Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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      Yet—and this is the central thrust of Identification—Niccolò does make his way forward. What this film suggests about human action, then, is that we commit ourselves ongoingly, without having real knowledge at all. One could say that knowledge is a dramatization, and thus that a film is a way of knowing the world or a demonstration and collection of knowledge, a library. Unable to access the world, cut off from contact, from direct perception, and restricted to the apprehension of surfaces and our conventions for guessing what surfaces may cover, we know by picturing, and the act of picturing is always an attempt, always fallible. Niccolò is trying to get a “picture” of Mavi, and later of Ida, and in both cases it could be said that he fails, yet it is also true that he makes—that Antonioni, acting for him, makes—a sufficient picture for us to believe we have seen them and can come to know them. He makes way.

      For each of us, understanding is beyond. This is why at the end of Identification, we must imagine that Niccolò is aboard that asteroidcraft. Somewhere, near the sun or near some other part of the universe, he will find what he needs.

      SCIENCE

      To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.

      —Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

      The argument can be made—is often made, in fact, in the most commonplace ways as well as the most sophisticated ones—that the right and proper approach toward expanding human knowledge is science, which to most people means a system of methods with its history, its taxonomy, its devotions, its rigors, and, to be sure, its enemies. We think of scientific progress, scientific revolutions, scientific laboratories, mad scientists, and so on, following more or less from Francis Bacon’s theorizing at the end of the sixteenth century. For him, the world had previously been accepted as a completed creation with its laws implicit and open to deduction, but now and henceforth it was to be seen instead as an aggregation of facts which were open to discreet observation. Just as the laws according to which nature moved had to be induced from an accretion of suppositions based upon clearly observed facts, so, too, was the power of the observer now held paramount in the formation of knowledge. Seeing clearly, discerning with refinement, measuring with assiduity—these were the powers involved in learning the world. And such a world, structured so as to be learnable, shone in its special visibility, its openness to measurement and observation. In this enlightenment, as Jean Starobinski described it, the processes of the reasoning mind “appear to have been closely akin to those of the seeing eye” (Invention 210; qtd. in Jay 85). Martin Jay describes the difficulties of apperception as they applied to politics: the court of the Sun King (Louis XIV) “at once theater and spectacle, was a dazzling display of superficial brilliance, bewildering to outsiders but legible to those who knew how to read its meaning. Here courtiers learned to decode the signs of power, distinction, and hierarchy in the gestures and accoutrements of bodies semaphorically on view” (87)—a type of situation handily described again and again by Dumas, of course, in Le Comte de Monte Cristo.

      Science understood in this (limited) way involves calibration, measurement, recording, publication, testing and retesting, doubt, hypothesis, experiment, controlled variables, and so on. The observation upon which it stands is very old as a process. “All early natural philosophers acknowledged that vision is man’s most noble and dependable sense,” claims David Lindberg (qtd. in Jay 39). In the Enlightenment, writes Patricia Fara, “seeing was closely allied with knowing. Progressive thinkers often claimed that they were living in an enlightened age, when the bright flame of reason would dispel the dark clouds of ignorance and superstition” (15). Scientific experiments became rationalized as a superior avenue to the truth, even though they weren’t always successful, even though “people make mistakes, ignore results that later seem significant, or persuade themselves—and others—to adopt theories that turn out to be false” (Fara 10). Beyond wanting to understand the world, “Enlightenment philos ophers wanted … to promote themselves by displaying their command of apparently inexplicable phenomena” (20–21), and “hoped to gain authority over society by proving their dominion over nature” (22), ultimately beginning to professionalize themselves as did Joseph Priestley, the “electrician.” What comes to be constituted in this shaping of “science” is a particular institutionalization of the more general process of human science, which has always been the human quest for knowledge of the world, or the repository of knowledge that any person may possess. Jay gives one illustration of the warping quality of such institutionalization, for example, when he writes that “space was robbed of its substantive meaningfulness to become an ordered, uniform system of abstract linear coordinates. As such, it was less the stage for a narrative to be developed over time than the eternal container of objective processes. It was not until the time of Darwin that narrative regained a significant place in the self-understanding of science” (53). And Michel Foucault gives another, as he discusses the pre-Freudian discourse on sex, wherein “we could take all these things that were said, the painstaking precautions and detailed analyses, as so many procedures meant to evade the unbearable, too hazardous truth … and the mere fact that one claimed to be speaking about it from the rarefied and neutral viewpoint of a science is in itself significant” (53). That “rarefied and neutral” viewpoint couched and covered, among other things, “a refusal to speak” and in this way bolstered “a science made up of evasions” (53). This “science” of sexuality, Foucault says, is “geared to a form of knowledge-power” (58), that is, it connects knowledge with control, mastery, superascendency, discipline, and, ultimately, class.

      By contrast, Vincentio opens Measure for Measure by reflecting to Escalus upon a different and broader way of knowing, suggesting that as to the properties of government “your own science/Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice/My strength can give you” (I.i.7–9). For Shakespeare, science exceeded observation and data collection, exceeded the amassing of “facts,” and included any and all aspects of knowing and apperceiving. The more limited “science” of white-coated technicians heavily equipped and wrapped in secrecy, that largely informs our view of this process today, valorizes certain professionalizations and class restrictions, accredits and sanctions some seekers as “legitimate” and “authoritative” while others are relegated to the marginalia of history as charlatans, dilettantes, skeptics, and so on. We may think of the sacred tasks of scientific philosophers touted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows” (47). And for a “would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge” one would reasonably have “the greatest disdain” (41).

      But all thinking creatures have their respective scientiae, and working upon our relation to the world we do scientia routinely, if unevenly and unrepeatably; even and especially is this the case for those whose science is articulated as an art. Auteurism is something of an equivalent to science, utilizing different methods and rigors and with an altogether separate history and taxonomy. For example, if David Bordwell suggests that the credits of an art film “can tease us with fragmentary, indecipherable images that announce the power of the author to control what we know” (43), it remains true as well that the author is being teased by his world, and is responding in kind. The artist explores the world, searching with a different kind of eye than our typical “scientist” uses; what the artist sees must be accepted as though others can also see and understand it, but this acceptance, this recognition, must be immediate and does not depend upon careful replication of experimental technique and comparison of results. The artist must speak in a language that is instantly apprehendable.

      Is Niccolò autobiographical, Antonioni was asked by Cahiers du cinéma; “What happened to him never happened to me …. A film is autobiographical to the extent that it is authentic and, in order to be that, it has to be sincere” (Cottino-Jones 368). Our СКАЧАТЬ