Narrative-Image

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Genesis: Language
Binary-Images: Narrative/Poetic
First Analysis: Author-Function/Free-Spectator

Narrative language can be analysed in two ways: what it says, and how it says it. “What” it says concerns descriptions of what the image is “of”. “How” it says it concerns what the image is “in”: the “frame” around the image. This “frame” re-positions us in a particular way toward a text, and may close us off to other meanings. Being aware of how the image is framed gives you the choice to view it in the way the image suggests, to take up the “subject-position” on offer, or to construct one of your own.

For instance, take the following two sentences. What they say is the same, but how they say it is different, and frames the language differently.

1. “I walked to the shops.”
2. “They walked to the shops.”

In the first a “shifter” is used (I), which puts us in the first-person. The writer speaks to us, and indicates that it is them who walked. It is “existentially” connected to them. In reading the line “I” also become the character (in a way) saying “I” walked to the shops with them. This is called “subjective” discourse, or discours (1). The second sentence is in the third-person, which suspends out knowledge of the author, and speaks the line as if it were not spoken, as if they were just walking to shops, and I just happened to know. The first frame tells “me” something from an “I” (discours) while the second frame vanishes, and attempts to hide its traces. These kinds of framing devices Foucault calls “subject-positions,” arranged for the audience to fill, to craft their experience. The second is called, in the French, histoire, and is often referred to as “objective” discourse. Histoire is a mode of discourse, which attempts to hide its traces, the presence of its “subject-positions” (they are invisible) Discours, as a mode of discourse, foregrounds its use of “signs” and “subject-positions” (the “S” is visible).

These two modes of narrative, “histoire” and “discours,” or “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” apply to all narratives, all stories, whether they are stories about leaves on the grass, stories about people, or animals, or stories about history. History is the most interesting of narratives. To crudely paraphrase Foucault, history is an “archive,” a series of documents which we can interact with. History, as we know, is written by the “victors.” History has a slant. How do we slant history? Suppress information, and destroy evidence from the past. This is what the ancient Orthodox Christians did when they sacked the libraries of Alexandria, attempting to re-write history.

This slants “what” is said, but more important to Foucault is “how” it is said, how “archives” uniformly position us toward information, and knowledge. The Bible, for instance, is slanted toward the white, light, right “God,” while the black, and dark is associated with the “devil.” These codes carry power, and distribute power across the text (forming what Foucault calls a “power-binary”). This exists at the level of what is said (ideological analysis: The Bible is racist). How is it said? As if it is “objective,” from the mouth of God himself (The Bible is also sexist, second ideological analysis). The “objectivity” of The Bible, attempts to position us in such a way that we read it as “fact,” as “history” rather than as a “story” (perhaps, at most, peppered with facts).

The “archive” may be about true events (what it says) but all archives slant what is said, and mostly hide their “shifters,” the traces of their “having-been-authored.” Foucault calls the work of philosophical “archaeology” the work of unearthing signification, and subject-positions adopted by the official archive, in order to illuminate the “stories” that they tell, to throw light on the way in which knowledge operates (as power).

There are two ways to counter the “objective,” and “official” archive: 1) Some texts in the archive illuminate their own shifters, their own subject-positions. This is an “authorship-function” (something the author does). 2) Some audience members do not choose to read the images in the way that they “officially” position us (according to the “archives” rules).

1) In cinema the most comprehensive analysis of “subject-positions,” from the cliché narrative, to the poetic, is Deleuze’s The Movement Image and The Time Image. The movement-image is the machine of the “official archive,” producing cliché, while the time-image deconstructs the cliché, and moves into realms beyond. Although these books are about the cinema, I believe the concepts Deleuze borrows from Bergson’s metaphysics have use throughout all art-theory (and creation).

2) Similarly Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye offers a theory of cinematic-perception which ignores the “official” signs/subject-positions of the narrative, and instead perceives the film as a big “eye,” and a big “body” which we wear as our own. This creates a new world of art thought, and experience. Again, although she speaks only of film, I believe her theory of the “eye” has relevance for all art-thinkers and creators. In thinking of a painting as an eye, rather than a canvas, a whole new kind of analysis can be done, an analysis which bypasses the classical archive. These two views form the two sides of the narrative/poetic text: 1) the “author-function” (traces of the author, subject-positions, “movement-images”) and 2) the “free spectator” or “free-author,” the spectator engaged not in watching the plot, but in other activities (time-images/eye/mind).

Classical narrative-images in cinema are called “movement-images,” or “histoire,” or the “classical realist text,” among other things. Often it is used to refer to “Classical Hollywood Film.”

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Reading (Wayfarer Gallery)

Gilles Deleuze, The Movement Image
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye

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