Creaturely Worlding in Goodbye to Language
Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard (2014)
Godard has given us multiple goodbyes over the course of his career, the most famous perhaps being the "end of cinema" title-card concluding Weekend (1967). Yet Goodbye to Language arrived 30 years into another ongoing period of withdrawal, as Godard abandoned Paris and the French film industry for his native Switzerland in the early 1980's. The title of the film retrospectively crystallizes this solitary retreat in light of his famous countryman Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps the most influential thinker to rail against nature's purported corruption by the written word and its attendant vices of culture. Godard's ostensible abandonment of language itself thus compounds a hermeneutic tangle that has frustrated critics ever since Weekend: when is he trying to simply provoke, and when is he trying to communicate?
Luckily for Godard skeptics, Goodbye to Language is perhaps his most beautiful film, fusing the best of Godard's disparate phases into a visceral 70 minutes: the romanticism of his late period is nourished here by the radicalism of the 1970's, and the giddy cinephilia of the 1960's. We have a characteristically flimsy love story, the "characters" serving as talking heads for a non-stop barrage of quotations from seemingly every major artist and philosopher of the twentieth century. Some of these are misattributed, and Godard even quotes one of his own early film reviews, suggesting that this practice is really a mode of free indirect discourse—expressing himself by moving between speaking positions.
Godard is thus not simply saying "goodbye" to language as much as extending it, inhabiting a mode of expression that refuses any boundary between subject and object, speaker and world. Ever since he featured his former philosophy teacher expounding on the limits of speech in Vivre sa vie (1962), Godard has wrestled with a certain agnosticism towards the power of mediation, whether linguistic or cinematic—the fact that the word and the image come in between us and the world, replacing our immediate relation to sensuous things with the intermediary of the concept. Godard's Dziga Vertov period could be seen as an overhasty reaction against this process, turning away from the cinema and mediation altogether. Yet since his return to mainstream filmmaking in the 1980's, Godard began to appreciate that to mediate something can also mean to draw back together, to reconcile two parties in conflict.
Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard (2014)
In Goodbye to Language this mediation is centered around the human and the animal, more specifically a dog—billed as Roxy Miéville—as Godard seeks to bridge the perceived abyss separating man's linguistic being from the animal's lack in language. In exploring this possibility, Godard explicitly takes up the challenge issued by Jacques Derrida, whom he quotes twice in the film, to think a renewed sense of coexistence with the animal: "It would not be a matter of 'giving speech back' to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation" (1). Throughout the film, Godard demonstrates a sense of wonder at the animal, attempting to find something generative in their non-linguistic being. Rather than being defined in opposition to the human, the animal seems able to lead human thought elsewhere: as we see Roxy running through forests and gazing into streams, Godard wonders if she can hear the inanimate speaking.
If most cinematic mediation is a one-sided affair, subordinating the non-human to a literal and figurative background, Godard seeks a form of mediation that does justice to the non-human, contaminating human experience with something radically other. What if art, instead of replacing the world—compensating for its lack of human meaning—could intensify the world in all its non-human "meaninglessness?" Godard perhaps provides an example of such a filmmaking practice with a shot of Roxy looking into the camera, as we hear a quote from Emmanuel Levinas: "As soon as gazes lock, there are no longer two of us." Through this ecstatic unmooring of our spectatorial position, Godard suggests modes of relation to the image not based on recognition, but instead a total un-working of the subject-object dichotomy.
The moving image thus has a unique role to play in this rapprochement between species. For Maurice Blanchot—a thinker Godard referenced as early as Le Mepris (1963), and who reappears in a citation in this film—the image is not a means by which a subject represents an object, but rather that which is there before the subject and object even arise: "Man is unmade according to his image" writes Blanchot, just as "a tool, when damaged, becomes its image" (2). To be an image is to be removed from the realm of recognizable utility, becoming something less and more than itself. Godard presents us with such images: roses that seem to bleed lurid pink, water that shimmers in a kaleidoscopic light. These images do not cohere "for" the viewer, understood in the traditional sense as a discrete perceiving subject. Much like the innovations of cubist painting, Godard's images necessitate a toggling between perspectives, an oscillation that perhaps implicates the non-human.
Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard (2014)
This process is unimaginable without Godard's enthusiasm for 3D and digital technology, practices that transform even the most recognizable markers of his style. The famous primary-color title cards now function in 3D as palimpsests, vibrating with plural meanings. This visual excess enhances a phenomenon that was already there in Godard's title cards of the 1960's: the ability of words to become pictures. And now even pictures become something else, tactile and distended through space. Godard quotes Proust (although he misattributes it to Monet) in what seems to be a maxim for his cinematic practice: "Paint so that you don't see." The image is something that modulates across sensorial registers, a practice that culminates over an empty black frame with a woman asking "What do you see?" The implication is everything is potentially meaningful in some sense, whether it be the perceived abyss of the animal's gaze, or the emptiness of the black frame.
What Godard values in the digital image is its mutability, a quality expounded upon when a man and a woman discuss the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann: "Riemann arrived at a landscape in which each point becomes music. A line of zeros along the sea." In this seeming allusion to digital encoding, the natural world is already information, ready to be extended and developed through technology. It is for this reason that Godard invokes music and mathematics as a potential "language of nature." Instead of the opposition between language and nothingness, we find an issue of translation between registers: the affective and the intellectual, the visual and the semantic, the human and the non-human. If a privileged site for the human remains in the film, it is perhaps only as a translator between languages, and this translation always assumes an underlying translatability in the natural world. The film's conclusion, in which we hear the cries of babies and barking of dogs over the credits, is a euphoric consummation of this practice, disparate languages communicating nothing other than their mutual intelligibility.
Godard wagers that what might appear to be non-sense, excess, noise—the excluded qualities of the "natural world"—may be the very essence of language and communication itself. In a statement repeated twice in the film, he turns to his childhood to imagine a form of non-exclusionary world-making, harmonizing with the sociality already in things: "When I was a kid, we played Indians. My favorite were the Apaches. Their word for the world is: forest." In this complicity of word and world, Godard disappears into the Swiss forest the same way he disappears into books and films. This disappearance is his most pointed attempt to communicate, a "goodbye" that merely signals a different way to speak.
Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard (2014)