The Text of Bliss: (Post)Structuralism as Liberation in Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (2)
Form and Affect as Theory in Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (3)
The Film as a Text: The Film-Text: The Moving Image (h)as Language (or, Alexandre Astruc Predicted the Future) (4)
The Pleasure of the Film-Text (5)
Theory of a Cinema of Bliss/Jouissance in Cinema (6)
“The [Concept] Pleasure of the Film Text [Cinematic Excess]” (6)
Style as a seam: style as a roughening: style/affect (6)
Hal Hartley: Purveyor of The Film of Pleasure (8)
Hal Hartley: Purveyor of Jouissance (8)
Transcendental Film Style (8)
Centers (9)
Oedipal Slow Cinema (9)
CINE 372 Final
December 17th, 2024
I have adhered to the honor code in this assignment.
“The whole history of the concept of structure… must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center... Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names.”
Cinema has become synonymous with the historical novel; cinematic devices have become synonymous with the historical letter, word, paragraph: we are being deceived by Cinema’s images, structures, and language: because we can, we must apply The Pleasure of the Text to cinema, we must find cinematic jouissance. If the text was once the material center of the structure of representation of life and thought in media, today, the motion picture has become the substituted center.
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Central to the argument of The Pleasure of the Text is a distinction Roland Barthes makes between the text of pleasure (of plaisir) and the text of bliss (of jouissance, a paradoxical physical and/or intellectual pleasure in which, in oversimplified terms, bliss is paradoxically found within suffering, and suffering is a pleasure). Barthes proposes that the text of pleasure is a pacifying text: it hides the constructed nature of language, narrativity, and textuality by entertaining the reader. The text of pleasure is an easy pleasure, its relationship between itself and the reader is a gesture of “ungratified sucking”. The text of pleasure employs an “unweaned language: imperative, automatic, unaffectionate, a minor disaster of static”. The text of pleasure abides by the systemic rigidity of language, and pacifies its readers through satisfying the codes and expectations of gratifying entertainment. Familiarity with the Text of pleasure pacifies vital emotional or intellectual energy that might otherwise ignite a transformative or liberatory reading/derivation of meaning. The pleasure that emanates from a reader’s comfortability and confrontation with repeated readings of the tools/language of hegemony can often be used to hide dominant ideology. “This prattling text is then a frigid text, as any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.”
The Text of bliss, the ‘writerly’ text, creates an active participant out of its reader through destabilizing the structures of literature and language. In reading the Text of bliss, the reader is made to expose, reframe, and develop conceptions of the construction of self and society, and the ways in such sites interact with the site of the text. Given that the text of bliss and the text of pleasure are both textual, linguistic, literary, the two are largely the same; “the text of bliss is merely the logical, organic, historical development of the text of pleasure; the avant-garde is never anything but the progressive, emancipated form of past culture: today emerges from yesterday”. The jouissance that is found in reading the text of bliss creates an inherently destabilizing experience, as it confuses normative pleasure. There is still an ultimate satisfaction in jouissance, but it is found in a perversion of suffering: suffering as a joy. When challenged by a text that breaks from convention, the reader can experience bliss through a double edged pleasure; the reader finds pleasure in the entertaining capacity of language, narrative, and medium of the text, and additionally in the experience of working, suffering through the breaks in “sucking”, in pacified ideology, to reveal the constructed and deceptive nature of the mediums of language and literature. A reader who returns to pleasure from jouissance can now engage with form and pleasure through play, understanding the arbitrary yet fabricated nature of expression, representation, experience, and existential-structural ordering.
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Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text makes a distinction between reader experience of the text of bliss and of the text of pleasure. The text of bliss is not a text but rather a moment, a sensation; it is a sensation that is not sensationalized, however, as it is the perversion of sense for the sake of itself. Jouissance, the affect of the text of bliss, occurs within the text of pleasure; through the perversion of pleasure, the celebration of the realization of the fallacy of the truth of the mimetic structures of language and literature, bliss transpires.
“Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so”; the text of pleasure, whether it is ideologically in support of or in opposition to dominant ideology, will always support dominant structures insofar that it negotiates its theoretical terms, its meaning, its message, what it aims to capture or represent, in the language, the rules, the linguistic and narrative tools of power. “We are all caught up in the truth of languages… For each jargon (each fiction) fights for hegemony; if power is on its side, it spreads everywhere in the general and daily occurrences of social life.” Anything, sensation or idea, that we can (logically, rationally, illogically, etc.) understand is a text of pleasure, is the perpetuation of hegemony; hermeneutics only exists in relationship to the text of pleasure. We can only interpret a text through the linguistic and narrative structures of dominant ideology because power has permitted the repetition of these tools, has funded their social memorization; we understand interpretation as a function of the head: Barthes speaks of “the old myth of heart against head, sensation against reasoning, (warm) “life” against (cold) “abstraction.” Because the text of bliss operates within the text of pleasure, these binaries are not rejected but complicated and collapsed. “What if knowledge itself were delicious?” What if epistemologies were erotic? What if truth cannot be understood by reading the word truth, or by reading a piece of literature that discusses a notion or theory of truth, but by feeling truth through perverting the acceptance of fiction? “Drawn from psychoanalysis… Pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot. Bliss is unspeakable, inter-dicted. I refer to Lacan… and to Leclaire (“...Whoever speaks, by speaking denies bliss, or correlatively, whoever experiences bliss causes the letter – and all possible speech – to collapse in the absolute degree of the annihilation he is celebrating.”) The writer of pleasure (and his reader) accepts the letter.” In order to express Barthes’ theory of jouissance, Barthes must forgo a logical, counterlogical, illogical, narrative, anarrative, or counternarrative organization of text, language, and argument/reasoning: in order to develop and communicate a theory of jouissance, Barthes must textually condition joussiance as an affect of his work; The Pleasure of the Text accepts that narrative organization is arbitrary, and that any idea predicated upon significance being inherent to coherent or incoherent linguistics or narratives is a fallacy. The Pleasure of the Text, then, works through arbitrary narrative organization to create seams, sensation, and express a theory of textual affect through textual affects conditioned by textuality. Traditional theory is, too, a lie. Theory cannot express reality through language: however, there is no politic to jouissance, to blissful eroticism, there is only truth and form.
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From Alexandre Astruc’s “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo” emerged a principle which could help spectators and film-makers organize and understand film: Astruc’s essay pioneered the notion that cinema could function as literature did/does: cinema can be a medium, like literature, that’s language is not merely in reference to, symbolic of, or a representation of natural content and/or orality. Cinema works to express thought through and with formal reference to itself, to its own codes, structures, histories, and the affects of such qualities. “The cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language”. Astruc’s “La Camera-Stylo” became a widely accepted text by filmmakers and critics alike, and became foundational to the development and codification of auteur theory as a way of critically receiving, interpreting, reading, and watching cinematic works.
Authorship can be a lens and method to read a text pleasurably. Authorship as a reading method locates meaning in the choices of the writer, creating a pleasurable reading experience in which one who engages with a work of literature can focus on what is being narrated and represented, and less on how and why they have been impacted by configurations of medium, narrative, and language. Astruc’s as well as cinematic and critical film history’s acceptance of the auteur theory counterintuitively reveals the artifice of cinematic language; if the fallacy of authorship can be found in cinema, as it is in written literature, then the language and form of cinema can be read, analyzed, experienced, constructed, and deconstructed as it has been in literature: yet, like the literature discussed by Barthes, like all literature, this cinematic language and form is arbitrary. Cinema is a language: cinematic forms are a fiction of fact.
Barthes notes that because literary jouissance is often found when a reader breaks from the reading experience conditioned by conventional formal organization, bliss can occur with simple distraction from text, such as looking up or closing a book. “What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of class inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading”. The rise of home-bound engagement with cinema, streaming, dvd players, etc., allows for readerly lacerations of the film-text, similar to the literary textual lacerations illustrated by Barthes. Even in 1948, Astruc notes what this technology, a technology that creates a more personal relationship to cinema and its formal exploitation of time, could do for the medium. He wrote that “it must be understood that up to now the cinema has been nothing more than a show. This is due to the basic fact that all films are projected in an auditorium. But with the development of 16mm and television, the day is not far off when everyone will possess a projector...There will be several cinemas just as today there are several literatures.”
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The Pleasure of the Text elucidates the arbitrary nature and feigned legitimacy of the representational capacities of language, literature, and narrative through affecting jouissance; The Pleasure of the Text realizes, expresses, makes a theoretical argument about jouissance by utilizing the affects of literary aesthetics, literary form, and text(uality) to impose jouissance upon its readers. The Pleasure of the Text formally and affectively theorizes about written literature, so it is written literature. Affect generates knowledge. Experience of thingness is the knowledge and realization of thingness; of the arbitrary; of the artifice of structure and form and the meaning or significance attributed to or derived from the arbitrary; of structure’s bastardized, repeated contortions of structure at the hands of the historically empowered.
Cinema is literature: cinema is language; cinema is narrative. Cinematic jouissance does exist and must be realized by filmmaker-spectator-critcs. However, these words become moving images, this text that you currently read will never be “the pleasure of the film-text,” and its readers may never understand cinematic jouissance.
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Mass culture relies on “humiliated repetition”, where the superficial, pleasurable forms of media may appear as novel, while the intended affects and underlying ideological schema remain unchanged. This repetition pacifies audiences by concealing its own constructedness, ensuring ideological continuity through the unobtrusive presentation of narrative structures. Thompson’s theorization of cinematic excess offers a parallel critique of this dynamic in cinema. While the conventions of classical narrative cinema rely on an “unobtrusive style” to smooth over the material aspects of the medium, excess disrupts this pacification by foregrounding the film’s stylistic devices. She explains that “the minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning”. Excess, then, destabilizes the ideological authority of narrative cohesion by rendering visible the material and constructed nature of the cinematic text. While excess may “exceed” a text’s signification, it does not “deny or blur” its meaning. Instead, excess, like bliss, creates a fissure within the normative experience of narrative, forcing the spectator to contend with the materiality rather than the ideological structures of cinematic language. The dialectic between humiliated repetition and cinematic excess mirrors the texts of pleasure and bliss, as the latter emerges through the rupture of ideological and formal stability.
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Hartley’s style gives equal space to these tangential characters/stories and to silence/stillness as he does to his protagonists, to the more conventional plot, and to action. The construction of Simple Men seems to be predicated upon inverted cinematic conventions/linguistic codes of presence and absence. Protagonists central to an active and cohesive plot are the expectation for a work of cinema, yet Hartley limits viewers access to these codes and instead heightens the access to what is more traditionally absent in cinema. Hartley, through Excessive representation of the exterior contexts of characters–the individuals, systems, structures, materiality, and rules present in experienced reality but not in film, and vice versa–forces active viewership with this divergence from traditional film form and style, allowing for jouissance in reading/watching the film-text to flourish, creating a consideration of the coded, arbitrary constructed-ness of the language the cinematic as well as the social within his viewers.
Simple Men’s plot, what occurs and how it happens, functions in accordance with Thompson’s notion of the function of cinematic Excess as “not only counternarrative [but] also counter-unity”. Through its deliberate deviation from traditional narrative and formal structures, Simple Men reading. Excess operates not simply as a challenge to narrative form but also to the social and cultural notion of unity coded within conventional filmic language. Simple Men’s style draws attention to the materiality of film and the way such material is disposed of in the structure of filmic language and narrative. The logical flow expected of narrative cinema. The excess of these elements encourages viewers to linger in this ambiguity, creating a field where pleasure is generated not from discovering a definitive meaning but from engaging with the film’s roughness—its refusal to cohere. This “roughness” speaks to Viktor Shklovski’s notion that the language of poetry, much like cinema, is not a comprehensible language but rather a “semi-comprehensible” one, one that invites complex and open-ended engagement, that affects the bliss of an audience member. This blissful engagement, in Barthes’ terms, is not “caught in the rivalry of names,” not concerned with constructing meaning within the confines of the “jargon” of dominant ideology; rather, jouissance as a method of watching a film is concerned with the “perceptual play” of the language that fails to fully communicate the world it seeks to represent.
Thompson defines style as “the use of repeated techniques which become characteristic of the work”, which is vague enough so as not to contradict Schrader’s definition of style as the devices which express “similar ideas in similar forms by divergent culture [... and] is concerned with what is universal rather than particular in the various means of expression, and therefore is ideally suited to describe a style which seeks to express the Wholly Other through divergent cultures and personalities.” Both Schrader and Thompson identify style as being present in film works and being codified by (critic-)spectators; both understand style as a formal discussion of form, structure, materiality, representation (not of what is visually-narratively being “represented”, but of how something can or cannot be represented, yet is still felt/understood) and its relationship to understanding, meaning, and affect. “The keys to the artist’s kingdom lie in the application of style over content. It’s the form of things that makes you free.”
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Transcendental film style is a set of, interchangeable yet limited, cinematic devices that operate as structural and formal filmic means to an afilmic ends of transcendence. “The style is not intrinsically transcendental or religious, but it represents a way (a tao, in the broadest sense of the term) to approach the Transcendent. The matter being transcended is different in each case, but the goal and the method are, at their purest, the same… the result of two universal contingencies: the desire to express the Transcendent in art and the nature of the film medium…camera angles, dialogue, editing… The Transcendent is beyond normal sense experience…Human works, accordingly, cannot inform one about the Transcendent; they can only be expressive of the transcendent. This essay will concentrate on transcendental art, art which expresses the Transcendent in the human mirror…Transcendental style seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism, and, finally, rationalism.”
In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes proposes that the text of bliss (of jouissance) can liberate the reader. In Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film, Schrader discusses how film form can be manipulated through the implementation of certain stylistic devices to create the affect of spiritual transcendence in a viewer. In Kirtstin Thompson’s “The Concept of Cinematic Excess”, Thompson analyzes film form that emphasizes style and draws attention to materiality and structure, as opposed to narrative, meaning, and representation. Integrating the film theories of Schrader and Thompson, I propose that Barthes’ jouissance, or the film of bliss, can be actualized through the devices of transcendental film style by reorienting the means of affect towards social, linguistic, (post)structural rather than spiritual transcendence.
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The Transcendent is the center of the structure of the spiritually organized world: transcendence of materiality is the realization of structures as organized by the spiritual, the Transcendent; Man/Dominant Ideology is the center of the structure of a rationally/narratively/linguistically organized representational-material world: transcendence of signification in narrative and linguistics is the realization of the man-made, arbitrary existence of such materials.
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“No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure (Lacan, apropos of Sade). For the writer, however, this object exists: it is not the language, it is the mother tongue. The writer is someone who plays with his mother's body (I refer to Pleynet on Lautreamont and Matisse): in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in order to dismember it, to take it to the limit of what can be known about the body: I would go so far as to take bliss in a disfiguration of the language.”
Style’s relationship to narrative’s relationship to temporality composes the language of cinema: slow cinema is an oedipal project. “Slow cinema works against the grain of cinema itself. It turns its back on what movies do best. It replaces action with stillness, empathy with distance.” Slow cinema is an outgrowth of transcendental style; it uses, exploits, emphasizes, expands upon much of the style that affects transcendence from film, however, unlike like transcendental style and its fixed affect, “not all directors use ‘slow’ cinema for the same purposes.”
All slow cinema understands temporality as the mother tongue, and it uses style to distort its mother’s body. Normal cutting, splices made ‘on action,’ mimetic dialogue, variety in shot types, mimetic narratives, depth of field, etc. are exchanged for wide angles, visual flatness, doubling or excessively presenting narrative information, offset edits, non-acting, and, most notably, the long take. With the long take, “the viewer makes time felt in a shot. The viewer is operative; the viewer acts upon the image.” The long shot conveys time, and this conveys materiality; “Duration can peel back the social veneer of an activity. Duration can invoke the Wholly Other.”
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“Just as the pleasure of the text supposes a whole indirect production, so boredom cannot presume it is entitled to any spontaneity: there is no sincere boredom: if the prattle-text bores me personally, it is because in reality I do not like the demand. But what if I did like (if I had some maternal appetite)? Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.”