OBVERSION Marco Senaldi

7/30/2019 OBVERSION Marco Senaldi

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Part I

Learning


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1.

At the end of the corridor

About the concept of Obversion

Je mobservais en permanence: cetait comme si une camera se trouvait fixe au-dessus de moi, et jtais la fois cette camera, lhomme quelle filmait, et lhomme qui ensuite tudiait le film.

Jonathan Littell,Les bienveillantese

A white, quite narrow corridor, lighted by a few lamps, opens in front ofyou. There is something cold, uninviting, but a kind of atavistic habit urges

you forward to see where it leads. After all, a lane is made just for that: to

be run along to the end. At the end of the corridor, in fact, there is

something surprising which can be perceived as soon as you enter: there

are two monitors. But they are not simply television screens. They are

control monitors. On the top one you can see just the empty hallway while

on the bottom one you can see the back of a human figure walking along

the corridor. As you approach the monitor to see who that person is, the

figure draws far away from you; but it doesnt take long to realize that thatfigure, seen from behind, is you.


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It is undoubtely you because now, every one of your gesture corresponds to

the gestures made by the figure on the monitor; on the other hand, you do

not recognize yourselfbecause you are taken from the back, and the shoot

angle, along with the distance between the videocamera and the monitor

itself which shows the image, makes you seen from an unusual point ofview which, nevertheless, concerns you directly.

In synthesis, this is what visitors can experience in the famous American

artist Bruce Nauman's installation, titled Live Tape Video Corridor(1969-

1971), better known as Video Corridor.

For the first time in history, at least not with a such remarkable clarity, the

viewer experiences the disturbing situation to see himself from a

perspective that does not belong to him, which is completely foreign. Even

in front of a mirror we see our image as something different from ourselves

- as an image not belonging to us in the same way that we watch our hands

at work or our feet as we are walking.

Nevertheless the image we see in the mirror is undoubtely ours also

because we see it from the viewpoint of our eyes, the viewpoit we are -

the point of view, from where we contemplate ourselves, is still ourselves;

the image we see in the mirror more or less satisfies our expectations (we

consider ourselves attractive, aging, ugly or simply different) - but without

a doubt we ourselves are looking at ourselves. Then, if we look at a portrait

or photo of ourselves, it is true that that the image as such does not belong

to us because it was taken from a viewpoint which is not ours (we couldsnap a photo of ourselves in front of a mirror, but even in that case we

would not see ourselves, we would see just a face hidden by a camera, as in

Andy Warhol's famous self-portrait, replicated by Jean Baudrillard some

years after, in the same way).

Anyway, even in this case, we hold the image of ourselves, and even if the

viewpoint from which it has been taken doesnt belong to us (which can be

annoying, especially if our image doesnt correspond to what we imagine

to be "true", that is, if theres a bad light or we are in a bad pose, nasty,

distorted or simply comic), however the image wont disappear, its there,we like it or not.

But returning to Video Corridor, things are quite different. In fact, in this

case, we see ourselves from a totally different viewpoint than our eyes

give us. Wesee ourselves from a point of view where we are not and where

we can never be; but we are in a place where we dont see ourselves and

well never see ourselves directly. We are well aware the image the

monitor is showing is our image; but, nonetheless, it remains foreign a to us


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as though it were someone elses - foreign in its own familiarity and,

therefore, even more disturbing.1

We should here refer to the famous notion of the Freudian notion of

Uncanny. In fact, Freud had already, in an already mediatic age, dealt withcases of false recognition and does so in the well-known text titled Das

Unheimliche (1919), the German word that, as he himself notes, grows

from the denial of what is heimlich, that is familiar, domestic, and so well-

known. In a footnote ofDas Unheimliche, Freud reminds a similar

experience, which happened to Ernst Mach, who "was quite frightened

when he realized that the face he had seen was, in fact, his own." The same

episode happened to Freud, described as follows:

I can supply a similar experience. I was sitting alone in my wagon-litcompartment

when a more than usually violent jerk of the train swung back the door of the adjoiningwashing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing- gown and a traveling cap came

in. I assumed that he had been about to leave the washing-cabinet which divides the two

compartments, and had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by

mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my

dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass of the

open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. 2

Freud's experience is extremely important here. In fact it takes place in a

train, a typically modern means of transport, which implies a movementfrom place to place and is, by definition, disorienting. Is not the shape of a

train, which stretches along a railroad as to anticipate the journey, similar

to a corridor? Clearly, Freuds disorientation is not due to a close circuit

videocamera, but nonetheless, the image perceived, though seen in a

ordinary mirror, is not generated in an usual way, but arises from an

unforeseeable event, that is, the jolting of a moving train which for an

instance moves the glance of the reflected image and gives Freud the

impression of seeing himself from another persons angle. So that he can

describe himself with a slightly malevolent objectivity, "from outside", as

"a rather elderly gentleman insists on entering a compartment which

doesnt belong to him. Finally, it is noteworthy to point out the significant

discomfort that Freud experiences. Freud, thus, had already perceived the

characteristics of this strange experience of not recognizing that which is

most familiar to us, I.e. ourselves yet he attributes it to a singular,

chance moment while in the Video Corridor this experience of self-

enstrangement becomes a stable, and repeateable, experience which

remains, nevertheless, uncanny.

1

Is this situation not the artistic version of the lacanian motto Je pense o je ne suis pas, je suis o jepense pas?2

S. Freud, The Uncanny, trans. A. Strachey (n 23, p. 17).


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More. In this current era, dominated by a widespread media network, it is

even superfluous to underline that a great deal of our social, and sometimes

intimate, life is spent alternately in front of a monitor (as in my case,writing these words at computer) or under the eye of surveillance cameras

at a point that the famous title by Sherry Turkle, Life on Screen should be

completed by another,AndLife under Videocameras. Therefore, it happens

more frequently that shooting and watching have become simultaneous,

creating situations similar to the artificially reconstructed one by Naumans

installation: in many public places such as petrol stations, shopping malls,

shops and even in the streets, its not uncommon to run into screens and see

in them people dressed just like us, with our features, etc., this is to say,

who look very much like us - because they are us. They are us, yet we find

it hard to recognize ourselves because our image is captured and sent back

on the screen from a radically estranged point of view, that is, the cameras

one. Thus, the situation is almost the opposite if we compare it to Freuds

experience: Freud sees a stranger in a lounging robe whom he recognizes

as being himself; we have plenty of time to observe that our medial ersatz

dont belong to us even when we understand that those people are us. So

the "great dismay", which comes out form this situation, is the same.

This is a so widespread reality that it can be parodied even in the shop

windows accrochage, as seen in this image (Milan, 2010).


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Although not exactly at the same terms, this situation has already been

described by Jean Baudrillard in a short text titled Videosphere and

fractal subject, dated 1989.3

In this text the great French thinker defines the notion ofvideosphere as thespace in which the subject is not only declined by a state of endless

mediatic loop, but also touched by the media in his own personal identity.

The subject is fragmented and the media, particularly the visual media,

dont relate to it as merely a passive insertion - rather it is man himself "to

be inserted in his own image." To describe this new condition, Baudrillard

resorts to the effective image of "video stage" - this is to say a condition, an

epochal and historic moment when the audiovisual media took over reality

and human beings. The whole meaning of the metaphor of Baudrillard,

however, can only be fully understood contrasting it to the older so-called

"mirror stage". This latter is the name of a particular transition in the

human awareness identified by Jacques Lacan more than half a century

ago. According to Lacan, there is a moment in a childs life when he passes

from indifference to his reflection in a mirror, to a joyful reaction in front

of it, which occurs in the first few months of his life. According to Lacan

this is the proof that the little man creates his own identity from the

recognition of his own image, even if this recognition, whic is based on a

virtual image of self (in the mirror), implies a fundamental asymmetry

between what he sees and what he is. Now, the existence of the mirror

stage has been repeatedly questioned by psychology, and Lacan himself isnot explicit as to whether it has an authentically psychological role or

merely a metaphorical one. Unquestionably, it provides the mirror stage a

much less reassuring image than the one we would have to give it: the

image we have of our self would fill a radical void in the center of our

being, providing the root for that structure referred to as the Imaginary

which, according to Lacan, characterizes the human status (together with

the key points of Symbolic and Real). Lacan repeteadly deals with the

notion of image, and in particular in the XI Seminar about the gaze of

1973; in those pages he clearly argues that the spectator never coincideswith the ideal geometrical point in front of a painting. On the contrary, in

those years he takes a fervid interest in optical illusions, of which he

provides complicated diagrams, where concave mirrors appear generating

fictitious images, etc. In other words, he is no longer satisfied (if ever he

had been) with the schema subject / gaze / (reflected) image, but rather he

focuses on his own concept of gaze and makes it the subject of an

extensive psychoanalytic research. In Lacans thinking, the classic viewer

3It is worth remembering that Baudrillard's notion ofVideosphere is not only older that the similar

sphare/Sphere notion introduced a decade ago by Sloterdijk, but it is much more useful because itimplies a mutual realationship between the sociological model (the sphere of interactions betweenhuman beings, etc.) and its (unavoidable) mediatic counterpart.


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diagram as defined by the classical text De Pictura, by humanist Leon

Battista Alberti, who sustains that a visual ray strats from the eye of the

observer directed to the object should be completed with a second

diagram that penetrates the first and "returns" the gaze back to the

spectator. The Lacanian gaze (which for him constitutes a "partialobject") is precisely this de-subjectivated counter-look coming back,

neither subjective nor objective, whose understanding is clearly traumatic.

At that point the (lacanian) psychoanalyst Joan Copjec is justified to

introduce the notion of screen:

The moment the look is grasped, the whole visual field becomes a terrifying

otherness. It losts its belong-to-me-aspect and assumes suddenly a screen-like

function.4

It is not difficult to detect in these words a clear reference to the Freudiannotion of Unheimlich, though in this case its the whole "visual field"

which becomes "estranged", which takes the form and the function of a

monitor. So the "feedback" of the gaze exactly reproduces the operation of

a closed circuit video on which Video Corridor is based and which is

traceable in the contemporary videosphere.5 Instead of the "reconciling"

gaze addressed to the objects, or to our image in the mirror, theres a

"traumatic" one, which we watch on the screen, where we do perceive our

image, but returned from a gaze that is not ours, which definitively does

not belong to us. It can be concluded that already in Lacan, the mirrorstage does not mean simply the problematic relationship that the

individual has with his own reflected image, but it seems to anticipate the

devastating consequences of the video stage foreseen by Baudrillard.6

Anyway, also from a visual point of view, the mirrors transformation from

a simple reflective surface to a screen that gives us our reverse image, is a

twentieth-century's tpos, well caught by avantguards artists such as

Surrealism. Magritte in particular gave an effective representation of this

situation with a mysterious-looking picture, whose meaningful title is Lareproduction interdite, 1936 (it is not surprising that it is contemporary

with The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction byBenjamin). In this artwork a man is seen from the back, reflected in a large

4Copjec, J.,Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1994.

5It 's also worth to explain here that the works by Nauman based on video installation and Lacan's

Seminars dedicated to the glance are contemporary, and they both take place in the late 60's and early

70's of the last century.6

Reading these words a psychoanalyst friend of mine told me that he became aware of the fact he was

bald on the top of his head just after having seen a shot from behind, during a visit to the classic standardclose-circuit video-installation where the viewer had been putting in the middle of the shooting...


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mirror, but, instead of seeing his own face, he faces his own head - that

is, he observes himself from an unpossible point of view, that usually one

cannot experiment directly. However, the typical enigmatic and surrealistic

touch here takes on a very specific meaning when related to what we

have said above: in fact, the artwork by Magritte is "technically"explainable - what it depicts becomes indeed explicable if, in the canvas,

instead of a mirror we put a monitor.

If on this monitor is shown the image of the subject from behind, the

enigma of Magritte's painting becomes perfectly clear. In fact, this

shoulders shooting facing the subject, is not exactly the same that we

experience in the monitor of Video Corridor? The title La reproduction

interdite refers to this: what is forbidden is the old way ofreproduction, which neede an original - but, as Benjamin writes (in the

same year of the painting!) this form of reproduction has been overcame by

the mechanical reproduction of the images. Benjamin speaks especially

about photography and cinema, of course, and we could think that Magritte

has had just a premonition, rather than a true awareness of the dis-

identification structure of video-stage. But it doesnt matter: in fact, 1936 is

the year of the first experimental television broadcasts made by Hitler

concerning the Olympic Games in Berlin7

7...and of the first BBC tv broadcast in UK. One may note that, in the painting by Magritte, an aspect

seems to escape from the logic of video-stage, that is the book resting on the shelf. But the book is a copy


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Moreover, some decades after the work of Magritte, some contemporary

artists continued to research about identification-through-images. In the

first sequence of his experimental video Three Transitions (1973), by the

American artist Peter Campus, we see the artist from behind who is doingsomething against a wall. Slowly his hands open a hole in the wall, but,

thanks to a double shooting and a double simultaneous projection, the gap

opens just inside his own image. The resulting effect is that Campus offers

a sort of sequel of Magrittes painting - showing us what happens next

to the man facing his own back. After the subject has looked to himself in

reverse, what happens? He tries to go beyond himself- and that is exactly

what Campus does.8

What consequences should be drawn from these examples? Once out of the

Video Corridor, the reality could appears in front of our eyes again the

same as before. But now we have explicitly seen (so we know really

well!) that is not so. If we have experienced ourselves equal-to-us but also

different-from-ourselves, it must go the same way for everything. It 's like

if all the reality, as considered from the point of view of the video-stage,

took on this strange Un-heimlich, un-familiar, not-belonging-to-me, andtherefore deeply disturbing, traumatic, quality. Thus, its not easy to

of Les Adventures de Gordon Pym by E. A. Poe, that is to say a nineteenth-century novel, which is

reflected "correctly" in the mirror, that is inverted/reversed. The correct interpretation of this paradox inthe paradox is that the ancient reproducibility (for example, by the means of printing) is obsolete to test

this mirror / screen, which instead reflects "correctly" the modern mans image.

8A literary parallel of Campus video is certainly the story The Other(El Otro) by J.L. Borges, in which

the protagonist (a seventy Borges, since the story is set in the 60's and appeared in 1975) meets himselfyounger ("each of us two is thinking that he is the dreamer himself "). Visually, the sense of Unheimlich

was represented in cinema in the opening scene of the masterpiece Wild Strawberries by Ingmar Bergman

(1959) - where the old Professor Isak Borg meets himself in the coffin and hes gripped from the hand ofhimself dead (clearly not-completely-dead).


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overcome this kind of feeling because, once come back to our houses,

instead of feeling at home in front of a fireplace, we first turn on a monitor

where a video-stages reality is already flowing...

Therefore, we are inside the video-stage even when we are away from theVideo Corridor in other words, the artworks here simply made it clear the

mechanism, the device we would say, which was still somewhat latent,

although already identified by many different thinkers. We couldn't avoid

this video-stage which, instead of helping us to identify ourselves, makes

us different - not from what is different from us, but from ourselves. In

other words, the video stage simply doesnt make us different from how we

are it shows ussimultaneously identical-and-different; in a word, it shows

us (and makes us) dis-identicalfrom ourselves.

Identity was the most fundamental concept of the classical logic, and

therefore the beginning of every possible discourse about the subject and

the world, - a concept so basic that we unconsciously take it for granted,

and where we place a blind (it must be said) trust. But today, one should

say that the video-stage requires the reversalof this concept; it suffice to

open your eyes to realize beyond any doubt, that dis-identity is nowadays

the general logical and ontological rule.

Now: when dis-identity was born? Is it an anthropological constant? Or

does it depend on the increasing social presence of the media? Certainly,we may conclude that all this depends on the spread of the mass media in

our lives. At the beginning there was telegraph, which could transmit news

from once insurmountable distances; then photography, that captured a real

moment with an intensity never seen before; then cinema, which seemed to

give back the breath of life itself; then radio, and television, able to

"distribute realities at home" (as told Paul Valry9) - and finally new media,

such as worldwide web and the social networks, which make personal the

once mass-mediated relationships... It seems clear that media have

gradually conquered almost every part of our lives. However, one couldargue that this long story is a historical event, and its not an inevitable

necessity - it is an open-ended story, and, if we want, we could certainly

change it.

It would be proper to raise this objection - which has undoubted strength

points, as the one to approach media from a historical perspective.

Unfortunately, as we shall see (infra, part 2., 1), the media are a

historical phenomenon, which, however, change the historys interpretation

9P. Valry,La conqute de lubiquit [1928], in Oeuvres, dition tablie et annote par J. Hytier, 2 voll.,

Gallimard, Paris 1960, vol. II, p. 1285.


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- as, in general, tend to change the phenomena in which they take part. The

real question is that, once entered the world as its duplication, media are no

longer distinguishable from it - and this dialectical un-distinction, which is

called obversion, seems a destiny inscribed in the reflective faculty of

consciousness - a phenomenon that, however historically manifested, is inits essence also meta-historical.

The proof of this argument is that, every time you tried to cancel or at least

to stop temporarily the medial advance, the remedy was worse than the

disease. Already in 1859, when French intellectuals, Baudelaire for

example, tried to exclude a technical medium as photography from the

category of fine arts, obtained as a result, a few years later, that all the

greatest painters used photography to realize their paintings, and, this

explains how today the photography is so widespread as an independent

means of communication10. Later, in a different context, political

dictatorships like fascism used largely the means of mass communication

(like radio and cinema) to influence the masses, restricting their use almost

for propaganda purposes. But, as noted by Pasolini in the '70s, that

propaganda was very little compared to the seductive power of persuasion

fielded from television after World War II. Just trying to stop this power,

the whole governments, as the United States, took the decision to limit the

spread of the medial news, as happened during the first Gulf War (1990-

91), to avoid the debcle of Vietnam (in part, it was told, due to the

presence of television reporters on the battlefield). The result was that theofficial news were controlled much more carefully, but the level of visible

images grew exponentially, until to put miniature cameras on the bombs

heads (see below part 3, 5).11 In the second Gulf War, then, where

reporters and journalists were more controlled, unpredicted event occurred

on the front of visuality: the same soldiers became themselves unexpected

war reporters, using technologies that developed in the meantime (mobile

phones with photos and camera inside), and allowing to see live not only

what happened on the battlefield, but also what was meant to remain

hidden in the rear (and that even during the war in Vietnam was impossibleto see), like the torture of prisoners in the Abu Ghraibs jail.

Everything seems to say that, although the media as technical devices and

as social phenomena take place within the historical process, is not enough

10Cfr. J. Gimpel, Contre lart et les artistes, Seuil, Paris, 1968. Cf. also L. Shiner, The Invention of Art,

200111

Cf. on this point the researches of N. Mirzoeff, about the increasing of the so-called visual culture (the problem

with the visual studies is, however, that usually they overlook the dialectical/paradoxical structure of vision in thevideo-stage era, privileging sociological keys of interpretation; in other words, the field of studies is new, the

means of research, old).


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to trace their history to understand the underlying structure that makes them

possible. What shall be done is rather an effort to delineate the conceptual

mechanism which imposes on our lives that double inversion (i.e. that

obversion) whose Video Corridoris the most perfect description.

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OBVERSION Marco Senaldi