For the eyedrum show Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies, Fehta Murghana had a piece from her estate on the problematics of hoaxing, This is a portion of a piece left out, on tattooing and psychogeography.RC
This photo is from material left out of Bladerunner, the Ridley Scott movie. Here we see the replicant Roy Batty. Of most interest are the tattoos on the upper left side side of his chest, looking like circular formations, quixotic, indecipherable really, designs which we can guess to relate to his short lived career as a spaceship pilot. Given the rest of the movies thematics of remembrance, false memory, questions of identity, it would be natural to relate the marks to identity somehow. Knowing that the replicants were basically short lived prisoners, conducting the work of a space faring civilization in conditions where 'normal' humans could not or did not choose to work may help.
Perhaps they were attachment points for neural control devices. But for our purposes they function exactly the same as traditional tattoos: boundaries markers, points de capiton sewing up memory and place, bringing them to a visible head.
In the essay acccompanying the book Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, V. 2, Alexie Plutser-Sarno makes the point that the criminal's tattoos speak for him/her, that when the criminals meet for the first time, or they interact with authorities, it is the tattoos which communicate: "The tattoos are like a mass media complex purveying propaganda opposed to the authorities"; from the thief's point of view words "only obscure the meaning of the abolutely reliable information that his tattoos communicate." The tattoos form an ideal world, and an ideal 'I' and a stable state of identity that precedes and bests the human's interior view of himself. Batty's markings, like the crop markings in the fields of England further eschew representation strategies for geometrization, a final unlocking of a unstable state of mudane existence onto some otherworlds/interdimensional state of reality and a re-loading into geometry, an anonymous (oddly enough, odd since it is backed by the currency of the person standing there yet made evanescent in her reality of presence) fateless mode delinked from death and loss, turned to figure. And perhaps the closest a replicant can get to knowledge of self, which is, if we are to believe the western traditions of The Book, also the way through and into the divine, the skin marking the only real boundary.
1 comment:
interesting, thanx for posting -- also, i was prompted to go looking for hi-res Batty tat pix, not many found, but i did discover that Philip Dick did indeed get to see an early cut of the film, i had always thot he never saw it, he grudgingly offered praise for the movie, tho making note, "it was not his story which was made"
tidbit found onna "bladerunner faq" site:
4.3.6. What are those tattoos on Roy's chest?
They are not tattoos as such. According to Ridley Scott quoted in Future Noir, it was a half-developed idea they had - another
thing inspired by Jean Giraud. What would have been interesting was having the Replicants "built up" from parts. (This wouldn't
have worked with other back-story that was developed though.) And it would have meant too long in makeup for Rutger anyway. So
they then thought of markings that denoted points where, say, a space war suit would plug in to sockets. But even that idea got
left behind and we were left with markings that are simply "A curious detail." So it is really up to you how you would like to
interpret them.
The markings were applied by Freddy Blau of Reel Creations through a process of silk-screening them on and then hand-finishing them.
It took four hours to do!
ahhh, & i feel inclined to transcribe a bit, fromma book i've long had but never picked up but recently by chance started reading, "the symbolic construction of community" by Anthony P. Cohen:
(apparently well-selling, prescribed textbook perhaps? first pub. 1985, then got by Routledge & reprinted 1989,1992,1993,1995,1998 & 2000, i found my copy ontha cheap @ Books Again in Decatur)
on with the bits:
"...In what has become one of the most celebrated statements in recent anthropological writing, Geertz proclaims, '...man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun...' These webs constitute 'culture', whose analysis is, ' not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning'. There are three interrelated and powerful principles contained within Geertz's precise & eloquent formulation. The 1st is that culture ('webs of significance') is created & continually recreated by people thru their social intyeraction, rather than imposed upon them as a Durkheimian body of social fact or as Marxist superstructure. 2ndly, being continuously in process, culture has neither deterministic power nor objectively identifiable referents ('law'). 3rd, it is manifest, rather, in the capacity w/ which it endows people to perceive meaning in, or to attatch meaning to social behaviour. Behaviour does not 'contain' meaning intrinsically; rather, it is found to be meaningful by an act of interpretation: we 'make sense' of what we observe. The sense we make is 'ours', & may or may not coincide w/ that intended by those whose behaviour it was. Thus, in so far as we 'understand' the behaviour which goes on around us & in which we participate, we make & act upon interpretations of it: we seek to attatch meaning to it. Social interaction is contingent upon such interpretation; it is, essentially, the transaction of meanings.
Interpretation implies a substantial degree of what, faute de mieux, we must cal 'subjectivity'. When it is a feature of social interaction, subjectivity clearly suggests the possibility of imprecision, of inexactitude of match, of ambiguity, of idiosyncracy. In other words, different people oriented to the same phenomenon are likely to differ from each other in certain respects in their interpretations of it. They may not be aware of this difference, esp. if the phenomenon is a common feature of their lives. Their disagreement is not necessarily, then, an impediment to their successful interaction. Indeed, often the contrary is the case. People can find common currency in behaviour whilst still tailoring it subjectively (& interpretatively) to their own needs.
These interpretations are not random. They tend to be made within the terms characteristic of a given society, & influenced by its language, ecology, its traditions of belief & ideology, & so forth. But neither are they immutable. They are, rather, responsive to the circumstances of interaction, both among individuals, & between the society as a whole & those across its boundaries. The vehicles of such interpretations are symbols. By their very nature symbols permit interpretation & provide scope for interpretive manoeuvre by those who use them. Symbols are often defined as things 'standing for' other things. But they do not represent these 'other things' unambiguously: indeed, as argued above, if they did so they would be superfluous & redundant. Rather, they 'express' other things in ways which allow their common form to be retained & shared among members of a group, whilst notimposing upon these people the constraints of uniform meaning."
etc etc, fingercramps...
btw,
nice blog, dude, will pop in herewith for musings
= )
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