(mis)behavior of images

THE (MIS) BEHAVIOR OF IMAGES:
CONTROL, SPECTATORSHIP AND THE CINEMA OF EISENSTEIN
by
David Bychkov
EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
SAAS FEE, WALLIS, SWITZERLAND
August 1, 2004

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction
Chapter 1: Controlling Media/Controlling Spectators
1.1 Unintended Affects and Control of the Spectator Gaze
1.2 Recording Change: Images of Achievement
1.3 A First Consideration of Eisenstein’s Metaphysics
1.4 Violence and Images
Chapter 2: Acting Out Images
2.1 Spectator DNA
2.2 Eisenstein’s Ideal Spectator
2.3 Identification
2.4 The “Training” of the Senses
2.5 Imagining, Fantasy and Escape
2.6 Availability to Truth
Chapter 3: The Image Interrogator
3.1 The Betrayal of Human Intentions
3.2 The Eisenstein Polygraph
Chapter 4: Moving Beyond Image-ness
4.1 The Transmission of Images
4.2 Another Consideration of Eisenstein’s Metaphysics or “Honey on the Medicine”
4.3 How Can Images and Media Technology Best Serve Man?
Conclusion
References
Bibliography
Appendix A: Eisenstein’s Sketches and Film Sequence Examples
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If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of
life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of
bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit
calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Introduction
Spectatorship and biology are interdependent. Text and other symbols take on
organic qualities once they are perceived, and by extension, human activity is advanced
by images. These are the core phenomena that tortured Soviet filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein, and fueled the vast body of his finished and unfinished works between 1923
and 1948. In his 1924 article “The Montage of Film Attractions,” Eisenstein first argued
that filmmakers both admit and submit to the inescapable power they wield over the
public’s “psychophysiology”—their bodily activities, emotions and thought processes.
At the same time, he maintained that moving images must be engineered to release
spectators from stasis, linear thinking and attachment to material values.
The paradox of this mission—an “engineering” of release—suggests both the
attraction and folly that exists in communications bred by theory or formula. Eisenstein’s
diaries, sketches and films demonstrate the convenience and pitfalls of his commitments
to formalism, empiricism and instrumentalism. These works also mark a turning point in
the history of film as a medium. Eisenstein would accidentally thrust cinema into the role
of the spectator’s warden, imposing mental and physical control even as, and perhaps
because, he sought mass intellectual reform.
The cinema of Eisenstein is both the precursor and antidote to the surveillance state.
It both commits violence against the spectator, and as Baudrillard would argue,
transforms the spectator himself into an image—transparent, devoid or overloaded with
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meaning, and divorced from the Real. It might even be argued that Eisenstein’s
psychophysiological understanding of the image makes Baudrillard’s assessment seem
too optimistic. Nevertheless, Eisenstein and Baudrillard would agree that achieving a
“Being beside oneself as image” is the only way to release spectators from mundane,
metaphysical gravity of the Real.
Spectatorship wasn’t always an omnipresent consumer activity. Accordingly, it has
received increasing philosophical attention since the earliest appearance of
cinematographic devices. Thomas Edison’s 1892 “kinetoscope,” a hand-cranked moving
image wheel represented not only an economic challenge to the Lumiere Brothers’ mass
audience system, but an aesthetic and ethical one: would cinema be a medium driven by
individual spectator participation or a product to be projected to passive audiences in
large venues? Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1926), October (1928) and The Old and
the New (1927-29) marked an uncomfortable fusion of the two: mass spectacles that
expect intellectual and emotional exertion.
The influence of these films has been felt not only in media culture, but in
neuropsychology—a scientific field made possible by the use of cinematography to
record variability in and adaptability of human movement. Alexander Luria’s seminal
research on human conflict and the nervous system was equally rooted in Eisenstein’s
adaptation of Marx’s Capital for the screen as it was in Bernstein’s film recordings of
dancers wearing black leotards with white polka-dots.
The development of the electroencephalograph (EEG) and lie detector technology in
1923 represented an enormous opportunity for Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and other
Soviet filmmakers whose funds were linked to brain research budgets. Rather than
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simply documenting how the brain and body react to images, Eisenstein sought a method
for editing spectator behavior and reflexes as images. This new paradigm, predicated on
the definition of images as units of human life, placed Eisenstein in a philosophically
convenient place to consider cinema as emotion control. Images, as Baudrillard would
later warn, behave as transmitted strategies (or instructions) for human change—secret
communications revealed and concealed by technology.
Eisenstein quite possibly brought humanity one step closer to Clockwork Orange. On
the other hand, we still live in an image culture defined by boredom, monotony and
unengaged spectatorship. Surveillance cameras rarely register anything beyond black
and white shots of elevator occupants, air traffic controllers routinely lose consciousness
on the job, and most people give up on their exercise videos after the first 5 minutes.
Although media technology is increasingly designed as a means of monitoring and
accounting for our selves, the human body is still incapable of caring about anything for
more than a few minutes. If current spectatorship offers a microscopic glimpse at the
future of human mutation, we are only headed towards further loss of muscle tissue, even
slower metabolisms and an interminable decline in tolerance to discomfort.
Regardless of the hopes of advertisers, contemporary psychophysiological research
confirms that the average spectator shows only trace evidence of any biochemical or
neurological change purely linked to any specific commercial. Of course, this problem is
less a refutation of Eisenstein’s theories than a symbol of a sloppy culture, organized
around haphazardly conceived and arranged symbols.
Although Baudrillard expresses philosophical despair at the image’s control over our
minds and bodies, media images today seem satisfied with even the slightest
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acknowledgement of their existence. While it is hoped that children contemplate the
meaning of the American flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, they usually get
away with a barely audible mumble of the Pledge, a half-heartedly placed hand
somewhere over their upper torso, and a fidgeting stance in the general direction of the
flag. Intentionally “confrontational” images, particularly those found in political
advertisements, are busier contradicting the claims of their opponents’ advertisements
than commanding obedience from any viewer’s psychophysiology.
Since Eisenstein’s “Montage of Attractions,” society has increasingly resigned itself
to the doling out of images to defeat our attractions. This comfortable reality allows
critical reasoning skills to emerge, but largely at the cost of the very anxiety and paranoia
that keeps us ready for the chaos of life. Although true spectator control is impossible, it
remains undeniable that Eisenstein’s attempts in this area unmask a defining part of
human evolution—the behavior (and the occasional misbehavior) of the image itself.
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1. CONTROLLING MEDIA/CONTROLLING SPECTATORS
1.1 Unintended Effects and Control of the Spectator Gaze
Contemporary spectator situations—video games, online casinos and chat-rooms—
still offer an expectation of excitation, laughter or stress. In each of these examples, the
spectator is asked to coordinate his eyes with his actions—to adapt his gaze in some way
during the course of the viewing. Ironically, the creators of such media rarely articulate a
sense of craftsmanship towards the very visual sensations their products are supposed to
foster. Every time a mothers’ group complains about violent behavior linked to video
games, the producers protest that their work ends with the graphic representations
themselves. Nevertheless, any expectation or denial of expectations towards spectators
betrays an underlying metaphysical assumption: that the shortest distance between one
cognitive state and another is an image; that media not only communicate information or
content, but conduct physiological mechanisms as well; that images stand as border posts
between frames of consciousness.
On the other hand, images, like memories, do not always submit to our rationalized
constructions of linearity, time and space. By dint of his interest in mathematically
controlling the spectator’s point of view, Eisenstein left himself very little crawl space
beyond the traditional, reductionist apparatus of reflex, stimulus-response, etc. Notorious
for keeping strict guidelines for the number and quality of frames per shot, and shots per
sequence, Eisenstein’s films yield affects, as Slavoj Zizek argues, not purposely
stimulated by, but “leftover” from montage—leftover from control of the gaze.
In Looking Awry, Zizek describes two circumstances where such leftover affects of
montage unintentionally manifest themselves: pornography and nostalgia. For Zizek,
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pornography robs the spectator of his resistance—he is compelled into a spread-eagle
stasis, where his arousal is clinically inspected and removed. The degradation lies not in
the shame of the sexual performers’ overt ness, as Zizek explains:
Contrary to the commonplace according to which, in pornography, the
other (the person shown on the screen) is degraded to an object of our
voyeuristic pleasure, we must stress that it is the spectator himself who
effectively occupies the position of the object. The real subjects are the
actors on the screen trying to rouse us sexually, while we, the spectators,
are reduced to a paralyzed object-gaze. (Zizek 110)
Zizek argues that the degradation inherent in pornography is a by-product of
subjectification from the perspective of the “uncanny.” Showing porn stars’ actions from
the perspective of the sex organs themselves reduces the spectator’s gaze to that of an
object—both satisfying and removing the appetite to see the Other in its every detail.
According to Zizek’s definition, Eisenstein’s The Old and the New stands as an
especially pornographic film. An ode to milk separators, tractors and other collectively-
owned machines, Eisenstein sought to depict machines as organs of pathos—life forms
that bend nature’s will to human ambitions. Setting aside the substance of this Stalinist
exegesis for a moment, Eisenstein’s form is what disturbs Zizek. He writes,
In a somewhat Lysenkoist scene demonstrating the way nature finds
pleasure in subordinating itself to the new rules of collective farming, the
way even cows and bulls mate more ardently once they are included in
kilkhozes(sic). In a quick tracking shot, the camera approaches a cow
from behind, and in the next shot, it becomes clear that this view of the
camera was of a bull mounting a cow. Needless to say, the effect of this
scene is so obscenely vulgar that it is almost nauseating. What we have
here is a kind of Stalinist pornography. It would be wiser, then, to turn
away from this Stalinist obscenity to the Hollywood decency of
Hitchcock. (Zizek 118)
In another sequence, this same cow is shown wearing a wedding dress. Eisenstein quite
simply intended to make the spectator laugh: to relieve him after 60 minutes of
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intellectual juxtapositions aimed at demonizing kulaks, bureaucrats and Orthodox clergy.
For Zizek, Eisenstein’s attempt at a very controlled experience—especially controlled
enjoyment—can not work while a spectator is shoved into the bull’s non-human gaze.
Meanwhile, Zizek does not reject the use of film form to bring the spectator
deeper into the narrative space, to expand his identification with characters and situations.
Above he cites “the Hollywood decency of Hitchcock,” a filmmaker he promotes as ideal
fodder for Lacanian analysis. Hitchcock’s methods, as Zizek argues, serve the humanity
of the spectator, refraining from the pornography of anthropomorphized objects:
In Hitchcockian montage, two kinds of shots are thus permitted and two
forbidden. Permitted are the objective shot of the person approaching a
Thing and the subjective shot presenting the Thing as the person sees it.
Forbidden are the objective shot of the Thing, of the ‘uncanny’ object, and
—above all—the subjective shot of the approaching person from the
perspective of the ’uncanny’ thing itself. (Zizek 117)
What makes The Old and the New “obscene” is not the narrative fact of bull sex, but the
explicit and graphic depiction of it in violent contradiction to the expectation of the
spectator gaze. What Zizek objects to in pornographic films is the imposition of
excessive storyline, just as he would object to graphic sodomy in a Hollywood film such
as Out of Africa. Perhaps Baudrillard best sums up this position: “Obscene is all what is
unnecessarily visible, without desire and without effect. All what usurps the so rare and
so precious space of appearances” (Baudrillard 10).
Yet, Eisenstein’s pornography occasionally defies the limitations of Zizek’s
critique. In one scene, two Stakhanovite men crank a milk separator, while Marfa
Lapkina, a budding Communist peasant woman watches on in suspense. With great
enthusiasm, these men row the gear of the milk centrifuge up and down. After torturous
suspense and delay, the cream separates and finally spurts out on Marfa's gleeful face.
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Although the spectator is subjected to a cum shot from the milk separator’s point of view,
the film’s form leads us to necessarily feel that the machine is aroused to life by Marfa’s
frustrated waiting, and by extension, our own. The point, as Eisenstein writes in Non-
Indifferent Nature, is that:
…priority was given to the ‘pathos of the machine,’ rather than to the
social analysis of those profound processes, which our villages
experienced in their transition to forms of collective farm economy… It
was our film The Old and the New….which acquired its fame by heralding
the ‘pathos of the milk separator’ (Eisenstein Non-Indifferent 39).
In order to reconcile the laborer to technology, the Marxian filmmaker must, as
Eisenstein would argue, show that even the most banal of machines reflect and serve
desire. Only in collective use of technology, as The Old and the New argues, can man
fulfill every individual appetite.
Following Eisenstein’s logic, both the bull sex scene and the milk separator
sequence work precisely because they systematically and forcefully succeed in pushing
the spectator into the gaze of the object—even if Zizek feels nauseated when he’s
supposed to laugh. For Zizek, a more benign dislocation of the gaze takes place when it
is transplanted from that of one spectator into that of another one:
What we really see, when we watch a film noir, is this gaze of the other:
we are fascinated by the gaze of the mythic “naïve” spectator, the one who
was “still able to take it all seriously,” in other words, the one who
“believes in it” for us, in place of us. For that reason, our relation to a film
noir is always divided, split between fascination and ironic distance: ironic
distance toward its diegetic reality, fascination with the gaze. (Zizek 112)
By 1929, Soviet spectators were resigned to a lifetime of fear, corruption and poverty.
Hundreds of thousands of peasants were slaughtered either indiscriminately or for
resisting collectivization, just as The Old and the New promised them liberation from
remaining vestiges of 19th
century religiosity and starvation. The Old and New spectator
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of 1929 experienced a kind of reverse-nostalgic propaganda—he is asked to put himself
into the gaze of the convinced and naïve spectator of an alternative future Soviet reality.
The unintended creation of pornography, as Zizek has himself discovered in The
Old and the New, is precisely what frightens media creators away from the idea of
control. Media creators try at all costs to distance themselves from easy dissection of the
control process itself, any perception of the immaturity on their part, and ridicule of
accidental hyperbole. And yet, the filmmaker by definition has no choice but try to
control the gaze. Zizek presents Hitchcock as someone most mature in the control
process: his images always behave according to specific laws of subject-object relations.
This is precisely why it’s necessary to continue our analysis of Eisenstein instead—
Eisenstein’s dismissal of these rules delineates the chinks in the armor of spectatorship
control.
1.2 Recording Change: Images of Achievement
Constructivism, a school of art that proposed looking to machines for inspiration,
nurtured Eisenstein’s concept of the “pathos of technology.” According to Rodchenko
and Vertov, modern man was forevermore a cyborg. Taylor and Pavlov categorized
human activity in machinist formulas of stimulus and response/cause and effect. For
Eisenstein and the Soviet Constructivists, philosophy should nevermore settle on a
conclusion later articulated by Wolfgang Schirmacher that “our biological structure tells
us nothing about our humanity” (Schirmacher Eco-Sophia 130). In fact, cinema sparked
Eisenstein and the others to naively argue that the “new,” technologized human body
heralded a future of prosperity, where all barriers to expression and creativity would be
leveled.
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The lectures of Nikolai Bernstein, a renowned Soviet biologist and physiologist,
helped prepare Eisenstein for his 1923 and 1924 articles on the “Montage of Attractions.”
Bernstein’s early use of cinema to record contradictions in human activity helped
Eisenstein reframe the problem of biology’s relationship with spectatorship in a way that
explained psychophysiological dynamics, psychological ambiguities and animal
adaptability to randomness.
After filming workers hitting nails with hammers, Bernstein demonstrated once and
for all that it is impossible to exactly duplicate an action. As physical and environmental
factors change, workers must adapt how they hold nails and how they gesticulate with
hammers—in a matter of milliseconds. This ability to adapt is possible, as Bernstein’s
films suggested, because animals create multi-dimensional plans for actions before they
act. This enables one to walk comfortably on slippery surfaces, to climb stairs without
looking, to wipe one’s own backside, etc. Bernstein’s students would later call these
models for future activity “images of achievement.” These images are stored in both
cerebral and muscle tissue as memories and bridge our sense of past, present and future.
The image of achievement is the body’s attempt to adapt itself in order to exert a
sense of control over the environment. This contradictory mechanism demands a
biological change in favor of equilibrium. Karl Pribram, the founder of modern
neuropsychology, describes this process in greater detail:
What the data suggest is that there exists in the cortex, a multidimensional
holographic-like process serving as an attractor or set point toward which
muscular contractions operate to achieve a specified environmental result.
The specification has to be based on prior experience (of the species or the
individual) and stored in holographic-like form. Activation of the store
involves patterns of muscular contractions (guided by basal ganglia,
cerebella, brain stem and spinal cord) whose sequential operations need
only to satisfy the 'target' encoded in the image of achievement much as
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the patterns of sequential operations of heating and cooling must meet the
set point of the thermostat. (Pribram Keynote Lecture, Society for Gestalt
Theory Convention, Vienna, Austria, 1997)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty described these multi-dimensional holograms as “intentional
arcs,” similar to Bernstein’s original term —“the reflex loop.” Merleau-Ponty writes in
The Phenomenology of Perception:
The life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual
life – is subtended by an ‘intentional arc’ which projects round about us
our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and
moral situation. (Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception 1962, 136)
He continues later on how the process of perception is received from outside oneself:
In so far as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions
which are not dependent upon my decisions and which affect my
surroundings in a way which I do not choose. These intentions are
general… they originate from other than myself, and I am not surprised to
find them in all psycho-physical subjects organized as I am (Merleau-
Ponty, 440)
I will touch on this “externalized” transmission and reception of intentions across species
in later sections. What concerns us most here is the philosophical substantiation by
Merleau-Ponty that this multi-dimensional process of intentionality is shared among
animals, that there is a link for Merleau-Ponty between individual intentionality and
evolution of the species.
As early as the 1910s, the Russian reflexologist Vladimir Bekhterev noted
that each exercising of the body’s response faculties strengthens the body’s
adaptability to future variations in the environment, a key element to evolution:
But if the reflex, because of combinative activity, is new in character, the
individual is enriched also in regard to the quality of external
manifestation. Thus… correlative activity, which lies at the basis of the
development of the person, changes and, as the manifestation of reflexes is
unintermittent, it is obvious that the person himself is being
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unintermittently changed and, indeed, at every moment, the person
changes as a result of the realization of the reflexes. (Bekhterev 300).
In other words, at all times, the body manifests the process by which it changes. Our
body’s goals and targets, as Pribram refers to them above, are detectable.
Returning to Pribram’s assessment, it is the spectator’s targets that Eisenstein tries to
both delineate and program. Consider this sequence in Battleship Potemkin: A starving
sailor is washing the officer’s dishes. While drying one, he slowly reads the embossed
text on one plate—“Give us this day our daily bread.” A close-up on his face reveals that
he mutters the words—“Go fuck your mother.” With the same gesticulation as a discus
thrower, the sailor swings the dish back and forth and then breaks it on the table in front
of him. The text on the dish stands as a disturbance of the sailor’s artificially sustained
comfort, his equilibrium.
Since fucking an officer’s mother is not an option, the recoiled swing of his arm
before breaking the dish stands as a final moment of consideration. He could throw his
dish at the other dishes, or even worse, throw his dish at one of the other sailors. Like a
heat-seeking missile, his body settles on breaking against the table as the best resolution
of this moment of intensity. But this delayed gesticulation also serves a more specific
purpose: to stimulate the spectator’s frustrated desire for the film’s themes to be resolved.
Eisenstein wants us angry and ready to break something bourgeois.
Even as this sequence demonstrates how human adaptability works, Eisenstein failed
at one of his own fundamental standards: the shaping of a specific spectator action as a
result of an image of achievement. The tension provoked by Eisenstein’s cinema leaves
spectators with nothing they can do in the moment, except rip out their seat or leave the
cinema altogether. Although Eisenstein may have wished to release what he diagnosed
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as the Soviet spectator’s latent rage onto capitalist materialism, the Bolsheviks had
already finished the job—there were no more Orthodox dishes left for the citizen to
break. This comes off, again unintentionally, as an insult.
In light of this disobedience on the part of his carefully constructed, “heat-seeking”
film sequence, it is worth inspecting Eisenstein’s articles through 1929 on how images
themselves are constituted and evolve. As he writes in Film Form (1929):
The shot is by no means an element of montage. The shot is a montage
cell. Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order,
the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the dialectical leap from
the shot, there is montage. By what, then, is montage characterized and,
consequently, its cell - the shot? By collision. By the conflict of two
pieces in opposition to each other. (Eisenstein Film Form 37)
For Eisenstein, montage is where biology and spectatorship meet. Sequences undermine
spectator values and confront physical inertia like a virus. They enter the body through
perception, and fuse seemingly contradictory intellectual concepts to produce involuntary
physical reactions—laughter, tears, sweating, etc.
The unfortunate thing about such pre-meditated disruptions of emotion is that
Eisenstein left no room for spontaneity, tangents or entropy. Every spectator sensation
had to be subservient to a greater comprehension, just as every image served its limited
target. Even Eisenstein’s language negates the nobility of ecstasy:
We discovered that the primary indication of pathos in composition is a
state of continuous ecstasy, a continuous state of “being beside oneself,” a
continuous leap of each separate element or sign of the work of art from
quality to quality, in proportion to the quantitative growth of the ever-
heightening intensity of the emotional content of a shot, sequence or scene
in the work of art as a whole. (Eisenstein Non-Indifferent 38)
As I’ve demonstrated in these first two sections, Eisenstein’s “proportions” of control
serve one distinct function: rebellion. No spectator can submit to his rhetoric or heavy-
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handed juxtapositions forever. We are free of the filmmaker’s domination so long as our
intentions and sympathies remain out of sync with his. This is not to say that we are free
of influence and affects, but it does serve as a warning to those who might underestimate
the unruliness of the spectator body.
1.3 A First Consideration of Eisenstein’s Metaphysics
At first glance, it seems that Eisenstein advocated pure bipolarities between
images—a strict metaphysics of montage. While this is largely true, I do not want to give
short shrift to his very careful designation of the desired spectator response as “Being
beside oneself.” In Russian, one would literally translate this as “Being off of one’s
plate”—an allusion to the dish sequence in Battleship Potemkin. His use of another
phrase—“dialectical leap” —suggests an acknowledgment that either he or his spectators
might fail in the changes pre-determined for them. Success in media communication, as
he has defined it, is uncertain, unwieldy and ephemeral.
This transformation of images from externalized psychological attractions to
processed physical reactions requires a sharing of intentions, as I mentioned briefly
before, and labor—labor on the part of the spectator to understand, to reconcile and to
react. Thus, the fusion of images into a montage sequence is made possible not by glue
or plastic, but by the availability and working of spectator perception:
These stimuli [i.e. shots, sequences, etc.] are heterogeneous as regards
their ‘external natures,’ but their reflex-physiological essence binds them
together in an iron unity. Physiological in so far as they are ‘psychic’ in
perception, this is merely the physiological process of a higher nervous
activity. (Eisenstein 67)
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For Eisenstein, the digestion tract of images starts from the purely physical and thrusts
itself towards the intellectual. This enforced “iron unity” of sensations between
physicality and rationalization produces the very nausea Zizek described in his critique of
The Old and the New. The images themselves are stuck together, after all, according to
criteria that cannot be pinned down—degrees of brain activity. But it doesn’t matter:
Eisenstein’s misguided metaphysic forces the spectator to choose between two options—
either accept the domination of these images or get out of their way.
1.4 Violence and Images
If we follow Eisenstein’s logic that images are cells and images of achievement
represent strategies for change, then what is changed in the spectator could be referred to
as “condition.” The term condition suggests the symptoms that can be associated with
change, while asserting the manipulative and representational qualities of images.
Eisenstein’s “Being beside oneself,” this leap out of body, could therefore be described as
between images of condition (where we perceive ourselves as being in the moment).
In Eisenstein’s films, such images of condition are picked away at non-linearly,
hyperbolically and always violently. Eisenstein did not want to afford his spectators any
special privilege to cling to one state, emotion or framework. In the case of Battleship
Potemkin, maggot ridden meat is declared fit for consumption by a Tsarist Naval doctor
who holds his bifocals up to the diseased carcass. The spectator is not even given
sufficient exposure to the maggots to become comfortable with them as maggots.
These images of rot and hypocrisy in such close proximity, according to Gilles
Deleuze, mean to say: “It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-
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image, you can’t escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you” (Deleuze 156). Or
better put: you can’t cling to the thinking which helps escape the shock in you. The
spectator body is assaulted until it submits to each new image of condition—disgust, fear,
anger, etc. For Deleuze, this “kino-fist” (as Eisenstein once called it), this distrust of the
spectator’s comprehension skills is still somehow compatible with transcendence:
This is the cinema of the punch—‘Soviet cinema must break heads.’ But
in this way [Eisenstein] dialecticizes the most general given of the
movement-image; he thinks that any other conception weakens the shock
and leaves thought optional. The cinematographic image must have a
shock effect on thought, and force thought itself as much as thinking the
whole. This is the very definition of the sublime. (Deleuze 158)
Jean Baudrillard has an entirely different opinion on any image-related head
breaking. The attack by the image, he argues, is both a necessary product of cinema, and
its own antidote. As Baudrillard explains: “The violence exercised by the image is
largely balanced by the violence done to the image” (Baudrillard 8). This self-defeating
characteristic lies in the very dulling process of media themselves. The hypnotic,
medicated dimension of the cinema gaze relaxes as much as other dimensions seek to
frazzle the spectator image of condition. Baudrillard claims:
That is the controversy about the violence on the screens and the impact of
images on people’s mind (sic). The fact is that the medium itself has a
neutralizing power, counterbalancing the direct effect of the violence on
the imagination… but at a price of a more virulent intrusion in the deep
cells of our mental world. The same as for anti-biotics: they eradicate the
agents of disease by reducing the general level of vitality. (2-3)
Cinema is, therefore, a kind of chemo-therapy. As much as it kills its target (i.e. cancer),
it destroys the rest of the healthy body as well.
To the point: Baudrillard is concerned that Eisenstein’s metaphysics will fail in
their necessary mission—the inconveniencing and discomforting of the human body.
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Cinema, as Baudrillard claims, has only suppressed us. There is no aroused and
bedazzled Eisensteinian spectator-activist, only the air-conditioned media bystander:
This is the typical violence of information, of media, of images, of the
spectacular… soon we shall discover the gene of revolt, the center of
violence in the brain, perhaps even the gene of resistance against genetic
manipulation—biological brainwashing, brainstorming, brainlifting with
nothing left but recycled, whitewashed, lobotomized people as in
Clockwork Orange. (Baudrillard 2)
Baudrillard’s fears are echoed by scientific evidence. The vast majority of media makes
it easy for the spectator to stay inert, brainwashed, etc.
Daniel Goleman, the founder of the emotional intelligence movement in
psychology, argues that man’s primary perceptological activity is to lie to himself. This is
so fundamental to human survival and communication that the vast majority of our
psychophysiological labor goes into keeping confrontational information within a kind of
“blind spot.” Goleman describes the relationship between attention and confrontational
stimuli:
The mind can protect itself against anxiety by dimming awareness. This
mechanism creates a blind spot: a zone of blocked attention and self-
deception. Such blind spots occur at each major level of behavior from
the psychological to the social. (Goleman 22).
Even, Merleau-Ponty recognized physical effort as the matrix of memory and cognition.
Psychophysiological engagement is the engine behind metaphysics, and this is precisely
why it is the primary target for Eisenstein’s control: “The analysis of motor habit as an
extension of existence leads… to an analysis of perceptual habit as the coming into
possession of the world. Conversely, every perceptual habit is still a motor habit and
here equally the process of grasping a meaning is performed by the body” (Merleau-
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Ponty 153). But Goleman is more specific in his critique of attention’s relationship to the
body’s survival:
The threat of pain is the essence of stress: an animal fleeing a predator is
aware of the danger long before it experiences pain, if it does at all. The
winning design in evolution, it seems, is for the pain response to be part of
the total package of reaction to danger (Goleman 31).
In threatening the spectator’s sense of survival, Eisenstein meets Baudrillard’s challenge:
his spectators become aware that future film sequences will only bring them greater
dimensions of shock, nausea and confrontation.
On the other hand, Baudrillard would argue that Eisenstein’s very attempts at the
disruption of bourgeois and Orthodox representation only contributed to the
meaninglessness and nothingness of media. Consider one sequence in October where
Eisenstein specifically tries to dislodge the spectator’s fixation on Christian iconography:
A shot of the Tsar’s statue is followed by text—“For God and Country.” This is followed
by an inter-title that reads: “For God?” Images of Christian statues are followed by
images of African, Asian and Native American idols. The only conflict between the
images of these idols is that they are of a variety of shapes, forms, sizes, etc. The target
of this intellectual montage is to show that there is no one God, no one representation and
no non-physical God. We are intended to understand that God is the image itself.
If we presume for a moment that spectators submitted to this argument, then
Eisenstein realized Baudrillard’s worst fears. Eisenstein’s very images steal the power of
God and violate the link between meaning and symbol. Baudrillard writes in The Evil
Demon of Images:
All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on
representation: That a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign
could exchange for meaning, and that something could guarantee this
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exchange — God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated,
that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the
whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic
simulacrum — not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for
what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without
reference or circumference.
Ultimately, Baudrillard’s assessment here is too reactionary. Regardless of any specific
image, meaning and values are increasingly posited in relationship to human pain,
pleasure, anxiety, threat, etc. Animal evolution, as Goleman demonstrates, relies on this
very fact. In other words, images have been and will always be referenced in the Real—
the real of psychophysiology. Any attempt at divorce or even disruption, as Eisenstein’s
work demonstrates, only reinforces this reference.
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2. ACTING OUT IMAGES
2.1 Spectator DNA
Even as I’ve given preliminary delineations of how images influence the body’s shift
between conditions, the questions of if and how organisms influence their own change
remains. As a necessary part of this examination, I will attempt to disrupt any
metaphysical distinction between “external” and “internal” images, and to distinguish
images of achievement from images of condition. In summary, an image is a
concentration by the senses of dispersed radiant energy. Another way of saying this is:
images represent the body’s work to focus the world as such. This work might be
dominantly visual in deaf culture, aural and tactile among the blind or even synaesthetic
among the autistic. One thing is common to all sentient animals: we are spectators not
only in that we perceive images, but that we await their appearance. We brace ourselves
for the emergence of the image while hoping in vain that somehow we’ll be ready to
make sense of it, to resolve it.
The very focusing action inherent in images is both a sign and rupture of life, as
Baudrillard and Eisenstein have shown. Evolution, according to the Eisensteinian school
of psychology, is made possible when animals act upon images. DNA, in terms of
Pribram’s critique of images of achievement, is holographic. These blueprints for an
organisms’ whole structural morphogenesis is represented in every organ, tissue and cell
as a spiral helix. Of concern to this examination are those ephemeral moments of
disobedience to such instructions.
The exercising of DNA is interrupted in the case of dinosaurs, a species that would
ultimately cope with plate-tectonic, cosmic and other environmental factors by
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transforming over millions of years into birds. Similarly, the phenotypes of flora often
stand in contradiction to their genotypes. Indeed, psychiatrists increasingly approach
their work with an understanding that certain alleles pre-dispose patients to
schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and alcoholism. The world affords their patients’ genetic
pre-dispositions both opportunities and triggers. The point is that once triggered, the
body carries out the instruction of the allele. The patient’s conscious exertion of self-
restraint becomes increasingly irrelevant. These alleles are a very specific kind of image
of achievement—they represent a series of possible resolutions to genetic disequilibrium,
and in all cases, await environmental affordances to manifest themselves.
How we await and respond to images – how we behave as spectators – defines how
we change ourselves to meet threats and affordances in the world. The hallmark of this
spectatorship is psychophysiology, the physical symptoms of psychological change. For
Alexander Luria, Eisenstein’s closest ally in this field, physiological symptoms of
emotion weaken the body’s ability to perceive—to organize and construct reality around
new stimuli: “That affect basically changes the structure of the reactive processes,
destroying the organized behavior, and converting the reactive processes into a diffused
one, has been shown already” (Luria 331).
Luria argues that each image of condition, every emotional eruption makes the
spectator more susceptible, more fatigued and more likely to lose the faculty of reason.
But even Luria concedes that it is precisely this manifestation of emotional conflict that
provokes stronger “behavioral organization,” and perhaps even releases improvisation to
be tested against its environment: “Darwin considered affect as a vital primitive sort of
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behavior, and in each symptom of affect he saw the origin of the primordial, archaic
forms of reactions” (Luria 331).
Ultimately, Eisenstein, Luria, Bekhterev, Pribram and the others are all stuck in the
metaphysic of functional Darwinism—that whatever is good for evolution is “good.”
Fortunately, human physiological obedience to genetic or behavioral instructions is a
prison with sleeping guards. The secret, if there is one, is to not wake them up with
images of condition—the very outbursts Eisenstein seeks to provoke.
2.2 Eisenstein’s Ideal Spectator
Eisenstein’s diaries from Mexico were consumed by the question of which
combinations of images trigger man’s pre-dispositions at each level: embryonic,
sociological, linguistic and cinematographic. For Eisenstein, the synthetic qualities of
montage reveal a fundamental language of the brain and body. That man can understand
moving photographs that have no necessarily real relationship as connected in movement
and narrative, demonstrates conclusively that we have evolved to where we perceive the
world according to conflict, contrast and contradiction. It never occurred to Eisenstein,
for example, that spectators might be cognitively or linguistically impaired, never mind
stupid.
If stupidity means a lack of the very hard wires that makes acceptance of
coincidentally-linked images automatic, stupid people fail the pre-requisite for
Eisenstein’s inducements—they are free to engage in any non-evolutionary activities they
see fit as they see fit. Although Avital Ronell would probably disagree with the tone of
this assessment, she nevertheless points out in Stupidity that: “The stupid cannot see
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themselves. No mirror yet has been invented in which they might reflect themselves.
They ineluctably evade reflection. No catoptrics can mirror back to them, the shallowest,
most surface-bound beings, the historical disaster they portend” (Ronell 18). Free of
their symptoms, their images of condition, stupid people not only can’t be controlled by
the carrots and sticks of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, but they can’t help but not see
conflict, contrast and contradiction. There’s no need for them to worry about triggering
genetic instructions, because their instructions are already activated. For the stupid
spectator, the world is already fit. Being stupid is the best thing one can be in
Baudrillard’s world, where systematic spectator control is not a dubious possibility but an
oppressive reality.
So what do the non-stupid rest of us do to evaluate our level of participation in
Eisenstein’s evolutionary process? Let’s return to one of these “primordial” images that
Eisenstein fixated on in Mexico: the spiral. He writes: “All lines are different projections
of the spiral… The spiral is the expression of active energy and all the vital energetic,
vegetative forms, etc. follows it” (Unpublished Diary Entry Jan 11 1931). Eisenstein’s
own fascination with the affective spiral was refined in Mexico by his readings of Lucien
Levi-Bruhl, the father of the “pre-logic” theory of social anthropology. He was
introduced to the concept earlier by the works of the constructivist architect Tatlin and
Lenin’s writings on the “spirally repeating dialectical universe.” All creative expression,
all eccentricity and all deviance, according to the dialectical materialist, take on the
element of recoil—essentially: “two steps forward, one step back.”
We see this recoil in the sailor’s swinging back and forth of the dish in Potemkin.
Instead of simply smashing this object against the table in front of him immediately, he
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stands back and swings it up, back and then down. Certainly, Eisenstein consciously
imbued his images with his arbitrary spiral-ness. But it’s also a test to determine if the
spectator responds to such archetypical dynamics. For Eisenstein, attraction to
archetypes such as the spiral is symptomatic of availability to the species’ mutagenic
dynamics, something the stupid spectator will never have. In his diaries, Eisenstein
recounts a story told to him by a Mexican doctor:
Child’s expression also goes in these lines… Boy with supersensitive skin
expression, graphic translation of thought translated to him, asked
experimentator[sic] to think abstractly about creation (creative effort)…
And boy’s hand depicted spiral on the skin… The spiral with its central
limit – the circle… unwinding and winding with it… is the fundamental
line of emotional conflict… (Eisenstein Jan 11 1931)
There are two elements in this anecdote that impressed Eisenstein. The first is that the
child physically mutates his skin to match the shapes another person imagines. This story
perfectly epitomizes’ Merleau-Ponty’s “origination” of intentions from the Other. The
second, perhaps more important element for Eisenstein, is that the participant in this
experiment willed the representation of a circle and its coiling into a spiral. In other
words, Eisenstein might say, the spectator shares a creative responsibility in the physical
manipulations that take place on the screen and in the body. Creative perception, which
Goleman called self-deception earlier, leads to evolution at key intensive points. The
spiral is where Eisenstein’s target audience’s image of condition settles. Eisenstein’s
choice spectator yields to intentions transmitted from the Other. His body bends to the
imposition of archetypical symbols, suggestions and threats.
2.3 Identification
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Eisenstein argues that the filmmaker’s power over his spectators is maintained by
their sense of identification with his arguments, ideas and images. Most narrative
filmmakers, including Hitchcock, focus more on spectator identification with their
protagonists. Eisenstein’s early films had few such characters because his emphasis was
placed instead on the movement of the masses. Those characters that do emerge, such as
Marfa Lapkina in The Old and the New or various sailors in Battleship Potemkin, are
intended to embody the entirety of their class’s ego. Perhaps it is this very deviation
from narrative norms that demonstrates how subversive identification can be. We are
neither alone as individuals nor are we alone as so-called “higher order” organisms.
Identification is what stokes change: change of opinion, change of gesticulation and even
change of skin temperature. Once again, Eisenstein’s designs for manipulation reveal
another escape hatch for the rest of us.
For Slavoj Zizek, identification is not just subversive, it’s even deviant:
The identification is on the level of the gaze, not on the level of the
content. There is something extremely unpleasant and obscene in this
experience of our gaze as already the gaze of the other. Why? The
Lacanian answer is that such a coincidence of gazes defines the position of
the pervert. (Zizek 108)
Before breaking the officer’s dish, the Potemkin sailor I’ve referenced several times
already, looks directly at the audience and mouths: “Yob tvoi mat’” or “Go fuck your
mother.” Eisenstein presumes that the sailor and the audience have grown to share a
sense of outrage at Tsarist military hypocrisy. We even see the officer’s dish from the
sailor’s point of view. But it is only when the sailor directs one of the most unaccepted,
profane expressions in the Russian language at the audience—Yob tvoi mat’—that true
identification begins.
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Although the shot is not from the sailor’s point of view, the audience and the
sailor have shared a private obscenity. They’ve deviated together. Zizek is completely
off-base in his assessment of the shared gaze as unpleasant. For Eisenstein, it is good that
Zizek feels perverted: moral discomfort suggests that the transplant of Zizek’s identity
has occurred successfully. It is precisely because the spectator participates in the sailor’s
gaze that the most absurd content (religious iconography on dishes) gives way to sublime
reactions. Identification derived from a feeling of “getting away with something”
removes us from our false sense of distance from the Other.
. The vast majority of Eisenstein’s work on identification in language focused on
the story-telling techniques among early American frontier pioneers and Native
Americans. The urge to stand up before a camp fire (what Eisenstein calls “the story-
teller’s ecstasy”), is transmitted by the audience. It is precisely the story-teller’s gaze that
the audience seeks to share. The more the story-teller feels this desire, the more
expressive he becomes. The story-teller must replenish his own energy, according to
Eisenstein, by using every rhetorical trick, inserting every perverted detail and keeping
his spectators locked into identification. The ecstatic story-teller is a symbiote: both
performer and ringmaster, dependent on and responsible for audience affects.
The same audience that gives story-tellers their force can render them impotent
by holding back expressivity. From this perspective, no medium is more perilous then
stand-up comedy. Identification must be established quickly and decisively. Otherwise
the audience may not yield their bodies. Consider one of Chris Rock’s most repeated
jokes: “White people got it good. There ain’t a white person in this room that wants to
change places with me… and I’m rich! Even that one-legged busboy is thinking—I’d
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rather ride this white thing out.” Non-Black spectators both relate to and laugh at this
joke because they identify with Chris Rock’s persona of the “loser.”
Wolfgang Schirmacher, on the other hand, perceives identification as more of an
attempt at acceptance than change—a dulling more than an ecstatic release.
Identification is a word that describes projection of our own metaphysics onto nature, and
by extension, biology—all this for the purpose of accommodating man’s fragility. In
Eco-Sophia, Schirmacher writes:
Learning from nature, finding natural ways of life, an ethics of partnership
between human beings and nature—these are hopes that must be
disappointed. For we ourselves are the ones who suddenly take the
standpoint of nature so as to steal the legitimation which can never be
ours. We may strive for such identification within nature, the
phenomenon of the whole, but as individual beings our claim is
insupportable. (Schirmacher Eco-Sophia 129)
The idealization of relations with the Whole, therefore, is a construct to fool us into
believing we are part of nature—even as our every social act marks war against it. For
Schirmacher, we are forever removed from nature. Our only relationship with nature is
as its sole competitor. Our war against nature is in fact a war against uncontrolled
mutation of the human species. We decide when, how and why alterations to the sexual
organs occur. We decide the temperature of our environment, the color of our hair and
the shape of our noses. Identification with any Whole, therefore, is inconsistent with the
agenda of civilization.
Identification with the Other, as we’ve seen in the Chris Rock example, proves to
be a more reliable method of subverting self-deception and control constructs than
identification with an abstract Whole. But for Eisenstein, there is no difference. Being
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outside and especially “beside oneself” during the process of identification means an
experience of the existence of a Whole:
I think I will never find enough energy to point out the allmost and utmost
importance of the question of identification: on every step in every
direction the solutions are found in it; ecstasy as the moment of it with the
Whole… humour like the excluding of the conflict and identification of
two things. (Eisenstein Jan 11 1931)
By forcing two contradictory concepts together in the same space at the same time--rich
Blacks and self-satisfied poor Whites--Chris Rock places his audiences outside their
senses. Deleuze, as we’ve already seen, supports Eisenstein’s assertion that identification
with the Whole happens through these very kinds of perceptological conflicts, where
images stand intertwined with the contradictory meaning of their referents. Following his
line of reasoning, jokes only work in the form of montage tropes:
The Whole can only be thought, because it is the indirect representation of
time which follows from movement. It does not follow like a logical
effect, analytically, but synthetically as the dynamic effect of images on
the whole cortex.’ Thus, it relies on montage, although it follows from the
image: it is not a sum, but a ‘product,’ a unity of a higher order. The
whole is the organic totality which presents itself by opposing and
overcoming its own parts, and which is constructed like the great Spiral in
accordance with the laws of dialectic. (Deleuze 158)
There are two problems then in the struggle to make spectators identify beyond
themselves. The first, as Deleuze pointed out, is that spectators must overcome the
individual parts of their sensory experience: images have to be treated as an integration of
stimuli rather than a domination of one. The second, which Baudrillard forcefully
demonstrates, is that they must submit to the new world order where meaning and
representation have no necessary link.
Nevertheless, it’s difficult to imagine an image-spectator relationship where
domination and manipulation are not part of the agenda. Most certainly, Eisenstein never
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intended to create Draconian methods for brainwashing. Wolfgang Schirmacher
describes what Eisenstein’s cinema of identification hoped for:
… what remains true is reviving the stifled senses and awakening those
never discovered in us, and training our poetic sensibility which we
systematically spoil and shatter in daily life. If we should succeed in this,
at least to a small extent, we would then “feel” differently and experience
a person seemingly worlds apart from that suspicious subjectivity.
(Schirmacher Eco-Sophia 130)
Eisenstein’s interest in the poetic sensibility was quite concrete: “For the musical
overtone (a throb) it is not strictly fitting to say: ‘I hear.’ Nor for the visual overtone: ‘I
see.’ For both, a new uniform formula must enter our vocabulary: “I feel’” (Eisenstein
Film Form 71). It is this very concreteness, on the other hand, that Baudrillard would call
naïve. Eisenstein’s images are most in control of the spectator’s identity sensibilities
precisely where he never planned it.
2.4 The “Training” of the Senses
Wolfgang Schirmacher describes the ideal of revitalizing one’s poetic sensibility—
openness and appreciation of the sublime, released and non-functional. Barthelemy
Amengual, the first Eisensteinian scholar to import Derridian interpretation, describes
how Eisenstein’s films manipulate time and space to achieve this objective:
Entondons precisement, pour ce qui nous regarde, le modele narratif
d’Eisenstein lui-meme nomme epique chez Kuleshov et Pudovkin. Ce
qui, selon Derrida, s’oppose, dans l’ecriture et le langage, a la linearite
absolue, c’est ce qui fonde l’autonomie de leurs signes: discretion,
difference, espacement. Or le montage Eisensteinien se nourrit
d’intervalles. (Amengual 420)
Eisenstein, as Amengual alluded to, conceived of montage as a psychophysiological
version of “internal combustion”—controlled intervals of explosions that both consume
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and regenerate the spectator’s energy. The intervals between these explosions are
controlled by degrees and qualities of perceptological conflict—metric/rhythmic, tonal,
overtonal and intellectual. Eisenstein described these categories of conflict as fluid and
useful only in that they force us to evaluate audio-visual stimuli in terms of our reactions.
In the case of the San Francisco boy’s spiral skin transformations, the experimentator is
confronted by: (1) the metric and rhythmic qualities of the phenomena (the speed by
which they take place), (2) the tone or mood of the situation in which it was perceived
(weirdness, awkwardness), (3) and the logical challenges associated with what he
witnessed.
Eisenstein’s internal combustion method undermines the strides he made in other
theoretical areas. If humans are like cars, they’re only able to respond—not to adapt.
This is the difference between Eisenstein’s training of the senses and Schirmacher’s
revitalization of the poetic sensibility. Both seek to unlock human perception from its
sphincter-like role of contracting and constricting. Eisenstein’s model still fails to move
beyond forcing the masses’ senses to contract and constrict longer and harder.
Schirmacher seeks to make them sing and dance.
2.5 Imagining, Fantasy and Escape
Cinema spectatorship has emerged as one of the few areas of fantasy and
theatricality where we can relieve suicidal and homicidal tendencies. This phenomenon
emerged after the Leninist revolution, as Russian masses were deprived of any and every
opportunity to participate in political violence. Eisenstein’s October, with its
documentary-style scenes of the “Storming of the Winter Palace,” an event that never
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happened, intended to exorcize the pent up hostilities of the rabble. A sign of
Eisenstein’s success is that these images from October are still cited as historical
evidence in histories of the Bolshevik Revolution. Old people even recount their
“memories” of participation in such fictional events. Of course, Stalin had a much
simpler method to achieve Eisenstein’s objectives: he murdered millions of people who
expressed any such hostilities. Eisenstein’s job, unfortunately, was to intellectualize what
was happening outside of his control—Soviet mass graves, collectivization and especially
spectator fantasies. His model of the actively cathartic spectator is comparable to
hallucidreaming, a neuropsychological technique by which it is possible to induce
patients to re-enter disturbing dreams and change their outcomes.
Although pornography might seem too obvious a target for critique of fantasy-
driven biological self-transformation, there are subtle aspects to spectator sexuality that
reveal how we effectively hallucidream our way out of a whole variety of threats. Forced
prisoner masturbation in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib, for example, presents a situation
where the conflict between intellectual activity and motor activity prevent any simple
resolution. While the point of male masturbation is actually the release of semen,
stimulation of male organs can only continue to arouse or intensify the muscle tissue that
holds back ejaculation. In order to overcome this contradiction, it is necessary to both
stimulate and undermine sexual organs. Abu Ghraib prisoners, forced to jerk off in front
of each other and prison guards under pain of death, must both sustain erection and
imagine a condition where they feel comfortable ejaculating—where they feel free to
identify, to escape the horrifyingly unsexual reality before them. That this imagining in
the face of guns, filth and ridicule is accomplished by molestation and rape victims on a
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daily basis demonstrates that we have the ability to control and modulate the effects of
our condition—at will.
But this reliance on hallucidreaming, as Baudrillard would argue, robs us of
vitality. It traps us in simulation. Hallucidreaming’s purpose is to serve as a pacifier for
the mentally disturbed, obsessed and vengeful. To be satisfied with it as a strategy for
life beyond the confines of Abu Ghraib sex torture chambers is disgusting. On the
interplay between reason and biology in sex, Eisenstein writes:
Il m’a fallu des annees pour m’apercervoir que le fondement premier des
pulsions est plus large que le sexuel auquel le confine Freud, c’est-a-dire
plus large que le cadre de la simple aventure biologique des personnes
humaines. La sphere du sexe n’est pas advantage qu’un comprime, serre
en un noeud, et qui deja, par d’innombrables retours en spirale, a retrace
des circles de normalite d’un rayon bien plus vaste… Voila pourquoi
m’attire le domaine de la prelogique, comprise a ma facon—ce
subconscient qui inclut, mais n’est pas asservi par, le sexe. (Aumont 110)
Eisenstein believed that sex betrays interplay between the brain and body that pre-dates
spoken language. Because of the physicality inherent in sexual communication,
Eisenstein rejects the confines of Freud’s unconscious.
Sex, for Eisenstein, is an expression of the desire for variation, even deviation.
Homosexuality, a desire that Eisenstein only expressed in his private drawings, is an
undeniable expression of his ideal form of identification—two people of the same sex
controlling each other’s sexual release. Homosexuality defies the internal combustion
model because it denies evolution, dialectics and societal regeneration. It represents both
lebenslust and death simultaneously. If there is any such thing as a training of the senses,
it is found precisely in this zone of non-reproductive pleasure.
2.6 Availability to Truth
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Perhaps tinkering with our own biology, whether through non-reproductive sex or
through simulation, creates an atmosphere where truth can reveal itself. For Wolfgang
Schirmacher, there is no manipulation that can force truth to appear. But both he and
Eisenstein would agree that the body must be available to recognize it:
Truth is a gift of Dasein, which is our place and activity in the world’s
process. As artificial beings by nature, our body as well as our mind is ‘a
happening of truth at work,’ every lived-through moment. Even in the
most inhumane enterprises, truth is still at work in humanity as a silent cry
towards its absence. (Schirmacher Homo Generator 68)
Even in the most barbaric circumstances, the active engagement of our powers of
perception is a process of joy. It provides an opportunity to create--to explore the
role of the artist. Schirmacher writes:
In Nietzsche’s sense the pleasures of perception expressly include
aversion as a shrewd challenge to overcoming itself, and the joy beauty
gives us is intensified by the ‘pleasure taken in the ugly.’ The ‘common
basis of pleasure and aversion,’ forgotten in the everyday scheme of
things, ‘re-emerges’ in the artist. (Schirmacher Art(ificial) 5-6)
Most people experience this self-destructive pleasure that Schirmacher describes while
trying to lose weight. On the one hand, caloric intake is essential to life. Tragically, food
has also become a form of entertainment and psychological reward.
As with all images, as Baudrillard would say, food no longer represents life—it
only reinforces nothingness. Food’s only links to the real is the decay of its consumer’s
digestive tract. This relatively new role for food pits reason against psychophysiology.
According to Evelyn Waugh’s Ishmael, nutritional self-deception began during the
agricultural revolution when nomadic life, hunting and gathering (work) was replaced
with the gleaning of the Earth’s fruits en masse.
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But a deeper deception lies in guilt associated with the food-lie. People actually
gain weight by simply fantasizing about cheating on a diet: guilt and anxiety slow down
from the metabolism; electrodermal activity intensifies; fat cells cling to life. No food
label in the world will contain that meaning.
Ultimately, contradictory images of achievement struggle within and upon us. On
a psychophysiological level, the will to achieve fitness is often sabotaged by the
temptations of self-destruction and self-defeat. In many cases of clinical obesity, hunger
and taste have almost nothing to do with the war of images that is waged between the
nervous system, hormones and various organs. Rather, the compulsive eater’s body acts
upon cancerous images of achievement—metastasizing instructions to sate a hunger that
may have never existed or may only exist in the distant future.
Despite these instances of bodily non-cooperation, man desperately tries to alter
his physical appearance and restrain behavior while simultaneously outlawing mutation,
cross-species mating, etc. Whether we like it or not, our bodies change from one
condition to the next within nanoseconds. The importance of understanding the role of
images behind this phenomenon lies in the question of acceptance: if we can learn to both
scrutinize and actively create the images that we consume and process with the same
urgency we give food, drugs and water, we might reclaim our bodies.
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3. THE IMAGE INTERROGATOR
3.1 The Betrayal of Human Intentions
Given that so many quotidian goals we set for our bodies are thwarted by self-
deception, it seems impossible to achieve even the vaguest sense of identification and
truth in the face of reification, fear, stress, etc. On the one hand, Nietzsche and
Eisenstein present shock and confrontation as fundamental to moving beyond the limits
of reason. At the same time, emotion betrays, by its very definition, our desires, urges
and subjectivity. It is emotion that transforms us into images, not culture as Baudrillard
argues. Nowhere is this more evident that in polygraph lie detection testing. Made
possible by the creation of the EEG machine in 1928, polygraph machines delineate
human discomfort, arousal and interest in intricate details. For Eisenstein, the spectator
body functions as both polygraph sensors and needles. Each gesticulation of the hand,
feet, mouth and eyes is recorded and indicative of degrees of subjectivity.
Emotion in the most general sense is a term synonymous with feelings—moments
when nervous, gastric and respiratory sensations break through the gauze of reason.
These sensations manifest themselves through smiles, sweat, erections, heartburn, etc.
Ironically, the appearance of sweat stimulates other symptoms: anxiety and muscle
tension Despite the intertwining of such psychophysiological events, we are more or less
expected to perform Nicomachean duty – to hold back laughter, hide disgust and even
disguise the need to urinate during take-off and landing. This duty only makes us more
subjective, more aware of the control factor in our lives. Society requires us to hide our
urges and emotional changes so that reason, incorrectly identified as the only path to
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understanding and harmony, might prevail. Yet, reason can never to be free from the
influence of emotions. Pain, pleasure and fatigue dictate priorities.
The idea that external restraints on our psychophysiologies release us from
individual frustrations, desires and preconceptions is totally false. Part of this problem
lies in society’s fetishization of the brain—the “home” of reason—as the only organ
capable of storing, communicating and understanding data. Indeed, a violinist’s hands,
arms and shoulders store the same images of achievement as the brain—three-
dimensional models on how to reach specific notes with specific finger placements, how
to adapt to friction and gravity, and how to compensate for mistakes in bowings. As in
the example of Bernstein’s hammer, the violinist’s adaptability is defined by tremendous
autonomy from the brain.
If indeed Eisenstein wants to pursue advancement of human evolution away from
subjectivity, reason must be thwarted in favor of polygraphic communication. Body
language and voice stress are more linked to meaning than logo-centric symbols rooted in
reason. As I’ve shown, the emergence of sweat and desire is the only physical link that
remains in reference to images.
3.2 The Eisenstein Polygraph
For Eisenstein, drawings and storyboards provided such an opportunity to both
sustain and command the emotive qualities behind his intentions while preparing to direct
a film. The intertwined mathematic and psychosomatic qualities of his sketches bring to
mind the polygraph recording itself. His Mexican sketches of the Crucifixion scene;
better described as experiments in automatic writing, feature uninterrupted lines where
38

the form of Christ takes that of a Bull (Appendix A). Figures merge together at the lips,
and in the case of Christ and his disciples, by fellatio. The pleasure of drawing for
Eisenstein lay directly in discovering the fault lines of his own homosexual attractions
and fantasies in real-time. This auto-pornography requires an openness and awareness of
pleasure—in addition to the synthetic reasoning Eisenstein so highly prized. On this
auto-stimulative factor in emotions, Luria writes:
The development of the voluntary processes comes about as a result of the
elaboration of the various forms of behavior, the mobilization of the
Quasi-Beduerfnisse [what he earlier describes as artificial needs] to
achieve his ends. Voluntary behavior is the ability to create stimuli and
subordinate them; or in other words, or in other words, to bring into being
stimuli of a special order, directed to the organization of behavior. (Luria
401)
Achieving auto-pornography requires what Eisenstein described later in his life as
inner monologue—self-communication designed to modulate emotion, discover desire
and exorcise fantasy. Despite his intentions, inner monologue and hallucidreaming are of
the same species. Both prize a simulated achievement to momentarily satisfy desire,
allay fears and rescue hope. As Baudrillard would argue, talking to oneself in images
only reinforces our image-ness. Where do we escape this virtuality and refind meaning?
To escape the prison of image-subjectivity and the cult of individuality, our
predisposition to ourselves must include laughter, arousal and pleasure. We must learn to
enjoy ourselves—to be curious about what makes us shift from one condition to another.
In other words, hallucidreaming and inner monologue are useful provided that they are
linked to physical exertion. I refuse to confine this to the boundaries of masturbation and
cheating on one’s diet. Successfully lying to a polygraph machine--perhaps the best
example--would mean physically feeling the lie as truth.
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4. MOVING BEYOND IMAGENESS
4.1 The Transmission of Images
Although I have spent a considerable amount of space on the conduct of self-
created and self-imposed images of condition and achievement, there is no doubt that
images we transmit are just as affective and malleable. In fact, the largest theoretical
problem facing media today involves whether can find a way to not infect and destroy
spectators. As spectator bodies change constantly, there should be no doubt that every
stimulus—especially communication—strives to subjectivize and push spectators away
from identification. Fortunately, life’s distractions and stupidity represent safety barriers
for a wide swath of people. Distracted and stupid people are simply not available to be
beside, beyond or outside themselves. Nevertheless, media creators are ethically faced
with two choices: they can embrace the tempting possibility of control over reception of
their communications or they can focus more plainly on reception a goal unto itself.
It is hard to avoid violence against spectators when the nature of montage, as both
Eisenstein and Baudrillard would agree, requires violence against images themselves.
Baudrillard says, “The image (and more generally the sphere of information) is violent
because what happens there is the murder of the Real, the vanishing point of Reality.
Everything must be seen, must be visible, and the image is the site par excellence of this
visibility. But at the same time it is the site of its disappearance” (Baudrillard 4).
Eisenstein argued that images must be treated as organisms (“cells”)—reproductive,
occasionally hostile and at times disobedient.
Yet these same organisms, according to this argument, must be disected,
juxtaposed, and deployed. This method of sending out images to stimulate responses is
40

predicated on the notion that cinema is not only a mass spectacle but an individual one.
Eisenstein may have imagined this as a partial-rehabilitation of Edison’s kinetoscope.
But more importantly than any of this, Eisenstein’s mass spectacle-individual spectator
paradigm transformed cinema into a weapon in the wars on nature and chaos. By
insisting media spectatorship transform into a locus of control, Eisenstein may have
blinded us from the possibility of any benign affects. Remember Baudrillard’s anti-
biotics example: like chemotherapy, cinema kills some of the meat, vitality and identity
of its recipient. So far, all we’ve seen from Eisenstein is the vivisection and none of the
therapy.
The use of filmmaking as a therapeutic approach, I admit, would inevitably mean
the destruction of some part of the patient as well. But in such a model, therapists would
at least be able to consider their work from the perspective of the internal mechanisms
their every communication stimulates—not only in the moment, but as memories of such
communications alter the subject over time. For cinetherapeutic images to relieve
spectators of psychological disorder, the images themselves would have to have the
ability to be time-released like aspirin, deodorant or even rat poison.
This is the very heart of what is intended by the term “interactive media”: that the
functioning of images will ultimately have some stake in the very condition of the
spectator. In other words, interactive media will only be recognizable as such when
images betray their own self-consciousness. Once spectators have a sense of the
implications of their ingestion of images will they and media creators be on an equal
footing to fight out issues of power together. This may be the only solution possible, as
41

improbably as it sounds, after the divorce of the image from the Real and its reassignment
to psychophysiology.
4.2 Another Consideration of Eisenstein’s Metaphysics or “Honey on the Medicine”
Surprisingly enough, Eisenstein admits that he viewed metaphysics as the
essential attraction necessary to shove spectators into ecstasy. In order to make
spectators receptive to manipulation, Eisenstein argues that the purely graphic and
narrative qualities of media must evoke the fallacies of good and evil, poor and rich, God
and Marx. Precisely because metaphysics are the natural tendency of human perception,
they also have the real potential to serve as the proverbial “honey on the medicine.”
Eisenstein writes of this in relationship to his screen adaptation of Capital:
Developper une situation en concept (il serait tres primitive de passer, par
exemple, du manque de pain a la crise dub le et au mecanisme de la
speculation. Mais passer du bouton a la crise de surproduction est deja
plus elegant et plus chair. Dans Ulysse, de Joyce, on trouve un
remarquable chapitre ecrit en style scolasto-cathechistique. On pose des
questions et on donne les reponses. Question sur le theme: comment
allumer un rechaud a petrole. Les reponses s’articulent dans le champ de
la metaphysique. (Eisenstein March 8 1928)
As I mentioned in the introduction, Eisenstein worked with Soviet neuropsychologist
Alexander Luria to develop a film version of Marx’s Capital, based entirely on James
Joyce’s Ulysses. Reflecting the physicality of Ulysses, each reel of Eisenstein’s Capital
would have the same form and function of a human organ.
The problem with this is how is it possible to use metaphysics without
succumbing to them. Setting aside Eisenstein’s instrumentalized ideas on montage and
control, how would one accomplish this separation without creating a new bipolarity of
values and other constructs? Baudrillard would argue that people are metaphysics—any
42

relationship to nuance is forever gone now that we have internalized media clichés to
point of being images ourselves: “The power of control is internalized and people are no
more victims of the image: they transform themselves into images—they only exist as
screens or in a superficial dimension”(Baudrillard 5). At face value, neither Eisenstein
nor Baudrillard offer a strategy for the spectator. Either we must obey or we cannot help
but obey.
Perhaps the answer lies in two elements of what Baudrillard says: “people are no
more victims of the image” and “they transform themselves into images.” By sifting
through strategies of image control and spectator transformation, we mixed up our
priorities: the only escape from this metaphysical trap is the transformation of spectators
as images. To be beside oneself as image means to both stimulate emotion and divorce
oneself from the stimulus. As meta-images, we deny our origins in technology and yet
still live within machines. Only meta-images may evade montage, cutting, fading and
cropping by shoving other images into the sacrificial pit first.
4.3 How can images and media technology best serve man?
The question of control belongs in the domain of machines. Precisely because images
are capable of defying our will suggests that they are not technology—that they are
sentient beings. And yet the function of every aspect of modern image technology is to
individualize man, to diminish his role from active participant to inert consumer, and to
deaden his alertness to forces of “natural selection.” Images medicate, desensitize and
sedate us. Media technology feeds upon our biology, leaving decayed, obese carcasses to
sit back as oblivious bystanders.
43

The emergence of artificial intelligence would lead us believe that this process is
perfectly safe: images and the machines that process will do all the heavy lifting. They
are clever enough to predict threats before they emerge, to perform transactions on our
behalf, and even to distract us from the boredom of details. Yet, we remain only bored,
unexercised and empty. Wouldn’t one prefer to be enervated by Eisenstein’s control
mechanisms than air-conditioned by home improvement television shows? We justify
imperceptible security systems, ergonomically correct keyboards and computerized
medical files by touting their convenience, efficiency and so on. But how can we justify
being left with nothing to do? On this, Baudrillard argues:
People are fascinated, terrified and fascinated by this indifference of the
Nothing-to-see, of the Nothing-to-say, by the indifference of their own
life, as of the zero degree of living. The banality and the consumption of
banality have now become an Olympic discipline of our time—the last
form of the experience of the limits… Something like a struggle for
Nothing and Virtual death—the perfect opposite to the basic
anthropological postulate of the struggle for life. (Baudrillard 6)
One should be thrilled by all this. Now everyone has more free time to do what they
want. But how can one want when the comfort of machines dulls desire, fear and
pleasure?
Images afford us a minimal physical presence in the Real as an additional
comfort. We appear productive so that we don’t question our very stasis. The reality is
that the continuity of our existence does not depend upon the attention span of a Homer
Simpson at the nuclear power plant or an Argenbright employee at the airport baggage
screening machine. It depends entirely upon whether they seem to stare dutifully at a
screen all day and feign attention to anomalies that may or may not exist. Almost every
media technology where our life is supposedly at stake—the Boeing 747-400 cockpit, the
44

air traffic control console, colonoscopy—stumbles into “disaster” because they have no
stake in the operator. Media technology is only interested in the life of the symbols and
representations it processes.
What is most inhumane about media technology is that in so-called security roles,
we must appear force ourselves to pay attention to images that obviously represent
nothing. Professional spectators, as one might call them, are compelled to represent
themselves as acting especially if they are not. Tapping of the feet, chewing finger nails
and so on is only meant to indicate to others that something is being accomplished. This
life as image, as Baudrillard specifies, means:
…that people are decipherable at every moment. Overexposed to the light
of information, and addicted to their own image. Driven to express
themselves at any time—self-expression as the ultimate form of
confession, as Foucault said. To become an image, one has to give a
visual object of his whole everyday life, of his possibilities, of his feelings
and desires… Just here is the deepest violence. (8)
Machines will ultimately replace humans in the role of monitoring “security and safety”
images: this is the greatest favor they can offer humanity. The only danger is that images
will most certainly escape machine control in the same way it escapes human control—
by representing contradictory, intertwined meanings or no meanings at all. But hopefully
that won’t be humanity’s problem anymore. While machines take over our role of image
babysitter in airports, elevators and cockpits, we should join the lead of disobedient
images: obfuscate, circumlocute, and exaggerate. In other words, treat the machines as
Eisenstein treated his spectators.
45

Conclusion
There are four core arguments that I have derived from deconstructing Eisenstein’s
diaries, sketches, films and articles: (1) spectator psychophysiology exposes our body as
a sphincter of images; (2) we can command our bodies to adapt to the world and so can
Eisenstein; (3) media communication entails a responsibility for the psychophysiological
effects of images; and (4) media technologies dulls our desire to evolve and adapt as a
means of taking over the role of the spectator in society.
Eisenstein is traditionally considered a structuralist largely because of his adherence
to Marx, Durkheim, Levi-Bruhl, et al. As unlikely as might have seemed, his diaries
betray a discomfort with the trappings of metaphysics. His use of the word “leap” to
describe the metamorphosis of psychological and physical reactions, for example, retains
the possibility of uncertainty and failure—domains of no particular value to Pavlovians
and Taylorists.
Eisenstein’s previously ignored writings on identification resonate with Nietzsche’s
critique of sameness/similitude. The purpose of Eisenstein’s films was to train spectators
to embrace that they are both alone and unified with others in “likeness.” At the same
time, Eisenstein’s overall critique couldn’t be farther from Nietzsche’s: he insists that
man is handicapped by the cult of individuality, locked in a stasis reinforced by
incompetent media communicators. Images emerge as the Rosetta stone to unlocking the
mysteries of becoming. Simultaneously, as Baudrillard points out, they are the prison
guards of another kind of cell—our own shallowness. Ecstasy, a possible exit hatch out
of this conflict, requires control of some sort—it is made possible by the transmission of
opposing images, assembled according to their degrees of conflict. There is no freedom
46

on the road to the Real. In fact, Eisenstein has therefore demonstrated a useful role for
metaphysics—as the only real enticement for spectators to change.
Ironically, Eisenstein’s contributions to the history of neuropsychology have been
ignored by film and science historians alike. Yet the fact remains that without
Eisenstein’s collaboration with Nikolai Bernstein and Alexander Luria there would be no
“brain holonomy,” as Karl Pribram calls it. Eisenstein contribution to deconstructionist
philosophy lies more in his use of psychophysiology to derive a model for how we can
live fulfilling lives.
Psychophysiology is a misleading term. Its etymology suggests not only a brain/body
dichotomy, but a privileging of psychology over activity. In fact, psychophysiology is
more of a reference to the process of imagining that occurs in both centralized and
autonomous functions all over the body. Although imagination and creativity are
qualities we tend to worship, these abilities exist at all levels of every organism to some
degree or another. Revealing and training these abilities to perceive beyond a given field
of concentration is both the onus of the spectator and the communicator.
Emotion, the one biological factor over which images exert exclusive influence,
serves as both an inhibitor to reason and an enabler for performance. Emotion is
necessary for these changes, and yet it thwarts our attempts at epiphany, identification
and transcendence. Emotion signals those mechanisms, as Goleman writes, that
encourage us into self-deception. On the other hand, acceptance of this very self-
perception means we can more effectively control our moods. The purpose of this is
somewhat pragmatic: whether we like it or not, images shape, persuade, violate and
transform us. To avoid the power inherent in the biological basis of perception would be
47

self-destructive and ultimately catastrophic. Images and media technology have no
problems with taking over this power, and as enticing as it might seem to just get out of
their way, complacency only enables the virtual to live off of our bodies. The first step in
reclaiming the spectator body requires an acknowledgement of the image feeding frenzy
that takes place within and upon our psychophysiologies.
48

REFERENCES
Amengual, Barthelemy. Que Viva Eisenstein!
Paris: Editions L’Age d’Homme, 1980
Aumont, Jacques. Memoires
Paris: Julliard, 1989
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Violence of the Image and The Violence Done to the Image.” A
Lecture Presented at the European Graduate School. Saas-Fee: EGS, 2004
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Evil Demon of Images and the Precession of Simulacra," pp. 194
ff. in Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader. New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1993
Bekhterev, Vladimir. Collective Reflexology
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001
Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form
New York: Harcourt, 1977
Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988
Goleman, Daniel. Vital lies, simple truths : the psychology of self-deception
New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1986, c1985
Luria, Alexander Romanovich. The nature of human conflicts : or emotion, conflict and
will : an objective study of disorganisation and control of human behaviour / translated
from the Russian and edited by W. Horsley Gantt. New York : Liveright, 1976, c1960
Marshall, Herbert. Non-Indifferent Nature (Translation of Eisenstein’s Translation of:
Neravnodushnaia priroda). Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1987
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception
London ; New York : Routledge, 1962
Pribram, Karl. “Keynote lecture at the 10th Scientific Convention of the Society for
Gestalt Theory and its Applications (GTA).” Vienna/Austria, 1997
Ronell, Avital. Stupidity
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002
Schirmacher, Wolfgang. “Art(ificial) Perception: Nietzsche and Culture after Nihilism”
from Poeisis: A Journal of the Arts and Communication. Saas Fee: EGS Press, 1999
49

Schirmacher, Wolfgang. “Eco-Sophia” from Philosophy and Technology 9: Ethics and
Technology, Ed. Carl Mitcham, Greenwich/London: JAI Press, 1989 pp. 125-134
Schirmacher, Wolfgang. “Homo Generator: Media and Postmodern Technology” from
Culture on the Brink, Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 9, Eds. Gretchen
Bender and Timothy Druckrey. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994, pp. 65-82
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking awry: an introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c1991
ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Amengual, Barthelemy. Que Viva Eisenstein!
Paris: Editions L’Age d’Homme, 1980
Aumont, Jacques. Memoires
Paris: Julliard, 1989
Aumont, Jacques. Montage Eisenstein
Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1987
Berstein, Nikolai Aleksandrovich. Biomekhanika dl i a instruktorov︠ ︡
Moscow: Nova i a Moskva", 1926︠ ︡
Bulgakowa, Oksana. Sergej Eisenstein-Drei Utopien
Berlin: Potemkin Press, c. 1998
Bulgakowa, Oksana. Eisenstein und Deutschland
Berlin Akademie der Künste; Henschel Verlag, 1998
Eisenstein, Sergei. The Eisenstein Reader / edited by Richard Taylor
London : British Film Institute, 1998
Evreinov, Nikolai Nikolaievich. N teatral nosti
St. Petersburg: Lenii Sad, 2002
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concening Technology and Other Essays
New York : Garland Pub., 1977
Joravsky, David. Russian psychology : a critical history
Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA : Blackwell, 1989
Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983
50

Luria, Alexander Romanovich. Basic Problems of Neurolinguistics
The Hague: Mouton, 1976
Luria, Alexander Romanovich. Language and Cognition
New York : J. Wiley, 1981
Mills, John A. Control : a history of behavioral psychology
New York : New York University Press, c1998
Pribram, Karl H. Biology of memory. Edited by Karl H. Pribram [and] Donald E.
Broadbent, New York: Academy Press, 1970
Pribram, Karl H. Brain and Perception
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1991
Pribram, Karl H. Languages of the Brain; experimental paradoxes and principles in
neuropsychology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1971
Schirmacher, Wolfgang. “Homo Generator: Media and Postmodern Technology” from
Culture on the Brink, Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 9, Eds. Gretchen
Bender and Timothy Druckrey. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994, pp. 65-82
Zizek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment : Six Essays on Woman and Causality
London, New York : Verso, 1994
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APPENDIX A: SKETCHES AND FILM SEQUENCE EXAMPLES
MEXICAN AUTO-PORNOGRAPHY:THE EISENSTEIN POLYGRAPH
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SUBJECTIFICATION OF OBJECTS
53

(mis)behavior of images

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