Turning the Camera Around
Here’s the premise:
Subjectivity arises out of the recognition of what is missing from the field of vision.
For example, in Hollywood movies this identification is achieved through the employment of the shot/reverse shot sequence. The sequence is a violation of the 180 degree rule. Wikipedia defines this rule as: a basic guideline for filmmaking that states that two characters (or other elements) in the same scene should always have the same left/right relationship to each other. If the camera passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line. The new shot, from the opposite side, is known as a reverse angle. ”
An example of the shot/reverse shot sequence can be found in the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Wonka leads the children down a hallway to a small door that, once opened, magically transforms into a giant iron door. The perspective reverses, breaks the rule, as the children step forward into the chocolate room and we linger on their astonishment. Another shot/reverse shot sequence is employed. First we scan the entire field of candy treats, take in the chocolate river, and then the shot reverses onto Charlie’s open mouthed expression of hunger and joy. 
“The viewer experiences shot one as an imaginary plenitude, unbounded by any gaze, and unmarked by difference. It is thus a site of enjoyment. However, almost immediately, the viewing subject becomes aware of the limitations of what it sees-aware, that is, of an absent field. At this point shot 1 becomes a signifier of that absent field, and jouissance gives way to unpleasure. In the moment of unpleasure the viewing subject perceives that it is lacking something. ” -Jacques Lacan, Madan Sarup
The establishing shot is of the Chocolate factory with its unregulated pleasures: Mushrooms with whipped cream spots, melons filled with jelly, gummy bears that grow on trees. The next shot, 180 degrees to the left or right, establishes the subject of the gaze #2 gives us a location for the gaze. Charlie is the subject, and he is located precisely there on the screen and in the narrative that is unfolding. 
This is both a suture and it is a cut. Precisely by limiting the image of the real a versilimitude of subjective experience is achieved. And by pointing the camera away from the object of perception and objectifying the perceiver the subject is created.
I can only understand or grasp this idea of the suture or gap from my own perspective inside this small story that I’m telling, and in order to illustrate this gap, I’m going to have to break the rules. I’m going to turn my pen around and tell you something now that should come later. I’m compelled to break the fourth wall and shatter the illusion of a linear narrative even at this point in the text where this narrative hasn’t even firmly established itself. I haven’t finished explaining how I came to be a wanderer, but despite all the misunderstandings that will inevitably result if I skip ahead, in fact precisely in order to create these misunderstandings, I’m going to tell you about looking for blackberries in an alley off Reedway.
I’ve reached a point where I have to turn the camera around.
Early on in my foraging adventures a supporter whose business involved the creation of realistic maps through the use of satellite photography sent me such a map. He sent me a photograph of the Woodstock neighborhood taken from outerspace with the the hope that by looking down on my neighborhood I could get a better sense of where I lived, and his map did help. I discovered, among other things, that my neighborhood was a checkerboard where the white and blue rectangular roofs of residential ranch houses competed with the more curved shapes of planted dissideous trees. My neighborhood was made up of light green square lawns, darker green circles of tree tops, and a million white box tops seperated by black lines of asphalt.
Alleys showed up on this sattellite photo as narrow brown lines that usually continued on where the black lines stopped. I lived on a series of boxes connected by as well as separated by roads and lawns.
In the third world of lived experience, as opposed, say, to the hypperreal 2 dimensional world of the television or internet images, neutral space appears as nature. It is easy to see how the space in a Cafe or public library is constructed or produced, but the ways in which a forest or swamp, the ways through which these spaces are produced, is more difficult to spot. A crack in a sidewalk where a dandelion or strip of grass has pushed through, a pocket of protected swamp land, an alley full of blackberry bushes, all of these are produced spaces, but how are these spaces produced and to what effect?
In early July a group of us explored these alleys. There were seven of us searching. My three boys, my wife Miriam, her friend Anne, and Anne’s son Kenneth. And what we found were blackberry bushes.
They were everywhere. And one short alley was completely overrun with them. We had to duck down to get past the vines and branches of bushes that had not yet produced berries or even flowers, but that were so numerous and large that I imagined a superabundant yield would be coming soon. The sunlight was made green by leaves and vines, and the air under the canopy was moist.
I recall that we stopped in this alley, under the blackberry leaves, between the prickly branches, for several minutes, and we discussed the Pick Your Battle project and how very trendy urban foraging was becoming. Anne informed me that The Willamette Week had recently run a feature on it. The practice was no longer associated with dumpster diving and ecoterrorism, but with knitting and backyard chickens.
I imagined the Willamette Week photoshoot. Imagined a clutch of young women in blue and brown coats, women with dreadlocks, underneath our blackberry bush canopy. I saw them reaching up with hands clad in fingerless wool gloves. I imagined them picking ripe fruit, imagined blackberry juice dribbling down their confident chins. They’d were laughing with each other, wiping purple juice off each other’s faces, and then running through the alley together in a race for more.
“The problem is that some these bushes are so overgrown that the berries won’t get any sun. It will be slow to produce ripe fruit,” Annie told me.
“Even if half or a third of the berries are good these bush will produce more than we’ll how what to do with.”
My imagination didn’t settle down into a coherent image, but was a fragmented orgy of berries, fashion, and the beautiful geek girls I’d seen in American Apparel advertisements. I imagined these hipster women and immediately envied them for getting to the alley first. Foraging was already popular.
My envy demonstrated how quickly an act that aimed at realizing a desire could be turned or could slip into an act of seeking to be desired.
Writing about Disneyland Neville Wakefield commented, “It is the imagination of the the child that is conceived as the past and future utopia of adults. The child is seen to represent a state of nature forfeited by the complexity of adult life. The omnipresence of animals within the Disney world also helps to reinforce the suggestion that it is nature itself that pervades and determines the whole complex of social relationships.” -pge 107, Postmodernism.
Perhaps the alleys truly are neutral. Certainly these fissures are nothing like the flat images constructed inside Disney, but the neighborhoods we live in are, more and more, like theme parks. I live in 1960s suburbia–a neighborhood lined with ranch houses built in that era, houses that emphasize the garage and the lawn while deemphasizing ornamentation. Perhaps these sorts of neighborhoods could be said to represent the last gasp of modernism. 30 blocks away my friends live in a mid-20th century neighborhood where a sense of urban community is inscribed into Craftsman style bungalows that line their block. In Beaverton and Lake Oswego there are homes that were built in the 80s and 90s and these represent nothing so much as the victory of late 20th century globalism. These homes aren’t inscribe with a utilitarian aesthetic, but are simply receptacles for whatever current lifestyle can be squeezed into the back of trucks and delivered. Disposable and transitory, these plexiglass wonders are the ahistoric conclusion of the history of the 20th century.
Disneyland is everywhere, and the rule is that there are no seams. There is one flat image of an American Utopia that appears in a thousand or a million guises. The rule is that we must never turn the camera around on this image. We must never expose the gap.
Bumble Bee 1989
According to the American Heritage dictionary a synchronicity is a coincidence of events that seems to be meaningfully related. Conceived in Jungian Theory as an explanatory principle on the same order as casualty a synchronicity is something in the field of everyday life that is freighted with an unexpected meaning. A Synchronicity fills in the gap between the story a person tells himself about his everyday life and the contingent or accidental working out of this story in real time. It is a happening that appears as something more than itself.
Here’s an example of a synchronicity:
During the summer of 1989 I discovered a bumblebee sticker on the cement floor of my friend’s basement while secretly washing my blue jeans at two in the morning. I was there in my friend’s parents’ house because in those months between high school graduation and before college my relationship with my own parents had broken down. There were too many restrictions at home, while my friend’s parents seemed okay with everything. For example, I’d been out with my newest girlfriend until around one. I spent a few hours at Dennys, then a few hours in her 1967 Ford Falcon, and I’d come back to my friends parents house to crash expecting that there would be no trouble as long as I didn’t make too much noise.
So I tried to be quiet as I snuck into their basement. I only had one last thing before crashing in their guest room. I’d try to make it quick.
If normal causality works on the level of billiard balls smacking into each other a synchronicity works on the etymological level. Words don’t smack into each other, but relate to each other in a symbolic chain. Watching my Levis tumble behind a glass bubble, worrying about how I would explain standing by their washing machine in nothing but a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and a bath towel if Professor Myers should investigate the noise from the radiator vents I felt absurd. I was in a limbo point between childhood and adulthood, and things were happening that seemed well beyond my control.
My new girlfriend, for instance, had surprised me on the front bench seat of her Ford. She was just the most recent girl in the series of girls who’d been interested in what I might manage in a backseat or on sofa cushions while parents were out, but as I watched suds behind the glass bubble of the washing machine I realized that she’d managed to change the game on me. She’d managed to shift the way I perceived her. I had desired her before, and now I hardly knew what I wanted.
In Lacan’s Seminar “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis” he introduced his idea of jouissance as something opposed to mere pleasure, and something quite apart from desire. Desire is defined by what is missing. It is a drive defined by language, by the symbolic order of a person’s society. Desire always seeks its object, and the arrival of that object is always made possible by something outside.
“Man’s desire is the Other’s desire. The subject desires only in so far as it experiences the Other itself as desiring….” pg. 42, How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Zizek
Looking back I can easily trace how I discovered that the Other desired my new girlfriend in 1989. It’s like this: She was the ex-girlfriend of my best friend, the very best friend whose house I was living in during the limbo time of 1989. I’d discovered my desire for her during the final months of my senior year, when she’d been dating my friend.
The three were in the same drama class at Palmer, the two of them had been paired together for an acting excercise, and after I watched them perform a scene from Neil Simon’s ‘Barefoot in the Park’ I knew what I wanted.
Corie: I’ve got so much to say to you, darling.
Paul: (Taking more clothes out of the suitcase) So have I, Corie…I got all the way downstairs and it hit me. I saw everything clearly for the first time. (He moves up left to behind the couch.) I said to myself, this is crazy…crazy…It’s all wrong for me to run like this…(he turns to CORIE ) And there’s only one right thing to do, Corie.
Corie: (Moving to him) Really, Paul? What?
Paul: (Jubilantly) You get out!
Corie: (Holding him) Paul, you’re ice cold…you’re freezing…what have you been doing?
Paul: (Pulls up his pants leg revealing his stockingless foot) What do you think I’ve been doing? (He puts his foot up on the seat) I’ve been walking barefoot in the goddamn park!
Neil Simon’s play placed both my best friend and the girlfriend into the precise roles that best fit my perceptions of them. My best friend was practical. He made decent if not excellent grade; he was Captain of the Track team. A conventional sort destined for sameness. It was, in fact, what he strived after. The girlfriend, on the other hand, was often literally barefoot in the halls, and while she was not as boisterous as Corie, while her rebellion was quiet even shy, conventional sameness simply was not something she was even capable of producing, much less something she seemed to want.
This was the framework for the fiction that supported my desire, but washing my blue jeans after our date indicated that the framework was failing. What I’d encountered in her front seat was not the realization of my desire, but an encounter with surplus-desire known as jouissance.
“Let’s get back to the idea of jouissance as sexual enjoyment, and it’s connection with suffering. If you ask someone to tell you about their experience of orgasms, usually they will tell you what a wonderful thing orgasm are. But imagine an experiment: if you were to stop someone having their orgams just five seconds before they had it, what do you think they would experience? Extreme discomfort and pain.” -pg. 55, Lacan for Beginners
What is a synchronicity? It is nothing more than a symptom. That is, it is an image or set of images that covers over the impossible disruption that jouissance brings. In the moment of blue jean washing my fuzzy synchronicity appeared in the form of a bumble bee sticker that was stuck impossibly to the concrete floor. This bumblebee was stuck half under the Maytag, and was just visible when I leaned over to open the door and transfer my pants to the dryer.
I recognized the bumblebee sticker as a memory from the previous summer. In 1988 I’d worked as a caddy at the Broadmoor hotel and the very same bumble bee sticker had been ubiquitous. The sticker was handed out to club members before they teed off, and this was how caddys and waiters distinguished between a club members who were likely to tip and lowly paying customers.
My best friend’s parents were not members of the Broadmoor country club, they did not even golf. There was no logical reason for one of these bumble bee stickers to enter their house and for it to appear their house. To find one as I did, for one of these special bees to appear precisely at that moment, as I stood there thinking about the way my new girlfriends hands fit together, the way her breath had been visible in the front seat of her Ford Falcon, it made me wonder how much power I was handing over to her. It seemed, somehow, to be a meaningful coincidence. It was an image that absorbed my real desire and covered over the gap in my desire.
I put my pants in the dryer, picked it up, and stuck it to the lid of dryer. I watched the bee buzz and vibrate as the mechanism inside the dryer whirled.
