1.

Michel Foucault: “Yes, that’s it. The visibility in the films [of Marguerite Duras] is still not a presence. I don’t know if [Michael] Lonsdale acts in this film [India Song (1975)]. I imagine he does, because he is such a good actor for Marguerite Duras. There is in him a kind of fog-like thickness. We don’t know what his form is. We don’t know what his face is like. Does Lonsdale have a nose, does Lonsdale have a chin? Does he have a smile? I really don’t know. He is thick and solid like a formless fog, and out of this fog come rumblings from who knows where, rumblings that are his voice, or again his gestures, which are not attached to anything, which come through the screen toward you. A kind of third dimension, where only the third dimension is left without the other two to support it, so that it’s always in front of you, it’s always between the screen and you, it’s never either on or in the screen. That’s what Lonsdale is. It seems to me that Lonsdale is absolutely one with Duras’s text, or rather with this mixture of text/image.”[1]

2.

How do you read a “fog”? How does one interpret it? You could first describe it perhaps? Easy enough, provided we take Foucault figuratively, keep this fog a “fog,” render it a body, a human body, an actor named Lonsdale, side-lit, center-framed, front-facing, shot for a medium, a medium shot. And then, by this very same person/frame/shot operation, we could describe some more shots, describe them so to sequence them, to assess their continuity; or determine their lack, their discontinuity, which is to say, their failed continuity, which is to say, per its rules—continuity’s. And maybe even describe the sound, say that post-production did it, say, per the standards of sync-sound, that it’s dissonant, that voice and image conflict. Thus described, thus described per the poetics of Hollywood, per its technical terms, from its posture of profilmic production, and therefore, by its norms, even if opposed—after all such description, we can now begin to read. To read thematically; to read historically; to read affectively and radically; to read phenomenologically and metabolically and atmospherically; to read psychoanalytically and even cognitively; to read politically and formally, which is to say, allegorically; to read, as we do, as we must—we can now begin to read, just like everyone else: from the same basis, the same work, the same lingua franca of description.

3.

How do you read a fog? How do you read its discursive formations? Its series and strata? Its microphysics of force and desire? How do you genealogize? Archaeologize? Again, describe it. Describe this image above, this event, its visibilities and statements, from Marcel Hanoun’s 1967 L’Authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung, but wait before speaking of discipline and punish, of subjectivation, of power/knowledge. Just wait. Wait—and describe. But describe it not as “fog,” but as a fog. As an event: A particulate mist coalesces, gathers. [Is it in focus?] Its grains bulk, undulate, quiver. [Is it centered?] Light refracts; whites shimmer; blacks pulse—an opacity, bright and night. [What’s its depth? Is there depth?] Vapor gains volume; tendrils stretch forward, shape roiling appendages. [Is this human?] And upward: a plume, a plume with a gaze, a look. Heavy and thick. It roils. [Is this even a body? Is this all of it?]  Features protrude; they probe the margins, the limits of the image, palpitate its four-walled visibility. [A frame?] They test them. [The framelines?] They deliquesce them. [Its axes, X and Y?] They dissolve their dimensions, scatter this mass, dissipate it, pour it into other images. [Other shots? Or is it the same shot?] A gaseous circulation begins: it flows; it sprays; it spreads across the succession of sights, mixing and mingling them. [Linear? Non-linear? Are these even shots anymore?] And then: accretion and diffusion, accumulation and dispersion—dilations vibrate this volume, pressurize it. Statements rumble. [Dubbed?] But from where? [Dolby?] They propagate sonically, centrifugally. [Off-screen?] They echo, displacing here then there then over there and then back there, never in the place you’d expect. [So unsynced?]. They disseminate. Become visible, a visibility. One we can read. [An intertitle?] One we can hear. [What?] Immiscible, yet one. [Seriously?] Eddies of expression swirl, however blurred—tremulously, without first or second dimensions, only somehow, a third. [Ah, the z-axis. Projection. Theatricality. But the screen’s now gone!] And it bulges forth, outward, toward us. [Us spectators? Us critics? What are we now? What are we doing? What are we even?] Now we can read. (Now we can work.)

4.

We’re speaking of operators, two of them: Lonedale and Lonsdale. Place them in the text, et voila, description. The Lonedale operator: continuity and contiguity; causation and integration; space carved—thus analyzed—and assembled—thus constructed—per the scale of the human, cut and fit per the metric of their bodies, their looks—put it in the text, it gets to work. Put it in the text. Yield narrative space. Put it in the text—so to flout it. Put it in the text. Affix voice to mouth. Put it in the text. Do Chion—again somehow. Put it in the text. The spaces? Segregation. Put it in the text. And thereafter? Discorrelation. Put it in the text. Make man your ground. Put in the text—then disfigure him, refigure him, configure him, whatever! The Lonedale operator: over and over again it works, it describes so we can mis-scribe and re-scribe it, over and over again, however much difference we find, it’s still only repetition and repetition, only another day fashioning and refashioning that empirical-transcendental doublet, however now unfashionable, however now needed or not, whether we know it or not, today. And the Lonsdale operator: see #3 above but remember: “He is cotton and lead at the same time.”

5.

We’re speaking of operations: we place them in the text, or we find them; but regardless, we run them, we work them—like a machine, however automated, wherever located, in the text or in our heads or otherwise. We’re speaking, in other words—perhaps not enough—of labor, of our labor, of us watching, us reading, and us describing before reading, a describing whose discourse of film production, of technique—of shots and cuts, of tracks and zooms, of screens and frames, of sounds, synced and not: of work—is displaced, is prior, profilmic, never here, ever elsewhere, never ever at the very site, the very abode, of its interpretive production. And we’re speaking to you. You know who you are, especially you (you other Foucauldians). The Lonsdale operator: try it out. Put it—put yourself—to work. So that we might no longer have to,  have to as we do today.