Bell- Shooting Theory Anekaant Journal

Anekaant: A Journal of Polysemic Thought, No.2 (2014), 39-‐46.

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Shooting Theory Shannon Bell

‘Shooting Theory’ brings digital video technology and print textual theory

together through imaging philosophical/theoretical concepts. The idea is to

transpose Martin Heidegger’s claim regarding technology, ‘that you can’t think

technology technologically,’1 to the praxis of political thought. The overarching

argument is that you can’t think political theory simply within language.

Heidegger contended that the place from which to think technology is art. I

contend that the sites in which to think, produce, and enliven written theoretical

textual concepts are visual images and sound-scapes that can be brought forth

by digital video technology. ‘Shooting Theory,’ an on-going project since 2007,

combines the technic of digital videography with the skills of philosophical

thinking, allowing this artistic endeavor to bring forth a materiality of the concept.

This bringing of the philosophical to sites of performativity informs my work,

not simply with the intention of using high theory to legitimize these sites but also

to affect philosophical theory. The aim is to produce both new ways of doing

theory and new theory.

Thus far, I have produced ten film projects as conceptual theory: that is,

ten image-sound texts (print and film) in which I take a signed concept in

continental philosophy and shoot it.2 This essay presents two of these projects:

Facing the Elemental (Emmanuel Levinas) and The Sinuous Turn (Samuel

Mallin).

The intent in these two texts, as in all shooting theory image-sound texts,

is to take a thinker’s signature or key concepts and engage in a form of


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conceptual drift that transposes the concept from print media to digital image and

sound media.

Philosophy, say Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is the activity of

creating concepts3; and Deleuze and Guattari hold that a concept is always

signed by its philosopher-creator4. In his works on cinema, Cinema 1: The

Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image5, Deleuze shows that

philosophical concepts are like sounds, images and colors. ‘Shooting Theory,’

then, is the activity of imaging signed concepts. While the films can stand alone;

the written text that accompanies the films specifies the film techniques used and

the concepts engaged. It is two of these texts that are presented here.

Facing the Elemental: Emmanuel Levinas6 (May 2012)

‘Facing the Elemental’ was shot from the air, water, and earth of Alaska;

specifically around Aleyska Highway, Girdwood, Whittier and Prince William


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Sound. It was done for the seventh annual North American Levinas conference;

the conference theme was the elemental. I wanted to do site specific theory.

Air, water, wind, sky and sea Levinas identifies as anonymously

composing our enjoyment of ‘something’. While, of course, we dwell in the

elemental in our daily living grounded on earth; our ‘bathing in the element,’ in

which the finite human component is non-distinct from the infinite, is more

evident in less taken-for-granted media.

Levinas’, with Simone Weil’s concept of attention, was relayed to the

visage of mountains and glaciers from the elemental sites of air and sea. The aim

is similar to that achieved by Alphonso Lingis, in The Community of Those Who

Have Nothing in Common7, where he shot the face of the other from “the point of

departure”8 (T&I, 99) of the face being photographed. Only in my case the visage

is the elemental manifest as the side of mountains and glaciers, “the edge of the

wind” (T&I 131) on the surface of snow and on “the surface of the sea” (T&I 131).

The objective was to face the natural objects of mountains, glaciers, waters with

consciousness that I am a “condensation of earth, light, air and warmth” (Lingis,

The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, 122). Shooting in HD

the conceptual image picked up both the ‘background noise of existence’, as

Lingis is fond of saying, and beyond what the human eye can see.

The aim of the endeavor (work and attention) was to visually present that

which can’t be captured except via the trace which it leaves behind on the edge,

surface, side. The film is shot in color; the shades of grey, white and in-between

are the colors I was seeing as an existent moving through existence. As


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Levinasians know the elemental can only be seen as a fleeting side, surface,

edge always threatening to recede into the il y a, or the anonymous existence of

the there is.

This is a brief descriptive review of Levinas’ elemental9: 1) The elemental is the background medium [milieu] in which everything takes shape including ourselves: “one is steeped in it; I am always within the element.” (T&I 131) One exists “bathing in the elemental.” (T&I 132) Or as the American poet Robinson Jeffers puts it: “I wander in the air Being mostly gas and water and flow in the ocean.”10 2) The medium is non-possessable, “nobody’s”: earth, sea, light[.] (T&I 131) 3) “The medium has its own density.” (T&I 131) It is depth and content without form. 4) When one comes face to face with the elemental it is always as a side, surface, edge; that is, we touch the face of the elemental when we encounter “the surface of the sea and of the field, the edge of the wind.” (T&I 131) 5) The elemental refuses representation – it cannot be fixed as an object. “It is wind, earth, sea, sky, air…. it precedes the distinction between the finite and the infinite.” (T&I 132) Levinas refers to the elemental as “an opaque density without origin.” (T&I 158)

6) The elemental is our domicile; and what gives us a foothold in the elemental is labor. Levinas cites the action of cultivating a field, fishing, cutting wood. (T&I 132) He also indicates that “the aesthetic orientation that humans give to the whole of their world represents a return to enjoyment and to the elemental on a higher plane.” (T&I 140)

7) The elemental can never be revealed beyond its visage—side, surface, edge—because what the side–surface–edge conceals “is not a ‘something’ susceptible of being revealed, but an ever-new depth of absence, an existence without existent, the impersonal par excellence.” (T&I 142)

8) The depth of the element prolongs the [visage from multifold sites] till it is lost in the earth and in the heavens. “Nothing ends, nothing begins.” (T&I 131)

Like Edmund Husserl’s epoche and Jacques Lacan’s Real, imaging the

elemental is seductive and elusive. It seems, to me, that the only ethical way of


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approaching the elemental is through attention as it is understood by Levinas and

Simone Weil, while paying homage to Husserl’s understanding of attention.

Attention to both the objects that present themselves to our consciousness and

to consciousness itself is the core of the phenomenological method. What

Levinas and Weil add to the Husserlian understanding of attention is attention not

only as the process of consciousness but also attention as an ethical

phenomenon.

Michael Marder, “A Levinasian Ethics of Attention”11, contends that

Levinas “assigns to attention a crucial role coextensive with Husserl’s

intentionality; Levinas recognizes in attention a “subjective modification” of

intentionality: “being attentive [to] the call of the other. (T&I 178) Marder

maintains that the “Husserlian reduction is not radical enough for Levinas’s

philosophical taste, since it fails to recognize that this life comes into being

thanks to the appeal emanating from the Other, whose calling out to me forces

me to pay attention[.]”12

Attention for Levinas, read through Marder, is ‘the condition of possibility

for thought, consciousness itself and what he terms “the reduction to the

ethical”13—attention to the other is “the point of departure”— “Attention is

attention to something because it is attention to someone.” (T&I, 99) Levinas

does not, however, set forth any method of engaging in such attention. It is here

that Simone Weil’s concept of attention necessarily supplements Levinas’.

For Weil there are five conditions that define the process of attention: 1) “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer…. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”14 (G&G 117)


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2) “Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in [hu]man[s]” (G&G 117). 3) “all that I call ‘I’ has to be passive. Attention alone—that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears—is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.” (G&G 118) ‘Attention … is so full that the ‘I’ disappears (N 1:179) Or, as Levinas says: “in attention the I transcends itself.” (T&I 138). 4) “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object[.]”15 (WG 62) 5) “Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist.” (WG 92)

In ‘Facing the Elemental’ the process of attention (focusing on the

exteriority of what does not exist, emptying thoughts, bracketing or making the I

disappear) is turned to depth that cannot be approached except in specific

notations of the visage—side–surface–edge—of rock, water, air. The process of

attention is a labor of attention that gives us access to the “opaque density

without origin” as a trace on the—side–surface–edge—until again “it is lost in the

earth and in the heavens,” (T&I 131) just “as water gushing forth from rock

washes away that rock.” (T&I 127)

Of course, work, for Weil, is time entering into the body and for Levinas it

is the action that grounds us in our domicile, “the way of access to the fathomless

obscurity of matter.” (T&I 159)

Extreme attention focused on the other that cannot be conceived, that can

only be come up against, thoughts emptied, the “I” bracketed, camera pointed:

the meditative count was 10 breaths, shoot for 20-30 seconds, stop; look, wait or


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begin immediately again, 10 breaths, shoot for 20-30 seconds—done in the air,

on the water and on the ground for a total of 900 seconds or 15 minutes.

The Sinuous Turn: Samuel Mallin16 (August 2013)

Honouring the late Samuel Mallin’s phenomenological observation that the

sinuous line has been regularized by the straight line of modernity, the project of

shooting theory went to an ancient site of sinuousity—the remainder of Ancient

Minoan architecture and art 1650BCE-1450BCE, with some ruins dating back to

1900BCE. Four archeological sites were filmed: Gournia, Knossos, Malia and

Phaistos on the island of Crete.

The film technique used in ‘The Sinuous Turn’ is Deleuze’s liquid

perception17 in which images flow together. The shots are direct stationary,

meandering motion and swirling circuitousness; the shots unevenly range in

duration from 2 seconds to 33 seconds.


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According to Mallin the life-world is naturally, originally, sinuous. “This

original space and time”, the abode of “the irregularity and sinuosity of the earth

and the human body”, have been “progressively repressed” by “technologism”.18

(ALT 289)

The sinuous line has been covered over by the regularized line. “The

regular line is a sinuous line that has turned on itself and that seeks ever re-

currently to regularized every vestige of sinuosity that remains in it.” (351) “The

sinuous…turns, twists, tenses, pulses, stretches, undulates and so on in

response to its diverse influences or environments and the more it is sinuous the

more it comprehends with its open texturedness.” (ALT 329)

The sinuous line, says Mallin, is “flexuously adaptive to the multi-

dimensionality of situations” (ALT 361). The sinuous body moves in chiasmic

relation with the outside world. “Our body is of the same ‘stuff’ or ‘flesh’ as things

with the result that the lines in each bend into one another simultaneously.” (ALT

259) Mallin specifically notes the way the body moves in chiasmic relation

(simultaneously holding and being held, inside and outside flowing) in the famous

bull-leaper image on the Athletes’ Vase and in one’s movement induced by the

Grand Staircase of Knossos. The bull-leaper’s “hold on the bull is held by the

bull’s own motion [.]” (ALT 135) When Mallin was at Knossos he repeatedly

walked the grand staircase and/or the grand staircase walked him: his body took

on “the famous Minoan bowed back stance so often seen in the sculptures and

paintings, leaning forward on the balls of the foot and with arched back.” (ALT

141)


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Mallin describes this sinuous walk: “each step has a very short rise, is

canted downward and is quite long. This promotes a flowing sinuous walk.” (ALT

140) “I find that if I let the stairs guide me, I go up or down on my toes with

arched back! … The shape of the stairs (long step, low drop and downward cant),

and the texture and transparency of their alabaster, have much to do with

motivating this motion and stance.” (ALT 141)

The Minoan archeological sites have become even more regularized since

Mallin interacted with them, particularly Knossos where entrance to the Grand

Staircase is blocked. It is noted on the Mionancrete website that at “Knossos

walkways of scaffolding scar the Palace and so much of Knossos has been

roped off, preventing access to visitors.”19

While the sinuous line is almost completely concealed at Knossos even to

the extent of squaring off the steps of the Grand Staircase, there are remnants of

it in the Theatre Area where the long steps retain the original short rise and

downward cant promoting a flowing sinuous walk. The grand staircase steps of

Phaistos and the Theatre Area steps complement and play off one another, each

retaining the sinuosity of movement experienced by Mallin.

Not surprisingly the most sinuous site is the one least reconstructed—

Gournia. Here the motor body can move with the swirling Minoan lines of the two

peripheral paved streets that cross and connect with smaller paths winding and

turning up the hill among the labyrinth of wall ruins. The Minoan flow is most

evident in moving about in Gournia and Malia (where there is not as significant a

reconstruction as in Phaistos and Knossos); the film has flowing movement


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images of both Gournia and Malia. The Minoan swirl and flow is evident in the

bird’s eye view images taken from Phaistos of the ruins below.

Mallin observes in the pottery (S-Swirl Jug shown in the film) the swirl and

movement of existence arising out of the deep; he says we can “sense the swirl

as an arising of the dark itself.” (ALT 169) Pottery was “the highest form of art for

the Middle Minoans” (ALT 143); for Mallin, the phenomenologist, the line

revealed in non-literary texts such as artwork—Minoan pottery jugs and

frescos—discloses ways of thinking and being that are occluded by the texts

written about them. Mallin suggests: “My method of anchoring my thought in an

artwork can save me, in spite of myself, from being completely lost in textuality.”

(ALT 231)

Experiencing and shooting the S-Swirl Jug, the Marine Style Octopus Jug

and the Blue Dolphin Fresco at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, in a highly

regularized environment, the Minoan confluence of depth and motion, the dark

and the emergent swirling was visibly present in the S-Swirl Jug. In Mallin’s

image-words: “The Minoan dark can be …sensed in all these pots … The black

is inseparably experienced in the swirling red and white contours of their midsts;

for the dark is felt phenomenologically to ‘line the insides’ of its brighter

patterns…It can be seen especially well in the s-swirls, flashing lozenges and

black-flowers how the carefully fashioned outermost edge of the brushwork,

although quick and sharp, is modulated by the black’s ownmost darkly absorbing

currents and bulging weights.” (ALT 170) The S-Swirl Jug has an overall bird-like

shape that has a feel of vessel-in-flight.


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The Marine Style Octopus Jug lets the fluidity of the sea creature move on

the curved surfaces of the jug, just as the Blue Dolphin Fresco from Knossos

shows the dolphins leaping, winding and gliding amongst smaller fish. The Bull-

leaper Fresco, and the depiction of bull-leaping on The Athlete’s Vase,

encapsulates the sinuosity of body, movement, and line visible in the Procession

Fresco (a replica greets the visitor at Knossos), in the architecture of the grand

staircases, in the S-Swirl Jug’s unconcealed sense of the deep, in the flowing of

the octopus and dolphins. One can see even in the 21st century cheap mass

produced regularized bull-leaping replica of the fresco the simultaneously

holding/held sinuosity of ancient Minoan existence: “the bull’s motions, the toss

of its head and arch of its body, are not manipulated by, used up or challenged,

but lay out the lines that the leaper seeks to take up. His hold on the bull is held


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by the bull’s own motion and that is what makes the [leaper’s] elegant twist be a

unique line of turning and bending.” (ALT 135)

‘Shooting Theory’ will result in a scalar book with film links and in a print

book. In addition to the ‘Shooting Theory’ project, I mesh digital culture with

political thought at all levels of undergraduate and graduate teaching. At the

undergraduate level, for example, I produce a weekly two-minute film that

accompanies the lectures; undergraduate and graduate students produce

concept films to accompany their written papers. Both in my own research and in

my teaching, the aim is to change how we practice theoretical engagement, how

we think philosophically. Mallin’s “method of anchoring … thought in …artwork,”

as a strategy to prevent “being completely lost in textuality” (ALT 231) is taken

further to producing art as theory and theory as art.

‘Shooting Theory’ and how I teach add what I maintain are necessary

dimensions to theoretical thinking at this point in time: the point at which the

dominant medium in the western world, the Web, has changed from a publishing

medium to a communication medium to a user-generated production medium.

1 Martin Heidegger, "Question Concerning Technology" " in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated and edited by William Lovitt (Harper and Row; New York & London 1977), 35. The quotation reads: “Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology, and on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.” Arthur Kroker stresses: “Make no mistake. Heidegger does not ‘think’ technology within its own terms. Quite the contrary. Repeatedly he insists that technology can not be understood


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technologically [...]" Arthur Kroker, The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University f Toronto Press, 2004), 45. 2 2007 Martin Heidegger – Dynamic Stillness, 40 days and nights of sunrise and sunset, Judean Desert 2008 Edmund Husserl – Epoché Reflections and Blind Residuum Caves, Judean Desert, Negev, Golan, and Galilee https://vimeo.com/21341729 2009 George Bataille and Simone Weil – Beautiful Waste: Dead Sea Sinkholes, Dead Sea, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDtr_8n54Cg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrFfwa483A4 2009 Paul Virilio – ‘Camel Vision Machine’ (Wadi Ram-‐ Jordian Desert) 2010 Gilles Deleuze – Shooting the Blur: the Syrian state, the Israeli state, the British state, the Jordanian state, Golan, North shore of the Dead Sea, Abu Dis, Jerusalem, Gilo/ Beit Jala https://vimeo.com/24035994 2011 Jacques Lacan and Paul Virilio-‐‘Imaging Time and the Real’ 2012 Emmanuel Levinas – Shooting the Elemental, Aleyska and Seward Highways, Girdwood, Whittier and Prince William Sound\ Lake George Valley, Lake George Glacier,Colony Glacier, Whiteout Glacier and Surprise Glacier, Alaska https://vimeo.com/42109865 2012 Walter Benjamin – Flâneuring Ancient Arcade Ruins, Israel/Palestine. https://vimeo.com/46174007 2013 Martin Heidegger – Flashes of Perception -‐ Pangnirtung, Cumberland Sound, Saniru in Baffin Island, Eastern Arctic https://vimeo.com/71183979 2013 Samuel Mallin – The Sinuous Turn, Ancient Minoan lines -‐ Gournia, Knosos, Malia, Phaestos in Crete https://vimeo.com/77701915 3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy , trans Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 5. 4 Ibid, pp.7-8. 5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,1986) and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,1989). 6 I would like to thank Raan Matalon for his research on this project and for the time he has given to reading and discussing the elemental and attention with me. As always, I wish to thank Gad Horowitz for his theoretical and editorial assistance and for his bringing to my attention the work of the poet Robinson Jeffers and the photographer Morley Baer who consistently come face-to-visage with the elemental in their words and images. 7 Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). 8 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh University Press: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 9 Developed through reading both Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity and John Sallis, “Levinas and the Elemental,” Research in Phenomenology, N. 28, 1998, pp. 152-159. 10 Robinson Jeffers, Stones of the Sur, photographs by Morley Baer, edited. and introduced by James Karman (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2001). 11 Michael Marder, “A Levinasian Ethics of Attention,” Phainomenon, N. 18-19, Lisboa, pp. 27-40. 12 Ibid., 27. 13 Ibid., 30. 14 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 15 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins Perennial Classics Publishers, 2001). 16 ‘The Sinuous Turn’ was filmed by me and Gad Horowitz; the theoretical text presented here is a result of our collaborative reading of and dialoguing about Samuel Mallin’s book Art Line Thought (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996. 17 Liquid perception is the second defining aspect of the perception image, images flow together in what Deleuze identifies as liquid perception. ‘[W]ater is the most perfect environment in which movement can be extracted from the thing moved, or mobility from movement itself.’ (Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The


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Movement-Image, 77). 18 All quotations are from Samuel B. Mallin, Art Line Thought (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996. 19 http://minoancrete.com, accessed March 7, 2014.

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