Crash

Front matter

OF- SPEED AND STASIS

KAREN—BECK MAN

C RASH

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank warmly all those people who have responded to sections of this book at various stages, and who have supported me during the time of its writing. I first began this project while at the University of Rochester, where I found a generous and stimulating intellectual community at the Susan B. Anthony faculty workshops and the Visual Studies rehearsals. Sharon Willis was a generous and inspiring mentor during my time there, as was Bette London, and I am very grateful for all their help. Douglas Crimp has been a wonderful interlocutor and friend since I first walked into his office. Jeannine Korman helped me through the day-to-day challenges of my first film-teaching job, and the multimedia librarians at the University of Rochester were absolutely indispensable. Rachel Ablow, Janet Berlo, Elizabeth Cohen, Ken Gross, Tom Hahn, Rachel Haidu, Rosemary Kegl, John Michael, Russell Peck, and Jeff Tucker all helped to make Rochester a supportive and exciting place to work.

My collaboration with Jean Ma on Still Moving was a terrific experience, and I learned a great deal from her during that process that has helped me think about this book. Jonathan Kahana and Jenny Horne not only came up with more car crash cartoons and references than I ever imagined existed, but they have also been incredibly generous to me over the last few years, and I thank them for that. Callie Angell, Eduardo Cadava, Oliver Gaycken, Rita Gonzalez, Tom Gunning, John McCoubrey, Caitlin McGrath, John Mowitt, Melissa Rangona, David Rodewick, Marc Siegel, and Liliane Weissberg have all made great suggestions along the way, and I am very grateful to them, and to those people, whose names I don’t know, in conference audiences who asked useful and challenging questions. Elizabeth Shepard at the Cornell Medical School Archive was extremely helpful, and I am indebted to her for making images and documents available to me. I am grateful to my fellow editors at Grey Room—Branden Joseph, Reinhold Martin, Tom McDonough, and Felicity Scott—for their collegiality and for the inspiring way in which they all work. Juan Suarez and James Meyer carefully read the Warhol chapter in its later stages, Paula Marantz Cohen and Dana Polan offered wonderful last minute feedback on chapter 2, and Leo Charney gave careful attention to an early version of chapter 6. Thank you all.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Heather Love and David Kazanjian provided highly illuminating responses to my early work on Andy Warhol. Heather Love and Mara Mills have also been terrific friends during my time at Penn—and in London most of all. The Penn Humanities Forum offered a lively and stimulating context in which to present my early work on the film Weekend, and the history of art department’s weekly colloquia have served as a very generative space in which to present work. All my colleagues in this department are terrific, and I am grateful for the support and friendship offered to me by everyone in the Jaffe building. The Cinema Studies Program at Penn has offered me a warm and stimulating environment in which to work, and I deeply appreciate the collegiality and friendship of Timothy Corrigan, Peter Decherney, Meta Mazaj, and Ellen Scott. Nicola Gentili works miracles and saves my life on a daily basis. Thank you, Nicola. Stephen Lehman, Paul Farber, and Bijan Oliai set the bar very high for all other librarians, and I count myself lucky to have had the chance to work with them. I would also like to thank Deans Rebecca Bushnell, Dennis De- Turck, and Ann Matter for their support of me and of this project. Lacey Baradel has been a phenomenal research assistant.

Ken Wissoker, of Duke University Press, has been a helpful and thoughtful adviser not just about book publishing, but about academic life in general. Thank you for your support, Ken. Special thanks also go to the three anonymous readers at Duke, who so carefully helped me to shape this book with their enlightening comments, and to the Duke editorial staff—especially Mandy Early, Tim Elfenbein, and Patricia Mickelberry. I am also grateful to Nancy Davenport and Chip Lord for making images available for publication.

Family members on both sides of the Atlantic have enriched my own life by allowing me to share theirs. I want to thank, in England, Barbara Redrobe, Ruth Wright, Jane Robin, Lucy and Suzanne Johnson, Claire Redrobe, Torben Steeg, and Janek, Freya, and Mikkel Redrobe-Steeg; and in the United States, Robert and Merrilee Beckman, Mari Beckman-Lau, x | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and Eric Lau. You are all so different from each other, and I love each of you differently.

There is no one in the world more fun to watch movies with than Siduri, Lua, and Bruno, but watching them is best of all. Michael Beckman—you know what I think of you—thank you so much for everything, and bring it on.

This book is dedicated to Diana Fuss, who has been a kind and thoughtful adviser and friend for what now seems like a long time. I continue to aspire to the standard she sets, and offer this strange book as a token of my thanks for the ways in which she has enriched my life and work.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | xi

Introduction

“Little Bastard”

On 30 September 1955, James Dean died in a car crash on the road to Salinas. He was driving his silver Porsche Spyder, “Little Bastard,” which is perhaps the best known of the many celebrity-crashed cars that have been absorbed into the landscape of postwar art, writing, and film (in fact, it became a celebrity in its own right, touring the United States as part of a safe-driving campaign for teens). While I will focus neither on Dean in particular nor on the celebrity crash in general, I want to invoke momentarily the name of Dean’s car because it encapsulates the dialectical tensions embedded within the cinematic car crash, one of film’s earliest and most persistent self-reflexive tropes. Through the lens of the crash, I will explore tensions that exist at the heart of the film experience: between stasis and motion, body and image, proximity and distance, self and other, and inside and outside. In invoking the figure of a “little bastard,” I hope to emphasize, rather than explain away, cinema’s inherent impurity at a time when some critics, especially within the field of art history, are calling for a renewed focus on the medium, a parallel reinvigoration of traditional epistemological structures, and a disciplining of the messy field of cinema studies. Yet if film is, as Hollis Frampton suggests, “a deeply hybridized, bastard technology ..., as rickety a collection of electromechanical devices as a Model T Ford,” then perhaps it makes sense to embrace the discourse of cinema studies less as a discipline than as a thoroughly bastardized field, one unable to contemplate its impure object of study, as Frampton’s gesture toward the Model T Ford suggests, without some acknowledgment of the way cinema’s high and hybrid technology binds it inextricably, if complexly, to capitalism’s industrial systems and to a wide variety of other media, technologies, and disciplines.’

The renewed interest in aesthetic autonomy and the medium within the field of art history has emerged at least partly in response to the growing presence of projected moving images both in the contemporary art museum and in urban public spaces. This presence (along with other factors) raises concerns about the transformation of the museum into a space of entertainment, the expansion of art in other media (such as painting) to a cinematic scale, the disappearance of monitors and feedback mechanisms in video-art practice, and the increasing prevalence of narrative as a defining feature of contemporary art in a variety of media closely related to film. Furthermore, mainstream industrial films now also commonly appear as crowd-pleasing, thematically related program supplements to museum shows, an approach to film programming that not only reductively posits cinema as “easy” and accessible, and art, in contrast, as difficult and elitist, but also displaces those more experimental films that are excluded from mainstream cinemas and have historically found a place only within museums’ film programming. Unless museums more effectively foreground the tension between multiple modes of moving-image production, art institutions will miss the opportunity of exploring the complex and increasingly intertwined relationships among commercial narrative cinema, art cinema, experimental film and video, and art across the course of the twentieth century and the twenty-first. At a moment of increasing anxiety about the prevalence of projected moving images in the museum, scholars addressing the relationship between the museum’s moving images and cinema may be better off confronting and engaging cinema with all its bastard traits than trying to purify it in order to make it good or pure enough— politically and aesthetically—for the discourse of art history. For this reason, Crash consciously strives to consider the trope of the car crash across genres, historical periods, exhibition spaces, and geographical locations, not in order to disregard, but to draw attention toward and to reflect on these categories and their limits, a reflection integral to the practice of film theory.

Commenting on the state of film theory in the digital age, David Rodowick suggests, pace those who claim that we are “post-theory,” that this discourse is uniquely equipped to engage what Rosalind Krauss has called the “post-medium” condition, not because it has successfully defined the nature of the medium, but because it starts from the difficulty of grounding “filmic ontology in a single medium-specific concept or technique.”* Like Rodowick, I think both that “film studies . . . has never congealed into a discipline in the same way as English literature or art history,” and that this is “a positive thing.”* Yet in recent years, in a version of the art historian’s anxiety about the arenas of entertainment, spectacle, and popular culture into which this hybrid or “mongrel medium” leads, film-studies conferences have become increasingly focused around caucuses and interest groups within the field.* While, on the one hand, these increasingly specialized forums—early cinema, documentary, ephemeral film, art cinema, experimental cinema, the Hollywood film industry, and so on—reflect the growth and success of the field, they may also run the risk of factionalizing the scholarly film community and hindering the kind of critical exchange about the contradictory impulses to be found within film practice, history, and theory that could usefully inform contemporary critical engagement with artists’ moving images. This is not to say that one would be better off erasing all distinctions between different modes of filmmaking and areas of specialization within the study of film. But there is perhaps a way of at once recognizing that there exist stronger affinities between some kinds of filmmaking and artists’ practice than between others, while keeping open the possibility that some of the critical questions that emerge in areas of film studies less closely or obviously tied to the field of art than, say, avant-garde film might still usefully be introduced to contemporary discussions of the medium within art history.

In recent years, “the medium” has sometimes been proffered as an antidote to the confusion that has followed in the wake of what one might think of as a critical and aesthetic “crash,” a widespread loss of faith in “high” or “grand” theory, but also in the political movements out of which many aesthetic and theoretical practices and discourses grew. Yet while the language of aesthetic autonomy, the medium, and critical distance offers a seductive fantasy of resistance to the encroachment of advanced capitalism on every area of human existence, this discourse is also rife with a vocabulary that borders on a kind of moralism in its disdainful condemnation of a range of qualities, concepts, and spectators that have come to be associated with capitalism’s images and their consumption, including promiscuity, scale, speed, desire, thrills, pleasure, sensation, immersion, emotion, and spectacle. It is almost superfluous to point out that many of the terms that have been negatively associated with capitalist image production and consumption have often found a positive resonance in the historically intertwined discourses of film studies, feminist theory, and queer theory, all of which have been more willing than art history to engage the full range of modern visual technology’s “excrements.”* I highlight the tension between these two strands of contemporary visual criticism, not to take up one pole or the other, but rather to ask how one can avoid caricaturing critical positions—with regressive, medium-specific disciplinarians on the one hand and pleasure-seeking, interdisciplinary populists on the other—and to instead consider how one might think more productively about the relation between aesthetic resistance to advanced capitalism and the operations of desire at this moment of transition.

The “crash” of theory, political movements, and utopian visions of interdisciplinarity’s possibilities has produced an intellectual environment that can seem at once confused, defensively dogmatic, and stifling, as scholars and critics, blinded by their proximity to the present, attempt to adopt and articulate a clear critical stance for their times. While this moment of critical disappointment and loss of clarity or direction urges some to move on, to identify the next new thing, I locate this book firmly in the center of the crash, the traumatic and uncertain moment of inertia that comes in the wake of speed and confidence. The crash, with its suggestion of high speed and collision, pleasure and recklessness, violent encounter, uninvited entry, contingency, and failure or depression, provides an apt and urgently needed metaphor through which to consider a series of closely interrelated concerns that persist throughout contemporary art and film criticism. The crash—as critical metaphor, narrative device, and visual image—is something to think through, not to just gawk at or avoid. It functions as an enabling critical and visual trope that insists on the continued usefulness of the hybrid, messy, and contaminated discourse of film theory.

Automobile accidents occupy as significant a place in film history as the staged train collision, the importance of which has been carefully demonstrated by Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Lynne Kirby. Though the car crash mutates as it migrates from the “cinema of attractions” to slapstick comedy, industrially sponsored films, experimental film and artists’ videos, and global art cinema, these varied forms of halted auto-mobility form a generative counterpoint to the more familiar critical paradigm that repeatedly aligns the automobile with the moving camera, the moving filmstrip, and the illusion of movement created in the act of projection. Jean Baudrillard writes, “The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen,” just as

Virilio suggests that “what goes on in the windshield is cinema in the strict sense.”® Similarly, Edward Dimendberg notes that “the highway provides a controlled visual experience analogous to the montage and multiplicity of perspectives afforded by cinema,” while other film scholars view the “road movie,” with its penchant for filming the world through the windshield of a car, as one of cinema’s most self-reflexive spaces, presenting a genre in which, as Timothy Corrigan claims, “the perspective of the camera comes the closest of any genre to the mechanical unrolling of images that define the movie camera. As with the movie experience, time on the road becomes figurative space.”’ In Crash I both extend the tradition of thinking about cinema through the frame of the automobile and challenge the tendency of this discourse to privilege movement above film’s other qualities.

Tracing lines of flight from the cinema of attractions to pop art, from slapstick comedy to industrial-safety films, I explore how the crash gives visual form to overlapping fantasies and anxieties regarding speed and stasis, risk and safety, immunity and contamination, impermeability and penetration. Rather than viewing this movement of a visual trope across aesthetic and ideological categories either as something that has to be cleanly categorized into positive and negative uses of the figure in question, or as evidence that each and every generative or disruptive figure produced by artists and filmmakers has been fully appropriated by the ideological visual spectacles of capitalism, the imbrications and collisions I track not only expand and refine our understanding of the medium of film and related moving image technologies, but also illuminate something of the affective, social, and political resonance of these media, and the way in which both our possibilities and vulnerabilities are dramatized, challenged, and shaped by the images that pass before our eyes.

The Body and the Spectator

Within film studies, the disembodied spectator of psychoanalytic film theory has largely given way to an embodied spectator who is engaged through sociological and phenomenological approaches that focus on haptic vision, body genres, and audience responses.* Yet while these critiques of film theory’s repression of the spectator’s body have been crucial in moving scholars away from an overly dogmatic and homogenous conceptualization of the absent cinematic spectator, one must nevertheless be wary of fully dismissing the complex relationship that psychoanalytic film theory posited between the spectator’s psyche and the apparatus.’ It is particularly important, in the context of this project, to consider the embodied, physical responses of a spectator alongside other possible modes of viewing film because of the intensely corporeal, and at times overly literal, tendencies that mark existing critical engagements of the cinematic car crash.

One can clearly see the ethical questions surrounding the representational crash, as well as the tensions that emerge at the intersection of aesthetic experimentation and traumatic bodily experience, in Vivian Sobchack’s angry response to Jean Baudrillard’s essay on J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, an exchange that was published in Science Fiction Studies in 1991. Sobchack describes Ballard’s use of the crash as “cautionary,” moral, and ironic, drawing evidence from Ballard’s introduction to the French edition of the novel, in which he specifically asserts the cautionary nature of the crash. By contrast, Sobchack condemns Baudrillard’s essay on the novel as “celebratory” and indulging in a “postmodern romanticism” that is indifferent to the suffering of the lived body. Writing in the wake of major cancer surgery on her left thigh, Sobchack declares, “The man [Baudrillard] is really dangerous. Indeed, as I sit here with a throbbing, vivid ‘inscription’ on my left distal thigh, I might wish Baudrillard a car crash or two. He needs a little pain (maybe a lot) to bring him to his senses, to remind him that he has a body, his body, and that the ‘moral gaze’ begins there.” * This exchange, in which crashes are almost cast like spells and the suffering body of the critic becomes inextricably bound to an argument about embodiment, comes close to a crisis of criticism. The possibility that the infliction of physical pain could be used as an instructive tool marks the borders of Sobchack’s essay and is symptomatic of the fraught and murky territory that texts like Ballard’s Crash enter when they take the site of trauma as the starting point for aesthetic and relational possibilities.

Though Sobchack firmly aligned her embodied “moral gaze” with Ballard’s own position, this alliance became more complicated when, three years after Sobchack’s response, Ballard retracted his defensive moral claims about Crash, on which Sobchack’s critique of Baudrillard at least in part depends. Ballard states, “I went wrong in... that introduction . . . [when] in the final paragraph, which I have always regretted, I claimed that in Crash there is a moral indictment of the sinister marriage between sex and technology. Of course it isn’t anything of the sort. Crash is not a cautionary tale. Crash is what it appears to be. It is a psychopathic hymn. But it is a psychopathic hymn which has a point.”” To note this shift in Ballard’s position is not to dismiss Sobchack’s claim that the novel’s morality is grounded in the body, but it is perhaps to suggest that the complexity of the body’s “moral gaze” may in part be responsible for Baudrillard’s disembodied style. As an organ that is both of the body and the bridge beyond it, the eye in cinema exceeds the limits of the physical body and “throws” us into the space of other “bodies” that are themselves cinematic projections and images that combine with spectators’ imaginations in idiosyncratic ways. Though fantasies of a complete transcendence of the body certainly have a terrifying dimension, one might also argue that without this ability to dream ourselves out of our bodies— through cinema or speed, for example—we would never feel anything for or with another. Crash explores the modern technological landscape and its impact on those who inhabit it. If it has a moral dimension, it lies in the novel’s persistent exploration of the line between inside and outside, self and other, private and public. In this way it is typical of many of the texts I will explore here. Crash films are cinematic quests, undertaken in the spaces whose outer limits are marked by terrestrial speed taking flight on the one hand, and by the mutilated body on the other; by the immobilized corpse, which throws film into crisis, and the speeding imagination taking a camera for a ride. Neither denying nor submitting to the logic of materiality, the crash film invokes a complex network of dialectical tensions that pry open spaces in which to reflect on the place of the body in the film experience, and begs the question of how one might think through, against, and about cinema, and its relation to oneself and others.

In Crash I ask why artists, writers, and filmmakers—including Cecil Hepworth, Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard, Ousmane Sembène, J. G. Ballard, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, and Nancy Davenport—have repeatedly turned to immobilized and crashed cars as they wrestle with the political, ethical, sexual, and aesthetic conundrums of the modern world. This book is fundamentally concerned with work that engages the continued potential of film’s hybridity and illegitimacy, qualities that frequently lead us into spaces of hybrid identity and non-normative sexuality, and that demand exchange across disciplines and media. Many of the works I consider emerge at the border of at least two media, media that, in colliding with each other, seem formally to mimic the subject of technological collision they depict. As these media encounter each other at their own limits, each one seems to yearn across the boundaries of what appears possible within itself, as though seeking to extend its capacity by creating an imaginary life for itself in the space of another. Film and photography, literature and film, film and television encounter, threaten, and enrich each other through the figure of the crash. The aesthetic encounters of this highly commercialized medium with other media highlight the way film places us within a conceptual paradigm of relationality, rather than of purity and autonomy, and the collisions I analyze provoke us repeatedly to consider the ethics of the border, the line dividing self from other, the world of the spectator from the world of the image. Existing in close proximity to the concepts of the accident and the disaster, the crash often constitutes a rupture in the membranes that seem to divide us, leading to an association of this term with penetration, contagion, disease, and corruption. Consequently, the cinematic crash brings concepts like responsibility, autonomy, movement, vulnerability, victimhood, and citizenship into focus, and asks how our understanding of them has been shaped by technological innovation and its accidents. It challenges us to consider the value of different types of risk-taking — physical, political, and critical—at a time when the discourse of citizen safety is wielded in ever more oppressive ways. This volume is not a sociological study of how car accidents affect people, but rather an attempt to explore why the fantasies, anxieties, and traumas associated with the automobile and its collisions have been so closely aligned with cinema.

Crash Methodology

My methodological strategy takes its cue from the hybrid nature of film itself, and draws on four related but distinct approaches to the question of the technological, mobile, and accident-prone subject: (1) the discourse surrounding the modern mobile spectator that has emerged in conversation with the writing of the Frankfurt School, particularly the media theory of Walter Benjamin (leading figures in this discourse include Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Jonathan Crary, Ann Friedberg, and Lynne Kirby); (2) the discourse of speed and disaster, most closely associated with Paul Virilio, in which cinema, transportation, and war emerge as intimately related capitalist technologies; (3) the discourse of the avant-garde, and most notably futurism, which embraces technologies of speed and their accidents as vehicles for creative transformation and radical possibility; and (4) the psychoanalytic discourse of “the drive” as it appears in the work of both Sigmund Freud and Jean Laplanche. Of course, at times these discourses become incompatible with each other, and in juxtaposing them, I intend not to obscure these points of difference, but rather to bring them to the fore in order to create a productive critical matrix through which to engage the specific complexities and possibilities of the trope of collision and disaster.

PANORAMIC VISION AND THE MODERN MOBILE SUBJECT

Over the last twenty years, scholarship in the related fields of visual studies, art history, and film studies could be characterized by an ongoing interest in historicizing how modernity has transformed the human subject’s experience of and formation by perception, movement, and time, perhaps sometimes at the expense of an interest in modern media’s equally complex engagement with stasis. The works of authors such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Lynne Kirby, Jonathan Crary, Tom Gunning, Anne Friedberg, and Giuliana Bruno share a common interest in what Gunning has described as “the archeology of the film spectator, modes of viewing that seem to have first been rehearsed within the urban environment.” ” Repeatedly, these authors establish strong links between the emergence of cinema as a technology, the visual and psychological experience of modernity, and the development of a wide range of high-speed transportation systems, including the railway, the streetcar, and, later, the automobile (among these, the railway is privileged). Kirby, drawing on the work of Schivelbusch, has explored in detail the role that shock plays in the “perceptual overlap between the railroad and the cinema,” noting that in addition to the stimulation offered by rapid shot changes, cuts to close-ups, and “attacks on vision” (like a “train charging headlong into the camera”), staged railway collisions repeatedly emerged as a thematic preoccupation in early films.” But as Gunning points out, the early “aesthetic of attractions” offers the modern spectator not just a potentially dangerous experience of shock, but also the kind of thrill previously found at amusement parks, resulting in a mixture of “pleasure and anxiety.’ * Unlike later narrative cinema, Gunning argues, this early cinema of attractions acknowledges, even directly addresses, the spectator, and is marked by a “reach outwards,” rather than by the absorption of the spectator into the film world, absorption that has come to be associated (perhaps reductively so) with classical narrative cinema. This outward reach to an embodied spectator parallels one of the central conundrums explored through the cinematic crash: how to make conscious the effect of modernity on the relation between subject and object, body and mind, inside and outside.

Addressing this question of the modern subject’s limits, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his seminal discussion of the shocks and assaults of urban life, draws on Freud, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin to describe the modern subject’s “stimulus shield,” a semi-permeable, inorganic membrane that would, according to Freud, filter out some of the intensity of the stimuli.” Yet for Benjamin, as Miriam Bratu Hansen brilliantly demonstrates, the radical possibility of cinema depends in part on one understanding this stimulus shield as “a bit less of a carapace or armor and a bit more ofa matrix or medium—a porous interface between the organism and the world that would allow for a greater mobility and circulation of psychic energies.” Focusing on the term innervation, Hansen contrasts the two-way process Benjamin articulates, which allows for the recovery of “split-off psychic energy through motor stimulation,” with the unidirectional models of innervation Freud develops in his writing on hysteria and dream analysis, where mental and affective energy simply take somatic form.” Furthermore, Hansen foregrounds Benjamin's statement that “people whom nothing moves or touches any longer are taught to cry again in the cinema,” in order to recognize the importance of “a regeneration of affect” to Benjamin’s vision of cinema and technology as a counterpoint to technology’s negative impact on modern subjects. Within this paradigm, the spaces newly configured by transportation, advertising, and cinema enable a movement of “energy” across and between layers, which in turn constitutes both our (potentially traumatic) reception of the world and our response to it. At this time of heightened anxiety about the demise of criticism, the impossibility of critical distance, and the spectacularization of the world, including the art museum, Hansen usefully draws attention to Benjamin’s exploration of the critical possibilities of nearness, speed, and American cinema, a near-

“ce ness forced on us by advertising, which “‘all but hits us between the eyes with things; in the same way that ‘a car, growing to gigantic proportions, careens at us out of a film screen?”

While Gunning, like Benjamin, does see in the cinematic thrills exemplified by a cinematic train rushing outwards toward the spectator a radically disruptive and critical potential, this is only, Gunning insists, because these early projections run “counter to the illusionistic absorption,” their two-dimensionality exposed, for example, by the sudden animation of a projected still image or by the live performances that accompanied projection”? For Gunning—and this point is essential—the real shock of cinema lies precisely not in a naive spectator’s faith in the realism of a train rushing at the screen, but rather in the exposure of the “loss of experience” reflected in cinema’s phantom image; and he insists that the screams of delight and terror recounted from those early screenings were not those of naive spectators beholden to a new realism, but those of a modern audience aware of cinema’s reflection of a modern world “freighted with emptiness.””*