Take for example the list 100 Most Influential Films of All Time from IMDB, or The Greatest Films of All Time from the British Film Institute.
Film & Media Studies. (2021, 31 januari). Kuleshov, Eisenstein, and Soviet Montage Theory. Youtube.
I got this metaphore from Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka.
I got this term from Draaisma, from Poortier, K; Myin, E; Verbeek, P. (2023). Wat maakt de mens?: Onze lichamelijkheid in relatie tot techniek en wetenschap. Amsterdam: Boom. 100.
Ibid, 93.
I go into this more in the rest of this work, but that part has not been published yet here.
Ibid, 61.
Deleuze, G; Guattari, F. (2009). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizphrenia. Pinguin Publishing. 11: “The body without organs now falls back on (se rabat sur) desiring production, attracts it, and appropriates it for its own. The organ-machines now cling to the body without organs as thought it were a fencer’s padded jacket, or as though these organ-machines were medals pinned onto the jersey of a wrestler who makes them jingle as he starts toward his opponent.” The ‘appropriates’ is very important here: the application of a socially-given meaning on itsself is one of the way the subject keeps changing.
Poortier, K.; Myin, E.; Verbeek, P. Wat maakt de mens?. 59.
In literature on Foucault they will often speak of 'énoncés' instead of statements.
I elaborated a lot more on this in the rest of this work, but by "Virtual Object" I mean the way the artist conceives an artwork before he actually makes it, either consciously or unconsciously.
When compiling a list of films that have had the greatest influence on the medium, one of the choices one quickly encounters is Battleship Potemkin (1925), directed by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. [1] The story describes a dramatized version of the uprising on the battleship Potemkin in 1905, and is best known for the scene in which a group of people is attacked by the Tsarist army on the steps of Odessa, which is often used as an example of a film editing method called "Soviet Montage." This artistic movement emerged in the early twentieth century in the then-new Soviet Union, where unused film material was very scarce. This led to the development of film theory, primarily at the film school in Moscow, based largely on imported films; By manipulating existing film reels, people began to focus on the construction of films, the way they were structured. [2] They swapped certain frames or scenes, with the aim of observing how the emotional impact or meaning of a film changed. In doing so, they developed a style of film analysis that borrowed heavily from semiotics, or the study of signs. After all, when one looks at a film—or works of art in general— the work resembles an animal's den, [3] with endless entrances and exits, full of intersecting paths. The phenomenological analysis of the moment a work of art is experienced is, after all, completely different from the moment it is analyzed: usually, the analysis only takes place afterward, when the book has already been read, or the film has ended. At that moment, time no longer exists for the work of art: the experience of it is no longer chronological, but each moment can be taken apart to view and study it. Consider a thriller that ends with the revelation of the murderer: afterward, we often rethink the actions and statements of the character who committed the murder we saw in the film, before he was revealed as the perpetrator: weren't there already hints, clues to the truth? In this way, the film's chronology is no longer the only way we can experience time during analysis; we no longer need to think of the story simply as running from the first page to the last, but could walk backward, break it up, and think about the chapters interwoven, just as the Moscow film analysts of the Soviet Montage movement cut out the pieces of film and pasted them back together in a different order. It is therefore more in line with the actual experience of analyzing art to view a work as a network of signs that together form meaning, both through the signs themselves and through the way they are interconnected. Signs, which here refer to elements within the story itself that can be said to possess a certain content, always have a pre-established socially produced value through association: we are more likely to assume that a character in a film who primarily wears black is an evil person because we associate the color black in fiction with evil. Because certain things—colors, actions, mannerisms, and so on—have a historically contingent [4] value within our socially produced conceptual framework, we can speak of signs with a certain value that are connected together in a work of art. The way this network is then read is the subjective interpretation of a work of art. We can, for example, speak of the semiotics of film analysis, or a way of viewing a film as if the medium were a kind of language.
The socially produced value of signs, which seem to be an essential part of works of art, is why we cannot say that a creative inspiration is entirely individually innovative; a work of art as a virtual object is merely a new sequence of signs, which the artist only knows through the environment in which they live. The human experience of existence is semiotic, consisting of the social signs that someone knows. Consider, for example, the way metaphors influence our thinking, as explained in the work of Lakoff and Johnson: they discuss how the metaphors we use influence how we think, and that these metaphors are socially formed and used. [5] Everything we can think lies within this symbolic order, within this way of thinking through signs; it is a thinking that is influenced by the values that a society assigns to certain signs, by the words used, by the meaning of actions. [6]
Being a person, becoming a subject, or the production of the self, can be seen as giving meaning to a person and changing it based on that meaning. The interpretation of a work of art as a network of signs, or as a collection of things that have certain socially determined meanings, and the formation of something that always proceeds through this social lens of meanings; isn't this the same as knowing a good friend, as having a body? What is a haircut if not a symbol that someone shapes to give themselves a certain meaning? Someone who sees themselves as punk gets a haircut that is often perceived as punk, to make themselves belong to that group, to become punk. The only things that prevent someone from analyzing the life and body of a subject as a poem are the breadth and depth of the signs and their meanings, and the way the subject is always in motion, always becoming. As people with, in Plessner's words [7], a utopian position, that is, as people without a predetermined essence of what we are, we are eternally becoming, and meanwhile eternally producing: what we produce is ourselves, is the signs we also use to form ourselves. When we say that Tetsuo in Tetsuo: The Iron Man was infected by his machine-like environment, or that Schreber's delusions develop not only from his Oedipal relationship with his father but also from everything around him, we are working upwards toward a conception of the productive being of man, or a way of being in which man is constantly engaged in producing something: the transformation into an iron monster, truly a product, or even a work of art; a productive way of being that we no longer imagine as something that arises individually within a subject, but as a social imposition, not from outside, but as something we are cursed to be a part of; the creative spirit that places itself within a subject to express itself through that person; art history is a process in which the abstract idea of art is developing, as in art as a concept above any work of art, or as that which connects all expressions of itself; the spirit of the artistic as a pre-individual phenomenon that actualizes itself by actualizing itself through a subject.
Here, the term "body without organs" from Anti-Oedipus could reappear. Although it is a notorious concept in the oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari, it would like to be seen here as something that something is before it undergoes this process of the social production of meaning. Deleuze also invokes the term outside the series "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," precisely when he discusses painting in his work on Bacon. There, we can see the blank canvas as a body without organs: a blank surface, without structure or content, a void full of potential; similarly, the human being, before it becomes a subject, is a body without organs: in Anti-Oedipus, it is discussed how the organ-machines pinned themselves to the body without organs, like "medals pinned to a wrestler's sweater." [8] The pre-reflective is suddenly reflected by connecting to its environment and emerges as something new, as Plessner also argued that people are always changing precisely because they relate to their knowledge about themselves. [9] This process of giving meaning to the subject, which is also the process that makes the subject who they are, happens, among other things, through the art or media the subject experiences: what it means to be a man, for example, is not only something learned from the people you have immediately around you, but also from the films or series you watch, or the books you read, and precisely again through the meaning given to those works as things that are masculine. The reality a subject lives is one of signs, consisting solely of an all-constructing semiotic; the totality of the world consists solely of everything that is spoken, and the ways in which these utterances are connected. Although this might at first glance seem like a very Wittgensteinian form of argumentation, I would argue that it coincides more closely with Foucault's work in Les Mots et les Choses, that is, the lived system of truths for humans consists of a conceptual framework constructed as a network of statements. [10] These truths are wrapped in symbols. For example, the image of the phallus as representing masculinity is not merely a truth found in the statement that one thing represents another, but a deeper truth constructed from the socially given value of the sign of the phallus. Masculinity as a truth about the male body does not consist solely of the statement a doctor makes upon seeing an ultrasound scan, but rather of the interpretation of the image of the phallus as part of the subject's body.
The production of the meaning of this semiotic reality is a process that produces both the subject and the art that subject creates. A work of art and a person are both networks of elements that have meaning, collectively forming a system of value that can be interpreted differently by everyone. Isn't it true that, just as everyone can look at a work of art differently and get something out of it, one can have a different opinion about everyone else around them than one's neighbors?
Creating new art is a process in which an artist takes the symbols that constitute their entire reality and uses them to form something new. When they actualize the virtual object [11] or the creative idea, they produce a new part of reality, a new element in the network of the symbolic order they themselves already experience, thus reaffirming that human creation and knowledge can be seen as the perception, interpretation, use, and construction of signs; this is what is meant when this profile paper speaks of the interpersonal part of the process of creating art. The signs we use to think are not representations of the real, but are immanent to our lived reality.
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