Introduction

During tense research and thinking, critical reflection often causes questions about the method and ethics of the research. Endless doubts and suspicions dry me into the desert. Then, I go back to relax. From his writing, his kindness and warmth are delivered and telling me ‘relax and float’. As much as I love sparkling theory and ideas, I desire to rest, hermit, and hibernate from the determinate judgement of myself and the subject. Sadly, Barthes’ sudden departure remained a montage of the Neutral concept. The texts I started reading were his last remains in the lecture theatre at the Collège De France from 1977 to 1978. Barthes (1915-1980) was of renowned French philosopher, semiotician, and literary theorist. One of his books, Methodologies was on my graduate’s reading list; thus, his name and early work were familiar in my research. However, when I carefully recollect his theories and concepts, I found I barely know his ideas. He was the figure floating and unfixed, only giving me nuances images of him. For, this idea of Neutral started from his other text, Degree Zero, which desired literacy Utopia. Maybe he dreamt of writing a degree zero and grasped a living degree zero.

Context of Neutral

Early and Late Barthes

Roland Barthes researches extensively on structuralist semiotics, which exposes ‘ideological abuse’ and wishes for exemption from meaning from the world that is trapped by language which includes, From Work to Text (Barthes, 1989: 56-64), Death of the Author (Barthes, 1989: 49-55), The Pleasure of the Text (1975). In the late 70s, his idea of Neutral considers further new post-structural forms, of ethical living. His idea on the neural was decisively developed through his reading of Camus’s The Stranger, which distinguished him from Claude Lévi-Strauss (positivism and binarism). Barthes read this in 1944 and also wrote an article on it, ‘Réflexion sur le style de L’Étranger’, then a book, [(Barthes, 1967|Roland Barthes (1967) Writing Degree Zero)], in which he developed the hypothesis of a ‘neutral style’, a ‘blank voice’, the ‘zero degree’. ” In ‘The Kitchen of Meaning’, influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, he declared “This at least: all are signs.” (Barthes, 1994, p.157)[1]

“as Mythologies makes clear, the project is to track down ruthlessly the ‘ideological abuse’ in ‘the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying’”

(Barthes, 2006, xix)

In ‘Mythology Today’, in 1971, Barthes understood the challenges of demystification on signs. “[T]he shift is from the sign (which Saussure had, of course, understood to be the union of signifiant and signifié) to a ‘science of the signifier’ whose ‘goal is not so much the analysis of the sign as its dislocation’ [(Barthes, 2006)] (1986: 66).” “a mythological endoxa has been created: demystification (or demystification) has itself become a discourse, a corpus of phrases, a catechistic statement’ (1986: 66).” Late Barthes turned to the desire of Neutral, using concepts of randomness]] and idiorrhythmy,[2] learn how to die, “Neutral treated the desire with fresh and fuller force” (Badmington, 2020, p.68) at stake in ethics of language.

In his brief summary of what he taught to be included in the Annuaire (Yearbook) in the lecture collection The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège De France (1977-1978) (2005), he approached Neutre as a grammatical genre, observe and describe in facts of discourses rather than of language. It refers to “every syntagm that is articulated by meaning: literary, philosophical, and mystical texts, but also gestures, behaviours, and conducts coded by society, inner subjective moves.” (Barthes, 2005, p.211) In the process of teaching every inflection of Neutral, it aimed at the suspension of the conflictual basis of discourse, which might be connected to the 19th and the 20th century theoretical ground including Marx, Freud, and Darwin.

Transposed to the ‘ethical’ level: injunctions addressed by the world to ‘choose’, to produce meaning, to enter conflicts, to ‘take responsibility,’ etc. ! temptation to suspend, to thwart, to elude the paradigm, its menacing pressure, its arrogance -> to exempt meaning -> this polymorphous field of paradigm, of conflict avoidance of the Neutral.

(Barthes, 2005, p.7)

Therefore, two groups are closely analysed in his lecture: conflictual types of discourse (Affirmation, Adjective, Anger, Arrogance, etc.) and that suspend conflict (Benevolence, Weariness, Silence, Tact, Sleep, Oscillation, Retreat, etc.). It is also important to note that those discourses are far from common uses but related to specific references, such as Tao or Boehme and Blanchot as he experimented in A Lover’s Discourse in the form of dictionary and Mourning Diary with fragmented through related to his mother.

After his death, especially after the 2010s, his posthumous publications kindled a new conversation with a new Barthes, which “has called for reconsideration,” (Badmington, 2020, p.65) based on his three lecture series, How to Live Together, The Neutral, and The Preparation of the Novel.

Practice of Neutral

Victor Burgin’s works related to the visual rhetorical practice resonate with Barthes’s understanding of Neutral and his experience of cacophony caused by outer noise as involuntary thoughts “to escape the ideological constraints of language, institutions and images.” (Bishop, 2020, p.135)

“The phenomena of everyday life form an amalgamated field of broadly isomorphic endogenous and exogenous impressions.” (Burgin, 2004, p.15)

Burgin‘s sequence-image goes beyond or outside of linguistic analysis of sequence shot, which was a popular method in the 60s to 70s, and questions the transitory state in the ’present moment’, a sequential association with perception and recollection in sporadic moving image practice, which cannot be positioned within the film or photography as a language nor memory claimed mainly by Cristian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Stephen Heath based on psychoanalytic and semiotic methods. For Burgin, however, the narrative is the secondary revision of perception from the fragmentary, discontinuous, which smooths out the gaps and absences of gaps. His approaches against culture and ideological doxa that regulate the ‘way of seeing’, suggest a new understanding of sequence-image.

However, in the early 1970s, Barthes started to refuse to engage with ideological critique, (Watts, 2016) and as Sunil Manghani claims, Barthes moved on from politics to ethical account in The Pleasure of the Text (2009)

Merleau-Ponty suggests

‘living in the flesh’ is always mediated experience.we come into the world on a ‘bias’ – our bodily situation, from the first, is never ‘neutral’ and no experience is ever ‘direct’ or ‘pure’ because it always happens in – and is mediated, formed, and transformed by – culture and history and, of course, our engagements with others and things.

(reference needed)

Therefore, the pursuit neutral is also the desire for the neutral, for the utopia, a utopia where against the grain of left-wing and Marxist critique. (Manghani, 2020a, p.21) It is evidenced in his late three lectures how they exercise scepticism of ‘emptying out’, which moves his ideas from politic to ethical challenge.

The Neutral, in which the subject matter itself goes against any kind of hierarchy and ordering […] he goes further. He again numbers his title entries according to alphabetical order, but then scrambles these by using ‘coordinates’ from a table in a statistical journal: ‘I 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’ (2005: 12).””

(Manghani, 2020a, p.9)

Manghani claims Barthes‘s positioning of desire can be seen as a resonance of Deleuze’s reading on Nietzsche and the ‘liberation’ of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari‘s thinking, ‘a liberation to enter into social relations,’ (Goodchild, 1996, p.2) liberation from the doxa, which is the main problem to build a new social relation. However, as Deleuze and Guattari offer a ‘politics of desire’ by affirming unlimited creative power (Hallward, 2006) Barthes bypasses Skepticism (Neither A nor B) of Pyrrho, which also he connects to the silence, weariness, Zen, Taoism, and Haiku,[3] more precisely, how to facing the dead/unsustainable:

People tell me ‘You’ll make a book with this course on the Neutral?’ .. . my answer: No, the Neutral is the unmarketable. And I think of Bloy’s words: ‘there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable’ → ‘Invisible’? I would say: ‘unsustainable’ → We’ll have to hold on to the unsustainable for thirteen weeks: after that, it will fade.

(Barthes, 2005, p.13)

Therefore, the practice of Neutral or the desire of Neutral should be a fierce and intense activity that surpasses the paradigm in accordance with Wou-wei in Zen, active non-action, non-doing, ‘not to act’ and ‘a desire rejecting fusional logics’ the pleasures of a flittering (papillonnement) For him, the “definition of the Neutral remains structural […] refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states.”To outplay the paradigm” is an ardent, burning activity,” (Barthes, 2005, p.7) thus, constitute a strong and active value in Neutral,” which concerns “every inflection that, dodging or baffling the paradigmatic, oppositional structure of meaning, aims at the suspension of the conflictual basis of discourse’ (Barthes, 2005, p.211): the Desire of ‘thought and practice of the non-conflictual’, (Barthes, 2005, p.44) or the “naturalization of conflict” (Badmington, 2020, p.69)

“In short, Western tradition is problematic for me in this: not because it decides that conflict exists, that the world is conflictual, but: because it transforms conflict into nature and a value (or, another version of the same refusal: making a value out of nature).

(Barthes, 2005, p.126)

Barthes adds his experience that he felt as an example of overturning the polite social convention or paradigm.

One day, Barthes asked a question to a woman, ‘The weather was nice yesterday’. “In reply to such a comment, he notes, ‘one might expect yes/no (and rather more yes, since the subject is not conflictual!)’ (2005: 113). Then, the woman replied ‘It was hot’, for this response ‘neither affirms nor denies the nice weather, [but] displaces the paradigm toward another paradigm, indeed another value”

(Barthes, 2005, p.113)

This conversation draws a new trajectory escape from the “cunning, too subtle, too stubborn, too strong” (Badmington, 2020, p.72), which interests Barthes’ in its intensities, or in-between states, is the refusal to judge (to delineate meaning) – this is what he means by the Neutral.” (Manghani, 2020a, p.19)

1. first: suspension (épochè) of orders, laws, summons, arrogances, terrorisms, puttings on notice, demands, the will-to-possess.

2. then, by way of deepening, refusal of the pure discourse of opposition. Suspension of narcissism: no longer to be afraid of images (imago): to dissolve one’s own image (a wish that borders on the negative mystical discourse, or Zen or Tao). (Barthes, 2005, p.12-3)

The Neutral, as imagined by Barthes in the course of 1977–8, offers alternatives, flight, respite, exemption, suspension […] “the ethics of language’,”

(Badmington, 2020, p.70)

More importantly, his perspective on the overthrow of paradigm or doxa is also between ethical and aesthetical folding, that is in the linguistic world of doubling, he brings the Neutral to daily life as the practice of notation, Haiku. In doing so, the Neutral is the strategy for living and also the aesthetic for living “for inhabiting and interpreting culture with nuanced tact” (Badmington, 2020, p.70)

Desire in Moving Image

Poetic interruption: Neither Realism Nor Romanticism

Barthes‘s work on the cinema is more subtle than Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière who actively engaged with intellectuals, cultural, and aesthetic discourses in Europe. One of central tenets of the late-1960s French intellectuals or gauchisme (leftism) was the awareness and question of the dominant position in demystifying, which lead to the distrust of demystification as a valid intellectual operation. (Watts, 2016, p.97)

This fight could be called demystification. I  still fight, here and there, but deep down I hardly believe in it any more … All that’s left to do is to sound one’s voice from the edge, from elsewhere: an unattached voice.”[4]

Jacques Rancière asserts that Barthes was less interested in the mise-en-scene or cinematic narrative than the experience of watching and its environment. However, Barthes clearly identifies a distinction between science (study of object or material) and techné (montage, realism) in his later lecture in The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France. 1978-1979 and 1979-1980 (2011), and his main concern is techné,[5] which is not only the aesthetic experience but how singular artwork, including cinema, questioning how it is formed in that particular structure.

I said earlier. He is describing the experience of someone “touched” by the rays of light of the projection. For him, the viewer isn’t a person looking at a screen, either to be fascinated or freed; a viewer is a person touched and caressed by a ray of light. To the overwhelming apparatus theory in vogue at the time, Barthes opposes an imaginary erotic experience which turns cinema into something tactile, with a viewer who is a character sitting in a chair caressed by a ray of light and eroticized by the site. This isn’t a theory about the spectator’s activity; it’s a theory about the spectator’s delicious, erotic passivity…

(Watts, 2016, p.106)

His view on the fragmentation of cinema, of narrative, of asyndeton, of anacoluthon, interrupt and suspend the flow of time and movement in the cinema,[6] as Haiku wide open a gap in the present as a form of speed writing. For Barthes, Haiku is one of the standard formulas for the notatio. He considered Haiku as an atom of the sentence in minimum enunciation that marks contours and praises the simultaneous real = incident.[7] Although the linguistic rhythm in the French translation for Barthes, insists on the importance of the blank or ventilate space, “Ma”, consist of three separate lines that generate the delicate visuality. For instance, in Basho’s Haiku”:

古池や
蛙飛びこむ
水の音

An old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water

(Basho)

Frames each incident and background in lines. First, he shows the environment, an old pond, delivering the atmosphere of the moment. Then, a frog jumps in, the poet’s interruption or intervention or showing his existence in that space. Finally, the effect, change or the situation before it goes back to the first quiet and serene place. As if our life brushes the world. It came into the world as an incident and departed from the world only the sound of water remained. There is not an order of those background/environment/view, emergence (surrectum/arise), and relational change, but it delivers minimised Where/When, What, and How. Further, “background” can be indirectly expressed in the “emergence” with season words (kigo, 季語), such as spring rain or the snow or certain blossom. Haiku is similar to jotting or scribbling, but neither of them is due to its rhythmical structure and rules. One more example from Barthes is:

The winter wind blew
The cats eyes
Start to blinking

Basho

Here, “background” is expressed with a season word and “emergence” = hit the cat’s eyes, relational change = blinking, therefore creating a movement of montage not in conflict but in the incident. In Haiku, it is also important not to finish the narrative, and open the thread to the next or nexts. I believe this feature came from the historical function of Haiku. Originally, Haiku is the first stanza in Renga (連歌, linked verse), which was a genre and collaborative game played with other multiple poets. Starting from the first stanza of 5-7-5, the first poet presents Haiku (first line), and then, the other multiple poets generate the following stanzas of 7-7 linked in succession. Therefore, the first stanza is the nuanced opening and solvable riddle for a narrative to start. To heat the narrative, Haiku works as a fist, surprises the listener and stimulates sensations. By bringing the Haiku into ethics, Barthes doubled the practice of notation (including writer’s note or autobiographical diary) by positioning it between speaking (형태 생산물 부여, illusion) and reality (what to choose) to enable Neutral writing.

‘현실’의 차원(무엇을 선택하는가)일까요, ‘말하기’의 차원(노타시오에 대해 어떤 형태, 어떤 생산물을 부여하는가)일까요? 이 실천은 의미, 시간, 순간, 말하기에 대해 무엇을 포함하고 있을까요? 노타시오는 당장 언어활동이라는 강(江), 중단되지 않는 언어활동이라는 강의 문제적 교차점에서 나타납니다. 그러니까 노타시오는 삶 — 연속되고, 달리고, 이어지는 텍스트이자, 겹친 텍스트인 동시에 재단된 텍스트들의 조직학, 팔렝프세스트(palimpseste) — 표시하기(고립시키기 : 희생, 희생양 등)라는 신성한 제스처의 교차점에서 나타납니다. 메모하기 역시 문제적 교차점일까요? 그렇습니다. 메모하기에 의해 제시된 것은 사실주의의 문제입니다. 메모하기의 실천을 가능한 것(가소로운 것이 아닙니다.)으로 여기는 것, 이것은 이미 문학적 리얼리즘의 회귀(나선형)를 가능한 것으로 받아들이는 것입니다.

(Barthes, 2011)

On the other side, there is the Korean poem ‘Sijo‘, which is a Korean verse form appearing (in Korean) in three lines of 14 to 16 syllables. In English translation, the verse form is divided into six shorter lines. Park Jae-Min and Kim Jinhee claim that the sijo originated from the traditional musical tune, mandaeyŏp around the late fifteenth century, as lyrics by comparing two. (Park, 2017) It is also evidence that the central unit in sijo, umbo (breath unit), which I believe, is not uncommon in the practice of poetry. The poem contains not only symbols or images to contemplate but also the rhythm of visuals from the nature and environment and aural representation from the voice, poetry to be sung and heard.

Shijo is to be sung, which gives them a particular quality: they are light, personal, and often conversational; the language is simple, direct, and devoid of elaboration or ornamentation. (O’Rourke, 2002, p.10)

chang	1 ku	2 ku	3ku	4ku
1st	3 (2-4)	4 (4-6)	4,3 (2-5)	4 (4-6)
2nd	3 (1-4)	4 (3-6)	4,3 (2-5)	4 (4-6)
3rd	3 (3)	5 (5-9)	4 (4-5)	3 (3-4)

Translation	Korean
Thus I have no worries, I live a fisherman’s life.	이 중에 시름 없는 것이 어부 생애로다.
Floating my tiny boat on waves that never end,	일엽편주를 만경파에 띄워 두고
oblivious of the affairs of men, how can I feel the passing of the days?	인세를 다 잊었거니 날 가는 줄을 아는가

Translation	Korean
The mountain may be high, but it is still below heaven.	태산이 높다하되 하늘 아래 뫼이로다
Climb and climb again; everyone can reach the summit.	오르고 또 오르면 못 오를리 없건마는
Only he who never climbs insists the mountain is high.	사람이 제 아니 오르고 뫼만 높다 하더라

The opening chang or line presents an idea or an image as a general statement.

Ride a horse through a field of flowers and the scent lingers on the hoof.

(O’Rourke, 2002, p.11)

The middle line (chang) develops further from the first line, either providing context or new material or providing more detail:

Enter a wine-spring tavern and the smell of undrunk wine sticks fast.

(O’Rourke, 2002, p.11)

The first ku of the last line is “twist”, as a counterpoint to the irony that is so often characteristic of the second part of the final chang. (O’Rourke, 2002, p.12)

All we did was catch each other’s eye; why then all the lies?

Kevin O’Rourke identifies fourteen to sixteen syllables in each line, “distributed through four distinct umbo, or breath groups, with no more than forty-five syllables.” (O’Rourke, 2002, p.4) O’Rourke’s approach follows a recent debate on the musical aspects of sijo in the musical tradition than shamanistic chants of antiquity, a form derived from Buddhist songs from China.[8] Apart from different approaches in rhythmic structure and common poetic style in Japan (observational) and Korea (essayistic), I believe the most significant difference between those poems is not only the subjectivity and objectivity or direct and indirect representations but also the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. In Korean traditional aesthetic, “Jeoshinsajo” (傳神寫照), means that the painting should deliver its soul and will. This tendency also indicates the accuracy of the representation and illustration of the spirit are treated in the same manner through the image. The Korean dictionary explains it as follows ‘When painting a portrait, it not only reproduces the figure but also captures the spirit. Or the portrait. It is the most important value when painting portraits in the East.’

Korean portrait painters believed in representing a human’s mettle through details of each element, such as facial marks, wrinkles, black spots, or exact sizes of mouth, nose, eyes, ears, and creased clothes. The painting should give viewers the energy or soul that makes them alive. It might be related to the tradition of physiognomy, which is the topology of facial figures, and the energy of their placement exposes their past, future, and disposition. Therefore, the topology reading is related to the art of observation and inference to the soul, which connotes the present tense, the past, marks and traces of someone’s life, and the future merged into presuppositional choices of life they will make. In this process of reading, the detail of the facial map is crucial depending on the various types of faces. Due to the fully detailed representation, the human body and face are almost flattened on the surface.

Conclusion (WIP)

Barthes, Deleuze, and Eisenstein are intermingled in history, but they are also forming idiorrhythmy. Eisenstein’s plasmaticity, Deleuze‘s Diagram, and Barthes‘s Neutral explores the energy of life and singing about liberty from meaning, doxa, and figure. Eisenstein describes the plasmatic as the behaviour of “primordial protoplasm, not yet having a stable form, but capable of taking on any and all forms.” (Eisenstein, 2017, p.32) Plasmatic phenomena exhibit “the endless possibility for diversity in form,” and plasmaticity, therefore, implies an absoluteness of movement and change, an “‘omnipotentiality,’ i.e. the ability to become ‘whatever you want.’” (Eisenstein, 2012, p. 15)

To Write and

• The rhythm of Life
  • Sergei M. Eisenstein (1977) Film Form: New Problems
  • Roland Barthes (1987)[1970] The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills
  • 202207061352-Conflictural Float of Thought 
  • 202207061354-Ambiguity and the Frame

the movement of flight as an impersonal and neutral event or action: “Movement is registered before the object is recognized.” Eisenstein, “Conspectus of Lectures,” 239.

(Eisenstein, 1988)

• Ambulatory Rhythm
  • Giuliana Bruno’s Architecture and Film , 
  • Giuliana Bruno (2007) Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts , 
  • Sergei M. Eisenstein (1977) Film Form: New Problems

Extras to Read

• Barthes, R. (2006) ‘Neither-Nor Criticism’, in Lavers, A. (tran.) Mythologies. 47. [print.]. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, pp. 81–83.
• Blanchot, M. (1993) The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Theory and history of literature, v. 82).
• Henry P. Schwartz (2013) ‘Barthes, The Neutral, and Our Neutrality’, American Imago, 70(3), pp. 487–513. doi:10.1353/aim.2013.0019.
• Manghani, S. (2020) ‘Neutral Life: Roland Barthes’ Late Work – An Introduction’, Theory, Culture & Society, 37(4), pp. 3–34. doi:10.1177/0263276420911425.

More of Barthes‘s recent posthumous publications:

• teaching notes
  • Barthes, Roland (2007) Le Discours amoureux: Séminaire à l’Ecole pratique deshautes e ́tudes 1974–1976, ed. Coste C. Paris: Seuil.
  • Barthes, Roland (2010a) Le Lexique de l’auteur: Séminaire à l’École pratique des hautes êtudes 1973–1974, suivi de fragments inédits du Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, ed. Pierrot AH. Paris: Seuil.
  • Barthes, R., Briggs, K. and Léger, N. (2011) The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège De France, 1978-1979 and 1979-1980. New York: Columbia University Press (European perspectives: a series in social thought and cultural criticism).
  • Barthes, Roland (2013) How To Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, trans. Briggs K. New York: Columbia University Press. – two journals – Barthes, Roland (2011) Travels in China, trans. Brown A. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
  • 바르트는 1974년에 중국을 여행함 – Barthes, Roland (2010) Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977–September 15, 1979, ed. Léger N, trans. Howard R. New York: Hill and Wang.
• a late account of modernity
  • Barthes, Roland (2010c) Phrase – Modernité. Genesis 30: 239–283.
• the letters, notes and short texts of the centenary Album
  • Barthes, R. and Gladding, J. (2018) Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts.

Bibliography

Badmington, N. (2020) An Undefined Something Else: Barthes, Culture, Neutral Life. Theory, Culture & Society. [Online] 37 (4), 65–76.

Barthes, R. (2006) Mythologies. 47. [print.]. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

Barthes, R. (2005) The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège De France (1977-1978). European perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press.

Barthes, R. (2009) The Pleasure of the Text. 37. print. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

Barthes, R. (2011) The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège De France, 1978-1979 and 1979-1980. European perspectives: A series in social thought and cultural criticism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Barthes, R. (1994) The Semiotic Challenge. 1. California paperback print. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Barthes, R. ([1970] 1987) ‘The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills’, in Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press. pp. 52–68.

Barthes, R. (1967) Writing Degree Zero. London: Jonathan Cape: Colin Smith.

Bishop, R. (2020) A Circle of Fragments: Barthes, Burgin, and the Interruption of Rhetoric. Theory, Culture & Society. [Online] 37 (4), 135–165.

Bruno, G. (2007) Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. Writing architecture series. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Burgin, V. (2004) ‘Introduction: The Noise of the Marketplace’, in The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion. pp. 7–7.

Eisenstein, S. M. (1988) ‘Conspectus of Lectures on the Psychology of Art’, in The Psychology of Composition. London: Methuen. pp. 16–25.

Eisenstein, S. M. (1977) ‘Film Form: New Problems’, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. A Harvest/HBJ book. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. pp. 122–149.

Eisenstein, S. M. (2017) On Disney. Jay Leyda (ed.). London: Seagull Books.

Goodchild, P. (1996) Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire. Theory, culture & society. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE.

Hallward, P. (2006) Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London ; New York: Verso.

Henry P. Schwartz (2013) Barthes, The Neutral, and Our Neutrality. American Imago. [Online] 70 (3), 487–513.

Manghani, S. (2020a) ‘Idiorrhythmy: An (Unsustainable) Aesthetic of Ethics’, in Paola Crespi & Sunil Manghani (eds.) Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practices. Technicities. Edinburgh (G.B.): Edinburgh university press. pp. 173–200.

Manghani, S. (2020b) Neutral Life: Roland Barthes’ Late Work  An Introduction. Theory, Culture & Society. [Online] 37 (4), 3–34.

O’Rourke, K. (ed.) (2002) The Book of Korean Shijo. Harvard East Asian monographs 215. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center : Distributed by Harvard University Press.

Watts, P. (2016) Roland Barthes’ Cinema. First edition. Dudley Andrew et al. (eds.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Notes

[1] (Manghani, 2020b)

[2]  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, 2020b, p.26)

[3] This, I believe might be apatheia (freedom or release from emotion or excitement.) and epoche (suspension of judgment)

[4] 1. Barthes, “La Chronique: Démystifier,” in OC V, 649–650. The translation here is from (Watts, 2016, p.98)

[5] 202206180901-Science and Techne

[6] 202206180651-Thinking in Cinema

[7] 그것은 최소한의 발화 행위, 고도로 짧은 형식, ‘실제적’ 삶, 현재적 삶, 동시 발생적인 삶과 잘 구별하기 어려운 요소를 메모하는(표시하고, 윤곽을 부여하고, 찬양하는, 파마(fama)76)를 부여하는) 문장의 원자입니다. (Barthes, 2011)][현재를 subject로 삼아 소설을 쓰고자 했던 Barthes에게 있어서 어느 것보다도 그러한 현재를 메모 (notatio), 라틴어 ‘노타시오(notatio)’는 프랑스어의 notation에 해당하는 명사이다. 이 책에서 바르트는 ‘메모(note)’에서 ‘글쓰기(écriture)’까지를 세 단계로 구별하고 있다. 첫 번째 단계는 불현듯 머리에 떠오르는 생각이나 영감을 수첩 등에 하나 또는 몇 개의 단어나 간단한 문장으로 하는 단순한 ‘메모’이다. 바르트는 이것을 ‘노툴라(notula)’라고 부른다. 두 번째 단계는 이렇게 메모된 내용을 정리하고, 분류해 약간의 체계를 부여하면서 ‘필사(copie)’하고 정서(正書)하는 단계로, 바르트는 이 단계를 ‘노타(nota)’로 명명한다. 이런 점을 고려하면서 바르트는 notatio를 ‘노툴라’에 가까운 것으로, notation을 ‘노타’에 가까운 것으로 보고 있다. 또한 이와 관련하여 notation에는 ‘노타레(Notare)’(메모하기)와 ‘포르마레(Formare)’(쓰기)가 압축되어 있다고 보고 있다. 그리고 세 번째 단계가 바로 본격적인 ‘글쓰기’ 단계, 곧 ‘에크리튀르(écriture)’ 단계이다. 이런 사실들을 고려해 여기에서는 순간적이고 직감과 영감을 바탕으로 한 메모하기에 해당하는 notatio는 ‘노타시오’로 쓰고, 이 ‘노타시오’를 다시 정서하고 필사하는 행위에 해당하는 notation은 ‘메모하기’로 옮기기로 한다. 의 형태로 capture했던 것은 Haiku였다.

[8] Kim, D. (1986) Sijo Yuhyongnon. Seoul: Ihwa Yoja Taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu.