My Life Flashed Before My Eyes (Email 4//Campany1]

Hi Everyone,

It's a cliché phrase, "My life flashed before my eyes," one that we're all familiar  with as an instant highlight replay reel that apparently plays at moments of death or near death. But if we place it next to Pier Paolo Pasolini's conjecture about montage and death, I think that it starts to mean something else, something more. This chapter of The Cinematic also really highlighted the other texts for the CATTt and for the semester, most particularly Ulmers' Internet Invention and Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ulmer's Mystory construction is, I think, an apt example of a montage. It reiterates patterns, even as it continuously presents us with something different. Moreover, I remember one week when Ulmer stated that our Mystories wouldn't ever be complete until we died (meaning, of course, that if no one was there to complete them, they would essentially never be complete). This, of course, is for the same reason that Pasolini says that "an honest man may at seventy commit a crime ... (that) modifies all his past actions ... so long as I'm not dead, no one will be able to guarantee he truly knows me" (Pasolini 86). The present will always filter out the past, which means that the past is in constant flux mode always, until our last breath. Oddly, this is a depressing – a lonely – notion, that no one, not even I, will ever know who I am, except maybe until that last moment before I die (if I'm even conscious enough to watch it). Though, at that point, I become a "was" and not an "am," essentially insuring that no one will ever know who I [present tense] am. Our timeline's convoluted and tangled Persistent Presentness, simultaneous as it is, is just as oddly comforting: "It's not over until it's over," as another cliché goes.

I want to think about the importance of time to our current project. What does time do to, how does time affect, Electracy? To think about this, we must first go back an excerpt to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's piece (page 83). He says that we have to first understand that "the knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as of the pen," before we can realize that a series of photographs can be as potent as a weapon or as tender as a poem (83). These days, I think that his position about the camera/pen equilibrium/dichotomy is very valid. Of course, our writing these days is less through a pen than through a keyboard (this email is a case-in-point), but for the moment, I will allow myself to think that the pen is any machine that allows for a written language to be transcribed or translated for later use (such as a computer, or a phone). It is quite fascinating to find that, currently, one machine that allows us to write is also the one that allows us to take images (the phone/tablet). It is just as common to take a picture of a product, video tape a recipe, take a picture of a written recipe, than it is to write it down. 

But, with Electracy, we're not trying to take the rules of writing and change them to fit an Electracal platform. We're trying to make our own instructions for Electracy. I think this is where Lacan's and Pasolini's input about the montage is the strongest. It's difficult to find montage in writing (that's not saying that it doesn't exist in some forms, perhaps something Joyce-ian). But it's strong in visual language. A camera can make a montage quite easily, especially with the use of apps that allow for montages to be constructed on the spot. For instance, I have an app called PicCollage that allows a person to pick random (if they want) images from their gallery and mesh them together. This kind of surrealism enables a situation where a "single picture loses its separate identity and becomes a part of the assembly, it becomes a structural element of the related whole which is the thing itself" (Moholy-Nagy 83). This brick-laying, rather than tent-unfolding, to try and ironically use paradoxically-static architectural terms, is what gives movement to a piece, to a life.  

How can we think about montage and time in terms of Electracy; how does Electracy provide that foundation for montage? I think the important thing to note is that montage is a way that supersedes the idea of linear time, in a way. If a single picture loses its singular identity when put in a sequence, although that perhaps is not always a montage, that's a similar position to Pasolini's, where he says that a life is made up of these images that are "non-symbolic signs" when looked at from the present tense -- until they are put in a montage, at which point they become the past. This simultaneous idea of present and past is confusing. But at the same time, it's not, because we are living with it all the time, and because time is never linear.

I will bring into play my idea of drafts again. Especially with Gmail, whenever one saves a draft, a completely different link is provided. What that means is that there exists, simultaneously, a sequence of urls that denote different changes that one has made to their email messages. These are past drafts, yet they exist at the same time always. Now, I don't know if they recycle these urls (probably, they do), but for the time that they exist, they are singular and individual in their incompleteness, and they aren't, because they lose their uniqueness if put next to the rest of the urls. 

Therefore, when we say or think, since that experience (if it's real) is a cliché because of film, and it is usually only in film when we really hear people saying that (or having the time afterwards to say that), about our life flashing before our eyes, it immediately becomes a finished work, a singular work made up of many other tiny singular works that make us a "past." It is an anthology of things that have become our canon. But what can we do with this construction in the mean time. You know... while we're still alive?

These different ideas about montage and time are definitely worth looking into further, and I am planning to do so in a blog.

Again, I apologize if I made no sense at all. 

See you soon,

Asmaa

----------------------------------------------------------Response

Of course you made (no) sense!  Or rather, you are a HEUretic.  We are inventing, and part of the interest of the email as back-channel is what each one selects and puts forward as worthy of attention.  Pasolini is hugely interesting in his own right, and I suppose the downside of a collection is that most of the individual pieces leads away to wonderful riches.  On the positive side as I noted is the accumulation expressing the propensity of the argument (regarding cinematics in this case), from which we may derive some confidence about the terms of our experiment.

    Pasolini is one of the  best representatives in the collection of the other major scene of instruction for electracy, along with training analysis in Psychoanalysis.  Pasolini was an auteur, as you no doubt are aware, and original even in that select group (thinking of the French New Wave, who invented the idea, but also Italian Neorealism).  He was a major poet to begin with, and also a significant theorist of semiotics, in addition to being an important filmmaker.  The argument touched on in our collection is worth extracting for further attention, as you have done. Pasolini's term was the "image-sign," (im-sign), by which he  meant that  the  world is already coded, such that photography (film) "writes with the world." You will recognize here my point about popular culture being to electracy what native Greek (and its culture) was to literacy.  The "code" supposedly missing from photography (according to Barthes, for example) is actually there, as ideology (as Barthes himself showed in his mythology). 
   What auteurs do, Pasoline said, is develop a particular vocabulary specific to them, which turns out to be close to mystory.  A commonplace of discussions contrasting word and image is such points as that "dog" as concept is a transcendent abstraction, but a picture of a dog has to be particular:  it must be a spaniel, a terrier... and some dogs are doggier than others (a concept is distributed from center to margin, with German Shepherds near the center and Pekinese on the margin).  Auteurs replace both universals and generic particulars with singular elements of their personal circumstance. Lacan would call this peculiarity "sinthome" (archaic symptom), to say that it is irreducible, and ultimately must be embraced as the core nonsense of being.