give voice, to ontologically wake up, to un-silence—then we should all remember that hearing this as clearly as possible is crucial.Notes1. The song "Me White Noise" is from Blur's album Think Tank. Written by Alex James, Damon Albarn, Dave Rowntree, Phil Daniels. EMI.2. Other works by Yongseok Oh are discussed in some detail in the introduction (pp. 12–15).3. For instance, regarding symbolic and physical images of death, see Baudrillard (1993) 2016 and Favero 2022.4. See Figure 9.7 in Tilley 2019: 358.5. Oddly enough, one of the instigators might even have some kinship ties with our author (Larson 1998: 133–34).ReferencesAlexander, Jeffrey C. 2020. "The performativity of objects." Sociologisk Forskning 57 (3–4): 381–409.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarAppadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarApple, Billy. 2009. "Less is Moore." One Day Sculpture. https://www.situations.org.uk/projects/one-day-sculpture/billy-apple-less-is-moore/.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarBaudrillard, Jean. (1993) 2016. Symbolic exchange and death. London: Sage.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarBhabha, Homi. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFavero, Paolo S. H. 2022. "It begins and ends with an image." Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 31 (1): 72–87.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFilipová, Marta. 2023. 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In London's urban landscape: Another way of telling, edited by Christopher Tilley, 353–402. London: UCL Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarPatrick Laviolette has coedited Berghahn's open access periodical, the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (AJEC), since 2019. From 2015 to 2019 he was coeditor of EASA's official journal, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (SA/AS). His research interests include the history of anthropology as well as embodied landscapes, with projects addressing creativity, imagination, and the senses from material and visual culture perspectives. Publications include: The landscaping of metaphor and cultural identity (Peter Lang, 2011), Things in culture—Culture in things (University of Tartu Press, 2013), Extreme landscapes of leisure (Routledge, 2016), Repair, brokenness and breakthrough (Berghahn, 2019), and Hitchhiking: Cultural inroads (Palgrave, 2020).Patrick Laviolette[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 13, Number 3Winter 2023 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/728426 PermissionsRequest permissions © 2023 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.