The Everyday's Dark Matter
Jacques Rancière, Figures of History
Polity, 112pp, £9.99, ISBN 9780745675970
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
How do we want to be remembered? Do we want to be figures of history – or, regretful of past events and their indiscriminate digital presence, simply forgotten? Of course the choice is never that straightforward: we want the best of both worlds, good publicity (better, a place in history) and some privacy (alive and dead). The background for Jacques Rancière in 1997 – when ‘The Unforgettable’, the longer of the two essays in Figures of History, was first published – was more urgent and concerned History itself: a rising tide of Holocaust denial in the late 1990s.
The book’s cover illustration is Larry Rivers’ 1987 painting Erasing the Past II, which alludes to the problems of recording and forgetting people and events that concern Rancière: the white stripes of the concentration camp pyjamas blurring into whitewashed strips of erased memory and history. But does the camera lens really save us from these problems, revealing the truth of events, History proper, by including each of our histories? In Holocaust denial Rancière sees a ‘resentment’ of History – people are sick of hearing about learning lessons from the past and ‘our present is beset by negation’, an attitude synchronous with erasing the past. And ‘resentment is only interested in knowing time without the trickery’; we wish to live in a constant present and so this spirit of resentment ‘abhors images’. But ‘the camera lens is indifferent to all that’; ‘it doesn’t need to insist on the present because it cannot not be in the present”. In short – and this is the essence of Rancière’s argument – the camera has no memory or ulterior motive, so no resentment. It cannot deny History.
It is tempting to dismiss the argument immediately, given that cameras are pointed selectively at events by people (with their memories and motives). But Rancière thinks that the camera has an ‘equalising effect’, creates an ‘equality before the light’, that comes from ‘sharing the same photographic plate’. Everyone in the frame shares the same image and ‘ontological status’ of ‘being now’, belonging to the same period of time, to that time we call history, he argues. Rancière concludes that the camera captures ‘the very stuff of human action in general.’ In his psychogeography of the M25 motorway, London Orbital (2002), Iain Sinclair made similar observations on William Frith’s famous example of Victorian social painting, the panoramic and populous The Derby Day. Frith’s commitment to phrenology as an explanation for social stratification led him to ask a photographer to ‘capture the queer types’ from which his painting was then made. Sinclair notes how the artist’s discredited social theory condemns the work to the cabinet of curiosities, while the original photographs are and remain democratic (showing ‘the crowd is a crowd, united’). Like Rancière, he believes the photographs tell us about the place, the day, the time, not the artist – they don’t play to the audience but simply serve them, and us, information. There is something in that, of course.
Unsurprisingly, Rancière suggests the documentary film is exemplary of this equalising effect of the camera lens. He cites a number of films, including People on Sunday (1929) and Listen to Britain (1942). People on Sunday (screenplay by Billy Wilder) shows Berliners enjoying their Sunday off, ending with their anticipation of Monday’s return to work. A 1930 review described it as ‘a film in which nothing actually happens’ but a film worth watching nonetheless. Similarly for Rancière, the film’s interest is its Flaubertian aim to make nothing – everydayness – significant, to turn any life into the stuff of art. This comes naturally to the cinematographic image, thinks Rancière. It is, so the argument goes, a power associated with abstracting from the scene, leaving things as they are, a power then of the mute, of the mere presence of things: the everyday’s dark matter. Against the ‘official documents’ of history, the camera lens presents images that are ‘monuments’ – people we don’t know and their everyday objects. Ranciere concedes historians must get their silent witnesses – these ‘monuments’ – to talk, but that still the documentary film, utilising the equalising effects of the camera, offers the possibility of playing with ‘all transformations of documents into monuments and monuments into documents.’
So what kinds of transformations are going on here? Any that can explain, in the terms of Ranciere’s initial concern about Holocaust denial, ‘how cinematic images as history can stop revisionism’? In the theoretical context of Rancière’s account of aesthetics and politics elsewhere (most notably in 2006’s The Politics of Aesthetics), the camera lens ‘distributes the sensible’, and does so in ways that necessarily avoids any whitewashing or erasure. It is hard to believe Ranciere really believes it’s as simple as this though – and yet he cites Listen to Britain as illustrative of the ‘mechanism’ of the camera’s essential democracy (its equalising of the status of people who are before it). Its writer-director, Humphrey Jennings, was New Labour before its time, setting ‘Rule Britannia’ against images of gently wind-swept cornfields, segued to military listening to Mozart at the National Gallery, and the comforting hums of trams and factory tank-making, uniformed men and women at ease and purposeful work, new politics convinced it would establish a post-war world for idealised and artful labour that capital would work for. But Rancière still sees in it the ‘camera eye’ saving the everyday, recording the events of Britain at war in 1941. It has no actors; it is sound and image, supposedly just that. People on Sunday, similarly for Ranciere, proclaims itself ‘an experimental film made without actors’.
Twenty or so years later Billy Wilder, now writer and director of Sunset Boulevard, has a ‘star’ to film. In People on Sunday no-one acts (or so we’re told; like the supposedly fortuitous juxtapositions of art and everyday in Listen to Britain). In Sunset Boulevard the star, Gloria Swanson, playing the star, only acts. She had made her first talkie, The Trespasser, in the same year Wilder was experimenting with films about the lives of ordinary Berliners. Reflecting on her stardom, she remarks: ‘I am big – it’s the pictures that got small.' But some people and things in history are big, and some small. That’s still a matter of judgement, framed by political and ethical considerations. Is it possible, then, for us to make history – to think of history beyond the great and the good and their stories – by simply turning the camera on ourselves? Perhaps that seemed a reasonable hope in 1997; but Rancière couldn’t have foreseen the trespassing conceits of social media to come.
The book’s cover illustration is Larry Rivers’ 1987 painting Erasing the Past II, which alludes to the problems of recording and forgetting people and events that concern Rancière: the white stripes of the concentration camp pyjamas blurring into whitewashed strips of erased memory and history. But does the camera lens really save us from these problems, revealing the truth of events, History proper, by including each of our histories? In Holocaust denial Rancière sees a ‘resentment’ of History – people are sick of hearing about learning lessons from the past and ‘our present is beset by negation’, an attitude synchronous with erasing the past. And ‘resentment is only interested in knowing time without the trickery’; we wish to live in a constant present and so this spirit of resentment ‘abhors images’. But ‘the camera lens is indifferent to all that’; ‘it doesn’t need to insist on the present because it cannot not be in the present”. In short – and this is the essence of Rancière’s argument – the camera has no memory or ulterior motive, so no resentment. It cannot deny History.
It is tempting to dismiss the argument immediately, given that cameras are pointed selectively at events by people (with their memories and motives). But Rancière thinks that the camera has an ‘equalising effect’, creates an ‘equality before the light’, that comes from ‘sharing the same photographic plate’. Everyone in the frame shares the same image and ‘ontological status’ of ‘being now’, belonging to the same period of time, to that time we call history, he argues. Rancière concludes that the camera captures ‘the very stuff of human action in general.’ In his psychogeography of the M25 motorway, London Orbital (2002), Iain Sinclair made similar observations on William Frith’s famous example of Victorian social painting, the panoramic and populous The Derby Day. Frith’s commitment to phrenology as an explanation for social stratification led him to ask a photographer to ‘capture the queer types’ from which his painting was then made. Sinclair notes how the artist’s discredited social theory condemns the work to the cabinet of curiosities, while the original photographs are and remain democratic (showing ‘the crowd is a crowd, united’). Like Rancière, he believes the photographs tell us about the place, the day, the time, not the artist – they don’t play to the audience but simply serve them, and us, information. There is something in that, of course.
Unsurprisingly, Rancière suggests the documentary film is exemplary of this equalising effect of the camera lens. He cites a number of films, including People on Sunday (1929) and Listen to Britain (1942). People on Sunday (screenplay by Billy Wilder) shows Berliners enjoying their Sunday off, ending with their anticipation of Monday’s return to work. A 1930 review described it as ‘a film in which nothing actually happens’ but a film worth watching nonetheless. Similarly for Rancière, the film’s interest is its Flaubertian aim to make nothing – everydayness – significant, to turn any life into the stuff of art. This comes naturally to the cinematographic image, thinks Rancière. It is, so the argument goes, a power associated with abstracting from the scene, leaving things as they are, a power then of the mute, of the mere presence of things: the everyday’s dark matter. Against the ‘official documents’ of history, the camera lens presents images that are ‘monuments’ – people we don’t know and their everyday objects. Ranciere concedes historians must get their silent witnesses – these ‘monuments’ – to talk, but that still the documentary film, utilising the equalising effects of the camera, offers the possibility of playing with ‘all transformations of documents into monuments and monuments into documents.’
So what kinds of transformations are going on here? Any that can explain, in the terms of Ranciere’s initial concern about Holocaust denial, ‘how cinematic images as history can stop revisionism’? In the theoretical context of Rancière’s account of aesthetics and politics elsewhere (most notably in 2006’s The Politics of Aesthetics), the camera lens ‘distributes the sensible’, and does so in ways that necessarily avoids any whitewashing or erasure. It is hard to believe Ranciere really believes it’s as simple as this though – and yet he cites Listen to Britain as illustrative of the ‘mechanism’ of the camera’s essential democracy (its equalising of the status of people who are before it). Its writer-director, Humphrey Jennings, was New Labour before its time, setting ‘Rule Britannia’ against images of gently wind-swept cornfields, segued to military listening to Mozart at the National Gallery, and the comforting hums of trams and factory tank-making, uniformed men and women at ease and purposeful work, new politics convinced it would establish a post-war world for idealised and artful labour that capital would work for. But Rancière still sees in it the ‘camera eye’ saving the everyday, recording the events of Britain at war in 1941. It has no actors; it is sound and image, supposedly just that. People on Sunday, similarly for Ranciere, proclaims itself ‘an experimental film made without actors’.
Twenty or so years later Billy Wilder, now writer and director of Sunset Boulevard, has a ‘star’ to film. In People on Sunday no-one acts (or so we’re told; like the supposedly fortuitous juxtapositions of art and everyday in Listen to Britain). In Sunset Boulevard the star, Gloria Swanson, playing the star, only acts. She had made her first talkie, The Trespasser, in the same year Wilder was experimenting with films about the lives of ordinary Berliners. Reflecting on her stardom, she remarks: ‘I am big – it’s the pictures that got small.' But some people and things in history are big, and some small. That’s still a matter of judgement, framed by political and ethical considerations. Is it possible, then, for us to make history – to think of history beyond the great and the good and their stories – by simply turning the camera on ourselves? Perhaps that seemed a reasonable hope in 1997; but Rancière couldn’t have foreseen the trespassing conceits of social media to come.