Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975)
In a 1983 interview with Gideon Bachmann, Jean-Luc Godard brags more than confesses that he’s cut all of his films from 1980’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) onward with two solitary mixing tracks, the idea being that “I have only two hands to manipulate them…if I had only one arm, maybe I’d only have a single sound track. All this business of having the various sounds marching up in front of you like soldiers is called mixing and I can only control it with the two hands I have.” The sound for each scene and sequence needs to be exhumed and reanimated by way of one “important sound of the moment” after another. In keeping things spare and acetic we turn our attention into a laser and there cannot either be any denying that the working methodology Godard elucidates is perfectly analogous to that of the DJ, who samples and scratches and tries to keep the rhythm, even when it’s allowed to skip or stammer, using two hands…unless one is at any given time holding a drink. One who can sample and scratch and also skip and stammer is the true Svengali of post-history, this a lived balletic process where the negation of the given is additive and doesn’t negate shit because Deleuze and Guattari’s perverse nuptials are the only law here in post-history, where the centre did not hold and the ground beneath us crumbled. Late in the 20th century, Silicon Valley optimists of the Whole Earth Catalog school and other commentators of one stripe or another were surmising that in the near future we’d all be DJs…and they weren’t wrong I don’t think, not really. The haptic self abandons all nerve endings so as to enter the Palace of Disposable Plastics. The body without organs conceived by Antonin Artaud and exhaustively theorized—and sliced and diced—by Deleuze and Guattari is the yogic initiate who has not yet ever felt the organic body for real, knowing that in dreams you can sustain injuries that are erased like an Etch A Sketch whereas in meatspace they stick, even if you can’t properly feel yourself feeling anything, as though drugged or numb. When one loses contact with the body one loses contact with the earth and this is largely what we mean when we say bio-politics. Power and the System of Controls can use you as kindling if you have not fortified your immortal soul in physical practice. If you are going to attain true mastery you are going to do it with a passion counterbalanced by humility. There is no other path that is not false, praying on vanities, prejudices, and will-to-judgement. Fail on your own and in good faith. Answer for yourself when you should but not when you shouldn’t. It is you who has to make those determinations on your own. Kierkegaard argued that we do not need a robust philosophy of ethics because we almost always know it consciously when we have erred or offended. In feeling and living with healthy amounts of prophylactic shame we learn not to be shameless and should in time have better luck not going rogue nine or ten times a day, humility somehow even making us grateful in the process. Who would have ever dared imagine? “Unlike Godard, who revolutionized sound tracks, rhythmically punctuating stretches of silence, street sounds, spoken voices, cafe noises, all used as music” writes the great American painter and film critic Manny Farber of Robert Altman and his brutal and brilliant 1975 state-of-the-nation Nashville, “Atman is saying that the media has corrupted and dulled Americans with a sound track that is one continuous flow of noises.” Specificity and discernment may be the ultimate flotation device for unsteady citizens of hovering post-history. Good programming provides shape and meaning to dreary, scatterbrained life. Let your own two hands mould your destiny and your heart and lungs find amusement in the body’s baffling terrestrial travails. We might also take a look at the image on the cover of the City Lights edition of Silvina Ocampo's short posthumously published novel The Promise, featuring the hands of the author arrayed aggressively in an attempt to obscure the unseen photographer’s unobstructed access to her face. Silvina did not have a thirst for attention remotely like that of her wheeling and dealing sister Victoria. It is a fact commonly acknowledged that Silvina did not like to have her photograph taken. When they won’t take no for an answer, well, the way out is the way through…give ‘em the hands…
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