Dialogic Materialism Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art PDF

A M E R I C A N U N I V E R S I T Y S T U D I E S
Jordan-Haladyn
Dialogic Materialism: Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art argues
for the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism as a means of
examining the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary moving image art
forms. The volume comprises six chapters divided into two sections. The
first section, Part I, illustrates the key concepts in Bakhtin’s multifaceted
dialogism and develops these ideas in relation to moving image art. The
main focus of this first part is the proposal of what the author terms dia-
logic materialism, which builds upon the Marxism inherent in Bakhtin,
examining the material processes of cultural exchange with a particu-
Dialogic Materialism
lar emphasis on multi-perspective subjective relations. Part II consists of
case studies that apply dialogic materialism to the moving image artwork
of three artists: Stan Douglas, Jamelie Hassan and Chris Marker. Apply-
ing Bakhtinian theory to the field of the visual arts provides a means of
examining the fundamentally dialogic nature of moving image art making
and viewing, a perspective that is not fully developed within the existing
literature.
MIRIAM JORDAN-HALADYN is a First Nations writer and artist. She

received her Ph.D. in art and visual culture from The University of Western
Ontario and is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art
and Visual Studies Department at Cornell University. Her writings on art,
film and culture have appeared in numerous publications, including the
collections Visual Representations of Native Americans: Transnational Con-
texts and Perspectives (2012), Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the
Lens of Cultural Diversity (2011) and Stanley Kubrick: Essays on His Films
and Legacy (2007). With Julian Haladyn she co-authored The Films and
Videos of Jamelie Hassan, a publication that accompanied their curated Dialogic Materialism
v • 215
project that brings together for the first time the moving image works of
Hassan, a prominent Canadian artist of Arabic background.
Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art
ISBN 978-1-4331-2445-7
PETER LANG
A M E R I C A N MIRIAM JORDAN-HALADYN
U N I V E R S I T Y
S T U D I E S
www.peterlang.com
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SERIES V
PHILOSOPHY
Vol. 215
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PETER LANG
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MIRIAM JORDAN-HALADYN
Bakhtin, Embodiment and
Moving Image Art
PETER LANG
New York ∙ Washington, D.C./Baltimore ∙ Bern
Frankfurt am Main ∙ Berlin ∙ Brussels ∙ Vienna ∙ Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jordan-Haladyn, Miriam.
Dialogic materialism: Bakhtin, embodiment, and moving
image art / Miriam Jordan-Haladyn.
p. cm. — (American University studies. v, Philosophy; Vol. 215)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895–1975.
2. Art—Philosophy—History—20th century. I. Title.
BH221.R84J67 701—dc23 2013042402
ISBN 978-1-4331-2445-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4539-1227-0 (e-book)
ISSN 0739-6392
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Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
Jamelie Hassan, Palestine’s Children, 1991; glazed ceramic tile, 25.5 x 19 cm;
number 3 in a series of tiles based on paintings by Salwa al Sawalhy,
resident of Rafah Refugee Camp, Gaza Strip;
© 2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
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All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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To Julian
Contents
List of Illustrations .................................................................................................................... ix

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................... xi
Introduction
Bakhtin and Moving Image Art ............................................................................ 1
PART I
Chapter 1
Dialogism and Its Material Context .................................................................... 21
Chapter 2
Dialogic Materialism: Artist – Artwork – Observer ........................................... 35
PART II
Chapter 3
Given and Created: Stan Douglas Subject To A Different Response ................ 53
Chapter 4
Chronotopic Bodies and the We of Aesthetic Discourse:
Jamelie Hassan’s Films and Videos .................................................................... 71
Chapter 5
Polyphonic Screens: Chris Marker and Embodied Memory .............................. 91
Conclusion
Dialogic Materialism: Aesthetic Language and Its Multi-medial Forms.......... 113
Endnotes ................................................................................................................................. 117

Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 135
Filmography ........................................................................................................................... 145
List of Illustrations
1. Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986; installation view in Witte de With, Rotterdam;

© 2013 Stan Douglas, Courtesy Stan Douglas Studio, Vancouver, British Co-
lumbia ............................................................................................................. 55
2. Stan Douglas, Der Sandmann, 1995; installation view in Künstlerhaus Wien,

Vienna; © 2013 Stan Douglas, Courtesy Stan Douglas Studio, Vancouver,
British Columbia ............................................................................................. 56
3. Stan Douglas, Subject to a Film: Marnie, 1989; installation view in Minima

Media: Mediabiennale, Leipzig; © 2013 Stan Douglas, Courtesy Stan Doug-
las Studio, Vancouver, British Columbia ...................................................... 59
4. Stan Douglas, Subject to a Film: Marnie, 1989; still of Marnie re-entering

empty office; © 2013 Stan Douglas, Courtesy Stan Douglas Studio, Vancou-
ver, British Columbia ...................................................................................... 68
5. Jamelie Hassan, Olives for Peace, 2003; still of Marwa’s hands holding ol-
ives; © 2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario .............................................. 73
6. Jamelie Hassan, The Well, 2001; installation view in Museum of Health Care,
Kingston; © 2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario ...................................... 80
7. Jamelie Hassan, Boutros al Armenian / Mediterranean Modern, 1997; instal-

lation view in 2381 Windermere, Windsor; © 2013 Jamelie Hassan, London,
Ontario ............................................................................................................. 85
8. Jamelie Hassan, Boutros al Armenian / Mediterranean Modern, 1997; still of

painted ceiling by Boutros; © 2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario .......... 86
x List of Illustrations
9. Jamelie Hassan, Mom, youre gonna blow it, 1990; still of Aly Aly Hassan,
artisan in Cairo; © 2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario ............................ 89
10. Chris Marker, Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 2005; installation
view in Peter Blum Gallery; © 2013 Chris Marker, Courtesy Peter Blum Gal-
lery, New York ................................................................................................ 97
11. Chris Marker, Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 2005; still of
T.S. Eliot quote; © 2013 Chris Marker, Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New
York ................................................................................................................. 98
12. Chris Marker, Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 2005; still of face;
© 2013 Chris Marker, Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York ................. 105
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to my colleagues, friends and family for their

support and encouragement during this project.
This book began as a dissertation in the Department of Visual Arts at the
University of Western Ontario. I am grateful for the critical feedback and guid-
ance given to me by my doctoral committee: Christine Sprengler, Janelle Blank-
enship and David Merritt. As my supervisor, Christine was particularly generous
with her commentary and erudite advice. In addition, I would like to thank Mar-
garet DeRosia and Susan Schuppli for their early support of my work, as well as
Elizabeth Legge, Chris Gittings and Joy James for their invaluable advice. For
their help in opening up the world of Bakhtin to me I thank Michael E. Gardiner,
Clive Thomson, Anthony Wall and Mireya Folch-Serra.
I am indebted to Ron Benner for his meticulous reading of and moving re-
sponse to my work. I cannot express the depths of my gratitude to Jamelie Has-
san for allowing me access to her work and for being such a wonderful friend.
The same is true for Janice Gurney and Andy Patton, with whom I had endless
conversations and challenging discussions on art and dialogue that directly
shaped my approach in this book. My profound gratitude for the continual sup-
port and encouragement of key individuals in my life: my father-in-law Andy,
my mother-in-law Susan, my sister Kim, Donovan, Maureen, Madeline Lennon
and Louise Hull.
Throughout the process of publishing this book I have benifited from the as-
sistence and support of a number of individuals. I thank my editor Heidi Burns
for believing in this project, as well as the many people at Peter Lang who
helped me with my manuscript. For allowing me to reproduce images of their
work, I am extremely grateful to Stan Douglas and Stan Douglas Studio, most
notably Linda Chinfen, as well as Jamelie Hassan. Peter Blum Gallery provided
images for Chris Marker, and I thank in particular David Blum for making this
possible. Finally, I would like to thank Christine Van Assche and Alain Dubil-
lot at the Centre Pompidou.
I am deeply grateful to my partner Julian for his endless support, love and
encouragement, his willingness to read and comment on my manuscript. With-
out Julian this project would not have been possible and I thank him from the
depths of my heart.
A version of chapter 4 previously appeared in my co-authored book with
Julian Haladyn The Films and Videos of Jamelie Hassan (London: Blue Medi-
um Press, 2010).
Introduction
Bakhtin and Moving Image Art
In our enthusiasm for specification we have ignored questions of the interconnection

and interdependence of various areas of culture; we have frequently forgotten that
the boundaries of these areas are not absolute, that in various epochs they have been
drawn in various ways; and we have not taken into account that the most intense and
productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and
not in places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity.
– Mikhail Bakhtin1
What is Mikhail Bakhtin’s relevance to contemporary visual arts? Given the

interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art practices, which more often than not
blurs the boundaries between disciplines, genres and media, Bakhtin’s ideas on
the open-ended nature of cultural texts provides an important means of analyz-
ing artistic works. In particular, his concept of the dialogic nature of text (i.e.,
the unfixed quality of the text that is never closed-off in advance but is always
open to interpretation) is particularly apt for describing the strategies of many
artists who seek to destabilize the authority of the text in cultural discourse by
countering a text with their own artistic response. A Bakhtinian methodology is
especially useful given the manner in which artists draw upon multiple genres
and media in the creation of contemporary moving image art.2
I use the term moving image as a means of addressing how contemporary
artists make use of time-based media that can be projected (or displayed on
television or computer screens) both inside and outside the museum. Because of
the interconnections between the various areas of media culture there is an im-
precise boundary between the numerous technologies of image reproduction as
used by artists. This means that slides, photographs, television, film, analogue
and digital video and even computer based images, though different media can
be used together or set to other uses, resulting in a blurring of medial boundaries
in the production of moving image art forms. In addition, the moving image
2 Introduction
encompasses different categories or genres that are themselves uncertain and

protean and in many cases overlap.
Such is the case with Mona Hatoum’s Corps Étranger (1994), which con-
sists of a white cylinder encircling a projection on the floor of medical video
footage filmed during endoscopic explorations of the artist’s orifices and sound
generated from recordings of her heart beating and other bodily sounds. In Ha-
toum’s installation the boundaries between documentary and art, fiction and
reality, body and object are intentionally blurred, highlighting how the distinc-
tions between artistic media and genre are difficult to maintain as discrete
categories. David Joselit challenges received notions of “the stability of artistic
media as objects of study” and argues that we need to study “particular image
technologies, without artificially dividing them into a priori categories such as
‘television’ and ‘video’ art.”3 Hence, in addressing the instable nature of pro-
jected images the term moving image functions as a more inclusive term than
that of television, video or film art. I am specifically interested in the permeable
boundaries of moving image art, which has a fluid form that is constantly chang-
ing and finding new material configurations through the merging or blending of
image-making practices that may make use of the same technology or travel
from one media to another.
The use of a Bakhtinian framework therefore parallels the interdisciplinary
potential of moving image art, providing a less discipline-bound examination of
art forms that defy a strict disciplinary or material categorization. My research
problematic focuses on Bakhtin’s dialogism – to use Michael Holquist’s term
describing the “different ways” Bakhtin “mediated on dialogue” – as a frame-
work for examining contemporary moving image art forms.4 What the artwork
itself consists of is part of the discourse and provides an experimental and mate-
rial framework that literally sets a stage for observers to aesthetically immerse
their bodies and minds. A strategy employed by many contemporary artists is to
construct an extended narrative by harnessing multiple media and forms and
multi-voiced perspectives. This often entails making the means of production,
the material and conceptual processes of art part of the artwork.
Since the 1960s artists have put the technology being used on display as a
means of examining the formal language of moving image art. Nam June Paik’s
Magnet TV (1965) consists of a large magnet placed on top of a television moni-
tor; the result is an exploration of the image making potential of television and
the material qualities of the television set itself as a replacement for traditional
media. In Reel Time (1973) Annabel Nicolson looped film around the space of a
room, through a film projector and a sewing machine, projecting the perfora-
tions made by the sewing machine onto a screen. The material movement of the
filmstrip through the viewing space, the projector and the sewing machine oper-
Bakhtin and Moving Image Art 3
ated by Nicolson continued until the film broke from the repeated puncturing of
the needle; the artwork is itself the material interaction of all these durational
elements. Both Paik and Nicolson’s moving image artworks defy media-based
or disciplinary categories of what an artwork is, for both the artwork consists of
its mode of production and the unconventional interactions between material and
conceptual forms as experienced by embodied observers at a particular location
in space and time.
The body is a key component in many moving image installations, which of-
ten depend upon the embodied observer to navigate and experience the multi-
sensorial installations in which they are immersed. Runa Islam’s filmic installa-
tions are deliberately left open to the subjective interpretation of observers and
their embodied perceptions of the fictions and realities that she juxtaposes. Her
artwork cannot be read only through the formal aspects of film because, as she
states, “I don’t make my works with all the meaning explicitly labeled, as I’m
not out to succeed to make something that I predetermine the outcome of… the
work can be read in a way by the ‘reader’ and written in another way by the
‘writer’.”5 Her installations typically examine the material qualities of film,
sound and sculpture by collapsing the boundaries between cinema and art. In
Islam’s The Restless Subject (2008) an S-shaped wooden partition, constructed
by Tobias Putrih, rises to the ceiling and surrounds the installation. The bottom
of the S encircles a looped film projector, a window cut into the wood allows it
to project onto a suspended translucent screen, which is isolated in the top half
of the S. The film itself consists of a mechanical thaumatrope being turned by a
hand that is visible at times. A bird is painted on one side of the thaumatrope
while on the other side are the bars of a cage. The soundtrack consists of archiv-
al recordings of birds from two different sources. As the title suggests, an
intrinsic component of the installation is the constantly moving body of the ob-
server who subjectively walks around the simple illusion of a chirping bird in a
cage. The moving image thus created is one that depends upon the movement of
observers around the partition, the film projector and the suspended screen; like
the thaumatrope which is operated by a person, the illusion presented does not
exist unless the observer sets it into motion by walking around it. Islam purpose-
fully makes visible the artifice behind moving image technologies. The
discourse that is framed as moving image art and placed in the gallery for our
perusal is one that constructs a dialogic encounter with several layers of artistic
forms, our complicit awareness and in particular the sensorium of the living
body.
The purpose of this present study is to demonstrate the importance of Bakh-
tin’s dialogism to the analysis of moving image art forms. In addition, I am
specifically arguing for a conception of active observership that is predicated on
4 Introduction
embodiment, which is key to Bakhtin’s understanding of aesthetics. The interre-

lated Bakhtinian categories that fall under the rubric of dialogism – outsideness,
the dialogic, the chronotope, answerability and polyphony – provide a means of
examining the fundamentally intertextual and dialogic nature of art making and
viewing, a perspective that is not fully developed within the existing literature
on moving image art. The work of Bakhtin is notable for its assertion that any
reading of a text is characterized by an infinite and unfixed openness of interpre-
tation. He demonstrates his point by approaching the text from a number of
different angles and in doing so highlights the necessity of multiple points of
view to sustaining a vibrant and open discourse, one that continually examines
its own givens and assumptions. His approach anticipates structuralism and
poststructuralism, however, unlike Barthes and Derrida, he does so in a marked-
ly materialist fashion through his constant emphasis of embodiment. More
importantly, his approach is one predicated on the lived experience of both au-
thor(s) and reader(s) in their unique locations in time and space. In “Toward a
Methodology for the Human Sciences” Bakhtin states: “There is neither a first
word nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context,” the word
continues to speak endlessly reaching into both the future and the past.6 Alt-
hough his later writing focuses primarily on the novel, his earliest extant texts
are concerned with art, aesthetics and the act of creation.7
Bakhtin, Art and the Plastic Body

Bakhtin’s ideas, which have a remarkable affinity with the relative and frag-
mented subjectivities of the postmodern world, have been applied in a broad
fashion across numerous disciplines such as education, anthropology, sociology,
comparative literature, film, science and even music. Several key texts use
Bakhtin as a means of examining the cultural agency inherent in visual images
that circulate in film, television and popular culture. In Subversive Pleasures:
Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film, Robert Stam applies Bakhtinian catego-
ries to analyze film and mass-media culture. Stam does much to advance the use
of Bakhtin in relation to film and cultural studies in arguing that Bakhtin’s theo-
ries “display an intrinsic identification with difference and alterity, a built-in
affinity for the oppressed and the marginal, a feature making them especially
appropriate for the analysis of opposition and marginal practices, be they Third
World, feminist, or avant-garde.”8 In her 2008 study Intersubjectivities and
Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond, Esther Peeren uses Bakhtin to examine
popular culture – as manifested in television, the carnival and the novel – in
relation to questions of identity and agency. In spite of the fruitful and diverse
applications of Bakhtin to visual culture, the employment of Bakhtin’s theories

to the field of visual art has been minimal.
Deborah Haynes’s Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (1995) is the first major
study to examine Bakhtin’s ideas in relation to art. Although Haynes does apply
Bakhtin to electronic technologies and performance art in her 1997 article “On
the Need for Ethical Aesthetics,” where she argues for a visual art that is predi-
cated on an ethical aesthetics – that is an aesthetics in which artists and
observers are morally responsible for their engagement with art – there are no
extensive applications of Bakhtin to moving image art.9 In Bakhtin and the Vis-
ual Arts Haynes intentionally neglects to discuss Bakhtin’s later writings on
dialogism and the carnival. Instead her discussion of Bakhtin is limited to his
early essays on aesthetics, an omission that she has been much criticized for.10
Her focus on Bakhtin’s early writings ignores his more mature texts, which the
majority of Western scholarship has focused on since his introduction to the
English-speaking world beginning in the 1970s. Furthermore, the limited scope
of her study undermines her discussion of Bakhtin’s phenomenology of self and
other, which is one of the strongest elements in her book, because she excludes
his later developments on intersubjectivity and power. The focus of Haynes’
arguments in relation to Bakhtin is that he “brings us back to the aesthetics of
the creative process itself, back to the activity of the artist or author who cre-
ates,” ultimately arguing for an ethical art that depends on the moral dimensions
of self and other relations.11 Haynes erroneously reads Bakhtin as a particularly
religious or moral thinker, which is odd since there are no reliable accounts of
him being a devoted Christian and much of his writing is focused on an ethics of
answerability which, as he structures it, does not depend on God, because all too
often God functions as a loophole that prevents any meaningful answerability.12
In addition, Bakhtin is well known for secularizing Hermann Cohen’s Neo-
Kantianism, in which Cohen draws upon Judaism and German Idealism to for-
mulate a universal ethics. Yet, one of Haynes’ objectives is to use Bakhtin to
“criticize object and viewer-centred theories and to develop a renewed apprecia-
tion of the religious and moral significance of the artist’s creative activity.”13 By
focusing so much on the early Bakhtin Haynes misses the opportunity to devel-
op Bakhtin’s author/hero concept into a more fruitful analysis of the dialogic
relationship between artist, artwork and observer, which is one of my goals.
However, Haynes does realize that art criticism would benefit from the notion of
conscious agency, which is an important element of my discussion of aesthetics.
But she does not apply Bakhtin’s conception of the responsive act in a sustained
way and as a result neglects the possibilities that the response to an artwork
offers in the context of social relations, i.e., ideological relations, in art criticism.
6 Introduction
In disregarding Bakhtin’s later texts Haynes’ neglects to examine the pres-

ence and vitality of dialogism and its related concepts within visual art, which,
as my study demonstrates, constitutes the basis of an active relationship between
artist and culture, as well as artist and observer. I am arguing that artists and
viewers make conscious decisions in response to art and in doing so act; this is
especially important in relation to questions of ideology and its (re)production.
A key feature of moving image art is a dialogic engagement with texts, with
artists often questioning the fixity of ideas and actively subverting issues of
cultural identity, race, class, sexual differentiation and orientations. More im-
portantly, Bakhtin offers a means of considering how artists reference, subvert
or borrow other cultural material in their artwork. In this manner, Bakhtin’s
conception of dialogism has been applied to museum and gallery spaces by
Charles R. Garoian, who argues that observers “enter into a dialogue with muse-
um artifacts” and in doing so effectively challenge the received knowledge
conception of the museum.14 While Garoian persuasively argues for the dialogic
in relation to the viewer and artifacts located within the gallery, he does not
discuss the relationship of the artist to the artwork – or the position of the artist
in this dialogue. Both Haynes and Garoian use Bakhtinian theory as a means of
highlighting the relational aspects of art. However, neither fully explores the
implications of dialogism as a rubric of visual art. In “Geography, Diaspora and
the Art of Dialogism Jamelie Hassan,” Mireya Folch-Serra applies Bakhtin’s
dialogic to Jamelie Hassan’s art in terms of the geography of space and time,
highlighting the manner in which two artists from different locations and times
interact.15 At the 13th International Conference on Mikhail Bakhtin Anthony
Wall presented a paper, “Eavesdropping on Painting,” in which he discussed the
paintings of Nicolaes Maes, the 17th century Dutch painter, and the dialogic
relationship of the observer to Maes’ scenes of people eavesdropping. Wall’s
use of dialogism to analyze the active role of the observer in relation to Maes’
paintings highlights the possibilities for applying Bakhtin to a discussion of
visual art, but more needs to be done in applying Bakhtin to visual art.
In applying dialogism to moving image art I am attempting to demonstrate
the manner in which visual language like verbal language, according to Bakhtin,
“is transformed from the absolute dogma it had been within the narrow frame-
work of a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia into a working hypothesis
for comprehending and expressing reality.”16 A key component of dialogism is
the relationship between the perception of reality and the understanding of an
artwork by an embodied observer. This is not unlike the way in which a verbal
text is deciphered and understood. Visual language communicates through
(sometimes) material signs, which like a verbal or written text is read using the
senses of the body. As Clark and Holquist point out, Bakhtin argues that “to be
conscious means to see something” highlighting the visuality that is inherent in

his conception of the dialogic.17 Likewise, John Docker and Subhash Jaireth also
call attention to Bakhtin’s tendency to describe verbal discourse in terms of
vision and being seen, consequently it is not surprising that his corporeal model
has been adapted to visual culture. As they argue:
Bakhtin’s concepts of outsidedness, chronotope, heteroglossia (modified as heter-

oscopia) and dialogism have found potency in the study of visuality and visual
culture. One of the reasons perhaps is that the artifacts of visual culture (such as
paintings, photographs, cinema) are never encountered in a void. They are either
immersed in the verbal or circumscribe the verbal. The verbal and the visual have
become part of an extended event of co-being.18
The verbal and the visual are inextricably bound together and as such it makes
sense to consider the implications of Bakhtin’s usage of visual, aural and corpo-
real terms to describe dialogism. Dialogic processes are characterized by what
Bakhtin terms plastic-pictorial moments, which are “emotional-volitional
equivalents of possible visual representations that correspond in the aesthetic
object to the meaning-independent plastic and pictorial whole.”19 Hence, the
observer of art dialogically engages with the utterance or artwork by literally
giving living form to what the artist communicates by translating what is visible
into verbal meaning and in doing so brings art into contact with the corporeal
and all its sensorial and emotional capacities. A dialogic response to art depends
upon the bodies of observers, those whose bodies literally bring artwork into
contact with life, through their contexts, perceptions, emotions, thoughts and
responsive actions to what they see.
The communication between artist and observer is made possible through
the artwork, which functions as a bridge between the two: it is through the mate-
rial form of an artwork that both can be said to dialogue. This meeting through
the artwork can be thought of along the lines of Nietzsche’s metaphorical mo-
ment of the shadow at noon: where there is no past, there is no present, there is
only now and in that moment one becomes two.20 The shadow at midday is that
moment in dialogic exchange in which the observer embodies the artwork and in
doing so returns the gaze of the artist. Any artwork, or text, is real to the extent
in which the observer brings it into contact with their life and in doing so makes
it real. Nietzsche’s moment of the shortest shadow is a plastic-pictorial moment
where the illusory world and the experiential world meet.21 The same can be said
of the meeting between the artifice of the artwork and the living reality of the
observer. Art, like thoughts, “are the shadows of our feelings – always darker,
emptier, simpler” and this is why Bakhtin argues so passionately for the necessi-
8 Introduction
ty of the creative moment in which art comes into contact with the fullness of
life.22
Accordingly, the plastic-pictorial moment is the communication of visible
representations that becomes embodied in the unique time and space of the ob-
server. My use of the term plastic bodies therefore references Bakhtin’s notion
of the plastic-pictorial moment in which the observer responds with her/his
unique body and perspective – that is, the observer whose response is needed to
complete the artwork. In other words, art is a plastic form, which depends on the
observer’s body to exist. In a sense artistic observership is analogous to the
question of a tree falling in a forest, if we reword it as “If no one is in the con-
text of the artwork, does the artwork make an utterance?” According to Bakhtin
the answer is no; while the physical artwork may exist without the material
presence of an observer, it is simply inert material without someone to interpret
it. As Bakhtin states: “Art and life are not one, but they must become united” in
the body of the observer; hence, it is the living self that perceives the artwork
and brings it to life.23 In addition, the material body also encompasses the plas-
tic-pictorial materiality of the moving image itself, which is notorious for
blurring the boundaries of genre and media. The representations that constitute
moving image art are themselves, similar to the position of the viewer, plastic in
the sense that they are unfixed and open, fluid projections that vanish in the air
only to be replayed for the next observer who continues the utterance.
The term plastic bodies directly references the necessity of the observer’s
body within the creative act: for Bakhtin the viewer is the one who completes
the artwork, gives the artwork a necessary body to be lived, or experienced,
through. For this reason, a major portion of my text focuses on a thorough inves-
tigation of the role of the observer as a key component in the dialogic processes
of the artwork. The observer’s engagement with the time and space of the mov-
ing image is a subjective embodiment of the work as a living plastic body (a
meeting between artist and observer in which one becomes two), which func-
tions as a polyphonic screen upon which images are constituted and come into
contact with the outside world. The dialogic process inherent in moving image
art forms must be activated by the embodied response and presence of the ob-
server. Bakhtinian concepts provide a significant means of analyzing how
moving image art installations are constituted, specifically through the positing
of an answerable observer whose response constitutes an act in any situation, a
subject position that other methodological approaches do not sufficiently con-
front.
For example, Roland Barthes argues for a reader that is without history and
hence is without subjectivity, a reader whose birth requires the death of the au-
thor. As he states in “The Death of the Author”: “The reader is the space on
which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of
them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this
destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biog-
raphy, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single
field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”24 It seems odd that
Barthes is a theorist who has been so readily incorporated into the canon of the
so-called liberal visual arts since he attempts to fix or structure language as a
textual, rather than a visual object. The reader is constructed as someone who is
completely objective, a tabula rasa so to speak. More importantly, Barthes does
not argue for the subjectivity of the reader, instead he privileges a reification of
discourse at the expense of both author and subject. In contrast to Barthes,
Bakhtin argues for dialogue, one that requires co-authorship on the part of the
reader and the author, a relationship that does not demand the death of anyone’s
subjectivity as Barthes advocates. As Michael Holquist points out, Bakhtin’s
extraordinary sensitivity to the immense plurality of experience more than anything

else distinguishes Bakhtin from other moderns who have been obsessed with lan-
guage. I emphasize experience here because Bakhtin’s basic scenario for modeling
variety is two actual people talking to each other in a specific dialogue at a particular
time and in a particular place.25
Bakhtinian theory retains the plurality and polyphony of observerial and autho-
rial voices, which allows for a discussion of the particular subjectivity of the
observer as a necessary part of the creative process. For Bakhtin, the subjectivity
of the observer is tied to the context or location of the observer and even this
subjective context is in constant dialogue with a plurality of others. Deborah J.
Haynes highlights the problem behind the tendency of dominant discourses to
privilege the object at the expense of different subjectivities when she states:
“Feminists have pointed to the curious and even dangerous fact that white male
theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have concentrated on the
object and on the ‘death of the subject’ or the ‘death of the author’ precisely as
women of all races and men of color have entered into the public sphere in in-
creasing numbers.”26 Dialogism permits a discussion of the relationship between
the subject and author, one that does not privilege the reification of discourse
over lived experience. Perhaps more importantly, a dialogical method seeks out
the subversive voices that challenge the monologism of authority.
10 Introduction
The Plastic Body as a Living Material Screen

What does it mean to refer to a viewer as having or being a plastic body? This is
a fundamental question that is intrinsic to my application of Bakhtin’s theories
to the visual arts and depends upon his conception of embodiment in aesthetic
activity. Any aesthetic event is dependent upon at least two consciousnesses –
that is two separate people who always remain separate – to unfold; this is be-
cause an artwork that takes place in the consciousness of one individual is not an
artwork at all. A key element in dialogical artwork is the possibility of encoun-
tering the ideas and lives of others through art that is enriching and to which
there is the possibility of response on the part of the observer. The most basic
conception of aesthetic activity for Bakhtin is dependent on the living interac-
tion of the self in relation to the other. The reason for this is that all utterances
are dependent upon the boundary between our inner lives and the outer lives of
other people, and vice versa, that are intrinsic to our existence as social beings.
The boundaries between the self and the social outer world are by necessity
embodied – just as we cannot live without our bodies, we can neither speak nor
listen without them. Aesthetic existence is not solitary, rather it is the meeting of
two consciousnesses whose interaction is an open-ended relationship that cannot
be finalized or resolved.
Bakhtin conceives outsideness as a governing principle of the utterance; that
is the way in which the self and the other both experience their respective bodies
as outside each other and as difference. Accordingly, I am positing a concept of
an active contemplator whose body as a material presence facilitates and is a
necessary component of an artwork, by necessity this requires the body of an-
other, the body of an author or hero that can be embodied through the material
of an artwork, which functions as an other to both the artist and the observer.
The material qualities of an artwork function as a medium that conveys the ut-
terance of the artist/author across time and space and thus enables the reception
of their speech by an observer that is always located in a different chronotope, a
separate and unique time-space.27 The artwork as a medium interacts with the
observer in that it speaks to them and participates in shaping their response, but
does not determine it in advance. The observer’s response is materially plastic in
its dynamics, and as such is a constantly changing and fluid experience, in part
because the observer is a responsive and separate being with their own thoughts
and life experience. In this way, a plastic body is a body that is outside the art-
work and correspondingly experiences the artwork as outside itself.28
How does this conception of an embodied observer function in relation to
the moving image? In “The Imaginary Signifier” Christian Metz argues that
“All vision consists of double movement: projective (the “sweeping” search-
light) and introjective: consciousness as a sensitive recording surface (as

screen).”29 As Metz explains, the consciousness of the observer functions as a
screen in the projective and introjective movement of vision. Metz continues:
“There are two cones in the auditorium: one ending on the screen and starting
both in the projection box and in the observer’s vision insofar as it is projective,
and one starting from the screen and ‘deposited’ in the observer’s perception
insofar as it is introjective (on the retina, a second screen).”30 However, the ex-
perience of moving images involves more than just the beacon of vision
illuminating the mind; the perception of the moving image is an embodied
awareness, it is also tactile, aural and marked by other bodily sensations. Going
beyond Metz’s conception of the eye as screen, I argue that the body of the ob-
server is itself a material screen that filters the sensations of the body in the
world. The body of the observer is a living surface on which the projected image
is embodied and made flesh: a plastic body that functions as a material interme-
diary necessary for the reception of the moving image.
The plastic body of the observer is a sensorium, a feeling and thinking body
in which the text lives. As Bakhtin puts it:
Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask
questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person par-
ticipates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes lips, hands, soul, spirit,
with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this dis-
course enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium.31
Through the observer’s body the sensory input of the exterior world results in an
embodied knowledge of the world. Discourse enters into human life through
responsive bodies, the thoughts and actions of people; dialogism is inherent in
every human exchange from reading, to watching a movie or contemplating a
work of art. This exchange is not restricted to the visual, but it extends to the
entire body of the observer who functions as a living matrix that animates and
brings to life the artwork. In other words, the artwork hails us and we in turn
respond: the body of the subject in its unique location in time and space re-
sponds to what it senses, it twitches, it thinks, it moves, it embodies the artwork
and in doing so it brings the artwork into contact with living discourse.
Unlike Althusser’s theory of interpellation, which supposes a subject who is
hailed into being and in responding to the hail mechanically reproduces the rules
of the established social order through identification, it is my contention that the
response to artwork, which is invariably ideological in its message, is not prede-
termined, but exists as a possibility. This potential response is dependent on the
unique experiences of the subject who responds; this response may identify with
12 Introduction
the ideological message of an artwork, but an identifying response is not a giv-

en. Instead the interpellated subject may choose to counteridentify, to rebel
against the dominant ideology, or even to disidentify, which is a more compli-
cated response that does not oppose ideology, but neither does it assimilate it.32
Althusser argues in his famous theses that the response to ideology is one predi-
cated on both the imaginary relationships of subjects to their lived conditions of
existence and to their material existence. Accordingly, it is through the plastic
body of the subject, their lived conditions and the exertion of their response on
the material world that ideology is produced, a production that may involve
outright reproduction or degrees of alteration.
In this way, as I argue, the plastic body of the observer is an intrinsic mate-
rial support and instrument of ideology through its answerability. Ideology
exists in material signs as they are expressed and experienced by the self in all
forms of social communication and they cannot be separated; hence, ideology
depends upon the body for its effect. V. N. Voloinov confirms the necessity of
embodiment for ideological processes when he states:
All ideological content, without exception, no matter what the semiotic material em-
bodying it may be, is susceptible of being understood and, consequently, of being
taken into the psyche, i.e., of being reproduced in the material of inner signs. On the
other hand, any ideological phenomenon in the process of creation passes through
the psyche as an essential stage of process. We repeat: every outer ideological sign,
of whatever kind, is engulfed in and washed over by inner signs – by the conscious-
ness. The outer sign originates from this sea of inner signs and continues to abide
there, since its life is a process of renewal as something to be understood, experi-
enced, and assimilated, i.e., its life consists in its being engaged ever anew into the
inner context.33
Thus, the relationship between ideology and the self is one that is socially mani-
fested – in a dialogic fashion, one in which there is no origin – in the material
forms of speech, which includes the moving image. The privileging of vision
over all other senses functions to narrow down perspective into a unitary point
of view, one that is essentially monologic and works to unify and shut out mul-
tiplicity. However, this can only happen if we deny the materiality of our bodies
and the multiple senses that we use to perceive the world. Hence, the need for a
dialogic method that focuses on the materiality of an embodied response.
The observer engages in a dialogic relationship with the moving image –
which includes the projected image(s), the screen(s), the context of exhibition,
as well as other observers within the space – subjectively responding to the work
through embodiment. In this way the multitude of observers function as a plural-
ity of living bodies upon which the polyphonic world of a moving image art-
work moves and unfolds. As Caryl Emerson puts it: “A polyphonic point of
view on the world is valuable precisely because it assumes that sort of multiple
burden so eagerly, because it enables so many different ideas and ideologies to
be authored side by side within a single text.”34 A polyphony of views emerge in
the responsive bodies of observers and their interactions with the artwork. Bakh-
tin’s conception of polyphony, which he first postulates in Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Poetics,35 focuses on a “plurality of independent and unmerged
voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices”; rather
than a single authorial voice Bakhtin argues for a “plurality of consciousnesses,
with equal rights and each with its own world.”36 This plurality of conscious-
nesses and unmerged voices is an ideal framework for discussing the manner in
which multiple observers actively engage with moving images and are answera-
ble for their role within the creative process.
Through this process of engagement, dialogism opens up discourse to non-
official viewpoints, marginalized and excluded voices. As Stam points out, these
voices often respond to the “deforming effects of power” that shape and mold all
“utterance and discourse”; true polyphony is often obstructed by “hegemonic
power blocks,” by which he means anything that functions to block or exclude
someone from speaking and thus functions to control and fix cultural utteranc-
es.37 The polyphony of fully conscious and embodied observers and their
viewpoints offer an active and answerable form of engagement with works of
art, one that does not preclude a response and permits the variability of contex-
tual responses. This is crucial to the vitality of art criticism in the current
environment, where deconstructivist theories have made it impossible to argue
for any singular point of view. Hence, questions of who the viewer is and what
their subjectivities may be are impossible to answer. This is evident in the reluc-
tance of art historians and theorists to accept the vagaries of an artwork, every
utterance of any artist must be transparent to observers (God forbid an artwork
makes someone struggle to interpret it!). In this way, deconstructivist discourse
ironically functions as a hegemonic power block effectively shutting out the
voices and experiences of those who are not part of the dominant discourse, i.e.,
all those others that are marginalized, those of lower classes, women and other
minorities. It is by focusing on the material forms of discourse – our very bodies
and the utterances that we give form to – that discourse can be truly freed and
opened up. This is what Bakhtin means when he says, we “are free, and can
therefore violate any regulation norms which might be thrust upon us.”38
Taken as a whole, my book examines the dialogic relationship between the
artist, the artwork and the observer by exploring how moving image art is con-
structed and interpreted through the infinite crisscrossing of interdisciplinary
14 Introduction
boundaries. I argue that the living body of the observer is an intrinsic component
of spectatorship, as Bakhtin would say: art does not exist without the subjective
response of a viewer who has a unique location in space and time. It is this liv-
ing context that is the material basis for the production of meaning in artwork
(and other cultural texts). Moving images as material representations are plastic,
like the shifting thoughts and bodily sensations of the viewer, they are fluid
projections that vanish into air and, as such, are unfixed and dependent on the
answering response of the viewer. I relate the plastic body to Bakhtin’s explora-
tions of the dialogic, which encompass the chronotope, outsideness,
answerability, the carnival body and the polyphonic relations between self and
other. His conception of dialogic exchange between the aesthetic object – which
has a material reality at the level of its production and its physical existence as a
vehicle of speech – and the embodied responses of viewers conceives of any
speech-act as being two-sided, embodied and always open to interpretation.
Bakhtin and Moving Image Art

Let us return to the question: What is Mikhail Bakhtin’s relevance to the study
of moving image art? The framework provided by Bakhtin’s dialogism serves as
an ideal means of discussing and analyzing the manner in which moving image
artworks are constituted, most prominently as a dialogue connecting artist, art-
work and observer. Applying Bakhtinian theory to the field of the visual arts
provides a means of examining the fundamentally intertextual and dialogic na-
ture of contemporary moving image art making and viewing, a perspective that
again is not fully developed within the existing literature.
The overriding concern or question of my study is the application and adap-
tation of Bakhtinian theories to moving image artworks, specifically through the
exploration of dialogism and its interrelated elements: outsideness, the dialogic,
the chronotope, answerability, the carnival body and polyphony. This book con-
sists of six chapters divided into two parts. Part I illustrates the key concepts in
Bakhtin’s multifaceted dialogism and develops these ideas in relation to moving
image art, my theoretical framework of dialogic materialism and its embodied
qualities. Part II consists of case studies in which I apply dialogic materialism to
the moving image artwork of three artists.
Part I begins with “Dialogism and Its Material Context” and is concerned
with the question: What does Bakhtin mean by embodiment? I explore the mate-
rial aspects of dialogism and how the relations between an artist and an observer
are both embodied interactions that are made possible through the material me-
dium of an artwork or text. I argue that the embodied response of a viewer to an
artwork is tactile, olfactory and aural; visuality is not just visual, but is the sum
of an individual’s sensorial response, which is itself material.
Chapter 2, “Dialogic Materialism: Artist – Artwork – Observer” lays the
groundwork for my proposed concept of dialogic materialism. Rather than using
a dialectic of either/or, which reinforces pre-existing inequitable power dynam-
ics, I examine moving image art through what I term dialogic materialism,
which is an examination of the material processes of cultural exchange with a
particular emphasis on the multi-perspective subjective relations that are intrin-
sic to the interdisciplinary processes of making film and video art. I explore
Bakhtin’s thought in relation to Marxism – specifically his opposition to the
brand of dialectical materialism practiced in the 1930s during Soviet collectivi-
zation and purges – as a dialogic materialism, in an effort to demonstrate the
ways in which the dialectic is re-conceptualized by dialogism. Through the ex-
amples of several moving image artworks I trace out the different possibilities
that material dialogism offers in terms of analyzing how meaning takes a plastic-
pictorial form and is reshaped through each successive utterance, which cannot
simply be thought of as a disembodied re-iteration.
Part II consists of three case studies. Here I use a Bakhtinian framework to
analyze the moving image artwork of artists that exemplify different material
aspects of dialogism: Stan Douglas, Jamelie Hassan and Chris Marker. My ma-
jor focus is on how the artistic practice of each of these artists demonstrates the
material interconnection and interdependence of various areas of culture such as
literature, film, art and digital media. A key aspect of this investigation is the
role that embodiment plays in both producing and activating culture, which I
describe as an ongoing sensorial and material process that functions to blur dis-
ciplinary boundaries and closed categories of meaning. In addition I ask: Where
does the author end and the viewer begin? And, most importantly: What consti-
tutes the material of an artwork? How are the bodies of the artist and viewers
intrinsic to the production of an artwork and its meaning?
In Chapter 3, “Given and Created: Stan Douglas Subject to a Different Re-
sponse,” I examine Douglas’ film installation Subject to a Film: Marnie (1989).
By using other cultural texts as a starting point – in this installation Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie – Douglas highlights the flexible relationship
between a speaker and addressee(s) that is inherent in all speech acts regardless
of medium, whether it is a novel, a film or a moving image artwork. Bakhtin
states that an utterance, or speech act, is a task to be accomplished by the ad-
dressee. I argue that this task posited in the future is dependent on the embodied
responses of viewers; such a response is subjective, contextual and materially
dependent upon the particular bodily senses and thoughts of an individual. To
encounter Douglas’ installation is not a passive act, nor is it an objective act.
16 Introduction
Instead, it is a response that can be understood as embodied and subjective, an

act that in answering to Douglas’ artwork demonstrates the material processes
through which texts are endlessly reconstituted in novel configurations and pos-
sible meanings.
Chapter 4, “Chronotopic Bodies and the We of Aesthetic Discourse: Jamelie
Hassan’s Films and Videos,” explores the material processes in which art func-
tions as a responsive dialogue not just to art but also to the everyday material
culture in which we live. I examine the artwork that accompanies Hassan’s mov-
ing image installations Olives for Peace (2003) and Boutros al
Armenian/Mediterranean Modern (1996–98). Of key interest are the processes
through which the artist explores the construction of space and time, by means
of multiple narratives, as social. I focus on the constant interaction between the
self and the social world through language, and its myriad discursive forms, as a
means of understanding how the social body is constituted through the materiali-
ty of speech and answerable action.
In my final chapter, “Polyphonic Screens: Chris Marker and Embodied
Memory,” I examine the eclectic oeuvre of Chris Marker, focusing primarily
upon his video installation Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005) and
his interactive CD-ROM Immemory (1997–2008). The “zapping zones” that
Marker constructs in his polyphonic assemblage of photographs, cinema, poetry,
museums, travel, memory and war facilitate an exchange of ideas that unfold
through the response of the living observer. Through his intermingling of media
he highlights that cultural memory is not something that exists in static isolation.
Instead, it is constructed dialogically through the variable contexts and view-
points of the observer, both real and imaginary. Immemory finds living form in
the endless potential for dialogue with observers who co-author what they are
experiencing by adding their own narratives and voices as they travel through
the field of possibilities that Marker sets in motion.
Dialogic materialism functions as a means of studying moving image art-
works and their complex multitude of utterances, which necessitates a study of
the living qualities of intersubjective observers and the ways in which meaning
changes over time and across contexts. One of the major conclusions of my
study concerns the role of the observer, who through a Bakhtinian reading func-
tions as an answerable participant within the dialogic production of the artwork.
As a key element within the apparatus of an artwork, the observer’s dialogic
interaction embodies or brings the work to life through their projective and in-
trojective interactions with the artwork. For Bakhtin, the observer plays a key
role in “aesthetic or art-generating activity,” which as Emerson notes “is distin-
guished from other activity in our everyday lives (practical tasks, business,
dreams, games, and fantasy) by one overwhelming factor: the presence of a
spectator.”39 This book highlights the observer of art as a living screen on which
the artwork is not simply received, but is materially constituted. This leads to
what I call the plastic body of the observer; in other words, an embodied and
living observer who is responsive to the artwork. Ultimately, I am arguing for a
dialogical materialism, which takes into account the material practices that are
necessary for any artwork to have genuine dialogic meaning.
PART I
Chapter 1
Dialogism and Its Material Context
Language – like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the
verbal artist lives – is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical sys-
tem of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological
conceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninterrupted process of his-
torical becoming that is a characteristic of all living language. Actual social life and
historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude
of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief sys-
tems; within these various systems (identical in the abstract) are elements of
language filled with various semantic and axiological content and each with its own
different sound.
– Mikhail Bakhtin40
The experiential, expressible element and its outward objectification are created, as
we know, out of one and the same material. After all, there is no such thing as expe-
rience outside of embodiment in signs. Consequently, the very notion of a
fundamental, qualitative difference between the inner and the outer element is inva-
lid to begin with. Furthermore, the location of the organizing and formative center is
not within (i.e., not in the material of inner signs) but outside. It is not experience
that organizes expression, but the other way around – expression organizes experi-
ence. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction.
Indeed, from whichever aspect we consider it, expression-utterance is determined by
the actual conditions of the given utterance – above all, by its immediate social situ-
ation.
– V.N. Voloinov41
In “Semiotics and Art History,” Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson argue for the
contextual construction of art history, a context that is grounded in the specific
context of a viewer or observer. They contend that “the text or artwork cannot
exist outside the circumstances in which the reader reads the text or the viewer
22 Chapter 1
views the image, and that the work of art cannot fix in advance the outcome of
any of its encounters with contextual plurality.”42 In advocating for contextual
plurality Bal and Bryson touch upon one of Mikhail Bakhtin’s key criticisms of
dialectical methods (such as Saussurian semiotics and Hegelian synthesis),
which is that an utterance takes place in life, between an addressee and an ad-
dresser, and as such cannot be separated from its contextual point(s) of view.
Contextual plurality is dependent upon the embodied responses of multiple ob-
servers. It is through interaction with numerous individuals that a text comes
into contact with life and is disseminated. The way we respond to a text and how
our response is manifested in both thought and act – both of which are material
processes that involve the embodied interaction of the self with the material
world – is the focus of what I term dialogic materialism.
The world is a world of movement and of change that never ceases. Our ex-
perience of the sensual world is what Caroline A. Jones refers to as a sensorium.
In addition to visuality, she states,
we should begin to reckon with the auditory, the olfactory, and the tactile as similar-
ly crucial sites of embodied knowledge. The resulting set of experiences can be
called a sensorium, the subject’s way of coordinating all of the body’s perceptual
and proprioceptive signals as well as the changing sensory envelope of the self. The
sensorium is at any historical moment, shifting, contingent, dynamic, and alive.43
Just as we experience the world through our fully embodied senses as a living
sensorium that is always changing, so too are texts brought into contact with our
embodied experiences and are transformed through our responsive thoughts and
actions. This is what Bakhtin means by “great time,” the endless interaction of
an artwork with life that is always changing and thus enables a work to break the
boundaries of its own time. As he states, “Everything that belongs only to the
present dies along with the present… great works continue to live in the distant
future. In the process of their posthumous life they are enriched with new mean-
ings, new significance: it is as though these works outgrow what they were in
the epoch of their creation.”44 An artwork finds its existence in multiple chrono-
topes and through contact with these different time-spaces is endowed with new
meaning that is – like a sensorium – constantly changing and becoming. The
understanding of an artwork changes with time in an “absolute restlessness of
becoming” and in this restlessness there is a constant intermingling of meanings
that are themselves continually in the process of transformation.45
For Bakhtin, Saussurian semiotics boils down speech acts to dry formulaic
skeletons that are more manageable for analysis. But this reduction deprives
speech of the rich variability of living contexts. The true power of speech is that
Dialogism and Its Material Context 23
it does not exist without the living bodies of people, to elide consideration of the
body and all of its variables is to eviscerate the potential that living speech has
to offer. Speech is not dry monologic exchange (except in the most artificial and
totalitarian of situations), but rather it is dialogic. As a result speech forms, such
as artwork, contain many references to other voices and other contexts to which
we respond (sometimes knowingly and at other times unknowingly). By denying
the living material qualities of the world and its cultural productions, the power
of individual actions and responses is stifled. To speak and to act, even to
choose not to respond, is to engage with the architectonics of the world and to
actively participate in its constructive and destructive forces. Architectonics is
concerned with the material world and the self/other relations that structure it.
Michael Holquist clarifies Bakhtin’s conception of architectonics and its im-
portance to his thought. Architectonics is “concerned with questions of building,
of the way something is put together. Architectonics provides the ground for
Bakhtin’s discussion of two related problems… first how relations between
living subjects get ordered into categories of ‘I’ and ‘another.’ The second is
how authors forge the kind of tentative wholeness we call a text out of the rela-
tion they articulate to their heroes.”46 The physical world and our thoughts exist
in mutual relations; dialogic materialism is the back and forth plastic force be-
tween the self and the world. What we make and how it makes us is the focus of
dialogic materialism, which is representative of an aesthetic response grounded
in the material relations that connect the self and other(s) through works of art.
Life and its speech forms do not take place in a vacuum, but act on each other
endlessly.47
A Bakhtinian framework calls for contextual plurality in which the context
of the observer is an intrinsic part of the creative process. Bakhtin argues for the
lived, subjective quality of speech in which the observer is an active participant.
In a sense the readers of a text are a collective body (not homogenous in reality)
and it is the contextual plurality of these readers that an artwork speaks to.
Holquist points out that Bakhtin’s “emphasis on particularity and situatedness,
the degree to which it insists that apparently abstract questions about selfhood
are pursuable only when treated as specific questions about location.”48 While
Bakhtin is concerned with the specific location of the observer, he does not de-
velop fully the subjective characteristics of the reader/observer. A location
requires a space/time that is predicated upon the material bodies of multiple
observers and their non-coinciding consciousnesses. Each of us experiences a
unique sensorium and it is against this living material that past chronotopes
resonate, the resulting sound is the echo of the past as modified by the living
present. Space-times are elusive and are difficult to pinpoint because they are
constructed and deconstructed and built again in endless waves. The best we can
24 Chapter 1
do is to sketch maps for each other of landmarks that are already moving else-
where even as the pen traces out obsolete pathways. Bakhtin conceives of
dialogic exchange at its most basic as occurring between the self and the other,
but this relationship occurs in multiple and yet to be determined space-times.49
Esther Peeren expands upon Bakhtin to argue for a reformulation of identity
construction as grounded in intersubjective experience, which is an ongoing
exchange among multiple individuals and their sociocultural environments. This
spatiotemporal specificity and situatedness of the observer is polyphonic and can
be considered an intersubjective experience as it is an exchange between many
people. For Peeren intersubjectivity means that: “In our interactions, we collec-
tively construct our environment and it in turn, constructs us.”50 Accordingly,
dialogic processes are multi-directional events in which the observer actively co-
constructs the artwork, which in turn acts on the observer through the sensorium.
Dialogic materialism takes place in the bodily processes and contexts that are
necessary for an artwork to exist. The interactions in any artist-text-observer
exchanges, which by their nature are unfinalizable, are in this manner governed
by heteroglossia. Michael Holquist defines heteroglossia as
The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that
which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given
place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological, physiolog-
ical – that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a
meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are
heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to
recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve.51
An artwork does not have a concrete beginning; it is heteroglot and shared

amongst multiple subjects, and in this way it is intersubjective. In other words,
there can be multiple artists and observers involved in an artwork. The artwork
is not a one-way trajectory from an artist to an observer.
As subjects we are not passive receptacles for ideology. Rather, we are per-
ceiving subjects who co-construct speech by measuring it against our own
thoughts, bodies and experiences and the experiences of others (the social com-
munity that surrounds us). What is the purpose of a text if it is not or cannot be
interpreted? The possibility of intersubjective interpretation is what makes
speech relevant to observers. Dialogic exchange requires the body of the ob-
server, for it is only through our bodies that we interact with an artwork. It is the
body that navigates moving image installations and through its response consti-
tutes a vital component that brings the artistic apparatus to life. Through dialogic
materialism I am proposing that attention be paid to embodied interactions and

how it is that bodies make all productive communications possible.
Artistic Speech and Its Embodied Forms

The related themes that fall under the category of dialogism are dependent upon
the generalized notion of the utterances or communications that are exchanged
in dialogue. For Bakhtin, the utterance is predicated on the notion of “text,”
which “is understood in the broad sense – as any coherent complex of signs,” as
such, “even the study of art (the study of music, the theory and history of fine
arts) deals with texts (works of art).”52 This open conception of the speech act or
text within Bakhtinian theory permits an analysis of the fluid relationships and
boundaries between the past, present and future, of the ways that artworks are
continually shaped and reshaped over time and space. In “Toward a Methodolo-
gy for the Human Sciences,” Bakhtin states that nothing is ever finished, that the
text is unbounded in an endless dialogic exchange in which “there is neither a
first word, nor a last word.” 53 If the text is always unfinished, it is because it
needs an other to respond – this is the nucleus of Bakhtin’s dialogism, around
which the bulk of his ideas emerge. The self is formed in dialogic relation to
others. It emerges through the meeting of external and internal worlds, that is the
dialogue of inside and outside. Collective experience is the intermingling of
communications through exchange between the material world and the self (the
hierarchical ordering of which will vary from subject to subject, from context to
context). More importantly, it is always moving.
The relationship of the non-coinciding consciousness of the self and the oth-
er are not decided in advance, but rather they exist in an ongoing dialogical
process. Unlike the dialectic, which attempts to fix self/other relationships in
advance through the negative constraints of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, dia-
logic processes leave room for the unanticipated responses of the other. It is a
dialogic approach that I believe is crucial in thinking of the creation and recep-
tion of moving image art as contemporaneous chronotopes, that is, more than
one chronotope dialoguing with each other. As sites of contact they are non-
fixed modes of both presentation and reception. As observers we are moving in
relation to the communications of others that are likewise in motion. Because it
does not require a singular point of view dialogism allows us to see our experi-
ence as a living movement and not just static fixed lines of type. In other words,
we negotiate the world as fluid beings capable of interacting with artwork that is
itself set in motion in a sea of others. The self and the text, when in contact, are
26 Chapter 1
where the interior world and the exterior world meet and are bridged. This mu-
tual movement is co-creative: the self and the text create each other.
A Bakhtinian framework provides an ideal means of analyzing the ob-
server’s response to the artwork not simply as passive reception, but as an
integral element in creative understanding. The observer actively engages in
reading a visual text and, in so reading, creates a dialogic response. This is op-
posed to a passive observer, one who receives without question through passive
identification and follows blindly along with the rest of the crowd (but this is
absurd for even passivity is willed). The notion of an active observer is central
to André Bazin’s conception of cinema. In What Is Cinema? he argues that cer-
tain films (such as those by Orson Welles or André Malraux) require “in the
observer an intellectual alertness incompatible with passivity.” 54 Notice he says
certain films, for some films do require a practiced passivity simply to be en-
dured. Likewise, Bakhtin argues for an observer who is alert and responsive, one
who as a condition of reception is actively engaged in a dialogic exchange with
the material form of a given text. Given Bakhtin’s assertion that the text is never
finished or complete, but requires the reader to activate the text by fleshing out
the meaning of the artist/author, the observer embodies an always moving text
and in this way creatively makes sense of its meaning. What does Bakhtin mean
by embodiment? What is it and what is its relation to thought, action and will?
These questions are useful to an examination of the aesthetics of contemporary
moving image art. The material body of the observer is malleable, it responds
and reacts (this reaction is open to the unpredictable boundaries of context) to
the embodied reception of moving image art and its concrete forms, but only in
the now. Aesthetic forms act upon the body and its sensible thoughts (this is true
even when a observer walks into a gallery glances at a video and walks away)
and it is the corporeal component that is of interest, because it is here that agen-
cy has potential.
Bakhtin’s conception of aesthetics makes a distinction between “the author,
who occupies a position analogous to the self, and the hero, who occupies a
position analogous to the other. This movement is rehearsed each time the text is
read, as the reader becomes the flesh of the author’s meaning, a self transgredi-
ent to the text’s otherness.”55 In a sense, readers of a text find that they are
occupying the perspective constructed by the artist: like the artist, the reader
gazes at the hero that is other, outside of the self.56 Though the hero of a text is
always outside the body of the observer, it does not exist without the embodied
response of the observer. What is the point of speech if we refuse to recognize
our bodily and cognitive responses to it? Or even to acknowledge that something
has been said? Reception by an observer is unique, it is structured by the subjec-
tive time and space occupied by the individual who receives it. The perspective
that is thus experienced is not wholly unbounded and completely open to any-
thing whatever, but is bounded by the shapes, lines, and colours – the very
material forms – that the artist uses to communicate and structure their utterance.
In this manner, the observer and the artist occupy similar and yet contextually
different positions in this dialogic exchange. As a result, the text never has a
unified meaning, it is never completed and always awaits the contextual body of
the observer at a particular point in space and time. After all, it is not possible to
communicate the full sensorial and cognitive experience of anything. Things get
left out, words fail us, meaning and intonation shift and we understand each
other differently. Bakhtin uses the example of Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer to
illustrate the ease in which meaning can shift simply through intonation.
In Diary of a Writer Dostoevsky tells the story of the six tipsy artisans who
respond to each other using the exact same word, but with different intonation
and hence slightly different meaning.
First, one of these fellows voices this noun shrilly and emphatically by way of
expressing his utterly disdainful denial of some point that had been in general
contention just prior. A second fellow repeats this very same noun in response to the
first fellow, but now in an altogether different tone and sense – to wit, in a sense that
he fully doubted the veracity of the first fellow’s denial. A third fellow waxes
indignant at the first one, sharply and heatedly sallying into the conversation and
shouting at him that very same noun, but now in a pejorative, abusive sense.
This exchange continues on using the exact same word until the end, when
“without having uttered one other word, they repeated just this one, but obvious-
ly beloved, little word of theirs six times in a row, one after the other, and they
understood each other perfectly.”57
According to Bakhtin, it is in these very differences in meaning and experi-
ence that dialogic exchanges occur.58 Think of this in terms of a game of
telephone; what emerges at the end is nothing like the initial communication. It
is through difference that newness enters into the world. Without difference
Hegel’s bad infinity reigns, it is the same stale message repeated over and over
again when the game of telephone is played by too few players for far too long.
Difference depends on bodily experience, because it is through sensation as it
passes through the body into thought and action that difference is possible. Un-
like Derrida’s différance, Bakhtin’s conception of difference is simultaneous and
embodied; rather than thinking of speech as a singular link in the chain of semi-
osis Bakhtin thinks of speech as simultaneously occurring amongst many other
tangled contextual chains.59 More importantly, Bakhtin concerns himself with
the actual materiality of language, for it is through understanding how language
28 Chapter 1
is material, how it is used to represent and communicate the material world that
we have any hope of real change. This is slightly ironic since Derrida, while
calling attention to the material and corporeal components of writing, in practice
concerns himself with conceptually abstract discourse divorced from the body.60
Bakhtin emphasizes the link between creative understanding and the
unique perspective of the observer that takes place in relation to the utterance,
the exchange that is constituted in the verbal and visual components of the dia-
logic. The notion that “the speaker expects a response” has implications for the
role of the observer, who can hardly be deemed passive, but must exhibit “an
active responsive understanding” given that the “utterance is constructed… in
anticipation of encountering this response.”61 In other words, the response of the
observer is an intrinsic component of all artwork and functions to highlight the
dialogic nature of creative understanding: the artwork is not closed off in time
and space once it is completed by the artist, but is always open to the responsive
understanding of future observers. This response is contemporaneous with the
now and, as such, it is embodied. It is in living bodies that artistic discourse
finds its response.
The Body Takes on Flesh

One of the key elements in Bakhtin’s dialogism is an active and embodied ob-
server who responds to an utterance and gives it form. The embodied observer is
a requirement with video installation, as Margaret Morse implicitly states, be-
cause it is a “form that unfolds in time,” an unfolding which requires the
observer to “complete a trajectory inspecting objects and monitors,” a journey
that demands “time for reflection in the subject… for the experience of a trans-
formation to occur.”62 Although Morse provides a means of understanding the
relationship of the observer to video installation through a discussion of time,
she does not address the issue of space as a fundamental element in the experi-
ence of video installation by a viewer. She argues that the crucial element of an
installation is “‘the space-in-between,’ or the actual construction of a passage for
bodies or figures in space and time,” but she overlooks a deeper discussion of
the relationship of living bodies to the constructed chronotopes of video installa-
tion: that is, the embodied experience of the observer.63 It is this gap that
Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope fills, providing a means of examining how
art becomes embodied through the bodies of observers who engage with the
time/space of contemporary moving image art forms.
Bakhtin defines the chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal
and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed.”64 In the chronotope,
which literally means time/space, neither time nor space is privileged: one can-
not exist without the other. This also means that no one particular time or space
is privileged. If one thinks of a reader of a text as engaging in a dialogue – a
reader who responds to a text from a particular context – the text acts as a bridge
across time and space, enabling the reader to become enmeshed in an intersec-
tion of time/space that transcends their spatiotemporal limitations. The artwork
is how the artist communicates with the observer between different temporali-
ties. Bakhtin argues that the observer’s “point of view is chronotopic…it
includes both the spatial and temporal aspects.”65 These spatiotemporal features
function to structure the ideal and real worlds that are perceived by the individu-
al observer. It goes without saying that chronotopic time extends from the
moment of utterance into the future; the artist speaks, but the observer may not
receive this artistic message for years. With any text there is a constant dialogue
between past-present-future; each generation conceives of different messages in
receiving the text, but over time a text also consists of the responses it has ac-
crued from various points of contact. It is because of this that texts mutate and
reappear in other forms. Such is the case with Stan Douglas’ Subject to a Film:
Marnie, a filmic installation that responds to Hitchcock’s film Marnie, which I
discuss in detail in Chapter 3.
Robert Stam argues that the concrete spatiotemporal structures of the novel
or cinema “are correlatable with the real historical world” but that they are “not
equatable because they are always mediated by art.”66 Even so, it is the observer
who, as Bakhtin notes, brings the artwork to life, embodies it with a response
and thus gives it form. While chronotopes are not equatable, as Stam states, they
are however part of the observer’s sensorial experience and are real in so far as
the observer determines. As such they can become part of someone’s conception
of another time and space. In addition, since this form cannot be conceived of in
advance it cannot be equated, the artwork can be thought of as taking place in
multiple correlatable chronotopes, each having their own particular concrete
time/space. The text is only a bridge through time and as such enables people to
speak to the future. This is why an artwork cannot be thought of as being fin-
ished. For Bakhtin, it is not just the past that is important but also the present,
because it is in the enunciation of the now where agency is active.
Through the chronotope time thickens and takes on flesh: it is through the
body of the observer that the text is manifested. Though a text may exist as a
concrete form (a painting, a film and so on) it needs a living person to read and
respond to it in order to have posterity. The observer gives the text an actual
living body to speak to, but because this body is plastic, the response is subject
to change. As Holquist and Clark state: “Time assuming flesh is something more
than a trope here, for those who enflesh the categories are people.”67 If it is
30 Chapter 1
through the bodies of observers that a text is constituted, then the experience of
time/space in art is always variable and must therefore be taken as an active
component in the work. Hence, it is through the plastic body of the observer that
the chronotope is a manifestation of real social relations – a point Deborah J.
Haynes argues for when she states: “Within any situation there may be many
different chronotopes, values and beliefs; but what the idea of the chronotope
shows is that those values and beliefs derive from actual social relations.”68 It is
through social relations, which exist in the countless histories and interactions
between people as they go about their daily lives, that the engagement and re-
sponse of the observer with art is influenced. The way art is received is shaped
by the specific habitus (in a Bourdieuian sense) of the individual observer –
which can include attitudes and ways of seeing the world.
Bakhtin traces a progression in the development of chronotopic forms in lit-
erature going back to ancient Greece. His analysis of literary forms reveals a
steady shift to an increasingly engaged and active observer, one who embodies
an ever more detailed and structured spatiotemporal arena. The influence of
literature and other art forms on the development of film has been sufficiently
established and so it comes as no surprise or stretch of the imagination when
Stam argues that, although Bakhtin
does not refer to the cinema, his category seems ideally suited to it as a medium…
Bakhtin’s description of the novel… seems in some ways even more appropriate to
film than to literature, for whereas literature plays itself out within a virtual, lexical
space, the cinematic chronotope is quite literal, splayed out concretely across a
screen with specific dimensions and unfolding in literal time (usually 24 frames a
second), quite apart from the fictive time/space specific films might construct.69
Likewise, Stam’s arguments can easily be applied to moving image art forms,
which often construct chronotopes that are spread out across the space of the
gallery, sometimes in complex configurations, through which the observer must
negotiate a spatiotemporal response between inner and outer experience.
Inner and Outer Dialogue

In “Art and Answerability,” Bakhtin posits the necessity of an “inner connec-
tion” between a person and artwork that he terms the “unity of answerability.”70
It is through the answerability of the observer – the embodied response of indi-
viduals – that the artwork is given life and takes shape. However, answerability
as Bakhtin conceived it is only possible through the embodied experience of the
exterior world by the subject, as a sensorium. What is at stake in the concept of
answerability, specifically in relation to the visual arts, is the potential of each

individual to shape and embody the exterior world. Such answerability is not
restricted to the one who creates, but is open to be created by the artist and the
observer in dialogue. In “Bakhtin and the Metaphorics of Perception,” Michael
E. Gardiner contends that each of us in response to the exterior world “is ani-
mated by a dynamic impulse to ‘sculpt’ or transform the discrete elements of
this object-world into coherent and meaningful wholes.” 71 This dialogic re-
sponse to the world that surrounds us exists in the potentiality of our response to
it, not as a pre-existing state of affairs that is fixed and immobile. Instead, as
Bakhtin states, the artwork is a world that is animated and “lives only by coming
into contact with another.”72 We are material beings and it is through material
means that we communicate and structure our exterior worlds. The concept of
answerability is therefore key to positing an active and responsive observer who
activates the moving image through their subjective and contextual understand-
ing.
In fact, I would like to propose that Bakhtin’s creative understanding, or an-
swerability, is analogous to what Marcel Duchamp calls the creative act. In “The
Creative Act,” Duchamp argues that the role of the observer “is to determine the
weight of the work on the esthetic scale;” which necessarily means that the “cre-
ative act is not performed by the artist alone; the observer brings the work in
contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifi-
cations and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”73 Like Bakhtin,
Duchamp saw the role of the observer as an active one in the reception of the
artwork. Rather than an artist creating an artwork that is experienced by an ob-
server after it has been created, in Duchamp’s description the artist is positioned
as producing works of art in a virtual partnership with the observer. The artwork
therefore cannot exist without the participation or partnership of the observer –
or the posterity (multiple spectators in multiple future contexts) that the observer
represents. Duchamp is arguing for the living qualities of the artwork, which for
him, and for Bakhtin, does not exist without the living context of someone who
responds to the utterance of an artist.
Answerability requires an acknowledgment of the mutual responsibility of
both the artist and the observer. Both are accountable for the utterance and its
answering response. Bakhtin states: “answerability entails guilt, or liability to
blame,” however answerability is not solely an ethical (or dare I say it religious)
burden, but it is primarily a crisis of will.74 Bakhtin’s conception of answerabil-
ity posits ideology as a potentiality that the observer shapes with their
responsiveness and not as a fixed actuality that cannot be changed. This has
profound implications when considering the role of the observer in activating an
artwork. Answerability functions as a means of examining how contemporary
32 Chapter 1
artists seek to make observers aware of the materialization of ideological forces

in their acts of observation. Michael E. Gardiner contextualizes Bakhtin’s view
of ideology by arguing that “Bakhtin unequivocally rejects the abstract base-
super-structure nexus propounded by economistic forms of Marxism, he dodges
the epistemological conundrums of this classical problematic and the debilitat-
ing dualisms it contains (false vs. real, science vs. ideology, etc.).”75 Hence,
ideology is a material force without end or beginning, one that takes shape
through the dialogical contact that occurs when the observer activates an art-
work.76 Perhaps more importantly ideology does not take place without both
material form and cognition: it is through mutual relations between interior and
exterior worlds that power relations unfold simultaneously.
In “Art and Answerability,” Bakhtin argues that for the speech act to be
fruitful the observer as an individual “must become answerable through and
through,” that the observer must be answerable not only in listening to the utter-
ance, but also responsible in their response to it.77 In so arguing, Bakhtin not
only posits the responsibility of the author/artist but also requires an observer
who responds, one who is part of the dialogic exchange. A Bakhtinian frame-
work is in this way useful in discussing the reception of art forms by the
observer because it is the very response of the observer that constitutes creative
understanding – that is the responsive, active understanding of the speech act of
the other – which is necessary for the observer, as the receiver of an utterance,
in order to engage with the moving image. An active, responsive observer co-
creatively understands the artwork, which “exists in potentia, and not in statu
quo.”78 The meaning of an artwork is one of potential, which cannot be prede-
termined in advance: it is co-created. Each individual observer (and their unique
location in time and space, which shapes their response) must bring their unique
perspectives to understanding discursive exchanges. As Katerina Clark and Mi-
chael Holquist point out, Bakhtin conceives of art and life as separate, the
“connection between art and life is made only where the perceiving human be-
ing makes it.”79 An artwork is incomplete until the embodied observer connects
it to life through their unique responsive understanding located at a particular
place and time that is unique to them.
This dialogic exchange is based on a contextual understanding of the form
that constitutes an utterance. Valentin Voloinov80 likewise asserts an active
engagement with the utterance, arguing that understanding is constructed in a
verbal form that lives:
in each utterance…a living dialectical synthesis is constantly taking place between

the psyche and ideology, between the inner and outer. In each speech act, subjective
experience perishes in the objective fact of the enunciated word-utterance, and the
enunciated word is subjectified in the act of responsive understanding in order to

generate, sooner or later, a counterstatement.81
This responsive understanding of an utterance necessarily occurs between the

reader, who is outside of the text, and the utterance. Communication takes place
in the exchange between the I that is the observer and the other who speaks in
each utterance. This dialogue can be thought of as similar to an exchange be-
tween two people conversing. For Bakhtin: “Creative understanding does not
renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In
order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to
be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding – in time, in
space, in culture.”82 The notion of outsideness, which is integral to Bakhtin’s
conception of the dialogic, is the relationship of the individual to the exterior
world, a world that is actively constructed through engagement with language
forms, with utterances. Everyone is always located outside the other in time, in
space, in culture; this relationship is intrinsically unbounded and unfinished;
and, perhaps most importantly, always embodied.
It is this notion of the outsideness of dialogue that makes his concepts sur-
rounding the dialogic invaluable for discussing the active role of the observer in
relation to art forms because, for Bakhtin, the body of the observer is a neces-
sary component of any speech act. Drawing upon Bakhtin’s theories, I argue that
the observer is intrinsic to the reception of the utterance that constitutes an art-
work: without the observer the artwork speaks to no one and says nothing.
Dialogism emphasizes “the material ground of existence.”83 Dialogic relation-
ships between the artwork and the body of the observer function as a key rubric
within my investigation, but it is the material aspects of this relationship that are
of most interest. It is for this reason that I propose dialogical materialism as an
alternative to the antagonisms of dialectical materialism, the dialectic by neces-
sity comes to an end with synthesis, but the dialogic as understood through
material living bodies is without conclusion.
Chapter 2
Dialogic Materialism: Artist – Artwork –
Observer
That anyone who speaks thereby creates is arguably the most radical implication of Bakhtin’s
thought and the root concern that unifies his trans-linguistics and his literary meta-criticism. … There
is something outrageous in so militantly extended a concept of authorship: it has the effect of abolish-
ing – or at least blurring – the cardinal distinctions between written and spoken texts and aesthetic
versus nonaesthetic use of language. In the face of what appears to be a galloping case of hyper-
homogenization, it is useful to keep in mind Bakhtin’s predilection for difference, for the unique and
the particular. Bakhtin batters at the walls between distinctions, which most of us now feel should be
even more sharply distinguished, because he is convinced such differences are epiphenomena of a
more fundamental split: the gap between mind and world that manifests itself as a noncoincidence of
the self with itself and with others. The suggestion of Bakhtin’s total oeuvre, conceived as a single ut-
terance, is that our ultimate act of authorship results in the text we call our self.
– Michael Holquist84
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point; however, is to change
it.
– Karl Marx85
Art as a living discourse is a social event. The response directed toward a work
of art is of key importance to Bakhtin, who maintains that the artwork functions
as an intrinsic material bridge between an artist and an observer. Valentin Vo-
loinov, in a text ostensibly co-written by Bakhtin, highlights the two-sided
nature of a word when he states, “A word is a bridge thrown between myself and
another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my
addressee.”86 If we think of utterances, built from words, as a bridge between at
least two people communicating, then to think of an artwork as a bridge between
people is not difficult. Hence, an analysis of art should not be restricted to just
one component, i.e., the artwork alone, or the individual psyche of the artist or
observer. As Bakhtin states: “What aesthetic analysis must be directed toward
immediately is not the work in its sensuous givenness, which is ordered solely
36 Chapter 2
by cognition, but – that which the work is for the artist’s and the contemplator’s
aesthetic activity toward it.”87 In other words, in aesthetic analysis Bakhtin
privileges the dialogic exchange between an artist and an observer as mediated
through the artwork. What constitutes an aesthetic response to an artwork?
Where and how is aesthetic activity manifested? What is of interest is the con-
templation of an artwork that is the basis of aesthetic activity and the way the
work lives as a result of aesthetic activity. Each response is a moment of subjec-
tive contestation. In responding to an artwork countless contemplators willfully
struggle with the ethos of their actions. Each moment is a moment in which the
observer chooses how to respond, what will they feel, what will they think and
what will they do. Consequently, dialogic materialism functions as a direct
move against the all too real temptation to reify artwork, to give a monologic
authority to the work, which stifles living subjective interpretation.88
In Dostoevsky’s novels Bakhtin perceives as fundamental to their dialogic
structure “the struggle against a reification of man, of human relations, of all
human values under the conditions of capitalism.”89 The artwork itself is not a
static or dead thing, contrary to the impression often given by conventional mu-
seum practices presenting art in the decontextualizing white box of the gallery; it
is not a mechanistic petrification of living processes. Rather the artwork co-
exists as a living communication amongst a plurality of contexts and subjectivi-
ties, it is the material in which living social forces intersect, as such it is not a
thing.90 The artwork, as an utterance, according to Voloinov, is “the expression
and product of the social interaction of three participants: the speaker (author),”
or artist, “the listener (reader),” or observer, “and the topic (the who or what) of
speech (the hero).” 91 The topic or hero, as conveyed by the medium, in a sense
can be equated with the medium as its voice. For example, the hero of Stan
Douglas’ Subject to a Film: Marnie (1989) is Marnie, whom we observe end-
lessly preparing to pilfer a bank safe. As the hero of Douglas’ film installation
she provides us with a character which functions as an other to our observing
selves. And we engage with Marnie according to conventions of the genre of the
romantic thriller film and the conventions of moving image reception in the art
gallery. This affects our response. We know what is meant and how to respond
because we know the language of film and artistic genres. The hero in this in-
stance animates the film installation and provides the “other” necessary for
dialogic exchange. Dostoevsky demonstrates this with his description of the
tipsy artisans and their extended one word conversation; the context can change
the meaning of speech and the response of the addressee. This context may not
be readily apparent to someone not versed in the local lingo or not privy to all of
the conversation. It is through the living materiality of the interrelationship of
Dialogic Materialism 37
the artist, artwork and observer that speech as a necessarily social and embodied
exchange occurs.
Dialogic Bridge between World and Experiential Self

Oft mentioned by Bakhtin, but never refined to its full potential, is the corporeal
aspect of discourse. Themes of the body and embodiment appear consistently
throughout his writing and function to mold a sensuous materiality. Both the
speaker and the listener give their bodies to artistic speech. Art requires living
material to be anything but an inert object. The referential relationships of
speech “in order to become dialogic, must be embodied, that is, they must enter
another sphere of existence: they must become discourse.”92 For communication
to occur, which is inherent in all artwork, it needs a material base and this con-
sists of the fully embodied artist and observer communicating through the
materiality of the artwork. Art as a discourse is a means of communicating the
dynamism of the social world and it occurs through the simultaneity of both
subject and object. Perhaps more important than the objective text is the rela-
tionship between the self and the other, which the text as a mediumistic device
facilitates across both time and space. Since communication between different
epochs is not possible without the mediation of some sort of text, the material
components of an artwork carry the meaning forward to the observer. As a signi-
fying object it literally functions as a disembodied shell of cultural memory. The
message of the artist is in a sense petrified in the text. Without the contact of
living bodies an artwork is just an object, an object that has the potential to
speak but requires someone to speak to. It is through contact with a body that is
living that there is a dialogue. The art object speaks to, and through, the embod-
ied reader. As Bakhtin indicates, “The unfinished and open body (dying,
bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined
boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects.” 93
The unfinished body that merges with the material world is a body that has
been subject to repeated attempts by dominant discourse to contain it, to hold it
to the boundaries of normative values and law, it is subject to body politics.
Michel Foucault is in agreement with Bakhtin on the power of the body. Though
Foucault is much more outspoken about the politics of the body and the need to
harness it for socio-political purposes, he touches on the bodily qualities that are
inherent in power relations when he states: “One would be concerned with the
‘body politic’, as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weap-
ons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge
relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into
38 Chapter 2
objects of knowledge” (emphasis added).94 Hence, the relationship between the

artwork and the living personalities that dialogue with it is a powerful and po-
tentially subversive one and we should not underestimate the radical potential of
embodiment to change the world by breaking down the limitations of finished,
closed categories.
There has been some criticism of Bakhtin’s neglect of the politics of dialo-
gism and questions of just how exactly dialogical relationships can be structured
free of the power asymmetries that have plagued the social and discursive world
with inequality and domination. Nevertheless, Bakhtin understandably remained
mute, as Gardiner makes clear,
He did not enjoy the freedom to explore the implications of dialogism for more
straightforward sociopolitical issues, insofar as his life and work were overshad-
owed by the long dark night of Stalin’s Russia. Nonetheless, it can be plausibly
argued that, for Bakhtin, the preservation of dialogism required the emergence of a
truly egalitarian and radically democratic community. This explains why he felt it
was necessary to combat the monologic desire to suppress difference and to under-
stand how this diversity and heterogeneity were sustained in the ‘unofficial’
linguistic, cultural and social practices of everyday life. Such a dialogical communi-
ty is not a collection of atomized, autonomous selves, each motivated solely by self-
interest and interested only in the maintenance of external, purely utilitarian rela-
tions with each other. Nor does it entail the absorption of the individual into an
anonymous collective, the ‘mass society’ condemned by culture critics of both the
left and right… Insofar as our own potentialities and capacities can be realized fully
only through our social relation to others – i.e. dialogically – real genuine difference
can be cultivated only if our connection with others is as free from domination and
asymmetries of power as possible.95
Bakhtin implies that monologic categories are the death knell of open discourse.
If the diversity of dialogism is to be maintained and celebrated then the power of
the body to defy containment must be used to the fullest degree possible to break
down power asymmetries.
One such example of the crucial role that the body plays in identity politics
is articulated by Judith Butler’s conception of gender as performance, which she
posits as a means of opening up the field of possibility for gender. She has noto-
riously established that gender identity is a performance staged between the self
and others, but more importantly it is an embodied and material-based perfor-
mance. The power of embodiment in social relations is evident in the often-
repressive ways that are used to contain and to hide its grotesque functions; for
example the shame that is forced upon women for menstruating – for bleeding
exceeds the body and reminds us of our grotesque materiality96 – the way that
we hide birth and are repressive puritan prigs when it comes to sexuality.97 The
body that transgresses its boundaries is the most dangerous type of body because
it is a body that can become something else. This is why the grotesque parody of
Rabelais is so important to Bakhtin, because it is “noncanonical,” i.e. non-
categorical, non-containable, “by its very nature.”98
The key to all attempts to control and delimit the body is the relation be-
tween the self and the other. Bakhtin undermines this by treating such relations
as dialogic and as productive of a creative understanding that cannot be defined
in advance, and it is difference that makes the unfinalizability of bodies an una-
voidable reality, that bugaboo that just will not go away. For Bakhtin, the
exchanges inherent in dialogism are not possible without alterity, or the relation-
ships of difference between people: “The correlation of the image-categories of I
and the other is the form in which an actual human being is concretely experi-
enced; this form of the I (the form in which I experience myself as the one-and-
only me) is radically different from the form of the other (in which I experience
all other human beings without exception).”99 Relationships are two-way streets.
Speech and response are not limited to one trajectory, rather they are constantly
going back and forth between the speaker and the addressee.
The product of a dialogic exchange between the self and the other is creative
understanding. Intrinsic to any form of understanding is outsideness.100 This idea
is often interpreted as a relation of the self to a foreign other, one who is located
in a different time, space and culture (this concept is also applicable to self/other
relations in the same culture). To be outside another culture is not to forget one’s
own culture and view of the world, it is to dialogue with another culture and
allow the differences to challenge the worldview of both. However, we are all
outside each other and we all experience each other only on the outside. It is by
being outside the other, as non-coinciding beings, that difference emerges and
the knowledge of both speakers is mutually expanded. It is through the perspec-
tives of many others, which often reveal ideas about ourselves that are hardly
noticeable to us, that we better understand ourselves. Without outsideness,
Bakhtin tells us, “one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend
it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be
seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in
space and because they are others.”101 It is only through the other that we come
to understand ourselves because it is through the eyes and utterances of another
that we see ourselves; in short, there is no a priori self, but only a self that is
constantly created through dialogue between the self and the other. As Bakhtin
states, “To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A
person has no internal sovereign territory, they are wholly and always on the
40 Chapter 2
boundary; looking inside themselves, they look into the eyes of another or with
the eyes of another.”102
The art object is the material that gives concrete shape to an artistic utter-
ance and allows it to circulate in culture as a speech act between the self and the
other, or the observer and the artist.103 In the ongoing nature of the relationship
amongst this basic triad necessary for dialogism, there are exchanges across the
chronotopes of all three entities – that is, the chronotope of the author, the chro-
notope of the text, which is a continuously expanding accretion, and the
chronotope of the reader. Each accumulates insight into other epochs and sub-
jectivities. The artwork, like the observer and the artist, in a sense, is living.
Without the life of all three it is not possible for ideology to proceed. As Carol
Duncan and Alan Wallach state, “the museum transforms ideology in the ab-
stract into living belief.”104 This transformation is utterly dependent upon
embodiment to proceed. To conceive of an artwork as otherwise is to confront
an artifact that is a dead shell and is incapable of speaking without constraints to
the living; such an artwork is reified and pointless. In spite of this, it is possible
to respond to objects that have been long buried by the passage of time, whose
meanings are lost and forgotten, by bringing the archeological artifact into dia-
logic contact with our space and time, as well as the centuries that are known.
Such is the case with ancient Egyptian art, though obviously in any such rebirth
of meaning there is a danger of severe cultural bias in the interpretation of the
long lost dead.
The unfinalizability of dialogic discourse entails an understanding of the ev-
er-expanding context that an artwork moves through, reaching deep into
expanding time and space. Bakhtin constantly points out the superficiality of
attempting to study an artwork without taking into account the interconnection
and interdependence of cultural forms across generations. We cling to finalized
words and worldviews because:
We are afraid to remove ourselves in time from the phenomenon under investiga-
tion. Yet the artwork extends its roots into the distant past. Great literary works are
prepared for by centuries, and in the epoch of their creation it is merely a matter of
picking the fruit that is ripe after a lengthy and complex of maturation. Trying to un-
derstand and explain a work solely in terms of the conditions of its epoch alone,
solely in terms of the conditions of the most immediate time, will never enable us to
penetrate into its semantic depths. Enclosure within the epoch also makes it impos-
sible to understand the work’s future life in subsequent centuries; this life appears as
a kind of paradox. Works break through the boundaries of their own time, they live
in centuries, that is in great time and frequently (with great works, always) their
lives there are more intense and fuller than are their lives within their own time. …
the work cannot live in future centuries without having somehow absorbed past cen-
turies as well. … Everything that belongs only to the present dies along with the
present.105
In a very real sense, we co-exist with cultural texts as bodies of meaning in a

transient ebb and flow of contextual unfolding that is enriched by coming in to
contact with others, especially alien cultures, and the unique circumstances that
are inherent in such meetings.
It is only through the difference that such contact entails that we can truly
see ourselves in relation to others. By understanding an artwork as a living mate-
rial bearer of meaning, one that discursively responds to us as much as we
respond to it, both the text and the observer are mutually enriched while both
retain their own uniqueness. Through artwork the present lives on in the future,
to say nothing and leave no record is to disappear with the passing of our bodies.
By means of concrete speech acts, utterances that have a material form, the fu-
ture gains the knowledge and insight of past times and contexts; this is why
Foucault can say that museums and libraries are heterotopias that accumulate
time.106 Foucault is arguing for heterotopias as accumulators of time and they are
thus open in the sense that time is continually being added, but in practice this is
not always the case. As cultural archives heterotopias, such as museums, often
function to symbolically and historically immobilize particular times and spaces.
This is why one is quiet in a library, behaves in a certain fashion in a mosque or
church and another way in a museum. Heterotopias often function as reposito-
ries; as such they are structured to appear as stationary monuments that
memorialize the past for future generations. But more important than the past or
the future is the now, the moment of re-enunciation, the moment in which a
living body comes into contact with the past and responds by making it relevant
to the present. The living body is the wild card of posterity. Knowledge has been
communicated from one generation to the next in this fashion, and the transmis-
sion of knowledge is dependent upon the material interactions of the speaker, all
those who give their speech materiality, with the cultural contexts of society.
The Sensible Materiality of Inner and Outer Speech

Discursive forms shift and take shape through our every motion and utterance in
the corporeal world. The world touches us, molds us just as much as we willful-
ly touch and manipulate it. We are not senseless automatons that react without
will, nor do we have a dispassionate material existence. We live in a world of
ideas and materialities that are in constant dialogue – one that connects self and
other, forming what I refer to as the We.107 Each and every utterance requires an
42 Chapter 2
answering counter word that is rooted in our embodied interactions with the
concrete verbal material of the social world.
Materialism as a concept has a cumbersome history, one that Bakhtin lived
to see distorted into the repression of Soviet Diamat.108 However, there are as-
pects of materialism that are still useful and to ignore the possibilities that the
material world offers in understanding art would be foolhardy. As Henri
Lefebvre states:
And materialism? Like Marx’s other concepts concerning the economic, the politi-
cal, and revolution, materialism is simultaneously right and wrong. If it is correct to
say that productive activity shifts from the production of objects (things) toward that
of images, signs, and texts, attempts to defend the “non-material” dimension are no
less demagogic. Just as with the “real” use and operation of technological equip-
ment, as with elements that are removed from the sensible and from practice, the
“non-material” (images, signs, and texts) can likewise only proceed through a “ma-
terial” base. The opposing of “creativity” to material “productivity” reveals a
“cultural” degradation that could rank alongside the opposition of fetishism and cul-
ture! Without returning to the old concepts of nature (Romantic and naturalist
concepts, etc.), the sensible and practical “real” could and should be conceived as
such. Maintaining some primary truths about production, work, workers, while sim-
ultaneously prohibiting changes and modifications, this attitude also reveals a
theoretical incapacity; the degradation of knowledge gives rise to the degradation of
culture (which can be separated neither from “pure” understanding, nor from techni-
cally applied knowledge).109
Creativity and material productivity go hand in hand; it is through the dialogic

exchange of non-material ideas and plastic material that artwork is created.
Attempts to ignore the material basis of artistic expression merely serve to un-
dermine the immensely influential role that art plays in the construction of
socio-cultural identity. Why else was Jacques-Louis David so crucial to Robes-
pierre, and later Napoleon I, but for the production of political propaganda? For
what other purpose did the museum emerge with the modern nation-state? Why
else would the CIA secretly fund the Abstract Expressionists to compete with
Soviet art? Art throughout modernity has functioned to shape and educate the
masses to render the social body docile and complacent, and through a pleasing
display drag the masses forward, a monstrous legion lulled into obedience.
Speech whether it is communicated through an artwork, text, film or sign has a
material form that is itself a dialogue between the material forms of the self and
the other and this by necessity includes the ideological imperatives that are pro-
duced by living bodies interacting and by their movements creating social
discourse.
Embedded in the inner and outward aspects of speech, artistic or otherwise,

is a material component, a necessary ingredient in Bakhtin’s translinguistic
views of the social nature of speech. To put it simply: speech has a material base
without which it does not exist. The materiality of speech is evident in the very
movement of our lips, the way our bodies twitch and react, and in the sounds
and sights and smells that accompany every utterance, the heft of the pen in the
hand as it scratches on paper, the tactility of fingers on a keyboard tapping out
words or notes, the deft motion of a paint brush and so on. These are all physical
gestures that are part and parcel of living speech, and it is through such material-
ity that we give our speech tonal shading, a nuance, without which
communication would be an incomprehensible monotone.
In exteriority the body finds its finest and only instrument for speech: with-
out the outward expression of speech the social world does not exist. As
Voloinov points out:
Every ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow, of reality, but is also itself
a material segment of that very reality. Every phenomenon functioning as an ideo-
logical sign has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical
mass, color, movements of the body, or the like. In this sense, the reality of the sign
is fully objective and lends itself to a unitary, monistic, objective method of study. A
sign is a phenomenon of the external world. Both the sign itself and all the effects it
produces (all those actions, reactions, and new signs it elicits in the surrounding so-
cial milieu) occur in outer experience.110
The validity of Voloinov’s comments on the materiality of speech is indisputa-

bly evident to me from the perspective that my deafness provides me on the
exterior qualities of speech. Since I cannot hear, I depend almost completely
upon lip-reading and sign language when I speak with people. Being deaf makes
me more aware of the embodied aspects of speech that most people take for
given. Bakhtin makes numerous references to the fact that we hear the world,
but what we often overlook is that hearing is more than just sound waves pass-
ing through the ears, it also consists of the other bodily senses working in
unison. Speech is necessarily embodied: facial expressions, minute gestures and
bodily stances, spatial orientation, even smell, are invaluable for comprehending
the words of others; often they provide a revealing window into the interior
world of the person speaking to me without which I could not function as a so-
cial being and this living materiality is necessary for all discursive exchanges. It
is through the necessity of interaction with others and the way that we read and
influence each other that Marx and Engels can state, “Consciousness is, there-
fore, from the very beginning a social product.”111
44 Chapter 2
Just as crucial to speech are the inner effects, that is, the material work-
ings of our minds. Through the body language and thought find material form, it
is through this linking of the outside and the inside that social intercourse is
possible.112 While the exteriority of speech permits the individual to engage with
the social world (it is the words and ideas of others that surround us and shape
our lived world, our very identities), it is on the inside that they settle and are
mulled over. The inner effect of speech occurs whether or not the addressee says
anything. Voloinov clarifies this aspect of communication when he states, “a
process of inner (‘covert’) speech occurs (we do, after all, think and feel and
desire with the help of words; without inner speech we would not become con-
scious of anything in ourselves). This process of inner speech is just as material
as is outward speech.”113
It is by bringing together the inner and outer elements of speech as two in-
trinsically linked processes that the dialogic can be said to be materialist. In
arguing for inner and outer speech Bakhtin echoes Marx’s earlier criticism of
materialism:
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is
that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of
contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.
Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly
by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.114
The disconnect between thought and action is the main shortcoming of current
contemporary theory. In making the social relations of humanity the foundation
of theory, Feuerbach founded “true materialism” and critiqued Hegel’s idealism,
while extolling the virtues of an external nature. However, rather than consider-
ing the complexities of intersubjective relations, as both Marx and Bakhtin do,
Feuerbach conceives of the individual subject as an abstraction, as pure nature,
and in doing so he disregards the importance of communal networks of
self/other relations. His abstraction of the human lapses into the very idealism
that he critiqued his own teacher Hegel for, “The Hegelian method boasts of
taking the same course as nature. It is true that it imitates nature, but the copy
lacks the life of the original.”115 He stresses that life cannot be copied and that
there can be no substitutes for the living material contexts of an object of
thought. However, this does not go far enough; as Lefebvre points out, for Feu-
erbach, “human activity… is theoretical and abstract,” this leads him to conceive
of man “as a material object, not as sensible activity, and his sensibility does not
appear as productive potentiality.”116 In thinking of humanity in abstract terms,
Feuerbach eviscerates the potential of his materialist approach to address the
inadequacies of the Hegelian model. Such reductionism, which artificially and

needlessly separates the mind from the world and thereby privileges idealism,
falls prey to the closed abstractionism that Bakhtin protests. A dialogic em-
bracement of materialism is not to fall into abstract or Romantic categories of
“Nature,” rather it is to accept the material contexts of life as it is actually lived,
in all its beauty and its grotesqueness, in all its praises and all its faults too. This
can be done without falling into essentialism through the dialogue of both the
material and the ideational that is not constrained by reductionism or mechanis-
tic approaches. Such an approach permits a study of embodied realities of life,
which have been oft ignored by theories that posit disembodied closed systems
of thought.
Dialectical or Dialogical Materialism?

The dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels is an endeavor to circumvent the
quandary caused by Hegel’s dialectic, which asserts a transcendental totality
through the process of sublation, of overcoming while preserving. Dialectics as
a method is difficult to understand because there are at a minimum two very
different methods of dialectics. Plato’s Dialogues is the most well known exam-
ple of the dialectical method and consists of a dialogue between at least two
people who have a difference of opinion about a topic and they make reasoned
arguments, back and forth in a volley of question and answer, until a consensus
is reached on the subject. Hence, the dialectic has dialogical roots, a point that
Bakhtin stresses when he states: “Dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return
again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities).”117 On the other
hand, as Z. A. Jordan clarifies, the dialectic “can be used to refer to a cosmic
force, an all-pervasive power of change, subject to laws which Hegel discovered
in the realm of thought and which are extended to all phenomenon without ex-
ception, to history and society as well as to nature.”118 What this in effect
accomplishes, through the Absolute Idea (pure thought that originates from
nothing and is just a fetishistic substitute for God), is to alienate the material
world from the ideal world and to come in the end to Absolute Knowledge, a
sublation which functions to transcend the real objective world in favor of an
unknowable ideal. In theory, the dialectic moves in a process of overcoming,
while preserving the elements overcome, resulting in a totality. However, ac-
cording to Alexandre Kojève the circularity of the dialectic means that it
“exhausts all the possibilities of thought,” and it is impossible to argue for “any
discourse in opposition” to Hegel that is not already “part of his own discourse,”
as a result “Hegel’s discourse sets forth an absolute truth, which cannot be ne-
46 Chapter 2
gated by anyone.”119 This method makes it impossible to enter into an open

discourse. Instead, we are confronted with a discourse that seeks to merge voices
and truths into a single monologic truth.
No doubt for Bakhtin this was too similar to the Stalinist implementation of
Diamat, which sought to create a unified socialist realism strictly controlled by a
central authority that was quick to exile or execute dissenting voices. Having
been exiled himself, Bakhtin was deeply at odds with the monologic interpreta-
tion of Marxism under the Soviet regime. It is no wonder that so many of his
texts were left to molder unpublished in a woodshed until the (relative) freedom
of the post-Stalinist years, nor can we be startled over the furor that his doctoral
dissertation, later published as Rabelais and His World, caused.
Marx’s famous answer to Hegel’s dialectical method is to simply turn him
upside down, rather than starting from the ideal and moving to the real, he be-
gins with the material world and then proceeds to the ideal, in doing so he
categorically rejects the numinous.120 As he states,
For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent
subject, under the name of ‘the Idea’, is the creator of the real world, and the real
world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the
ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated
into forms of thought.121
Hegel’s mode of dialectics necessitates an origin and an end (perhaps an uncon-

scious reiteration of God as both the Alpha and the Omega); such thinking was
anathema to Bakhtin who abhorred the oppressive monologue inherent in such
absolute totalities. Building upon Marx – who neatly sidesteps the issue of an
unknowable spirit with a material dialectic that begins with the real interdepend-
ence of all phenomena, although unfortunately still working towards an
historical end – Bakhtin brings together the material and ideational world
through the openness of a dialogic. Privileging neither the inner or outer ele-
ments of speech, Bakhtin’s dialogue is a back and forth non-hierarchical
movement dependent upon both the interior and exterior worlds. In favoring this
open ambivalence Bakhtin undermines the totalizing dialectic of Hegel, in doing
so he also abandons the integration of contradictions, a key feature of the mono-
logic, and thus opens the door for many voices and their multifaceted truths.
It is Marx who I believe provides much of the foundation for Bakhtin’s
work on the dialogic and that his conception of dialogue is very similar to the
classical notion of the open dialectic. However, it is unmistakably clear in his
anti-Formalist stance that he disagrees with Marxism as it was applied in Soviet
Russia. This runs contrary to the neoliberal reading of Bakhtin, which attempts
to disavow any connection to Marxism. Such a reading is not surprising given

that many of the academics that espouse this view lived and worked in the Unit-
ed States during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The ideological bias (not
to mention sheer hysteria and political propaganda) in American interpretations
of communism is all too well known. As a result the hazards of arguing for a
Marxist reading of Bakhtin, or even pointing out the ways that he absorbed
Marx through his context, are no doubt not for the faint of heart. As Gardiner
points out, “The depiction of Bakhtinian thought as wholly incompatible with
dialectics is part of a pronounced desire to demonstrate his hostility towards
Marxism per se, and hence to discredit, merely by dint of association, every
aspect of the Marxist emancipatory project, particularly the notion of collective
sociopolitical agency.”122 Attempts to discredit the Marxist influence on Bakhtin
are ludicrous since they are contrary to the most basic aspect of dialogism and
ignore the role that an individual’s particular location in space and time plays in
the formation of the self. To rule out Marxism in Bakhtin is to impoverish his
theories by separating them from the concrete human activity of which he was
part, such an action merely serves perpetuates the split between the subjective
and the objective. As I argue, the historical materialism of Marx provides Bakh-
tin with a means of addressing the impoverishing aspects of the dialectic as both
Hegel and the Soviet communists used it. It is through the perspective that all
three approaches offer that a previously imperceptible idea emerges of both the
dialectic and materialism; it is through such dialogue that the means emerges in
which they can be reworked for a responsive understanding that is inclusive of
the interdependence of bodies of meaning, what I term dialogic materialism. The
boundlessness of social discourse as conceived by Bakhtin thrives on such re-
articulation, in a very real sense it is a subversion of totalizing theories by talk-
ing back, by answering.
Even though Bakhtin represents himself as having an anti-dialectical stance,
he conceives of the dialogic in a dialectical fashion that dates back to the Socrat-
ic method, which, as observed in Plato’s writings, are not a dialogue per say as
Socrates is always right and the people he dialogues with are so patently daft
and shallow in their answers. The truth derived from the rigid abstractionism of
the dialectic as so practiced is no truth at all, to take out all aspects of spontane-
ous life from discourse results in a hollow, empty shell. Hence, in the dialogic
Bakhtin expands the reductionist dialectical method of Plato and makes it a
genuine dialogue and in doing so brings it back into contact with life. It is the
abstractionism – and in a very real sense the disembodiment – of the dialectic,
which he is most opposed to and his answer is to subvert the authoritarian as-
pects of speech. Peter V. Zima points out that “Bakhtin defends a dialectical
point of view which avoids all unilateral reductions and simplifications. In this
48 Chapter 2
respect he has also inherited the theoretical assets and burdens of young Hegeli-
an philosophy, for the central idea of this philosophy was and is that it should be
possible to dissociate dialectics from the constraints of the system and the op-
pressive monologue of the rulers.”123 The problem with the dialectic is that it
takes the body for granted, it constructs a universalizing body politic and then
proceeds to undermine it by eviscerating the political agency of the body to
effect meaningful social change. I am not saying that the dialectic does not deal
with issues of embodiment, but merely that issues of corporeality are purpose-
fully reduced and made abstract. My argument for a dialogic materialism,
instead of dialectic materialism, is to highlight the importance of the body as a
material component in all communication.
Dialogic materialism is a way of looking at the socio-cultural world; it is di-
alogic in the method of analysis that examines the material aspects of the speech
act in all its forms. The body and the myriad forms of texts that are used to me-
diate speech are material and they talk to each other in an endless answering. As
the world changes, mainly through our own agency, so too do our ideas, our
experiences and the way we speak. This is why a methodology that is capable of
recognizing the unfinalizability of the living world is not only useful, but imper-
ative to action within the world and not just theorization.
This is particularly important for visual art given that the dominant mode of
artistic dissemination and legitimization (still) is through the museum, which
functions through an odd juxtaposition of presence and absence in the presenta-
tion of artwork in the “neutral” space of the gallery for an idealized spectator.
Moreover, the museum itself is structured as an identity-forming site that is
fixed and closed to both interpretation and specific others. As such the museum
is an ideological site of contact between the material and ideational forms of
culture, but the materiality of art, the artists and the observers are often sub-
sumed in the face of a totalizing ideal or “truth.” Carol Duncan makes it clear
that “To control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a
community and some of its highest, most authoritative truths.”124 Authoritative
truths that eliminate difference, that function to homogenize, are not truths at all,
they are simply the program that the rest of us are charged with miming, forget-
ting along the way that we can think, we can speak, we can respond.125 The
artists I examine in my case studies highlight the different ways that speech
occurs and the material means necessary to do so: Stan Douglas questions the
prison of repressed back stories and the repetitions they engender; the social and
the manner in which the individual participates in its material construction is a
key feature of Jamelie Hassan’s filmic installations; Chris Marker points out the
very instability of meaning and the ways in which “truth” can be manufactured
by ourselves and our desire to believe.
Through dialogic materialism the concept of answerability achieves a new

material dimension, highlighting the social agency of each and every individual
to effect and change their social reality. Hence, the living material of the body is
a prerequisite for all future responses. It is in the meeting of material and idea
that culture is truly formed. This is because the material and the ideal are always
in dialogue. Right now is the moment that dialogic materialism is most con-
cerned with, not yesterday, not tomorrow. The reason for this is that an artwork
functions in the material presence of its enunciation, the moment in which the
observer stands before an artwork and hears the message of its maker, the mo-
ment of response, the moment in which the self stands before the other. Because
of this relationship of difference and change there are no real boundaries in art.
PART II
Chapter 3
Given and Created: Stan Douglas Subject To A
Different Response
The very question of whether an event has occurred at all is already an act of inter-
pretation. Bakhtin’s early emphasis on the distinction between “given” and “made”
is useful here reminding us that an event is always a dialogue between both possibil-
ities.
– Michael Holquist126
Working in the form of loops with these recombinant pieces you can’t really talk
about beginnings or ends, which are arbitrary and often produced by the ideological
or formal requirements of a narrative form. I mean life is all middle.
– Stan Douglas127
Canadian artist Stan Douglas engages in a dialogic exchange with the language
of film and other narrative forms through his film installations. For Douglas, the
starting point of all of his work is the problem of language, “not only in the
sense of spoken or written language but also in terms of different media and
idioms of knowledge,” he tells Diana Thater.128 His engagement with the negoti-
ation of language by the observer, which necessitates a crisscrossing of the
permeable boundaries of media and texts, is reflective of a dialogic materialism
that relates one speaker to an other, utterances that are often restated with differ-
ences in another material form.
A consistent theme in Douglas’ filmic installations is his restaging of other
cultural texts. Douglas makes use of music, film, television and even literature
in making his moving image installations in which, as Daina Augaitis notes, he
“uses the discursive codes of all these media, layering musical references onto
media structures, inscribing one text over another.”129 In this way, Douglas’
artwork is dependent on the unique temporality and space of the observer whose
body reacts with an answering response that is necessarily embodied in relation
to the artwork as a multilayered material construct. As he himself points out, the
54 Chapter 3
middle of all narrative exchanges is life; it is what generates the stories that we
tell ourselves and it is where the story finds its answering audience. More im-
portantly, it is the body where cultural forms find life. Douglas plays on the
varying levels of cultural knowledge of observers, echoing and repositioning the
words of other authors, and in doing so calls attention to the presumptive givens
in cultural discourse. What does it mean to act? Where and when is art experi-
enced? What are the boundaries of aesthetic discourse? These are all key
questions that Douglas contests with his moving image installations. In his first
film installation Overture (1986), Douglas juxtaposes Edison Company archival
films shot from the front of a moving train with audio recorded from segments
of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The installation Inconsolable
Memories (2005), which consists of a film, photographs and a screenplay, is a
reworking of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968),
which tells the story of a bourgeois man who chooses to stay in Cuba during the
Bay of Pigs missile crisis. Drawing on Dario Argento’s horror film Suspiria
(1977), Karl Marx’s Capital, Frederick Engels and Marx’s Manifesto of the
Communist Party and the Brothers Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Douglas constructs
Suspiria (2003), a video installation of infinite combinations. In each of these
artworks he uses the materials of the filmic apparatus as a means of deconstruct-
ing the workings of film and the infinite variability of meaning within the
subjective responses of observers.
By using other cultural texts as a starting point, Douglas highlights the
reciprocity between a speaker and their addressees that is inherent in all speech
acts, which is the given of a speech act and the necessary creative response to
what is given in speech. For example, in Der Sandmann (1995), a looped film
installation for two projectors, Douglas retells E.T.A. Hoffman’s tale Der
Sandmann (1817). He presents us with three narrators reading letters and a
Schrebergärten130 garden set filmed in a 360˚ pan that increasingly is out of sync
with the sound. Hoffman’s tale has been famously responded to by Freud in his
essay “The ‘Uncanny,’” in which he explains the unheimlich as a return of an
earlier experience that is made strange, even frightening, by its repression and
subsequent return.131 More than being simply a repressed memory coming to
light it is also an expression of ambivalence, of the conflicting differences that
make something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, of the uncertainties
between the experience of past, present and future. In this film installation
Douglas stages the uncanny as an embodied experience through repetition of out
of phase sound and two films, which are projected on one screen that is split
down the middle meeting in an almost invisible seam. The uncanny is presented
by Douglas in visible form: the moving seam is created through the splicing
together of left and right halves of film that do not match up, paired with the
Given and Created 55
1. Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986; installation view in Witte de With, Rotterdam; © 2013 Stan
Douglas, Courtesy Stan Douglas Studio, Vancouver, British Columbia
56 Chapter 3
2. Stan Douglas, Der Sandmann, 1995; installation view in Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; ©
2013 Stan Douglas, Courtesy Stan Douglas Studio, Vancouver, British Columbia
disjointed sound and images, it is both disorienting and dizzying. The first time I
viewed this installation at the Power Plant in Toronto,132 I felt nauseated and
bewildered, an experience intensified by the steady circular panning of the two
synchronous looped projections. I was literally being pulled between two differ-
ent versions of the same experience. The intersection of two different
temporalities of the garden set and the sometimes visible Nathanael reading – in
conjunction with the never visible characters of Lothar and Clara – and an old
man (the Sandman) working in the garden, are off-kilter, but it takes a while to
figure out exactly what makes this so because they appear the same, but are not
the same. After one or two rotations of the film it becomes obvious that two
takes are spliced together and meet in a constantly moving seam in the middle of
the screen, a gap which grows wider and longer in duration as the film progress-
es.
The uncanny feeling is made possible in Douglas’ installation by the conflict
created by multiple temporalities that do not always correspond. What is most
interesting about this installation is that Douglas repeats Hoffman’s tale, some-
thing that is given to him as a reader, but he interprets it and restates it with a
visceral difference. Our feelings of the uncanny arise from Douglas’ material
manipulations of film and sound, which interfere with the variable memories
that observers have of Hoffmann’s story. In responding to the given speech act
of Hoffman and Freud, Douglas creates something new by transforming what is
given (the original texts) into his response, which is created. The result for ob-
servers of Der Sandmann is a conflict in our recall of the well-known story and
our experience of the material manifestation of “Der Sandmann” as a palpably
visceral cinematic event in which we also create our own response. Part of our
response, to be explicit, is embodied; we each feel and think something. Ideolo-
gy exists in the material dialogue amongst subjects; at each moment of artistic
enunciation the subjects participating choose how they will respond.
The Aesthetic Object and the Givens of Speech

Svetlana Alpers perceptively points out the presumption of “objectivity” that has
been glossed over as an unquestioned given in art historical methodology. As
she states, “art history as a discipline has had a point of view which involves
choices and exclusions despite its usual claim to scholarly objectivity.”133 One of
the cultural givens that I want to call attention to is the presumption of objectivi-
ty that plagues art history as a discipline still to this day. There is no such thing
as a universal or objective spectator. To argue for objectivity is to argue for a
point of view, one that exists literally nowhere, which attempts to universalize
58 Chapter 3
and is arbitrarily closed-off from interpretation. Any claim for scholarly objec-
tivity is absurd because, as subjective beings, we all have subjective
perspectives that have yet to be realized and this has a profound effect on what
we think, do and say. The effect of claims to objectivity have functioned as a
means of excluding difference, which usually means overlooking issues of gen-
der, race, religion, class and so on. Furthermore, claims to a neutral objectivity
are impossible due to our necessary state of embodiment. As Bakhtin states, “No
one can assume a position toward the I and the other that is neutral. The abstract
cognitive standpoint lacks any axiological approach, since the axiological atti-
tude requires that one should occupy a unique place in the unitary event of being
– that one should be embodied.”134 My unique location in space and time means
that I will see things from my unique event of being, and this is true of any other
person that I encounter. This is why speech is dialogic because it is an ongoing
process of mutual exchange that takes place on the boundaries of the bodies of at
least two consciousnesses. Engagement with the living world is something that
is always in process and is always posited as a response yet to be completed. As
Bakhtin makes clear, the relationship of an addressee to what is given in speech
can never be a consummated relationship, rather the aesthetic object has yet to
complete its mandate of communication. There is always the possibility of dif-
ference, of dissent. This means strictly speaking that although an utterance may
be given to an addressee, the meaning of the speech act is “not given but im-
posed as a task still to be accomplished.”135 If we accept that any given utterance
requires a reciprocal task of subjective interpretation this means that strictly
speaking there is no such thing as objectivity; every response is a subjective
response that is constantly created by the addressee(s) that receive and evaluate
any given speech act. The given material that constitutes speech and the ambigu-
ity of its corresponding response is the subject of much of Douglas’ artwork.
Evident in Douglas’ artwork is the process through which cultural texts are
materially remade and recycled in successive reincarnations. Through his work-
ing method he demonstrates the manner in which culturally given texts are open
to the future responses of observers. Douglas demonstrates how there is always
a possibility of the emergence of differences through the sheer chance of re-
sponse. His artwork depends on the dialogic exchange that unfolds amongst the
discrete elements that he sets into motion. In each of his moving image installa-
tions he highlights the polyphonic aspects of discourse and the differences that
accrue through multiple perspectives.
Douglas’ film installation Subject to a Film: Marnie (1989) is a restaging of
a pivotal burglary scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie, to which
Douglas creatively responds. Through his re-iteration of an iconic film – one
that has been the subject of much feminist film criticism because of the manner
3. Stan Douglas, Subject to a Film: Marnie, 1989; installation view in Minima Media:
Mediabiennale, Leipzig; © 2013 Stan Douglas, Courtesy Stan Douglas Studio,
Vancouver, British Columbia
60 Chapter 3
in which spousal rape is portrayed136 – Douglas restages the scene of Marnie’s

last act of freedom and implicitly questions the autonomy that Marnie has to act
within the patriarchally imposed constraints of her situation. The filmic installa-
tion consists of a looped 16mm film projector. Projected on a suspended screen
the grainy black and white silent film begins with Marnie saying goodbye to her
colleagues. She then proceeds to hide in a bathroom and emerges after her co-
workers have left the office. She walks through the office, retrieves a key and
opens a desk with it. The film loops back to the beginning. This is accompanied
by a dramatic clunking sound (the only sound except for the whir of the projec-
tor) as the spliced film passes through the projector at the exact moment Marnie
shuts the desk drawer – a sound that I imagine, which sounds eerily like a prison
door slamming shut. I am particularly intrigued by Douglas’ decision to loop his
film installation to endlessly replay Marnie’s robbery. These elements function
to recontextualize and subvert the given meanings of the original film by draw-
ing attention to the idea of a predetermined response, one which functions as a
prison that constrains possible responses. Douglas highlights the cyclical nature
of the filmic apparatus through the clunking of the looped projection. In the loop
he materializes Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return and draws our attention to
the subjective will of the observer to experience the world as an infinite combi-
nation of difference. The subject of Douglas’ installation is not Marnie, as many
critics argue. Rather, it is the observer who is the subject that contemplates the
given elements of the artwork and answers to it. As Christa Blümlinger points
out, Subject to a Film: Marnie “embodies a ‘recontextualization,’ of a previous
work within contemporary constellations of meaning,” and is demonstrative of
Douglas’ tendency to shift films “into a new territory of meaning through the
material appropriation, of the citation, pastiche, or remake.”137 In short, Douglas
consistently dialogues with cultural texts in his artwork, primarily on a material
level, and in doing so highlights the possibility inherent in all speech to suggest
something new and unexpected.
In remaking Marnie Douglas calls attention to two aspects of givenness. The
first is the constraining idea that a given utterance or text has a specific re-
sponse, one that is itself given in advance and not open to interpretation. This is
the case with many deeply ingrained social conventions and forms of official
speech, which become so habitual that they are often overlooked and the
“givenness” of a response is not even questioned. As Bakhtin points out in
Rabelais and His World, the ambivalence of “the people’s speech” is shut out in
official speech, “In the official philosophy of the ruling classes such a dual tone
of speech is, generally speaking, impossible; hard, well-established lines are
drawn between all the phenomena (and these phenomena are torn away from the
contradictory world of becoming, of the whole). A monotone character of
thought and style almost always prevails in the official spheres of art and ideol-
ogy.”138 This is why, for example, in the official sphere of ideology, as
represented by Canadian law, the rape of a woman by her husband was legal
until 1983 when such sexual assault was made a criminal offence. It was such an
unquestionable given that a man could legally rape his wife that when NDP MP
Margaret Mitchell raised the issue in the House of Commons in 1982, her fellow
MPs laughed at her.139
Official viewpoints often delineate the borders of what is and is not part of
discourse. Kaja Silverman in The Acoustic Mirror draws attention to how patri-
archal discourse functions as metalanguage, one that gives enunciative authority
to masculine voices and excludes the validity of feminine viewpoints inside the
filmic text, but in spite of authoritative constraints the feminine voice does find
ways to assert itself. Hence, in Marnie Mark positions himself in the authorita-
tive role of psychiatrist to which Marnie responds, in reference to the scene
between Tarzan and Jane in the 1932 film, directed by W.S. Van Dyke, Tarzan
The Ape Man, by archly saying “You Freud, me Jane?” In this line Marnie is
positioned as a mute animal learning to speak, while Mark is positioned as the
expert who will tame and civilize her unconscious mind by molding her accord-
ing to a masculine point of view in which men rule and women are their
possessions. However, Marnie’s retort is actually quite witty and, at second
glance, subtly undermines Mark’s claim to authority. Silverman’s response to a
patriarchal order that suppresses feminine discourse in classical film is to look
outside the confines of what constitutes an authoritative filmic text. As she
states, “authorship might be inscribed not merely through the camera, or such an
obviously reflexive diegetic indicator as the look, but through those forms of
identification and textual organization which are generally assumed to be ‘sec-
ondary,’ and which hinge upon a variety of characterological and narrative
devices.”140 This type of authorship, one that is inscribed inside or outside the
filmic apparatus, challenges the conventions that function to exclude voices not
sanctioned by official viewpoints.
This brings us to a second aspect of givenness that Douglas highlights in
Subject to a Film: Marnie, the expectation of a created answer on the part of the
observer. This permits the possibility of creating a response that changes the
meaning of the original utterance. For Bakhtin language is conceived as being
“both given and created.”141 Language, in the post-Kantian sense, is both “simp-
ly there, given (das Gegebene, dan),” and in an answering response “conceived
(das Aufgegebene, zadan). Everything is more or less dan or zadan. A thing is
dan; a thought, zadan.”142 If we think of the dialogic exchange of language as a
gift, then we see the ways in which an utterance, once spoken, returns in the
answering thoughts, deeds or actions of those who receive the utterance. The
62 Chapter 3
giftedness of the aesthetic event consists of two parts: that which is given and its
reciprocating answer, which is conceived – or thought – in response. According
to Marcel Mauss, the gift, when freely exchanged, is endlessly returned and
functions to structure the most basic forms of human exchange. Here it becomes
necessary to state the obvious, which is so often overlooked as given and not in
need of thought or analysis: speech is an intrinsic component of all human ex-
changes; speech when given openhandedly is a thing (dan); it is productive in
that it elicits answering thoughts (zadan). “The thing that is given,” as Mauss
states in The Gift, “produces its rewards in this life and the next. … It is not lost,
it reproduces itself; in the next life, one finds the same thing only it has in-
creased.”143 Artistic speech at its moment of enunciation is given (dan) and once
given concrete material form accrues new meaning through its contact with
others. This can be seen in the various texts that constitute a body of utterances
and responses to Hitchcock’s Marnie, the novel it was based on and Douglas’
film installation Subject to a Film: Marnie. At each level of production general-
ly the same story is told, but each version is altered, sometimes with radical
results. Emphasis is placed on different elements and the resulting texts present
several different subjective perspectives on female/male power dynamics, thus
demonstrating how speech is predicated on change and repetition. Nothing is
static.
The given quality of speech as conceived by Bakhtin is similar to a gift,
which once given must be answered and returned. And there is always an an-
swer – even though sometimes we pretend not to hear the answer we are given.
It is not that a subject cannot speak, but that we attempt to impose control
through conformity, through rules and socially accepted responses. This is why
it was acceptable, for example, for the Canadian Parliament to laugh at the issue
of spousal rape. The result of conformity is that responses of certain subjectivi-
ties are rendered invisible. Bakhtin argues against this by pointing out that any
utterance is always met by a responsive judgment. An utterance is by its very
nature conceived (zadan) in the mind of the receiver, who formulates a respon-
sive thought and action in response to the initial speech act. There is always a
choice of response depending on the situation, but whatever the situation we are
tasked to respond. Caryl Emerson points out that for Bakhtin words “are ideally
suited for ‘participative’ modes of being. It is through words that the world is
most easily transformed from givenness to ‘positedness,’ zadannost,” a task.144
Hence, speech becomes a task to be accomplished by the subject who receives
it. To encounter an utterance therefore is not a passive act for Bakhtin, but one
that must be understood as a fundamentally participative act that is necessary for
all cultural production. But always there is the question of individual will and
degrees of responsiveness.
The given and conceived aspects of speech are highlighted in Douglas’ Sub-
ject to a Film: Marnie. The artist materializes what he is given by constructing
his film installation in response to Hitchcock’s Marnie. Though prompted by
Hitchcock’s film, Douglas’ unique response was impossible for the British di-
rector to anticipate in advance. Rather, his installation is created in response to
what he has been given; it is an oscillation between states of dan and zadan.
Douglas demonstrates how speech moves from dan and zadan and then back
again in a continual chain of semiosis where discourse is constantly in a process
of being remade. Just as Douglas is tasked to respond in some way to Hitch-
cock’s film, observers of his installation are likewise tasked to respond in
varying ways to Douglas’ installation. They can be in the same ballpark of
meaning or easily shifted to another interpretation – remember Dostoevsky’s
tipsy artisans and the six different repetitions of the same word with six different
meanings. I have seen people come into the space of installation and keep mov-
ing onto the next exhibit without pause. At other times one or more individuals
stand and contemplate Subject to a Film: Marnie for one full loop, while I sat on
the floor and watched it for several loops. How what is given to observers is
conceived depends upon the individual and their contextual experience. Some
people have not seen the Hitchcock film and have no idea what Douglas is refer-
encing and are baffled. Some people take the time to read accompanying
literature or ask others what is being referenced. Having devoured Hitchcock’s
films and encountered the discourse about them in various texts – books, news-
papers, journals and documentaries – my response is predicated on my
knowledge of the discourse, which has taken place between multiple speakers on
the topic. This means I can conceive of multiple readings, including my own,
meanings that are not evident to people who do not know the larger context of
the installation or take the time to find out. Hence, an understanding of the lan-
guage that is being spoken can change how one conceives what they are given.
The mise-en-scène of Difference

In dialogic materialism the aesthetic event of art is one that, once given by the
artist or author, is endlessly given as a text to be interpreted by multiple observ-
ers and their unique contexts. This is evident in the various interpretations of
Marnie as it has been materialized in the hands of several authors, first as a nov-
el, then as two different screenplays, a film and Douglas’ film installation – not
to mention the innumerable texts discussing these various utterances, including
my own. From a dialogic perspective, Hitchcock’s film Marnie is produced
through a simultaneous dialogue of individual voices, thus rendering it hetero-
64 Chapter 3
glot, which, as Michael Holquist points out, means that it is shaped “by forces
whose particularity and variety are practically beyond systematization.”145 The
collaborative nature of writing and shooting a film undermines the basic as-
sumption of auteur theory, which has framed a substantial part of early film
criticism on Hitchcock.
As a director Hitchcock is well known for his intense collaboration with
writers of both genders and, in particular, his wife Alma Reville. In spite of
working closely with women throughout his career, his films are still marked by
a misogyny that is disturbing and raises questions about who is responsible for
this skewed view of women. Is it Hitchcock, or is it just society? Tania Modleski
describes his collaboration with women as one that is ambivalently marked by
both collusion and resistance; she makes the point that while we are all under the
influence of the dominant ideology, “no one is entirely under the sway of the
dominant ideology.”146 The reception of Hitchcock’s films has been varied with
critics of both genders interpreting it in sometimes radically different fashions.
What this demonstrates is the extent to which a text remains open to interpreta-
tion even in the face of attempts to enclose it through strict conventions.
What makes an artwork relevant is the extent to which it is open to the fu-
ture response of living, thinking subjects. Mieke Bal’s discussion of mise-en-
scène reaffirms the importance of the subject in the staging of video installation,
as she states: “mise-en-scène is a materialization of text in a form that is accessi-
ble for the public, collective reception; a mediation between a play and the
multiple public” and “each individual in it.”147 It is through the body of the ob-
server that a video installation is staged and performed as a social event (one
that is both private and public), as a dialogue between inner and outer speech. In
other words, the aesthetic event finds its answering response in the limitless
mise-en-scène that is constituted through the subjective bodies of observers as
they interact with art. It is the through the responsive actions of a subjective
body engaging in social interaction with video installation, an engagement that
activates the artwork as a speech act directed at someone, that artwork exists and
has meaning. It is the observer interacting with the temporal space of a video
installation that gives living form to the artwork. In video installations, as Bal
points out, “it is primarily the viewer who is caught up on the stage and must
perform. This enactment by the audience, this performance in performativity, is
the only way the art work can actually, not only be but also do, work.”148 If an
artwork is given by an artist and it correspondingly needs an observer to give it
meaning, then just how constrained is this gift of speech? More importantly,
how much do the shifting contextual circumstances of an artwork influence its
reception?
The original novel Marnie, written by Winston Graham, is set in England

and is told from the point of view of Marnie, which is supplanted in Hitchcock’s
film by the controlling gaze of Mark Rutland. Other differences at Hitchcock’s
direction include the replacement of the psychiatrist, Roman Holbrook, with
whom many of the crucial scenes occur in the novel, with Rutland. As a result
the film is framed from the perspective of Rutland, who is given further authori-
ty by the director by being positioned in the role of the now elided analyst,
whose only credentials are that he is a rich white zoologist by hobby. The deci-
sion to replace a psychiatrist with a zoologist is troubling from a feminist
perspective, but is entirely in keeping with the masculine perspective of the film
in which Marnie is likened to an animal that is meant to be possessed and con-
trolled. Hitchcock emphasizes this by repeatedly showing Mark as callously
amused and entertained by Marnie’s troubles (stating at one point in the film
“Let’s just say that I’m an interested spectator in the passing parade”), which he
himself orchestrates in the pivotal robbery scene that he uses to trap her and
blackmail her into marrying him. She functions as an object, one whose secrets
are forcibly unlocked and possessed by her husband. This possession of Marnie
culminates in the infamous rape scene.
As has been widely noted, the original screenwriter Evan Hunter was fired
by Hitchcock after refusing to represent the rape of Marnie. He was replaced by
Jay Presson Allen who recounts in the 1999 documentary, “The Trouble With
Marnie” that Hitchcock “wanted a rape scene and I wrote a rape scene. I don’t
remember any consternation whatsoever.” Later when she met the original
screenwriter, Evan Hunter, and he told her about the conflict that ended his pro-
fessional relationship with Hitchcock, she states, “I was astonished at my lack of
sensitivity,” because she did not think of it as a rape and Hitchcock never used
the word.149 This highlights the illusions that govern our choices in our modes of
relation, which often remain unexamined. As Bal points out “the ‘freedom’ to
choose a mode of looking,” which is often influenced by the generic mode of the
utterance, and that this freedom to look, “comes with a price.”150 One of the
prices of this “freedom” is the collusion and disavowal of what is actually being
uttered. In this case, Presson Allen demonstrates her collusion with patriarchy,
which in Hitchcock’s filmic version presents Marnie as an object to be pos-
sessed – in all senses of the word, including the unspoken word of rape151 – by
her husband. As the original theatrical trailer exclaimed in bright yellow letters:
“IS Hitchcock’s Marnie… A sex story… ? …A Mystery…? …A Detective
Story…? …A Romance…? …A Story of a Thief…? …A Love Story…? YES.
AND MORE! …” Apparently Marnie is many things that are left unspoken and
implied, but which are often overlooked as givens.
66 Chapter 3
Answerability is a key component of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic relations,

the engagement that occurs between an author and an active reader of a text in
the form of dialogue. The related themes that fall under Bakhtin’s conception of
dialogism are dependent upon the generalized notion of the utterance, or com-
munication, which is exchanged in dialogue. For Bakhtin the utterance is
predicated on the notion of “text,” which can be “understood in the broad sense
– as any coherent complex of signs” and implies that
even the study of art (the study of music, the theory and history of fine arts) deals
with texts (works of art). Thoughts about thoughts, experiences of experiences,
words about words, and texts about texts. … Thought about the human sciences
originates as thought about other’s thoughts, wills, manifestations, expressions, and
signs.152
This open conception of the utterance or text within Bakhtinian theory permits
an analysis of the fluid relationships and boundaries that demarcate the past,
present and future. In turn this relationship allows us to conceive of the ways
that utterances are continually shaped and reshaped over time and space by re-
sponsive subjects who are anything but objective. In “Toward a Methodology
for the Human Sciences,” Bakhtin posits that nothing is ever finished the text is
unbounded in an endless dialogic exchange in which there is neither a beginning
nor an ending. It is this aspect of his thought that makes him so germane to an
interdisciplinary analysis of cultural texts as they are constructed across the arts.
For Bakhtin a text is answerable because it is always part of a larger social dia-
logue, one that necessitates a response.
There are innumerable contexts that are produced in response to this film,
each resulting in an unfolding expanse of created meaning responding to Hitch-
cock’s film. One such response is Douglas’ Subject to a Film: Marnie.
It is important, however, to stress that Douglas is in a dual role as a viewer
of Hitchcock and as an artist, or creator, of his own response. Hitchcock himself
takes on multiple roles as a co-author of the screenplays and as a director of the
film itself, which are both creative activities in response to the original novel.
Each person in a sense subjectively responds to what is given in this installation.
Douglas responds or answers to these materials in his filmic installation, which
he structures as an open-ended dialogue with Hitchcock’s heroine caught in the
act of acting out a repressed memory of rape and murder. Will Marnie work
through her repression on her own, will she endlessly thieve, or will she be
forced to confront her past by her future husband, Mark Rutland, whose safe she
is pilfering? Marnie’s actions are left open for the observer to dialogue with;
ultimately it is the viewer who is answerable for their choices and responsive
actions in reading Douglas’ revision of Marnie.
It is by leaving a space for an observer that Douglas subverts the domination
of Marnie by male enunciation, which persistently undercuts feminine identity
by victimizing and infantilizing women.153 In leaving space for the possibility of
difference he demonstrates a “dialogical mode of looking,” which as Bal points
out, requires “a recognition of historical positionality” and an “appreciation of
relations of reciprocity.”154 The relations of reciprocity that Bal speaks of are
evident across the plurality of possible subjectivities that are produced in re-
sponse to the givens of Marnie. The result is an unfolding body of meanings,
contexts and responsive speech acts that is part of the aesthetic event of the art-
work. Douglas engages dialogically with Hitchcock’s text by responding with
his own responsive utterance, which itself invites a response from the viewers
who experience it. In doing so, Douglas highlights the “lack of limits to the
dialogic context,” of which Bakhtin speaks when he argues against the closure
that first and last words provide.155 Without the constraining limits of a begin-
ning and an end the potential for an answer is imperative.
Material Performance of Plastic Speech

If the text is always unfinished, it is because it needs an other to respond. This is
the nucleus of Bakhtin’s dialogism, around which the bulk of his ideas emerge.
An artwork as an aesthetic event is fundamentally unfinished until the moment
of being viewed by an other, who is answerable for their participation in this
dialogic process.156 In opposition to monological points of view, Bakhtin’s dia-
logical approach posits the relation between the self and the text as an “aesthetic
event,” which can only occur “when there are two participants present; it pre-
supposes two non-coinciding consciousnesses.”157 It is this dialogic approach
that I believe is most important in developing a means of examining the text of
art as a non-fixed mode of presentation and reception. The exchange of utter-
ances that constitute the “relations” of art history, which according to Bal are
elided from discourse, and as a result, “the lived out” component of art, which is
unfixed in advance, is often left unanalyzed.158
Bakhtin tells us in “Art and Answerability” that it is through the living body
of the observer that art and life come into contact. It is in the self that art and life
mingle and are, in a sense, brought to life by the answering thoughts of an ob-
server. Or, as I argue, it is in the embodied response of the observer of art, as the
one who reads and responds to the text, that visual art is constituted. As Bal
states “From an originating, founding act performed by a willing, intentional
68 Chapter 3
4. Stan Douglas, Subject to a Film: Marnie, 1989; © 2013 Stan Douglas, Courtesy Stan
Douglas Studio, Vancouver, British Columbia
subject, performativity becomes the instance of an endless process of repetition;

a repetition involving similarity and difference, and therefore relativizing and
enabling social change and subjects’ interventions, in other words, agency.”159
Bal’s conception of performativity is fundamentally intrinsic to understanding
Bakhtin’s conception of the dialogic exchange between an author and a reader,
which requires the agency of an active reader who is answerable for the interpre-
tations and ideas that emerge with the mingling of art and life.
The language of visual art, made up of plastic-pictorial forms that function
in a similar communicative manner as words, is given to the observer who is
charged with the task of reading or interpreting the artwork. Bakhtin describes
the dialogic processes of verbal creation as being characterized by plastic-
pictorial moments, which are “emotional volitional equivalents of possible visu-
al representations that correspond in the aesthetic object to the meaning-
independent plastic and pictorial whole.”160 It is the observer, as a plastic body,
who brings the artwork into contact with living time and willingly creates a
meaningful response. Hence, Subject to a Film: Marnie, which, in its rather
simple austerity, has been characterized as boring because it requires the observ-
er to spend time contemplating and creating their own response.161 Any response
performed by the observer is a subjective conception of the artwork that moves
the body and is not just given. Hence, some people get frustrated trying to un-
derstand what is being communicated and just move on seeking the next new
experience.
In any case, all speech acts are embodied at the moments of conception and
reception and are potentially without limit. Just as Douglas responded to Hitch-
cock, the viewers of Douglas’ work can themselves answer the utterance of the
artists with their own experience of the aesthetic event. Douglas demonstrates
the lack of boundaries between the text and the social world, specifically
through the blurring of boundaries that are revealed in his own artwork, which
are demonstrative of dialogic materialism. Through his attention to the means by
which cultural material is reworked and given new meaning by being brought
into new contexts, he highlights the material nature of speech and thought. Just
as an idea needs to be uttered to exist and have meaning outside the individual,
so too does an utterance need a material form to be circulated in culture across
sometimes vast swathes of space and time.
The qualities of gift exchange that are inherent in Bakhtin’s conception of
answerability reveal the endless potential of the aesthetic event, which is both
given and conceived. This has profound implications for understanding the
relationship that is staged between an artist, artwork and observer. Fundamental-
ly, this relationship is always one that is initially and intentionally shaped by the
artist, but ultimately completed by the observer. This is not to say that the ob-
70 Chapter 3
server has complete freedom, the artist always shapes the conditions of an aes-
thetic event in advance cognizant of a response. This context always haunts the
response. Douglas’ Subject to a Film: Marnie demonstrates how cultural materi-
al is exchanged like a gift that allows each observer their own point of view and
therefore creates the possibility of a multi-voiced discourse, one in which indi-
viduals are answerable for their responses. By being aware of how subjectivity
is constituted through its responsive performance, viewers are positioned to
answer for what they view. Douglas puts observers in the position of deciding
how Marnie’s subjectivity will be constituted: will she continue repressing what
makes her steal, will she be violated again by being forced to confront her past
or will she do something different? This open-endedness is Douglas’ gift to us.
Chapter 4
Chronotopic Bodies and the We of Aesthetic
Discourse: Jamelie Hassan’s Films and Videos
Experience is a staging of experience.
– Gayaytri Chakravorty Spivak162
The way in which communities are built and maintained by the collective narra-
tives we circulate is a central feature of Jamelie Hassan’s diverse artistic output.
She labels herself both an activist and artist; the work that she accomplishes in
both areas bleed into each other and call attention to the importance of speech in
the construction of our daily lives. Typically her work explores the material
processes in which art functions as a responsive dialogue, not just to art, but also
to the everyday material culture in which we live. Of key interest are the pro-
cesses through which she explores the construction of space and time, by means
of multiple narratives, as constituting and creating the social. The power dynam-
ics between the self and others are key aspects of her art. As a result, her work
provides an opportunity to observe how the social body is constituted through
the materiality of speech and answerable action.
I have known Hassan for a number of years and am familiar with her multi-
media installations and interventions, but beyond her video installations Meeting
Nasser (1985) and Boutros Al Armenian/ Mediterranean Modern (1998) I was
unaware that she had experimented so extensively with moving images in her
artwork. Hence, it was a bit of a surprise when she mentioned over coffee one
morning in her kitchen that she had over a number of years created a series of
film and video works. My partner and long-time collaborator Julian Haladyn
gave me a look of astonishment that mirrored my own sentiments. (In retrospect
we ought not to have been surprised as it was through Jamelie and her partner
Ron Benner that we both learned the most about Jack Chambers’ use of film).
Our curiosity was piqued and we pressed Jamelie for more details. She was
rather nonchalant as she confirmed that she had used videos in a number of in-
stallations.
72 Chapter 4
A few days later Hassan dropped by with a large white box filled with vari-
ously formatted videos. Julian and I were excited to peer through them. We
plugged in the necessary equipment required to view the assortment of VHS and
DV tapes – media we had experimented with ourselves and abandoned in favor
of DVD and digitized projectors and screens. In the dark we watched the flicker-
ing images that are characteristic of the ways in which analog and digital tape
age. We sorted through the box of tapes peering at labels: a typewriter has been
used to type some of the cassette labels, other labels are written in smudged
pencil or pen. In this white box there is a mix of media, both outmoded and
contemporary, which speaks to the permeable boundaries of media and aesthetic
forms. This work takes the form of super 8 reels, 16mm film, VHS tapes, DV
tapes and DVDs. These are the material modes through which ideas circulate
through our culture and the formats that they take as they are spoken and ex-
changed. The circulation of ideas occurs as a dialogue between the observer –
who is an intersubjective agent, one who translates art through their own subjec-
tive positions – and the artwork that, thanks to the Duchampian readymade, can
take any form, from a mass produced urinal to a mere conceptual idea. The artist
is mediumistic according to Duchamp, and so too I argue is the observer: i.e.,
the bodies of the artist and observer are as much a medium as the artwork. Du-
champ gives equal importance to both positions, the work of art “is comparable
to a transference from the artist to the observer in the form of an esthetic osmo-
sis taking place through the inert matter” of the artwork.163 It is the bodies of
both artist and observer that function as the living mediums through which art is
translated and made sensible. This is why Duchamp says that artworks depend
on posterity, because the observer is an endless multitude of embodied possibili-
ties stretched across time.
Drawing the Lines of Our Chronotopic Bodies

The multiple layers of Hassan’s artistic practice provide an opportunity to study
the material processes in which art functions as a responsive dialogue, not just to
art, but also to the everyday material culture in which we live. The boundaries
between art and life are blurry. Visible in Hassan’s artistic practice is the manner
in which we are constantly in the process of forming our identities in conjunc-
tion with our discursive exchanges with others. Discourse is key to shaping the
material properties of our social environments in both body and object. In Olives
for Peace (2003) she presents observers with video footage of a young child,
Hassan’s great-niece Marwa, outside with olives that she is eating. The olives
are large and drip with juice in the diminutive hands and mouth of this girl, who
Chronotopic Bodies 73
5. Jamelie Hassan, Olives for Peace, 2003; © 2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario
74 Chapter 4
delights in the pleasure of eating and touching these fragrant fruits. Images of
ceramic tiles from her series Palestine’s Children (1990) are montaged into the
video footage of the girl playing in a laneway in Canada. Hassan’s tiles are
based on paintings by Salwa al Sawalhy, whose work records her daily life in
the Rafah Refugee Camp in Gaza, showing us scenes of strife and unimaginable
violence rendered in the abstract simplicity that is characteristic of children’s art.
The paintings are childish, consisting of free form shape, line and colour. The
story that they tell is disturbing: unarmed men and women, their arms in the air,
surrounded by green uniformed soldiers who aim their large black firearms at
them; helmeted Israeli soldiers corral Palestinian civilians, closing off streets
with rolls of barbed wire.
It is difficult to comprehend the daily reality of a child living in a conflict
zone or refugee camp, but al Sawalhy’s drawings speak volumes about the vio-
lent strife that she has witnessed since she was an infant, experiences that serve
as the foundation for her understanding of the world. The dialogic materialism
that is part of her lived exchange between interior and exterior worlds includes
the fighting, burning and smoky streets, helicopters with armed soldiers aiming
weapons at civilian targets, smoke, blood, bombs and dead bodies that appear in
her drawings. This is not what children typically draw and it is jarring to see,
particularly since it goes against conventional Western ideals of childhood as
being sheltered and safe. Hassan’s rendition of al Sawalhy’s paintings is an
example of how two artists engage in an artistic dialogue that is itself a response
to a particular context, in this case life as seen by a Palestinian child. Her mate-
rial choices for translating al Sawalhy’s original paintings are intriguing and
speak volumes about how everyday experiences become the bedrock of our
perspectives on the world. Instead of painting on canvas or paper, Hassan ren-
ders the childish images on ceramic tiles, her intention for doing so is not
ambiguous. Instead of beautiful decorative tiles on walls and floors, covered
with bucolic images of flowers and other idyllic patterns – tiles that children
learn to crawl and walk on and even imitate in their own drawings – Hassan’s
tiles record the daily experiences of violence through the eyes of a child. There
is a fragile permanence to the tiles, which are typically built into houses. In her
video Hassan juxtaposes the images of a child discovering the world in the safe-
ty of her front yard with images of violence that are the reality drawn by another
child. The difference between these two childhoods is stark and asks us to re-
spond. But Hassan’s video elicits different responses from different people.
Olives for Peace was projected on a wall as part of the 2004 installation
Smurfistan, in which Hassan re-constructs a child’s bedroom filled with Smurfs
and other toys battling for dominance in the space of what she calls a social
laboratory.164 The identity of a child is one that is learned and imitated from the
social language and constructed reality that surrounds them, from bed sheets to
wallpaper, from reading primers to images and toys. 165 Hassan is interested in
the everyday world of the child and their material dialogue with their environs.
This installation parallels the UNICEF commercial run on Belgian television in
2005. The thirty-second long cartoon was made in collaboration with the family
of Peyo, the Belgian artist who created the Smurfs. The tagline of the video
reads: “Don’t let war affect the lives of children” and shows the Smurfs being
bombed, their village destroyed, Smurfette is killed, Papa Smurf runs off leaving
behind an orphaned Baby Smurf, who sits in a smoking crater crying. The pur-
pose of the ad was to raise awareness of how children are being used as soldiers
in over thirty wars around the globe. In addition, it shocked complacent audi-
ences into supporting a fundraising drive for ex-child soldiers in Africa.
Bombing the Smurfs is shocking because it radically subverts the conservative
image of the original cartoon by marring the perfection of the bucolic village,
their mushroom houses surrounded by a pristine forest filled with fluttering
butterflies. Though we screen these cartoons for children, they are not a realistic
representations. The real world is imperfect and always in the process of being
constructed (and even destroyed, bombed through the daily dialectics of unrea-
son). Hassan calls attention to how it is that difference is elided in discourse in
the process of translating the real into the ideational world of speech. Things get
left out and the world is represented in polarizing shades of black and white.
Dialectical thinking isolates the world into neat categories: the dominant idea is
that we are all saying and thinking the same thing. But when does this ever hap-
pen?
As the combined voices of Vladimir Voloinov and Mikhail Bakhtin argue:
“With respect to living language, systematic, grammatical thought must inevita-
bly adopt a conservative position, i.e. it must interpret living language as if it
were already perfected and readymade, and thus must look upon any sort of
innovation in language with hostility. Formal, systematic thought about lan-
guage is incompatible with living historical understanding of language.”166
Reality is the multitude of discursive forms that surround us and form part of our
daily experiences, yet we often overlook a discussion of the politics of form, of
the ways in which we respond to discourse and in doing so co-creatively repro-
duce it in our bodies, our sensations and our voices. In Olives for Peace Hassan
points our attention to the cultural construction of childhood, the ways in which
some children are raised in peace and others are raised in unnecessary war over
land construed by some as a promised land and still others as a stolen homeland.
These conflicting ideas are part of an ideological struggle, one in which the very
vocabulary of reality is contested right down to the very drawings of a child. It is
in the meeting of material and idea that culture is truly constructed. As Bakhtin
76 Chapter 4
argues, the complexities of living language cannot be fully rendered in static

forms because in life we respond and that response cannot be fully constrained
or controlled.
Hassan’s dialogic montage of ordinary scenes of childhood with images of
war parallels Jack Chambers’ film Hybrid (1967).167 Here he montages still
photographs of the Vietnam War and its victims with moving images of the
process of cultivating roses; the images often offend because they interrogate
our sense of answerability. Bakhtin argues that answerability means that we
have to answer with and through our own lives for what we have experienced
and understood; for him this process of “answerability entails guilt, or liability
to blame.”168 The flickering images of roses and war make us feel responsible
and guilty; though the Vietnam War is over, there are still wars that we are di-
rectly or indirectly responsible for today. Chambers focuses our eyes on the
ways in which life is cultivated through cultural apparatuses that are structured
by relations of power. His anti-war film constructs a sublime aesthetic, one that
instills a growing sensation of responsibility and complicity through the framing
of a horrific beauty. Chambers’ comparison of the hybridization of roses with
graphic photographs of Vietnamese citizens disfigured by the American military
industrial machine at first seems a discordant pairing, but the relation becomes
increasingly clear – after a few jump-cuts the observer can increasingly recog-
nize that what they have in common is human agency.169 The roses do not get
cultivated on their own, nor do bombs just fall from the sky of their own accord.
The step-by-step process of achieving a specific end is apparent in the develop-
ment of both roses and war. Chambers asks us as (active) observers for a
visceral response to these provocative images that demonstrate the degree to
which aesthetics influences the collective order of culture, right down to our
very bodies and minds. In one sequence a photograph of a Vietnamese man
blindfolded and bound with rope is montaged with film of a man staking and
binding a rose bush with twine: through the aesthetically conflicting images,
Chambers communicates the idea that the ordering of life often results from
severe methods at the hands of human agency.
Like Hassan, Chambers called London, Ontario his home and depicted it in
his films and paintings. He filmed and photographed the daily world that sur-
rounded him, rendering these images in a Perceptual Realist style in his films
and paintings. The everyday and the ordinary are integral elements in his art-
work. For example, in his 16mm film Circle (1969) the artist aimed his camera
at his family and the surrounding community. Part of the film consists of footage
he shot of his backyard everyday at ten o’clock, for four-second intervals, using
coloured film. The other elements include a segment filmed in the personal in-
timacy of his living room that he montaged with archival footage of London,
both filmed in black and white. In this film and much of his other artwork,
Chambers, as Kathryn Elder points out,
rejected the notion of linear time advocated by popular cinema because he thought
the narrative illusion that resulted misrepresented the synthetic character of human
perception. To this end he employed various montage strategies – semantic and for-
mal – to imbue the viewing experience with a sense of “presentness” so that we
participate in the same process of self-awareness as did the artist.170
As a result, it is the living observer who brings the past into contact with the
present and gives it life in their responsive thoughts and actions. The observer
occupies an unique position in time and space. Where and when an individual is
located matters in how they will respond. For example, when I watched Circle I
was aware of the fact that Chambers’ had filmed part of the film two blocks
away from where I presently live. The backyard looks much like my own and, as
I watch his film, I cannot help but think of my own life in the same location, but
different time.
It is through the manipulation of the material world by living people that
ideology is manifested. But these methods, like Janus, are dual-sided and work
in multiple directions. The addresser and the addressee work on each other, but
they face others who likewise push and pull them in the ebb and flow of dis-
course. The conventions governing the body and speech is not some giant all-
seeing monolith operating from the top down, there is no godlike being cracking
a whip and bending people to be harnessed by social constraints and rendered
productive citizens. Rather, power is manifested in the everyday interactions of
people, it is through speech and action that will is embodied and made real.
Will, like all speech, is materialized through the body and the dialogic exchang-
es between self and others. Ways of managing people as a group rely on the
pliable material of the body and the appropriate technologies necessary to
achieve the desired end. Like Hassan, Chambers points out how seemingly
mundane acts and objects are political in the ways that they shape our thoughts
and actions.
Likewise in Olives for Peace, what Hassan makes visibly obvious is the fact
that the boundaries of reality, like the conventions that frame it, are permeable
and plastic, repeated at will on our bodies and our surroundings. She does so by
presenting the scene of a young toddler (Marwa with her beautiful brown eyes)
playing with olives and stones, while her mother sits next to her holding in one
arm a nude black doll with curly hair and in the other arm rests the grip of a
metal crutch. Framing this peaceful scene between aunt, mother and child are
painted tiles copied from the paintings of a young girl living in Gaza: brightly
78 Chapter 4
coloured scenes of war and bloodshed as seen by a child dialogue with images
of another child playing a world away in Canada. The ways that children are
responsively shaped by social concord and conflict is the subtext of this video.
Both Hassan and Chambers emphasize the politics inherent in everyday life and
our willingness to disregard the corresponding power dynamics that are part of
all cultural relationships. In doing so they ask us to account for our deepest be-
liefs and the ways in which these beliefs impact the reality of the material world.
In Olives for Peace Hassan makes palpable the politics of artistic representa-
tion and the power that it has to set the tone of discourse. Some people question
whether or not art is and can be political, if it even has an impact on our lives.
But art has always been political because it has always been used to tell us the
story of who we are and the decorous forms of proper discourse. This is why art
is often used as decoration within various public edifices to commemorate the
past (which more often than not is manipulated into a public mythos for the
masses to model) through monumental murals, towering edifices and gargantuan
sculptures. Art tells us who we are and where we come from, this is why the
birth of the museum was intricately entwined with the rise of the nation state; as
such it is the highest altar of the power of aesthetics to influence and to tame the
masses. A point Jacques Rancière drives home when he states: “There is no art
without a specific form of visibility and discursivity which identifies it as such.
There is no art without a specific distribution of the sensible tying it to a certain
form of politics. Aesthetics is such a distribution.”171 The aesthetics of art is the
sensation produced through artwork itself, whatever forms it may take. For
Bakhtin the aesthetic activity of the arts functions as a bridge between the self
and others. An artwork is the material means of communicating the internal
thoughts of an individual to the collectivity that is the external world. The dia-
logic nature of thought means that ideas are actualized only when they are
communicated in some fashion. The idea is intersubjective since as Bakhtin
states, “the realm of its existence is not individual consciousness but dialogic
communion between consciousnesses.”172 This means that human thought exists
in an intersubjective web of communications that are in constant exchange be-
tween individuals and collectives. Discourse is living and exists in the multiple
moments of communication as it takes place through the body. It is through the
back and forth ebb and flow of ideas that discourse functions to create the living
social forces that structure our communities and our everyday lives. Discourse is
plastic and takes many forms from books, film, painting, video, and includes the
actual bodies that experience and reproduce it. Seen from the perspective of
dialogic materialism, the necessity of the body as a material component in all
communication is inescapable. All discourse functions to give identity to the
individuals who make up particular communities, which at their heart are rela-
tions between self and other(s). Through the aesthetic processes of art the indi-
vidual observer engages in an intersubjective exchange between the self and a
socially constructed other that is communicated through the artwork. The dis-
course of art takes place in a multitude of contexts and is dependent on an
apparatus – or form of visibility and discursivity – that enables the exchange of
such speech acts.
Hence, in Olives for Peace, the juxtaposed images of the small hands of a
toddler holding olives and scenes of war drawn by a child communicate the
trauma of war and exposes the idea that childhood should be innocent and free
of strife, but often is not. Hassan makes visible the illusions that order childhood
and are reproduced in our very toys. In doing so, she makes it evident how play-
ing with a black doll or a white doll, playing cowboys and Indians at war with
plastic toys, speaks to our ideological outlook as adults and the actual wars that
are part of our lives. It is through the material objects (objects that do not simply
appear without human agency) that we surround ourselves with, from birth until
death, that ideology is disseminated and perpetuated.
While each individual has a varying degree of freedom to respond to discur-
sive exchanges, there are some limits. After all, as Bakhtin argues, “Our
speech… our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others’ words,
varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of ‘our-own-ness,’ varying
degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them
their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework,
and re-accentuate.”173 While discourse takes place in exchange with the other,
influencing our thoughts and actions, the restrictions of speech are always being
contested in culture. The degree to which we allow ourselves to be blind and
often passive to social constraints is the focus of much of Hassan’s artwork. To
accomplish this task she often blurs the boundaries of form and speech to make
her point. Hence, the jumble of toys mixed in with a child’s impressions of war
in Smurfistan.
The Semantics of Material Discourse

Bakhtin traces the emergence of the dialogic novel from multiple genres that
have evolved from ancient literary forms into modern forms. After a lifetime of
study he comes to the conclusion that “Dialogic relationships are possible …
among images belonging to different art forms. But such relationships already
exceed the limits of metalinguistics.”174 In other words, the process through
which art is socially and ideologically constituted is through dialogic relation-
ships that exceed the material boundaries of genre and form. This is why
80 Chapter 4
6. Jamelie Hassan, The Well, 2001; installation view in Museum of Health Care, Kingston; ©
2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario
discourse cannot be confined to nice neat disciplinary categories.

Such social and cultural overlaps are made visible in Hassan’s video instal-
lation The Well (2001) located at the Museum of Health Care in Kingston,
Ontario.175 This installation consists of a video monitor set up in front of a cur-
tain made from a red birthing sheet, set back in an archway, which Hassan has
inlayed with red and white tiles painted with images of roses, red crosses and
crescents. The red sheet functions as a sensuous backdrop to the home videos of
the birth by caesarean of Alice and John Williams’ two children: Max, born
February 26, 1999, and Luc, born March 15, 2001. There is a push and pull
between two forms of sensuality: the erotic sensation of the red velvet curtains
theatrically framing the video monitor and its moving images, which depict the
grotesque sensuality of birth. The images and sounds of the birth are very vis-
ceral. In fact, at screenings of The Well I consistently noticed a number of
observers – both women and men – clenching their bodies and wincing in re-
sponse to the grotesque images; but there is both fear and smiling wonder at this
universal process. In grotesque realism “the bodily element is deeply positive. It
is presented not in a private egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of
life, but as something universal, representing all people.”176 Reminiscent of
Chambers’ Hybrid, Hassan uses close-up images of cultivated red roses to frame
the scenes of Alice’s c-section, a cultivated form of birth – a gesture made more
significant when we discover that all four members of the Williams family have
been born through caesarean.
Hassan shows us life in the process of becoming, a metamorphosis that is
unending and rooted in the body itself. It is through surgical procedures like the
c-section – which comes with an array of machines, devices, discourses and
medical personnel – that the body is regimented and cultivated. Michel Fou-
cault’s conception of bio-power is evident in the images of birth we witness and
its bloody viscera; it is through such regulatory mechanisms that the family is
transformed, molded and pictured as useful. Hassan uses ordinary home videos
to spotlight the dialogic materialism between social discourse and the body. For
example, as the surgical team extracts a child from Alice’s cut open and splayed
stomach, one of the doctors states that at another hospital ninety percent of
women giving birth receive epidurals. The first nurse responds by saying “We
need to coach…coach those ladies,” while the second nurse exclaims “How
sad!” In this exchange the normative politics of medicine are momentarily made
visible, but much is left implied in these seemingly benign statements. It is such
silences or gaps that are of interest in Hassan’s video; as Foucault states “There
is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that
underlie and permeate discourses.”177
82 Chapter 4
The images of birth and cultivated red roses are framed through Hassan’s
inclusion of historically contextualizing end-titles, which state: “Caesarian oper-
ation one for delivering a child by cutting the mother, so called from Julius
Caesar, who was born through such an operation.” This operation is the very
definition of Bakhtin’s grotesque body: the body that is “unfinished, outgrows
itself, transgresses its own limits.”178 These end-titles link contemporary caesar-
eans, specifically the caesarean births of Max and Luc, to a long history in
which the deployment of medical mechanisms are discursively enacted on the
body. Close-up shots depict the grotesque births of both brothers, while their
mother calmly looks at the camera, in each case separated from her sons by
surgical draperies that prevent her from seeing her sons pried out of her abdo-
men, covered in blood and viscera. Surgical scissors cut Max’s wet umbilical
cord while his red genitals reveal his sex. Later a slow pan reveals his small
body in an incubator as he sucks on the feeding tube taped to his mouth, a jump-
cut reveals a heart monitor measuring his vitals, another cut continues the pan
down his body revealing the small clear plastic bag collecting his urine. This
medical apparatus is supported by human agency: it is Alice, John, Max and
Luc, along with the nurses and doctors who are the living human components
that give support and form to biopower by lending their bodies and actions.
Without the human body, as it is cultivated through social controls, there is no
body politic. The sterile environment of the hospital and the surgical interven-
tion that makes Max’s birth possible does not exist without the participation of
each person. Biopower is the cultivation of social ideas upon our bodies. In
these family videos of birth and childhood, we observe the personal and how
individual interaction plays such a crucial role in the construction of community.
Projected on the wall of a hospital, surrounded by a frame of red crosses and
crescents, the different ways in which we dialogue with social institutions like
the hospital are made visible. What Hassan drives home with this moving image
installation is the manner in which each and every one of us participates dialogi-
cally with the world and, in doing so, helps to shape it.
Speech and the Material World

The aesthetic forms of an idea are reflected in the responsive actions of our bod-
ies and the material ephemera that we produce and surround ourselves with.
This is not to say that discourse predetermines the subject, but that the subject is
in dialogue with discourse: both are working on each other. Bakhtin makes clear
that a dialogic encounter between the subject and the other “does not result in
merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are
mutually enriched.”179 In this way, dialogic processes are embodied in our ac-
tions as subjects, which actively respond to the ideas that we are given with a
distinctive back and forth influence, rather than being subjected to a slavish
relationship to an “original” idea. Each subject has the possibility to find their
own way, to change and adjust the idea that is given and to make it compatible
with their own cultural and historical context. This is not an objective process
and can never be objective since, as subjective beings, we all have subjective
perspectives that cannot be escaped however much we try.
The way discourse shapes our identities is the theme of Les lanques du
monde (2000). Filmed in the now dismantled rare books library at the University
of Western Ontario, Professor Clive Thomson sits in front of a young boy, Has-
san’s nephew Qays, reading out loud “Ecrire les lanques du monde” by Radhia
Dziri – which focuses on the development of Arabic writing through multiple
languages both written and spoken across the Middle East, Asia and parts of
Europe – while a girl, Hassan’s niece Baalqis – who is named after the famed
Queen of the Yemen – walks around the library caressing the leather spines of
old books. The physicality of books, the spaces of reading, the act of touching
and turning the pages of a book are part of the construction of languages of the
world. We often forget that words require concrete material form, whether it is
the material bodies that enable us to speak and listen or the materiality of the
word or image as produced on paper or any other media. The same two children
investigate their relationship to Arabic language and culture in Hassan’s Topsy
Turvy Land (1999), a work conceptually and contextually connected with Les
lanques du monde – both being conceived and often screened together.180 Has-
san’s main focus in these works is to negotiate the chronotopes of language in
relation to the development of subjective identities. In Les lanques du monde,
we listen to Thomson’s voice as he makes audible a text that traces out how
language is “être empruntée par un multitude (borrowed by a multitude).”181
Thomson reads in French, while English subtitles scroll across the bottom of the
screen. Hassan’s work continually exposes the manner in which the subjective
repetition of ideas – be it in the form of medical procedures, collected ephemera
or personal encounters with language – is itself answerable to materially en-
gaged dialogues of reception and (personal) translation.
Like books touched and opened by a multitude of readers in a library and the
verbal exchanges of a teacher and a student, the observer listens and reads Has-
san’s videos: these are the material forms through which we intersubjectively
communicate with the ideas of the artist. In this manner, Bakhtin tells us, “the
ideas of others become more and more plastic; people and ideas which in histor-
ical reality never entered into real dialogic contact (but could have done so)
begin to come together in dialogues.”182 Ideas come into contact with a multi-
84 Chapter 4
tude of people, each person is an independent subject, one who responds in

some sensible form through their own thoughts and bodily actions to the materi-
al ideas that surround them.
In all cultural engagements the embodied presence of the subject activates
what Homi K. Bhabha terms the third space, this is the space where cultures
meet and mingle in the process of cross cultural dialogue and translation. In
“Identity and Cultural Displacement,” Bhabha in conversation with Hassan asks
the question “When is culture?”183 The multiple moments that constitute culture
occur in time and space. Thus, the when of culture is marked by both the pres-
ence and absence of subjective bodies. Culture exists in the multitude of
moments of dialogic enunciation. The past, present and the endless future are
part of the when of culture and take place in the chronotopic bodies of the artist
and the observer who is always posited in the future – that is an observer who is
not pre-determined in advance. There is a living materiality at all points: the
artist lives in the moment of enunciation and the observer lives in the moment of
response, which is itself an enunciation. Bakhtin gives the name chronotope to
the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artisti-
cally expressed”; just as there are elements of time and space in art, there are
also by necessity chronotopic bodies.184
The Plastic Bodies of Aesthetic Culture

In Hassan’s video installation Boutros al Armenian/ Mediterranean Modern
(1996-98) she physically constructs multiple sets – one located in a private home
in Windsor and another in the National Gallery of Ottawa – that recreate the
murals painted in the living room of her grandparents’ house in Kar’oun, Leba-
non. The walls of these sets function as a backdrop for the accompanying video,
which tells a story of how the iterant Armenian painter Boutros came to paint
murals in the house of Hussein Shouser, Hassan’s maternal grandfather. In the
original installations, footage is screened on television monitors located outside
of the recreated living room (Hassan has subsequently screened this video as a
separate projection). The demolition of her grandfather’s murals flickers on the
screen, showing us the process of destruction that comes along with renovation
and modernization; the past vanishes before our eyes even as we hear the voice
of Boutros – Canadian-Armenian Atom Egoyan reads the words written by Has-
san – telling of his life amongst this family. Analog fuzz marks the decaying
videotape, which sticks as it spools through the VCR, resulting in much static
and skipping around the edges of the television frame. Like her structural and
experimental film forebears – Jack Chambers, Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow
7. Jamelie Hassan, Boutros al Armenian / Mediterranean Modern, 1997; installation view in

2381 Windermere, Windsor; © 2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario
86 Chapter 4
8. Jamelie Hassan, Boutros al Armenian / Mediterranean Modern, 1997; painted ceiling by

Boutros; © 2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario
– Hassan calls attention to the material qualities of her chosen media and makes
the grainy static of the video part of the story.
Through her layering of multiple chronotopic spaces in this video and ac-
companying installation, the narrative that Hassan stages is made aesthetically
sensible to observers. The vanished murals of the house in Kar’oun are in dia-
logue with the two reproductions that Hassan paints and with multiple observers
of different backgrounds and sensibilities. The observer negotiates the threads of
the narrative and interprets the spaces and stories through the sensations the
body produces in responsive dialogue.
These bodies are intersubjective and socially constructed. It is a compound
body that reads, thinks, sees, hears, feels, imagines and responds. As subjects we
each shape ourselves according to our own responsive and answerable subjectiv-
ities. Yet, as Hassan makes obvious in Les lanques du monde, these
subjectivities are also shaped by what our language or discourse permits us to
say and do, as well as the ways in which we subjectively translate and respond
to what we experience within our own specific locations in space and time. The
sensibilities of the body are influenced by relations of self/other as communicat-
ed through the plastic forms of discourse, which always has a material form. As
Thomson reads aloud to the children in the rare book library:
Treasuries of imagination were needed to adopt Arabic writing to different lan-

guages, since despite their numbers, the consonants in Arabic are insufficient, and
each language, in looking for its own way, pushes the diacritic system of signs to the
extreme.185
The imagination – creative thought – is housed and made sensible by the body in
which it lives. Languages may push and pull at people, but we are self-shaping
beings and at all points of contact there is a negotiation that must be acknowl-
edged: this is what Bakhtin means by responsibility. As Bhabha states to
Hassan, “You see it in the work of Bakhtin: As forms of language reflect rela-
tions of power and authority, there is always a kind of boundary where
contestation happens, because there is no co-option but rather negotiation of
demands, of wills, of meanings and so on.”186 The subject position in all dialogic
exchanges takes place in specific and unique space/time(s). Discourse, I argue,
represents a meeting of chronotopic bodies through the material forms of lan-
guage – in the case of Hassan, a primarily visual language.
Art is made possible through multiple bodies and voices interacting and
dialoguing within a variety of spatial and temporal locations, the tracing of
which is the discipline of art history. From this multitude emerges an experien-
tial and discursive plurality: the we of culture. As Jean-Luc Nancy states in The
88 Chapter 4
Ground of the Image: “Alterity – the distinct identity – is not given. Whereas I
produces or creates its own identity, we project it or assume it. Nous autres lets
it be heard that in the end, after further investigation, this we could one day be-
come a completely different – and entirely other – subject.”187 The we is a
self/other relationship in which the self is in dialogue with a plurality, which we
have named the other.
In Mom, Youre Gonna Blow It (1990),188 Hassan films the construction of
this we through the daily social relations that surround her while staying in Cairo
with her son Tariq. Images of a public square, the Midan El Hussein, filmed at
night from a balcony at the El Hussein Hotel, the minaret of the neighboring El
Hussein Mosque and the street below are lit up with colourful lights; Hassan
adds stress to the normality of this locale by repeating the clip twice, in doing so
she highlights the structural qualities of both the film and the public square.
More footage filmed during the day shows crowds of men praying outside the
Mosque, a car slowly squeezing through a narrow street teeming with people, a
neon sign advertises milk in English and Arabic, and a funeral procession that
winds out of the mosque and down the street. These are relatively ordinary
scenes of life in Cairo, which is the backdrop that frames footage of a man
hammering away at a brass plate as he engraves it for the artist. The title of this
video is taken from a conversation Hassan had with her son about the plate that
she commissioned from Egyptian artisan Aly Aly Hassan. Back in the hotel
room overlooking the mosque, (Jamelie) Hassan writes: “Contemplating the
inscribed brass plate, I turn to my son Tariq reading in the other bed and ask, Do
you think Aly Aly knows who Salman Rushdie is? Tariq looks at me in exasper-
ation and says, Mom, you’re gonna blow it.”189 The artist later tells Aly Aly that
he made the plate for Rushdie, who was condemned as an enemy of Islam in
1989 for his book The Satanic Verses. At first he is upset at her deception, but
then gradually he admits to Hassan that he would not obey the fatwa against
Rushdie. In this action Hassan singles out Aly Aly, isolating him from the plu-
rality of the we and making him answer for himself: she holds him to account
for his actions and his opinions. What kind of person chooses to stand by silent-
ly while someone is condemned to death for merely writing a book?
Hassan’s videos call attention to the way we learn and interact with the
world aesthetically – a way of seeing that necessarily includes questions of poli-
tics and ideology. She calls observers to account for their interactions with the
world, for the way in which their opinions are formed and have formative re-
sults. Calling individuals to account for their actions is a basic tenet of
citizenship and politics, to willfully wield power is to be answerable. Hannah
Arendt traces the origins of accountability to Platonic thought:
9. Jamelie Hassan, Mom, youre gonna blow it, 1990; Aly Aly Hassan, artisan in Cairo; ©
2013 Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario
90 Chapter 4
Logon didonai, “to give an account” – not to prove, but to be able to say how one
came to an opinion and for what reasons one formed it – is actually what separated
Plato from all of his predecessors. The term itself is political in origin: to render ac-
counts is what Athenian citizens asked of their politicians, not only in money
matters, but in matters of politics. They could be held responsible. And this – hold-
ing oneself and everyone else responsible and answerable for what he thought and
taught – was what transformed into philosophy that search for knowledge and for
truth that had sprung up in Ionia.190
Hassan asks Aly Aly to account for his beliefs and his actions not in theory but
in practice, inviting him to be answerable for his own intersubjective responses
to the world around him. In a similar manner, Hassan’s artwork positions us to
responsively give form to the we of culture: it is our bodies that provide this
plastic form.
Chapter 5
Polyphonic Screens: Chris Marker and
Embodied Memory
Always preserved in a genre are undying elements of the archaic. True, these archaic
elements are preserved in it only thanks to their constant renewal, which is to say,
their contemporization. A genre is always the same and yet not the same, always old
and new simultaneously… A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its
past, its beginning. – Mikhail Bakhtin191
Of course, this work in no way constitutes an autobiography, and I’ve permitted my-
self to drift in all directions. Nonetheless, if you’re going to work on memory, you
might as well use the one you’ve always got on you. – Chris Marker192
Although primarily known as a French filmmaker and essayist, Chris Marker’s

practice consists of an ever-expanding multitude of media and disciplinary
fields. He has worked as a writer, poet, filmmaker, activist, artist and photogra-
pher. His work has been constructed through collective-productions, as solitary
ventures under cover of a pseudonym, on the Internet and in the museum. Like
the wide range of topics that he explores, Marker is at heart a traveler who criss-
crosses media, exploring the movements of history and memory as it is
constructed through cultural dialogue. This interdisciplinarity is fundamental to
the experience of his working process. Marker in his typical fashion – with his
many masks and alter egos – presents, as Nietzsche hypothesizes, the “subject as
multiplicity,” which like time never stops moving.193 As I will demonstrate,
Marker’s works are constructed through multiple points of cultural, historical
and personal dialogue, which are dependent upon multifaceted perspectives.
Marker is perhaps best known as the director of La jetée (1962), a film
made from photographic stills and one brief flash of filmed moving footage.
Along with Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi, Marguerite Duras, Alain Resnais, Alain
Robbe-Grillet and Armand Gatti, Marker was a key figure in the Rive Gauche
92 Chapter 5
(Left Bank) of French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) cinema. As a group they
collaborated extensively with each other, taking on different roles as writers,
film directors and film editors. One of his earliest collaborations with Alain
Resnais was on the essay film Les Statues aussi meurent (Statues Also Die,
1952), which explored the relationship between how African Art is perceived
and colonialism. In addition, Marker reluctantly permitted Resnais to list him as
an assistant to the director in the credits of the controversial documentary Nuit et
brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955). Directed by Resnais, this poetic documentary
on the Holocaust was originally written by the novelist Jean Cayrol, a survivor
of Mauthausen concentration camp. Marker worked closely with both Resnais
and Cayrol, rewriting the script to successfully work with Resnais’ editing and
Hans Eisler’s haunting music. Such collaboration across disciplines, with vari-
ous members of the group moving easily back and forth between film, literature
and art, makes Marker’s life long interest in the essay film an unsurprising
choice. The essay film is “a hybrid that fuses the two long-established categories
of film: fiction and documentary” and “it also goes beyond this to cross the
boundaries of traditional disciplines.”194 As a form, the essay film oscillates
almost imperceptibly between truth and fiction, a shaky terrain that the observer
must actively participate in to construct meaning.
In his subsequent projects Marker increasingly advocates for a more active
approach to filmmaking that departs from auteurist practices. In Loin du
Viêtnam (Far From Vietnam, 1967), he organized and edited a collective protest
film on the Vietnam War involving the contributions of Jean-Luc Godard, Joris
Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais and Agnes Varda.
Through a non-hierarchical approach the directors involved collectively counter
the sensationalistic propaganda of the U.S. military and media by actively align-
ing themselves with the Vietnamese in protesting military aggression. As
Catherine Lupton points out, this film marks the beginning of Marker’s “active
involvement in militant cinema, which flourished in tandem with radical politi-
cal movements of the era, and aimed to give a voice to revolutionary activists
who normally went unheard in the babel of mainstream media and film produc-
tion.”195 Polyphony is a vital component of the act of authoring for Marker.
Voices ring out at each level of production. Multiple subjects participate in film-
ing, editing, writing and viewing. For Marker everyone is a potential actor,
whether one is near or far; all are permitted to look and to speak.196
In a 1968 interview Marker discusses the film Far from Vietnam, which was
made collectively by Marker, Resnais and Godard and highlights the importance
of collective work and dialogue for his working method. Marker recalls the
presentation of this film in Besançon, a small town in France, where a memora-
ble discussion occurred after the screening. As he states, “During that
Polyphonic Screens 93
discussion, the film received a critique, and its ideas took shape, which means
that our film became alive. For the makers of the film, this outcome was of
course more important than if all the observers had simply been enthusiastic.
This film has been made to trigger discussion.”197 Evidently, for Marker and his
compatriots what was most important to them was a lively dialogue, one that
generated a contextual meaning subject to change. Collective dialogue and dis-
cussion is only possible through the bodies of multiple observers – a polyphony
of living screens – through which the images of history are embodied, trans-
formed and communicated.
In “Towards a Third Cinema,” Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino cite
Marker as an influence in the development of Third Cinema and its radical poli-
tics of decolonization. As they state:
Filmmaking is increasingly within the reach of larger social layers. Chris Marker
experimented in France with groups of workers whom he provided with 8mm
equipment and some basic instruction in its handling. The goal was to have the
worker film his way of looking at the world, just as if he were writing it. This has
opened up unheard-of prospects for the cinema; above all, a new conception of
filmmaking and the significance of art in our times.198
When Solanas and Getino delineate the features and goals of their revolutionary
filmmaking, they argue for a collective cinema that goes beyond the collective
act of film production to include the audience. Thus, they proclaim in their man-
ifesto: “We thus discovered a new facet of cinema: the participation of people
who, until then, were considered spectators.”199 The gap between the production
of a film and observers is presented as mutable and actionable: through the par-
ticipation of the audience, film is continually remade in the present. In Third
Cinema the film is unfinished, left open-ended so when it comes into contact
with audiences they are not passive spectators, but active agents. There is a pal-
pable material dialogue that exists between the actors that participate at all levels
in the production of a film. The material of Third Cinema is the film and all the
aspects that function to facilitate active communication: this includes the aural,
the visual, the verbal and the people who make it possible. It is militant in the
sense that it insists that there is a dialogue, even in cases where official dis-
course attempts to say otherwise. Hence, the participation of audiences as actors
is a crucial element to the construction of film and its meaning.
Such is the case with Level Five (1996), Marker’s essay film that chronicles
the battle of Okinawa in October 1944 and the fictional character Laura, who
searches for her dead lover in the unfinished database he created on the Japanese
tragedy. The morphing back in forth between media, truth and fiction highlights
94 Chapter 5
the ways in which meaning is constituted through our bodies and minds. Though
the film is mediated through several matrixes, it is the experience and
knowledge of the viewer that influences how it will be understood and an-
swered. The film opens with a birds-eye-view of a hand manipulating a mouse
in front of a computer screen.200 The narrative unfolds as we watch Laura ma-
nipulating a computer database as she sits in a virtual archive surrounded by
books, CDs and photographs. The probing feline eyes of Guillaume-en-Egypte,
Marker’s favorite cat, returns our gaze, the past looks back at us in expectant
dialogue. HyperStudio generated images, charming in their quirky out-
datedness, flicker with photographs, static laced video and grainy old films, a
churning whirlwind of speech in motion. Marker runs these fragments through
various machines, which provide the material form necessary to view this as-
semblage. The various technologies on which this film can be viewed include a
film projector, an i-Pad, a DVD and television or computer screen. I am sure
that this list of devices that function as screens (some of which did not exist
when Level Five was made) will expand and change over time too. This is a
point Erkki Huhtamo stresses, “The history of the screen fluctuates between the
imagination and the world of things. As gateways to displaying and exchanging
information, screens are situated in the liminal zone between the material and
the immaterial, the real and the virtual.”201 The technologies used to make and
view this film are themselves constantly being reformatted and updated, a point
that Marker drives home with his own use of outdated beige computers and the
primitive graphics of early computers. In spite of all these changes, the one con-
stant material is the living body of the observer. Though the media changes, the
point is the same in all eras: to speak and to answer.
Laura, looking into the camera, speaks directly to observers as she reminisc-
es about the mutability of history and memory. The bloody outcome of
Okinawa’s invasion by Americans unfolds as she navigates the program left
behind, a program through which she searches for her lost lover. Her story be-
comes entwined in the story of mass suicide. The question of how the camera
and the cyberspace of the computer can influence actual events and our percep-
tions of them is paramount to Marker’s construction of Level Five. The dialogue
of the film unfolds in both directions, as Jonathan Kear explains, “The beguiling
power of the image as witness to substitute its reality for the reality of the event,
to transform our perception and consciousness of events, and in turn, to be trans-
formed by the context and framework within which it is seen is a central feature
of Level Five.”202 Grainy footage of a woman running to the edge of a cliff in
Saipan, turning back and looking into the camera before jumping to her death, is
juxtaposed with footage of a man jumping to his death from the Eiffel tower in
1900 wearing bat wings that fail to fly. Cameras are present at the death of both,
they are removed in time and space from each other – as we are from them – but
both respond to the lens of the camera eye and are captured on grainy film for
posterity. Though we are separated by both time and space they are looking at
us. They interrogate us with their ghostly faces and disembodied eyes. The full
screen of the woman is suddenly reduced and framed in a black circle like the
scope of a gun as Laura solemnly states:
I’d seen these images before. In slow motion you can see the woman turn back, and
spot the camera. Do we know she would have jumped if at the last minute she hadn’t
known she was watched? The woman in Saipan saw the lens and knew that the for-
eign devils would show the world she hadn’t jumped. So she jumps. The cameraman
aimed at her like a hunter through his sight, and he shot her like a hunter.203
Though this is a representation and I am not actually there, every time I watch
this I feel as if I am the one holding the camera, as if I was there and the scene
elicits a visceral shudder from me as the woman leaps and plunges to her death.
The presumably dead camera man shows us the scene one way and Marker an-
other. And I see it another way, deeply influenced by my particular context. The
first time I watched the film I could not stop myself from exclaiming, as I ges-
tured back at the nameless woman, “No, don’t jump!” Through such
manipulation of imagery Marker positions the observer to participate. We re-
spond by grafting onto the images we are given “our own visions, our thoughts,
and memories, our pitiful scraps of information.” 204 This is in fact what every-
one does when watching moving images, it is to and through our bodies that
images speak. The feeling of being directly addressed is typical of the essay
film, which “establishes the address of the enunciator as a dialogue with the
spectator.”205 The answering ideas of Level Five are created in the bodies of
observers, because it is through willing bodies that Marker’s film finds living
form and is able to exist in both the present and the future. Thus, as I gaze I am
aware of being surrounded by others who are present as dark shadowy forms
illuminated by flickering light. It is interesting to watch the reactions of others,
to see what others feel and think, to see how meaning and action can change in
the presence of others. The gaze is materially dialogic because eyes need living
bodies (actors all) to see.
For Marker the gaze is reciprocal, even when those doing the gazing are
no longer present. In Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983) the looks exchanged between
the person being filmed and the camera builds upon this and is a recurring
theme. Marker, through his alter-ego narrator Krasna, mocks the conventions of
film and the attempt to deny the gaze, when he says: “Frankly, have you ever
heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in film schools,
96 Chapter 5
not to look at the camera?”206 Marker films the inquisitive gazes of Africans’
violating this rule, they transcend time and space to speak to us, to assert their
own existence, undermining the normative rules of First Cinema. He uses the
camera to look and in return to be looked at. The gaze exchanged between those
that film and those that are filmed is an act of communication. The look ex-
changed is not just a mere look, for the gaze itself functions to communicate
complex social meanings that are conveniently buried under cultural conven-
tions and contexts, such as the directive not to look at the camera or the equally
absurd contention that we cannot know what someone in a photograph or film is
thinking. We speak in more ways than one, our bodies and expressions telegraph
just as much as spoken words. The gaze goes both ways. Marker uses the cam-
era as a medium, a vehicle, to convey speech between people on both ends of
the camera, between those who are present and those who are far away.
There is a thrill at the brief moment of contact when the African woman re-
turns the gaze of the camera. As the narrator says in the voiceover: “I see her,
she saw me, she knows that I see her, she drops me her glance, but just at an
angle where it is still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me, and at
the end the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-forth of a second,
the length of a film frame.”207 My eyes meet the eyes of another woman, a wom-
an who defies the conventions of culture, gender and film to look at the camera.
The camera crosses time and space, permitting a momentary exchange. She
knows when she looks into the camera that she is looking not just into the eyes
of the cameraman, but the eyes of those who will look back at her image.208 The
look is both material and immaterial. Looking is an act of communication and
like all language processes can have varying degrees of success and at times
failure. At all levels this process is in flux because it is a material dialogue that
operates on many levels of reality none of which can be pinned down. There is
no one point at which the gaze of the African woman can be fixed.209
In his 2005 video installation Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men,
commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Marker creates a
journey through the constructs of history. Again he makes use of the amorphous
form of the essay film by combining an array of photographic stills with his own
thoughts, which appear in text on the screens in response to T.S. Eliot’s pacifist
poem The Hollow Men and reverberate with the somber cadences of Toru
Takemitsu’s piano composition Corona.210 Emblematic of his working process,
this video installation is constructed through a multi-layered montage of rela-
tionships formed among this assemblage of poetry fragments, photographs and
music. The result is a co-mingling that produces a polyphonic visual and aural
experience, an experience that is mirrored in the conceptual parameters of the
piece. As a political work, The Hollow Men condemns the absurdities of war and
10. Chris Marker, Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 2005; installation view in Peter
Blum Gallery; © 2013 Chris Marker, Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York
98 Chapter 5
11. Chris Marker, Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 2005; © 2013 Chris Marker,
Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York
the recklessness of marching along like empty-headed automatons – fools who

choose to accept culture passively without thought, as a spectacle merely to be
watched and promptly forgotten. Marker’s words flit across the screens of this
installation mixing with those of Eliot “‘Headpieces filled with straw’… How
often would these words apply to my fellow passengers aboard the erratic liner
of century XXth.”211 Through these elements Marker sets in motion a constella-
tion of elements that are both open to the movement and arrest of thought that
unfolds in the dialogue between the future and the past. History for Marker is a
recycling plant, in which memory is constantly constructed from the fragmented
forms of culture.
The bodies of observers function as screens for these fragments. For Marker
history is not a monolith that once built exists unchanging until the end of time.
Rather, history is a living material process that is always in the moment of being
constructed. But this is not a dialectical process, one that ensures the limitations
of binary thought are perpetuated in the stagnancy of negative infinity. Raymond
Bellour describes The Hollow Men as a “memory experience internalized / pro-
jected by a observer”; this back and forth exchange between the self and the
material text – understood as the speech of an Other reduced to a sign – requires
a living subject to screen, or project, the text onto the self. 212 It is via the living
body of the self and the bodies of others that the experience of memory depends.
Through his intermingling of media, Marker reveals the manner in which cultur-
al memory is not something that exists in static isolation, but rather unfolds as
dialogue with an observer who contributes their own context and perspectives to
the conversation. Standing in the gallery observing The Hollow Men, I was
struck by the play of light and shadow from the screens on the bodies of the
people standing or sitting in the darkened gallery with me. Each of our bodies
functioned as screens for each other and for ourselves.
The necessity of the observer’s body can be seen more explicitly in Mark-
er’s interactive virtual Museum Gestaltung in the online community Second Life
– opened in conjunction with his exhibit A Farewell to Movies at the Museum
fur Gegenwarkunst in Zurich, Switzerland in March 2008. Found on the island
of Ouvroir in Second Life is Marker’s virtual online museum, which re-
constructs many of his earlier multi-media artworks and films. The instructions
for navigating the site are self-evident in the title of this virtual archipelago:
Ouvroir, which can be loosely translated to mean open workshop. The neolo-
gism of the title echoes its close homonyms ouvrir, which in French means “to
open” and ouvrier, a sly reference to a person who works for a salary and pos-
sesses Marxist connotations in the cultural politics of post-war France. But who
is doing the work here? To access Marker’s virtual museum I had to create an
100 Chapter 5
avatar for myself and explore the virtual realm. Though a team under Marker’s
direction constructed Ouvroir, I work the mouse and as such I am an actor.
The openness with which Marker approaches the materials of his work, as
well as his interdisciplinary modes of presentation, cannot be overstated. My
examination of Immemory (1997 –2008) focuses on the manner in which this
project is activated through the embodied perceptions of the reader-visitor inter-
acting with the CD-ROM as they would with an essay film. Immemory functions
through an interaction of multiple consciousnesses. The translation and travers-
ing of media that is a hallmark of his career is evident in Marker’s account of
how the terrain of Immemory was conceived:
I have many fragments of images I have never used and which, as one might say,
stream off of my films like the tail of a comet. From every country I visit I return
with postcards, newspaper cuttings and posters, which I tear off walls. The idea be-
hind all that is to immerse myself in that whirlpool of images and construct their
geography. …The objective of this project is to provide a guide for some person’s
particular archive, creating a geography book of my own with the help of a comput-
er, either through free choice or through a random tour of the programmes.213
This statement reveals the fluidity that lies at the heart of his creative endeavors
and highlights the impossibility of determining in advance what the individual
experiences when navigating the whirlpool of Marker’s open work. Immemory
is constructed through a process of dialogue between the “fixed” constraints of
the CD-ROM that Marker gives to readers and the openness of the process of
reception as it unfolds.
Bakhtin’s conception of polyphony is predicated on a plurality of independ-
ent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses. This plurality of consciousnesses
and unmerged voices is an ideal means of conceiving the manner in which mul-
tiple observers actively engage with moving images, particularly when cultural
memory is constructed. Cultural texts, such as art and film, function to preserve
fragments of the past, which are propelled into the future through the engage-
ment of observers in the present. Immemory is constrained by the limitations of
its form, but it lives through our responsive thoughts and actions. To engage
with Immemory is an actively material process of dialogue. We stare back at the
past, responding to what has already been uttered, bringing it into contact with
the present via our bodies. It is through subjects located in the present – a mo-
ment that is always in passage – that the images and texts of history are unfurled
and made active in Marker’s work. “It is precisely this concept of the present
which underlies the actuality of genuine historiography,” Walter Benjamin tells
us, “Someone who pokes about in the past as if rummaging in a storeroom of
examples and analogies still has no inkling of how much in a given moment
depends on its being made present.”214 This entails an awareness of the ways in
which form mutates when it is transported into the present by multiple readers,
each of whom necessarily bring the living contexts of their continuously unfold-
ing consciousness’ to their readings. In other words, living thought is where the
moment of reading unfolds and this requires an embodied observer. For Benja-
min history is never closed off, even his own conception of it is continuously
reworked through new theses; history is not a site of truth, but continually evolv-
ing subjective opinions and perspectives.
Likewise, for Marker history is constructed through the Kuleshov effect
whereby meaning is made possible through the observer’s dialogue with utter-
ances formed through a continually changing juxtaposition of sounds, images
and texts. Even when presented with the same images, the response of the ob-
server depends upon an agreement between what is denoted and what is
connoted. In Sergei Eisenstein’s famous film sequence from October (1928), a
well-groomed man juxtaposed with a male peacock and military titles present
separate images of reality – the military, a man and a bird – but, when juxta-
posed, acquire another meaning through their interrelationship. Though the
meaning is obvious to people from specific cultural contexts, it remains open to
interpretation and it must be translated and made contemporaneous by each
individual reader. Marker likewise makes use of this same method in Immemory
by offering us an image that “does not so much provide access to the past but
contains the possibility for entering into a subjective relationship with it.”215 He
presents us with an image-text on the Fenouillard Family, the words of Jules
Verne, in French “Ouvrage dentiné à donner à la jeunesse française le gout des
voyages,” and translated into English, “A work destined to give French youth a
taste for travel.”216 A click of the mouse takes me to an image of a man sprawled
on the ground with a man standing over him, juxtaposed with a text that illus-
trates the ease with which Marker can be made to mean something entirely
different when separate realities are brought together.217
The Body and the Amorphous Construction of Memory

In all of his works Marker puts the particular media employed to the service of
exploring personal and social memories, which in turn interact and dialogue
with the form of the project itself. In Immemory this collaborative and dialogic
process is taken to an extreme, with Marker forcing people to actively engage
with what they are viewing; readers must interact and engage with the material
in order to generate layers of meaning. Immemory does not exist without the
102 Chapter 5
observer physically navigating the screens that emerge. In front of the computer
participants explore this archive of images and texts meandering their way
through an unfixed path of cultural memories and references, which are experi-
enced in a succession that depends upon the level of engagement. Through the
interactive processes of the CD-ROM reading “becomes an unpredictable expe-
rience for each person according to his or her mouse moves.”218 The result is a
work that exists through the observers’ manipulation of the visual and textual
material on the multitude of screens that comprise the project, all of which exist
as a mediated plurality of memories. More importantly, Immemory is dependent
upon dialogic materialism to work: there is a dialogic exchange between the
material forms of the CD-Rom, the materiality of the computer and the embod-
ied observer that makes Marker’s artwork live and speak in endlessly new ways.
Immemory locates the introspective observer within a series of “zones”219
constructed from loose categories of cinema, photography, poetry, museums,
travel, memory, war (and in later editions an X-Plugs zone). Marker states that
each zone we navigate intersects other “zones, which are so many islands or
continents, of which my memory contains the descriptions, and my archives, the
illustrations.”220 One might start out in the category of poetry and then find one
has at some point entered the zone of travel, only to pass unknowingly into pho-
tography and experience the way a photograph functions to take us on travels
through the narratives of cinema or war. There are no discrete boundaries be-
tween categories, at any given moment the observer can suddenly find that they
are in another “zone.” What begins as a series of apparently discrete categories
quickly becomes an endless exploration driven primarily by the observer’s curi-
osity. Marker uses the CD-ROM “to stretch” the confines of genre and media by
going “beyond the book and film to incorporate all types of images in digitized
form: paintings, engravings, ticket stubs, postcards, the impression of physical
objects… newspaper cuttings, letters, posters.”221 Immemory exists in the poten-
tial dialogue among observers who co-author what they are reading by adding
their own narratives and voices as they travel through the textual and pictorial
world that Marker provides. The unending possibility of different meanings
highlights the impossibility of concrete borders between media and the unavoid-
able mixing and merging of supposedly discrete disciplines.
Key to the reading of Marker’s travelogue is the concept of memory, which
exists as a plurality that is always projected into the future, in the interstitial
spaces of cultural exchanges that occur between living and once living entities.
This memory is by necessity unfixed and embodied by and through the thought
processes of individuals who engage with his work. A necessary, but often over-
looked, component of Marker’s oeuvre is the body, which functions as a living
screen. Freud’s conception of a screen memory is helpful for thinking of how
bodies and texts function as screens or frames for memory. As he states, a screen
memory “owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to the relation
existing between that content and some other,” this relation is often repressed or
overlooked.222 It is telling to note that repressed memories in one way or another
typically come down to the question of one’s answerability and the ethics of
socially constituted responses. The specifics of this relation hinge on the way
memory is constructed both by individuals and culture; it is subject to the sup-
pression of difference between lived reality and virtual (imaginary) reality.
Memory binds together the filaments of Marker’s work and it is the threads of
history – the stories of who we are, where we come from, dreams of the future –
which are woven anew through the willful responses of observers in every era.
Marker presents us with an endless back-and-forth dialogue between the self
and cultural artifacts in a manner that is reminiscent of Benjamin’s investiga-
tions of history and the modes through which form is made afresh with each
passing generation. Benjamin rejects a conception of history as closed and com-
plete, instead conceiving of it as open and marked by difference. Rather than
being an overarching monad, history is constituted through difference and in-
completeness. This necessitates thinking of time as constructed through
multiple subjectivities, instead of as a fixed monad. Tim Beasley-Murray in
Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form observes, “Time is
no longer homogenous and empty, but filled with the bodily presence of sub-
jects.”223 History or cultural memory does not exist without the material or
plastic bodies of observers who live it by embodying, enacting and performing
it. As both Benjamin and Bakhtin make clear, this is a living and embodied pro-
cess. Benjamin argues that the moment of reading or translation is “something
living” and as a result, rather than looking for the process of change in the origi-
nal, we should look to “the very life of language.”224 Likewise, Bakhtin speaks
of “bodies of meaning” that emerge in the dialogic encounter with the currents
of culture.225 Where else is meaning conceived, but in the living bodies of ob-
servers who are the very life of language?
If we think of a text as being completed only in the bodies of observers, the
place where language is constituted, then the text is always in a process of being
interpreted; it is very much a living text. As a result, multiple interactions with
Immemory become richer because each additional perusal of Marker’s work
reveals the almost imperceptible modes through which cultural viewpoints are
constructed through repetition and difference – a subjective multiplicity that is
reminiscent of Nietzschean philosophy. “The subject of eternal return is not the
same but the different, not the similar but the dissimilar, not the one but the
many, not necessity but chance.”226 The experience of Immemory is tempered by
the chance contexts of the observer and the comparison of multiple dissimilari-
104 Chapter 5
ties between the screens of individual experience and text. The openness be-
tween information and the modes through which it is communicated, Umberto
Eco tells us, hinge upon “the relationship between message and receiver – a
relationship in which the receiver’s interpretation constitutes the effective value
of the information.”227 It is the viewpoints or perspectives that construct history
as an unfolding cultural memory, one that is always in the process of being re-
vised and reformulated. It is through the programmed form of Immemory that
the interpretation constructed by readers’ of this interactive text is both “a com-
pleted and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole,” and at
the same time constitutes “an open product on account of its…countless differ-
ent interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity.”228 The
closed quality of a text is its pastness, whereas the open quality of text is the
embodied present, which must be experienced by a living observer. It is a re-
sponse that is both willful and ripe with potential. The notion of a closed and
open work has obvious implications for Marker and the manner in which he
explores culture as a continuous recycling of technologies and forms that are
given renewed meaning through the contexts of the present. In other words,
what is in movement is the idea itself as embodied by each observer that comes
in contact with Immemory. The idea is always subject to the answering response
of the observer. The flickering focus of Marker’s attention functions as a frame
and yet simultaneously makes visible the manner in which the apparatuses of
cultural memory are activated and re-constructed through the living exertions of
observers.
In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin conceives of history as
an elusive image that is marked by ruptures: the “true picture of the past flits by”
and every image that flies by unrecognized “in the present… threatens to disap-
pear irretrievably. …In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest
tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.”229 Benjamin
perceives history as something that must be seized and wrested out of the static
grasp of conformity – a certain death occurs otherwise. Life flits by and vanishes
unless the present is materially communicated through the successive contexts
of each generation. History at its worst can be a passive totalitarianism, one that
stifles possibilities of a people and their place in time. It is the selective recollec-
tions of a conformist history, one that is closed and authoritarian, which Marker
reacts against. He prods observers out of passive conformity through the open-
ness with which he approaches the concept of memory. In works such as Owls
At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men and Immemory Marker calls attention to the
collective agency of memory as it is constructed in the present. History exists in
each and every being; what you and I perceive is not the same and can never be.
Memory for Marker, I argue, is a collective dialogue of material interactions.
12. Chris Marker, Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 2005; © 2013 Chris Marker,
Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York
106 Chapter 5
Furthermore, it is a dialogic exchange that takes place only through the material
interaction of a text and a living, breathing observer.
The Observer as a Polyphonic Screen

What is a polyphony of screens, and perhaps more to the point, how can it be
embodied? In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin declares that Dostoev-
sky is the first to permit many points of view and voices that merge between
characters (what he terms heroes) and, correspondingly, multiple readers – to
emerge and mingle, resulting in a plurality of points of view that function as
creative constellations of dialogue. Polyphony is multivocal and as such permits
an exchange between the self and the other, between the past and the present,
between an open-ended text and the thought processes of the reader, who acti-
vates the text and gives it meaning. Bakhtin never unequivocally defines
polyphony, but instead gives us numerous examples, often using metaphors of
voice and vision to convey his ideas. It is important to note that Bakhtin’s con-
cept of polyphony is intimately connected with his ideas of dialogism, in which
polyphony is characterized by an open-ended dialogue between the producer of
the text (loosely understood here as including visual, aural and/or textual materi-
al) and the multitude of readers, who bring the text to life through their
experience of it. For Bakhtin polyphony encompasses the multivoiced qualities
of life, “To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to
respond, to agree, and so forth.”230 Sadly, it needs to be said that to be alive is to
think and to act willfully. If we are not empty-headed automatons we must be
aware of the consequences of our actions at each moment, that we all have
agency. In this manner, the text participates in or interacts with life, going be-
yond the boundaries of the author’s intentions to encompass many voices,
bodies and events. The point of any utterance is to speak to someone else and in
doing so bridge the inner world of the self with the exterior social community.
Cultural texts do not exist in isolation. Instead they exist in the dialogue be-
tween discourse and the human existence that shapes it. The personal viewpoint
of each individual reader sounds alongside the text and coexists with it. In fact,
the perspectives of the reader or observer and those expressed in a text, as pro-
duced by the author or artist, are best understood as a creative act in which both
the reader and author construct a text. Both Bakhtin and Duchamp argue for an
active form of observership that posits an equally active and answerable history
of art, a historical perspective that is not fixed in advance but is responsive to the
living encounters. The text exists in a plurality of viewpoints – or ideas – that
are in dialogue with each other.
By its nature polyphony defies discrete categories of genre, notions of dif-

ference and origin. Polyphony crisscrosses borders of the body, time, history,
art, music, the moving or still image and shifting literary forms. The archaic past
is made contemporary through the living bodies of the present. Polyphony is the
eternal return of ideas as they are embodied in the present, which is always the
same and yet different – Bakhtin clearly responds to and extends Nietzschean
thought. For Bakhtin polyphony is conceived as possessing “extraordinary inde-
pendence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were, alongside the
author’s word and in a special way combines both with it and with the full and
equally valid voices of other characters.”231 And correspondingly, in polyphonic
exchanges the responsive thoughts of the reader becomes mixed with the per-
spectives of the author and hero. Ideas exist in the plurality of discourses that are
always shaped by “values in two different centers, the I and the other.”232 Hence,
the appropriateness of referencing the musical origins of polyphony: in texts that
are polyphonic voices sing alongside each other. Bakhtin conceives of polypho-
ny as consisting of many autonomous participants, this means that the
multivocal qualities of polyphony depends on the independent voices of speak-
ers resulting in a “combination of several wills.”233 This mixing of multiple
perspectives and voices permits a simultaneous coexistence of consciousness
across bodies and texts, thereby allowing the untrammeled interaction of partici-
pants in a discourse that unfolds without end or limits.
Accordingly, polyphonic exchange can be conceived as socially constructed
and maintained. Human thought is by its very nature multiple; enunciated
speech lives and dies, it exists in dialogue between the self and the other and it is
kept in cultural circulation by living bodies:
The idea lives not in one person’s isolated individual consciousness – if it remains
there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to
develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only
when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of
others. Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under condi-
tions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in
someone else’s voice…in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At
that point of contact between voice-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives.234
Bakhtin’s notion of the idea existing through living contact is illustrated in the
“zapping zones” that Marker constructs in Immemory, particularly the manner in
which these zones facilitate an exchange of ideas that unfold in the thoughts of
the living observer. Throughout his work Marker orchestrates a polyphonic play
of living screens through the responsive bodies of observers, who each give
108 Chapter 5
birth to new ideas through their dialogic relationship to the artistic text. Rather
than a single authoritative voice, which dominates and silences other points of
view, Marker demonstrates the freedom inherent in the open-ended qualities of
polyphonic forms that allow for multiple consciousnesses, each with their own
unique contexts and rights to be heard. The idea exists in unrestricted discourse,
the tyranny of authority, of ownership, is overthrown through the mingling of
viewpoints.
It is in the eyes and minds of multiple viewers that the screens of Marker’s
multi-media artworks are activated, a constellation of particles and moving bod-
ies that are set in motion through the variable contexts of viewing. The form of
history, according to Eco, “can be seen…only if it is dynamically considered.
Aesthetic contemplation is this active consideration that retraces the process
which gave life to form… it is at once the ‘current memory’ and the ‘permanent
recollection’ of the productive activity that gave it life.”235 History is a perspec-
tive that is constructed through the constant interaction of the present and the
past. This is a dynamic process that occurs between the living and the once liv-
ing. History is activated through the bodies of living observers, plastic bodies
that function as living screens for the reception of memory.
A Multitude of Bodies
According to Bakhtin, the defining feature of the polyphonic novel is that the
self-consciousness of the hero is never fixed, it always remains in the process of
unfolding, it exists in dialogue with the world and other self-consciousnesses
that perceive the hero. This is reflected in Immemory, which follows a dialogical
structure – rather than a fixed and closed off monological mode – in that it re-
quires multiple of points of view to exist. The nature of the narrative that
Immemory encapsulates is that it always exists in the play of unfolding cultural
and individual memory that can never be totalized. Bakhtin conceives of the
position of the author in relation to the hero in polyphony as one that “visual-
izes… the hero’s self-consciousness and the inescapable open-endedness, the
vicious circle of that self-consciousness.”236 In other words, the self-
consciousness of Immemory is inescapably open-ended and plural. Marker cre-
ates a fluid narrative frame that makes the self-consciousness of the viewer a
necessary component in the work, in fact just as necessary as Marker’s. Because
the reader of Immemory is a living reader, the “reading” of Marker’s CD-ROM
is an interaction in which the voices of multiple authors and observers are con-
structed across different time zones.
To participate in Marker’s Immemory is to engage in dialogue and to im-

merse the self in the discourse that is unfolding across the shifting screens of the
monitor and the thoughts of the observer. The discourse that constitutes this
interactive CD-ROM enters into the fabric of human life and engages the entire
self of the observer in a responsive dialogue in which the work, rather than be-
ing passively experienced, is created through the interactions of the observer
with the material provided by Marker. This process necessarily takes place with-
in a multitude of individuals as each engages with the work from their personal
perspectives. This inner reflection does not occur in isolation. The polyphonic
play of screens that Marker utilizes in his interactive CD-ROM is realized
through the bodies of observers, which exceed the boundaries of the individual.
Jessica Benjamin argues that critical discourse often overlooks the complexities
of intersubjective communication, the multitude of speech forms that compose
the basic structures of dialogue. As she states:
The intersubjective dimension, on the other hand, refers to experience between and
within individuals, rather than just within. It refers to the sense of self and other that
evolves through the consciousness that separate minds can share the same feeling
and intentions, through mutual recognition. Its viewpoint encompasses not simply
what we take in from the outside but also what we bring to and develop through the
interaction with others – our innate capacities for activity and receptivity toward the
world. This sense of self later meshes with symbolic structures, but it is
not…created by them. And since this experience of self is not identical with the
well-known symbolic structures, we may speculate that it has its own way of being
elaborated in the mind.237
The intersubjective exchanges that occur through dialogue are both a real and
imaginary interactions that cannot be constructed in advance; the self sounds
alongside cultural discourse, in some cases echoing it and in others changing the
ideas, pushing human thought in different directions. Human thought occurs
between and within consciousnesses that are living and evolving through the
polyphony of discourse that is expanded in living minds.
Although each interaction with Immemory is different, it is nonetheless im-
portant to explore an example of this process. When navigating the zone of
photography, a quick click of a mouse brings us to a button marked faeries. A
ghostly black and white photograph appears of Ludmila Tolstoy – the beautiful
and brainy partner of the famous novelist Leo Tolstoy – juxtaposed with the
cover of the science-fiction novel Aélita inscribed with Alexei Tolstoy’s name,
which eerily echoes the graceful lines of the face in the photo. Another click
reveals a montage of this same photograph with a book cover of Aélita and a
110 Chapter 5
text by Marker stating, “It was said in Moscow that the sublime Ludmila was
actually the author of her husband’s books.”238 In conveying to us the rumors of
another time and place, Marker undermines the stability of the author’s identity.
Is the author Alexei, Ludmila, Marker or the observer who constructs the result-
ing layers of text? This question becomes even more difficult to answer when
we come to the next screen, in which Marker has positioned a 1924 poster of
Yakov Protazanov’s film Aelita with a text that traces out the contemporization
of Tolstoy’s science-fiction novel in this cinematic adaptation. Marker credits
Issak Rabinovich with building the model of the Martian city, set-décors are by
Viktor Simov, the costumes are by “Alexandra Exter (whose students Rabino-
vich had been…in the company of the young Pavel Tchelitchew, who would one
day compose the decors of Jouvet’s Ondine.”239 By listing off these contributors
he highlights the multiplicity of voices necessary to author a film, the voices
which articulate the features of a regimented and rapidly modernizing Europe –
traversing the permeable borders of France, Germany and Russia – from which
as Marker states “A culture was being born.”240
A feature of such cultural labor is what Michael E. Gardiner terms “a plural-
ity of unmerged consciousnesses, a mixture of ‘valid voices’ which” are not
controlled or subordinated by authorial intentions.241 Instead there is a shifting
play of voices not limited or constrained by a single authoritative voice. The
result of this interaction between the masses is a polyphonic play of screens
illuminated across the bodies of multiple observers, each of whom lives and
thinks differently and acts accordingly. These screens are not governed by a
chaotic atonal tune, one that threatens to drown out the boundaries of the indi-
vidual. Instead there is a translation of ideas, a discourse that is spoken, with no
pre-defined or absolute meanings, but always approximations continuously
elaborated on and in the plastic bodies of observers. Think again of Dostoev-
sky’s inebriated workers.
Form as a Field of Living Possibility

Chris Marker calls attention to the fluidity of boundaries in genre and media
throughout his work by manipulating the divisions between multimedia con-
structs, the ways in which words and images function to translate and objectify
concepts across space and time. The emergence of interdisciplinary studies in
academia is the result of needing to cross generic boundaries in order to under-
stand discourse and how it unfolds. Hence, Mieke Bal’s conception of
translation as “dual” because it moves “between language and visuality, between
present and past.”242 To experience Marker’s Owls At Noon or Immemory is to
travel between temporalities, texts, images and memories both social and per-
sonal, all of which are in need of translation. Such a journey exposes the
material dialogism inherent in the creation of cultural objects that is active with-
in virtually all of cultural discourse, whether acknowledged or not. Translation
is the mingling of pluralities, a polyphony of tongues interacting. It is an inter-
subjective construction of meaning that unfolds in a dialogic exchange between
the self and others.
What emerges is the possibility of dialogue between the form of the art-
work itself and an observer. In Immemory one such persona is that of
Guillaume-en-Egypte (his beloved dead cat who lives on in the afterlife of
speech) who periodically pops up and draws us deeper into the zones of the CD-
ROM. The viewer responds to the queries of this orange cat and actively makes
decisions on how to respond, which influence the communications that unfold as
a consequence of this exchange. My own engagement with this feline interlocu-
tor includes, at one point, a guided tour of the photo albums of Edith and Anton
Krasna, Marker’s aunt and uncle. Her husband Anton appears in the beginning
and disappears, numerous family members theorize about his disappearance,
some claim to have heard that he is living in some distant and exotic locale. At
the end I am shown a photograph of a table covered with several severed heads,
one of which appears to be Anton’s. I engage with Guillaume and his informa-
tive suggestions and along the way, my own memories and thoughts become
entwined with the gruesome story that unfolds and ends with a screen that simp-
ly says, “Don’t ask me anything more.”243 This statement is merely a prelude to
my own vivid and wild imagination; I am left to complete the story myself. My
dialogue with the text is influenced by my own memory of a wildcat leading me
on a tour of a graveyard in Korea many years ago, which is oddly juxtaposed in
my thoughts with my first exposure to a photograph of a dismembered human
corpse, but this response is distinctly my own. I shuddered and felt lightheaded
when I came to the end of Edith and Anton’s story. This was my visceral re-
sponse to this exchange with Immemory, a response that has changed each time I
engage with the work; the responses of other viewers will likewise be variable
and influenced by specific contexts and experience. The dialogue that unfolds,
while subject to some constraints of form, is also open to a wide range of inter-
pretations that change with the reader.
Through an engagement with possibilities, Marker’s moving image artworks
turn the observer into a screen that functions as a polyphonic site of translation,
an embodied zone that gives birth to new viewpoints and experiences. Eco dis-
cusses the “openness” of informal art and asks whether there is “a possible
agreement between the intention of the author and the viewer’s response.”244 He
comes to the conclusion that the open work presents a totality of signs that are
112 Chapter 5
open-ended and enable the reader to engage in a free play of associations be-
tween the work itself and the reactions elicited by it. Rather than interpreting a
work solely on the author’s intentions, the response of the reader is indetermi-
nate and cannot be fixed in advance. In response to a work the thoughts of the
reader are in motion, caught in the back and forth dialogue between text and
response. Throughout his multi-media work Marker demonstrates the manner in
which thoughts and memories, like time, never come to a standstill.
Conclusion
Dialogic Materialism: Aesthetic Language and
Its Multi-medial Forms
“In the distorting mirror of art, reality appears undistorted.”

– Franz Kafka
From the moment an artwork is created it begins a journey on a trajectory away

from the artist and their context, traversing the material world, which is prey to
the vicissitudes of time and distance. Things get dropped away, people misun-
derstand and conventions change over time. As I write this I cannot help but
think of Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X
(1953). Bacon refused to see Velázquez’s original portrait of Pope Innocent X,
painted in 1650, because he knew that it was impossible for him to faithfully
reproduce this Baroque masterpiece. Instead he worked from a photograph and
transcribed the painting that he envisioned. Needless to say, the result looks
nothing like the original painting. (Especially when you think of Bacon saying
that, when he began a painting, he would see a beautiful landscape with birds,
but then end up with the twisted and distorted paintings that he is known for.)
Bacon depicts the pope with his lustrous silk robes faded and fraying, Innocent
clutches the arms of his chair, as if he were trying to hang on with all of his
might, while he disintegrates against the void of a black background. He appears
to be decaying right in front of our eyes, each part of his body being torn away
grain by grain. The mouth of the pope is open as if he were screaming: Is he
trying to tell us something by shouting across the vacuum of time? Or is he
screaming in pain as he disintegrates? What is he trying to say? The distortion of
reality that Bacon paints illustrates the manner in which art is distorted both by
time and observers. The artwork once released is set into motion and itself enters
a constantly shifting world. Nothing is absolute. At every level of artistic dis-
course there is an inescapable grey area, because the meaning of what is visually
represented is impossible to quantify and to firmly fix into place for all time.
114 Conclusion
Think again of the drunken banter of Dostoevsky’s artisans, each accenting

the same word a slightly different way and each saying something different.
Think of the flicker of a grainy and scratched film, or the static of an old video:
something is gone. Not only does all media decay, but to top it off artistic
speech itself is not precise and cannot capture every nuance. Because of the
impossibility of communicating everything, we often fall into accepted usages,
dull, boring (or worse repressive) conventions often couched in dialectical terms
of black and white. But this is not in fact the way reception actually functions.
The living world is a world that is always changing moment by moment, what
we say and think at each second passes and is replaced with something else, this
is the eternal return of the world. Art is merely a vehicle for representing this.
By now I have made the case for attention to the materiality of media and
the ways in which speech is translated through multi-medial forms in artistic
discourse. From this perspective art must be understood as both a material form
and an embodied experience. Art is an interaction or dialogue between living
beings with the material form of the artwork functioning as a bridge between the
artist and the observer. Both are speaking to the other from different chrono-
topes. To speak across time it is necessary for the material form of the artwork
to act as a vehicle to propel the artist’s speech into the future to the observer.
Since, in most cases, the artist and observer are not in the same location, their
interactions literally occur in different time zones, different chronotopic spaces.
But this does not mean that they do not dialogue. Art in a sense captures the
breath of the artist, allowing us to experience the aesthetic moment of the art-
work even as the artist in death decays and disappears into the distant past. This
is what we respond to as observers when we engage with art. This artistic or
aesthetic engagement, stated simply, is what I have described as dialogic materi-
alism. The artist, as Bakhtin points out, is merely one of many embodied voices
that speak in the unfinalizable dialogue of art.
My selection of artists for my case studies was predicated on the different
ways in which each interacts with cultural material and how they seek to trans-
form it in their artwork. In making an artwork every artist is choosing to say
something to a potential audience, sometimes (as Bacon was) when they create
an artwork they are responding to another artwork or text. The words of others
always echo in our speech and our interactions, this is because we do not live
alone in isolation. We respond to the world and the world responds to us, it is a
ceaseless wave of interactions, a fluid back and forth with no beginning and no
end. What comes first or last truly makes no difference in the end, it all blends
together in a chorus of different voices.
Stan Douglas has a sophisticated understanding of the way films and literary
texts interact within popular and artistic cultures. Part of his strategy is to call
attention to the different ways in which people experience and understand the
same artistic event. Hence, the character of Marnie is one that is understood by
people in different ways, what happens to Marnie changes with each person who
interacts with Douglas’ Subject to a Film: Marnie. The knowledge of the origi-
nal texts that he is referencing, most notably Hitchcock’s Marnie, is not
necessary to engage with his film installation but it certainly makes a difference
when you know the nuances. What someone gets out of this artwork, or any
other artwork, is dependent on the amount of effort they are willing to put into
responding to it. Some people pay attention and others do not. What makes any
artwork interesting is the way it makes us respond and the differences that arise
between one response and the responses of others.
The relationship to the material world and the objects that surround us is
what Jamelie Hassan addresses with her moving image artwork, an oeuvre that
is itself materially boundless. Letters of print on a page, wallpaper, cartoons, the
drawings of a child, a dripping juicy olive and photographs all speak to us and
contribute to our understanding of the world and how we choose to interact with
it. The self and the world are cooperative because speech is dialogic and works
back and forth between subjects and across different material forms of speech.
Though their artwork engages with different themes, Douglas and Hassan both
engage with the agency of the subject and the way it materially shapes and is
vice-versa shaped by culture. Furthermore, they indicate that any communica-
tion – whether it is an artwork, a novel, a film, a photograph or a family story –
changes with every encounter and every reiteration.
Chris Marker’s artwork demonstrates just how fluid social memory actually
is, how easy it is both to manipulate and be manipulated and at the same time
get completely unanticipated results. This is because the world is a social con-
struct that is always in the process of being made. All things decay and
breakdown and we are constantly occupied with repairing, building, tearing
down and patching up the world. Through Marker’s intermingling of media, he
highlights that cultural memory is not something that exists in static isolation.
Instead, it is constructed dialogically through the variable contexts and view-
points of the observer, it is both real and imaginary, material and immaterial.
This is a point that both Hassan and Douglas also stress in their moving image
artwork as well; in reality there is no boundary between art and life.
My use of Bakhtin has aimed to contribute to an understanding of the mate-
rial relations that exist among viewers, artworks, artists and the shifting contexts
in which such dialogic exchange unfolds. I have taken Bakhtin’s insistence on
dialogism to heart and approached his ideas dialogically, by freely responding
and adding my own contribution. It is crucial to understand that all speech is
predicated on our own responsive wills. We are material beings and as such we
116 Conclusion
exert powerful forces on the world and each other. We are all agents of change,
each engaging in our own subjective ways in conversation with each other –
something that happens regardless of the media needed to convey speech. In a
sense, I have engaged in an extended conversation with Bakhtin and all the other
Bakhtinians that I have encountered along the way. And this is what dialogism is
all about. Such an approach is invaluable because it enables a discursive analysis
of the material and ideational basis of visual culture as a practice, which more
often than not defies disciplinary boundaries. How we experience the world and
the living materials that we use to express ourselves is part of all speech acts;
whether filmed, painted or written speech needs a living body to speak it and
some material form to act as a vehicle of speech to another person. Since all
people do not agree or have the same agendas, people act on the material world
in different ways, but whatever one’s intentions we all have a response. This is
why any discussion of discourse needs to pay attention to the embodied relation-
ships that make it possible and not just to what is said and how it is said. This is
true whether I am talking about moving image artwork or a novel.
Dialogic materialism enables an analysis of relations and is concerned with
the interaction of the self and other, whether present or absent, embodied or
disembodied. All art has a specific material form that makes it visible and sensi-
ble. All art is meant to communicate something and as such art is a political
force. The purpose of dialogic materialism is to enable an analysis of art and its
ongoing relationship between the self and others. We shape the material world
and ourselves through art. It functions as a heterotopic arena where we are free
to envision possibilities and have the power to make them real. We are all em-
bodied agents.
Notes
Introduction
1
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Response to a Question from Novy Mir,” in Speech Genres and Other
Later Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Aus-
tin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 2.
2
Raymond Bellour polemically argues for an examination of “cinema and the thousand and
one ways to show moving images,” in “La querelle des dispositifs / Battle of the Imag-
es,” Art Press 262 (November 2000): 48. For a discussion of the term moving image as
it pertains to contemporary art and the evolution of cinematic forms, see: Tanya Leigh-
ton, ed., Art and the Moving Image, (London: Tate Publishing, 2008); Lev Manovich,
“Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image,” in The Language of New Media,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 293–308; and Deborah E. Horowitz, ed., The Cinema
Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, (London: Giles, 2008).
3
David Joselit, “The Video Public Sphere,” Art Journal 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 53.
4
Michael Holquist, Dialogism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 15.
5
Mirjam Varadinis and Runa Islam, “Mirjam Varadinis in Conversation with Runa Islam,” in
Restless Subject (Zürich: Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2008), 27–28.
6
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences,” in Speech Genres and
Other Late Essays, 170.
7
These four texts are: “Toward a Philosophy of the Act,” (1919–1921) “Author and Hero in
Aesthetic Activity,” (1920–1923) “The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Ver-
bal Art,” (1924) and “Art and Answerability” (1919).
8
Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 21.
9
Deborah J. Haynes “On the Need for Ethical Aesthetics: Or, Where I Stand Between Neo-
Luddites and Cyberians,” Art Journal 56, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 75–82.
10
As Steve Edwards notes in his review, “For all the Bakhtinian fireworks this is a book
informed by a simple conception of turnip crop art history – that weak contextualism
that leaves everything just as it was. As a work of ostensible theory this book is remark-
ably uninformed about contemporary methodological debates in the discipline.” Steve
Edwards, “… To The Sound Of A Tambourine,” review of Bakhtin and the Visual Arts,
by Deborah J. Haynes, Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 2 (1998): 180. For other equally crit-
ical reviews see: Martin Gaughan, review of Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, by Deborah J.
Haynes, Art History 19, no. 4 (December 1996): 625–626; David Carrier, review of
Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, by Deborah J. Haynes, The Burlington Magazine 140,
no.1143 (June 1998): 404; Christine Hasenmueller, “Modern art as post-modern text:
Bakhtin and the arts,” review of Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, by Deborah J. Haynes,
Semiotica 123, no. 1–2 (1999): 183–200.
11
Deborah J. Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 4.
118 Notes
12
As Caryl Emerson points out, “nor does the fact that Bakhtin intensely disliked the atheism
of the Revolution transform him into a mainstream ‘Christian believer,’ or his work into
a theology in code.” Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 124.
13
Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, 21.
14
Charles R. Garoian, “Performing the Museum,” Studies in Art Education 42,3 (Spring
2001): 237.
15
Mireya Folch-Serra, “Geography, Diaspora and the Art of Dialogism Jamelie Hassan,”
Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine 90 (April-June 1998): 10–17.
16
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Mi-
chael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 61.
17
Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984), 71.
18
John Docker and Subhash Jaireht, “Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin – Vision and Visu-
ality,” Journal of Narrative Theory 33, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 3.
19
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero In Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability, eds.
Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1990), 99.
20
“The friend of noon – no, do not ask me who – / At noon it was that one turned into two.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1966), 245.
21
When thinking of Bakhtin’s conception of the plastic-pictorial as a fluid meeting of illusion
and the real, it is helpful to remember that along with his older brother Nikolai, and
their friends, they formed the first Bakhtin Circle in Vilnius at the respective ages of ten
and eleven. At this young age along with devouring Marx and Engels they fervently
read Nietzsche and engaged in many passionate debates. Nietzsche was a profound and
early influence to Bakhtin’s work, from the Ubermensch, to will and eternal return his
words are echoed in Bakhtin’s. Hence it is helpful to turn to Nietzsche to understand
what Bakhtin only implies by the words plastic-pictorial, which is the fluidity of the in-
teraction between truth and illusion: “The true world is gone: which world is left? The
illusory one, perhaps? … But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true
one! (Noon; moment of the shortest shadow; end of longest error; highpoint of humani-
ty; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo,
Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans.
Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 171.
22
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 137.
23
Bakhtin, “Art and Answerability,” in Art and Answerability, 2.
24
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 148.
25
Michael Holquist, “Introduction,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), xx.
26
Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, 156.
Notes 119
27
Bakhtin defines the chronotope (which means time-space) in The Dialogic Imagination as
“the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically ex-
pressed.” Bakhtin goes on to state that the chronotope not only defines genre but also
man, “The image of man is always chronotopic.” For Bakhtin temporal and spatial rela-
tionships are interdependent and cannot be analyzed separately. Bakhtin, “Author and
Hero,” 84–85.
28
The living dynamics of dialogic contact and the need for a material body is evident when
Bakhtin states, in a rather convoluted manner: “Aesthetic self-activity always operates
on the boundaries (form is a boundary) of a life-experienced-from within – operates at
those points where this life is turned outward, where it comes to an end (in space, time,
and meaning) and another life begins, that is where it comes up against a sphere of self-
activity beyond its reach – the sphere of another’s self-activity. A life’s self-experience
and self-awareness (and, consequently, its ‘expressive’ self-expression as well), as
something unitary, have their own immovable bounds. And these bounds pertain, first
of all, to one’s own external body: as an aesthetically intuitable value that may harmo-
niously combine with a lived life’s inner directedness, my external body lies beyond the
bounds of my unitary self-experience. In my experiencing of my own life, my external
body cannot take up the place which an external body occupies for me in my sympathet-
ic co-experiencing of another’s life – in the other’s life as a whole for me. The outward
beauty of my body may be for myself as well a highly important constituent in my own
life, but this is in principle different from experiencing the whole of my body intuitively
on one and the same axiological plane with my own inner life as the form of my own
inner life; it is different, that is, from the intuitive experience of the whole of myself as
embodied in my own external body, the way I experience another’s embodiedness in his
external body.” Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 85.
29
Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory
Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Colombia University Press, 1986), 254.
30
Ibid., 254.
31
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 293.
32
For a detailed account of alternative responses to interpellation see Michel Pêcheux, who
formulates the theories of counteridentification and disidentification in his book Lan-
guage, Semantics and Ideology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982). José Esteban
Muñoz applies Pêcheux’s theory of disidentification to the performative work of artists
outside the racial and sexual mainstream in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
33
Valentin Voloinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and
I.R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 33.
34
Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 87.
35
This is Bakhtin’s 1963 edition of the Dostoevsky book – originally titled Problems of Dos-
toevsky’s Creative Art in the 1929 edition, which he reworked for publication at the
behest of V.V. Kozhinov. Note the reworking of the title and the replacement of crea-
tive art with the term poetry, an exchange that exhibits Bakhtin’s refusal to make
distinctions between art forms; for him the utterance is not a fixed form, but can be
communicated in a number of ways: spoken, written, visual, musical. This openness of
120 Notes
form is itself polyphony in action. As Caryl Emerson asserts “Bakhtin never really
made a distinction between casual and formally inscribed utterances, nor – more im-
portantly – between speaking and writing.” See “Editor’s Preface,” in Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Poetics, xxxiv.
36
37
Stam, Subversive Pleasures, 231.
38
I have taken the liberty of rewording Bakhtin to be open to difference and in doing so I have
thus demonstrated how dialogic discourse permits the transmission of different view-
points and contexts. To paraphrase Bakhtin: nothing is final. The original quotation
reads as follows: “man is free, and can therefore violate any regulating norms which
might be thrust upon him.” Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 59.
39
Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 217.
40
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 288.
41
Voloinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 85.
42
Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin LXXIII.2
(June 1991): 179.
43
Caroline A. Jones, “The Mediated Sensorium,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Tech-
nology and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 8.
44
Bakhtin, “Response to a Question,” 4.
45
Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven
Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 12.
46
Michael Holquist, “The Architectonics of Answerability,” in Art and Answerability, eds.
Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: Texas Univer-
sity Press, 1990), x.
47
Aesthetics applies to the various arts. It is the range of aesthetic conventions that govern
form and content in poetry, sculpture, architecture, painting and film. The bleed be-
tween material forms in the construction of art is demonstrative of dialogical
materialism. Think of Duchamp’s inframince and Zeno’s paradoxes. Simultaneity.
48
Holquist, Dialogism, 12.
49
“For cognition, there is no absolutely inconvertible relationship of I and all others; for
cognition, ‘I and the other,’ inasmuch as they are being thought, constitute a relation-
ship that is relative and convertible, since the cognitive subiectum as such does not
occupy any determinate, concrete place in being.” Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 23.
50
Esther Peeren, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008, 32.
51
Michael Holquist, “Glossary,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 428.
52
Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sci-
ences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis,” in Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays, 103.
53
Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology,” 170.
54
André Bazin, “Theatre and Cinema – Part Two,” in What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 113.
55
Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 88.
Notes 121
56
Although it is relatively straightforward to identify a hero in most artwork, such as the
character of Marnie in Stan Douglas’ Subject to a Film: Marnie, or the various charac-
ters in Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1978), it is not so straightforward in other
artistic media. Who or what is the hero in Barnett Newman’s painting Voice of Fire
(1967) is debatable. I would like to propose that with some visual art forms there is a
shift away from the easily definable hero in the Bakhtinian sense towards an artwork-
hero that is not clearly determinable. This can best be conceived of by thinking of the
hero as a consciousness of an artwork, or in the case of Newman’s Voice of Fire as that
other which communicates to or with the observer.
57
As quoted in Voloinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 103-104.
58
Bakhtin’s conception is similar to the one held by Friedrich Nietzsche who argues against
Immanuel Kant’s conception of “pure reason” when he states: “There is only a perspec-
tival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak
about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and
the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objec-
tivity’ be.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie
Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 85.
59
Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 9–10.
60
Daniele Selcer clarifies how Derrida alienates the word from the materiality of the book –
an alienation of word from material context that Bakhtin consistently argues against. As
Selcer points out, “Derrida did constantly insist on the materiality of the differential
trace and on the corporeality of writing. Nevertheless, from the perspective of an ontol-
ogy of the page it looks obvious that the space in which Derrida’s arche-writing takes
place and the surface on which it is inscribed – the page is thoroughly dematerialized.
Its gathering in quires and binding in boards – the book – becomes, for Derrida, simply
the retrospective totalization, intellectualization, and idealization of the body. Here, the
book is a thoroughly metaphysical ‘envelope’ in which writing as such is sealed and
from which a properly deconstructive theorization of arche-writing may one day free its
readers. In short, when Of Grammatology announces that the book must be brought to
an end in the name of writing, the book is purged of its function as an apparatus for the
production of material effects and is thereby utterly idealized. At its limit, the book is
virtually embedded as the formal character of the trace in a matter from which it is fun-
damentally alienated.” Daniel Selcer, Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures
of Material Inscription (New York: Continuum, 2010), 10.
61
Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays, 94.
62
Margaret Morse, “Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between,”
in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, eds. Doug Hall and Sally Jo
Fifer (New York: Aperture, 1990), 166.
63
Ibid., 166.
64
65
Mikhail Bakhtin, “From Notes Made in 1970–71,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Es-
says, 134.
66
122 Notes
67
68
Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, 166 (emphasis added).
69
70
Bakhtin, “Art and Answerability,” 1.
71
Michael E. Gardiner, “Bakhtin and the Metaphorics of Perception,” in Interpreting Visual
Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual, eds. Ian Heywood and Barry
Sandywell (London: Routledge, 1999), 50.
72
Bakhtin, “Methodology for the Human Sciences,”163.
73
Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Michel
Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 140.
74
75
Michael E. Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology.
(London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7.
76
As Gardiner states “Bakhtin views ideology as the essential symbolic medium through
which all social relations are necessarily constituted. Thus, like Althusser and Gramsci,
Bakhtin conceives of ideology not as epiphenomena, or as a distorted representation of
the ‘real’, but as a material force in its own right.” Ibid., 7.
77
78
Gardiner, “Bakhtin and the Metaphorics of Perception,” 50.
79
80
Special attention should be paid to the name of Valentin Voloinov who, as a member of
the Bakhtin circle, shares authorship with Bakhtin on a number of texts, the authorship
of which is not firmly fixed. Michael Holquist points out that Bakhtin and others – in an
interesting dialogical exchange, one that blurs the boundaries among texts and their au-
thors – have claimed “that he published some work from this period,” roughly 1924 to
1929, “under the names of his friends Medvedev (“The formal method in literary
study,” 1928), Voloinov (“Freudianism; a critical sketch,” 1927; “Marxism and the
philosophy of language,” 1929), and Kanaev (a two-part article, “Contemporary vital-
ism,” 1926). The claim has struck many subsequent scholars as questionable, and a
whole literature has developed on the topic of these texts’ disputed authorship…I hold
the opinion that Bakhtin is… primarily responsible for these texts.” Holquist, Dialo-
gism, 8. For a more thorough history of the authorship dispute, see footnote 3 in
Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique, 196–197.
81
Voloinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 40–41.
82
83
Michael Holquist, “Dialogism and Aesthetics,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, Vol. 1, ed. Michael E.
Gardiner (London: Sage, 2003), 379.
84
Michael Holquist, “Answering as Authoring: Mikhail Bakhtin’s TransLinguistics,” Critical
Inquiry 10 no. 2 (December 1983): 315.
85
Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 145.
86
87
Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art,” in Art and
Answerability, 266–267, (emphasis added).
Notes 123
88
Georg Lukács articulates the contradictory dangers of reification (which is monologic in the
extreme and is an alienating process that must be continually resisted) that Bakhtin so
assiduously avoids naming, only addressing reification obliquely through the idea of un-
finalizability. “The struggle against the effects of reified consciousness is itself a
lengthy process full of stubborn battles and it would be a mistake to assume that the
form of those effects or the contents of particular phenomenon could be determined in
advance. But the domination of reification over men living today does in fact have that
kind of effect. If reification is to be overcome at one point the danger immediately aris-
es that the state of consciousness that led to that victory might itself atrophy into a new
form of reification. For example, the workers who live under a capitalist system have to
conquer the delusion that the economic or juridical forms of bourgeois society consti-
tute the ‘eternal,’ the ‘rational’ and the ‘natural’ environment for man.” History and
Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans Rodney Livingstone (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1971), 334.
89
90
Bakhtin makes a clear distinction between the aesthetic object and a reified thing; in light of
the consistency of his referencing the text as a hero, or as living, I am interpreting the
aesthetic object as in a sense a living object. “It should be clear from all we have said
that the aesthetic object is not a thing, since its form (of to be exact, the form of its con-
tent, for the aesthetic object is shaped content,) in which I feel myself as an active
subiectum, and into which I enter as a necessary constitutive moment, cannot be, of
course, the form of a thing, of an object.” Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content,” 317.
(emphasis added)
91
V.N. Voloinov, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, eds. I.R. Titunik and Neal H. Bruss, trans.
I.R. Titunik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 105.
92
93
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 26–27.
94
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995), 28.
95
Michael E. Gardiner, “Foucault, Ethics and Dialogue,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, Vol. 4, ed. Mi-
chael E. Gardiner (London: Sage, 2003), 75.
96
“Bakhtin’s answer to the traditional revulsion toward the material and the corporeal… is to
propound a celebration of matter and the body that seeks to suspend the dualism of
mind and matter and that travesties the ‘victory’ of the mystical and the ascetic over the
body.” Renate Lachmann, “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture,” in Mi-
khail Bakhtin, Vol. 2, ed. Michael E. Gardiner (London: Sage, 2003), 67.
97
Foucault makes it apparent that modern sexual mores are instrumental to the production of
sexuality, the ultimate goal of which is to delineate the boundaries of the living body
and thus to contain and control it. As he states, “Sex was a means of access both to the
life of the body and the life of the species. It was employed as a standard for the disci-
plines and as a basis for regulations… one also sees it becoming the theme of political
operations, economic interventions (through incitements to or curbs on procreation),
and ideological campaigns… it was put forward as the index of a society’s strength, re-
124 Notes
vealing of both its political energy and its biological vigor. Spread out from one pole to
the other of this technology of sex was a whole series of different tactics that combined
in varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating pop-
ulations.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 146.
98
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 30.
99
Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 37–38.
100
“To understand another person’s utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find
the proper place for it in the corresponding context. For each word of the utterance that
we are in the process of understanding, we, as it were, lay down a set of our own an-
swering words. The greater their number and weight, the deeper and more substantial
our understanding will be. Thus each of the distinguishable significative elements of an
utterance and the entire utterance as a whole entity are translated in our minds into an-
other, active and responsive context. Any true understanding is dialogic in nature.
Understanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue is to the next. Understanding
strives to match the speaker’s word with a counter word.” Voloinov, Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language, 102.
101
102
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 287. It should be noted that this quote has been
altered: he has been changed to they.
103
For the sake of clarity, form is here understood as content and material brought together in
an artwork; content is that which an artwork can be stated to be about outside of the
artwork itself; material is the actual physical substance that an artwork is constructed
from, this includes text, paint, stone, film or even music. A more detailed explanation of
the intricacies of these three aspects of aesthetics can be found in Michael Holquist and
Vadim Liapunov’s note 1 in Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content,” 318.
104
Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual:
An Iconographic Analysis,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Don-
ald Preziosi and Claire Farago (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 483.
105
Bakhtin, “Response to a Question,” 3–4 (emphasis added).
106
Foucault states, “Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never
stops building up and topping its own summit… the idea of accumulating everything, of
establishing a sort of general archive… the project of organizing in this way a sort of
perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea be-
longs to our modernity.” Michel Foucault, “Texts/Contexts: Of Other Spaces,” in
Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago
(Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 377.
107
The idea of dialogism may appear to some to be an overpowering legion. It is no coinci-
dence that in the Bible (the oft misread, or worse still unread, novel of the West) – when
Jesus asks the Gerasenean man possessed by demons “What is thy name?” the answer is
“My name is Legion: for we are many” – the idea of the many is represented as the ul-
timate boogey man, which threatens to engulf and overrun the will of the individual.
But Legion is just the tryanny of a mindless will of the many, who rather than using
their noggins, complacently give up their will to think and act. It is these straw headed
Notes 125
fools that Eliot and Marker rightfully bemoan that are the real legion to fear. In a sense,
Bakhtin advocates for an anti-legion, for a populace of individuals that willfully con-
struct the social world and each individual is free to contribute: “If one is to talk about
individual will, then it is precisely in polyphony that a combination of several individual
wills takes place, that the boundaries of the individual will can be in principle exceeded.
One could put it this way: the artistic will of polyphony is a will to combine many wills,
a will to the event.” Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 21.
108
In an account that echoes the movement of dialogism, but is markedly deleterious and rigid
when compared to the aspects of accountability in Bakhtin’s thought, Stalin describes
Diamat as, “The dialectical method tells us that we must regard life as it actually is. We
have seen that life is in continual motion; consequently, we must regard life in its mo-
tion and ask: Where is life going? We have seen that life presents a picture of constant
destruction and creation; consequently, we must examine life in its process of destruc-
tion and creation and ask: What is being destroyed and what is being created in life?”
J.V. Stalin, “Anarchism Or Socialism?” in Works, Vol.1, November 1901- April 1907
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954). It is arguable that Bakhtin’s
distaste for the dialectic may be a response to the authoritarian and inherently destruc-
tive ethos of Diamat (an ethos that is quite contrary to his own ethical philosophy),
which he witnessed in action through the bloody purges that he barely survived. As
Gardiner points out, “To resort to the static formulae of Diamat in an a priori fashion is
evidence of a failure of political will and moral imagination.” Michael E. Gardiner, “ ‘A
Very Understandable Horror of Dialectics’: Bakhtin and Marxist Phenomenology,” in
Materializing Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory, eds. Craig Brandist and
Galin Tihanov (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 132.
109
Henri Lefebvre, “Revolutions,” in State, Space, World, eds. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden,
trans. Gerald Moore (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 303-304.
110
Voloinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 11 (emphasis added).
111
Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed.
Robert C. Tucker, trans. S. Ryazanskaya (New York: Norton, 1978), 158.
112
The material form of an artwork cannot exist without the body to give it form; i.e. an art-
work initially requires the fully embodied artist to create it. Such is the case with
Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was an ordinary mass produced urinal until
Duchamp designated it as an artwork.
113
Voloinov, Freudianism, 21.
114
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker
(New York: Norton, 1978), 143.
115
Ludwig Feuerbach, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,” in The Fiery Brook:
Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi (New York: Doubleday,
1972), 54.
116
Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, trans. John Sturrock (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009), 56.
117
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology,” 162.
118
Z.A. Jordan, “Contemporary Problems of Dialectical Materialism,” in Marxism and Reli-
gion in Eastern Europe, ed. Richard T. de George (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 15.
126 Notes
119
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology
of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1969), 194.
120
Marx begins his theories with a materialist conception of history. He radically argues that
men produce their ideas, which exist in direct correlation to real lived life, a life that is
dependant upon material conditions, hence consciousness is the awareness of actual
lived life, this of course is a reversal of Hegel’s arguments, which begin with Absolute
Idea and end with Absolute Truth, both nuomenal conceptions. As Marx states: “In di-
rect contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we
ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imag-
ine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to
arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real
life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of
this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, subli-
mates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to
material premises.” Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” 154.
121
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New
York: Penguin Books, 1976), 102.
122
Gardiner, “A Very Understandable Horror,” 120–121.
123
Peter V. Zima, “Bakhtin’s Young Hegelian Aesthetics,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, Vol. 2, ed.
Michael E. Gardiner (London: Sage, 2003), 25–26.
124
Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The
Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Wash-
ington: Smithsonian, 1991), 101–102.
125
One cannot help but recall the following words of John Stuart Mill: “He who lets the
world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other
faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs
all his faculties.” John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations On
Representative Government, ed. H.B. Action (London: Everyman, 1972), 126.
126
127
Stan Douglas and Robert Enright, “Double Take,” Frieze (September 2007), 170.
128
Stan Douglas and Diana Thater, “Diana Thater in conversation with Stan Douglas,” in Stan
Douglas, eds. Scott Watson, Diana Thater and Carol J. Clover (London: Phaidon Press,
1998), 8.
129
Daina Augaitis, “Casting Doubt: The Narratives of Stan Douglas,” in Stan Douglas, eds.
Mary Ann Moser and Catherine Bennett (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Gallery,
1999), 38.
130
Schrebergärten are small civic garden plots that were allotted to city dwellers in Germany
enabling the poor to grow their own food. In 1865 these gardens were named after
Moritz Schreber, a German physician, a staunch advocate of outdoor physical activities
for children.
131
Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” in Writings on Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 217.
Notes 127
132
The solo exhibit Stan Douglas tour intinary included a stop in Toronto, but also appeared
at: Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; The Edmonton Art Gallery. Edmonton,
Alberta; De Pont, Tilburg, the Netherlands; and, The Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles, U.S.A.
133
Svetlana Alpers, “Art History and Its Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Art,” in Feminism
and Art History: Questioning the Litany, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrad (New
York: Harper & Row, 1982), 184.
134
Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 129.
135
Ibid., 98.
136
Some of the key feminist film critics who discuss Marnie include: Rebecca Bailin, “Femi-
nist Readership, Violence, and Marnie,” Film Reader 5 (1982), 24–35; Janet Bergstrom,
“Enunciation and Sexual Difference Part (I),” Camera Obscura 3-4 (1979), 32–69;
Sandy Flitterman, “Woman, Desire, and the Look: Feminism and the Enunciative Appa-
ratus in the Cinema,” in Theories of Authorship, ed. John Caughie (London: Routledge,
1981), 242–250; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theo-
ry and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New
York: Oxford UP, 1999), 833–844; Michele Piso, “Mark’s Marnie,” in A Hitchcock
Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Ames: Iowa State UP, 1986),
288–303; and Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford UP, 1983).
137
Christa Blümlinger, “Remake, Readymade, Reconfiguration: Film as Metahistory,” in Stan
Douglas Past Imperfect: Works 1986–2007, eds. Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler (Ost-
fildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008), 31.
138
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 433.
139
Caroline Alphonso and Marjan Farakbaksh, “Canadian law only changed 26 years ago,”
The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, April 1, 2009. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
news/world/article764381.ece (accessed September 8, 2011).
140
Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: the Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 207.
141
Holquist, “Answering as Authoring,” 309.
142
Ibid., 309.
143
Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990), 56.
144
Caryl Emerson, “Bakhtin at 100: Looking Back at the Very Early Years,” Russian Review,
54 (1995), 110.
145
146
Tania Modleski, “Suspicion: Collusion and Resistance in the Work of Hitchcock’s Female
Collaborators,” in A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, eds. Thomas Leitch and Leland
Poague (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 164.
147
Mieke Bal, “Setting the Stage: The Subject Mise-en-scène,” in Videodreams: Between the
Cinematic and the Theatrical, ed. Peter Pakesch (Cologne: Walther König, 2004), 46.
148
Ibid., 36.
149
“The Trouble With Marnie.” Marnie, Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection DVD,
directed by Laurent Bouzereau (Los Angeles: Universal Studios, 2005).
150
Mieke Bal, “His Master’s Eye,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David
Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 387.
128 Notes
151
Rape is a word that Hitchcock cannot even bring himself to say, as demonstrated in his
taped conversations with Evan Hunter, a disavowal that is striking given his insistence
on the scene and on his powerful position as, what Bellour terms, enunciator: “And then
you get the second night in the cabin. He comes to her and she tries to resist – and then
she turns her head away and you follow the big head right down onto the bed and you
stay on the big head and … you know …” (emphasis added). In his choice of words,
Hitchcock demonstrates the givenness of the scene: what happens is so obvious that
even though the rape itself is not actually uttered (nor do we see the actual rape in the
film) we know exactly what he means. Dan Auiler, Hitchcock’s Notebooks (New York:
Avon Books, 1999), 433.
152
Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text,” 103.
153
An example of how male enunciation functions to victimize and infantilize in Marnie is the
rape scene where Mark, in response to her forceful “No,” violently rips off Marnie’s
nightgown, an action that renders her completely silent and without voice. Hitchcock at-
tempts, with Jay Presson Allen’s collaboration, to represent Mark’s brutality toward
Marnie as being moved by “love” and “gentleness” by having him cover her gently with
his bathrobe even as he pushes her down on the bed and proceeds to violate her. The di-
rections for this scene in the screenplay written by Allen read as follows: “His hands,
placing the robe around her bare shoulders, seem unable to leave her. Still she does not
move from her icy stance. Gently, but compulsively, he pulls her to him, softly, coax-
ingly covers her face with kisses …it is not just his desire that has finally overflowed,
but his very real love for her. And it is love that dictates the manner in which he takes
her…not simply using her, but courting, caressing, desperately urging her.” Auiler,
Hitchcock’s Notebooks, 257–258.
154
Bal, “His Master’s Eye,” 400.
155
Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology,” 170.
156
Bakhtin’s answerability, or creative understanding, is analogous to what the artist Marcel
Duchamp argues in “The Creative Act,” when he states that the role of the observer “is
to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale;” this necessarily means that
the “creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the observer brings the work in
contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications
and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 140.
157
Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 22.
158
Bal, “His Master’s Eye,”380.
159
Bal, “Setting the Stage,” 32.
160
While Bakhtin was writing specifically about verbal creation it does not take a great leap to
apply the plastic-pictorial to the present discussion of visual arts. See Bakhtin, “Author
and Hero,” 99.
161
As Jonathan Romney notes, Subject to a Film: Marnie, “demands to be followed, in every
sense (it’s partly about the fascination of the tracking shot), so at first sight it’s boring.
…I found it endlessly watchable, with its sense of act performed in an automaton haze
of compulsion. Douglas’ piece evokes the seamless repetition, without beginning or
end, of the eternal remake, the infinite retake.” Jonathan Romney, “A Hitch in time,”
New Statesman, July 19, 1999.
Notes 129
162
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Inscriptions of Truth to Size.” in Inscription: Jamelie Has-
san, (Regina: Dunlop Art Gallery, 1990), 10. This catalogue essay is also reprinted as
“Inscriptions: Of Truth to Size,” in Outside in the Teaching Museum, (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 201-216.
163
Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 139.
164
Smurfistan was exhibited at La chamber blanche, Quebec City in 2004. A smaller version
of Smurfistan (without the video Olives for Peace) was exhibited at the Winnipeg Art
Gallery in 2002.
165
It should be noted that I am intentionally using the terms they, them and their as sexless
plurals, which was considered grammatically correct until it was replaced in the 18th
century by the term he, which until recently has been used to apply to both sexes. At-
tempts at gender equity have resulted in the awkwardness of he and she alternations, or
worse still, he/she or s/he. According to Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, in
1775 Anne Fisher replaced the usage of they with he in her popular book A New Gram-
mar, which is “believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both
sexes” regardless of the fact that “for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers
as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody
seemed to mind that they, them, and their were officially plural.” This debate over a bi-
sexual pronoun – the we to which my argument is focused – is demonstrative of the
power language has to shape subjectivities and the way speech rules are themselves sub-
ject to dialogic processes. Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, “On language:
The Search for an Anybody Who’s Everybody,” The New York Times Magazine, July
26, 2009, 14.
166
167
Over the years Hassan has been deeply influenced by the art of Jack Chambers. As she
writes, Chambers’ paintings and films have had a “strange generational synthesis that
happens to be occurring in this household is one that Chambers would clearly have en-
joyed. Perhaps among this generation the mysterious vision that Chambers’ works
possess will continue to unfold.” Jamelie Hassan, “Notes from viewing The Jack
Chambers Retrospective, London, Ontario 1988,” in The Silence of Jack Chambers, ed.
Ron Benner, Center for Baalqisian Studies, London, 1998.
168
169
In “Biologisms, Metaphor & Answerability,” Ron Benner discusses Jack Chambers’ film
Hybrid in relation to the various conceptions of hybridization and hybrids. Benner
points out the invisible hand of human agency that is hidden beneath metaphorical biol-
ogisms to describe and shape human society. In Hybrid “what underlies the production
of the rose is human agency. This agency crosses over into an attempt to destroy a soci-
ety in Vietnam and reproduce a model of what the U.S. thought of as a ‘civil’ or
‘productive’ society.” “Biologisms, Metaphor & Answerability,” in The Silence of Jack
Chambers.
170
Kathryn Elder, “Introduction,” in The Films of Jack Chambers, ed Kathryn Elder (Toronto:
Cinemateque Ontario, 2002), 4.
171
Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetics as Politics,” in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven
Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 44.
130 Notes
172
173
Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” 89.
174
175
The Well was a site-specific intervention included as part of Museopathy a multi-venue
exhibition presented by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and curated by DisplayCult
(Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher) in 2001. For a detailed description of Hassan’s The
Well and the other artists and sites involved in Museopathy see Jim Drobnick and Jen-
nifer Fisher, Museopathy (Kingston: Agnes Etherington Centre, 2001).
176
177
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 27.
178
179
Bakhtin, “Response to a Question ,” 7.
180
Topsy Turvy Land and Les langues du monde were exhibited together in the installations
L’espace de l’alphabet (2000), presented on two monitors in the Oboro Gallery, and
L’espace de l’alphabet II (1999–2001), screened on two monitors embedded into the
walls of the gallery at The Canadian Museum of Civilization as part of The Lands with-
in Me: Expressions by Canadian Artists of Arab Origin, curated by Aïda Kaouk.
181
Radhia Dziri, “Ecrire Les langues du monde,” Qantara 19 (1996): 14–15. The English
translation of Dziri’s text is “Writing the Languages of the World,” translated by Jason
R. D’Aoust, which was used for the subtitles that appear in the video and has been re-
produced in my co-authored book with Julian Haladyn The Films and Videos of Jamelie
Hassan (London: Blue Medium Press, 2010), 167–168.
182
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 112 (emphasis added).
183
Homi K. Bhabha and Jamelie Hassan with Monika Kin Gagnon, “Identity and Cultural
Displacement,” in Jamelie Hassan: Aldin’s Gift, (Toronto: Art Gallery of York Univer-
sity and Art Gallery of Windsor, 1996), 10–30.
184
185
Radhia Dziri, “Writing the Languages of the World,” 167–168.
186
Bhabha and Hassan, “Identity and Cultural Displacement,” 25.
187
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Nous Autres,” in The Ground of the Image, trans Jeff Fort (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2005), 103.
188
Even the title, Mom youre gonna blow it, conveys the youthfulness of Tariq and the errors
that children make when learning to spell. Hassan accomplishes this through the delib-
erate omission of the apostrophe in the contraction you’re.
189
Jamelie Hassan, “Wednesday Evening,” and “Thursday Morning,” in Inscription (Regina:
Dunlop Art Gallery, 1990), 13–14.
190
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 41.
191
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 106.
192
Chris Marker, Immemory, CD-ROM, trans. Brian Holmes (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change,
2008).
193
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufman, trans. Walter Kaufman and
R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 270.
Notes 131
194
Nora M. Alter, “Translating the Essay into Film and Installation,” The Journal of Visual
Culture 6 no. 1 (2007): 44.
195
Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books,
2005), 108.
196
François Lecointe stresses the equality of participants, as he states, “These relationships
between the here and the elsewhere are at the root of a gesture initiated by Chris Mark-
er’s work in order that, in a cinematographic utopia, all gazes are equal.” “The
Elephants at the End of the World Chris Marker and Third Cinema,” Third Text 25 no. 1
(January 2011): 94.
197
Chris Marker to R. Ritterbusch, “Entretien vec Chris Marker,” Image et Son 213 (February
1968), quoted in Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2006), 138.
198
Ibid., 63.
199
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” Movies and Methods,
ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: U of California P, 1976), 63.
200
Screen practice has a varied and complex history before and after cinema, constantly
morphing through contact with new cultural significations and technological advances.
Charles Musser suggests an alternate beginning for cinema in relation to the screen. As
he states, “A history of screen practice presents cinema as a continuation and transfor-
mation of magic lantern traditions in which showmen displayed images on a screen,
accompanying them with voice, music and sound effects. … Cinema did not emerge out
of the chaos of various borrowings to find its true or logical self. It is part of a much
longer, dynamic tradition which had undergone repeated transformations in its practice
and become increasingly central within a changing cultural system.” “Toward a History
of Screen Practice,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9 no.1 (Winter 1984): 59, 60–61.
201
Erkki Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen,”
ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image, vol.7 (2004), 4.
202
Jonathan Kear, “A Game That Must Be Lost: Chris Marker Replays Alain Resnais’ Hiro-
shima mon amour,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual
Culture, eds. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 136.
203
Level Five, DVD directed by Chris Marker (London: Optimum Classic, 1996).
204
Ibid.
205
Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London:
Wallflower Press, 2009), 81.
206
Sans Soleil, Two Films by Chris Marker: La Jetée / Sans Soleil DVD, directed by Chris
Marker (New York: The Criterion Collection, 2007).
207
Ibid.
208
Erkki Huhtamo argues “To have a meaning in the cross-cultural context, the concept “me-
dia” should probably be extended to cover cultural forms that deal with communication,
but don’t necessarily involve the replacement of the physical human element with
something mediated. … The idea of ‘media culture’ should never be limited to material
forms only. These are always related with things immaterial – the dream worlds of cul-
ture, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin. Traditional modes of visual representation may
therefore also function as ‘media,’ because their material existence inspires discursive
132 Notes
‘media-related’ manifestations that begin to live their own lives within the fabric of cul-
ture.” “Intercultural Interfaces: Correcting the Pro-Western Bias of Media,”
MediaArtHistoriesArchive (November 2007), PDF http://hdl.handle.net/10002/441.
209
David Montero argues that ‘The Zone” in Sans soleil is Marker’s acknowledgement of the
distortions that film images undergo, as he states: “The whole process naturally culmi-
nates in an act of contrition when Krasna decides to alter the images in Sans soleil in
‘The Zone’… acknowledging once more the impossibility of recalling complete
memory through film, and the unfairness with which these images are themselves con-
structing ‘History’ as they pass, and privilege a certain version of past events, fixing
them even when they try not to. Therefore, the only ethical option left to the film is to
address this impossibility, exposing a sort of healthy useslessness to the whole exercise,
but one that also questions the nature of the memories we construct using film.” In,
“Film also ages: time and images in Chris Marker’s Sans soleil,” Studies in French Cin-
ema 6 no. 2 (2006): 114.
210
Toru Takemitsu makes an appearance in Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory (2008). Like the
condemned person in Adolfo Bioy Casares novella The Invention of Morel (1940) – a
text Marker makes repeated reference to and which his friend Alain Resnais filmed as
Last Year at Marienbad (1961) – we interact with the sound-image presented of Take-
mitsu. We hear his music and are enraptured, he is like the copy of Faustina, though he
is reduced to a phantom trace we fall in love with him and wish to talk to him, to know
him. But we discover that he is dead. We can only dialogue with the traces that he left
behind; his ideas and voice linger on in the fragments of music through which we travel
through time to meet Takemitsu in the dialogue of great time.
211
Chris Marker, Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, directed by Chris Marker (New
York: MoMA, 2005).
212
Raymond Bellour, “Marker’s Gesture,” in Chris Marker: Owls At Noon Prelude: The
Hollow Men, trans. Adrian Martin (Brisbane: IMA, 2008), 18.
213
Chris Marker as quoted in Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker, 150.
214
Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, Vol. 4, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 405
215
Uriel Orlow, “Chris Marker: The Archival Power of the Image,” in Lost in the Archives,
ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City, 2002), 441.
216
Marker, Immemory.
217
The text that accompanied the photo of what appears to be a dead man reads as follows:
“Had I simply – and truthfully – entitled this photo ‘Israel 1961,’ with the grieving pos-
ture of the standing man and the Jeep bleeding out of the frame, a whole scenario would
start to emerge in the viewer’s head. In fact the man stretched out on the ground had
sunstroke. And the guys in the kibbutz expressing their scorn for his lack of resistance,
told me ‘he’s an artist.’” Ibid.
218
Philippe Bootz, “The Functional Point of View: New Artistic Forms for Programmed
Literary Works,” Leonardo 32, 4 (1999), 309.
Notes 133
219
An obvious reference to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979) in which a mysterious
alien place called “the Zone” which exists outside of the normal laws of space and time,
thereby permitting the innermost desires of a person entering the zone to be fulfilled.
220
Marker, Immemory.
221
Lupton, Chris Marker, 210.
222
Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi-
cal Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. III, eds. and trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud
(London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 320.
223
Tim Beasley-Murray, in Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form,
(New York: Palgrave, 2007), 86.
224
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
Vol. I, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 256.
225
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Response to a Question,” 6.
226
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Colombia Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 126.
227
Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universi-
ty Press, 1989), 70.
228
Ibid., 4.
229
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.
230
231
232
233
234
Ibid., 87–88.
235
Eco, The Open Work, 163.
236
237
Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problems of
Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 125.
238
Marker, Immemory.
239
Ibid.
240
Ibid.
241
Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique, 24.
242
Mieke Bal, Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2002), 15.
243
Marker, Immemory.
244
Eco, The Open Text, 87.
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A M E R I C A N U N I V E R S I T Y S T U D I E S

MIRIAM JORDAN-HALADYN is a First Nations writer and artist. She

AUS S-V 215-312445_Jordan_TH 150x225 HC NY.indd 1 27.03.14 10:47

This book is a volume in a Peter Lang monograph series.

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

© 2014 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

List of Illustrations .................................................................................................................... ix

Endnotes ................................................................................................................................. 117

1. Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986; installation view in Witte de With, Rotterdam;

2. Stan Douglas, Der Sandmann, 1995; installation view in Künstlerhaus Wien,

3. Stan Douglas, Subject to a Film: Marnie, 1989; installation view in Minima

4. Stan Douglas, Subject to a Film: Marnie, 1989; still of Marnie re-entering

7. Jamelie Hassan, Boutros al Armenian / Mediterranean Modern, 1997; instal-

8. Jamelie Hassan, Boutros al Armenian / Mediterranean Modern, 1997; still of

I wish to express my gratitude to my colleagues, friends and family for their

In our enthusiasm for specification we have ignored questions of the interconnection

What is Mikhail Bakhtin’s relevance to contemporary visual arts? Given the

encompasses different categories or genres that are themselves uncertain and

embodiment, which is key to Bakhtin’s understanding of aesthetics. The interre-

Bakhtin, Art and the Plastic Body

applications of Bakhtin to visual culture, the employment of Bakhtin’s theories

In disregarding Bakhtin’s later texts Haynes’ neglects to examine the pres-

conscious means to see something” highlighting the visuality that is inherent in

Bakhtin’s concepts of outsidedness, chronotope, heteroglossia (modified as heter-

extraordinary sensitivity to the immense plurality of experience more than anything

The Plastic Body as a Living Material Screen

light) and introjective: consciousness as a sensitive recording surface (as

the ideological message of an artwork, but an identifying response is not a giv-

Bakhtin and Moving Image Art

Instead, it is a response that can be understood as embodied and subjective, an

An artwork does not have a concrete beginning; it is heteroglot and shared

materialism I am proposing that attention be paid to embodied interactions and

Artistic Speech and Its Embodied Forms

The Body Takes on Flesh

Inner and Outer Dialogue

answerability, specifically in relation to the visual arts, is the potential of each

artists seek to make observers aware of the materialization of ideological forces

in each utterance…a living dialectical synthesis is constantly taking place between

enunciated word is subjectified in the act of responsive understanding in order to

This responsive understanding of an utterance necessarily occurs between the

Dialogic Bridge between World and Experiential Self

objects of knowledge” (emphasis added).94 Hence, the relationship between the

In a very real sense, we co-exist with cultural texts as bodies of meaning in a

The Sensible Materiality of Inner and Outer Speech

Creativity and material productivity go hand in hand; it is through the dialogic

Embedded in the inner and outward aspects of speech, artistic or otherwise,

The validity of Voloinov’s comments on the materiality of speech is indisputa-

inadequacies of the Hegelian model. Such reductionism, which artificially and

Dialectical or Dialogical Materialism?

gated by anyone.”119 This method makes it impossible to enter into an open

Hegel’s mode of dialectics necessitates an origin and an end (perhaps an uncon-

to disavow any connection to Marxism. Such a reading is not surprising given

Through dialogic materialism the concept of answerability achieves a new

The Aesthetic Object and the Givens of Speech

in which spousal rape is portrayed136 – Douglas restages the scene of Marnie’s

The mise-en-scène of Difference

The original novel Marnie, written by Winston Graham, is set in England