A “Public” List

1.1) Trapped in Public-ity

As Thomas Keenan notes in his essay Windows: Of Vulnerability, the notion of the public has changed in direct relation to the significance of the “window” as a cultural metaphor. Like the “window” that does no longer open onto another world, but onto the same one in another form, “the public” has grown to be integrated into the notion of the private, though latently so – as potentiality (1), as the following citation suggests:

The public sphere is structurally elsewhere, neither lost nor in need of recovery and rebuilding, but defined by its resistance to being made present. (2)

The result of this shift in the notion of the public is alarming, I believe: public-ity becomes a “mark” of the human being, a characteristic indissolubly connected with the human being. In other words, the human being is trapped in public-ity. In a sense, this amounts to what Walter Benjamin calls a “loss of the aura” (3) – only, this time, it is of the human being, for the public human being is subject to “reproduction” – not necessarily in the biological way, but in terms of his/her image that ceases to be a personal possession. In the public sphere, the human being loses the “copyrights” to his/her own image (and self).

With this in mind, I believe that answering a mobile phone in public does not create a “rupture of space”, an infiltration of the private into the public, as Prof. Chun suggested in the lecture. By contrast, it illustrates precisely this idea of the public being integrated into the private, for the mobile phone-answerer remains in the private sphere only in as far as he/she respects the rules of the public sphere. If, for example, he/she raises his/her voice to such an extent that he/she disturbs the other private persons in the public sphere, he/she is likely to be interfered with precisely on account of his/her public-ity.

The question to be addressed under these circumstances is then: how can we deal with this “inherent”, inescapable public-ity?

1.2) Image, knowledge, and performance

In the essay Windows: Of Vulnerability, Thomas Keenan states: “Human knowledge stems from the gaze” (4). In the same line, in Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television) he makes the following assertion: “Images (…) make things happen, sometimes too quickly” (5). The insistence on the power of the image and on the seeing-being seen mechanism and its implications appears to be prominent in both of the readings from Keenan for this week, and justly so, in my view, as the contemporary world seems to function on visual perception and image-negotiation. However, in her lecture, Prof. Chun appears to have focused almost exclusively on language and its relation to publicity. Is this because she operates with an extended definition of “language” covering “image” as well as other forms of representation?

2.1) The autonomy of aesthetics

The most intriguing aspect of Solanas and Getino’s manifesto is for me the requirement that art must be subservient to politics: “Dissolve aesthetics in the life of society”, ”The film, important only as a detonator or pretext” (6). Yet, calling into question – and even more than that, denying – the autonomy of aesthetics is in contradiction with the very notion of “art” as I conceive of it and as it has been defined since Antiquity (since Aristotle or even before him) onwards. What Solanas and Getino propose, therefore, is not a new art – for there can be no art without the autonomy of the aesthetic, in my view – but a new ideology. This, I believe, cannot be achieved in/through film or other works of art (the existence of the work of art presupposes the autonomy and primacy of aesthetics).

Essentially based on aesthetic primacy, the actual Third Cinema films are, thus, not the Third Cinema that Solanas and Getino envisaged in the Toward a Third Cinema manifesto. Sembene’s film Ceddo illustrates this idea. As Philip Rosen suggests in his essay Discursive Space and Historical Time, the creation of this film involves a series of decisions that account (in my opinion) for the primacy of aesthetics. For example, aesthetic considerations clearly underlie the technique of the “dissolved” close-ups (7) that Sembene so successfully employs. Even though political considerations might also be at stake here, these are secondary and not immediately grasped by all the spectators.

The Third Cinema as it was practically developed, therefore, is distinct from its theoretical formulation by Solanas and Getino in at least one fundamental way. This is because, in my view, a theory about Cinema that disregards the primacy of aesthetics cannot be validated and applied.

Notes

(1) Bentham’s concept of the panopticon is in operation here, in my view, though at another level. Thus, the private person is always – at least as potentiality – public, and this is embedded in his/her own privacy. Being private now presupposes being public. (2) Thomas Keenan, “Windows: Of Vulnerability” in The Phantom Public Sphere, Ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), p.135

(3) Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), p.223

(4) Thomas Keenan, “Windows: Of Vulnerability” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), p.126

(5) Thomas Keenan, “Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)” in PMLA 117:1 (January 2002), p.109

(6) Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema” in Reviewing Histories: Selections From New Latin American Cinema, ed. Coco Fusco (Buffalos, NY: Hallwalls, 1987), p. 63& p. 77

(7) Philip Rosen, “Discursive Space and Historical Time: Ceddo” in Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, ed. Jeffrey Geiger, R.L. Rutsky (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 732