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Sharon Willis

“Scenes from the Institutionalization of the Field,” the title of our Part I, immediately puts me in mind of the scene selection function built into the design of most of the DVDs that deliver to me my object of study: film. Among its many rewards, the DVD offers us the ability to archive or edit this object, to pause it or repeat it, to return again and again to its most pleasurable or confusing or elusive moments. This device both denatures the “original” and restores it to us in the capacities for reflection and analysis it affords us.

In Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Laura Mulvey pays special attention to the temporal reshaping that digital technology brings to the cinematic object. “[W]ith this completely altered sense of time,” she writes, “it seems possible to capture the cinema in the process of its own coming into being. A segment extracted from the flow of narrative bears witness to the pull towards tableaux that has always been there in cinema” (Mulvey 2006, 150). Spectacle resists narrative in this format, she points out appreciatively. “To halt, to return and to repeat these images is to see cinematic meaning coming into being as an ordinary object detached from its surroundings… But delaying the image, extracting it from its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deferred meaning, to the story’s narration” (150–1). In a passage inflected by the affective tonality of pleasure and gratification, Mulvey registers the ways in which digital technology may restore cinema to us as a “lost object.”

What a contrast to the aggressive force that energized her famous early essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which offers a section heading of the form “Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon” and ends by announcing its ambition to “free the look of the camera into its materiality and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment” (Mulvey 1989, 126)! In the loss of an object through its willful destruction, this early statement strives to escape the entanglements of visual fetishism, while Mulvey’s more recent work seems to revel in its pleasures, endowing them with an analytical force.

But among all its gratifications, analytical and sensual alike, DVD technology also imposes an interpretive frame extrinsic to film as an object—no matter how we construe it. Dividing films by “scene” selection or into “chapters,” DVDs attach titles to the segments they create, supplying an interpretive gloss on the digital artifact. Into the bargain, the choice itself to name this segmentation by scene or chapter evokes the gravitational pull of other media—theatrical or literary, for example. Film mutates into an intermedial hybrid, a creolized object across which, and through which, media speak to one another and entertain one another’s ghosts. Thus the imprint of a new form of segmentation—quite foreign to the film medium itself in its management of the information it delivers as a “film”—reminds us of the loss of that very object, even as its renewed commodification as digital effect makes it available to us in easily manipulated—and therefore revelatory—form.

Digital forms and incarnations of cinema may both displace and restore our objects, making archivists of us all. It should surely be no surprise that, with the emergence of digital technologies, we in film studies have become increasingly preoccupied with the archive—that is, with archiving and curatorial processes as they intersect with critical and theoretical ones, as Catherine Russell proposes in Archivology. She suggests that, as these technologies dissolve the divide between public and private and reconfigure the status and practices of archiving, we might productively return to Walter Benjamin, whose “historiography is based on a nonlinear conception of correspondences between past and future and on the shock or crystallization of the moment produced through juxtaposition and montage.” “His aesthetics of awakening and recognition,” she argues, “are techniques of interruption of the ‘flow’ of images on which conventional historicism relies” (Russell 2018, 28).

But as we archive and explore the archive, we are reminded that our disciplines in and around visual studies are marked by shiftiness: our objects stubbornly refuse stability and demand constant redefinition, as do our fields of study themselves. In all this movement and mutation, what happens when we take our field of study to be our theoretical object seems especially vexed. In its anxiety about its boundaries and the status of its objects, our work remains tinged with melancholy, particularly when we consider our archives and the shifting history of the present as we seek to read it. Can we read it and see it at the same time? We find ourselves increasingly concerned with endings, as our fugitive objects retreat or disappear or transform, eluding us. Ultimately, I will be concerned with two movements: the disappearance of some objects and the failure of others to disappear—especially those objects we wish would not remain so durable: race, gender, ethnicity. These movements, it seems, traverse the various conflicted, dangerous, and oppressive intersections of the visual and the social fields.

To explore the anxious encounters between object and endings, I enter my own recent archive, where I find writers who are mostly friends and former colleagues taking stock of their own investments in their fields. I find each one in a scene of some sort of ending—though not at an end. No doubt, this ambient “sense of an ending” relates to archival impulses as well as to the narrative drive that shapes our efforts to make accounts of our history. As Carolyn Steedman reminds us in Dust, “History is not about ends … history does something most peculiar (as writing) and unique (as cognition); it turns what possesses narrative coherence into something without an end, possessing only an ending” (Steedman 2002, 149).

In this spirit, I consider the endings of some recent books that reflect on our field(s). Each functions uneasily, almost uncannily, across the meanings of “end”: conclusion, objective, telos, remnant. For instance The Melancholy Art, Michael Ann Holly’s moving meditation on the nature of the art historical project and its objects, centers (like much recent film studies scholarship) on the issue of melancholy. “I am tempted to argue in general that the discipline of art history is eternally fated to be a melancholic one, primarily because the objects it appropriates as its own always and forever keep the wound open (the cut between present and past, word and image)—resistant to interpretation, these works of art nonetheless insistently provoke it” (Holly 2013, 116). “These beautiful orphans, in other words,” she writes, “animate scholars’ essays on the one hand because they ‘live,’ and on the other, because they are long ‘dead.’ It is melancholy that affords us a disciplinary soul” (132).

Paolo Cherchi‐Usai ends The Death of Cinema, his anxious, uneasy meditation on the extinction of film, with two sections that break free of his analysis in the form of a coda. That piece consists of the anonymous “A Reader’s Report to the Publisher,” followed by a “Reply.” Here the book’s narrating persona speculates about the cinema’s slow slide into oblivion. “Unable to preserve cinema by means of cinema, the archives (no doubt after a few pathetic gestures such as proposing to manufacture film for their own use) will be forced to face up to reality and go for other options. Projecting a film will become first a special circumstance, then a rare occurrence, and finally an exceptional event,” writes this reader (Cherchi‐Usai 2001, 124). “Eventually nothing at all will be projected, either because all surviving copies will be worn to a frazzle or decomposed, or because somebody decides to stop showing them in order to save for future duplication onto another format the few prints that remain” (124). What a vivid picture of inertia and exhaustion. But what follows makes a different claim: “There will be a final screening attended by a final audience, perhaps indeed a lonely spectator. With that, cinema will be talked about and written about as some remote hallucination, a dream that lasted a century or two” (124).

Imagine: a last screening, a lone spectator! But this is precisely a paradoxically optimistic and confident fantasy: the end of cinema will be a privileged punctual moment, and maybe you will be its final spectator. What a fascinating mix of anxiety, anticipatory nostalgia, and fantasies of mastering the medium’s extinction. How uncanny that such optimism surges from this bleak story of entropy.

But if this moment seems saturated with a compensatory sense of mastery, we can turn to Douglas Crimp’s elegant and pointed account of his past curatorial and critical project(s). He chooses to end Before Pictures with this reflection on the trajectory of his developing thoughts on the exhibit Pictures, which he curated in 1977 and with which the book opens: “One thing I can say for certain: when I wrote the Pictures catalogue essay, and even more when I rewrote it for October, I was convinced that with sufficient insight a critic could—or even should—determine what was historically significant at a given moment and explain why,” he writes. “That conviction was a result of my intellectual formation as an art historian and aspiring art critic. Moreover, it was possible to believe such a thing then: the art scene as I experienced it in New York from 1967 to 1977 was small enough to seem fully comprehensible. That, of course, no longer holds true” (Crimp 2016, 278).

“And because it is so clearly not true now, ” he continues, “it seems unlikely that it could really have been true then. In the meantime, coming to the understanding that my knowledge of art can never be anything but partial has been liberating. It has allowed me to write about what attracts me, challenges me, or simply gives me pleasure without having to make a grand historical claim for it.” Crimp continues, concluding his book with this observation: “No doubt that is why I respond to the reception of Pictures with ambivalence. It historicizes me” (278). Ending in process, inside the shifting perspectives or frames evoked by “historicization,” Crimp gracefully closes a narrative that maps a memoir onto a survey of beloved objects of study, even as it tracks the shifting relations between the critic and the work, and the mutating art world of New York City during the period that this book captures and frames. One finds no sense of mastery here, but rather an abiding respect for the work of reframing.

In the second volume of his magisterial trilogy on the “ends” of film theory, D. N. Rodowick inscribes mourning in the book’s title itself: Elegy for Theory. He devotes the final chapter to the question of “becoming a subject in theory,” which builds to a critical–aggressive conclusion that announces his confidence about a certain theory’s future, a certain future of theory. An account of the volatility that marks the evolution of theory across the 1980s and 1990s and into the next century, this 2014 text spends considerable time in its very last chapter anxiously confronting the relationship of theory to its subjects—the subjects in and of it—instead of its objects. Rodowick maps the shifts that have reshaped film theory: he maps them as unstable boundaries that attempt to mark off “film studies” from “media studies” and “cultural studies” (scare quotes here signal the anxious nature of any claim to delimit these categories).

“In a process happening across all media,” Rodowick (2014, 257) argues, “the rise of media studies and new critical interest in popular television, video art, and electronic media produced a situation where the object of film theory gave way to a new concern with visual studies and the multiplication of screen cultures driven by the demands of multinational capitalism and proliferating simultaneously on global and capillary scales” (257). Importantly, however, this movement intersects with developments in cultural studies, which “had created a new conception of a class or collective subject of mass culture, attentive to the differential contexts of reading and readership, that overturned or reversed logics of apparatus theory and the subject in process,” producing “readers rather than spectators” (257).

At the same time, he argues, “the steadily rising arc of cultural studies in film and media studies could also be mapped against a decline or displacement of psychoanalysis,” which is “especially apparent in the history of feminist film theory” (258). Looking back at this moment, he finds that feminist film theory, in particular, presents an apparent contradiction—even an internal rupture—at a pivotal point that displaces “a conceptual framework … committed to psychoanalysis, the unconscious, subjective difference, and the transgressive force of desire and the drives.” “In retrospect,” he contends, “one of the most curious features of contemporary theory is how the concept of negation or critique returns continually to the problem of identity” (260). For him, then, the paradox is that the negative force—or aggression—that lines critique in postmodern theoretical projects is displaced and returns to cling stubbornly to bodies, as if seeking to ground itself in the material resistance of the body, and specifically in visible difference.

So, while Rodowick wants to insist that “one of the very great achievements of this age of theory was its deep ethical commitments to political activism and the desire to critique and seek redress for inequality, discrimination, oppression, and injustice,” he identifies a core problem underpinning these achievements: “the tendency to construct a concept of identity as the site of a special epistemological space in relation to ideology or to power” (261). Consequently, he can then go on to argue that the force of negation has somehow been highjacked to the advantage of certain identity positions. Troubling in this account is its apparent suspicion of any theoretical claims to “a special kind of epistemological privilege” that may issue from a social location. Here, I think, his argument conflates the body and its visible aspects with “situated knowledge.”

It seems to me that this last conflation (or rather collapse) names an ongoing issue in our most pressing efforts to define, delineate, shape, or stabilize and frame our object of study and its critique. And I hear in Rodowick’s retrospection a real interest in tracking the ways in which our critical relationship to aesthetic objects—whether in the form of competing theoretical claims or in the form of the institutions that frame theses objects—has come to be energized as much by pleasure, aesthetic or otherwise, as by aggression. That is, negative charges have moved around a lot as, collectively, we seem to have retreated from our more aggressive—even assaultive—theoretical positions in order to leave room for appreciation, to seek out and court surprise.

Yet something is clearly left over, remaining unmanageable as epistemological privilege brushes against, but does not coincide with, what we might still call “the burden of representation.” In identity, what Rodowick sees as “epistemological” or ideological privilege can look that way only if one believes that I possess or inhabit identity more than it possesses or inhabits me. If I cannot own it (and I cannot), then I must remain mindful of the “burdens” that come with the representations I nonetheless struggle to claim.

As I approached this essay’s conclusion, I came across a searing account of our current state “not of post‐racialism, but of unabashed racialism”: “Injustice on Repeat,” in a Sunday book review section of the New York Times (Alexander 2020). Michelle Alexander, who is a civil rights lawyer, a legal scholar, and the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, asserts there: “It has been an astonishing decade. Everything has changed and nothing has changed.” “White people are generally allowed to have problems,” she writes. “But people of color … are regularly viewed and treated as the problem” (6, emphasis mine). “White nationalism, at its core, reflects a belief that our nation’s problems would be solved if only people of color could somehow be gotten rid of, or at least better controlled,” Alexander writes. “In short,” she asserts, “mass incarceration and mass deportation have less to do with crime and immigration than the ways we’ve chosen to respond to those issues when black and brown people are framed as the problem” (6–7). Identity frames us: we may need to foreground this framing in visual culture and visual studies alike, as the being–having dichotomy forces us back to embodiment.

Perhaps we can find some dynamism in this direction if we consider a turn to a symptomatic reading of the field itself. Exploring the problem of the very concept of “visual culture” in “There Are No Visual Media,” W. J. T. Mitchell (2013, 12) confronts the phrase “visual media,” indicating that “it gives the illusion of [picking out] a class of things about as coherent as ‘things you can put in the oven,’ … and thus, it tells us ‘next to nothing about’ its objects.” Preferring the term “visual culture” as “the field of study that refuses to take vision for granted, that insists on problematizing the visual process as such,” Mitchell insists that this “is not merely the hitching of an unexamined concept of ‘the visual’ onto an only slightly more reflective notion of culture—i.e. visual culture as the ‘spectacle’ wing of cultural studies” (12).

As he elaborates upon these problems of spectacle in “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” which is the last chapter of What Do Pictures Want?, Mitchell asks us to see the enmeshing of social and visual and insists that we reframe our questions—along with our anxieties—just as this chapter’s ambition to “show seeing” reframes seeing itself. He argues for framing our objects in “a more nuanced and balanced approach located in the equivocation between the visual image as instrument and agency: the image as a tool for manipulation on the one hand, and as an apparently autonomous source of its own purposes and meanings on the other” (Mitchell 2005, 350). “This approach,” he suggests, “would treat visual culture and visual images as ‘go‐betweens’ in social transactions.” “As go‐betweens or ‘subaltern’ entities,” he proposes, “these images are the filters through which we recognize and of course misrecognize other people … And this means that ‘the social construction of the visual field has to be continuously replayed as the ‘visual construction of the social field,’ an invisible screen or latticework of apparently unmediated figures that makes the effects of mediated images possible” (351). He is expressing a plausible hope for reframing and re‐visioning our objects as dynamic brushes between force fields through which the visual and the social are reciprocally shaping, in ways that probably never stabilize.

These are the encounters that Darby English targets in his book How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, which is distinguished by the absence of any reassuring subtitle to qualify, specify, or stabilize the main title’s bold promise. English (2007) confronts the vexed entanglement of representations and representativeness, when it comes to something like “black art,” or “black” culture. He prefaces his nuanced case studies of four artists, Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope L., with a consideration of one exemplary case of black representational space.

David Hammons’s Concerto in Black and Blue of 2002 becomes the emblem and the template for English’s explorations of the “representational space of blackness.” This is a site‐specific work that consisted of three rooms of a gallery, unilluminated: “a cavernous darkness punch‐lit by dim cones of light [devices viewers could collect at entry], which partnered with footsteps and whispering to register the presence of other visitors … a situation from which one could not be fully separate without exiting it altogether … this space produced a dense, inscrutable social space.” As this work’s title and staging generate meanings inflected (illuminated?) by the viewer’s knowledge of the artist’s blackness and of his history, the work’s “blackness” is “falling outside and between bodies and peoples and cultures” (English 2007, 1–2).

“Concerto,” English continues, “can be seen to stage the contradictory and contested processes whereby racial blackness is conceptualized and represented, and diverse subject positions are assigned, felt, embraced, or contested in relation to it” (3). He goes on to reference a certain “viewer complicity” that produces a viewpoint on “black art” “often grounded outside of the work of art itself and beyond the profound intentions of an artist” (3). A supplementary and imposing work of enframing by identity impresses this work with assumptions, expectations, and anticipations, all attached to the spectator’s “knowledge” of the signifier of the artist’s blackness. In this process, identity becomes an awkward, ill‐fitting frame that violently shapes, cuts, and limits the space of representations—and subjects—in the visual field, always foreclosing something, always difficult to inhabit, or even to occupy. Destabilized, mixed, this racialized space is precarious—but not gone.

The problem that How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness inscribes in its elegant analysis remains that “blackness,” like “black art,” refuses to stay within boundaries. Does it come from inside or from outside? And who gets to decide this, to name it, to see it? Although many of us in visual studies can agree that race is a fiction and gender a performance dependent on fictions—we “know very well, but nonetheless”—race and gender remain stubbornly material in their effects. Everything goes on “as if.” And it is this “as if” that matters, that forms the matter of the matter of things that both are and are not material, of objects that we must continually reframe because they are both fugitive and stubbornly durable, both elusive and intractable. Problems of representation and its politics are doggedly moving targets; they resist our efforts at stable framing, and yet, in their stickiness, they cling materially to a fictional ground that never quite fully anchors them.

Returning where I started: in a late chapter of Death at 24× titled “Delaying Cinema,” Laura Mulvey revisits the overlay of spectrality she finds in digitized film. As digital technology permits us to arrest the movement of film, to fragment the original object, it also allows us to restore the traces of the celluloid medium’s indexicality, its archival functions as a document of its moment. Mulvey offers us a reading of Imitation of Life that she contends is possible only through digital technology, precisely because it lets us see what would have passed too quickly at 24×. “Of course,” she writes, “to still ‘a frozen moment’ on celluloid, on an editing table, is to redouble the effect and to trigger immediately a reflection on the cinema’s essential duality, its tension between movement and stillness.” She’ll call this effect “the ghostly presence of the still strip of film on which the illusion of movement depends” (Mulvey 2006, 155). Thus this technology restores a spectral trace, which is there but not visible: Benjamin’s “optical unconscious.”

Mulvey reads this film’s “opening premise,” its initial sequence, where a white and a black mother, Lora Meredith and Annie Johnson, meet to form the partnership that sustains the film’s plot. She goes on to argue that, visually, “this sequence also points in another direction” from this premise, because, “mapped through the metaphoric significance of high and low, it reaches out beyond the diegetic world of the film into the society to which it refers.” Looking at this sequence through the repetition and delay occasioned by a detail, she makes the following discovery: “At the same time, two black extras move through the top left‐hand corner of the frame. This detail is, once again, impossible to detect at 24 frames per second.” “But this moment,” she contends, “has the impact of a gesture, not one that is acted out through a character, but one that seems to materialize out of the texture of the film itself, mysterious but present and relevant” (157).

For Mulvey, this “find” disrupts the film’s texture, explodes it into context. “Inscribed onto the screen but only subliminally visible,” she writes, “the fleeting presence of the extras relates to Annie’s invisibility as the worker on whom Lora’s visibility depends.” “With the image halted,” she continues, “the appearance of the black figures on the screen takes on added power and weightiness, standing in for and conjuring up the mass of ‘coloured people’ rendered invisible by racism and oppression very particularly by Hollywood’s culture and representation” (160).

She finds this detail and its entailments crucial to the film’s historical force because, while “the depiction of the ‘race problem’ in Imitation of Life still belongs firmly to a pre‐1960s, pre‐Malcolm X, pre‐Black Power era, [it also] belongs to that style of film‐making in which a social ‘unconscious’ is both acknowledged and displaced in which melodrama flourished.” Mulvey’s conclusion makes a broader claim, however: “Now, to look at films such as those made by Douglas Sirk is to have the impression of looking into history,” as “close readings inevitably lead to questions of context as well as text” (160). So the restoration of the spectral qualities of these images, their status as archives, brings history into our readings as material and matter.