Intense Play with Light and SoundReading Su Friedrich’s Seeing Red (2005) together with Walter Benjamin’s and Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophies of Technology

Playing with Technology

Su Friedrich has made almost 30 films over the last 44 years. Some are longer, ranging from 60 to 81 minutes in length, while many are shorter, from between 2 and 16 minutes. She shot her first film on a Super 8 film camera in 1978, and her subsequent films on 16mm, while since 2004 she has produced videos only. Friedrich is known for combining documentary elements with narrative elements in her films, playing with genres and visual structures, and subtly combining questions of sexual identity, her personal family, and stories of illness with political issues. She has played a central role in the establishment of avant-garde queer cinema and has taught at the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University since 1998. She has lived in Brooklyn for almost as long, the New York borough that became the setting for her last feature-length video Gut Renovation (2012), which is 81 minutes, and also for the shorter video Seeing Red (2005), which is 27 minutes. Seeing Red explicitly reflected and played with the genre of the diary film genre at a time when, as a 2006 review in The New York Times put it, ‘with nearly a million video diaries posted on Youtube.com, it’s safe to assume that people now find self-recording as natural as brushing their teeth’.11Stuart Klawans, ‘Midlife Fury, Glowing in Glorious Red’, The New York Times, 24 September 2006.

Seeing Red can be reasonably interpreted as a commentary on the spreading of vlog culture and as a continuation of Friedrich’s artistic exploration of the interplay between the filmic medium, the personal, and the political. However, Seeing Red also marks a break with her earlier films and represents more than a playing with genres — in what follows, I shall show this with reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion on play in the genealogy of assemblages and to Walter Benjamin’s linking of play and what he calls the second technology. Friedrich uses digital video technology to make filming itself a game. She is playing with technology, in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to children’s singing games like Ring-Around-the-Rosie,22See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980), p. 382. Brian Massumi translates ronde enfantine as ‘children’s dance’. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 313. In Massumi's translation, however, the reference to game and to play is lost, which is crucial for my reading here. ‘Enfantine ronde' refers to the playground singing game ‘Faire-la-Ronde,’ which corresponds to the English ‘Ring a Ring o' Roses’ and the German ‘Ringelreihen’. as playing with repetitions and a going through variations, as a passage and a movement of intensifications.

Playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the chapter ‘Of the Refrain’ through the example of a child who becomes frightened in the dark and calms herself by singing. The refrain here seen as a first approach to putting order into chaos. A home is created when a circle is formed around this centre. As an example of this, Deleuze and Guattari suggest la ronde infantile, the game of Ring-Around-the-Rosie. This example could seem somewhat reminiscent of the magic circle that Johan Huizinga introduced in his influential study from 1938, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. According to Huizinga, play is characterized by the following qualities: first, it is voluntary; second, it differs from work and everyday life; third, it contains a specific tension; and fourth, it represents a magical circle. These characteristics distinguish the play as a cultural form.

Huizinga's definition of play as taking place in a magical circle also defines play as being limited in time and space. A game, Huizinga writes, ‘assumes fixed form as a cultural phenomenon. Once played, it endures as a new-found creation of the mind, a treasure to be retained by memory’.33Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 9–10. For Huizinga, play is characterized by repeatability, yet it can only be repeated when it has been played out and reached its temporal end.44Ibid. In other words, Huizinga’s notion of play presupposes a given time and a given space. It thereby differs from Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of the refrain, in which repetition involves a movement of productivity through which time and space are created in the first place. Indeed, unlike Huizinga and all the game theories that refer to Huizinga’s study, Deleuze and Guattari are not concerned with play as a cultural form that has fixed and binding rules, nor with the emergence of culture from nature, nor even with the demarcation between play and work. Rather, they are concerned with the emergence of time from chaos and the creation of territories and assemblages (agencements). Thus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, in the game of Ring-Around-the-Rosie, one does not create a magic circle in Huizinga’s sense; one ‘combines rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the differentiated parts of an organism’.55Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 311. Here, Ring-Around-the-Rosie appears not as a fixed form but as a passage. It is a circle that, as one ‘launches forth, hazards an improvisation’, opens up onto a future, thus connecting one with the world. ‘One ventures from home on the thread of a tune’.66Ibid.

Variations

Seeing Red begins abruptly with a high G on a piano and a shot of a bed of red tulips set against a black background. The high G is the first note of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which starts with an aria that introduces a set of thirty variations. The film features Glenn Gould’s 1981 rhythmic and up-tempo recording of Bach’s masterpiece. The sound sequence is combined with a precisely edited montage of images, in which each frame contains something with a red, or reddish, colour. These are moving images taken from the Brooklyn neighbourhood: a piece of red graffiti, a boy with a red cap, a dog’s pink collar, a brick wall, a cat’s tail on a red cushion, a crane with a red lattice, cherry blossoms, a bit of orange peel on the street, a nail salon’s neon advert, a glowing bicycle, a woman’s red boots, pink tulips, and children in the park interspersed with shots of Su Friedrich’s upper body clothed in various red T-shirts, blouses, and jumpers, each piece of clothing having a small black microphone attached to it. The title plays after three minutes, and instead of the piano we hear Friedrich’s dark voice. One frame, in which she appears in an orange T-shirt, extends from her neckline to the pinned microphone. We hear her complaining about several issues: that she is about to turn fifty; that she’s going through a crisis; that her control over her emotions is no greater than it was thirty years ago; and that she simultaneously feels that she is a control freak. A piece of paper on the floor in the hallway annoys her. When her flatmates don’t pick up the piece of paper, she also gets annoyed. And she gets frustrated with herself: she is angry and can’t change it. Nothing has changed. Then the music starts again.

Constructing an Assemblage

To desire, as Deleuze and Guattari formulate it both with and against psychoanalysis, means to construct an assemblage.77See Monique David-Ménard, Deleuze et la psychanalyse: l’altercation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005), pp. 15–31. With psychoanalysis, they insist on the reality-constituting capacity of desire; against psychoanalysis, they argue that one never desires an abstract, or detached, object — a thing or a person — but always a concrete ensemble: desire takes place in a concrete relational structure and is constructive. To desire literally means agencer, to bring together, to gather concrete elements (colours, smells, landscapes, things, and so on) into a relational structure. With this concept of desire and assemblage (agencement), Deleuze and Guattari undermine the abstract juxtaposition of subject and object, and thus also that of work and play as well as of technology and nature. In this way, they contribute to the attempt to think technology in a non-instrumental and thus non-anthropocentric way, similarly to what Heidegger sought to do in his essay The Question Concerning Technology, and Walter Benjamin attempted in his scattered approaches to a philosophy of the second technology back in the 1930s.88See Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, ‘Spiel und zweite Technik. Walter Benjamins Entwurf einer Medienanthropologie des Spiels’, in Mediale Anthropologie, ed. by Christiane Voss and Lorenz Engell (Munich: Fink, 2015), pp. 35–62. ‘The principle behind all technology’, write Deleuze and Guattari in describing the relationship between technical elements and social machines, ‘is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposed.’99Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 397–98.[Deleuze, Gilles]

They thus define the relationship between technical elements and the social machine in a very analogous way to the relationship between desire and assemblage. Just as desire does not refer to an object, nor is technology an object. Instead, it is an element in the process of construction of an assemblage. Interestingly, the two differently shaped machinic assemblages that run through A Thousand Plateaus are themselves modelled on different forms of play: the war machine is an assemblage that is based on the old Chinese strategy game of Go, the aim of which is to divide up an open space and maintain constant movement without a goal, direction, beginning or end; and the state apparatus is an assemblage that draws on the game of chess, which is played using pieces that are coded by limited possibilities of movement and in which the aim is to divide up a limited space.1010See ibid., p. 389.

A Complex Composition

Friedrich first received artistic recognition in 1981 with a 14-minute silent, experimental film called Gently Down the Stream. Flickering white letters and words that are carved into the filmstrip alternate with dreamlike black-and-white images of women desiring women, creating fragile depictions of lesbian desire. The viewer dives into this dream world along with one of the female figures who is moving in the water of a pool, the edge of which becomes a kind of picture frame, and only awakens again at the end of the film. Friedrich’s fame came from her next film The Ties that Bind (1984), shot on 16mm and 55 minutes in length, which is about her mother, who, raised in Germany, suffered from war trauma. She emigrated to the US with her American husband in 1947 and then, abandoned by him, raised three children on her own. Friedrich is her mother's interlocutor but, unlike her mother, she only appears indirectly, through sentences that are again carved into the filmstrip. This film was followed by Sink or Swim (1990), also shot on 16mm and 48 minutes long, in which her relationship with her absent father and his power over his daughter is artistically documented and reconstructed. Friedrich features a sequence of stories that link her to her father. The stories are alphabetically arranged but in reverse and are told from a third-person perspective. The voice-over is read by an actress. Her next 16mm film, Hide and Seek (1996), is 63 minutes in length and undertakes an experimental reconstruction of the childhood memories of lesbian women in the USA and Germany in the 1960s. The film script was written by Friedrich together with Cathy Quinlan. The scenes show a girl’s fictive childhood in the 1960s, a girl who, in her estrangement from an entirely heteronormative environment, feels a kinship with monkeys; these are then followed by some interview excerpts.

It is only in the 65-minute 16mm film The Odds of Recovery (2002) that Friedrich herself appears for the first time in one of her own films. The Odds of Recovery, combining the formats of both medical report and diary film, paints a precise portrait of the emotions that one goes through after a series of medical interventions, emotions and feelings that range from attempts at self-treatment with the help of Tai Chi and healthy eating to relationship crises and issues with self-perception. Among other things, Friedrich uses film footage of her conversations with the doctors at the hospital that she took with a hidden Hi8 video camera and then transferred to 16mm. In this footage, the director can be seen and heard talking about herself. Friedrich clearly also uses video technology here to work herself into the camera shot and thus literally bring herself into the picture. In this respect, Seeing Red, shot entirely on video, could be seen as the preliminary culmination of this development.1111See Katy Martin, ‘Su Friedrich Interviewed by Katy Martin’, Art World Magazine (Yishu Shije), Shanghai, China and the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (MOCA Shanghai), p. 7 <https://www.katymartin.net/s/Su-Friedrich-interview-by-Katy-Martin-Sept08.pdf> [accessed 5 January 2025]. The biggest methodological change in her video work was that she abandoned the idea of following any script or plan: simply, she went into her studio, set up the camera, and started talking. This procedure was possible thanks to the fact that filming with video had become cheaper and editing on the computer made easier. Even after the first recording, there was still no plan. But there was a simple rule: the director always recorded herself when she felt the need to say something and, at the same time, she collected images in her surroundings that had something red in them. At one point during the process, she decided to use Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations — the pinnacle of the Baroque art of variation — as a soundtrack. As she emphasizes, while the computer had made editing technically easier, a lengthy process was still required to find the right rhythm and narrative flow.1212See ibid. Indeed, the video itself is a complex composition in which a colour responds contrapuntally to a sound; thus, it is more an assemblage of play that follows a counting verse, more an obsessive play of light and sound, than it is a narration.

A Gently Swinging, Aimlessly Floating Movement

Deleuze and Guattari’s determination of the quality of movement in the game of Go, in which an open space is divided up and movement itself becomes constant, goalless, directionless, without beginning or end, ties in with the etymological meaning of the German word Spiel (play), as even a quick glance at nineteenth-century theories of play will make clear. Accordingly, Spiel designates a repetitive, rhythmic movement that is both moving and being moved. ‘It turns out’, according to Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk’s 1933 study Essence and Meaning of Play: The Play of Human Beings and Animals as Manifestation of the Drive to Life, ‘that a meaning [of the word Spiel] survived in Middle Dutch that also existed in older West Germanic, namely: to be in a twitching movement, to flicker, to move back and forth, to jump, especially for joy (Latin ensultare).’1313Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk, Wesen und Sinn des Spiels. Das Spielen des Menschen und der Tiere als Erscheinungsform der Lebenstriebe (Berlin: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1933), p. 18; my translation. Buytendijk’s definition is in keeping with a derivative sense of the word taken from the established literature on play and its meaning. Already back in 1883, as the ethno-psychologist and linguist Moritz Lazarus reminded us in his ground-breaking book, On the Charms of Play, the German word spielen (to play) goes back to the Old-German spilan, which likewise indicates: ‘a gently swinging, aimlessly floating movement’.1414Moritz Lazarus, Über die Reize des Spiels (Berlin: Dümmler Verlag, 1883), p. 19; my translation. Here the idea of play is detached from specifically human play and gets interpreted as a manifestation of life. ‘In this sense’, Lazarus comments further,

we are speaking of a kind of play that takes place between two different kinds of similar movement: from the playing back and forth of the shuttle of a loom, the play of water in a fountain spring, and the play of waves in a well, and of the room for play, or the wiggle room, that a thing must have in order to move freely.1515Ibid., p. 20; my translation.

While the connection between ‘play’ and ‘feeling alive’ was already at the centre of Kant’s concept of aesthetic experience and Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in the mid-nineteenth century ‘play’ moved closer to the technical through the experimentalization of life.1616See also Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens. Experimentalsysteme in den biologischen Wissenschaften. 1850/1950, ed. by Michael Hagner and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993). The spatio-temporal structure of play in the sense of spilan came to converge with that of experiment: the idea of ‘fluctuating, aimlessly floating activity’ became embedded as a ‘doing over and over again’, that is as the regulated repetition and running through of the variations of a uniform process in a defined setting. Karl Groos, a student of the philosopher and psychologist Kuno Fischer, coined the term ‘playful experimentation’ in his interpretation of toddler play to describe a process of settling into the world.1717Karl Groos, The Play of Man, trans. by Elizabeth L. Baldwin (New York: Appleton, 1901), p. 7. Mediated by the ambiguity attributed to play through the rediscovery of the etymological meaning of a ‘slightly swaying, aimlessly floating activity’ or, with Buytendijk of a ‘flickering’, a ‘twitching’, and a ‘moving back and forth’, since the nineteenth century play has functioned as a medium between the living and the technical. The discovery of this mediating function then culminated in an emphasis in theories of play on rhythm and repetition as the essential elements. Rhythm connects the mechanical with the living and acts as a hinge between them. At the same time, however, play threatens to lose its connection to the living through dissolution into the pure mechanics of repetition. This becomes particularly evident in the treatment and interpretation of play as gambling — Glücksspiel in German — associated as it is with addiction and money, vending machines and automatism, self-destruction and unproductivity.1818It is precisely in this ambiguous light that the game is understood by Freud as an expression of the death drive and of repetition compulsion in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), xviii: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works (1920–22) (1955), pp. 1–64.

To Hold a Movement Constantly

In Seeing Red, the Goldberg Variations are not the only things that indicate loops of repetition. There is also the repetition of the settings: Friedrich, whose face is never seen, variously wears red sweaters, shirts or T-shirts, as she complains, reports, paces back and forth, and smokes. The film is staged as a diary — a video diary. Yet no information is given concerning the dates, nor concerning the diary’s orientation in time. We receive indications such as ‘yesterday’, ‘when I was young’, ‘this evening’, and ‘now I will go’, but there are no developments. Or, as she says at another point, ‘Words of wisdom don’t come. Don’t come’.1919Seeing Red, 7:50. It is not certain that the scenes we see have taken place one after the other, in a chronological sequence. They appear out of nothingness; they are simply thrown. This impression is reinforced by the fact that individual images and scenes, with their incident red, pink, and orange tones, appear repeatedly like parts of a refrain, or of a ritornello. The eight scenes in which Friedrich appears are already indicated in the trailer. Each of the scenes is represented by an image taken from it, and is woven together with scenes from her Brooklyn neighbourhood, with its streets and parks, its people, animals, and machines. The visual composition takes and reflects the form of an aria. While Friedrich makes no progress in her contributions, keeps repeating her complaints and seems to spin around in a circle, the interplay between the sounds and the moving images in the scenes, in which no one speaks and Friedrich cannot be seen, intensifies.

A particularly beautiful sequence follows after Friedrich’s defiant outburst of rage at the fact that no ‘wanting’ follows the ‘should’ and that the unfulfilled ‘should’ instead becomes an imperative that constantly makes you feel like you’re in the wrong.2020Seeing Red, 7:25. We hear a rapid sequence of piano notes from the fourteenth of the Goldberg Variations, which is introduced with an image of a red grid in the foreground and moving cars in the background. In the next shot, the camera moves along the red grid to the fast rhythm of the music, whereby the red grid bars gliding past with the framed image sections remind us of a moving film strip. The speed of the camera increases with the rhythm of the music, you lose control of the image, which fades to black and ends with the view of a piece of blue sky and a pan to a red crane. After a brief moment of calm, the black is repeated and the camera moves swiftly past the grid again, this time in the other direction: the red rods light up and flash past, serially and repetitively. The scene closes, at the level of the sound, with the end of the variation, and, at the level of visuality, by playing on the images of a moving red piece of plastic that eventually passes over into a wavering bloc of red (Fig. 1).

In its editing and composition, the film enacts, in the interplay of image and music, the same movement that Buytendijk, Lazarus, and Groos connect with the etymological significance of the German word Spiel. A jittering, a swaying, an aimlessly floating activity, a movement that in Deleuze and Guattari’s description recalls the assemblage of the war machine and the Chinese game of Go, in which it is a matter of dividing an open space and constantly maintaining motion.

Experimenting with Basic Rhythms

In his 1928 review of Karl Gröber’s Children’s Toys of Bygone Days: A History of Playthings of all People from Prehistoric Times to the xixth Century,2121Karl Gröber, Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit. Eine Geschichte des Spielzeugs (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1928); in English as Children’s Toys of Bygone Days: A History of Playthings of all People from Prehistoric Times to the xixth Century, trans. by Philip Hereford (London: Batsford, 1928). Walter Benjamin outlined the main features of a novel theory of play. In so doing, he drew on Karl Groos’s monumental 546-page study from 1899, The Play of Man.2222Groos, The Play of Man. The German original is titled Die Spiele des Menschen (Jena: Verlag Gustav Fischer, 1899). According to Benjamin, such a theory has to fulfil three tasks: firstly, it has ‘to take account of the Gestalt theory of play gestures’; secondly, it has to explore the ‘enigmatic doubles of stick and hoop, whip and top, marble and king-marble, as well as the magnetic attraction generated between the two parts’;2323Walter Benjamin, ‘Toys and Play: Marginal Notes to a Monumental Work’, trans. by Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings and others, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996–2005), ii.1: 1927–1930, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (2005), pp. 117–21 (p. 120). and, thirdly, it has to explore the law of repetition. For Benjamin, games with inanimate objects such as sticks and hoops, whips and spinning tops, are connected to the sexual:

In all probability the situation is this: before we transcend ourselves in love and enter into the life and the often-alien rhythm of another human being, we experiment early on with basic rhythms that proclaim themselves in their simplest forms in these sorts of games with inanimate objects. Or rather these are the rhythms in which we first gain possession of ourselves.2424Ibid.

Yet, as he immediately underscores, ‘the great law that presides over all rules and rhythms of the entire world of play’ is the law of repetition.2525Ibid. And here we must bear in mind that, in his essay ‘Work of Art’, Benjamin will associate play and repetition with the ‘second technology’, the work of art being that which alone promises a relationship between humanity and nature that goes beyond domination and violence. Following Freud, Benjamin links the desire for repetition in children’s play with the drive that determines the sexual life of adults beyond the pleasure principle: ‘We know that for a child repetition is the soul of play, that nothing gives him greater pleasure than to “Do it again!”’2626Ibid. We also know, however, that ‘in fact, every profound experience longs to be insatiable, longs for return and repetition until the end of time, and for the reinstatement of an original condition from which it sprang’.2727Ibid.

The interweaving of happiness and horror that Benjamin identifies in repetition is reflected in the double meaning of the German word spielen: ‘play’, ‘game’, ‘perform’, ‘gamble’: ‘the element of repetition is what is actually common to them. […] Not a “doing as if” but a “doing the same thing over and over again”, the transformation of a shattering experience into habit — that is the essence of play.’2828Ibid. In the following, Benjamin consistently describes play as the ‘midwife’ of habit:

For play and nothing else is the midwife of every habit. Eating, sleeping, getting dressed, washing have to be instilled into the struggling little brat in a playful way, following the rhythm of nursery rhymes. Habit enters life as a game, and in habit, even in its most sclerotic forms, an element of play survives to the end. Habits are the forms of our first happiness and our first horror that have congealed and become deformed to the point of being unrecognizable.2929Ibid; my translation. Specifically, I have changed the translation of Wehmutter from ‘mother’ to ‘midwife’.

And the paragraph ends almost as if it were a commentary on Friedrich’s Seeing Red: ‘And without knowing it, even the most arid pedant plays in a childish rather than a childlike way; the more childish his play, the more pedantic it is.’3030Ibid.

O me! O life!

One of the video diary scenes features a shot of Friedrich’s upper body clothed in a red jumper. She sits in a white armchair and holds the frontispiece of a used poetry book in front of the camera. The frontispiece shows a drawing of a young man with a red floppy hat, light-coloured long hair, and a beard, backdropped by a green meadow and a pale sky. Red letters on the book spell out the title Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass. Friedrich first reads out the verse she wrote in the volume when she was twenty: ‘Nestled in the crook of my arm where the sweat crept on a summer day.’ She remembers and laughs at the sudden presence of the past. She turns to a poem titled ‘O me! O life!’ Walt Whitman is considered by many — despite and because of his patriotism — as a prophet of the gay rights movement. He embodies intensity, youth, romanticism, the living present — an embodiment the fifty-year-old Friedrich comments on ironically: ‘So much the sentiment of a twenty-year-old!’ She pictures reading these Walt Whitman poems at the age of twenty and loving them: ‘When you’re twenty, you feel like “O me! O life!”’ Without pausing, she continues: ‘She seems to be doing the same thing at fifty.’ She begins to read the poem aloud, while at the same time verses appear in the picture in red letters together with their shadows as a deep dimension of time, and we hear the rapid piano playing of Variation 29:

Friedrich does not read out the answer with which the poem ends: ‘That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse!’3232Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), p. 298. Instead, she joins in the game and creates her own ritornello — ‘childlike not childish’.

Habit

In his reflections on play and the relationship between play and habit, Benjamin draws on Karl Groos’s practice theory. Groos’s observations of young children’s enjoyment of rhythmic movements, as they experiment with sensory stimuli, counting rhymes, nursery rhymes, dancing, and so on, led him to put forward the theory that instincts, in humans no less than in animals, are practised through playful experimentation. Groos refers, among others, to Gabriel Tarde and his 1890 study The Laws of Imitation.3333Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. by Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903). In this work, Tarde develops an evolutionary social and natural philosophy through the concepts of imitation and innovation, concepts to which Deleuze also refers at key points in his work, for example in Difference and Repetition, notably when it comes to his presentation of habit as contraction, and thus as the first synthesis of time.3434See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 78.

According to Groos, Tarde’s merit lies in having shown that the concept of imitation could be called upon ‘to gain a similar principal meaning in biological psychology as the concept of association in the older theory of the soul’.3535Groos, Spiele der Menschen, p. 361; my translation. As Groos emphasizes, however, Tarde understands imitation in a broader sense than the usual one, namely ‘as a special case of the great universal law of repetition’. We see this when he writes, for example, that the three forms of this répétition universelle are ondulation, génération, and imitation.3636Ibid. Groos refers here, respectively, to Tarde’s definition of molecular oscillation (at the level of physics), reproduction (at the level of biology), and social imitation. In his own commentary on Tarde, Deleuze similarly emphasizes that,

The non-correspondence of difference and repetition establishes the order of the general. Gabriel Tarde suggested in this sense that resemblance itself was only displaced repetition: real repetition is that which corresponds directly to a difference of the same degree as itself.3737Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 25.

Deleuze is concerned here with the small variations that are summarized and integrated in repetition.3838See ibid., p. 332, n. 3. In fact, the problem here is one of how an increasingly precise correspondence between difference and repetition can be established. As Deleuze succinctly puts it, habit ‘elicits something new from repetition: difference (which is initially posited as generality)’.3939Ibid., p. 7. Notable here is the fact that when, together with Henri Bergson, he defines habit as contraction, he interprets this contraction as a qualitative impression. It is only as something perceived that contraction, as habit, extracts something — namely, a difference — from repetition. Here we see the same kind of self-referential movement as in the affection-image.4040See, ‘Affective-Political Work with Documents: Sharon Hayes and Yael Bartana’, p. 68. Building on Bergson and Kant, Deleuze defines the first synthesis of time as the living present. Together with the pleasure it brings, the living present is the new that habit extracts from repetition as fusion of repetitions in the observing mind, that is as a passive ‘form of a pure determinability (space and time)’.4141Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. by Paul Bové (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 87.

Inexhaustible Variations of the Experimental Arrangement

Another video diary entry in red (you can see the red jumper that clothes Friedrich’s upper body, as well as the play of its folds and the little black microphone tucked into it) begins with the following consideration:

I suppose it would be great if I could think that I have a certain number of mannerisms, and devices, and you know, values, interests, whatever, and I can just, you know, do variations on them. So, it’s not just a matter of like, you know, being a bad person and then trying to turn into a different person. But instead to think that you’re a very enthusiastic person and so sometimes that means you’re manic and excessive and other times incredibly focused and appreciative — whatever…4242Seeing Red, 14:10–14:50.

It would be, Friedrich concludes her reflection, as if this personality and its different moments were variations held together by a certain interest, as if by a refrain, similarly to the way in which Bach, in the Goldberg Variations, repeats the motif introduced in the aria in different variations. Here Friedrich undertakes a precise reflection on the interplay of form and content in her film. This interplay is emphasized by the editing and the composition of image and sound. During her speech, for example, the viewer’s gaze is drawn to the faded red comb of a plaster hen; at another time the image of the red beak of a plastic duck is faded in. Then, we hear the talk in the film phases out as the nineth of the Goldberg Variations takes over, the camera shows a 50-second close-up as an uncut shot of a wandering robin with a magnificently inflated orange belly, listening quietly and attentively and hopping to the rhythm. Instead of her singing, however, we hear Gould’s piano playing.4343Seeing Red, 14:54–15:44.

In sum, Friedrich’s at once playful and rule-based approach to the production and post-production of her video evokes not only Tarde and Deleuze’s small variations, but also Benjamin’s characterization of the second technology as ‘endlessly varied test procedures’.4444Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. Second Version’, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, iii: 1935–1938, ed. by Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland (2002), pp. 101–33 (p. 107).

Play and the Second Technology

A key reason for Benjamin’s interest in Groos’s concept of experimental play is undoubtedly the central importance in it of feelings, sensations and perceptions, which is to say of aesthetics, in the Greek sense of the word aisthesis. In contrast to Groos, however, Benjamin closely links aesthetics, play, and technique by embedding his theory of play in a theory of the second technology. In contrast to Freud, Benjamin begins with the sort of rhythms ‘in which we first gain possession of ourselves’,4545Walter Benjamin, ‘Toys and Play’, p. 120. and not from the child and its relationships to objects. These rhythms are the same rhythms that have connected the living since the nineteenth century with the technical innovations of the steam engine, electricity, gas, the media of reproduction (such as photography), the typewriter, sound recording, and film.

In his texts from the mid-1930s, Benjamin distinguishes between two technical eras, which is to say two eras that refer to two different ways of being in the world and of arranging oneself in it. One he calls the ‘first technology’, the other the ‘second technology’.4646Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 107. The second technology, unlike the first, is no longer centred around humans and notably not around human sacrifice: ‘The achievements of the first technology might be said to culminate in human sacrifice; those of the second, in the remote-controlled aircraft which needs no human crew.’4747Ibid. In the following terse but significant sentence, Benjamin traces the interweaving of technology and sacrifice back to a temporal order of ‘once and for all’, an order that rests on ‘sacrificial death [as that] which holds good for eternity’. Indeed, the Great War’s violent excesses would have been inconceivable without discourses of sacrifice. They were what gave meaning to the war and to dying for the nation. The disentanglement of technology and war, Benjamin concluded, presupposes the disentanglement of technology from the logic of sacrifice, and thus also an overcoming of the Christian secular order centred around Christ’s sacrificial death. Instead of some exemplary ‘once and for all’, the second technology follows the temporal index of repetition and of ‘once is never’, and thus follows the openness of beginnings that always begin again, and of experimentation.

With reference to the ancient concept of techne, Benjamin, as later Heidegger,4848Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. by William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2013). attempts an overcoming of the anthropocentric understanding of technology as tool and instrument. For Benjamin, however, technology also means more than the skills of craftsmen and artists, and does not coincide with poiesis.4949Ibid., p. 11. He sees, the potentiality of technology as lying in its mediality. He links the concept of the second technology with the question concerning perceptual aesthetics by determining it as a collective perception. In this respect, the concepts of the first and the second technology simultaneously encompass two different technical arrangements and their corresponding appropriations of the world. The second technology is characterized by Benjamin as an ‘endlessly varied test procedure’, an approach he associates with the concept of experimental play.5050Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 107. The historical changes that Benjamin observes in art and science form the point of reference for this close relationship between technique and play.5151See Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, trans. by Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings, ii.2: 1931–1934, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (1999), pp. 731–36 (p. 731).

For Benjamin, the constellation of the second technology was characterized by a ‘tremendous gain in room-for-play [Spielraum]’.5252Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 124. [I have changed the translation of ‘ungeheuer’ from ‘huge’ to ‘tremendous’ and ‘Spielraum’ from ‘scope’ to ‘room-for-play’ as this comes closer to the meaning of the German words.] This room-for-play is just as inexhaustible as the ‘tremendous’, in both senses of the word, ‘unfolding of technique’5353Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, p. 732.: tremendous in the sense of huge, as well as in that of threatening, uncanny, unfamiliar. Benjamin deepens his earlier insights into the relationship between play and habit in ‘Work of Art’, by noting that ‘the origin of the second technology lies at the point where, by an unconscious ruse, human beings first began to distance themselves from nature. It lies, in other words, in play.’ The second technology changes everything with its enormous gain in ‘room-for-play’. It opens up new, unprecedented movements of intensity and possibilities, but also an unimagined power of destruction. This was clearly demonstrated by the First World War.5454Ibid. Benjamin makes clear that at issue is to prevent the next great war by familiarizing ourselves in a new way with this new technical environment through experimentation and play. He saw this experimental play not only in the movements of avant-garde art, but also in the new scientific methods of modern physics and sociology, their interdisciplinarity and constructive processes, and in the Bauhaus and Neues Bauen movements.5555Ibid. People, he thought, had a need of rejuvenating and reorganizing themselves. First and foremost, they had a need of overcoming the habit of viewing technology as an instrument that serves to master nature. As Benjamin emphasizes, this anthropocentric and teleological idea forms a central element of the dispositive of the first technology and, together with Wilhelmine imperialism and class society, is part of the legacy that a truly cosmopolitan society must overcome. According to Benjamin, the temporal structure of the first technology is that of a ‘once and for all’, and involves ‘irreparable laps or a sacrificial death that lasts for eternity’. By contrast, the second technology involves ‘the wholly provisional’; it is a temporal structure in keeping with ‘experiment and endlessly varied testing procedures’.5656Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 107. In an early piece of his from 1928, One Way Street, Benjamin states:

Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.5757Walter Benjamin, ‘One Way Street’, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, i: 1913–1926, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (1996), pp. 444–88 (p. 487).

This oft-quoted sentence contains a new sense when read in light of the above-presented connection between play, habit, experimentation, and basic rhythms. Benjamin ends the aphorism ‘To the Planetarium’ by relating new cosmic experience with new experiences of time and space:

One need recall only the experience of velocities by virtue of which mankind is now preparing to embark on incalculable journeys into the interior of time, to encounter there rhythms from which the sick shall draw strength as they did earlier on high mountains or on the shores of southern seas. The ‘Lunaparks’ are a prefiguration of sanatoria.5858Ibid.

Intensity

In one of the appearances she makes in her film, Friedrich likewise refers to humankind. She complains about it and levels accusations at it. She sees no possibility of changing the world. Of the many billions of people who live on the planet, most of them do not have enough work to provide them with sufficient amounts to eat, or are bored with their work, or are made unhappy by it. They have difficulties in and with their families. Friedrich concludes that a large number of people on this planet are in the habit of calling on some god several times a day to improve their lives, or else to seek this improvement by playing the lottery, taking drugs, smoking, cheating on their loved ones, and so on. She is seen from chest to chin in a red shirt and hanging on the wall behind her are stills from Hide and Seek. Scenes from the neighbourhood are shown again, this time of people shopping in a 99-cent store. Friedrich’s voice disappears and Glenn Gould’s interpretation of the 22nd Goldberg Variation takes over the soundtrack. The hands of an ice cream vendor, coloured red by ice cream, appear in the picture, scraping bright red ice cream from a large bowl of flashing metal in rhythm to the music, artfully scooping it into a small white cup, and accepting a dollar note. The camera follows the hands and captures the beautiful, almost dance-like movements with which the man organizes a bundle of dollar notes, turning them back and forth and counting them. It is another unedited shot, a whole 84 seconds in length.5959Seeing Red, 9:54–11:27. The movements of the red-coloured hands are finally replaced by those of a little girl with a red jumper and black hair who tries to ride her scooter in circles and to find a common rhythm with the movement of the scooter.

This brings me to the next and final question, which concerns the rule according to which as much red as possible should appear in the picture, as well as the function this red has in light of the aforementioned theories of experimental play, the second technology, and the ritornello. How does the intensity of the colour relate to the observation that change requires more than the sum of all small variations?

Expressiveness

Friedrich poses this same question about the red used in her video just prior to the last shot. Her question is formulated from the point of view of her lack of knowledge. She thinks she ought to teach her students not to use red in video films and to be careful with metaphors. But why not use red? ‘Blinding, kitschy, hideous red that bleeds across the screen, that you don’t want to see and that contains no information whatsoever’.6060Seeing Red, 23:21. She opens her jacket and lets the red of her jumper flow across the screen. She leaves the question open, ending the scene on an ellipsis: ‘Chances are when I… New opportunities are when I…’— no further answer is given.6161Ibid.

Friedrich’s question introduces a self-referential moment into the film and evokes the level of aesthetics. ‘Seeing Red’ is not just a metaphor, but a figure of speech, a play on words. In an interview with Katy Martin, Friedrich answers the question of what ‘Seeing Red’ means by saying that, firstly, it refers to the affect of anger and rage; that, secondly, she was interested in showing colour and pointing out the variations of tones and shades in which a colour appears; and that, finally, the colour red stands for passion, for a passionate, in the positive sense of the word, relationship to the world.6262Martin, ‘Su Friedrich Interviewed by Katy Martin’, p. 10.

Red shows — to speak with Deleuze — a difference of intensity. The colour becomes an expressive material, in the sense that Friedrich’s play becomes expressive through this colour. In Difference and Repetition, when introducing habit as a contraction and as the first synthesis of time, Deleuze emphasizes that the habit of repetition can only elicit something new — here, the living present — on the condition that it is interpreted as a qualitative impression — and thus as perceived difference. This differential play between quantitative and qualitative variables appears again in the chapter ‘Of the Refrain’, in which Deleuze and Guattari state the following:

There is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness. What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities). Take the example of color in birds or fish: color is a membrane state associated with interior hormonal states, but it remains functional and transitory as long as it is tied to a type of action (sexuality, aggressiveness, flight). It becomes expressive, on the other hand, when it acquires a temporal constancy and a spatial range that make it a territorial, or rather, territorializing mark: a signature.6363Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 315.

Temporal constancy assumes the contraction of time, or habit, and thus the experience of difference in repetition. Something new is extracted from the repetition by a difference of intensity, which, just like habit, constitutes a qualia, that is an experienced difference. The differentiation between the functional and expressive significance of colours corresponds to the difference between physical intensity, which can be measured, and the aesthetic significance of the intensity, which eludes measurement as qualia.6464See Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, ‘Einleitung’, in Hermann Cohen, Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte. Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik (Wien: Turia+Kant, 2013), pp. 7–70. While from a scientific perspective intensity as variable of a function remains in the realm of quantities, intensity in the realm of the aesthetic, as well as of philosophy, constitutes a quality or, to use another concept from Deleuze, an être de sensations, which is to say a sensation that lasts and that becomes a movement of expression.

This differentiation appears again when Deleuze insists that rhythm is not the same as measure. That claim is already apparent in the first sentence of the cited passage, which reads: ‘There is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness.’6565Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 313. Deleuze and Guattari thereby emphasize what they had affirmed earlier in the book on the relationship between chaos and rhythm, namely that the commonality of chaos and rhythm is the space in-between. They continue that,

It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march. […] Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unity of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical: it ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one milieu to another.6666Ibid., p. 315.

Spaces of Desire

This leads us back to the ritornello and the children’s game of Ring-Around-the-Rosie. As I explained at the beginning of this essay concerning Friedrich’s playful use of technology, in Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation, the ‘game’ does not constitute a magic circle in the sense that it does in Huizinga’s theory of play. Instead, it creates a passage in the sense of a ritornello. The circle, in which rhythmized consonants and vowels are combined, is opened in the proverbial sense: you let someone enter or you step out of the circle yourself.6767Ibid., p. 313. For Deleuze and Guattari, this falling out of the circle is a ‘tumbling outwards’ that coheres with the tendency of the circle to open up to a future: ‘You launch forth and attempt an improvization.’6868Ibid. The blocs of red in Friedrich’s film suggests precisely this: red is the rhythm in its becoming expressive, and in this respect it is more than just another variation. Using the red, Friedrich is able to mark a boundary and create a place to stay. For Deleuze and Guattari, art emerges precisely in this expressive becoming.

Unlike Deleuze, Benjamin was interested in the historical change in perception that occurred with the transition from the first to the second technology. An important indication of this change — which parallels the emergence of film and photography — was the exodus of the masses from the countryside to the cities. The accompanying transformation of cities into metropolises, with their technical infrastructures, their speed, volatility, and congestion was accompanied, as Benjamin claimed, by the much-discussed decline of the aura of the artwork insofar as it is associated with uniqueness, distance, and duration. For Benjamin, however, as Samuel Weber has already noted, the masses were essentially mass movements.6969See Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 84. In fact, in ‘Work of Art’, Benjamin links the decay of the aura, or uniqueness of the work of art with the increasing numbers of masses that were joining the big cities and with the ‘growing intensity of their movements’.7070Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 105. This sentence is not in Benjamin’s ‘A Little History of Photography’, from which he extracts the passage on the aura and its collapse verbatim. It is no coincidence that Benjamin uses the term intensity at this point. What it indicates is that the decline of the aura is at the same time a transition of intensity from the unique and the ‘here and now’ — the point — to the incessant and complex movements of the masses. This transition of intensity from point to movement marks the historical change in the medium of perception. Thus, the medium in which the perception of that reality corresponding to the masses takes place is no longer the aura, but rather simply dispersing, small, differentiated, and differentiating movements. Accordingly, Benjamin comments on the ‘growing intensity’ of mass movements in the second version of ‘Work of Art’ with reference to the changed forms of reception:

Namely: the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things, and their equal passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness [Überwindung des Einmaligen jeder Gegebenheit] by assimilating it as a reproduction.7171Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 105.

… that I am a woman

In the last scene of her film, Friedrich spins around on a black office chair and, as she does so, she removes the orange, red, and red-checked shirts, sweaters and t-shirts that she has worn throughout the film and video diaries. Once again only her upper body can be seen. She introduces the scene by remarking that everything she does is in light of the fact that she is a woman. On the soundtrack, while Glenn Gould is playing the fourteenth variation, all the speeches she had given during her performances overlap to form a tower of words. Finally, she is left standing there wearing only a T-shirt. She gives the chair a last whirl and pulls off the T-shirt over her head (Fig. 2). The video ends with a view of the rear of the chair, her bare back and the black straps of her bra slightly swaying to and fro (Fig. 3). After the image has vanished, the last runs of the piano can still be heard as the end credits roll. A new game, a new cinema can begin.