This dissertation explores two major works of the twentieth century: Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma. Both of these works explore the expressiveness of their own medium in relation to other media, thereby opening up diverse channels of sensory experience within their own particular deployment of aesthetic form. In each case, these works draw upon sensory multiplicity in order to develop new ways of conceptualizing the present as well as new ways of generating acts of memory that relate past and present.
Most studies of Proust's novel focus on one single medium that becomes a catalyst for the narrator's transformative experience. On the contrary: Proust's text does not make any particular medium the absolute (including the novel's own medium of writing), but develops its own perspective by dramatizing the tensions between multiple regimes of sensuous experience, e.g. between text, music, photography, painting, and optical technologies. Ultimately, the novel shows how any attempt to use one particular medium to capture or master reality fails. Moreover, every act of expression in one medium indexes the partiality of its own opening onto the world, thereby creating a space in which an other medium or an other image of the world becomes possible and desirable.
Every particular medium foregrounds the blindspot of other media while simultaneously opening up a zone of attraction toward which other media tend. This movement toward other sensuous channels reveals not only the limits of a particular medium, but constitutes the depth of a medium by holding open an inexhaustible reserve of data that it can never fully capture. The text therefore moves in a space that is characterized by a tension between media that seek to totalize their own points of entry into the world and the inexorable detotalization that ensues when these points of entry are revealed to be incomplete, partial, and revisable.
Drawing on the models of the kinetoscope and the kaleidoscope in the early pages of A la recherche du temps perdu, the intermedial configuration of the novel points toward its main task for thought: the relation between the one and the multiple. The novel interrogates the very integrity of perception--how humans are able to perceive identity in difference and how individuals are the same and yet different over time--by drawing upon the multiplicity of forms of individuation across different media. Ultimatley, the act of writing recovers the past not by capturing the essence or fullness of time, but by revealing how the same world is modulated over time in differentiated sensuous forms.
Intermediality also lies at the core of Jean-Luc Godard's filmic production. Godard interweaves texts, images and sounds in order to explore the power and limits of cinematic language. Godard's filmic productivity prioritizes showing rather than saying and thereby seeks to vanquish the subordination of the image to forms of narrativization specific to textuality.
In Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard constructs an intermedial space that seems at first glance to aim at a redemption of past moments of suffering and injustice (in particular associated with the Holocaust). However, as in Proust's novel, a double gesture emerges in Godard's film: a movement that oscillates between totalization and detotalization. Whereas cinema aims to represent "everything," Godard continually frustrates this tendency by using intermediality to achieve a radically different goal: video, montage, and formal fragmentation produces an act of memory that is simultaneously an act of dispossession.
By refusing a complete or full representation of the past, Godard's film keeps viewers in a constant state of tension, longing, attentiveness, and ultimately, creativity. For Godard, cinema does not regain time and cannot redeem reality. Cinematic memory is not restorative. Instead, cinema provokes multiple acts of memory that do not merely reproduce that which is gone, but allow latent traces from the past to re-enter human practices and perceptions through the work of art. Working upon the image bestows on the past a new form of existence rather than restoring that which has irrevocably disappeared.
