Collective Consciousness
Collective intelligence—observed in slime molds, termite colonies, the internet, social movements, the stock exchange, urban fabric, and our brains—is a phenomenon where novel forms emerge in nonlinear and unpredictable ways out of interactions between thousands or millions of elements or agents in a complex system. (1)Kurant, Agnieszka. “Polyphonies: From Collective Intelligence To Artificial Societies.”
Liz Rhodes’ Light Reading (1978) begins with no image—only a voiceover of fragmented description. The tone and words seem to set the stage for a narrative,
and that’s what we expect of a narrator at the beginning of a film. Yet, the meaning begins to deconstruct. There’s no clear-cut introduction. Minutes stretch past with no image, as the language breaks down: Rhodes warps and fractures syntax, the thread is not easy to follow.
When images finally appear, the voice goes silent. While the oral language and visuals mirror each other, Rhodes shows a flurry of fragmented written text and flashing distorted letterforms. As the film goes on, at times the text whips past in a textured, illegible fog, at times images appear and clip inward; measurement devices appear, as if there’s something technical, something like research or an investigation occurring. Yet we are never given the neatness of a true endpoint: Light Reading (1978) begins, signifies, and never ends, except in time. It might even be incorrect to say that it signifies, because it only does so in a certain way. We cannot connect the threads 
of cause and effect in a conventional way because of the ambiguity of the language, images, and their sequencing, so we cannot be certain about our interpretations. Yes, it seems to be a woman in the photo, that seems to be the letter “g.” But there are gaps between how they relate and even whether we can be certain of what we see. The narrative line is unsettled—we are given no closure.
The recurrence of multiplicity emerges in feminist moving image art from the late 20th century to today. We are often flooded with many images or narrative threads at once, doubling, mirroring, multiple languages, multiple voices, text, sound, and image contradicting each other, or obscure, inscrutable imagery
and juxtapositions. Could this be a reflection of the collective authorship or intelligence observed in natural systems? And could that articulate a new notion of feminism as a reflection of the emergent logics and networks of reciprocity observed in natural systems? I see a linkage between the reciprocal, interconnected, cybernetic environments humanity is embedded within and feminist artistic practices in contemporary human society. Kurant, a contemporary artist and researcher whose work tries to upend notions of singular, human authorship, articulates an idea of collective consciousnesses applied to the human: “The contemporary human is an assemblage of agencies, from microbes to AI, that operate simultaneously.” (2) Kurant, Agnieszka. “Polyphonies: From Collective Intelligence To Artificial Societies.” The human has always been collective somehow, and these artistic practices use moving images to articulate a feminism that parallels this alternative logic to the singular, male author.
Multivocal, Lingual, Voiced
Toward the beginning of Julie Dash’s film Illusions (1982), there is a striking moment of juxtaposition: within the black-and-white framed image is another frame showing the performance of a white actress, while in the foreground, we see a shadowed figure of the Black singer who is vocalizing her part. This pairing layers with the frame in our own lives and the screen within it, to create many multiples in tension with each other.
The voice and its source are unsettled. We are faced with the ease and deception of lip syncing. I was struck by the truth that we can never truly know whose voice is who's in film; we are faced with the reality that pairing sound and image can easily create illusions. Dash’s “(un)masking” (3) Heredia, Shai, Juliet Jacques, Sarah Keller, and Beatrice Loayza. “First Person Feminine: A Discussion,” in Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, ed. Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. (MIT Press, Sep 27, 2022). of the singer, the white-passing woman, the inner workings of male-dominated Hollywood, but also the medium of film itself, constructs a reality in which everything is multiple. Many paradoxical truths coexist.
There are many other instances of vocal and linguistic multiples in feminist film: Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege (1990) has multiple narrators of different ages and identities; Etel Adnan and Jocelyne Saab combine voiceover narrative in English with conversations in French and Arabic, as well as subtitles; Maya Deren’s Sink (2011) by Barbara Hammer layers numerous voices from interviews with oral performances of Deren’s writing, bringing together unscripted and performed vocalizations. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work commingles French, Korean, and English, which are interwoven in her book Dictée. (4) Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. 2nd ed. University of California Press, 2001. In films such as Mouth to Mouth (1975) she shows writings in Hangul and English, as well as layered film of her mouth opening and closing but uttering no words, overlaid with images and loud sounds of water.
These assemblages of speech parallel the logics of networked intelligence in nature. Bifo Berardi theorizes this logic of systems organization as a “swarm,” “citing theorists such as Kevin Kelly, “The social organism is going to be transformed into a swarm, a collective organism composed of many individual bodies whose brains follow rules embedded in the nervous system of each individual.” However, rather than a future transformation of social systems, Karen Barad might describe this as the existing state of things, obscured by the paradigm of singular, linear narratives. These films construct an alternative mode of expression that foregrounds the social, collective self, and often through language.
Barad writes about the scientific phenomenon of diffraction (5) Karen Barad (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart, Parallax,20:3, 168-187, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 related to identity and social relationships, problematizing dualistic notions of identity. They favor “a non-binary conception of difference” which, in the words of Trinh T. Minh-ha is “not opposed to sameness, nor synonymous with separateness.” (6) Karen Barad (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart, Parallax,20:3, 168-187, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Works like Hak Kyung-Cha’s enact this notion of multiple identity, or the collective selves through interwoven languages and scripts. Also quoting Minh-ha, Barad cites:
Identity as understood in the context of a certain ideology of dominance has long been a notion that relies on the concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden to one’s consciousness and that requires the elimination of all that is considered foreign or not true to the self, that is to say, non-I, other. In such a concept the other is almost unavoidably either opposed to the self or submitted to the self’s dominance. It is always condemned to remain its shadow while attempting at being its equal. Identity, thus understood, supposes that a clear dividing line can be made between I and not-I, he and she; between depth and surface, or vertical and horizontal identity; between us here and them over there. (7) Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Question of Identity and Difference’, Inscriptions, special issues ‘Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse’, 3–4 (1988), ,http://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/ PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_3-4/minh-ha.html. [26/02/2014] [my emphasis], Karen Barad (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart, Parallax, 20:3, 168-187, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623
This clearly relates to the multiple human-as-species-assemblage Kurant describes, which is based on scientific ideas that only recently entered popular knowledge. Language quickly becomes a medium to express these blurred notions of the singular and collective subject.
As scholar and filmmaker Alisa Lebow has noted, since the first-person pronoun can be singular or plural in speaking of “first person” filmmaking, “we allow the resonances to reverberate between the I and the we—to imagine indeed, that the one doesn’t speak without the other, that in fact, the ‘I’ inheres in the ‘we,’ if not vice versa. (8)Heredia, Shai, Juliet Jacques, Sarah Keller, and Beatrice Loayza.“First Person Feminine: A Discussion,” in Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, ed. Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. (MIT Press, Sep 27, 2022).
The “‘I’ inherent in the ‘we’” seems like a great linguistic articulation of collective consciousness. Whether consciously or not, these filmmakers made linguistic decisions that foregrounded the multiplicity of the self, many contradicting separate-but-not identities within a human individual. At once, we are made up of the bacterial colonies that form a symbiotic system with us, and we are not them; our thoughts and ideas both blend with the collective intellectual networks of humans and our environments, and yet there still exists singularity, specificity. These ideas themselves coexist, just as French, Korean, and English exist together within Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
Adnan writes most frequently in what might be considered her fourth language, English. Her parents spoke Turkish at home—which was a native language for neither of them, leaving her raised in a home in which the lingua franca was a second language to all, yet hearing her mother’s Greek and her father’s Arabic always in the background. As did all children of her generation in Lebanon, she went to a French school. As she explains in ‘To Write in a Foreign Language,’ it wasn’t just the language that was French, but the entire content of the instruction, leaving her educated in and into a culture that was not her own. (9)Swensen, Cole. “Etel Adnan: The Word in and by Exile,” in To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader. (Nightboat Books, 2014).
Although it’s tempting to describe Etel Adnan’s identity as “fractured,” and perhaps it is, a better term might be to call it paradoxical. She speaks multiple languages, she is from multiple places. Of course, paradox entails friction, yet that friction may be simply the only universal. As Barad writes:
Mystery is alive and well in physics, making its current home in quantum mechanics. There is a tradition of this, despite all attempts to defend physics against “irrationalisms.” (10)Karen Barad (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart, Parallax,20:3, 168-187, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623
“Rational” logic can’t explain all truths.
Visual Motifs of the Multiple
Just as different languages and registers of speech coexist and layer, so do visual frames and motifs. Mirrors visually multiply and fragment the scene, as well as individuals within it. Many scenes in Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975) take place in a grand room with a floor length mirror and a large piano. We see the central, redheaded woman look at herself in the mirror in long sustained shots. She drapes her gowned body across the piano, reflected in the mirror. A suited man appears in the reflection, entering the scene indirectly. Each figure is doubled, the difference between the reflected image and its filmed counterpart at times unclear. Often only scored or with abbreviated voiceover narration in French, the long duration of the shots leaves the viewer wondering what is occurring, if anything. We might consider all the possibilities. Encouraged by the doubling of the mirror, the space for multiplicity opens up. Time and space dilate—bent and made visible by the mirrors—opening up space for difference. With slowness and gaps for the mind to wander, it does!
In Illusions (1982), mirrors are also a visual indication of multiplicity, especially of the self/identity. Multiple scenes occur in an office space of a Hollywood executive, who speaks with the central character, a white-passing woman of color. Notably, they have an argument in that room in which her face is often only visible perfectly framed in a small, oval mirror on the wall. This both doubles her, reflecting her multiple identity, and transforms her face into a disembodied mask. As Judylyn S. Ryan asserts in her thorough analysis of the film, “the mask functions as a double-voiced or polyvocal signifier.” (11)Ryan, Judylyn S. “Outing the Black Feminist Filmmaker in Julie Dash’s Illusions.” Signs 30, no. 1 (2004): 1319–44. https://doi.org/10.1086/421884. The mirror constructs the mask, showing the layers of space and identity beyond the image we see.
The mirror also creates a secondary frame within the frame of the film. Generating and repeating multiple frames within frames is another formal suggestion of multiplicity: we see television screens, architectural frames, mirrors, photographs within the film compositions. Marjorie Keller especially layers these visual frames in Herein (1991). Keller shows images of texts, the page becoming a frame within the filmic frame; architectures of the city cut through scenes and frame buildings behind them. She films a projection of a film within the film; then the same film appears on a small television screen. The television screen is located within an open rectangular cutout of a wall, which enframes the space behind it as seen in the shot. Text scrolls on the small television screen—it’s encircled by the television set, an architectural window within a room, and lastly the film’s bounds. A similar shot recurs in which the same architectural frame surrounds a doorframe beyond it in space, and another window-like cutout exposing a closet. It is clear throughout that there is more to see beyond these bounds, including outside the edges of the film. It’s unclear which frame is most important or whether they are particularly meaningful; they merely coexist and muddle the sense of a singular focal point or narrative. As Tarkovsky says,
Our experiences in life are complex, plural, and full of uncertainties. And this complexity can never be reduced and fitted into the rigid corners of ready-made solutions and filmic conventions. (12)Minh-ha, T.T. “A Minute Too Long*,” When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. (Routledge, 1991).
Breaking down the filmic frame into many subsections disrupts the idea that there is a singular experience or “image” in favor of many occurring at once.
Rejecting Linearity/Cause and Effect:
How do these multiples connect/disconnect/line up/relate to each other? Is there no organization or cause and effect? Often, in my experience watching these films, multiplicities meant I would construct a specific narrative during that viewing with the palette provided. Almost like a monoprint, it seemed unlikely to me that I would ever be able to replicate the experience. It was singular, and I imagine the other people in the theater had different, singular experiences. (13)This also resonates with the medium of photography, in which an image can sometimes index a specific, irreplicable moment. This idea is unsettled, however, by AI image-making and photoshop. Is the photograph singular, multiple?
This might have meant I fixated on the different registers of formality of speech in Le voyage à Lyon (1981) by Claudia von Alemann and how they shaped the interactions with Lyon locals. Watching Hemlock Forest (2016), I focused visually on Moyra Davey’s precise compositions of photograph, space, and film; the experience became about the trance that her strange, reenacted vocal inflection induced, or the introspective, beautiful hewn writing she read. Light Reading (1978) provided little relief of coherence, so at times the wash of language transformed into a texture for meditation in the dark, quiet space of the theater. Watching Mouth to Mouth (1975) confused me—I couldn’t tell that the opening and closing mouth was a mouth, and my mind focused on discerning what the image was. Even this trail of discernment, upon reflection, was a valuable experience. It made me think about the limitations of human perception, or my own individual perception at that moment.
Through all these experiences, I saw how I was inadvertently seeking one sensorial experience, one thread of narrative that “made sense”—almost closing my eyes or ears to isolate categorical layers. Was this my training by more conventional films? A deeply embedded rational logic of cause and effect? Could I shed this impulse, or was it embedded in all people of this generation? During Herein (1991), I took in the film purely as form: my mind filtered the images as a painter would, identifying rectangles and frames within frames. I noticed and started to catalog the ways that the domestic spaces and croppings of each shot formed pictorial compositions within the filmic frame. Yet I could imagine another viewing when I might focus on something else, or, taking into account my previous experience watching, have a clear idea of some narrative that I had constructed.
Partiality pairs with multiplicity. When there is rarely a focal point or a linear guide through the narrative, we (who are willing and able to stay engaged) find meaning on our own terms.
We do not tell linear or straightforward narratives precisely because we believe the stories we are telling cannot be held within those generic formations. Those structures foreclose certain articulations of self and experience, and thus need to be pushed to their breaking point so they might be remade, or remain unmade. (14)Joynt, Chase, and Jules Rosskam. “Toward a Trans Method, or Reciprocity as a Way of Life.” Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 1 (2021): 11–20. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.1.11.
Where conventional, male filmmaking creates “a closed story,” (15)Shapiro, Ann-Louise. “How Real Is the Reality in Documentary Film? Jill Godmilow, in Conversation with Ann-Louise Shapiro.” History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 80–101. https://doi.org/10.1111/0018-2656.00032. these films are multiple and complex, requiring viewers to either sink, meditatively into the morass or to, out of intellectual or sensory overwhelm, selectively direct attention. “Cut the line and chronology falls in a crumpled heap. I prefer a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head,” (16)“Cut the Line” No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image ed. Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022) [available here]writes Rhodes. The messiness is intentional; it resists reducing the images and stories and their subjects, while also resisting forcing the viewers to have a singular, standardized experience.
The most generative archival intervention we are left with is to attend to the radical heterogeneity of lived experience that can fall under the category of ‘woman.’
Returning to science, these practices directly challenge the aperspectival objectivity assumed in science, going back to the Enlightenment. (17)Daston, Lorraine & Galison, Peter (2007). Objectivity. Rather than imagining a universal, generalizable subject, and therefore that people can “objectively” perceive and measure experience, these practices recognize that all subjects are multiple, and that there are always numerous specific perceptions of a given thing, which construct numerous, equally true realities at once. (18)Zone Books. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988). I love situated knowledges! Relating this to film brings up the question, is the avoidance of confusion part of this? Why do we desire clarity, directness, transparency? A forest is a confusing disorderly place; and yet, there is evident order in how the trees relate to each other, how each of the species within it are able to coexist harmoniously in a broad sense.
Rhodes’ even alludes to the intentionality of confusion in her films in the voiceover of Light Reading (1978), saying:
there remained several strands
each black and white
threads of possible meaning
nothing was unraveled—nothing revealed
no singularity of structural logic (19)Zone Books. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988). I love situated knowledges!
Thus, the coexistence of multiples and prevalence of paradox in feminist films relates to natural systems: the swarm is composed of many individual actors who, to our knowledge, are not making singular decisions as we understand cognition to occur. Rather, the collective responsively moves as one and many at once. Difference exists within a larger system.
[Termites] build these sustainable monumental structures — the mounds, which resemble cathedrals or pyramids. Each mound is a product of a collective intelligence of often over a million specimens. So it is very similar to a human society, collectively creating or erecting monuments, or landmarks of culture. (20)“An Interview with Agnieszka Kurant.” Even Magazine, April 13, 2018. http://evenmagazine.com/agnieszka-kurant/.
Resisting Singular Definition
By definition, multiplicity resists singular definition. Instead of confining things to categories, these films allow for opacity and complexity of identity, for human subjects, narrative threads, and perhaps truth in general. Minh-ha reflects this rejection of categorical, limited definition, saying ““I don’t think of my films in terms of categories—documentary, fiction, film art, educational or experimental—but rather as fluid, interacting movements.” (22)Trinh T. Minh-ha, “‘There is No Such Thing as Documentary’: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” interviewed by Erika Balsom, FRIEZE, 1 November 2018. Iva Radivojević’s film Aleph (2021) defies definition in this way: Radivojević traces a series of stories that are scripted and narrativized, but based on close study of locations in ten different countries. During her process, she visited each place and simply spent time with people, identifying interesting stories. At the end of her visits, the filming process happened organically based on synthesized, slightly fictionalized scripts and improvisation. Radivojević defies the harsh lines between fiction and nonfiction, documentary and narrative film. She favors what feels truthful about her subjects in a different, more impressionistic way. Minh-ha terms this sort of open-ended treatment of subject as follows:
When you decide to speak nearby, rather than speak about, the first thing you need to do is to acknowledge the possible gap between you and those who populate your film: in other words, to leave the space of representation open… (22)Heredia, Shai, Juliet Jacques, Sarah Keller, and Beatrice Loayza. “First Person Feminine: A Discussion,” in Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, ed. Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. (MIT Press, Sep 27, 2022).
Aleph (2021) exemplifies “speaking nearby.” Versus a traditional anthropological practice of studying and then explaining cultures to privileged audiences, speaking for others, Radivojević does something unquestionably subjective. She is transparent that her stories are narrativized, constructed from her situated observations and perspective. She does not claim totality in her depiction, yet the film only exists in response to these places and stories. To me, this is speaking nearby, and perhaps more truthful than much heavily editorialized “documentary film” that strives for “objectivity.”
Resonance Structures
As I wrote this, I noticed myself often quoting moments of writers quoting other voices. This double-layered quote to me is a beautiful reflection of the feminism I am trying to articulate: a multivalent, multivocal, multi-textured logic–the collectively cohering voice(s) that produce and prompt knowing.
Resonance can be considered as the condition occurring when more than one valid Lewis structure can be written for a particular molecule…Resonance structures are imaginary. They represent extremes of electron location. Resonance can be considered as a valence theory solution to a molecular orbital problem. (23)Although I have critiqued science and objectivity in this essay, I also love science, admittedly. These perspectives coexist within me! Science is a great source of poetry.
Molecular resonance is a condition of stability in ever present motion. They are an imaginary theory to understand how an electron can be multiple places at once, possibly, truthfully.
Barad suggests a shift from “difference” to the active “differencing” of identity. (24)Karen Barad (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart, Parallax,20:3, 168-187, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 This shift from noun to verb might parallel the relationship between still images and film. Is all moving image work active? Not equally. Many feminist films ask us to act. Challenging films become textures or worlds that offer us many threads of possible narrative, possible connection and interpretation, which we cannot even reenact ourselves. These often nonlinear, layered, or otherwise entangled films become fixed places to visit: we can travel to these worlds-within-worlds, and we are here-and-there at once, all experiencing something the same-and-different at once. (25)Is it possible that language has no way to point at this in-between? It seems you can only name the extreme ends, and there is no word for the in-between, because language is limiting. They are stable in motion and multiplicity, resonating.
When you do not want to speak as a ‘knower’, you talk with a lot of blanks and holes and question marks. Perhaps you have no desire to fix meaning, which may sometimes lead you to a place of nonsense. But, in language, even when you work with nonsense, people find meaning. (26)Heredia, Shai, Juliet Jacques, Sarah Keller, and Beatrice Loayza. “First Person Feminine: A Discussion,” in Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, ed. Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. (MIT Press, Sep 27, 2022).
A Final Note on this Essay
Throughout writing this essay, I felt conflicted. I was taught to narrow the focus of essays, to choose a few key texts to focus on, or specific scenes or works to analyze in detail. Was I doing something wrong by quoting so many sources, referencing so many films? Was it too confusing, not enough focus?
I also wondered about tone: can I use “I” in this paper? Should it be more like a personal essay, or should I write it more academically? Surely I couldn’t shift registers/styles? As I neared finishing writing it, I felt the impulse to make it consistent, to impose order and singularity. Yet, when I reflected on what I was doing, it seemed to make no sense to write something singular, assertive, something with a “narrow focus” to address this topic. It made more sense to write something a bit messy, something that brought together as many voices as I could. That would be the best way to examine the complex, multivalent forms I was hoping to address.