Hank Williams' radio show was introduced by a continuity announcer with the simple phrase, delivered with the voice of a market trader, "howdy neighbours!" Hank built his career on popular sentiment - it served as an anchor and foil for his excess. Music industry professionals tried to steer Hank upmarket . His success was plain to see but the industry couldn't understand it, so didn't trust it to continue. His band members complained that playing his simple tunes would ruin their reputation as musicians . Three-chord hillbilly music had no right to compete with western swing, but Hank Williams trusted his instincts and trusted his audience. "Play it vanilla" he would tell his band before going on stage and there would be hell to pay if anyone over-elaborated or showed-off. "Play it vanilla" had, perhaps, a racial connotation to it, but it was essentially an instruction to the musicians that the songs were to be played 'plain' because they were not performing for their own pleasure or taste, but that of the audience. Hank Williams's performances were acts of hospitality and his songs were a form of greeting. Every line and every chord said 'howdy', as they welcomed the audience on its own terms and in its own voice.

As a corny welcome, 'howdy neighbours!' is a prime example of what Adorno criticised as the fraudulent happiness and premature reconciliation peddled by mass culture: "the hostility inherent in the principle of entertainment" . Its warmth and familiarity compensate for and are contradicted by the calculation and distance required by radio stations/programmes/stars to survive in a competitive market. Greetings, then, can be graded (hostility at one end, hospitality at the other) but it is only the tip of Adorno's iceberg. A particular greeting's full social significance extends beyond, and cannot be read off directly from, its warmth or coldness. A game show host's professional familiarity, for instance, is an act of warmth that is a symptom of the systemic coldness of the culture industry: the industrialisation of welcome is the abolition of warmth in the guise of the smiling face. Adorno's aesthetic thinking, therefore, campaigns for an inverted economy of the greeting, tracing the most aggressive social forces within the most hospitable and popular culture while discovering hope in the most austere and hostile art. As such, Adorno's inverted economy is a valuable corrective to one-dimensional cultural criticism; it cannot, however, be used as a formula for analysing the social life of culture's greeting. If social hope or despair cannot be read off mechanically from a greeting's warmth or coldness, it makes no sense simply to invert the mechanism. Adorno may be a spellbinding advocate for inhospitality in art but we need to guard against taking his analysis as a new equation of inhospitality and hope. Perhaps Adorno makes this mistake himself now and then, overstating the case for cultural austerity or tying hope and inhospitality together too tightly. The essential thing is not to take sides with one style of greeting or another but to examine critically the complex totality of forces brought to bear with each cultural encounter. Cultural forms of attention (in their full social depth) and culture's modes of address (beyond the vagaries of hospitality and hostility) are the basis of the performative deployment of social relations in culture.

What does it mean to engage critically with the social relations that are deployed in a corny welcome or a vangardist affront? In part, it means attending to how culture greets us, rather than reducing cultural engagement to the binary logic of high and low, or the illogic of pluralism, postmodernist or otherwise . Consider, for instance, a film's opening credits. Credit sequences are the first welcome of movies. Fredric Jameson's famous analysis of the opening credits to Star Wars - that it signals the futuristic tale, in fact, to be a 'nostalgia film' - describes how the film frames itself semiotically for the cinema-going audience. In considering issues around culture's forms of greeting, on the other hand, I am concerned less about how culture frames itself than how culture constructs itself and its audiences through its modes of address. Credit sequences undoubtedly frame the movies they precede, but they also establish the movie's greeting. Star Wars greets us warmly, we might say, insofar as it introduces itself and addresses us in the guise of an anachronistic genre. As such, Star Wars contrives to say 'howdy' even as it prefaces its adventures with an arcane and alien back-story. In place of 'howdy neighbours' Star Wars greets us with something like 'howdy B-movie fans'. In the words of Jameson, it "satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again" . The guise is, indeed, a semiotic matter, as Jameson describes it, but its social effect is carried in its mode of address - and, pace Adorno, its apparent warmth cannot be taken at face value. It's not that a chummy credit sequence is bound to be a disguise for an iron fist or an accountant's calculation. Each howdy welcomes you differently and consequently (to put it moderately) welcomes a different version of you. The radical formulation goes like this: the welcome constructs whoever is welcomed by it; a credit sequence never merely says 'hello', it determines (by singling out and actively forming them) to whom it says 'hello'. It puts us in the correct frame of mind; gets us in the mood; and, prepares us for what is about to unfold. In this way, the performative 'howdy' always places conditions on the welcome and the welcomed.

No soundtrack accompanies Moretti's opening credits to Dear Diary; nor are the credits superimposed on an establishing sequence: they consist of nothing other than names (of the actors) or names and jobs (of the crew). So far, so conventional, perhaps, except that there is a rare tenderness about Moretti's handling of the conventions. Having nothing else to look at or listen to, the longer the credit sequence goes on, the more the viewer is made aware of the value of these individuals. No distractions take our attention away from them as their names are introduced to us one by one (or two by two, in some cases, as they are introduced to us in pairs, like couples). The names are not rushed through at top speed (which always gives the effect that the 'introduction' is merely a legal requirement); each one is given plenty of screen time so that their name can be read at a leisurely pace before passing on to the next one (which gives the impression that they are valued). Would it be too far-fetched to say the pace and the consideration are closer to the introductions a host might make at a dinner party, rather than the acknowledgements made in the culture industry? The resemblance to dinner party introductions is enhanced by the fact that the credits are hand written - the product of a single person's labour, our host. The effect is underlined, and the host identified, in the very first moment of the film proper, when Moretti writes a new page of his diary in the same hand.

What sort of welcome is this? If we are inclined to think of its intimacy as warm and hospitable, its lack of sound and visual spectacle means its hospitality falls some way short of the typical showbiz greeting: entertainment as welcome-on-a-plate, so to speak. There is a certain warmth in the spectacle - a gift of colours, action and music on a grand scale (the bigger the scale, the bigger the welcome, perhaps) - that is entirely lacking in Dear Diary's opening credits. This film addresses us, instead, with a warmth that doesn't exaggerate itself for the sake of impact. Neither does it bypass introductions by winning us over in an instant.

If the opening credits and the first scene are unspectacular, quiet, humble affairs, then the first sight of the film's star is correspondingly anonymous: Moretti is seen from behind, riding his scooter through the empty, afternoon streets of Rome. One introduction follows another. It is as if Moretti is greeting us tentatively and in stages. He is taking care. It is a slow start compared to the attention seeking standards of the entertainment industry. And the contrast is highlighted by Moretti's voiceover that begins with a lament: "Summer in Rome, cinemas are closed. All you can see is 'Sex, Love and Shepherding'. 'Snow White and the Seven Blacks' or horror like 'Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer' or Italian films". Porn, ultraviolence and a cynical brand of Italian cinema are the targets of a short but pointed complaint by Moretti as we watch him scoot around his favourite streets, showing us not the official Rome of tourism and commerce but his Rome. Following him, we see street after street of a quiet residential Rome, a kind of secret garden in the style of a string of suburban districts. Geography, then, comes to conspire with filmic style and narrated argument to greet us (and thereby configure us) as Moretti's personal guests. Moretti introduces himself to us without any plot to speak of, without spectacle or even a face and, in the same movement, converts us from the mass of strangers that constitutes a cinema audience into new friends, confidantes, intimates.

Moretti scoots on in his element as we hear the boil-in-the-bag philosophising of his well-off but disappointed peers from Italian cinema: "I'm afraid to re-think my life. I'm a coward. What happened?" When we cut to the scene in which these words are uttered, we are witnesses to a sort of well-heeled penthouse wake in the shape of a small group of professionals moaning into their wine. Stylish interiors and tailored clothes don't compensate for their mawkish sense of subjective impoverishment. "What has our generation become?" asks one, "We all changed for the worse. Sold out, compromised, co-opted." Cut to Moretti sat in the cinema, on edge listening to this self-indulgent mush, saying, "Why 'all'? This fixation with us 'all' being sold out and co-opted!" Moretti is resisting the cold embrace of his own generation's representatives on the screen in one of the two classic formulations of political struggle , one being to represent the experience of the downtrodden as universal, the other (Moretti's) is to call into question the universality of the experience of those in power. Moretti does not identify himself in the role that the movie assigns him and responds wonderfully when the voice of the Italian movie continues, "We're old, bitter, dishonest. We used to shout awful, violent slogans. Look how ugly we've gotten!" Moretti, now back on his vespa, replies, "You shouted awful, violent slogans. You've gotten ugly. I shouted the right slogans and I'm a splendid forty year old." Cue Leonard Cohen's song, "I'm Your Man".

Later on, Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer comes to stand for another kind of film Moretti does not want to make - or sit through. Henry is not your man; he is a law unto himself: an ego on the loose. As Moretti makes a few light points against its ultraviolence, Moretti intercuts a few murderous scenes, in which a tubby victim has a television set smashed over his head and another is shot dead while his murderer giggles. If Moretti had objected to violence in a prudish way then these scenes would not appear in his film. Dear Diary is not in denial about violence in the movies and violence in the world. His dispute with the ultraviolent movie does not take the style of the censor or lobbyists of censors, who would stand between the audience and such material, protecting us from it. Moretti includes scenes from an ultraviolent movie in a movie that opposes ultraviolence because he is, above all, interested in establishing a different relationship with the audience, one that is primarily based on mutuality and dialogue. He has introduced himself to us through a string of commitments, beliefs and positions that he holds: he greets us not as a movie star but as a person with an identity, a personality, a history and a geography. And in so doing, Moretti imagines us, the audience, as a group of people who are interested in other people's identities, personalities, histories and geographies because we have them too. Reciprocity is built into Dear Diary by constructing a different sort of relationship between the filmmaker and the audience, by constructing a welcome that is not merely an invitation to pay your money to witness a spectacle. Indiscriminate violence has a knack of catching your attention in the movies - gun shots, bomb blasts, fist fights, bloody bodies and explosions are the pyrotechnics of a movie industry frightened that the audience will be bored if it is not fed a constant diet of bite-size 'events'. Moretti's film is not a firework display at which we gawp and gasp; it does not content itself with merely holding our attention with whatever it takes. Dear Diary is a different kind of film that consequently allows us to be a different kind of audience. What's more, this is as true for fans of ultraviolent movies as anyone else. Moretti walks out of the cinema showing Henry visibly upset and asks, "who said good things about this film?" He copies into his diary, word for word, an intellectual defence of the film, as if he is documenting a strange life form. Then he searches out the reviewer (a fantasy scene?) and reads passages back to him. The reviewer curls up, weeping in remorse but Moretti carries on, reading more passages in disbelief and anger. In this way Moretti once again puts dialogue where there once was spectacle, revealing also an emotional inner life at variance with the slick, cynical face of ultraviolence. One of Moretti's greetings, then, could be phrased as, "howdy ultraviolent fans, here's someone else you are!"

Sat in the cinema, complaining about his peers… this is the first time we see Moretti's face in the film (the next stage in this dialectic of introduction) and he casts himself in the role of the ordinary moviegoer, a viewer talking back to a screen. Moretti's face is revealed, then, at a moment when the actor-director is also a viewer: he is not perceptively different from us. However, this cinemagoer on the screen is not just watching a movie and commenting on it (ie watching a movie and resisting its form of address; reconstituting the movie with alternative forms of attention); Moretti is also calling for another kind of movie and is in the process of making such a movie. Before any storyline is in place, Moretti sets up a dialogue about what kind of movie he does and does not want to watch or produce. In contrast to mainstream cinema and TV, which is driven by a star system that commodifies individual identity, Moretti identifies himself in Dear Diary - shows his face - at the very point at which he wants to distinguish himself, and his sort of movie, from Italian cinema, and also from the comfortable self-loathing of his generation's conservative opinion formers. His identity, therefore, is not reduced to a face; on the contrary, his face becomes the sign of his beliefs, his opinions, his position. He resumes his scooter ride after leaving the cinema again with the back of his helmeted head to the camera. And Leonard Cohen continues to plead his own devotional case: I'm your man.

"What I like most is to see houses, neighbourhoods," Moretti says, "My favourite neighbourhood is the Grabatella. I wander through the old housing projects. I don't like to see only the facades, I like to see the inside too." He turns off the road into a courtyard and walks into the building with his scooter helmet still on. In order to gain access to the properties Moretti has to introduce himself in a mask, as Cohen puts it in "I'm Your Man", so that the occupants will accept him. "I ring the buzzer and pretend I'm location scouting for a film. The tenant asks me what the film is about. I don't know what to say". He re-enacts this moment for us, in a piece to camera in which he makes up a pitch that might allow him to enter someone else's house. "It's a film about a Trotskyist pastry chef in Italy during the 1950's", he pauses for moment to think and completes the description in English, "a musical". He is asking to be welcomed. Hank Williams' continuity announcer speaks as the host, welcoming the virtual neighbourhood to Hank's entertainment; posing as a location scout, Moretti greets the residents as their potential guest, so that when he re-enacts this for the camera it is the audience that is put in the position of the host. Moretti, the filmmaker, is showing us how the power of the movies can be used as a passport into people's intimate lives, and, at the same time, using the cinema as a foil for his own, more idiosyncratic, pastime. That last sentence is a description of his greeting to the tenant but read it again, now, as a description of what he does to cinema in Dear Diary.

"One day at a penthouse which seemed more affordable", Moretti says, as we see him and his partner, Silvia, both wearing the same style white scooter helmet, looking up at an historical building, "we asked the price. $700 a square foot!" With Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man" still watching over the scene, Moretti protests against what Adorno calls "the ruling principle of reality, which is the principle that all things can be exchanged for other things" . "You can't talk square feet," Moretti complains, "Via Dandolo is a historic street". And finally, Moretti tells us, as if to put a cherry on the top of his proposition, "Garibaldi fought here." Moretti, Garibaldi and Leonard Cohen seem to be in agreement with Oscar Wilde's famous put-down: a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Dear Diary makes this point over and again, from the host's introductions in the opening credits to the next scene, in which Moretti distances himself from the mechanisms of price and profit altogether.

Pulling up at a traffic light Moretti eyes a young man in a sports car and dismounts. There is no anger in his voice when he says, "You know what I was thinking?" The driver listens without joining in. "A very sad thing", Moretti continues, "even in a more decent society than this one, I'll only feel at ease with a minority of people". Economically, Moretti takes his point of departure from the roots of capitalist 'mass' culture, in which the cultural product that appealed to the largest majority made the most of its profit margin. This is not the only formula for making money, but it was central to the development of the culture industry, and of the cinema in particular. The first condition of 'mass' culture, therefore, is that it produces and requires (constructs for itself) a 'mass' out of the individuals and groups who come before it, in order to sell to them. Mass culture is a defunct term because it presupposed an homogenous audience (passive recipients, or dupes, in the notoriously pejorative versions). In terms of the greeting, a culture that welcomes its audience as a mass of people cannot help but be centrifugal, in which the product holds the central position from which everything flows. Under these circumstances, the audience can be brought into the calculations but not regarded as individual, contingent or unpredictable. To side with the minority, on the other hand, is not only to prefer the audience to be sovereign in its own contingency but also for those you address to be beyond your calculations. Capitalism likes to think of its markets as pools of 'demand' that justify its 'supply' but Moretti's preference for the minority goes against economic good sense for the sake of the contingent identities hidden by the averages of market research.

In effect, the majority (mass audience) only exists as an effect of the possibility of calculating its average responses to certain products. A minority is, by contrast, not subject to these broad calculations. For too long the Left (and postmodernists across the board) have equated minorities with elitism, failing to factor in the power necessary to turn a minority into an elite. The minority, then, is not a concept to be preserved for ruling elites but needs to be extended to groups with a kernel of resistance to cultural calculation. In siding with the minority, Moretti is not being elitist in the usual sense, and he makes this clear by distinguishing his love of the minority from both the capitalist exploitation of the masses and the elitist distinction from the herd: "Not like those films where a couple fights on a desert island because the filmmaker doesn't believe in people. I believe in people, I just don't believe in the majority of people. I'll always be in tune with a minority". Moretti puts his commitment to the minority to the test by trying to explain it patiently to a complete stranger. The stranger is a minority of one, who, when faced with Moretti's argument about the value of minorities, does not respond. If you can't calculate the response of a minority in the way you can with a majority, you have to be prepared to miss your mark. When the lights change the driver leaves Moretti behind, but not before wishing him 'good luck'. The meeting is not a total failure, then. Moretti gets back to his scooter and continues on his way.

By this point Cohen's "I'm Your Man" has faded out. It slipped into the movie when Moretti walked out of a cynical Italian movie and it had gone by the time the sports car driver wished him good luck. If the song is anything to go by - and it is - Moretti is a humble sort of film star. Cohen's song confirms Moretti's subversion of the power of the cinema (as spectacle). We are not his audience; he is our man. "If you want a boxer", Cohen sings, "I will step into the ring for you". Whatever or whoever you want, the song says, I'm your man. 'I'm Your Man' is not a boast, though, it is a plea: it is not the arrogant statement of a man who is everything the beloved wants, it is the masochistic promise of a man who will become whatever the beloved asks. It's masochism is not the popularised conception of masochism or the subcultural one but rather a masochism rooted in Sacher-Masoch's "Venus in Furs", in which Severin, the swooning narrator, takes an excessive step beyond merely expressing his love. He asks his Venus, Wanda, to marry him and anticipating her rejection, offers himself as her plaything. Severin is not his own man, as they say. Severin is Wanda's man. "Be a tyrant, be a despot", Severin says, "but be mine". Regardless of whether this is his preference or his taste, Severin expresses it differently. It is his plan-B. Severin chooses to be Wanda's slave rather than being apart from her. And the deal he is striking with her is stated clearly and up front when he says, "If you cannot be mine entirely and forever [by which he means, be my wife] then I want to be your slave, I want to suffer anything to be able to stay by your side". Note the 'if/then' structure. Severin may or may not derive pleasure from pain or of engaging in sexual role play as a slave (most readers assume that he does); what he says, though, is that he craves a totalising bond with his beloved over and above his own identity, dignity or power - if not a mutually captivated bond, then an asymmetric master-slave one, but at any cost a bond that is total. His slavery is neither inevitable nor his own choice; his love for Wanda engulfs him to the extent that he cannot live without her, hence he offers her the choice between being his wife and being his tyrant. "If you want a partner", Cohen sings, "take my hand or/ if you want to strike me down in anger/ here I stand/ I'm your man".

For the lover, the beloved is everything, and in response, the lover promises to become everything. However, when everything equals anything, anything equals nothing. I'm your man, therefore, does not mean I am everything (as in, I fulfil your all your desires) but I am nothing (your desires, not mine, are sovereign). I am nothing precisely because I can be anything (tell me your desires and I will conform to them). "I'm your man" makes no demands on the beloved and asks for nothing in return. In the contract between Wanda and Sacher-Masoch the disappearance of the 'slave' is spelled out in clear terms: "You shall renounce your identity completely"; "You have nothing save me; for you I am everything, your life, your future, your happiness, your unhappiness, your torment, your joy". To love is not to ask for more of the beloved but to wish for them more from you. A better you, perhaps. Or a version of you (a particular construction) that pleases the beloved, so that the beloved's happiness is prized above your own. This is why the lover who says, 'I'm your man' is promising to change but going further than that. He is dreaming of multiplying himself. "And if you want another kind of lover, I'll wear a mask for you": Cohen volunteers all of these possible men and announces, "I'm your man". Cohen is your man because he is your men. Moretti is our man because he multiplies himself, too - each scene articulates another Moretti - rather than reducing himself to a single image, character, trait, role, logo.

There is, perhaps, a masochistic edge to all love. Sacher-Masoch elaborates for the first time and in full detail a subjectivity lit up by devotion, longing, worship and adoration for the beloved. "I'm Your Man" is not just a masochistic love song, then, but a lover's love song - a song characterised by the lover's love of the beloved. The industry standard love song has no love in it, just the cold calculation of business, which is not masochistic (loving) but sadistic (to repeat, cold and calculating). Likewise, the Big Loud Action Movie is sadistic, not only in its spectacularisation and repetition of cruel acts but also in its cold, hard, mechanical, detached, witty, modus operandi. Moretti's film depends on precisely that which "Big Loud Action Movies have managed to repress, eliminate or overcome: psychological complexity and the registration of accurate social and historical detail" . Big Loud Action Movies drive out human-scale experience with monumentality while Moretti drives out spectacle, in retaliation, with the little dramas of an idiosyncratic, provincial, inner life. Dear Diary is a film that runs on love.

Beauty, Fame, Work, Time, Death, Economics, Atmosphere, Success, Art, Titles, The Tingle, Underwear Power: these are the headings to chapters 4 to 15 of Andy Warhol's 'From A to B and Back Again'. The first three chapters are headed 'Love'. This is somewhat surprising, perhaps, since Warhol is undoubtedly the court artist of business. Warhol's works are structured around the commercial practices of reproducibility, de-skilling, uniformity and celebrity (which is all the above). Love sits uncomfortably amongst such criteria. And yet love survives in Warhol's work. Consider, for instance, his preference for those outtakes in which an extra makes a mistake. Instead of rejecting the outtake, Warhol wants to cherish it, as a separate movie, with a new star, the extra who made a mistake. Love exceeds the formula and when the formula is peeled away, as in an outtake, there is a glimpse of love. "I really don't care that much about 'Beauties'. What I really like are Talkers. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love" : Moretti could have said that in Dear Diary, but it comes from Warhol. "We are always being told about desire", Barthes said, "never about pleasure; desire has an epistemic dignity, pleasure does not". Love lacks epistemic dignity as much as the Sacher-Masoch lacks his own identity under the spell of Wanda. Barthes changed the face of cultural criticism by modelling his theory of literature on that of love. From the point of view of reading, Barthes textuality of desire means reserving a place for the uncodified, the intractable and the eccentric. From the point of view of writing, it means hesitancy, longing, loss. "The text you write must prove to me that it desires me", he wrote, before concluding immediately, "This proof exists: it is writing". The Postmodernist's view of our manipulated culture conforms to Peter Halley's explanation in 1989: "The regimentation of human movement, activity and perception accompanies the geometric division of space/time. It is governed by the use of time-keeping devices, the application of standards of normalcy, and the police apparatus. In the factory, human movement is made to conform to rigorous spatial and temporal geometries". Love, enthusiasm, euphoria, frank enjoyment of the playful, exuberance, manipulation, spontaneity and beguilement of the senses seem naïve by comparison, but perhaps less so under Barthes' motto: "Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order."

Meaning is never monogamous in Barthes' account, nor is writing a comforting exchange with a welcoming reader. Writing is an embrace that has no grip. In this sense, everything that Barthes wrote was a fragment of a lover's discourse: a text written in response to amorous disappointment and rejection. Writing, as an embrace that has no grip, is invitation. A film greets us, also, as a welcome that has no firm control over us. The point of using formula in Hollywood is to compensate for the audience's unpredictability. Dear Diary adds one greeting to another in order to place love and dialogue above the spectacle - it is an invitation to Moretti that stands in for an invitation to a different kind of culture as well as different modes of address and different forms of attention. Warmth is not enough. Accepting an invitation amounts to submitting to its authority and, by doing so, contributing to its authority. This is why Derrida's investigation into the politics of friendship has made its greatest insight by deconstructing the Kantian opposition of hospitality and hostility. Welcoming the stranger as a friend (as a proxy friend, we might say) is a virtue perhaps but it is not without its economy of power. Hospitality moderates the split between friend and stranger without confusing the roles of host and guest. In fact, from a structural point of view, it could be said that the hospitable elision of the friend/stranger opposition preserves the vital distinction between host and guest. Mastery conditions hospitality. If, in Kant, hospitality is owed to the stranger as a duty, it follows that the host receives authority in the very act of welcoming. Hospitality is possible only on the condition that it is impossible. Welcoming the stranger into the economy of the household, of which the host is master, means to submit the stranger to the host's mastery. For there to be hospitality, Derrida says, there must be a door. But if there is a door, and there must be, then hospitality is hostile to the stranger. Someone has a key to the door, Derrida adds, which means that someone controls the conditions of hospitality. Indeed, hospitality is the door - the threshold - that closes onto the world of strangers in order to be able to permit entry to strangers-as-friends.

Hospitality is hostile to the stranger by virtue of demanding the stranger be greeted as a friend. The stranger is not an intruder but a friend when the host authorises the guest as a proxy friend. Hospitality is opposed to hostility - which fixes the stranger-as-stranger - so as to be more effectively hostile to the stranger. It would be a mistake to think of hospitality as hostile only inasmuch as it administers (rations, legislates, selects) passage across the threshold; hospitality is hostile to the guest through the effect of including the stranger in the law of the 'house'. To accept an invitation, therefore, is to codify oneself, or allow oneself to be so codified, and thereby to submit to the 'house rules'. Invitations are not issued without conditions; they are demands for proper behaviour. Effectively, to welcome a stranger as a friend, then, is to convert the stranger into a friend in order to welcome them as a guest. The guest is the iteration of the stranger that submits to the mastery of the host. Only the host has the authority to issue invitations. Hence, every invitation is a coded - in both senses, of cryptic and semiotic - order to comply. And, the warmth of the welcome assures compliance. The friendlier the host, the more efficient is the conversion of the stranger into the guest. That is to say, the ebullient host allows the guest to believe that the authority of the host is not being imposed at all. Likewise, the more inviting the invitation, the more conspicuous is the concealment of the hostility within hospitality.

Derrida's warning about the hostility concealed within hospitality should not be underestimated. It has a very important contribution to make to our understanding of culture, especially culture's forms of attention and modes of address. Like Adorno's critique of 'mass' culture's fraudulent happiness and premature reconciliation, Derrida unfolds the greeting with devastating effect. Unlike Adorno, though, Derrida does not give any reason for equating cultural hostility with hope. He gives no clear indication of hope at all. For this we need to return to Barthes, I think, for whom hope lies in love and the dialogue of writing's (culture's) address. This is Moretti's hope, also. "Anything is likely to ravish me which can reach me through a ring, a rip, a rent", Barthes said, "the first time I saw X through a car window: the window shifted, like a lens searching out who to love in the crowd; and then - immobilized in some accuracy of my desire? - I focused on that apparition whom I was henceforth to follow for months" . To be ravished by the fragment, fascinated by the occluded scene and immobilized by the chance encounter is, in Barthes, to prefer care to justice and prize parochial sentiment over universal truth. In the 80s, cultural theory coerced artists into getting things right; Barthes gives us higher ambitions. Even amidst the technical orrery of 'Myth Today', Barthes chose to clarify the relationship between signifier and signified with the example of a bunch of roses given to a lover. Philosophers have typically preferred to talk about tables and other dull objects in order to foreground the analysis at hand; Barthes illustrates the liveliness of signs by talking about 'passionified' roses. Instead of the 'pious show' of standard critique and academic achievement, Barthes closes in on the world and its passions. Semiological theory was never Barthes' attempt to absolve the intellectual from the everyday, the contingent and emotional life. On the contrary, it places the writer among the manure of contradictions in which the writer is always implicated by writing. The theory of signs does not indulge itself in a show trial in which the culture industry (or some other false rival) is tried for crimes against culture and found perpetually guilty. When he writes "Take a bunch of roses: I use them to signify my passion" , it is Barthes himself who is offering the roses, and, perhaps, it is the reader directly who is being asked to take them.

Do we project charm onto Moretti - in the absence of character, action, plot - and see him, magically, as 'our man', the man we want him to be at this early stage of the movie? When the film has hardly begun, and perhaps only because the film has hardly begun, the actor-director is all the men we want. Moretti uses the exploratory early part of the film, when nothing has settled, as a space in which he can multiply himself and thereby establish a relationship with the moviegoer that is not based on the spectacle. This is a Barthesian greeting. Moretti multiplies himself and refuses to reduce himself to an image as he introduces himself to us. But: although he is the multiplied lover who introduces himself to us over and again, is it not us, the multiple, anonymous audience who is being cast as his lover? He multiplies himself for a beloved that is already, literally multiple: us. Moretti scoots along on his vespa to the sound of Cohen singing "I'm Your Man" and Moretti is our man. At the same time, though, the song is clearly extra-diegetic: Moretti doesn't sing it and there is no indication that he has heard it. The song is for us. Perhaps we associate the song with him and attribute it to him, but it is us that listen to it. Cohen's song is for us, and we are induced into singing it for Moretti. Sat in the cinema, tapping our feet, following the beat with a finger or slapping the arm of the chair, it is the audience who is chiming with Cohen, whispering the words or following them in our heads: "I'm you man". You might not necessarily feel utterly devoted to the author a la Sacher-Masoch, but you have at least devoted your time, your attentiveness, something of yourself. After all, isn't that what attending to someone else's movie, essay, artwork or song is like?