L'EMERGERE DEL POSSIBILE: WATCH TOWER PUBBLICATO DA FRANCESCA RUSALEN Translated by Cristina Ionica
It is starting in the ‘60s that a pragmatic theory of communication starts to develop (Austin and Searle’s theories of speech acts, Watzlawick and his Palo Alto school) – one characterized by a holistic notion of communication, touching on all of its component aspects. If some axioms of this theory have entered common usage (such as the most basic one, “it is impossible not to communicate”), it is in part because communication has been acknowledged as dependent primarily on its means of transmission, as seen in mass media, but also in a communication medium such as the family (see the theory of the double bind). Such axioms have become a cue, and at times a red flag for discussions concerning the effect of certain forms of “power” over collective or mass consciousness, and therefore also for the possibility that some forms of communication might function as “resistance to power” in various ways. If, on the one hand, pragmatic theories were meant to serve other purposes than turning into slogans, on the other hand, it would be naïve not to take into account their conceptual origins and the various ramifications such an analysis of communication acts can have. Theories of human communication are always just one step away from claiming that they have universal applicability, even in non-human contexts. In saying this, I do not mean to argue in favour or against specific theories, but rather to emphasize these theories’ potential to allow us to conceive of global relations in a non-Eurocentric, non-Occident-focused way. In the years 2000, we find ourselves at a point where slogans seem to serve us more than focused study. Within this context, Charlie Egleston’s short film Watch Tower (Canada, 2017, 23’) strikes me as an attempt to bypass rhetoric and engage directly and meaningfully with the real. The fact that communication consists mostly of linguistic acts does not mean that it can be defined simply as an abstraction. Precisely for this reason, Egleston reveals the pragmatic aspects of communication not by equating it to action, but by generating what we could refer to as an “ecological” perspective, as he represents the environment in its dual nature: ecological impact and the ecology of the communication system itself. In this way, communication is not connected solely to action, since action is not solely defined as non-verbal. Instead, communication comes across as a daily experienced practice. What Egleston, then, seems to do is pose the question from a different angle, one purely cinematographic, which incorporates, through its very nature, this ecological aspect – that is, he tries to capture the complexity of the question within the image, which is then not understood as a copy of reality and legitimated in this basic mode, but rather proposed as a contemplation of form and content that does not involve separating the two, which then allows the film to emphasize the vital perceptual role of the image. Perception is classically defined as influenced by the object being perceived on the one hand, and by the subject who perceives it on the other. This dual understanding of reality does not conflict with holistic communication theories, as they are both based on a conceptualization of transcendence that does not disappear at the level of theorized equivalences such as “to communicate is to act” or “any act of communication is an action.” These equivalences do not truly threaten dualistic conceptualizations, as they do not threaten oppositional pairs such as abstract and concrete – they lack the “ecological,” or rather, immanent perspective offered by certain forms of cinema, as I am about to explain. Watch Tower offers itself as a short film characterized by a meditative approach that does not simply originate in a subject (director and then spectator) oriented towards an object (the environment, subsequently transformed into film) – and that is because the film avoids the classical subject-object dualisms by preventing any obvious transcendental dimension from becoming apparent. The film does not offer a subject that might organize the real through a subjective act of seeing and perception (despite any mutual influences naturally established between subject and object), a subject that might place itself on a level superior to the phenomenological plane (of the real), in the way some films claiming to be contemplative do – films that, through certain structures such as the narrative, bring back into the picture a transcendental dimension that forces the spectator into a predefined position. The meditative approach achieved in Watch Tower encourages differentiation rather than identification, without creating the types of differences that would sustain the generation of hierarchies. In this way, this short film is not a demonstration of the clash between assertions of power and modalities to resist them, but rather a visualization practice, a practice of seeing in an immanent sense.
It is starting in the ‘60s that a pragmatic theory of communication starts to develop (Austin and Searle’s theories of speech acts, Watzlawick and his Palo Alto school) – one characterized by a holistic notion of communication, touching on all of its component aspects. If some axioms of this theory have entered common usage (such as the most basic one, “it is impossible not to communicate”), it is in part because communication has been acknowledged as dependent primarily on its means of transmission, as seen in mass media, but also in a communication medium such as the family (see the theory of the double bind). Such axioms have become a cue, and at times a red flag for discussions concerning the effect of certain forms of “power” over collective or mass consciousness, and therefore also for the possibility that some forms of communication might function as “resistance to power” in various ways. If, on the one hand, pragmatic theories were meant to serve other purposes than turning into slogans, on the other hand, it would be naïve not to take into account their conceptual origins and the various ramifications such an analysis of communication acts can have. Theories of human communication are always just one step away from claiming that they have universal applicability, even in non-human contexts. In saying this, I do not mean to argue in favour or against specific theories, but rather to emphasize these theories’ potential to allow us to conceive of global relations in a non-Eurocentric, non-Occident-focused way. In the years 2000, we find ourselves at a point where slogans seem to serve us more than focused study. Within this context, Charlie Egleston’s short film Watch Tower (Canada, 2017, 23’) strikes me as an attempt to bypass rhetoric and engage directly and meaningfully with the real. The fact that communication consists mostly of linguistic acts does not mean that it can be defined simply as an abstraction. Precisely for this reason, Egleston reveals the pragmatic aspects of communication not by equating it to action, but by generating what we could refer to as an “ecological” perspective, as he represents the environment in its dual nature: ecological impact and the ecology of the communication system itself. In this way, communication is not connected solely to action, since action is not solely defined as non-verbal. Instead, communication comes across as a daily experienced practice. What Egleston, then, seems to do is pose the question from a different angle, one purely cinematographic, which incorporates, through its very nature, this ecological aspect – that is, he tries to capture the complexity of the question within the image, which is then not understood as a copy of reality and legitimated in this basic mode, but rather proposed as a contemplation of form and content that does not involve separating the two, which then allows the film to emphasize the vital perceptual role of the image. Perception is classically defined as influenced by the object being perceived on the one hand, and by the subject who perceives it on the other. This dual understanding of reality does not conflict with holistic communication theories, as they are both based on a conceptualization of transcendence that does not disappear at the level of theorized equivalences such as “to communicate is to act” or “any act of communication is an action.” These equivalences do not truly threaten dualistic conceptualizations, as they do not threaten oppositional pairs such as abstract and concrete – they lack the “ecological,” or rather, immanent perspective offered by certain forms of cinema, as I am about to explain. Watch Tower offers itself as a short film characterized by a meditative approach that does not simply originate in a subject (director and then spectator) oriented towards an object (the environment, subsequently transformed into film) – and that is because the film avoids the classical subject-object dualisms by preventing any obvious transcendental dimension from becoming apparent. The film does not offer a subject that might organize the real through a subjective act of seeing and perception (despite any mutual influences naturally established between subject and object), a subject that might place itself on a level superior to the phenomenological plane (of the real), in the way some films claiming to be contemplative do – films that, through certain structures such as the narrative, bring back into the picture a transcendental dimension that forces the spectator into a predefined position. The meditative approach achieved in Watch Tower encourages differentiation rather than identification, without creating the types of differences that would sustain the generation of hierarchies. In this way, this short film is not a demonstration of the clash between assertions of power and modalities to resist them, but rather a visualization practice, a practice of seeing in an immanent sense.