1

Introduction

This paper aims to look at certain film texts as heterotopian bodies of affect. This will

be attempted in order to show how a sort of affective presence (a meaning that cannot

be represented by modes of absent metaphysical meaning) is produced and how this

production of presence can be seen as a return to a more physical or corporeal based

mode of experience that is not translatable through metaphysical meaning. The two

texts most utilised in this paper are James Cameron’s Avatar and Michael Haneke’s

Funny Games US. Funny Games US draws attention to its own mechanical fictionality

and in so doing makes the audience aware that the text does not represent reality; it

merely re-presents indexical images that once stood in front of a camera and which were

later manipulated through editing to stand in for a reproduction of reality. In a sense,

self-referential texts actually present a mode of resistance, as opposed to merely

representing resistance. Touching upon what Lyotard states, the question of the here-

and-now disappears in representation, whereas with presentation ‘something is there

now’ (61). Avatar, despite its representation of dubious content, offers up a new and

engulfing type of interaction between the text and the audience; arguably this is due to

its use of innovative technology which will be discussed in Chapter two. To show how

effective/affective this can be the phenomenon of ‘Avatar Blues’ will be highlighted.

This is a condition of severe depression experienced by some audience members after

seeing the film. The real world is no longer enough for them; the physicality and

rhizomatic connectedness, both represented in the text and presented as the text and the

audience, is so euphoric and complete that ‘real life’ is no longer equivalent to a fullness

of being.

Chapter One will focus on setting up the theoretical framework for the entire piece.

The two texts will only be referred to in passing and will not yet be discussed in any

great detail in this chapter. The kernel of Chapter One will be a discussion of

postmodernity and how this has led to a waning of physicality, or an emphasis on

metaphysical modes of understanding. I will also be discussing heterotopian bodies of

affect and how these affective spaces open up new modes of meaning. A heterotopia is

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an actually ‘enacted utopia[n]’1 site (Foucault, 231): a real place where usually

forbidden or abject acts can actually unfold. The internet is now a heterotopian space

without rival; however, films and literary texts can act as less interactive (in the sense of

the reciprocal production of the text) heterotopias that allow for a space to be opened up

– a space in which (symbolic or violent) resistance can actually take place. This

violence will be expanded upon in the final chapter and will result in the resistance

towards realist impositions of absent meaning and manipulated ontologies. Steven

Shaviro, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, discusses ‘blocs of affect’: texts which are

more productive in that they ‘do not represent social processes, so much as they

participate actively in these processes, and help to constitute them’ (2). The reason I

have termed them bodies of affect is that the experience produced between the text and

the audience is a connected (rhizomatic) and lived experience that is non-hierarchical

and actually present as a thing in itself. This chapter will also discuss the notion of

producing presence. Shaviro notes that ‘[o]ur experience is always bound up with

affective and aesthetic flows that elude cognitive definition or capture’ (4). There is

therefore another (emotional) presence that affects us physically. Hans Ulrich

Gumbrecht sees this as a production of presence: a post-metaphysical moment of

intensity or of lived experience (100). What Gumbrecht attempts to get at is more than

just interpretation; he is attempting to go beyond this, beyond the ‘dimensions of

meaning’ and beyond ‘language as places and instruments of world construction’ (44).

He wants to go beyond the poststructural psychoanalytic formula discussed by Lacan

which sees ‘the world of words […] creat[ing] the world of things’ (Lacan, 72). This

metaphysical meaning, where a signifier stands in for the thing itself, can be seen as a

“loss of world” (Gumbrecht, 49): to overcome this is to foreground a type of presence

that ‘may suddenly turn into an unmediated state of being-in-the-world’ (Gumbrecht,

137). This occurs in moments of epiphany, or in Shaviro’s words, in moments that

highlight affect.

Chapter two will focus on the presentification of presence and how this can be seen

to be a backlash against postmodernity and poststructuralism in a general sense that the

image and surface, or absence of “thingness” through meaning, has dominated thought

and life for a long time now and has relegated physicality and presence to a secondary

or right-wing position. This notion will be expanded upon in this chapter, touching on

1 A utopia is a metaphysical ideal, or an idea: a heterotopia is an actuality.

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the dubious content of Avatar and paving the way for a discussion on the focus on the

body in Funny Games US in Chapter Three. Both of these texts focus on corporeality

which can be seen to connote right wing or fascist agendas. In this chapter, Avatar will

be discussed in detail using the above theoretical frameworks to show how a body of

affect operates and how it creates a rhizomatic physicality of presence through the use

of motion capture technology. A rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a non-

hierarchical plane where ‘any point […] can be connected to anything other, and must

be.’ (7) In this way, texts and audiences connect together and operate together to

demonstrate how a loss of world can be recuperated through a production of presence

through all things equally.

Chapter Three will focus on the seeming autonomy of the characters in Funny

Games US and how this contributes to a shared physicality between the text and the

audience. The focus on physicality in the actual content will be addressed in relation to

the physicality created by Avatar and also the rhizomatic connectedness between these

texts and the viewers, and how this can be seen as a type of violence upon the subject,

albeit, a liberatory type of violence. The violence in Funny Games US will also come to

have a bearing here since it is actual physically disruptive violence in the content,

coupled with the violent disruption to realist Hollywood norms of filmic production.

Whilst Funny Games US is not as interactive as Avatar (in the sense that the audience

can be seen as actually entering the world of Avatar), it does allow for physically

disruptive moments of epiphany to take place, collapsing the boundaries between the

text and the audience2.

The conclusion will focus on synthesising the entire argument, showing how texts

like the aforementioned present and highlight a form of presence that is beyond

mediation (despite the message appearing to come from obviously mediated images and

symbols: however, the digital image throws this notion into disarray, especially in

Avatar). It is the production of affect and the occurrence of epiphany which lead to a

step beyond mediation: there is a passage from representation to presentation occurring

in these texts and this mirrors and acts as a symptom for the living form of this

phenomenon (i.e. the wider pool of emotive affect that acts upon and creates subjects

2 Arguably, this could be seen as being more interactive in the sense that the audience is actually allowed

to see the operation of realism, but in this instance, the interactivity of Avatar appears more interactive in

that the audience partakes in the event of the film unfolding by actually altering their physical being in the

form of 3D glasses.

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both physically and cognitively). There are interesting conclusions to be drawn from the

production of digital images (as opposed to recording actually lived images) which will

have an overall bearing on this piece: since this piece is about the production of an

affective presence, it could be assumed that the images focus on presenting as close a

replica of real life as possible. Analog film images are indexical in that they refer back

to an image that stood in front of the camera at one stage; this is certainly the case with

Funny Games US although this too is thrown into disarray: digital images do not

operate in this fashion (Shaviro, 16-17). Arguably, therefore, they come closer to

presenting a thing in itself, as in Avatar. So, digital images will be seen to be closer to a

form of reality than straight forward realist images are. This will relate again to the

violence carried out by realist images on the subject (the imposition of ideological

norms) and the violence inherent in disrupting these norms (as with the unification of

text and audience and also the autonomy of the texts themselves which rupture realist

hegemony).

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Chapter One: The Emerging Moment

“It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our

reality”

- Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real¸ p.16

The aim of this chapter is to set up the theoretical framework for the entire argument

and also to locate both Avatar and Funny Games US in their post-metaphysical moment.

In order to achieve this, a detailed discussion of where they arose from is necessary.

Terming these texts post-metaphysical takes up on Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s project of

attempting to reinstate a meaning based in and on presence, as opposed to a

metaphysical meaning based on absence. This mode of presence based meaning will

have great importance for this overall piece. To achieve this, the phenomenon of

postmodernity must be looked at carefully and in some depth in order to show how the

two aforementioned texts, which can very easily be categorised as postmodern artefacts,

are in fact emerging from the collapse or waste of the postmodern mode of thought3. For

this discussion, theorists such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, Eagleton, Adorno, Shaviro and

Gumbrecht will be utilised; showing firstly what are considered to be elements or

symptoms of postmodernism/postmodernity, then moving on to discuss how, despite

similarities, a return to presence is an actual and definitive paradigmatic shift away from

postmodernity itself. It should be noted at this stage that it is mainly the aesthetic side of

postmodernity which will be considered in this piece (that is, the focus on image,

surface and simulation).

Gumbrecht, who openly (and perhaps controversially) advocates a return to, or a

rediscovery of presence, wants to ‘overcome metaphysics’ (49). He relates, or equates,

metaphysics to an ontological inadequacy – a lack – not in the Lacanian sense of desire

(which can never be fulfilled), but a realist desire to fill the void created by absent

meaning. For Gumbrecht, the metaphysical stands for a ‘loss of world’ (49). This loss of

3 Both texts question the status of various ontological modes of existence, exposing the validity of various

forms of alterity: however, they do not do this at the expense of the lived world or in a turn to relativism,

but in order to show how the lived world can operate in coincidence with itself on a physical and

metaphysical level, uniting form and content on an equal level.

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world relates to postmodernity in every respect, but before getting to that, an

explanation of absent meaning is necessary. As stated above, Gumbrecht is attempting

to materialise an ontological mode of meaning that breaks away from poststructural

(and postmodern) psychoanalytic theories of being which see the world of things only

existing (or mediated) through the world of words. For roughly the second half of the

twentieth century, meaning and language, and therefore interpretation, were used as

‘instruments of world construction’ (44)4. Since words, in both their postmodern and

other conceptions can be considered as empty and arbitrary signifiers, it becomes

impossible to stabilise any meaning. If it is a case that the world is founded on words,

then no permanent or stable world of physical presence can ever coincide with itself. If

words create the world, then the world of things is always at a remove. In its place, a

fluid and continually shifting realm of metaphysical interpretation based on the absence

of stable meaning becomes accepted as reality. In this mode of meaning based ontology,

meaning or reality can never coincide with itself and its designated object since it can

only be accessed through the words which designate its meaning in the first place – and

if these are malleable and transient – stable meaning falls away. Gumbrecht also

proposes a new or modified approach to subject/object relations. If a signifier is fluid

and unstable, then meaning also becomes fluid and unstable. It can therefore differ from

subject to subject and end up in a mire of relativism. No object can coincide in its

materiality with its fluid and transient metaphysical meaning since its meaning is so

diffuse and changeable. In place of subject/object relations, Gumbrecht offers up a

delight in presence which ‘reestablish[es] our contact with the things of the world

outside the subject/object paradigm’ (56-57) (this will relate to Deleuze and Guattari’s

model of the rhizome at a later stage).

Terry Eagleton succinctly enumerates the postmodern as follows: he sees it as a

‘depthless, decentred, ungrounded, self-reflexive, playful, derivative, eclectic pluralistic

art which blurs the boundaries between “high” and “popular” culture, as well as

between art and everyday experience’ (Illusions, vii). Whilst this piece will also attempt

to blur the boundaries between art and everyday experience, it will attempt to do so in

order to (re)instate a realist ontology as opposed to an ontological depthlessness based

in and on pastiche. In Deleuzian terms, remaining ‘immanent to the world of matter and

4 It should be noted that understanding is based primarily in and through language, but this does not mean

that the thingness of the world is not a physical reality if there are no words to describe it.

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energy’ (De Landa, 5) is essential to a post-metaphysical or realist mode of experience

that espouses physicality and presence over transcendental absent essences. The

postmodern, according to David Harvey, has annihilated space through time (205): this

occurs through, and because of, organisational shifts in production, developments in

technologies of production, advances in electronic financing and communications, all of

which lead to temporal compression resulting in a collapse in spatial actuality. Put

simply, one no longer needs, in this zone of “aspatiality”, to exist in the spatial

dimensions of the world: it is possible to reside (almost fully) in an omnipresence of

virtuality5. An existence based purely in meaning, that is, in the metaphysical space of

non-physical being, can, in this mode of thought, be considered as a lived reality.

Materiality has been collapsed or disintegrated through technological advances and

digitalisation. However, the digital image will be discussed at a later stage since it can

be seen to be actually presenting the thing itself as opposed to representing an indexical

image that actually existed before a camera in a spatial presence located now in the past.

In postmodernity, according to Baudrillard, simulation abounds. Since the Industrial

Revolution and the ability for the mass production of products, ‘the extinction of the

original reference’ means that all production is the production of simulacra; not

counterfeits of an original, but the ‘indistinct simulation of products without originals’

(Symbolic Exchange, 55). Put in another way, simulation is ‘the generation by models of

a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ (Simulacra, 1). Simulation of this type no

longer needs to be rational, or no longer needs to correspond to a physical instance of

reality with an origin since it ‘no longer measures itself against either an ideal or a

negative instance’ (Simulacra, 2). Through this collapse of historicity and physical

originality, Baudrillard feels that ‘it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real,

or to prove the real’ (Simulacra, 21). This is a condition of postmodernity that has

arisen, like Harvey’s conception of postmodernism, due to the progress of technology

and capitalism, and it is this which has heralded in the waning of physicality. For a thing

to be real, in relation to the post-metaphysical moment, it must have an original physical

entity which exists as a thing in the world of objects and which coincides with its absent

or metaphysical construction in the world of ideas. It is the aforementioned radical loss

of material stability which forces the loss of world upon the post-industrial/postmodern

5 However, the Occupy Movement, which will be highlighted briefly at a later stage, manages to exist in

actual space, but, if and when their physical presence is removed, they can actually still survive in the

aspatial zones opened up by postmodernity (the internet). This ability exposes the unity of the present and

the absent that is so important to the mode of existence emerging in the post-metaphysical moment.

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subject (perhaps postmodern object is more apt, given that no stable subjectivity can be

formed in a situation where originality and historical origin are effaced and replaced by

models). Television, and more recently the internet, has shown how it is possible, due to

the technological collapse of space through time, to live in an almost fully virtual way

(this will have a bearing on the chapter about Avatar but in an ontologically opposing

fashion). The entire (physical) world is now fully accessible in a virtual format: money

no longer needs a physical manifestation; interactions can take place via video or text;

music and video have been digitised eradicating the need for physical instances of their

reproduction (CDs and DVDs respectively); virtual space is now a site of virtual travel

and the instantaneous ‘viral’ nature of the internet fully eradicates modernist

conceptions of space. However, what all of these technological advances overlook (in

the extreme last instance) is the fact that its collapse of space through time utterly

eclipses and relegates the world of the physically real to a fading memory.

The real must now re-emerge and arguably it is doing so in a number of ways.

Being-in-the-world, Gumbrecht notes, borrowing from Heidegger, is ‘an existence that

is always already in a substantial and therefore in a spatial contact with the things of the

world’ (66). Moving away from the metaphysical meaning that has dominated recent

thought, towards a more presence based and physical ontology has almost been forced

upon conceptions of the world due to acts such as the terrorist attacks on the World

Trade Center on 9/11. Acts like this, and other violent acts that focus on physical

destruction, according to Žižek, demonstrate that the ‘masses were so deeply immersed

in their apolitical consumerist state that it was not possible to awaken them through

standard political education’ so a more radical mode of intervention was needed

(Desert, 9). Basically, people had become so enmeshed and attuned to the metaphysical

imposition of ideological norms and meanings that the only meaning available to them

was the slippery and unstable meaning produced by these ideological impositions 6.

Žižek continues: people ‘know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it

as if they did not know’ (Sublime Object, 30). In this way, the metaphysical meaning of

ideology covers up the physical reality that huge amounts of unseen people suffer in

order for (in this case, Western bourgeois) life to be maintained as common sense and

6 The cultural network of meaning which underpins the intuitive status quo of reality in contemporary

Western capitalist society, which is based in and on images, signifiers or simulations has been exposed as

empty by acts such as 9/11. It is arguably in this way that violent destruction and an emphasis on

physicality become a mode of liberation.

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normal. Again, we see a representation (ideology) mask and stand in for the real

(physical) truth and also the idea that life is lived through images that are empty, but

which are taken as reality. Adorno and Horkheimer, in relation to ideology in general,

and cinema in specific, sum up this postmodern condition as follows: they see ‘[r]eal

life […] becoming indistinguishable from the movies’ (43). This relates more to the

imposition of ideological hegemony and capitalist realism mediated and instated

through the mass medium of cinema (and other media) and the resulting inability for

sustained critique which this breeds; it also, however, relates to the aforementioned loss

of world. Real life and the movies become equivalent systems of (re)presentation in that

one reality (mediated representation) is indistinguishable from another (presentation

understood only through representation). Whilst I will be attempting to argue a similar

point (movies and reality form a non-hierarchical lived ontological equivalence), I will

be doing so, not on the level of metaphysical ideological meaning taken as common

sense, but on the level of the rhizomatic immanent physicality between audience and

artefact which unites to create a lived ontological equivalence. Returning now to the

notion of being-in-the-world and violence; being-in-the-world demands a relation

between physical objects and their spatial interactions. It also demands a metaphysical

level of interpretation taken as meaning; but one cannot be privileged over the other.

When this occurs, as with the privileging of the image or the simulation over the

physical and original, all worldliness is effaced, as seen in postmodern conceptions of

the world. When it occurs on the level of pure physicality, the end result can be a

terrifying apotheosis of fascistic purity (this will be touched on in later chapters in

relation to the dubious atavistic content of Avatar and the body image consciousness in

Funny Games US). This Cartesian split between subject/object, or physical existence

and metaphysical meaning ‘had led Western culture to an extreme state of alienation

from the world’ (Gumbrecht, 66). Again, if words create the world of things, then the

world of things is lost to the world of words and all physical materiality and

corporeality is forgotten and degraded. Technology has led to this privileging of virtual

reality and simulation (but it has also, in a specific way, through the thingness of the

digital image, led to a sort of reality based ontology which will be discussed in the next

chapter in relation to Avatar). It is the notion of physical violence (in extreme cases) and

a violent disruption to ideology (in Funny Games US), or the violent (taken as shocking)

disruption to the boundary between text and audience (in both texts) that has prompted

and forced this return to the physicality of presence in recent thought.

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Violence, on all levels (actual physical violence and the violent disruption to

hegemonic norms), plays a major role in both texts, but for the moment, a discussion of

violence itself is necessary in relation to heterotopian spaces. In his essay, ‘Of Other

Spaces’, Foucault makes a clear and important distinction between utopian spaces and

spaces designated as heterotopian. Utopias are discussed as ‘sites with no real place’:

conversely, and importantly, heterotopias are considered as ‘effectively enacted’

utopian spaces (231). This distinction can be phrased and framed in another way in

relation to the present argument: utopian space is metaphysical whilst heterotopian

space is physical. Utopian spaces do not exist other than in the absent space of

meaning7. Heterotopian spaces do exist as physical spaces and are designated as sites of

deviation. It is within these heterotopian zones that devious acts, usually forbidden in

civil society, can take place. Foucault gives the example of a colony where criminals

could own and cultivate land, thus living a ‘normal’ life; and hotels or brothels where

normally forbidden sex acts or extra-marital affairs can be lived out in an actual,

physical environment. These sites are thus real, actual spaces which can be used as

instances of ‘compensation’ (235). It is spaces like these that work with the idea of

violence – not violence in the physically destructive sense of terrorist attacks (although

these spaces do permit an element of this type of violence) – but violence in the sense of

its ontologically destructive force. The violent disruption of the forbidden acts of extra-

marital sex for example, or the violence to bourgeois society in allowing criminals settle

into a normal sort of life ‘over there’ in the colony. Any act that creates resistance to the

prescribed hegemonic norms and ideological impositions is, for the purposes of this

piece, to be taken as being a liberatory violent act. It is this type of destructive force that

is experienced in Avatar and in Funny Games US. Both texts disrupt the norms of

classical Hollywood narrative, based on the manipulation free presentation of realist

images, by collapsing the boundaries between the text (the metaphysical meaning or the

content) and the audience (the physical) and in doing so, they both open up heterotopian

spaces or bodies of affect. The process or production of that space, by these texts and

the audience will not be discussed at this stage since the concept of affect still needs to

be addressed before moving on to show how this actually unfolds in presence. What is

to be taken from the idea of heterotopian space is the notion that a space of disruption or

violent and resistant compensation can be actually enacted within the real space of

7 Perhaps in this instance, they function as a site of Lacanian desire which can never be attained and are

thus always already lacking.

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physically being-in-the-world. Heterotopian spaces are therefore physical spaces that

compensate for the absence of materiality in the utopian spaces usually constructed for

specific ideological ends.

Any sort of violent act, be it the physically destructive impact of an event like 9/11,

or the ideologically and ontologically disruptive act of violence against a prescribed

hegemony, will induce an emotional response in those affected by the act. This induced

or provoked response is not unique, nor is it uniform however. According to Dr Greg M.

Smith, who discusses emotional responses in relation to film viewing, ‘[f]ilms are

objects that are well constructed to elicit a real emotional response from our already

existing emotion systems’ (6). These emotions are bound by social regulations in that

prescribed emotional responses are expected at certain times and elicited by certain acts

(it is inappropriate to be happy at the death of a loved one, or to laugh at a poignant

moment in a movie for example). These responses may be learned and socially

constructed, but they are nonetheless real, material (bodily and cognitive) reactions. Dr

Smith continues, stating that: ‘emotional responses are sometimes romanticized as being

uncontrollable, they are [however] in the vast majority of cases subject to social

inhibitions’ (19). He gives the example of a party to elucidate the socially acceptable

mode of emotive action: not all the guests at a party will act in the same fashion,

however, they will all act in a similar fashion, relating to similar topics of conversation

and acting in similar ways to social stimuli. This means that there is an overarching

mode of acceptable conduct, but it need not be exactly uniform. This can be seen in

emotional responses to film. The film invites (it does not necessarily force) its viewers

to feel in a specific way as a group, bound by broad social strokes such as happiness,

sadness, fear etc.8 Think of how an entire cinema audience can react in similar physical

ways to horror films in particular. It must be stressed that not all reactions are equal in

all viewers: Dr Smith points out that ‘films extend an invitation to feel in particular

ways’ (12) which may vary from subject to subject who can just share a general emotive

connection. These particular ways of feeling can be considered as singular emotional

responses in certain subjects and the wider pool from which they are drawn from can be

considered as being the pool of affect. Steven Shaviro, drawing from Deleuze and

Guattari’s work, sees emotionally inductive texts as affective in that they represent,

8 A crude Marxist approach would see film as forcefully imposing emotional responses that create a false-

consciousness in the viewer, leading to the reproduction of social norms that best suit those who own the

means of producing those social norms.

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produce and participate ‘actively’ in the process of affect (seen as the reservoir of

emotion) (2-3). These texts do not just represent affect or emotion; they are producers

and also examples of affect which are crystallised as emotion in the subject. He sees

emotion, the singular, but not necessarily unique experience as ‘affect captured by a

subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that

subject’ (3). Both Shaviro’s and Gumbrecht’s ideas come to resemble each other at the

point of actual lived experience which is present and unmediated as an example of itself

and also the producer of itself. Lyotard’s idea of presence is apt to aid in an explanation

at this point: he sees the here-and-now disappearing in relation to representation (or

mediation); whereas with presentation (presence) ‘something is there now’ (61). This

there-nowness relates to Gumbrecht’s ‘strong individual feelings of joy or of sadness’

experienced with both the body and the mind which unites or eradicates the distance

between subject (as unified mind and body experience) and object (the world) which

can turn into and be experienced as ‘an unmediated state of being-in-the-world’ (137).

This is pure presence or presentification which is a momentary unification of body

(physical) and mind (metaphysical) with the physical object it beholds and its absent

meaning. This fleeting moment of temporality is termed, by Gumbrecht, an ‘epiphany’

(113). Epiphany is the experience of bodily and cognitive emotion at an event (an event

being something which unfolds over time in actual lived spatial relations)9. Temporality

is important here in that the epiphanic event ‘undoes itself while it emerges’

(Gumbrecht, 113) allowing only for moments of presence to be experienced in their

affective fullness. The undoing of itself is highlighted with the example of a beautiful

passage in a game of sport which only lasts a small amount of time in relation to the

overall game being played; or here, perhaps the feeling of unification that is experienced

between the text and the audience in relation to Avatar (especially relating to ‘Avatar

Blues’) and Funny Games US can be considered the moment of epiphanic presence

where the emotive response is produced, reproduced and made coincide with itself as an

actual moment of affective presence. So Gumbrecht’s epiphany can now relate to the

presence of the thing-itself which can be seen as emotion which is a temporal or fleeting

9 James Joyce termed some of his short pieces ‘Epiphanies’: he related the term with its theological value

where a deity becomes manifest or where a secret meaning is exposed. In Joyce’s case, there is a

revelation of being, be it physical (the body of a deity) or metaphysical (the secret meaning). For Joyce,

epiphany expands the world to make it become a unity of both physical (mortal) and metaphysical

(spiritual) where neither term is privileged. There is an interesting parallel between Joyce and Gumbrecht:

both attempt, through epiphanic moments, to unify the physical and the metaphysical in moments of

intensity that can be understood as post-metaphysical. (Jamesjoyce.ie)

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moment of actualised affect produced in a subject by the event which itself induces,

produces and reproduces emotion in the singular and affect in the multiple. Media texts

of this type, which produce and reproduce emotion, according to Shaviro ‘generate

subjectivity’ (3): in this sense, they make the subject actually coincide with the self in a

moment of realised and actualised presence (or epiphany) – they are there-now as a

being-in-the-world. Importantly, and moving away from postmodernity, these bodies of

affect now replace the Lacanian mirror image which shows the subject itself, but which

never allows the self to coincide with its own represented image. The mirror image

remains perpetually metaphysical and always at a lack; the epiphanic affective moment

of media texts allows the subject a presence as the self, in both image and in physical

reality.

What I have attempted to show in this chapter is that metaphysical modes of

understanding, despite being necessary to an overall understanding, are not the only

mode of encountering and experiencing the world. This has been achieved by showing a

move away from postmodern thought, which focuses on surface and image alone, to a

more physical and corporeal mode of existence based understanding. In order to show

this, modernist theories, postmodern theories, post-metaphysical theories and cognitive

approaches to emotive responses and cinematic images have all been discussed and

combined. This combination of disparate theories and ontological approaches shows a

thread that can be followed in all cases which inevitably leads away from the focus on

the empty signifier and a psychoanalytic lack in the subject, to a fullness of being

experienced through moments of extreme aesthetic experience, solidified in moments of

epiphany. The next step was to show how this move from metaphysical existence, to

post-metaphysical experience actually altered subject/object relations. This was

achieved using Gumbrecht’s delight in presence which re-establishes our contact with

the things of the world outside the subject/object paradigm. If subject/object relations

are no longer a mode of understanding the world, a new paradigm must be instated in

order for experience to be possible. This paradigmatic shift can be seen to take the shape

of the rhizome: a non-hierarchical root-structure in which ‘any point […] can be

connected to anything other’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 7). This type of structure,

according to Deleuze and Guattari ‘ceaselessly establishes connections between

semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences,

and social struggles’ (8). This mode of realist ontology maintains an equivalence

14

between all things; an empty signifier is equivalent to the thing it represents and is fully

present at all times; art is an epiphanic corporeal experience and so on. Another way to

look at this is to see affect as the structure that unites and connects all things equally,

since all experience has both a physical and emotive quality. Each root of the affective

rhizome is an emotional response created and sustained by texts which are examples of

and reproductions of the affect they represent. Texts like these therefore coincide with

themselves as moments of epiphany which are experienced by viewers as moments of

personal emotive reactions (personal epiphanies) that are full of lived presence. By lived

presence, I mean that these instances of affect are not lacking what they represent; they

are in fact present as a thing-in-the-world which enables the viewer to unite with what

they encounter and therefore unite with themselves since all things are equally

connected in this mode of ontology.

The next chapter will focus on James Cameron’s Avatar, showing how this movie

operates as an example of the aforementioned rhizomatic affective body of presence.

Both the content and the form of this text allow a detailed examination of presence,

aided by advances in technology and a unification of text and viewer. The phenomenon

of Avatar Blues will be discussed, showing how some viewers actually feel emotionally

attached to the text and the world it depicts, so much so that life without the text, and

the inability to live in the world depicted, has resulted in actual depression. This film

can be seen as an extended moment of epiphanic joy at being-in-the-world; being

connected to all things and coinciding at all times with the depicted images and with the

actual digital imagery itself.

15

Chapter Two: Becoming-Avatar

‘Your Spirit goes with Ewya. Your body stays behind to become part of The People’

- Omaticaya hunter belief highlighting connectedness.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss Avatar in relation to the theoretical frameworks

expanded upon in the previous chapter. This will entail a detailed discussion of the

technology (motion capture) utilised in the making of the film and how this aids in the

production of a new form of digital image that cannot, according to Shaviro, be

distinguished from “reality” and its ‘multiple simulations’ (7). This form of simulation

will be shown to differ from Baudrillard’s conception of simulation which effaces

reality in that these new types of simulated digital image create an actual original

ontological reality, or a visual and visible there-now-ness. These digital bodies of affect

will then be discussed showing how they are created and how they create moments of

‘asubjective, unqualified, and intensive affect’ (Shaviro, 160) which are manifest as

emotive responses in the audience. Affect can be taken as the unification of text and

audience which produces itself as it unfolds and which also represents the unfolding of

affect in itself. The audience experiences this affect as emotional responses which in

themselves produce the subject as they unfold. Audience participation or textual

unification is a major aspect of this chapter and it sets up the rhizomatic realist ontology

of epiphany that has resulted in actual cases of depression termed ‘Avatar Blues’. This

occurs when the audience disconnects from the text or are removed from the affective

bond. This connection relates to the content and the form of Avatar, both of which will

have bearing on the overall affective physicality and cognitive responses to and from

the text. The atavistic depiction of the Na’vi people cannot be ignored and will be

touched upon in relation to two things: firstly, showing how a return to physicality can

be coded as primitivist and possibly right wing: and secondly, how capitalism can only

imagine a threat to itself as an atavistic and primitive nuisance. In order to achieve an

in-depth discussion of the above matters, a number of sources will be necessary: since,

however, this discussion is based in and on an emerging digital presence, it makes sense

to look to the internet, and in particular to film blogs, for real, on-going, instant and up

to date information. Beyond this, theorists such as Shaviro, Baudrillard and Gumbrecht

16

will all have a major contribution, and will all be drawn from in order to make a

coherent and strong argument.

To begin with, we must take into account the use of a new form of technology used

in the production of Avatar. James Cameron and his crew developed what is termed

‘motion capture’ technology to create, not an animated film along the lines of

Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story, but a film that, with the aid of this new technology, aims ‘to

capture the performance of an actor and translate it to a digital character’ (Avatar

Exclusive). The difference between normal computer generated images (CGI) and the

images produced by and through motion capture is enormous. CGI graphics are

simulacra or simulations in the strict postmodern sense Baudrillard attributed to these

terms: they are the ‘generation by models of a real without origin or reality’ (Simulacra,

p.1). The images created by CGI appear real in that they resemble real world physical

objects, yet they have no lived (or physical) real world equivalence. In other words, they

can never coincide with themselves in a lived reality, so, in this sense, they remain

purely metaphysical. Arguably they retain a sort of reality, but they only do so in an

absent metaphysical sense10

. Like language, they do not correspond or coincide with the

physical entity they represent or stand in for. These simulated CGI graphics have been

solely created in and on computer based modes of production. They are images that

have ‘no relation to any reality whatsoever: [they are their] own pure simulacrum’

(Simulacra, p.6) which are made to mime and sync with a real voice (the voice has its

own metaphysical issues of absence and prosthesis which cannot be discussed in this

piece due to its limited scope). Avatar, whilst having some obvious elements of CGI,

such as a spatially simulated background, does not operate solely on this level. The

motion capture technology allows for a sort of simulated presence to be achieved. By

this, I do not mean that the digital images that the viewer is presented with are models

based on no original, but that they are a sort of lived digital rendition of actual present

beings. Richard Baneham, the Animation Supervisor involved with the Avatar project,

sums up the aim of motion capture as follows: it is an attempt to capture the ‘intent of

the actor’ (Avatar Exclusive) and not to generate a computer image of what an actor

might do in certain situations (as CGI would do). Or, as Joe Letteri, the Senior Visual

10

In a strange way, CGI graphics are arguably closer to classical indexical images than the new motion

capture technology. CGI reproduces elements from the world in a computer generated format: motion

capture uses a similar approach, but it manages to make the real world coincide with the digital world and

makes one perform the other in a production of presence.

17

Effects Supervisor of the Avatar team puts it, motion capture tries to gather together

what the ‘actor is doing emotionally’ and then ‘translate that into the characters [and

this is done] using their muscles’ (Avatar Exclusive). This means that the actual,

corporeal (muscular) actor is filmed by a vast number of cameras and motion sensors to

capture every precise movement, especially in the face and eyes, in order to ‘drive a

computer generated character’ (Avatar Exclusive) or an affective avatar. It may seem

that the motion capture point is being over-elaborated, but it is too important for it not to

be discussed in detail. James Cameron emphasises the point of what they are trying to

do with the technology as follows: he sees it as ‘true human emotion captured and

performed by a non-human character’ (Avatar Exclusive). Sam Worthington, the actor

who plays Jake Sully, the physically ‘disabled’ marine, says that due to the

technological transfer of himself to the digital version of himself, ‘in every take you

have to be truthful’ (Avatar Exclusive). In a final telling statement from Worthington, he

claims that the Na’vi avatar animated (brought to life) by him in the film, actually has

his soul (Avatar Exclusive).

Arguably, what this new technology has managed to achieve is a sort of lived

rhizomatic connection between the actors performing and the avatars being performed:

the two create a non-hierarchical connection. The actors openly discuss this feeling of

connection to the digital entities they animate; the connection is supposedly so strong

that Laz Alonso (Tsu’tey, a chief Na’vi warrior in Avatar) states: you get ‘so deep into

the world [of the Na’vi] that you start hearing, seeing, feeling Pandora [the actual living

world depicted in the film]’ (Avatar Exclusive). Every physical and emotional response

produced in and by the actor is also produced in and on their digital avatar counterpart.

Dr Smith states that ‘emotions resemble reflexes because they provide simple, quick

responses to the environment’ (19): this highlights the connection between emotional

responses and physical responses, both of which act and react upon one and other. This

formula is the same idea behind the motion capture technology. If the exact physical

responses of an actor, which expose or relate to their emotional responses, can be made

to be carried out on and in a digital avatar, then that avatar itself will appear to be fully

emotionally and physically responsive. The gap between actor and avatar must be

discussed in relation to this point however. The avatar that is digitally rendered upon

and through an actor’s emotive and physical reflexes does not actually have these

feelings; but there is a new sort of presence or non-metaphysical materiality being

18

produced between them. In his discussion of Grace Jones’ music video “Corporate

Cannibal” in which Jones’ image digitally morphs and stretches like a living oil spill,

Shaviro posits her fluctuating and modulating image as a figure not ‘implied in space,

but an electronic signal whose modulations pulse across the screen’ (15). Jones’ image

spills and morphs across the entire surface of the screen; it is a digital image made out

of an indexical image, but it does not re-present an indexical image as it once was, it

creates a new image: in this way the screen itself ‘works as a material support for this

signal/image’ (Shaviro, 15). Shaviro attributes a ‘dense materiality’ (13) to this type of

image which generates its own space and presence. This is opposed to the classical

cinematic image that operates indexically, pointing back to ‘some sort of absolute, pre-

existing space’ (Shaviro, 16). The digital image or presence does not operate in this

referential fashion; it points only to itself in its modulating present of presence: the

digital image happens/occurs/unfolds on screen. In the case of Avatar there is a

doubling of presence: there is no indexical image to refer back to, but actors did

produce, through their actual presence and actions, the presence and actions of the

digital avatars. This separates these digital images from the postmodern simulacra

discussed by Baudrillard. These new digital images have an origin from which they

have come, and they have become detached from this in order to inhabit their own lived

reality and presence; their own ontological affective actuality. Avatar is interesting, not

only due to its technological production which facilitates this digital materiality, but

also because what it does is mirrored in what it says. Its images coincide with its actions

and its audience in a prolonged moment of affective epiphany.

Avatar’s story follows a paraplegic marine, Jake, to the planet of Pandora. He has

been called upon to replace his dead brother as a driver, or host, for a Na’vi avatar. Jake

thus becomes an instant living presence for his absent brother. Beyond this, however,

Jake must become part of the Na’vi people (via avatar infiltration) in order to learn

about the ‘natives’ to aid the scientific arm of the off world mission, and also, loyal to

his military background, enter their world in order to move them off their land with the

aim of extracting the rare and highly expensive mineral, Unobtanium. The transition

from Jake to avatar is aided by a motion capture capsule that, like its Hollywood

equivalent, reads every physical and emotional response in Jake and translates this into

the actual body of a Na’vi that can then be used or lived as a real body. Jake, through

his avatar, has the ability to move and emote as a living Na’vi. The avatar version can

19

clearly feel, both physically and emotionally since he falls in love with a Na’vi female,

Neytiri. However, since Jake is merely “driving” his avatar, he cannot coincide with it

in a fully present materiality. Jake and the avatar he operates are still separate; they are

stuck in a subject/object dichotomy in which both terms are interchangeable with the

passage from man to avatar and vice versa. When Jake is “in” the avatar, the avatar is

present and the human Jake is absent, and when the avatar is not being operated, Jake is

present and the avatar is absent. This is shown in the film as sleep: when Jake “unplugs”

from his avatar, the avatar body become motionless (represented as sleep) since this

covers up the fact that avatar-Jake is not actually a Na’vi. This inability to coincide fully

with a presence of self is depicted over the length of the film. Gumbrecht points out that

‘Being is not a meaning. Being belongs to the dimension of things’ (68). Building on

Heidegger’s writing, he goes on to state that if ‘Being has the character of a thing this

means that it has substance and that, therefore (and unlike anything purely spiritual [or

absent such as metaphysical meaning]), it occupies space’ (68). Both Jake and his

avatar-equivalent have Being as separate entities which can only be understood as

materiality, but in each case, this Being is not fully present: Jake is a human who wants

more and more to become his avatar, and as the avatar, he wants to cast off his

humanness. There is a chasm in the very Being of Jake/avatar: as separate entities, when

one inhabits the other, the being that is not active is absent. So, like meaning in

language, Jake can be seen as the signifier and the avatar as the signified. They cannot

yet coincide with each other in an epiphanic moment of full materiality. At the

beginning of the film, we see (human) Jake wake up from a dream of flying: the

character states: “you always have to wake up”. Jake has awoken from a fantasy, or a

dream, and has entered a reality. At the end of the film, human Jake dies and his spirit

or soul transmigrates, via the rhizomatic organism of Pandora as spiritual and material

coincidence, into the body of his avatar for good. This is the first time that one of the

entities involved in the subject/object dichotomy has become invalid as a separate

entity, collapsing the dichotomy into a harmonious unity. When this occurs in the film,

Jake’s Being passes into his avatar and the avatar’s eyes open. He has finally awoken

into a present new reality of coinciding fully with his self. The Being of Jake is now a

hybrid of living human consciousness (a previously absent metaphysical meaning that

was, until now, absent from the avatar) and a living avatar (that is physical in that

Pandora is overtly sensuous and corporeal where all living and spiritual entities connect

in material presence which some of the human characters fail to comprehend). With the

20

passage from human to avatar, Jake/avatar manages to fully coincide with a subjectivity

in a way similar to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. Gumbrecht sums Dasein up as

follows: it is ‘being-in-the-world, that is, human existence that is always already in –

both spatial and functional – contact with the world: [that is] always already interpreted

world’ (71). Dasein is a physical presence that cannot be conveyed via the mediation of

absent sign systems usually used to carry meaning (language in this case). It is a

corporeal understanding based in materiality and ontological presence and is thus

always already interpreted through its very materiality. Jake reaches this point in his

avatar which combines human and humanoid-avatar when he opens his eyes at the end

of the film and enters his new ontological reality.

It is this precise type of unification (highlighted in the content of Avatar) that

resembles directly what happens between the text itself and the text’s audience. The

entire world of Pandora, every element of it, both spiritual and physical, is united via a

‘network of energy that flows through all living things’ (Avatar). On a more localised

level, the Na’vi people themselves use a biological appendage to connect themselves to

animals (and plants etc.) in order to become one with the animal whilst the connection is

made. This appendage of life, or surrogate umbilical cord, which can be attached and

detached at will, serves as a root system (a rhizomatic system) that connects all things

equally. When Jake connects to his avatar via the motion capture capsule, he is a

becoming-avatar; when the Na’vi connect to their animals (or their planet) they are

becoming-animal (-planet). According to Deleuze and Guattari, this type of rhizomatic

connection opens up new spaces of subjectivity: becoming ‘is not a correspondence

between relations [nor] a resemblance [or] an imitation’ (262). Becoming-x does not

change y into x, it creates x|y (or y|x): a new type of subjectivity of non-hierarchical

connected reality. Becomings are ‘perfectly real’ and in the process of becoming it

‘produces nothing other than itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari, p.262). A becoming-animal

is not a human-turned-animal, or vice versa, but a new ontological materiality of a

becoming-animal where becoming ‘concerns alliance’ (A Thousand Plateaus, p.262). In

these terms, Avatar is a becoming: it is a movement of presence in all things equally.

Jake is a becoming-machine (motion capture capsule) and a becoming-avatar/Na’vi;

when he reaches the avatar/Na’vi state he enters another wider becoming, that of

becoming-animal (-planet). There is no end point or apex in this movement: it is a

duration or modulation of subjective unity. This is what happens between the text and

21

the audience due to the technology and the presence of the digital image. The text is a

becoming-human/audience and the audience is a becoming-text/digital image. The two

combine to become a becoming-act-of-presence. The 3D technology makes the image

spill out of the screen which is merely a conductor for the digital materiality and it also

allows the audience to enter into the textual and overtly textured world of the film

itself11

. When this happens, the text and the audience create a new subjective-becoming:

they both coincide with each other in a prolonged movement/moment of epiphany

which does not instantly undo itself as it unfolds, but one that lasts the entire duration of

the filmic event. Gumbrecht, again expanding on Heidegger’s concepts, sees the ‘work

of art as a privileged site for the happening of truth, that is, for the unconcealment (and

the withdrawal) of Being’ (72). Being is a physical and already interpreted presence of

itself as truth: it is an unmediated presence that is beyond meaning (meaning for

Gumbrecht is that which makes things culturally specific and is mediated through

language [77]) and therefore not actual or fully truthful (immanently present in

physicality). Moments, especially in art, when this non-culturally-specific presence is

experienced are the aforementioned epiphanic moments of intensity. Gumbrecht gives

the following becoming-rhizome example to elucidate this point: ‘the almost excessive,

exuberant sweetness that sometimes overcomes me when a Mozart aria grows into

polyphonic complexity and when I indeed believe that I can hear the tones of the oboe

on my skin’ (97). It is these moments of intensity which have no metaphysical meaning

of correspondence: they are purely physical moments that are only interpreted

physically and have no ‘edifying contents or effects to offer’ (Gumbrecht, 99).

Gumbrecht highlights the temporality and momentariness of these epiphanic moments:

they are events that are fleeting and undone in their own emergence. However, with the

interactive unity of Avatar and audience, which creates a becoming, the epiphanic

moment is prolonged and endured for a relatively long time.

This is where the phenomenon of Avatar Blues comes to be of major import. When

one experiences a moment of epiphanic intensity, it is usually fleeting and gone as

quickly as it unfolds. The event folds in on itself, and, like lightening, is a huge energy

that strikes and subsides instantly in the same moment. These moments of intensity are

bearable only because they are precisely that: moments. With Avatar, the epiphanic

11

The 3D glasses act as a real world living-appendage, or surrogate umbilical cord that allows the

becoming to emerge from the screen.

22

moment of affective intensity lasts for almost three hours. In this time period a

becoming is created and emerges. Subject/object relations collapse, and like the Na’vi

people with Pandora, the text and the audience plug into each other, drawing life equally

from both terms which become one in a becoming. According to CNN reports, Avatar

‘may have been a little too real for some who say they experienced depression and

suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of […]

Pandora’ (CNN). These feelings may be down to the fact that Avatar is such a visual

and corporeal spectacle, but it also arguably highlights the becomingness of the entire

event. Viewers lose their subjectivity (which is arguably always already lacking or

prostheticised through language) and become a fullness of becoming-rhizome of

audience|text/text|audience. One film blogger commends Cameron for ‘believing the

investment of massive amounts of money and time might eventually close the

irreconcilable gap between realism and reality’ (ludicdespair). The text is now, as

Shaviro describes, a dense materiality: it transmits flows of affect which crystalize as

emotive responses in the audience, that ‘are so intense, and so impersonal and inhuman,

that they cannot be contained within traditional forms of subjectivity’ (20) (hence the

new subjectivity of becoming). The singular emotive responses are only deemed so in

hindsight; when they are occurring, the subject/object dichotomy actually collapses and

a becoming emerges in the place of the two terms. This becoming makes all

subjectivities coincide with their meaning in moments of intense affective epiphany, and

when this is stopped, or when the audience unplugs back into singular subject positions,

Avatar Blues, or depression in disconnection ensues. After all, epiphanies for ‘moments

at least, make us dream, make us long for, and make us perhaps even remember with

our bodies as well as with our minds, how good it would be to live in sync with the

things of the world’ (Gumbrecht, p.118). Avatar and the audience meld together into

this dream of cognitive and corporeal materiality resulting in a presence that is beyond

interpretation in its absent, metaphysical sense (through language) and which affects,

unifies and intensifies a materiality of meaning that is post-metaphysical. This is evident

not only in the form, but also in the content of Avatar.

The final point of discussion in this chapter will be the rather dubious and atavistic

depiction of the ‘natives’ of Pandora. This cannot be overlooked in any discussion of

Avatar. This discussion will begin to pave the way for an exploration of violence in the

final chapter, focussing on the violence of ideological disruption (the disruption to

23

Classical Hollywood Narrative in particular), epiphanic violence (of the event as it

unfolds) and actual physical violence (particularly in Funny Games US). Colonel Miles

Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang) is the head of the military arm of the human

exploration/exploitation of Pandora. At one point in the film, when a full military

offensive has been put in operation, Quaritch describes the Omaticaya people (a tribe of

Na’vi beings) as ‘Fly bitten savages that live in a tree’ (Avatar). He primitivises the

‘alien’ race in order to justify his destruction of them. His construction of hierarchical

power relations (with humans in the dominant position) is in direct

ideological/ontological opposition to the Na’vi’s rhizomatic connectedness and non-

hierarchical network: there are hierarchies within the tribes which appear to be based on

seniority, but there are no racial or gendered hierarchies. This discourse of primitivism

constructs the Na’vi as an atavistic life form, and thus, as a lower life form in the eyes

of some of the human colonisers. This feeds into a certain type of right-wing mentality

which allows the film to be read allegorically. It has obvious anti-extraction, anti-

colonial and anti-war overtones and as such could be read as an anti-Bush movie. The

militarist arm of the expedition want to eradicate the ‘savages’ who unite with their

animals and their planet in such a way that the purity of their blood and race comes into

question (by those who believe in such empty categories). The Na’vi are not a pure race

in the sense that they are a becoming-organism connected to all things living and

spiritual. In this sense, it can be argued that the military side of the human mission has

overt right-wing or fascist leanings: fascism according to Terry Eagleton found its

‘grotesque apotheosis’ in its ‘panoply of myths, symbols and orgiastic spectacles, its

repressive expressivity, its appeals to passion, racial intuition, instinctual judgement, the

sublimity of self-sacrifice and the pulse of the blood’ (Ideology, 373). Whilst some of

these fascist tropes can equally apply to the depictions of the Na’vi, with their

connection to the soil and self-sacrificial willingness, there is no element of racial purity

or repression on their behalf, especially when their trans-racial, or trans-organic nature

is considered. This is in stark opposition to the greedy capitalist consumption of some of

the humans; their consumption has outdone itself and has clearly used up the minerals

necessary to sustain itself on Earth, so they have come, as a self-termed superior race, to

an alien planet in order to extract what they need and pay no heed to the indigenous life

forms. By the end of the text, however, the humans must leave Pandora and Jake

becomes a full ‘native’: in other words; the fascists, read as the extreme point of

capitalist consumption, fail in their mission and a pan-organic life form flourishes in its

24

place. It should also be noted in any discussion relating to Avatar, that if the text is an

anti-expansionist, or anti-Bush allegory, both of which can be seen to support global

capitalism, that the threat to this mode of capitalist realism is coded as primitive and

alien. The humans return to earth, defeated by the Na’vi, yet they remain “on top” in

their hierarchical power structures and discursive formations back home. This attack or

disruption to realism will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter. There is a

note of anti-globalisation and anti-capitalism coming through in the film however (the

Na’vi flourish in the absence of human intervention) despite it being one of the highest

grossing and most expensive projects in cinematic history. The film espouses a

rhizomatic affective becoming in form and in content, yet it is situated firmly within the

constraints of global capitalism, producing wider markets for itself in the form of

computer games, merchandise, DVD sales, fan fiction and possible sequels.

25

Chapter Three: Funny Violence

‘All I ever wanted,

All I ever needed

Is here in my arms,

Words are very unnecessary

They can only do harm’

- Enjoy the Silence, Depeche Mode, 1990

This final chapter aims to discuss the violence inherent in the process of creating or

experiencing a heterotopian body of affect. The primary focus will be on Funny Games

US and how this text, like Avatar, disrupts the hegemonic notion of cinematic realism

(albeit in a very different manner). This disruption to cinematic realism will be

considered as an act of liberatory violence against the ideological imposition of certain

modes of subjectivity. Further to this notion of violence will be a discussion of actual

physical violence in its (self-) destructive and liberatory sense: for this element of the

discussion, Baudrillard’s writing on ‘symbolic death’ will be utilised, showing how the

threat of violently removing oneself from an imposed system actually works to reinstate

the positive presence of the self and support the formation of a fully present subject that

resides as a Being-in-the world and not an absent or disjointed subject. Throughout this

discussion, the violence of the epiphanic event will be an important factor given the

nature of the overall aesthetic discussion and the experience of an affective becoming-

subject aided by and aiding the emergence of an interactive and materially present form

of art/experience. Like Avatar, Funny Games US also has a doubling of form and

content which shows the similarities between the two texts and also between what the

two texts are attempting to achieve. Again, for the purposes of this chapter, a number of

film blogs and cultural theorists, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, Shaviro, Žižek and

Gumbrecht will be drawn from in order to gain an insight into the post-metaphysical

moment taking shape in film (and in wider contexts – however – these wider contexts

cannot be discussed at this point given the present paper’s scope, but it should be noted

26

that an emerging presence-based meaning and a return to physicality are a major factor

in relation to the recent global economic disaster and the concurrent ‘non-stop inertia’,

to borrow a phrase from Ivor Southwood, of post-industrial society).

To begin with, it is necessary to return to the notion of the heterotopia. It is within

the heterotopian space that usually forbidden acts are permitted to take place. Foucault

discusses these spaces as heterotopian spaces of deviation: these are zones where

‘individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are

placed’ (232). These places exist in real space but may be transitory or impermanent,

moving from place to place12

. Entry into these places is ‘either compulsory, as in the

case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and

purifications’ (235). In relation to film, a certain degree of giving is needed: the viewer

must give the self over to the film, but also vice versa in this instance. This occurs

through the use of 3D glasses in Avatar and an acceptance of the violent disruption of

narrative in Funny Games US. For the purposes of this piece, the two texts being

discussed are to be considered as opening up new heterotopian spaces through film.

What is permitted to occur through and in these spaces is a prolonged act of physicality

of meaning, or a non-meaning, or already interpreted (in the sense of Being) physical

connection to all things equally. In everyday, non-heterotopian space, there is an

inherent violence in the sense Gumbrecht attributes to the violence of space. He

discusses space as the dominant dimension of a presence based culture where the

relationship between human bodies ‘can constantly turn (and indeed tends to turn) into

violence – that is, into occupying and blocking spaces with bodies – against other

bodies’ (83). Space is thus the presence of the possibility of violent power relations

where bodies are either allowed or disallowed occupy certain spaces. When space is

produced in and through artistic texts that allow a physical interaction of real space and

the space of affect, another violence is enacted and a new space is opened up: this time

it is a liberatory violence that creates a heterotopian body of affect. This devious textual

space collapses subject/object relations and thus collapses the ability to block bodies or

to create power relations based on the hierarchical production of space. As has been

shown, Avatar does this openly with the aid of motion capture and 3D technology.

12

The internet is a heterotopian space without rival. This space allows any number of devious acts or

subjectivities to take shape. It is within the heterotopian space of cyber-space, for example, that a

movement like Occupy Wall Street can really ‘come to life’; allowing both its physical presence in

occupation and its globally instant cyber-incarnation coincide and become a single entity.

27

Funny Games US, however, whilst attempting a similar feat, goes about it in a very

different fashion: in fact, it arguably does so in a far more violent fashion. Avatar

adheres to a linear narrative structure despite being able to open up an abyss of affective

space between the text and the audience. The narrative is smooth and seamless – in

other words – Avatar creates its own realism by disguising its modes of production.

Funny Games US disrupts this narrative realism by allowing the characters their own

space of autonomy: Funny Games US thus opens up a sort of Brechtian space where the

characters can refer to the audience and thus collapse subject/object boundaries (or to

use Kristeva’s well-worn phrase, they draw attention to ‘the place where meaning

collapses’ [2])13

. By doing this, the characters make the audience feel that they are

watching something actually living unfold or emerge. This is most obvious when Paul

(played by Michael Pitt), one of the two young male aggressors, rewinds the diegetic

time of the film in order to alter the events that have unfolded (Ann, played by Naomi

Watts, has shot Peter, the second aggressor, played by Brady Corbet). This shooting by

Ann is not in line with the rules of the game (or the controlled narrative) set out by Paul

so he proves his presence by altering the very fabric of the film and its diegetic world.

The narrative can no longer contain the text and the text begins to create its own space

in a way similar to the dense materiality discussed in relation to Grace Jones’ image in

‘Corporate Cannibal’.

When this narrative violence is carried out by the text, the audience experiences a

new feeling: arguably a sort of uneasy feeling caused by the violent disruption to the

normal viewing process aided by the apparently interference free seamlessness of

classical Hollywood narrative: this is the moment of epiphany. The film emerges as an

actual living entity and it makes the audience live it also, in the sense of an actual shared

physical reaction. Gumbrecht states that the epiphanic character of any aesthetic

affective experience ‘implies the emergence of a substance that seems to come out of

nothing’ (114). This epiphanic violence, like the violence of spatial relations, blocks, or

arrests our bodies. This blocking is the physical shock of the narrative being violently

disrupted: its meaning is beyond (metaphysical) interpretation – it has made the viewer

13

As such, in line with what Kristeva says, this form of boundary disruption carried out by the characters

in Funny Games US, and by both the text and the audience in Avatar with the aid of technology, becomes

‘a border that has encroached upon everything’(3). All subject and object distinctions collapse and any

sort of closed off identification, which can lead to hierarchical distinctions, becomes impossible: in this

way, this new space feeds into discourses of feminism and other discourses that aim at collapsing

traditional power structures.

28

feel uneasy – it has produced a lived, physical presence of Being-in-the-world. The

spectator is no longer viewing a representation; they are violently and physically forced

to witness an unmediated (in the sense of being present and always already interpreted)

presentation of living and connected becoming-text/audience. Since, in a meaning based

mode of living, subject and object are separate entities, disconnected or absent from one

and other, this form of violent disruption collapses this boundary and thus can be

considered as a deviation unfolding in the new and transitory heterotopian space opened

up by the film and the audience. This is why the epiphanic emergence is to be

considered as a heterotopian body of affect. It is a real (yet transitory) place, within our

world of things, that allows the normally deviant act of losing one’s subjectivity (or

creating a rhizomatic subjectivity) to occur and emerge.

This leads on to Adorno and Horkheimer’s belief the ‘[r]eal life is becoming

indistinguishable from the movies’ (43). Adorno and Horkheimer see mass culture as a

fully loaded ideological machine which reproduces the dominant ideology which

produces it. Their view is a rather pessimistic one that automatically disallows an active

or critical response to texts from the audience (unless you are critically and theoretically

engaged) and they see all of real life as identical to images produced by the owners of

the means of production; they sum their view up as follows: ‘The man with leisure has

to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 42). The

man with leisure is thus expected, or it is assumed that he will, reproduce what he

consumes as a norm in his everyday life. This view of cultural texts and the audience as

consumer assumes the viewers are ‘mostly passive, uncritical, and easily manipulated

[…] completely at the mercy of the films they watch, rather than conscious beings who

don’t simply turn off their brains and moral compasses’ when watching a film

(Alternate Takes). However, what Adorno and Horkheimer are attempting to highlight

is that certain cultural products (in this case, films) operate on such a level that their

realism appears to resemble the (only possible) way things are, or should be, according

to those who produce them, and that there is no alternative. Whilst some viewers may

be duped by this ideological imposition, others may not, but either way, its ideological

form is still maintained, as is the possibility of producing (or reproducing) a certain

mode of living that appears as common sense and which produces and reproduces

certain modes of subjectivity (the dominant patriarchal white male for example). The

form of Avatar follows this trend: it has a narrative arc that follows a set pattern from

29

beginning, to middle, to end, without any narrative disruption. Funny Games US,

despite appearing more realistic (it is not made up of digital images or CGI), is far less

realist: it does not reproduce a version of normality in its form. Instead it produces a

presence; the characters rupture out of the text and they manage to become a living

presence, again in a similar way to the dense materiality of the images produced by

Grace Jones’ image in ‘Corporate Cannibal’ and in a similar way to how presence is

created in the space between the text and the audience in Avatar14

. The characters

become a becoming-presence: they reach out of the screen in a number of moments of

intensity, or epiphanic moments that stress their physicality and their presence and in

doing so, they put the viewer in a “compromised” position where subject/object

relations collapse and a unified (textual and textured) presence emerges. As a horror

film, Funny Games US repeats the generic trope of ‘“normality” (read: predominantly

white, middle-class, heterosexual, etc.) being violently attacked by forces it doesn’t

want to acknowledge and is ill equipped to defend itself against’ (Alternate Takes). This

formula does not only work in relation to horror films: it can be used to relate to the

violence of disruption to the entire narrative structure of “normality” built by

Hollywood itself. Hollywood becomes the norm (read: predominantly white, middle-

class, heterosexual, etc.) that cannot deal with the emergence of a physical body of

affect which collapses the viewer/text dichotomy into a unified becoming-presence. The

system of subjectivity set up by Hollywood realism is under attack and is unable to deal

with the violent threat.

Funny Games US depicts the ruthless and unprovoked violence of two young,

white, male aggressors, carried out on an obviously wealthy (white American) family.

Their physical violence utterly disrupts and destroys the heteronormative patriarchal

family unit which is arguably seen as the hegemonic norm of Western society. The two

young aggressors, Peter and Paul, carry out all of the acts of actual physical violence off

screen (breaking George’s leg, played by Tim Roth, shooting the son and punching

Ann, the wife and mother). Arguably this is done in order to draw attention towards the

more violent act being carried out against what Žižek terms ‘systemic’ violence. It is at

14

It must be noted that it is only the disruptive violent characters, viewed as a threat to normality that can

rupture out of the text in this instance. In a telling scene, the two aggressors force Ann to strip down to

her underwear in front of her husband and child. They admire her body for its slender appearance, but

more importantly, this act exposes the direct physical carnality of Ann’s body. She is, as yet, unaware of

her physical presence, whereas the two aggressors are fully aware of the importance of presence. They

can use her body as capital, or as a direct mode of making meaning, in order to get what they want. They

have entered the realm of physical presence and left the other characters in the realm of ignorance/images.

30

this point that the mirroring of form and content is most apparent. The violence in the

film, although relatively unseen, mirrors the usually unseen systemic, or ideological,

violence carried out by systems of realism. The violence in the film duplicates the

violence carried out by the film: in other words, the form and the content connect on a

non-hierarchical plane and manage to coincide with each other. Systemic violence is, as

Žižek puts it, ‘the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our

economic and political systems’ (Violence, 1), or the smooth functioning of ideology

itself which is capable of imposing certain hegemonic modes of living. This is the

‘violence inherent in a system […] that sustains relations of domination and

exploitation, including the threat of violence’ (Violence, 8). Žižek terms this type of

systemic violence ‘objective’ violence, and the type of physical violence carried out by

single agents (like the aggressors of Funny Games US) ‘subjective’ violence. In Funny

Games US, the subjective violence is ancillary; the real violence depicted is the violence

of the patriarchal system of capitalism which sustains a normality based on hierarchical

power relations: the actual violence emerging from the text is the violence against this

system carried out by the young aggressors. Classical Hollywood narrative may be

made to appear as real life: this is true at a relatively crude Marxist level and it can be

resisted; however, the realist imposition of subjectivities does occur as violence.

Hegemony can be created and instated through cultural products, especially through

realist forms that appear to reproduce the way things appear to be. The young

aggressors of Funny Games US who address the audience and control every element of

the diegetic world, including its temporal and spatial configurations, are attacking this

very systemic violence. Their apparently aimless violence is the very result of a system

that dictates what, or who, is to be considered as a subject and what, or who, an object.

The violent characters of a film attack the form of a film which would usually dictate

their subjectivity: this is done in order for the characters to act autonomously and to

stress their dense materiality of presence. The audience, used to linear narrative and its

inherently obedient characters, are shocked by this violent attack on the systemic

violence which can be taken as the common sense norm. In line with Gumbrecht’s

thesis, nothing is learned from this epiphanic and intense emergence (emergency): it is

not edifying and has no purely interpretative meaning. There is an awareness of

ideological impositions and the inherent inequalities of living within certain systems:

what emerges however is a ‘moment of intensity’ (Gumbrecht, 98), or a ‘lived

experience’ (Gumbrecht, 100). Unequal subject/object relations collapse and the

31

symbolic system that produces subjectivities is forced to recede. The text and the

audience coincide with each other in moments of lived experience as opposed to absent

moments based purely in metaphysical interpretation. Gumbrecht refuses to use the term

‘aesthetic experience’ since philosophical traditions equate these moments with ‘acts of

meaning attribution’ (100): this is not what physicality and presence aim at, their

meaning is always full and coincides with both its present and absent manifestations (in

terms of the signifier and the signified). What Funny Games US and Avatar allow is an

always already interpreted physicality of becoming to emerge in and on the subject

(subject here refers to the rhizomatic becoming-text/audience).

It is with these moments of intensity, or moments of physicality, that Baudrillard’s

writing on ‘symbolic death’ comes to have a vital importance. According to the

postmodern theorist Brian McHale the ‘metafictional gesture of breaking the text’s

fictionality functions as a metaphor for nuclear apocalypse’ (161). This apocalypse is

the apex of any violent disruption which forces any system based on unequal

subject/object relations to terminate, or to collapse and emerge again as an ontologically

different system. In a way, this violence on fiction is mirrored in Baudrillard’s idea of

symbolic death. The worst thing, according to Baudrillard, the system of inequality, or

capitalist realism inflicts ‘on them [labourers in this instance] is refusing them death’

(Symbolic Exchange, 39). By deferring the death of labourers the system of capital can

maintain them as labourers and extract their true value (their labour) for as long as

mortally possible: once the labourer’s labour is dead, it is no longer of value to capital15

.

So, in terms of labour, ‘retaliating against a deferred death with an immediate death,

constitutes a radical response, and the only possibility of abolishing power’ (Symbolic

Exchange, 40). The slow death imposed by capital, which creates a decentred and

dominated subject in a similar way realist cinema does, by maintaining a specific

hierarchical subject/object power base, is disrupted by the threat of an immediate,

violent death, or the suicide of the labourer, which in present terms, is the violent death

forced upon realist cinema by the violent characters refusing to remain subjected in

films like Funny Games US. Characters in realist films, and also in Avatar, are forced to

reside within the confines of a set and imposed realism: their labour is extracted to its

15

This deferral of death is carried out along lines of bio-political power. Power over a subject moved

from the right of seizure over the subject’s life, to the power to administer life. In other words, power

shifted from the ability of a sovereign to ‘take life or let live’ (The Foucault Reader, p.259) to the power

of the state to make live and let die. In this formulation of power, suicide is thus an act of absolute

resistance.

32

full value for the benefit of realist narrative, by a higher power (cinema/capital) and

they appear as mere objects. They have no power to resist the confines of the realist

texts they inhabit. The violent aggressors of Funny Games US manage to alter this mode

of extraction. By threatening to remove themselves from the realist mode of

film/extraction, the system they resist is forced to lose its power over them. The system

(film) realises it can no longer control the characters or extract their value for its own

use since they have now managed to become autonomous or becoming-physical/living.

By smashing the boundaries of reality set up between the text and the audience, Peter

and Paul threaten film with their own immanent death, and thus with film’s own

immanent death. In doing this, highlighting the possibility of violently killing oneself,

and in the process, removing oneself from a system of inequality, the threat of death not

only makes the hierarchical system of power lose its footing, it also highlights the

physical presence of those threatening to remove their presence, and in this process,

attributes to the aggressors a fully present subjectivity. This subjectivity, founded on

subjective violence, which directly attacks systemic violence collapses subject/object

positions in relation to film and audience by having the film (characters) spill into the

real world and expose the constructed nature of realism/ideology. It also allows the

audience to experience the physicality of the resistant text which disrupts the ideological

imposition of subject/object roles and in a moment, or in moments of epiphany, allows

the audience to unite with the text in realising that certain modes of subjectivity are

based on unequal and hierarchical power relations, and thus the audience can also opt

out/threaten with death the system that upholds these modes of being. In its place, the

becoming-subject emerging in the space where the text and the audience unite as a

being in a violent presence of emergent physicality, or an equal and immanent affective

autonomy set up on the threat of death, is established. In Funny Games US, like in

Avatar, this new becoming is allowed to exist for a prolonged amount of time. These

moments, in other words, moments where and when the very existence of the resistant

subject is threatened (by the very subject itself) are not undone as they emerge. Death

has been evoked and brought face to face with life, and in the process, it has highlighted

the actual intensity of living, physical Being-in-the-world. Once this has occurred, it

cannot be undone. Realist film has met its match; real life can no longer resemble the

movies: real life has threatened the movies (the symbolic imposition of ideological

modes of life) with its own removal. If this were to happen, the movies would have no

33

referent and they would appear fully and ontologically unintelligible: their signs could

never even attempt to be exchanged for an absent, let alone a lived, signifier.

What has arguably occurred in this process is that, by using the threat of this violent

removal of the self from the system of exchange (exchanging filmic images for real life

in the unequal and absent construction of ideological subjects), the imposition of a

realism onto the subject is exposed as constructed and thus the playing field is levelled

and becomes rhizomatic. The text and the audience become equal: through depicted and

enacted violence, they merge into one and other and create a process and space of dual

creation and manifestation where signs and signifiers, presence and absence and movies

and real life, not so much resemble one and other, but actually become one and the same

thing, not on a symbolic or ideological level, but on an ontological level of intensity.

This is the same affective presence opened up in the heterotopian space of Avatar: the

audience and the text are the one rhizomatic entity. The difference between the two

texts remains at the level of violence. Avatar is a realist text and thus, through its from,

can be used to manipulate certain modes of reality. Funny Games US opens up the same

space of deviation and physicality between the text and the audience, but it does so only

by attacking the principle of realism upon which innumerable films are based, or by

aiming its attack on the systemic violence inherent in the smooth functioning of

ideology or of covertly constructed reality/realism.

34

35

Conclusion

This paper has aimed to show that there is arguably a post-metaphysical moment, or a

post-metaphysical meaning located in physicality and presence, emerging in and

through film (and also in wider lived cultural areas). This emergence has been aided by

the use, in films like Avatar, of motion capture and 3D technology. These forms of

technology help to open up a new space, a heterotopian space, in between, or in the

connection between the text (in both its form, or presentation, and its content, or

representation) and the audience. Within this new rhizomatic presence where all things

must connect equally (or where subject/object relations are flattened out into a single

entity) the subject and object, the sign and the signifier, or the meaning and the thing

represented in meaning all manage to coincide with their traditionally dialectical

counterparts; in other words, presence (here being the physically corporeal) and absence

(the thing’s absent or metaphysical meaning) unite on a plane where abstract meaning

becomes void, or is exposed as an eternal lack, and meaning becomes rooted in

presence: it becomes a case where meaning is present in its already interpreted

physicality. Avatar manages to create this mode of being by disrupting the ontological

status of both the text and the audience, making both terms spill into and create one and

other. This is made possible by the use of new technology that creates such an affective

realm that upon exiting this realm and returning to traditional subject/object roles, the

subject, or the audience member no longer feels complete in the realm of absent

meaning. This same type of physicality and presence based mode of interpretation and

meaning is discernible in Funny Games US, although in this instance, it is not so much

aided by the use of new technologies, but by the relatively worn mode of artistic critique

of exposing the use of those very technologies. Most classical Hollywood narratives

disguise their manufactured or false modes of representation in order for their content to

appear as realist and common sense (this has been elaborated above in relation to

ideological impositions of subjectivity). Funny Games US violently and irreparably

disrupts this mode of representation and in the process allows the text/characters to

assume a form of life that appears to be on a par with the lived experience of those

actually watching the text unfold. In this way, the text and the audience become one and

the same lived intensity. The text is no longer the object of the gaze of a viewing

36

subject: this ocular hierarchy has been smashed and the boundary between the text and

the audience has been shattered, allowing in its place a rhizomatic body of (abject)

affect to emerge and announce itself as a new mode of subjectivity that is not reliant on

metaphysical modes of meaning. There are parallels to be drawn between this type of

affective presence and the dual (on-line and actual) presence of a phenomenon like the

Occupy Wall Street movement (or its global equivalent, the Occupy Movement), which

focuses on creating a physical presence (and an on-line presence), not based on the

usual protest format of offering up a list of demands (which can in this instance be

viewed as metaphysical), but on affirming the power of a physical presence and lived

actuality. This would be an interesting and important area to focus on since the

movement is still occurring, but the scope of this paper means that this line of inquiry

must be left at the present rudimentary level of discussion.

In his book, What is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe states that ‘[o]nly in death does

one escape the prosthetics of subjectivity’ (187). If, traditionally, subjectivity is based

on a split between the subject and the object, or between the cognitive and the physical,

then the subject is created in and on the basis of presence and absence as mutual

supplements that can never coincide with their counterpart, or in other words, the

subject is reliant on prosthetics. If, going back to Lacan, the world of words creates the

world of things, then subjectivity is maintained by the prosthesis of language – it gives a

metaphysical meaning to the physical things of the world – the world of words, in its

absent nature, creates/upholds/interprets the world of things. If death puts an end to this

prosthetic subjectivity, then arguably death is a fullness of being in which the subject is

fully present to itself. This death of the subject can also be theorised along the lines of

Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic death: the threat of death discussed above becomes

enough for the subject to fully realise the power of physical presence (without actually

succumbing to death) and thus through the threat of death the subject can fully coincide

with itself in both physical and metaphysical terms, becoming a post-metaphysical

mode of always already interpreted corporeality. The space that once separated art/the

text and the viewer, or the rift between the object and the subject now itself becomes a

present and full space where the two entities merge into each other on a level and equal

plane of becoming. Since the space opened up is transitory (it lasts only as long as the

text is active with the viewer, or in the case of Occupy, as long as the protest is in

operation) it can never be closed off, and as such, it cannot be subsumed back into the

37

system of capital, or the system of Hollywood, since it resists the realist closure needed

by such systems to make it intelligible to itself. These moments of lived intensity

remain outside any closed hierarchical system and as such are a liberatory and

ontologically different mode of subjectivity to those modes of imposed subjectivity that

rely on absence. This mode of resistant and rhizomatic being that can be seen to emerge

is not a postmodern type of identity in which all things are emptied of their meaning or

flattened out to become meaningless: on the contrary, this new mode of emerging

affective presence is one that cannot be interpreted along traditional lines of meaning,

but one that is founded in a realist ontology (not cinematic realism) and can only be

known by its living and being lived. Its meaning is its present physicality of intensive

affect in the same way that digital images become their own lived intensity since they

do not refer back to an indexical image but present themselves as a thing in itself. Since

metaphysical meaning, founded on the primacy of language and symbolic systems

which create and sustain life lived through simulations of the real, can no longer

describe this new emergent mode of being, these metaphysical systems consider this

physicality as deviant. It is this deviance that places this emergent becoming-

subjectivity in the realm of the heterotopian and thus it can flourish in actual spaces

within the actual world (in and on, and in between the text and the audience). The space

opened up by films like Avatar and Funny Games US comes to be a liberatory zone

where the subject and the object are freed from hierarchical power relations and

ideological impositions and where they are allowed to grow as an intensive unity. It is

this space, aided by technology and the disruption to traditional modes of filmic address

that comes to be so important in post-metaphysical terms. This space occurs within the

system of film/capital but it emerges from this system as an opposing and physical

system that is not reliant on empty signifiers that stand in for real life, and it is here that

it comes to resemble closest the aims of the Occupy movement: highlighting a presence

and an affective subjectivity that coincides with itself becomes a terrifying mode of

resistance and critique to a system founded on words, signs and symbols that are

expected to stand in for lived physical life itself. This focus on physicality can be taken

to an illicit extreme, as in the case of fascist physical purity: this can be seen in Funny

Games US when Paul, the obviously dominant and stronger (as in will and

determination) of the two aggressors, who has blonde hair and an athletic physique

continually derides Peter, the second and subordinate aggressor, whose physique is not

as ‘firm’ or athletic. These two characters know the power of presence and of

38

physicality; they have used it to open up a liberatory space, but they also threaten to

take it to its ‘terrifying apotheosis of fascistic purity’: if this can be contained then the

focus on presence and physicality as a mode of interpretation and meaning that

coincides with itself can be an absolutely novel and liberatory mode of rhizomatic

existence.

39

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41

Filmography

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