Radical

Pedagogy
Working
Group
week 8:
Yvonne Rainer &
Anna Halprin
BHQFU - SP 2016

Looking Myself in the Mouth

Sliding Out of Narrativeand Lurching
Back In, Not Once but...
Is the "New Talkie" Something
to Chirp About?
From Fiction to Theory
(Kicking and Screaming)
Death of the Maiden, I Mean Author,I
Mean Artist... No, I Mean Character
A RevisionistNarrativizationof/with
Myselfas Subject (Still Kicking) via
John Cage's Ample Back

YVONNE RAINER

I. A Likely Story:What I Know and What I Think I Feel

She says, "Yes, I was talking with Joan Bradermanabout the subject in
signifyingpractice,and she broughtup the idea thateverythingis fictionexcept
theory."
Hard as she tries to focus on this most intriguingidea, she findsherself
distractedby the recognitionof an annoyinghabit to which she revertswhenever
discussingtheory,viz.,a tendencyto transform
theoryinto narrativebyinterpolating what she calls "concreteexperience"in theformofa first-person
pronoun and
progressiveverb,such as "Yes, I was talkingwith ..." or "I've been reading this
book by..." or, even worse, "Yesterdayas I was walking down Broadway I was
thinking..." The obvious motive might be to bolster or support her own
to known and respectedfigureswho have advanced similar
argumentbyreferring
or
to
make
an analogy thatmightilluminate theissue at hand. There
arguments,
is, however,anotherway to describe the phenomenon which points to eithera
conflictor a contradiction-dependingon how one looks at it.
(Artistas ExemplarySufferer)
(Artistas Self-AbsorbedIndividualist)
(Artistas Changer of the Subject)
She knows that the contentof her thoughtsconsistsentirelyof what she's
read, heard, spoken, dreamt,and thoughtabout what she's read, heard,spoken,
dreamt. She knows that thought is not something privileged, autonomous,
originative,and that the formulation"Cogito ergo sum" is, to say the least,

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66

OCTOBER

inaccurate.She knows too thathernotionof "concreteexperience"is an idealized,

fictionalsite where contradictionscan be resolved,"personhood" demonstrated,
and desire fulfilledforever.Yet all the same the magical, seductive,narrative
propertiesof "Yes, I was talking.. ." draw her with an inevitabilitythatmakes
her slightlydizzy.She stands tremblingbetweenfascinationand skepticism.She
moves obstinatelybetweenthe two.
"Yes, I am constructedin language," she thinks."And no, I don't thinkI've
ever really advocated a 'restoredintegrityof the self.'" She pauses, bites at a
cuticle,and finally-in a burstof sheerexasperation--facesthe camera squarely
and blurts,"But when I say, 'Yes, I was thinking .. ,' you'd just betterbelieve
me!"
Linguistically,theauthor is nevermore than theinstancewriting,just
as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a
'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, emptyoutside of the very
to make language 'hold together',
enunciationwhich definesit,suffices
it.
that
is
to
to
exhaust
suffices,
say,
-Roland Barthes'
as
(Artist Medium)
(Artistas Ventriloquist)
II. The Cagean Knot
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the ongoing modernistassault took as its
targetscertainassumptionsbythencodifiedin theinstitutionofAmericanmodern
dance: the necessityof musical accompaniment;the inadmissability-and neceseverydaymovement;the rigid and inviolable separasity of transformation--of
tionsbetweenhumorous,tragic,dramatic,and lyricalforms;theexistenceofrules
governingsequence climax and developmentof movement("theme and variations"), and therelationshipof movementto music, cliched notions of coherence
and unity,and exact conditions under which "dissonance" mightreplace "harmony" (as in "modern" themesof "alienation"). You heard a lot of Bartok at
dance concertsin those days.
The forerunnersof this assault were Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
(Artistas Innovator)
In mutual determinationtheysucceededin opening a veritablePandora's Box, an
act that launched in due course a thousand dancers', composers',writers',and
performanceartists'ships, to say nothingof theswarmsofsalubriouslynastyideas
it loosed upon an increasinglygeneral populace, ideas which are apparent even
today in fluxus-likepunk performances.I would ventureto say thatby now the

"The Death of the Author," Image-Music-Text,trans. Stephen Heath, New York, Hill and
1.
Wang, 1977,p. 145.

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Looking Myselfin the Mouth

67

"Cagean effect"is almost as endemicas theencountergroup. I say "Cagean" and

not "Cunninghamian" because it is Cage who has articulatedand published the
concepts which I shall be addressing here and which have been especially
problematicin myown development.It is not myintentionto forcethelid shuton
John'sBox, but ratherto examine certaintroublingimplicationsof his ideas even
as theycontinue to lend themselvesto amplificationin art-making.
Only a man born with a sunny disposition could have said:
This play, however,is an affirmation
of life,not an attemptto bring
orderout ofchaos nor to suggestimprovementson creation,but simply
a way of waking up to the verylife we're living which is so excellent
once one getsone's mind and one's desiresout of itsway and lets it act
of its own accord.
-John Cage2
(Artistas Consumer)
Let's not come down too heavilyon the goofynaiveteof such an utterance,
on its invocation of J. J. Rousseau, on Cage's adherenceto themessianicideas of
BuckyFuller some yearsback,withtheirtotalignoringofworldwidestrugglesfor
liberation and the realities of imperialistpolitics, on the suppression of the
question, "Whose lifeis so excellentand at what cost to others?"Let's focuson the
means by which we will awaken to this excellentlife: by gettingour minds and
desiresout of the way, bymaking way foran artof indeterminacyto be practiced
by everyone,an artexistingin thegap betweenlifeand art.All thisand more has
been statedhundredsof timesin more ways than one.
Who am I and what is my debt to John Cage? My earlydances (1960-62)
employedchance proceduresor improvisationto determinesequences of choreographed movementphrases. At that point, for some of us who performedat
JudsonChurchin New York City,repetition,indeterminatesequencing,sequence
arrivedat by aleatorymethods,and ordinary/untransformed
movementwere a
slap-in-the-faceto the old order,and, dimly beknownstto us, reached straight
(Artistas Transgressor)
back to the surrealistsvia the expatriatedDuchamp. Our own rationales were
and confident.We were "opening up possibilities" and
clear, on-the-offensive,
"thwartingexpectationsand preconceptions."A frequentresponse to the bafflementof theuninitiatedwas "Why not?" We werereceivedwithhorrorand enthusiasm. I can't beguile myselfinto thinkingthatthe world has not been thesame
since.
What is John Cage's giftto some of us who make art?This: therelayingof
conceptual precedentsfor methods of nonhierarchical,indeterminateorganization which can be used with a critical intelligence, that is, selectivelyand
2.
Quoted in Richard Barnes, "Our Distinguished Dropout," in John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz,New York, Praeger, 1970,p. 51.

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68

OCTOBER

productively,not, however, so we may awaken to this excellent life; on the

contrary,so we may the more readilyawaken to theways in which we have been
led to believe thatthis life is so excellent,just, and right.
The reintroductionof selectivityand control,however,is totallyantithetical
to the Cagean philosophy, and it is selectivityand control that I have always
intuitively-by this I mean "without question"-brought to bear on Cagean
devices in my own work. In the light of semiological analysis I have found
vindicationof those intuitions.In the same light it is possible to see Cage's decentering-or violation of theunity-of the "speaking subject" as more apparent
than real.
Beforegoing on I wish to say that it makes me mad that,as importanta
figureas he is to any discussionofAmericanmodernism,JohnCage has not to my
knowledge been examined within the frameworkof the various reworkingsof
Freudian and Marxisttheorythathave been accumulatingwith such impressive
resultsoverthepast twodecades. In Franceand England thisis in partattributable
to the factthatsuch theoreticalwritingshave concentratedon literatureand film
to theexclusionof music. Not thattheFrench-with theirtendencyto romanticize
American "irrationalism"--coulddo him justice at thispoint. The English know
little about him, and the Germans zeroed in on him too early to make use of
Frenchcriticaltheory.I am ignorantof writingson him thatmay have appeared
in othercountriesin which he has performedand lecturedextensively,such as
Sweden and Denmark. In America I tend to blame the avant-gardecritical
establishmentfor its neglect of this most influentialman. So whom does that
leave? Me?! Well, sometimes artistsrush in where criticsrefuseto tread. In
(Artistas Failed Primitive)
(Artistas Failed Intellectual)
the noisy silence that surroundsthe man, I shall produce a fewsemioticchirps.

III. Five-Hundred-PoundCanary
What are the implications of the Cagean abdication of principles for
or
assigning importanceand significance?A method formaking indeterminate,
forrandomizing,a sequence of signifiers
a
concomitant
arbitrariness
in
produces
the relationof signifierto signified,a situationcharacterizednot by an effacement
of signifiersby signifiedas in Gone with the Wind,nor by a shiftingrelationship
of signifierto signifiedwherebythesignifier
itself,or theact ofsignifying,
bybeing
foregrounded,becomes problematic, but by a denial and suppression of a
relationshipaltogether.
What is this but an attemptto deny the veryfunctionof language and, by
extension, the signifyingsubject, which is, according to Lacan's definition,
dependent on and constructedthrough and in systemsof signification,i.e.,
language?

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Looking Myselfin the Mouth

69

A signifyingpractice... is a complex processwhich assumes a (speakdiscernable

ing) subject admittingof mutations,loss of infinitization,
in the modificationsof his discourse but remaining irreducibleto its
formalityalone, since theyreferback on theone hand to unconsciousinstinctual processes and, on the other, to the socio-historicalconstraintsunder which the practicein question is carriedon.
-Julia Kristeva3
The highestpurpose is to have no purpose at all.
-John Cage
For Cage, either to problematize,i.e., call into question, a "purposive"
subject,or to grantadmission to a "mutating,"finiteone, would have been to risk
becoming reentangledin those hated measurementsof genius and inspiration
(Artistas Shaman)
(Artistas Visionary)
thatparticularlyinfestedthe world of music, and in those "ambiguities,hidden
. . . silentpurposesand obscurecontents
meanings (which requireinterpretation),
(which giveriseto commentary).""Cage's solutionwas to throwout thebabywith
the bathwater.In the absence of a signifyingsubject,not only "modificationsof
discourse" become untenable, but also the concept of an unconscious which
manifestsitselfin the heterogeneityand contradictionsof the subject as it is
positioned in relationshipsof identityand differenceby "socio-historicalconstraints,"not the least of which is the patriarchalorderitself.Trying to operate
outside of theseprocesses,a Cagean "nonsignifyingpractice"sees itselfas existing
in a realm of pure idea, anteriorto language-without mind, without desire,
withoutdifferentiation,
withoutfinitude.In a word,thatrealm of idealismwhich
so much of our capricious,wavering,flawed,lurchingtwentieth-century
art has
similarlyfailed-while being so committed-to violate.
Surrealism, unable to accord language a supreme place (language
being a systemand the aim of the movementbeing, romantically,a
directsubversionof codes-itself moreoverillusory:a code cannot be
destroyed;only 'played off'),contributedto the desacralizationof the
image of the Author by ceaselesslyrecommendingthe abrupt disappointmentof expectationsof meaning.
-Roland Barthes5
From the standpoint of consumption, if meaning is constantlybeing
subvertedbeforea practicethatrefusesto make or breaksigns,if the avowed goal
of a work is a succession of "nonsignifyingsignifiers,"one is leftwith an im3.
4.
5.

"The Subject in SignifyingPractice," Semiotext(e),no. 3 (1975), 19.

Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?"Screen,vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring 1979), 17.
"Death of the Author,"p. 144.

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OCTOBER

70

eventsset in motion by and referring

back to
penetrableweb of undifferentiated
in this case the abandonmentof personal
the original flamboyantartist-gesture,
taste.The work thus places an audience in the "mindless" (sensual?) position of
appreciatinga manifestationof yetone more
Artistas TranscendentalEgo
and excludesit fromparticipationin
the formingof the meanings of that manifestationjust as surelyas any monolithic,unassailable, and properlyvalidatedmasterpiece.JohnCage can now-and
perhaps always could-be safelytaught in any high school music appreciation
course. His genius is beyondquestion; the productof that genius beyondambiguity.
What was it actually thatmade me choose music ratherthanpainting?
Justbecause theysaid nicerthingsabout mymusic than theydid about
my paintings?But I don't have absolute pitch. I can't keep a tune. In
fact,I have no talentformusic. The last time I saw her,Aunt Phoebe
said, "You're in the wrong profession."
-John Cage6
(Artistas Misfit)
I was telling some of my students at the Whitney Independent Study
Program that ten yearsago I had been invitedthereto conduct a seminar.I had
begun by playing a record of Billie Holiday singing "The Way You Look
Tonight," repeatedlyliftingand replacing the arm of the recordplayer as, with
I triedto learn themelody.I couldn't get
and embarrassment,
increasingdifficulty
it and had at lengthto give it up. At thispoint in the storyMartyWinn said, "So
theyhired you!"
IV. Bang the Tale Slowly
AfterI had been studyingwith him fortwo years,Schoenbergsaid, "In
order to write music you must have a feeling for harmony." I then
explained to him thatI had no feelingforharmony.He thensaid thatI
would always encounteran obstacle,thatit would be as thoughI came
to a wall throughwhich I could not pass. I said, "In thatcase I will
devotemy life to beating my head against thatwall."
-John Cage7
I was just beginningto congratulatemyselfforhaving finallytriumphed,in
Journeysfrom Berlin/1971, over the tyrannyof narrative. I didn't need it
6.
7.

A Year fromMonday, Middletown,WesleyanUniversity,1967,p. 118.

Ibid., p. 114.

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Looking Myselfin the Mouth

71

anymore,I told myself.The distinctparts of that filmnevercome togetherin a

spaciotemporalcontinuity.From thispoint ofview,narrativeseemedno longerto
be an issue. If thefilmmade any effort
towardintegratingtheseparate"speakers,"
it was at thelevel of anotherkind ofdiscourse,propellednot bynarrative,but bya
heterogeneous interweavingof verbal texts acting on/against/in relation to
images. What a thrillingidea: to be freeof the compelling and detesteddomination of cinematic narrativitywith its unseen, unspoken codes for arranging
images and language with a "coherence, integrity,fullness,and closure," so
lacking in the imperfectrealityit purportsto mirror.
Upon closerexamination,however,it becomesclear thata particularaspect
of narrative,namely character,is a consistentpresence in Journeysfrom Berlin/1971as it is-often by dint of its conspicuous absence-in my threeprevious
films.It was, in fact,a decisivefactorin a move fromdance to filmin theearly'70s.
Upon closer examination it seems to me thatI am going to be banging myhead
against narrativefora long time to come.
But once we have been alertedto the intimaterelationshipthatHegel
we cannot
suggestsexists between law, historicality,and narrativity,
but be struckby the frequencywith which narrativity,
whetherof the
fictionalor the factualsort,presupposestheexistenceof a legal system
against or on behalfof which the typicalagentsof a narrativeaccount
militate.
-Hayden White8
"Language knows a 'subject,' not a 'person,"'" says Barthes. A central
presumption of narrativityis that "subject" may become synonymouswith
"Authorityof the Law" in an unseen leap that is implicit in everyinstance of
narrativediscourse. In literatureit has traditionallybeen the author-conflatedwith-narrator
thathas occupied thisposition of authority.In mainstreamcinema
a more encompassingillusionism tendsto suppressthepresenceof thewriter/directorto a greaterdegree.As a consequence, authorial status is assumed exclusivelyby a "character,"a designationwhich-with all of its implicitcompounding of self-containednarrator,"person," "persona," and legal/psychological
existence-blocks theintrusionof an anteriorauthorship,at once embodyingthe
representationof, and unseen leap between,subject and legal system.
Godard was probably the firstdirector working within the illusionist
narrativefilmtraditionto "meddle" with the integrityof this usually singular
speaking position. He accomplished this byhaving a given characterspeak from
different
authorialpositions,including thatof performer,
but also byintroducing
the presence-usually in voice-over-of anotherauthorship,a commentatorneithersufficiently
"filledin" to be a character,nor sufficiently
"omniscient" to be a
8.
"The Value of Narrativityin the Representationof Reality," Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1
(Autumn 1980), 17.

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72

OCTOBER

narrator,nor identifiablewith any conclusivenessas speaking theopinions of the

director/writer
himself,even when it is unquestionably the voice of the director
that we hear. The tension attendanton this splitting of authorship among
character,performer,commentator,and director/writer
produces fissuresand
contradictionswhich the viewer must consciously registerin order to "get"
anythingfromthe film.
Who speaks (in thenarrative)is not who
writes(in real life) and who writesis not
who is.
-Roland Barthes
The thingthatpushed me towardnarrativeand ultimatelyinto cinema was
"emotional life." I wished not exactly to "express" emotion, certainlynot to
mimic it, and I wasn't sure whethera recognizablesocial contextwould play a
part. I knew little more than that its means of presentationwould be largely
language, and that when spoken, it would be spoken by someone. Not that I
hadn't used spoken textsbefore.In everycase, however,eitherdisjunctionbetween
movementand speech or the separation inherentin dance presentationbetween
what is performedand the person performingit had preventedthe speech from
being receivedas "belonging to" theperformer
utteringit. Upon takingup film,I
would perforcebe dealing with an entirelydifferentregisterof relationship
between"spoken" and "speaker." The problemwould be not so much in getting
themtogetheras tearingthemapart.
I was not only enteringa new medium,but was jettisoninga whole lexicon
of formalizedmovementand behavior,realizinginstinctively
thatcertainconcessions to "lifelikeness"would have to be made. For the most part my speaking
performerswould be doing what people, or characters,so often do in "the
movies": sit around,eat, walk down the street,ride bicycles,look at things,etc. If
theydanced in my early films,I gave them good reason by assigning them the
occupation "dancer."
From the beginning I used a loose, paratactic,nondramaticconstruction,
morenarrativein feelingthan fact.My primary"mission," as I see it now, was to
avoid narrativecontextualizingthat would require synchronized,"naturalized"
speech to continue forverylong in any given seriesof shots. I could neverquite
satisfactorily
account-publicly-for thenecessityof myparticularalternativesto
conventional narrativefilms.I veeredunsettlinglyclose to formalistgeneralizations ("It hasn't been done; it's thereto do; it's another'possibility'") to thepoint
of almost denying altogetherthat my enterprisehad any significanceas social
criticism,or thatit was an "intervention"against illusionistcinema. Or I aboutfaced and took up the cudgels of the illusionist-cinema-produces-passive-viewer
argument.I feltinadequate to the taskofadvancinga morepertinentargumentto
supportmyaversionto the "acting" and "acting out" requiredby thenarratological character.

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Looking Myselfin the Mouth

73

As recentlyas summer of 1980 I findmyselfsaying in Millennium Film

Journal:
Previously I used whateverinterestedme. I was able to absorb and
arrange most materialsunder some sliding rule of thumb governing
formaljuxtaposition. Everythingwas subsumed under the kinds of
collage strategiesthat had characterizedmy dancing, and could even
include a kind of mechanistic,or quasi-psychologicalnarrative.9
Still laboring under long-standingCagean habits of thoughtabout whatI'd
done-and here I'm talking literallyabout doing one thingand describingit as
another-I was willing to annex my labors to that segmentof the surrealist
traditionwhich, from Schwittersto Cage to Rauschenberg,has used "collage
of meaning. On
strategies"to equalize and suppress hierarchicaldifferentiations
another face of it, my work can be, and has been, read as a kind of reductivism
coming out of '60s minimal art,a view which I myselfheld when I was making
dances. It still seems that the refusal to investmy filmperformerswith the full
statureand authorityof charactersshares at some level the same impulse that
substituted"running" for"dancing" manyyearsago. What marksthisrefusalin
the medium of filmas not simplyan obsolescentholdoverfroman earlierway of
doing thingsis thatfromthe theveryoutsetit was broughtto bear against a fullblown institutionand manifesteditself in specific,pertinent,and contesting
strategies.
Speaking of themedieval annals, an earlyformof European historiography,
Hayden White writes:
For the annalist, thereis no need to claim the authorityto narrate
events since there is nothing problematical about their status as
manifestationsof a realitythat is being contested.Since thereis no
"contest," thereis nothing to narrativize.... It is necessaryonly to
recordthemin the orderthat theycome to notice,forsince thereis no
contest,thereis no storyto tell.10
The implied narratorof theannalist's account is the"Lord," whose supreme
authorityhas subsumed all human need to change "the order[in which things]
come to notice." Here we can discoverthestoryofJohnCage come full-circle.For
all of John'sBuddhistleanings and egalitarianespousals, forall ofhis objections
to hierarchiesand consequent seeming to operatein thespace leftby theabsence
of God, his ideas lead inevitably back to the "no contest" of White's early
historian.We can't have it bothways: no desireand no God. To have no desirefor "improvementson creation"-is necessarilycoequal to having no quarrel
9.
Nodl Carroll, "Interviewwith a Woman Who ...,"
Winter1980-81),44.
10. White,p. 22.

Millennium Film Journal,nos. 7-9 (Fall-

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OCTOBER

74

with-God-given-manifestations of reality.Any such dispassionate stance in

turn obviates the necessityof "retelling" the way thingshave been given. The
converseof thissituationis a stateofaffairswhich Cage-rightfully-most feared:
we are surroundedby manifestationsof realitythat are not God-given but all
fuckedup byhuman societyand thatmustbe contestedand reorderedbya human
"NarrativizingAuthority"which, by so representingthem,will impartto events
an integrityand coherencecut to the measure of all-too-humandesire.
Maybe I'm being simple-mindedwhen I say theproblem(not thesolution) is
clear: to track down the NarrativizingAuthoritywhere it currentlylives and
wallop thedaylightsout of it. And wheredoes it now live?The battlezone is not a
ofnarrative,nor,
outside of theoverdeterminations
sereneplane of indeterminacy
of the storyand
as I put it in 1973, "somewherebetweenthe excessivespecificity
the emotional unspecificity
of object-orientedpermutations,""thinkingit would
of Scylla and theformalismof
be somethinglike steeringbetweenthenarrativity
Charybdis.
(Is who speaks [in the essay] The Artist
[in real life]and is The Artistwho is?)
In cinema thebattlegroundis neitherbetweennor outside.The battleground
and the means by which theyare
is narrativityitself,both its constructs/images
constructed;both its signs and its signifiers.

V. In the N.A.'s Lair

The reluctanceto declare its codes characterizesbourgeois societyand
themass cultureissuing fromit: both demand signs whichdo not look
like signs.
-Roland Barthes12
to
a
an
ultimate
'secret',
By refusing assign
meaning,to thetext(and to
the world as text), [writing]liberates what may be called an antitheological activity,an activitythat is trulyrevolutionarysince to
refuseto fixmeaning is, in the end, to refuseGod and his hypostasesreason, science,law.
-Roland Barthes'3

11.
Yvonne Rainer, Work1961-73,Halifax and New York, The Pressof theNova Scotia College of
Art and Design/New York UniversityPress, 1974,p. 244.
"Introductionto the StructuralAnalysisof Narratives,"Image-Music-Text,p. 116.
12.
"Death of theAuthor," p. 147.
13.

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Looking Myselfin the Mouth

75

A House bytheRiver:The Wrong

Dan Walworth.
Shape.1980.
Arguing with Douglas Beer about Dan Walworth'sfilm,A House by the
River: The WrongShape, stirredup some thoughts.There are a numberof clues
in this filmpointing to the instabilityof the narrative,I mean a fragilityin the
relationshipof speech to speaker,action to actor.This instabilityin turntellsus
thatwe are to listento theverbaltext,a historicalcritiqueof thebourgeoisfamily,
in its own right, at least not to judge it primarilyand absolutely from the
standpointof its having emanatedfromthe lips of a "bad actor" or a particular
student.True, recognition
character,in thiscase a seventeen-or eighteen-year-old
our
of thecharacter:"student,"and situation:"presentationofpaper," does affect
be
to
or
discredit
receptionof the text.Whateverone's initial impulse, however,
is
a
student's
term
inattentivebecause "it's only
paper" quickly mitigatedby a
of social reality
film
the
In
kind
of
various
of
factors.
this
number
representations
do not have, necessarily,equivalent relations to theirreferentswith respectto
meaning. The "classroom" is stable as a signifiedinsofar as it consistently
illustratesthosepartsof thetextthatdeal withschool. The "student,"on theother
of
hand, is not. What with theprolongationof theclassroomshot,theformality
its fixedframing,and the densityand duration of the student'sreading, our
"reading" of theperformancemoves back and forthfrom"character"to "agentThe effect
of thismovementis to put boththerepresentafor-transmitting-a-text."
tion and the verbaltextinto a precariousbalance: thecharacterization
constantly
and
covered
dissolves and reforms-the signifier-performer
alternatelyexposed
over-and at thesame timetheunstablesignified-"student"
spills overas a kindof
metaphor,ratherthan identity,informingthe spoken textas being other than
authorial, as being in a state of flux,in process, to-be-scrutinized
by the artistThe audience, ratherthan moving from
filmmakerand "audience-filmmaker."
now passes fromrecognition
to identification/repulsion
perception/recognition
to criticalattention.

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76

OCTOBER

Do I seem to be paraphrasing Brecht?Yes and no. I'm not mentioning

You can lead a horse to water; you cannot make it
knowledge/understanding.
drink.
This texthas been concernedwith the necessityforproblematizinga fixed
relation of signifierto signified,the notion of a unifiedsubject,and, specifically,
within the codes of narrativefilmpractice, the integrityof the narratological
character.Anysuch problematizing,calling into question, or "playing off"of the
termsof significationof necessityinvolvesan "unfixing"of meaning,a venturing
into ambiguity,an exposing of the signs that constituteand promulgatesocial
inequities.
I have also analyzed the contradictionsin John Cage's conceptsof indeterminacy. It is importantthat Cage's effortsto eliminate and suppress meaning
should in no way be confusedwith the refusalto fix meaning of which Barthes
speaks. Cage's refusal of meaning is an abandonment,an appeal to a Higher
Authority.The refusal thathas been of more concern to me is a confrontation
with-and within--authorialsignifyingcodes. I wouldn't go so faras Barthesin
calling such confrontationa revolutionaryactivity,at least not at this point in
time.Nevertheless,insofaras it involvesa certainamountof riskand struggle,it is
an importantand necessaryactivity.
A last paraphrase on the battlegroundof cinematic narrativity:As the
characterdies it is not inconceivablethatsome membersof theaudience will come
to theirsenses. And I don't mean Aristotle.

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