The Anti-Language of New Media

T. J. Clark observed once, with the simple voice of experience, that in Courbet the entire world is one of proximity; the paintable is that thing, that space, that can be transformed into a Second Empire drawing room. This is Stanley Cavell's assessment too when, in The World Viewed, following Michael Fried's 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood," he likens painting to a certain desire for presentness. Painting assembles a space. But it is always a proximal space, a bounded space of textures and things brought around, not too close exactly, but certainly unconcealed and arrayed for handling. Painting is not Cavell's primary concern in The World Viewed, it is cinema after all, but painting offers a road down which one might travel to ascertain a certain quality shared by painting, photography, film, and a number of other art forms. It is the desire that the world be brought near to us.

A desire to be brought near—such a desire is most certainly at the very base of human life. Indeed the relative nearness and farness of things may account for all manner of action, from love to hate, from the joy of communion to the perils of exile. But that is not all, for in art it concerns a specific, not a general iteration of this desire for nearness. The phenomenon is most acute in photography, and thereby, for Cavell, in cinema (for him, a photography derivative). As he puts it: the world of the image is present to us, but we were never present to it. So it is nearness with a catch. The viewer does not attend the filming of the "profilmic event," to use the parlance of cinema studies. Thus it is a desire to be brought near, but one already afflicted with a specific neurosis, that of the rejection of the self. With each attempt to array the world in proximal relation to us, we must at the same time make ourselves disappear. With each step forward in Cavell's world, one becomes that much more inert. Every step done is a step undone.

In Plato there is a magical ring, the Ring of Gyges, that grants invisibility to the wearer and thus potential immunity from moral consequence. The cinema in effect forces us to don the Ring of Gyges, making the self an invisible half-participant in the world.¹ The self becomes a viewing self, and the world becomes a world viewed. In a nutshell, this is the cinematic condition for Cavell, and I guess I agree with him. The penalties and rewards are clear: to be "cinematically" present to the world, to experience the pleasure of the movies, one must be a masochist. In other words, to be in a relation of presence with the world cinematically, one must subject the self to the ultimate in pain and humiliation, which is nothing short of complete erasure. It has been said that the cinema is the most phenomenological of media. But whether this is a phenomenology or the absolute impossibility of one is not entirely clear.

"A painting 'is' a world; a photograph is 'of' a world," wrote Cavell.² What can one say then of the cinema? Or the computer? Paraphrasing Cavell's definition of cinema, one might say, with considerably less panache than he, that the cinema automatically projects worlds (in series). So might it be "for" a world? The computer, then, is simply "on" a world, as it tends to rise in separation from some referent, modeling and supplementing it. But enough phrase making, the crucial thing is to determine the nature of the machine.

The object of the computer is not a man, nor is it this or that human face or body. In this sense it breaks with those arts (painting, photography, cinema) that fixate upon the embodied human form—the face, but not always, the hand, but not always—and its proximal relation to a world, if not as their immediate subject matter then at least the absolute horizon of their various aesthetic investments. The computer has not this same obsession...