Getting Close to Machine and Method
First, let us return to the haptic and virtual contact: our “contact” with the world or our experience of life has always been through “the prism of culture” and thus virtual, states Boellstorff in preparing the ground for his own ethnography of the digital world of Second Life (Boellstorff 2008, 5). “Human being has always been virtual being” and technologies, especially visual ones, intensify this virtual being through reconfiguration and re-presenting our ways of knowing ourselves (Ibid.). But the contact is also sensuously embodied in an anthropology that seeks “to escape the visualist paradigm by rediscovering the full range of human senses” (Grimshaw 2001, 6). This dual form of contact underscores the interplay of sensual bodies and embodied media. Immediate, sensory experience requires us to reground media within the contact zone of the body. To invoke digital media is perhaps to conjure people seamlessly flowing through layered modes of technologized interactions while seemingly disconnected from “reality,” documenting everyday minutiae through smart phones, and crafting digital identities through channels as public as YouTube to the more selective tunings of social media and texting. Envisioned this way, media is expansively utopic with a global universality and requires regrounding in lived, varied experience, at the level where bodies can be altered, re-imagined and transformed. The human in contact with the machine “provincializes” media and in such proximity to the body “allows us to consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world” (Coleman 2010, 3).
For Rouch, the tripod’s loss liberated him to form new, generative contacts with the camera and his subjects, to experience the sensuousness of space and an ecstatic bond with his recording machine. The method here is first one of loss or destruction that produces an intimate effect of incorporation. The camera comes into close contact with bodies, through physical proximity and as an extension and alteration of the ocular sense and the physiological apparatus of the human that supports it—the camera takes on the motion of the head and the body and amplifies the eye. As the body is transformed through incorporation so to is the machine, resulting in affective transformation. Rouch describes walking with the camera, “trying to make it as alive as the people it is filming” and in so doing he comes under the spell of the camera where “he is no longer himself”—a newly mediated subject possessed in a ciné-trance (Rouch 2003, 39). As the camera takes on more liveliness, it requires not only more living energy from the anthropologist but more of what Guattari terms “abstract human vitality” (1995, 36). The vocabulary of the occult retains its potent capacity in analogy for us as it initially did for Rouch, but we most vividly see the machine’s magic in Marx’s own otherworldly assertion when channeling Goethe:
Eliding the subjectivities of work in field and factory, the substitution of “anthropology” for “capital” reveals a figure of double possession: the good luck of Rouch’s lost tripod signals not a freedom from the transfixing power of machinic discipline but the uncanny mobilization of the camera as vector for a new ethnographic method of close but mediated contact. Changing the way he sees through the camera produces a state in which “[Rouch] is no longer himself” and is “absorbed” by the ethnographic camera he puts into motion. Rouch’s possession by the camera transpires as the camera seems to objectively “absorb” the truth of the subject—a point we will return to in considering Margaret Mead’s own experiments with visual ethnography. Rouch’s ciné-trance and Marx’s “coarsely sensuous form” of labor’s absorption describe the affective power of close contact with machines and the methodological and disciplinary regimes which structure the relations that emerge from these contacts. The camera, as the ethnographic medium, alters the researcher, compels new movement through space, and intercedes with the field site on behalf of the researcher, rearranging the modes of contact between Rouch and his informants. Anthropology, as a site of knowledge and a method of knowing, takes up the labor of those before the camera and transfigures them into subjects and their active energy into the recorded matter of raw academic data. But this process of transformative possession depends on the researcher embodying the form and techniques of anthropology.
The camera, as an authority of scientific sight and authoring of ethnographic vision, absorbs the anthropologist into itself and in turn takes on a living presence able to reconfigure social relations. This phrasing gives the camera a mystical power, or perhaps simply the unwarranted force of technological determinism. But I draw attention here to the camera as part of an assemblage of knowledge production where the anthropologist is already situated as a recording apparatus with alert ear and ready notebook but apparently and inexplicably never under the spell of the keyboard. Among anthropologists I know, other substances are necessary to produce an adequate “typo-trance” that might feebly approximate Rouch’s ciné-trance and this state hardly requires anything more than the writer’s familiar panoply of sideboard chemicals, on the rocks or rolled. What is it about the ethnographic camera that channels at once anthropology’s disciplinary power, then strange enactments of embodied techniques, hazing back into a seductive aesthetic and intellectual form of the “imponderabilia of actual life” gotten at close range (Malinowski 2002, 16)? There are the countless small details of sound and sight clouding the celluloid, the videotape, the digital SC card, so effortlessly with just a sweep of the lens across a scene, across many scenes, in long, uninterrupted takes. Perhaps it is not simply the pull of the photogenic (and our distrust of what becomes comely once taken in through the apparatus) but also the charm of the camera, the way we’re taken in—the way it touches us. Fatimah Toby Rony proposes the idea of conversion as both mode and discourse in the filmic encounter between anthropological science and Native Other. Conversion, she argues, is “both a crossing over and a translation through various different visual media” she writes (Rony 2006, 7). She is especially concerned with the process whereby Western procedures of truth-telling convert the experience, performance and beliefs of the Other into purportedly objective records, such as the films made by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson of Balinese trance. In this converting act, she says, “the Native is often seen as the subjugated Silenced one, and the European, who leaves behind his autobiographies, books, photographs, films, etc. is the Voice” (Ibid.). Rouch’s account of his own conversion by the camera describes a newly charged cyborg Other, taken in through a socially complex trance—between himself, the camera, and those engaging knowingly in front of the lens. So there is a question then of this conversion, to double Rony’s conceptualization back on itself, where the possessive power of anthropology and doing “good work” in the field is repossessed by the means of its own production, an already delicate alchemy of the camera and those that perform for it.
Anthropology, despite its traditional insistence on the supremacy of written text, is not immune to the energy of the visual field or the charm of its machines with their capacity for conversion, despite some suspicion. Perhaps anthropology becomes even more receptive to the camera as it depends anxiously upon its own agents in the field to literally become recording (writing) machines for its elusive data (those who remain Rimbaud’s “pen hands”) (Rouch 2003, 43). The compulsion, or disciplinary need, to generate records, documents, and images that are “true” and thick with raw veracity saturates the bodies of anthropologists such that they might say, echoing the title of Jean Jackson’s famous essay, “I am a fieldnote.” Surely the ontological calm of embodying the alchemy of anthropology’s revered fieldnote comes as the labor of the senses is drawn through the discipline’s membrane to become text as a “meditative vehicle for a transcendence of time and place [that is] a transcendental return to time and place” (Tyler 1986, 129). Writing becomes the site of the out of body experience: ethnography's power exercised in the writing out of a sensory distillation of the field replete with its putative subjects. The writing body writes out the lived knowledge in the most ideal state of anthropological possession “as though…by love possessed.” The writing machine puts back together a disordered or fragmented world and recollects the body bursting with data, albeit as “an object of meditation that provokes a rupture with the commonsense world and evokes an aesthetic integration whose therapeutic effect is worked out in the restoration of the commonsense world” (Ibid., 134). Ethnographic writing is, Tyler argues, an enigmatic, occult document “to read not with the eyes alone” to which the vision machine—the ethnographic camera—responds, intervening in this corpographic alchemy with a challenge to and enhancement of the body (Ibid., 136). In so doing, it unsettles my appropriation of Marx: labor, I maintain, is transmogrified into product through the camera—the unedited video or film is a raw ethnographic text that is already an evocative visual representation of rhythm and proximity and thus exerts “a kind of magical power over appearances” that Tyler eschews (131). However, the body-camera assemblage is never absorbed totally into the disciplinary spell of even a richly ambiguous post-modern anthropology. There is still the method of trance to consider and the effects of conversion.
The entranced ethnographic camera does not put the world of the field site into the soft focus one might imagine corresponds to something as sensuous as a ciné-trance. Instead Rouch desires a paradoxical proximity again shaded by the magic of machines: “We have become invisible by being close and by having an extremely wide view [through the use of wide angle lenses]; that’s the model of disorder” (Rouch 2003, 155). Rouch describes a technique of sharp intimacy confounded by the eclipse of the human-operator within the camera assemblage. However, though he may sense himself to be invisible while seeing everything, his claims to “disorder” only point to the collapsed distances between himself and his subjects. He is sharing the space with his subjects, moving with them, and in his formulation of visual machines in intimate contact, he is forced to follow the flow of information emanating from his subjects and to improvise within his method to comprehend visually and haptically what is happening in the field around him. Ethnographic writing “…uses everyday speech to suggest what is ineffable, not through abstraction, but by means of the concrete” but is continually at risk of converting the subject or native Other into a concrete, if uneasily fragmented object under the sign of anthropological authorship (Tyler 1986, 136). The ethnographic camera is not entirely exempt from this dilemma, yet it operates within the contingency of the visual vernacular, moving within the everyday as an entranced and entrancing scopic machine, capable of converting the familiar into something that seems truer but somehow transfigured into a magical alterity. The field site is literally re-presented through the camera’s gaze but Rouch’s method afflict the truths the camera might claim with disorders of movement, especially amidst the dizzying, mediated vortex created when the field site itself is a cultural space contingent on mobilizing cameras and bodies in front of them.
For Rouch, the tripod’s loss liberated him to form new, generative contacts with the camera and his subjects, to experience the sensuousness of space and an ecstatic bond with his recording machine. The method here is first one of loss or destruction that produces an intimate effect of incorporation. The camera comes into close contact with bodies, through physical proximity and as an extension and alteration of the ocular sense and the physiological apparatus of the human that supports it—the camera takes on the motion of the head and the body and amplifies the eye. As the body is transformed through incorporation so to is the machine, resulting in affective transformation. Rouch describes walking with the camera, “trying to make it as alive as the people it is filming” and in so doing he comes under the spell of the camera where “he is no longer himself”—a newly mediated subject possessed in a ciné-trance (Rouch 2003, 39). As the camera takes on more liveliness, it requires not only more living energy from the anthropologist but more of what Guattari terms “abstract human vitality” (1995, 36). The vocabulary of the occult retains its potent capacity in analogy for us as it initially did for Rouch, but we most vividly see the machine’s magic in Marx’s own otherworldly assertion when channeling Goethe:
What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself – ‘as though its body were by love possessed’ (Marx 1973, 704).
Eliding the subjectivities of work in field and factory, the substitution of “anthropology” for “capital” reveals a figure of double possession: the good luck of Rouch’s lost tripod signals not a freedom from the transfixing power of machinic discipline but the uncanny mobilization of the camera as vector for a new ethnographic method of close but mediated contact. Changing the way he sees through the camera produces a state in which “[Rouch] is no longer himself” and is “absorbed” by the ethnographic camera he puts into motion. Rouch’s possession by the camera transpires as the camera seems to objectively “absorb” the truth of the subject—a point we will return to in considering Margaret Mead’s own experiments with visual ethnography. Rouch’s ciné-trance and Marx’s “coarsely sensuous form” of labor’s absorption describe the affective power of close contact with machines and the methodological and disciplinary regimes which structure the relations that emerge from these contacts. The camera, as the ethnographic medium, alters the researcher, compels new movement through space, and intercedes with the field site on behalf of the researcher, rearranging the modes of contact between Rouch and his informants. Anthropology, as a site of knowledge and a method of knowing, takes up the labor of those before the camera and transfigures them into subjects and their active energy into the recorded matter of raw academic data. But this process of transformative possession depends on the researcher embodying the form and techniques of anthropology.
The camera, as an authority of scientific sight and authoring of ethnographic vision, absorbs the anthropologist into itself and in turn takes on a living presence able to reconfigure social relations. This phrasing gives the camera a mystical power, or perhaps simply the unwarranted force of technological determinism. But I draw attention here to the camera as part of an assemblage of knowledge production where the anthropologist is already situated as a recording apparatus with alert ear and ready notebook but apparently and inexplicably never under the spell of the keyboard. Among anthropologists I know, other substances are necessary to produce an adequate “typo-trance” that might feebly approximate Rouch’s ciné-trance and this state hardly requires anything more than the writer’s familiar panoply of sideboard chemicals, on the rocks or rolled. What is it about the ethnographic camera that channels at once anthropology’s disciplinary power, then strange enactments of embodied techniques, hazing back into a seductive aesthetic and intellectual form of the “imponderabilia of actual life” gotten at close range (Malinowski 2002, 16)? There are the countless small details of sound and sight clouding the celluloid, the videotape, the digital SC card, so effortlessly with just a sweep of the lens across a scene, across many scenes, in long, uninterrupted takes. Perhaps it is not simply the pull of the photogenic (and our distrust of what becomes comely once taken in through the apparatus) but also the charm of the camera, the way we’re taken in—the way it touches us. Fatimah Toby Rony proposes the idea of conversion as both mode and discourse in the filmic encounter between anthropological science and Native Other. Conversion, she argues, is “both a crossing over and a translation through various different visual media” she writes (Rony 2006, 7). She is especially concerned with the process whereby Western procedures of truth-telling convert the experience, performance and beliefs of the Other into purportedly objective records, such as the films made by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson of Balinese trance. In this converting act, she says, “the Native is often seen as the subjugated Silenced one, and the European, who leaves behind his autobiographies, books, photographs, films, etc. is the Voice” (Ibid.). Rouch’s account of his own conversion by the camera describes a newly charged cyborg Other, taken in through a socially complex trance—between himself, the camera, and those engaging knowingly in front of the lens. So there is a question then of this conversion, to double Rony’s conceptualization back on itself, where the possessive power of anthropology and doing “good work” in the field is repossessed by the means of its own production, an already delicate alchemy of the camera and those that perform for it.
Anthropology, despite its traditional insistence on the supremacy of written text, is not immune to the energy of the visual field or the charm of its machines with their capacity for conversion, despite some suspicion. Perhaps anthropology becomes even more receptive to the camera as it depends anxiously upon its own agents in the field to literally become recording (writing) machines for its elusive data (those who remain Rimbaud’s “pen hands”) (Rouch 2003, 43). The compulsion, or disciplinary need, to generate records, documents, and images that are “true” and thick with raw veracity saturates the bodies of anthropologists such that they might say, echoing the title of Jean Jackson’s famous essay, “I am a fieldnote.” Surely the ontological calm of embodying the alchemy of anthropology’s revered fieldnote comes as the labor of the senses is drawn through the discipline’s membrane to become text as a “meditative vehicle for a transcendence of time and place [that is] a transcendental return to time and place” (Tyler 1986, 129). Writing becomes the site of the out of body experience: ethnography's power exercised in the writing out of a sensory distillation of the field replete with its putative subjects. The writing body writes out the lived knowledge in the most ideal state of anthropological possession “as though…by love possessed.” The writing machine puts back together a disordered or fragmented world and recollects the body bursting with data, albeit as “an object of meditation that provokes a rupture with the commonsense world and evokes an aesthetic integration whose therapeutic effect is worked out in the restoration of the commonsense world” (Ibid., 134). Ethnographic writing is, Tyler argues, an enigmatic, occult document “to read not with the eyes alone” to which the vision machine—the ethnographic camera—responds, intervening in this corpographic alchemy with a challenge to and enhancement of the body (Ibid., 136). In so doing, it unsettles my appropriation of Marx: labor, I maintain, is transmogrified into product through the camera—the unedited video or film is a raw ethnographic text that is already an evocative visual representation of rhythm and proximity and thus exerts “a kind of magical power over appearances” that Tyler eschews (131). However, the body-camera assemblage is never absorbed totally into the disciplinary spell of even a richly ambiguous post-modern anthropology. There is still the method of trance to consider and the effects of conversion.
The entranced ethnographic camera does not put the world of the field site into the soft focus one might imagine corresponds to something as sensuous as a ciné-trance. Instead Rouch desires a paradoxical proximity again shaded by the magic of machines: “We have become invisible by being close and by having an extremely wide view [through the use of wide angle lenses]; that’s the model of disorder” (Rouch 2003, 155). Rouch describes a technique of sharp intimacy confounded by the eclipse of the human-operator within the camera assemblage. However, though he may sense himself to be invisible while seeing everything, his claims to “disorder” only point to the collapsed distances between himself and his subjects. He is sharing the space with his subjects, moving with them, and in his formulation of visual machines in intimate contact, he is forced to follow the flow of information emanating from his subjects and to improvise within his method to comprehend visually and haptically what is happening in the field around him. Ethnographic writing “…uses everyday speech to suggest what is ineffable, not through abstraction, but by means of the concrete” but is continually at risk of converting the subject or native Other into a concrete, if uneasily fragmented object under the sign of anthropological authorship (Tyler 1986, 136). The ethnographic camera is not entirely exempt from this dilemma, yet it operates within the contingency of the visual vernacular, moving within the everyday as an entranced and entrancing scopic machine, capable of converting the familiar into something that seems truer but somehow transfigured into a magical alterity. The field site is literally re-presented through the camera’s gaze but Rouch’s method afflict the truths the camera might claim with disorders of movement, especially amidst the dizzying, mediated vortex created when the field site itself is a cultural space contingent on mobilizing cameras and bodies in front of them.
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