Vinicius Navarro
There is a story about documenting personal experiences in the Internet age that goes like this: widespread access to recording technologies and distribution networks has spawned an unprecedented number of personal videos whose circulation overlaps with the rhythms of ordinary life. In these new contexts, playing oneself for the camera, as Thomas Waugh once described documentary performance, becomes a sort of lingua franca.1Personal videos, not surprisingly, often focus on the performance itself. Against the backdrop of uneventful situations and unpretentious settings, they have little to show other than the encounter between the player and the camera—the act of self-presentation. Much of this material, it is often assumed, is viewed by only a small number of people and can therefore be dismissed as solipsistic and inconsequential. Similarly, online performances end up appearing as a sort of compromise, a technological imposition that both facilitates and trivializes contact with others.
If we draw on the long history of performance in nonfiction cinema, however, there might be another way to tell the story of online personal videos. Documentaries have traditionally relied on the “contribution” of real-life subjects, and the practice of soliciting a performance from social actors goes back to the silent period. Now, as then, the performances create instances in which the referential world “erupts” onto the screen, or rather is summoned by the subjects in the film. Online personal videos are likely to revisit some of these practices, in particular the presentational modes of address associated with experimental nonfictional works. This is a kind of performance that resists narrative finality and rhetorical argumentation, and that is best described not as acting but as presentation or display. At its most basic, performing is a way of making oneself present to others. More than solipsism, it suggests a desire for conversation and exchange, which aligns the act of self-presentation with the contingencies of lived reality.
In what follows, I look at self-presentation as a form of intervention and a mode of address in nonfiction. The questions I ask are partly inspired by documentary scholarship; they involve issues of referentiality and rhetoric and invite us to think about the relations between individual performances and collective experiences. The examples I explore, however, assume a broad understanding of nonfiction. While I have no intention of sampling a large variety of performances, I do turn both to film and new media in an effort to examine how practices associated with documentary and experimental cinema are currently used in Internet videos. Underlying my claims is the belief that performance plays an increasingly significant role in the expanding universe of contemporary nonfiction media.
Performance, Nonfiction Film, and the Presentation of Self.
Paul Arthur describes the portrait film, a type of film with roots in early cinema but which found more consistent expression in the 1960s, as one of “the most ‘literal’ or nonrhetorical of filmic genres.”2 Portraits privilege fairly uneventful scenes, in which complex structures are dropped in favor of an experience that seems to unfold in the present. Indeed, the very conventions of the genre, Arthur goes on to explain, conspire to create such experience: “Longer takes and relatively straightforward handling of the camera are preferred over the use of montage … [while] temporal arrangements of shots or scenes abjure dramatic development or rhythmic articulation.”3 Display, in other words, takes precedence over plotting. Lacking “proper” articulation, portrait films rely on the pose struck by the “sitter” to produce the subject of the film. The camera does not so much document a situation that exists before the moment of filming as it helps create that situation through the exchanges with the performing subject. Some of the examples used by Arthur are drawn, appropriately, from the cinema of Andy Warhol. Warhol’s interest in portraiture exceeded his filmmaking activities; it involved media as different as painting, photography, and television.4 Yet, starting with his early works, cinema provided the most direct response to an artistic practice centered on the notion of performance. Several of Warhol’s films feature only a subject performing ordinary—albeit studied—actions. Awkward monologues and unrehearsed exchanges substitute for coherent plotlines, thus leaving us with the unstructured pleasures of digression and spectacle. The fictional world, when it exists at all, functions as a sort of excuse for the performance. At their most literal, Warhol’s portrait films simply expose the presentational quality of this act; they turn the performance into the only event available for recording. The screen tests shot in the midsixties, for instance, show a nearly static subject looking at the camera for approximately three minutes. We have no choice but to “look back” and confront the performance for what it is, a pose.
One way to think about how the pose produces that subject for the camera is to consider an analogy with the use of deictic pronouns such as Iand this or adverbs such as here and now. Deictics are performative in the sense that they are meaningful only insofar as they are actualized in concrete situations. I, for example, can designate only “the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I,” as Emile Benveniste has claimed in a formulation that suggestively situates language in the realm of performance.5 Deictics also figure prominently as indexes in Charles Sanders Peirce’s taxonomy of signs. An index, according to him, “signifies its object solely by virtue of being really connected with it.”6 The word this, to use another example, simply indicates the presence of the particular object to which it is connected. Closeness to “the present reality of speech” is thus what separates deictics from words whose relation to actual objects is established mainly by convention.7Indexicality is also, of course, what distinguishes an impression (such as a photographic record) from a drawing, although in this case the indexical connection is of a different nature. As Mary Ann Doane notes, there is a difference between the index as trace (a footprint) and the index as deixis (a demonstrative pronoun): “As photographic trace or impression, the index seems to harbor a fullness, an excessiveness of detail… . Yet, the index as deixis implies an emptiness, a hollowness that can only be filled in specific, contingent, always mutating situations.”8 By analogy, then, we may claim a special relation between presentational performances and lived reality, and we may say that the performance as well is part of a contingent, mutating situation.
That situation is, of course, the profilmic exchange with the camera. As a reaction to being filmed, the performance establishes the presence of the performing subject by directing our attention to that subject.9 The gesture has double implications since it involves not one but two subjects. The figure on the screen is there only insofar as its presence anticipates our own. More than producing the subject we see, the performance thus signals our complicity with it and calls for a different engagement with the film, one that shifts attention from the presumed fullness of the record to the contingencies of the situation presented to the camera.
In this context, a film like Jia Zhangke’s hybrid documentary 24 City (2008) is especially noteworthy because it highlights the partial autonomy of these situations. 24 City examines the closing of a state-owned factory in Chengdu, China, as a result of changing socioeconomic conditions. Besides interviewing former workers and local residents (some of them played by professional actors), Jia has some of his subjects pose practically still, staring at the camera. The shots last just a few seconds, but their insertion between testimonies and scenes of everyday life changes our viewing experience. The images briefly interrupt the flow of story information, inviting us to consider not the alleged certainty of the reality documented but the process of documenting— not what has already taken place but what might still happen. Both disarmingly literal and highly contrived, the shots reinforce the closeness between the presentational act and the situation recorded by the camera, and they force us to look for the phenomenal-world in the artifice of the pose.10
The special status of these performances—they elude narrative expectations and medium-specific requirements—calls for consideration of what role presentational acts may play in an expanded realm of nonfiction, a realm that includes but is not limited to documentary or experimental film. Along with the ease with which images of oneself can be generated, it is this relative autonomy that makes the performances adaptable to new media environments. To video bloggers and other Internet users, the attractiveness lies as well in the potential to address other online performers, to produce new forms of exchange so that presence and performance remain attached to the possibility of conversation and connection.
Connectivity and Engagement.
In some ways, the Internet seems destined to maximize the promises of the presentational performance. A preference for display over rhetorical or narrative complexity is common to a wide range of online experiences. In lieu of linearity and cohesiveness, the Internet offers multidirectional forms of exchange that amplify the role of contingency in the production and circulation of information. As a result, closeness to actual, lived experience also seems more pronounced. All this suggests parallels with examples drawn from nonfiction filmmaking, along with a generally optimistic belief in the expanded significance of presentational forms of address. Yet a different assessment of online experiences is also possible. Excessive options and overabundant information can lead to confusion and dispersal rather than connection. Exposure does not always generate conversation, and there is no guarantee that access to the Internet produces effective, consequential, or satisfying forms of engagement. From this perspective, the expectations associated with the act of self-presentation are likely to be undermined, and the performing subject may “get lost” amid other indifferent players.
It is precisely this gap between connectivity and effective engagement, however, that makes the concept of performance especially relevant in this context. As the media artist Natalie Bookchin suggests, performative practices like video blogging render apparent both the failure and the need to engage with others: “Our equivalent of a public forum,” she says, “is a person alone in his or her room speaking to a computer screen. But … we are not alone in our need for public conversation and debate about the circumstances of our lives.”11 Bookchin’s own work tackles this contradiction by “documenting” the actions of individuals who use the Internet to share particular aspects of their lives. Bookchin neither shoots nor posts the videos. Instead, she collects and arranges them so as to create ensembles of individual voices that convey a sense of shared experience. In Mass Ornament, an installation from 2009, she shows clips of amateur dancers—mostly female—in their bedrooms, performing sexually insinuating movements that seem reminiscent of music videos. Bookchin displays the clips side by side, producing a sort of choreography that, as the artist herself has noted, brings to mind a post-Fordist experimental version of a Tiller Girls or Busby Berkeley dance number.12 In another work from that same year, a series of installations titled Testament, she creates “choruses of vloggers [video bloggers] who comment on actions that have taken place off screen.”13 In one group, the subjects describe the experience of losing their jobs. In a different set, the vloggers comment on taking prescription medications. However distinct, the voices of the individuals in each group tend to echo one another, revealing a desire for collective engagement that might not have been fulfilled in the “vlogosphere” from which the pieces were taken.
Bookchin’s installations revisit the idea of performance as an everyday social practice—” the presentation of self in everyday life,” to borrow the title of Erving Goffman’s classic book.14 However, the situations that inspired Goffman to talk about social performance, the exchanges in which individuals try to impress one another, seem compromised by the potential dispersal of the individual vloggers. In this new scenario, the performing subjects, not surprisingly, end up substituting media imageries for social conventions, as is the case with the solo dances from Mass Ornament. Sociality is concretized, in part, through the hand of an outsider—that is to say, through the artist’s intervention. “I take many original ‘I’s and make them into ‘we’s,” explains Bookchin.15
Why, then, focus on the performances of anonymous, yet overexposed subjects? And what can we expect from these performances? To be sure, Bookchin’s work does not really displace the roles of the individual performers. Rather, she seems to explore capabilities already found in the presentational acts. While the installations do involve a high degree of editorial intervention, the performances themselves embody a dialogical quality that makes it possible to create connections. In contrast with “properly” articulated narratives, presentational acts seem inherently “incomplete” and therefore open to addition and change. This sense of incompletion—the lack of finality or direction—accounts in part for the propensity to fragmentation and dispersal of content among Internet users. But it also enables the kind of exchanges visualized in Bookchin’s work.16 Online performances, such as those that we find in video blogs, may be thought of in relation to what Peter Lunenfeld calls “the unfinished business” of digital media. “To celebrate the unfinished in this era of digital ubiquity,” he argues, “is to laud process rather than goal—to open up a third thing that is not a resolution, but rather a state of suspension.”17 Lunenfeld’s claim recalls standard definitions of performance, which similarly conjure up the notions of process and contingency. It also remedies what could elsewhere look like a limitation. “Suspension,” as he sees it, does not mean failure or disruption; it is, instead, a call for subsequent action.
Because they are associated with generative processes, performances shift focus from the network as a means of exchange to the actual relations between players. They allow us to see not simply the potential for dialogue but also the ways through which that potential is realized. Performances produce concrete effects. Insofar as they are part of contingent, mutating situations, they are likely to do more than simply reiterate “communicativity as such.”18 The unfinished business of the performance, to paraphrase Lunenfeld, propels us beyond mere connectivity toward actual engagement and connection with others. Still, since these are concrete interventions rather than predictable abstractions, the performances may also reveal the limits of that engagement. Not all performances are equal. Not all are equally capable of generating meaningful connections. Some simply fail to turn exposure into dialogue. In this sense, the performances make palpable the unequal distribution of attention that is typical of the network. The question to consider, then, may be not just how but also when the act of self-presentation serves as a form of engagement with others.
In his discussion of cinematic portraits from the 1960s, Paul Arthur claims that the films “served as a democratic forum for the display of alternative lifestyles and social diversity.”19 The presentational form common to several of these works is clearly noted in his statement. It is the display of diversity that is offered to the viewer. Performance and visibility are conjoined in the films, and this visibility—the screen presence of groups or individuals presumably banned from less “democratic forums”—gives the portraits their political valence. The performances, in other words, render concrete the oppositional attitude that inspires the making of the films, usually by aligning social and aesthetic values. It is a different kind of visibility that emerges from video blogs and other performative uses of new media, where the performances are not as easily bound up with specific cultural contexts. Gone is the certainty of anchoring the act of display in clearly defined institutional or political practices. And gone is the comfort of stable communities. Visibility is now related to the pursuit of ever-changing connections. What remains in the picture is the performance itself, revived as a form of media intervention in ordinary life.
Vinicius Navarro is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the coauthor (with Louise Spence) of Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (Rutgers University Press, 2011).
Footnotes
1. Thomas Waugh, “‘Acting to Play Oneself’: Notes on Performance in Documentary,” in Making Visible the Invisible: An Anthology of Original Essays on Film Acting, ed. Carole Zucker (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990).
2. Paul Arthur, “No Longer Absolute: Portraiture in American Avant-Garde and Documentary Films of the Sixties,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 95.
3. Ibid.
4. On portraiture in Warhol’s oeuvre, see About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits, ed. Nicholas Baume (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
5. Emile Benveniste, “The Nature of Pronouns” (1971), Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1997), 218.
6. Charles Sanders Peirce, “On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (1867-1893), ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 226.
7. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 93.
8. Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction,” Differences 18, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 2.
9. According to Peirce, the index “forces the mind to attend to [a particular] object.” Peirce, “Of Reasoning in General,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (1893-1913), ed. the Peirce Edition Project. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 14.
10. In one of the shots, the filmmaker has a professional actor stand still before the camera, repeating a pose we have seen in other subjects. The shot appears shortly after the actor has performed lines from a scripted interview. Revealingly, the literalness of the pose tests the limits of what might otherwise be recognized as fictional acting. Standing motionless before the camera, the actor can do little more than play himself.
11. Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation with Blake Stimson,” Rhizome, March 9, 2011, http://rhizome.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blakesti (first published in Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles, eds., Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images beyond YouTube [Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011], 306-317).
12. Natalie Bookchin and Carolyn Kane, “Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin,” Rhizome, May 27, 2009, http://rhizome.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/editorial/2009/may/27/dancing-machines.
13. Bookchin and Stimson, “Out in Public.”
14. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959).
15. In some ways, her role seems akin to that of an editor, archivist, or ethnographer, one who puts together what might otherwise elude our desire for organization. See Bookchin and Stimson, “Out in Public.”
16. The association between incompleteness and dialogue echoes Bakhtin’s notion of unfinalizability: “Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication.” Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 91.
17. Peter Lunenfeld, “Unfinished Business,” in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, ed. Lunenfeld (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 8.
18. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 88.
19. Arthur, “No Longer Absolute,” 98.
