# Fragments and Fragmentations In my work, there is an idea that I must pick up before discussing the diaristic practice that connects diagrams and diaries: Fragment or fragmentation. The idea of fragments in cinema triggers a conversation about realism and essentialism, such as Andre Bazin’s "raw reality" that is connected to "events" in our minds [@bazin_what_2009, 215], an abstraction opposite to surplus the image of [[photogénie]], both look for a "cinematic" expression apart from the general art and theatrical expressions. While [[Jean Renoir]] "uncovered the secret of a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the world up into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them” [@levi_cinema_2012], Eisenstein and Bresson are the most prominent directors in film history to use the word "fragment" as a counterpart to "shot". [[Sergei Eisenstein|Eisenstein]] [-@eisenstein_unexpected_1988] [-eisenstein_montage_1989] [-@eisenstein_montage_1989] illustrates a fragment of the everyday life or fragmentation of architectural space, [[Robert Bresson|Bresson]] insists that the fragmentation is how we experience the world and cinematography is the art of fragments that "not represent anything […] it’s about rhythms” [@bresson_bresson_2016, 346 of 396], and this is "what allow[s] for artistic expression, which is not the mimicry and vocal techniques that actors use in the theater" [@bresson_bresson_2016, 379 of 396]. In his cinematography, a "fragment" refers to an image that has "no absolute value", an image that is neither self-completing nor self-sufficient [@bresson_notes_1997], that is independent as a separate part that can be rendered with a new dependence [@bresson_notes_1997, 93]. According to [[Blaise Pascal]], this fragmentation produces three qualities: infinite, deformability, and connectability. "Fragmentation, making things visible through their isolated fragments, which is how we see them in reality” [@bresson_bresson_2016, 345 of 396]; thus, fragmented image is not given or to be reproduced, but are 'discovered' and encountered through a process of 'fragmentation', which consists of these encounters and relationships of images/fragments. Furthermore, this fragmentation not only allows for artistic expression but also challenges societal norms, reinforcing the tendency to attempt to escape ideological and institutional constraints. However, my approach here concerning fragmentation is not to connect these cinematic fragments into the notions of cinematic memories, archives, or reality that may limit the infinity of fragmentation back to the totality of hierarchy and order. Rather, the fragment is a virtual chaos, a miscellany in itself, with the potential for expansion that can only be perceived as density and intensity of sensation. It remains as a seed prior to the meaning and naming of its sprout, and it transforms into a new form and points to the moment of experience. The process of making or capturing footage in my practice is not, as stated in the main thesis, directed towards linear narrative nor capturing the real experience,^[I analysed the concept of diagrams in chapter one in my main text] rather, it is a ladling out untranslatable things before it becomes an experience that has been a reality, which is an active action that is a different act that neither represents nor demonstrates subjective or objective experience. It is similar to [[Walter Benjamin]]'s [[Erlebnis]], which is an experiment in self-exploration before it becomes an experience, and the resulting films emerge from a state already transformed by experience. Benjamin's distinction between two German words for experience, Erlebnis and Erfahrung, shows different ideas of the historical process in pre and post-modernism. According to Martin Jay [-@jay_cultural_1998, 48-9], Benjamin argues "the modalities of experience were skewed in favor of *Erlebnis* rather than *Erfahrung*” (Jay, 1998, p. 45), which “suggests the prereflexively registered influx of stimuli from without or the upsurge of stimuli, either somatic or psychic, from within” [@jay_cultural_1998, 44]. Benjamin was deeply sceptical about "the possibility of restoring *genupokiine Erfahrung* in the modern, capitalist world". With the main reference to _One-Way Street_ [-@benjamin_one-way_2016], Experience and Poverty [-@benjamin_experience_2005], ‘The Storyteller’ [-@benjamin_storyteller_1996], ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ [-@benjamin_motifs_2003], Jay describes Benjamin’s two experiences as Erlebnis is pragmatic and short-term, "The immediate, passive, fragmented, isolated, and unintegrated inner experience", whereas "very different from the cumulative, totalizing accretion of transmittable wisdom, of epic truth, which was Erfahrung” [@jay_cultural_1998, 48-9], while the latter is "often subconscious weaving together of discrete events into a narrative whole with coherence and perhaps even teleological meaning” (Jay 1998, 45) cumulative, totalising accretion of transmittable wisdom, of epic truth. Erfahrung is something no longer available to the individual in the modern world in haphazard information and raw sensation in the mass media. “The contrasting term, Erfahrung, implies a more complexly mediated, historically integrated, and culturally filtered totalization of those stimuli into a meaningful pattern” [@jay_cultural_1998, 44]. ### Barthes and Burgin Bajamin’s classification can help to break down the process of recording footage in the qualities of fragments, however, to go deeper in terms of fragment in the qualities of collecting footage in my practice, it might be helpful to take Barthes’s ideas of “fragment as form" in The Neutral [-@barthes_neutral_2005]. The biggest question of the fragment is "no one realizes what a problem it is to decide in what order to put them" [-@barthes_neutral_2005, 12], and it is relished through "a disruption of narrative and linear or automatic readings”. > “To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many stones on the perimeter of a circle: I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the center, what? [@barthes_roland_1977, 92-3] The strongest manifestation of this characteristic is in the late [[Roland Barthes|Barthes]]’s two publications *Roland Barthes* [-@barthes_roland_1977] and *A Lover's Discourse* [-@barthes_lovers_2010], where he takes the fragmentary writing and arbitrary ordering of fragments. For example, *A Lover's Discourse* has a dictionary-like format, while Mourning Diary [-@barthes_mourning_2010] is a series of fragmented thoughts about his mother. His desire on fragment turns towards the Neutral with concepts of [[randomness]] and [[idiorrhythmy]],^[ introduces the use of the term ‘idiorrhythmy’ to refer to the idiosyncratic rhythms of people, but does so to ask how can we live together. [@manghani_neutral_2020, 26]] lean how to dead, “Neutral treated the desire with fresh and fuller force” [@badmington_undefined_2020, 68] at stake in ethics of language in the structure of dictionary, "not of def[[202405051549]]initions but of twinklings" [-@barthes_neutral_2005, 10], which is scrambled continuous flux by using ‘coordinates’ from a table in a statistical journal where he "followed the numbers horizontally, according to the direction of reading: pure and simple chance’. [...] of computing to generate chance, [...] "still in the stage of infancy’ [-@barthes_neutral_2005, 12]". The law of the neutral, he writes, would be to find a way "to disseminate intelligent stuff, as though between the lines (cf. the monochrome) of a flat, dumb (verbal) fabric" [@barthes_neutral_2005, 85]. > ...series (sequence) of fragments, each of which is given a title ¼ the figures of the Neutral. Figure: rhetorical allusion (¼ a circled piece of discourse, identifiable since titleable) + face that has an ‘air’, an ‘expression’: fragment not on the Neutral but in which, more vaguely, there is some Neutral, a little like those rebus drawings in which one must look for the silhouette of the hunter, of the rabbit, etc. [@barthes_neutral_2005, 10] The technique of fragment, for Barthes, is likened to the "thought-sentence" [@barthes_roland_1977, 94], which "is the continuous flux his "sequence of fragments" on the Neutral hoped to realize, as he notes at the start of his seminar [@barthes_neutral_2005, 10].^[Doxa: The term Barthes appropriates from Aristotle to denote ‘Common Sense, Right Reason, the Norm, General Opinion’. Also, it connotes the history after Aristotle. For Barthes, the question of the neutral and fragment is finding ways the fragment can “escape from the tyranny of meaning imposed by doxa and received wisdom, sometimes called literature.] In [[Victor Burgin]], who was heavily influenced by [[Roland Barthes|Barthes]], this manifests itself in the [[sequence-image]] in [[visual rhetorical practice]]. In A Circle of Fragments [-@bishop_circle_2020], Bishop deconstructs the meaning of Burgin's fragments and those of Barthes, whom he was most influenced by, arguing that the technique he used could be an example of [[Asyndeton]] or Anacolution. [[Victor Burgin|Burgin]]’s [[sequence-image]] is a specific sequence of spatial units in memory and experience within a single frame that fall apart from standard cinematic and photographic theory [@burgin_remembered_2004, 27-8]. With the argument that film study must face heterogeneous "object", he reconnects juxtapositions of diverse elements to what Lev Vygotsky의 "[[inner speech]] and explain "a single word is so saturated with sense that many words would be required to explain it in external speech" [-@vygotskii_thought_2012, 148], and called this experience as a fragmentary *rebus* [@burgin_introduction_2004, 14] This is a continuation of the abstract unification of someone, somewhere, and something, neither image nor image sequence truly outside of linguistics [@burgin_introduction_2004, 16], quasi-dream but neither daydream nor delusion and “the only adequate way to approach the sequence-image is to write in such a way as to evoke its associative structure, which is to say ‘poeticise’.” [@burgin_introduction_2004, 28]. It is another actual of a "present" "association with past affects and meaning" [@burgin_introduction_2004, 21] > "Although this ‘sequence-image’ is in itself sharply particular, it is in all other respects vague: uniting ‘someone’, ‘somewhere’ and ‘something’, without specifying who, where and what. There is nothing before, nothing after, and although the action gestures out of frame, ‘somewhere ahead’, it is nevertheless self-sufficient” [@burgin_introduction_2004, 16] In [[Victor Burgin|Burgin]]'s video installation, the video appears in perpetual fragments as the viewer enters/leaves in perpetual loops, in this loop, the narrative is "normally the equivalent of perspective: bridging gaps, it smooths discontinuities into a continuum – much as ‘secondary revision’, in Freud’s account of the dream-work, makes a drama out of a picture-puzzle” [@burgin_remembered_2004, 27]. And ways to retain the fragmentary nature of experience, following [[Barthes]]’s words, [[Victor Burgin|Burgin]] argues it requires echelonnement, a spatial or a temporal context; of disconinuity, of absences, of gaps [@burgin_remembered_2004, 26].^[This understanding is clearly centred on the viewer's point of view, and this is made more evident by his distinction between possessive, pensive and possessed viewers in the final chapter influenced by [[Bernard Stiegler]].] 이 지점은 Jonas Mekas가 지적한 diaristic practice에서도 자주 보이며 또한 Roland Barthes 또한 homology between two experiences는 cacophony of the bar와 involuntary throughts를 통해 이야기한다. ## 여기부터 내 조각들 ## References [[fragment|Fragment]] [[202206121026|Fragmented and Neutral Space in Barthes]] [@epstein_fragments_1988]