Long Con, Graham Parker, 2006.
From a series of neon signs based on titles of spam e-mails.

In the late 1970s, the poet Bruce Andrews bought a paper cutter. The purchase of this quotidian manual technology transformed his writing process, allowing him to organize shards of original and appropriated language according to a sort of jump-cut logic. Thus, during the 1980s, Andrews composed several books of fragmented, modular poems that displaced the authorial ego and pushed everyday expressions into startling juxtapositions.¹ The poem “Confidence Trick,” which opens his 1987 collection Give ‘Em Enough Rope, displays a stunning range of discourses distilled into acerbic aphorisms: “Intentionally leaderless / recite this alphabet / body never ends.” Preceded by a quote from Marx – “The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis” – the poem challenges the reader to perceive the social and political functions undergirding the language.

“How’s your ambient buddy system?” Andrews asks wryly, in this poetic jab at hyper-mediated capitalism that predates the Web’s global transfer of information. Since the advent of the World Wide Web, the course of U.S. experimental poetry has shifted from the radical poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers like Andrews to more glib methods of appropriating Internet culture, variously labeled “conceptual,” “flarf,” or “ambient.” As interest in advertising, celebrity, consumerism, global exchange, online identity, and social networking grew in the poetry community, more poets published works sampling from language that documented these phenomena.

Today, the “ambient buddy system” could be Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, but the phrase also suits the exchanges resulting from spam emails, in which we perceive the “buddy” sending the unsolicited message as a malevolent robot or an altogether incorporeal agent. Likely due to the appeal of collaborating with nonhuman co-authors, so much poetry has been written from spam that the poet Craig Dworkin deemed any additional work of this ilk “old hat” and therefore unpublishable by 2006, when he offered a chapbook entitled Maps to UbuWeb for its PDF project, Publishing the Unpublishable. As Dworkin notes, the language of Maps (or, certain instances of spam) sound convincingly like the fragmented poetry of Bruce Andrews. Whether or not the artist Graham Parker is aware of this poetic trajectory, his new book Fair Use (notes from spam) reveals a similar interest in the peculiar linguistics of spam and the social realities nestled within these ethereal transmissions.

If a poetic compilation of spam emails is indeed cliché by now, Graham Parker’s book project holds interest as a fragmented history of the “confidence trick” or “con,” beginning with those perpetrated by medieval beggar gangs and continuing through contemporary Nigerian e-mail scams. Fair Use is actually a case containing five small books – Petrol Liar, Narrow Gauge, 419 (occasional 420), The Wire, and Spectres of Marks - each of which is labeled with a particular time and space. Parker samples heavily from spam emails, but the books primarily consist of essays on the architecture, language, and politics of globalization. Interspersed with the critical writing are multimedia samples of Parker’s artworks, which map out the largely invisible structures and routes upholding global communications systems.

Parker takes aim at the conviction that the Web constitutes a utopian decentralization of power which — as a free, paperless information network — is not only non-hierarchical, but also environmentally sound. In 419 (Occasional 420), he grounds the Internet, finding its carbon footprints in U.S. server farms that consume over $3 billion in energy each year. Housed within big-box architecture, many of these servers rest atop landfills in countryside locations like Reston, Virginia or Lenoir, North Carolina, so that “[t]he trash ferments below and flows in bits above — each process adding layers of friction and heat.” Of course, it’s a long way from Reston to San Francisco or New York; however, for the computer user in Lagos, Nigeria, the filth associated with computer technology is all too visible, as the communications networks are concentrated in the urban centers exploited by Western oil companies. Noting this sensory divergence, Parker compellingly explores the relationship between Nigerian scammers and American scambaiters — savvy U.S. citizens who “claim a kind of vigilante public service” in foiling the scammers’ schemes. Read alongside a flamboyant example of a “captcha” — in which four Nigerians pose as James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Humphrey Bogart in an image re-staged for an American scambaiter — the exchange reveals the forms of cultural hegemony that have survived the long post-WWII moment of American power.

In the United States, the con emerged in the 1840s as the trick of the “Confidence Man,” who asked strangers in New York City whether they placed “confidence” in him to borrow their watch, then walked away laughing. Parker unearths this piece of trivia in Petrol Liar, after relaying his experience with a street schemer in Manchester. In this salient setting, the code of the con man’s conduct is a well-rehearsed choreography that reveals the victim’s assumptions about property, space, and what it means to be a neighbor or citizen. Parker studies the architecture of the city closely and presents an annotated map of its central buildings. Yet, even with its elegant visuals, the most striking aspect of this mixed-media book remains the dominance of small text by way of the footnote; indeed, Parker’s tangential remarks tend to be more engaging than the narratives he establishes.

In the tradition of the critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin — who serves as the subject of his photo essay Narrow Gauge – Parker is a flâneur of archives and city streets. His project is engrossing because it navigates a winding path from the telegraphs and railroads of the United States circa 1860 to e-mail inboxes and server farms now installed across the globe, with the slippery concept of the “con” as his anchor. Yet, given the provocative title Fair Use — hinting that Nigerian scams are as “fair” as the global capitalist developments that enabled them, while nodding towards a subversive tradition of sampling, appropriating, and plundering — it’s disappointing to find dry, scholarly writings confined within the glimmering neon covers. The language of spam is magnificently varied, as often dull as it is bold, conventional as it is experimental, commercial as it is non-commercial (if only to avoid filters). Perusing this ambitious project, one wishes that Parker would deign to con his readers a bit and write with the dissociative stylistics of our ambient buddy, Bruce Andrews.

1 To listen to Bruce Andrews discuss his writing process and read from “Confidence Trick,” listen to my 2008 interview with him on PennSound (scroll down the page to Episode 10).

I’m routinely asked what my fashion inspirations are and the answer I give is rarely the same from one moment to the next.  Like my clothing, the things that inspire me are from all over and come in a variety of styles.  There are movie stars, tv shows, films, paintings, photography, nature, memories, music, and, well, life.  Below is a random list of a few people, ideas, and images that have made me excited about my own aesthetic (even those that don’t appear overtly in the clothes that I choose).

1: The photography Flor Garduño: Her photography treats the female forms as luxuriant and evocative, tracing curves and dips with light, paint, and subtle fabrics.  Each object she photographs is lovingly dissected through her lens, left open, raw, and stunning.  I love clothing that flatters and worships the body the way her photography does.

2: Old Photographs: Photography has been a love of mine since I was a child.  Out of that love arose a fascination with old photos.  Or maybe the love of photography arose from the photos?  Regardless, beginning with black and white, grainy shots of my grandparents (especially my grandmother in her 1950’s dresses and her sunglasses, looking like a socialite even in her rural Georgia town) or of my parents as children I have been captivated by the faces, posture, and clothing of others as they’re frozen in photography.  Time and giant bins of old pictures in random antique stores around the country have only expanded this interest, and there are moments when dressing in the morning that I think back to the people in photos I’ve found and am left with a feeling that inspires what I put on that day.

Image: http://www.fashion-era.com

3: The work of Walter Benjamin: I’m a little bit obsessed with Benjamin, but it’s his writings on fashion  that really impact how I feel about the aesthetic part of my life.  His understanding of the role of historical time, political motivation, and utopianism in the broad category of “fashion” is enlightening and provocative and is a large part of motivating my concept of my own intellectual relationship with clothing, art, and how those interact with my body and the people around me.

4: The landscape and people of Southern Africa.  After college I spent over two years living and working in Namibia, an arid and fascinating country on the west coast of Southern Africa.  My understanding of beauty  evolved rapidly over those two years and I left Namibia with an understanding of natural grace that was more about red sand, sunsets, and big skies than the pervasive green woodedness of my childhood.  Likewise, the bright fabrics and loose dresses of the Owambo women and the beads that I still wear left an impression of what clothing means in places where working in an office or going to school aren’t the only reasons to get dressed and clothing and jewelry still hold a ritual function.

A tree next to my house in my village, Oshikuku.

Two elderly women (called "Kuku" in the language I learned in Namibia) in their loose, bright dresses and traditional beads.

Image: http://www.kalaharimineals.com

5: The work of J.B. Boyd: I met J.B. in Namibia when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer and he was traveling with a friend.  I later came across his paintings in Charleston and was overwhelmed by the manner in which he captured the subtle, silent beauty of Namibia’s landscape and the green flush of the Okavango Delta in Namibia and Botswana.  His paintings are surreal and magical, their replication of nature near exact in oil, but far more than simple mimesis.

Image: Robert Lange Studios, http://www.robertlangestudios.com

]]> http://wehateyourblog.com/2009/11/27/we-hate-generation-bubble/ Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:07:19 +0000 The Gosford of James http://wehateyourblog.com/2009/11/27/we-hate-generation-bubble/

We hate Generation Bubble, and we hate the post Detroit Nosh City

1. WE HATE that you’re us, only smarter. It’s a classic example of kids from the northeast and kids from the midwest. We’d like it a lot if we could start a Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown Massacre-style rivalry (but only if we get to be BJM). We have WAY more Facebook fans than you. Take that.

2. WE HATE that your blog reads like 1. A desperate job application for NPR newswriter; or 2. A distillation of various aspects of your Master’s thesis. You even have an annotated bibliography, for cryin’ out loud. “Yeah, we read Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin for fun!” Pshaw, we say, GenBub. P. Shaw. Besides, everyone knows that the only Benjamin worth reading is “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” (By the way, your citations are neither APA, nor MLA. Lame.)

It's one of those weird-ass bubbles from The Prisoner! Look out Number Six! Aaaaaiiiiiiiiiii!

3. WE HATE the sorry, lazy tactic of posting a rerun blog from those halcyon days of GenBub yore (April), rather than posting actual content on Thanksgiving. Tracking back to an early post that you might have liked, but didn’t get much run because your only readers were yourselves (we have no idea what that is like…), is just pathetic. We would never do that. In fact, on Thanksgiving we sucked it up, ran off to our room, (leaving behind the four soused, belligerent cousins and the grandmother who never understands that “intellectuals” like us don’t “work” for corporations) to shoot off.

Oh. What?

To shoot off a sterling hatepost about vegans (which we assume your ultra-liberal, east-coast biased asses are. We ate meat. In fact, we road-killed a turkey, threw it in the back of the Jeep, plucked it ourselves, and cooked it up. That turkey would have busted your Prius in half).

4. WE HATE your patronizing treatment of Coon Man. “Armed with a .22 rifle and some faithful hounds, he reaps the Motor City’s brownfield bounty.” Yeah, that’s how he would’ve said it. Way to denigrate a man just trying to get by in the world.

"What, don't I look like the sort who 'reaps Motor City's brownfield bounty'?"

5. WE HATE your pretension. You start off your post by saying “April is the cruelest month…for varmints.” Kakow! Throw in a slammer sometimes, just for fun. Okay, so an obvious Eliot reference in an article about Detroit might not be that pretentious. Let’s read on. “Apparently unfazed by this unfortunate sobriquet, “Coon Man” Beasley observes a credo as simple as his diet.” What’s unfortunate about his sobriquet? He hunts, traps, and sells raccoons. His sobriquet makes perfect sense to us. Only here in Real America, we just call it his nickname. Maybe it’s just this “Anton” character who is pretentious. We have other authors, too, and they are plenty pretentious sometimes. Let’s check out the next post. Good, good. Uh oh. “[...]like the kind of appurtenances they had in Borders before its governing powers discovered they’d inadvertently made their stores into flophouses and therefore decided to snatch them away.” We understand “flophouse” (where we grew up), and “snatch” (um…). But not much else. Write for America, GenBub. Not East America.

           It is really funny but I’ve been bouncing around with Benjamin’s “technological (mechanical) reproduction” in my readings for the last couple of years. I’m coming away with a completely different understanding of what he was driving at, something much more integrated with primitivism, colonialism and the Enlightenment (as defining of meaning and hence what primitivism “means”, colonialism, etc.). It is also very much connected with what he was trying to describe as aura, or the “new” aura being reproduced through these technological innovations. It is also tied in to a completely different understanding of the word “medium.” The word medium, for Benjamin, probably did not have the same connotations it does for us. After McLuhan, the word medium has a much more sterile, generic connotation (like a telephone wire, radio wave, or digital code- capable of carrying any signal, i.e. signifier). With Benjamin, it is tied to the understanding of aura, that is, a medium embodies or transfers the aura. I also came at all this AFTER reading a lot of Baudrillard who established an understanding of the possibility of a culture “grounded” on signifiers with no signified (the emphasis on potlatch, where the original, and the power of the original, is wasted on purpose in order to display “real” power). With Benjamin, there is still recognition of the “power of the original” which somehow is transformed with the technological copy (hence his forays into aura and the difference in the connotation of the term medium). So for Benjamin, there was the intuition that technological society was, in a sense, becoming primitive, but not in the Enlightenment sense (where it is the opposite of intellectual “enlightenment,” i.e. ignorance), rather in the sense of how the power of the original is transferred or found in the copy, the technological reproduction, as a form of knowing (i.e. a mimetic faculty of which Michael Taussig writes in Mimesis and Alterity). This is very different from what Baudrillard (who wrote well after Benjamin and with knowledge of Benjamin’s thought) seized on with regard to Disneyland being America, and a social order, ethics, and raison d’etre that does not have any origin, any original, but is only a simulacra. Origins are ostensibly the sources of power for primitive cultures, as in songs of origin. But I digress.

The art of progressivism is also the art of doubt.  If the study of aesthetics is the study of value, then one has to take value in art seriously.  Indeed, the question, whether or not art is engaged with value, lies at the core of high modernism.  Nevertheless, as long as one is sufficiently comfortable with some stance on pragmatic truth or even conceptual truth, then one need not disassociate art making from value promulgation.

If the art of fascism is stringent rule-minded expressionism that refers only to itself, then the art of progressivism would require a supporting idea that would tend to disavow stringent rule-following.  Hence to understand progressive art or art-making–for now, the two co-exist as one!–one must first understand fascist art.   I propose that fascist art is stringent rule following that comes from some avowed interest in the not-self, though expressionism is concerned with just that.  By concern, with not-self, I mean, the artist is not interested in any sense of what it is to be a man or a woman or an artist: the biographical facts of works that are rooted in communal and individual choices are rejected.  What matters is the expression itself of some objective fact, which can only reflect objective things that remain true irrespective of the perspective taken on the work.   As soon as the artist looks upon himself, as person, as subject, all view points become true or false but relatively so.  He makes judgments on pragmatic truth, that is whether he exists or whether he is in love or whether there is today, in some corner of the world, some kind of border skirmish.  But whether or not certain other propositions can be thought conceptually true, for instance, propositions on certain religious beliefs, nevertheless he remains interested in their truth or falsity.

It is only when the subjective vision is disavowed and some concrete value is given priority that fascism creeps into art and art-making.  This concrete vision is merciless, since it cannot respect relative value and requires that its own value supersede all others.  Authoritarians project their own value in just these terms.  The fascists speaks of the way war and machinery as a beautiful march to a new world; man is undone here.  The fatherland is the project of this new world, and with it heralds the cleansing of reason so that the favored, perhaps Aryan, reason (of the dictator) becomes the sole objective reason and hence, running top down, becomes cause.  The dictator and his fascist vision are required to be infallible.  By denying and often destroying every other conception of the good, the dictators proves himself to be infallible.

Liberalism rejects these infallible objective values and seeks to support individual reason and individual cause in a non-interventionist manner.  I know what I want, but you cannot claim to know what I want and vice versa because we have not lived each others lives, though we have lived our way.  I want to seek my good, but you can only legitimately intervene on my aspiration for my good, if you know my claim is faulty or irrational.   Since often you cannot know this, you must stay your hand.  Since this is the case for me as well, I must be committed to stay my hand as well.  Hence, mutual non-intervention is required of us due to the sociological fact of doubt and is sanctioned by the normative acceptance of liberalism.  Hence, through liberalism–and yes, the liberal state–we are each fully able to respect each others own conception of the good.

Liberalism requires that each individual be a person who has claim of choice over his own a certain sphere of actions.  However, those choices can be pluralistic and need not function as a numerical accounting system that functions in a hierarchical manner.  Hence liberalism supports pluralism.   The art of progressivism is then not only the art of doubt, because for sociological reasons we cannot know the objective good for and of another person, but is also teh art of pluralism.

This position is then best supported by a position of aesthetic pluralism.  This value requires that an artist think that there are no objectively superior ways of painting in one way relative to another.  There simply are ways of painting in one way, relative to another.  If this is the case, the aesthetic pluralist artist is in a quandary: there are no rules to follow, that are designated as the correct rules; there are no facts of the matter that can support a work that he might create, because there is no superhuman authority who might adjudicate between two competing claims of the truth in works.  The aesthetic pluralist artist is a fallibilist.

The fallibilist artist has every route available to him, but no direction in which to travel.  That is the cost of aesthetic pluralism.  It is a price he pays by choosing one of the available routes.  Where he goes, only he can tell, only after he has reached the destination that, plausibly, remains unknown to him.

Segue uma tradução não autorizada do artigo “Waking the Dead“, de Terry Eagleton, publicado em 12.11.2009 no New Statesman. A reprodução da tradução é naturalmente permitida, desde que não se ganhe dinheiro com isso. No texto, Eagleton interpreta a ascensão de Obama com base nas reflexões sobre história de Walter Benjamin.

DESPERTANDO OS MORTOS

Terry Eagleton

Para Walter Benjamin, a história era mais do que um conjunto de fatos neutros. Ele demonstrou como o esforço pelo passado molda nosso futuro

O filósofo alemão Walter Benjamin nutria a curiosa ideia de que nós podíamos mudar o passado. Para a maioria de nós, o passado é fixo, enquanto o futuro é aberto. Benjamin achava que o passado podia ser transformado pelo que nós fazemos no presente. Não transformado literalmente, claro, já que a única coisa de que temos certeza sobre o passado é que ele não existe.

Não há como apagarmos retrospectivamente o Tratado de Viena ou a Grande Fome Irlandesa. É uma característica peculiar das ações humanas que, uma vez realizadas, não podem jamais ser recuperadas. O que é verdadeiro sobre o passado será sempre verdadeiro sobre ele. Napoleão será baixo e Einstein terá o cabelo levantado até o fim dos tempos. Nada no futuro pode alterar o fato de que Benjamin, ele mesmo um judeu devoto, cometeu suicídio na fronteira franco-espanhola em 1940, quando estava para ser entregue à Gestapo. Sem poder ressuscitar literalmente, as incontáveis gerações de homens e mulheres que pelejaram e sofreram para o benefício de uma minoria – a história da história humana até hoje, na verdade – não poderão jamais ser recompensadas por seu sacrifício horrendo.

O que Benjamin quis dizer foi que a maneira como agimos no presente pode mudar o significado do passado. O passado pode não existir literalmente (não mais do que o futuro existe), mas ele sobrevive em suas consequências, que são uma parte vital dele. Benjamin também pensava assim a respeito de obras de arte. Para ele, o significado de uma obra de arte é algo que evolui com o tempo. Grandes poemas e novelas são como rastilhos que queimam lentamente. Na medida em que entram em situações novas e imprevisíveis, começam a liberar novos significados que o próprio autor não podia ter previsto, não mais do que Goethe podia ter previsto a televisão comercial. Para Benjamin, é como se houvesse significados escondidos em obras de arte, que somente virão a lume no que se poderia chamar seu futuro. Toda grande peça, escultura ou sinfonia, como toda pessoa individualmente, tem um futuro que ajuda a definir o que ela é, mas que está além de seu poder determinar.

Em certo sentido, nós sabemos mais sobre a Revolução Francesa ou o reino de terror stalinista do que aqueles que estavam envolvidos neles, porque sabemos ao que levaram. Com o privilégio de poder olhar para trás, podemos inscrever estes eventos numa narrativa mais ampla, fazendo mais sentido deles do que Robespierre ou Trotski jamais poderiam. O preço deste conhecimento superior é a impotência. Não há como usar este conhecimento para desfazer catástrofes passadas. Somos como homens e mulheres acenando loucamente para a história desde uma grande distância, incapazes de intervir em suas crises e convulsões.

Ainda assim, nós não somos inteiramente impotentes. Cabe a nós assegurar que Michelangelo e Thomas Mann, não pertençam à raça que acabou consigo mesma, por exemplo. Eles mesmos, estando mortos, não têm poder algum para evitar tal desfecho, enquanto nós não estamos. Nós podemos fazer uma diferença para as histórias deles. Nós não podemos desfazer o destino daqueles no passado que lutaram por justiça e que foram assassinados por seus esforços. Mas nós podemos reescrever suas histórias de acordo com nossas próprias ações no presente, e até lhes dar um clássico final feliz.

Assim, Benjamin pensava que nós podíamos redimir nossos ancestrais de certa forma. Aos tradicionais rituais judaicos de luto e rememoração pode ser dado um novo viés. Para este esquerdista não-ortodoxo, surpreendentemente, podia até haver algo revolucionário sobre a nostalgia. Hoje, a nostalgia é quase tão inaceitável quanto o racismo. Nossos políticos falam de traçar uma linha sob o passado e virar nossas costas para antigas discussões. Deste jeito, nós podemos saltar à frente em direção a um futuro limpo, branco e amnésico.

Se Benjamin rejeitava este tipo de filistinismo, era porque estava ciente de que o passado conserva recursos vitais para a renovação do presente. Aqueles que devastam o passado correm perigo de abolir o futuro também. Ninguém foi mais comprometido em erradicar o passado do que os nazistas que, como os stalinistas, simplesmente limpavam do registro histórico o que quer que achassem inconveniente. O passado era tão barro em suas mãos quanto o futuro. O verdadeiro poder é a soberania sobre o que já ocorreu, não apenas a capacidade de determinar o que vai acontecer a seguir.

Em uma de suas frases mais perspicazes, Benjamin notou que o que leva homens e mulheres a se revoltarem contra a injustiça não são sonhos de netos liberados, mas memórias de ancestrais escravizados. É virando nosso olhar para os horrores do passado, na esperança de que nós assim não nos tornemos pedra, que somos impelidos a mover adiante.

Benjamin era imensamente interessado no trabalho de um colega judeu, Sigmund Freud, que também via a rememoração como a chave para a emancipação. Na visão de Freud, os seres humanos são animais naturalmente amnésicos. É o esquecimento que nos mantém vivos. Nós sobrevivemos somente reprimindo uma enorme quantidade de material desagradável do nosso passado. Para Freud, é o olvido que nos é natural. Lembrar é apenas esquecer de esquecer. Pode ser um processo extraordinariamente doloroso, uma das razões por que nós tendemos a evitá-lo.

Há um paralelo aqui entre indivíduos e nações. Nações, às vezes, florescem negando os crimes que as trouxeram à vida. Somente quando a invasão, ocupação, extermínio ou usurpação original for devidamente empurrada para o inconsciente político é que a soberania sente-se segura.

São ancestrais escravizados, como Benjamin os chama, que Obama deve guardar. Ele pode não ser ele mesmo descendente de escravos, mas é uma criança do continente do qual eles foram mandados. Obama não é especialmente interessado em divulgar este fato, dada sua persona pós-racial cuidadosamente construída. Nós podemos certamente esperar pouco de sua administração no sentido de mudança real. Os EUA permanecerão um estado de partido único, independentemente do nome que o partido capitalista por acaso tenha. Mesmo assim, com um homem negro no poder, o país tem ao seu alcance uma oportunidade única para redimir seus mortos. Tem uma chance para escrever um epílogo inesperado à sórdida história de escravidão e conflito racial.

Isto não quer dizer que tudo está bem quando acaba bem, como Shakespeare parece ter pensado. Tragédias não são convertidas em comédias simplesmente acrescentando-se umas poucas falas finais positivas. Na verdade, a maioria dos finais felizes do próprio Shakespeare deliberadamente inclui algum elemento dissidente, algum coringa no baralho que se recusa a ser incorporado pela resolução final.

A vitória de Obama não faz as pazes com o horroroso passado racial da América. Aos linchados, castrados e humilhados de tempos anteriores não pode ser concedida nenhuma redenção literal. Nossos antepassados mais otimistas às vezes pensavam a história como uma espécie de trem, nos carreando dos vales sombrios para os planaltos banhados de sol. Mas se a história é um trem, temos então que honrar aqueles que nunca chegaram ao seu destino – aqueles que morreram nas beiradas ou que pularam desesperadamente sobre os trilhos.

Ainda assim, a cômica virada dos eventos que enviaram Obama para Washington serve para mostrar que a história, por mais trágica, não é destino. O que acontece, acontece. Mas como o amigo e colega de Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, nunca deixou de nos lembrar, poderia ter sempre acontecido de maneira diferente, ou não acontecido de jeito nenhum. Entre as coisas que fazem a história estão as coisas que não aconteceram, ou que não precisavam acontecer, que frequentemente exercem uma influência tão profunda sobre o curso dos eventos quanto aquelas que assim fizeram.

Olhando para trás desde a Casa Branca de Barack Obama, nós podemos enxergar mais do que os proprietários de escravos novecentistas do sul profundo americano podiam. Nós podemos ver que a escravidão não precisava acontecer porque, um dia, um afro-americano seria presidente, assim finalmente liquidando o mito de que sua gente era inferior.

Isso reescreve retrospectivamente a narrativa da nação. Mas, ao mesmo tempo, nos lembra de um ultraje intolerável: todo aquele sofrimento e miséria foram, no final, por nada. Como dizia Brecht: “Os sofrimentos deste homem me horrorizam porque são desnecessários”.

Martes/ “Iluminaciones” por Walter Benjamin

“Pensador alemán cuya obra, fragmentada e incompleta, es, por su valor de sugerencia y proyección en el pensamiento actual, una de las más relevantes del pasado siglo XX. Desde una concepción definida como ‘utopismo negativo’, primero desde posiciones marxistas definidas y, más tarde, con una visión que se inscribe en el espíritu crítico de la Escuela de Francfort.”

Extraído de Infoamerica.org

Ver además:

http://www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=1461

http://www.wbenjamin.org/walterbenjamin.html

http://www.unavarra.es/puresoc/pdfs/c_ponencias/Cabrera.pdf

Los títulos seleccionados  son una muestra de los materiales actualmente en préstamo de los fondos de la Biblioteca del Instituto Internacional.

Si te interesa ver o leer ésta recomendación puedes consultar su disponibilidad en el catálogo la biblioteca del IIE.

Iluminaciones / Walter Benjamin ; prólogo traducción y notas de Jesús Aguirre. — [2ª ed.]. — [Madrid] : Taurus, [1980]. — 2 v. ; 21 cm.

Contiene: v. 1. Imaginación y sociedad — v. 2. Poesía y capitalismo

ISBN 84-306-2047-8 (V.1) — ISBN 84-306-2051-6 (V.2)

PN 37 .B4618 1980

The second episode of this BBC series is on the architectural history of Berlin. Matt Frei (writer and presenter of the show) is a news presenter more commonly seen on the US version of BBC News. Although he said he was interested in the architecture, it was the social history that seemed to be his principle interest. But Frei’s preference for politico-historical bombast did not detract from what was a very interesting show; his discussion of Albert Speer and the use and reuse of public space fascinated me, particularly when Frei visited the derelict listening station atop the Teufelsberg (‘Devil’s Mountain’).

Derelict NSA Listening Station, Teufelsberg, Berlin

I thought it a great shame that Frei didn’t elaborate the idea of ruin a little further (nothing said about German Romanticism, for instance). That he could talk so passionately about Speer and not mention Speer’s ‘ruin theory of value’ was a surprising omission. Wikipedia tells me that the Teufelsberg was not only built with the rubble of bombed-out Berlin, but this rubble was used to cover a Speer-designed Nazi military-technical college which proved impervious to demolition. Speer’s buildings were built to last 1000 years but when this lifespan was deemed too long by allied forces they covered some of them over with rubble. The irony is too tragic! But the details of this story aren’t nearly as important as the relationship it expresses between narrative, time and the ruin-object:

Ruin has a peculiar sense of temporality, one that registers both the termination and the survival of matter.  The ruin’s demand for narrative projection and manipulation, what Walter Benjamin calls the “irresistible decay” (2002: 178)  of ruin, emerges in how its fragments seem to have both withstood time and fallen prey to time’s relentless wearing and wasting. It seems to me that some of the beguiling charm of a ruin arises through our attempts to attend to this untimeliness, to the time of things that have persisted beyond their end.  This is one of the central paradoxes that permeates many accounts of Romantic ruin: ruins figure both transience and durability, both the entropic dissolution of all material things and the survival of remainders that seem to outlive this dissolution.

So a ruin announces a time that no longer occurs, a time when the building functioned according to human design.  The castle no longer defends, the house no longer gives shelter, the sports arena no longer provides a space for gaming or competition, but these purposes and functions remain bound up in the identity of what is left behind. Even in my earliest memories of visiting ruins, I remember the immediate task was always to transform toppled stones into spaces of combat, romance, or horror: to give a function to objects that no longer functioned, to give time to a thing that had fallen out of time.  With the purposive time of human action and activity at an end, ruins, simply by being labelled a ‘ruin,’ suggest this cinder of a former time, an absent time made present by collapse and decay.

Our impulse to respond to and supplement the lack in the ruin corresponds to that well-worn belief that we all experience ruins subjectively.  As Christopher Woodward has argued, it is precisely because each ruin is materially and temporally incomplete that “each spectator is forced to supply the missing pieces from his or her own imagination” (2001: 15).  Since our perception of a ruin is formed in productive confrontation to these material and temporal absences, we attempt to piece the ruin back together by narrative interpretation.  In this way, ruins are always a ruin of something else, they seem to demand a backstory, a ‘life’ that explains the architectural ‘afterlife’ that we encounter.  Indeed, there’s something about the ruin that seems to demand these sorts of narratives; a projection of was, what wasn’t, or what yet might be.  I’d like to suggest that this kind of ‘hermeneutic exigency’ is an attempt to stabilise and manage the peculiarly abundant, chaotic, and convolved time of ruin.

[For those with a large appetite for Nazi ruins:  www.thirdreichruins.com]

]]> http://immateriell.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/zitat-aura-staunen-und-neugierde/ Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:41:35 +0000 pgart http://immateriell.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/zitat-aura-staunen-und-neugierde/

“Die physische Nähe des Objekts ist ebenso gegeben wie die psychische Fremdheit, also die Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag. [...] Aus diesem Spannungsverhältnis, das im räumlich nahen, aber mental fernen Ding seinen Grund hat, leiten sich Staunen und Neugierde her, [...].”

Korff, Gottfried: Fremde (der,die,das) und das Museum (1997), in: Gottfried Korff: Museumsdinge. Deponieren – Exponieren, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2007, S.146-154, hier S.147.

Inhaltlicher Verweise auf Walter Benjamin

For a brief while there, I was happy.

            It struck me as very unusual because I was happy, but not in a bourgeois way. I was aware that my happiness was in no way sanctioned by or prescribed by any bourgeois standards. I knew I was happy; but it was also unlike anything I had been striving for, expecting or anticipating. It didn’t “compare” to anything, nor did it “live up” to any kind of expectation. I was JUST happy.

            I found the whole event surprising, and totally mind boggling.

            Perhaps it was the reading I had done that evening. It was an article by Miriam Bratu Hansen regarding Benjamin’s use of aura, by revisiting its contemporary usage. How it literally was defined in association with medium, but more in the pre McLuhan sense, whereby medium is what permits something to take place or be transferred (makes possible). How Benjamin was trying to modify this sense to provide for a condition of experience in the technological age.

            Perhaps it was nostalgia for the young Marx’s utopian account of how in the post revolution Communist state, the citizen could work on some process in the morning, study and learn later in the day and go fishing or play tennis in the late afternoon. My day had been filled with a variety of tasks- from pouring concrete to gardening and reading the Hansen article.

            Perhaps it was that when the day started out, as well as throughout the day, I involved myself in tasks of interest, “that I wanted to see done.” Without consciously setting any goals, I met, if not surpassed, whatever goals I may have set on another day (as a motivation to fulfill the task). All the disparate tasks were actualized organically without the slightest sense of oppression, compulsion, or evasion.

            The next day after this event, I understood that this was rare and not to be duplicated. But the understanding of how much the bourgeois outlook stains and determines every aspect of personal experience (as a “condition” of experience today), became apparent, learned through praxis, as Marx would have real knowledge be.

            Then again, perhaps it had more to do with the watch I found several days prior. I believe it was my father’s. My pragmatic mother had continued to use it after his death since it still worked (even though it wasn’t a “ladies” watch). And there I was looking at it remembering that you had to wind these things to get them to “keep time.” So I wound it and it worked. I set it by the time on the computer monitor. The next day I checked it and it showed the exact same time as Microsoft time. So I wound it again. Every day since I have checked it and wound the little, oh-so-soft spring (there is resistance there but it takes so little effort to wind it up). Perhaps it is this lost sense that Benjamin was trying to address in his redefining of aura and its place within the condition of experience in the age of technology. This ability to “create” (time) through one’s efforts (bringing it into the Marxist discourse), daily (both through engagement as well as individually establishing the hour) differs from time as a capacity- the capacity of a battery, preset and charged with no need for engagement or individuation. This “new” sense, as a capacity that is predetermined with replenishment as the only contingency (like the action agent renewed with each termination/start-up of a video game), a sense of time that one never sets or engages, is totally different from the “old” sense that this historic mechanism initiated. Indeed, it is much as Benjamin’s something distant that appears but is not present.

Sorry for the recent scarcity of posts — the semester is winding down, and spare writing time will be pretty slim until mid-December. But in the meantime, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity…

In the 1930s, German cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”  In it, he talks about the loss of “aura” (authenticity, uniqueness) when art is reproduced and distributed en masse, appropriated by what fellow critic Theodore Adorno would call “the culture industry” for political or economic purposes, rather than aesthetic ones.

When that happens, has it ceased to be art (or literature)?

Bringing this debate up to the present, I recently came across an interesting discussion posted by Alexander Russo at This Week in Education: Poetry in Ads: Can We Live With It? and the related Levi’s Uses Rare Walt Whitman Recording To Sell Jeans. See video.

So does poetry lose its aura once it has been inculcated with a message for consumers?  I think there are several possible answers. On one hand, the advertisers are attempting to raise their product to the level of something artistic, powerfully American, and poetic. On the other hand, they are forging another link in the minds of consumers between art and consumption.

On one hand, they are acknowledging the power of the spoken word; on the other, they are, one could argue, debasing that power by employing a great poet to sell a pair of jeans. But then again, is this any different than hiring talented writers to inscribe Hallmark cards and magazine ads?

It’s worth considering. And to re-quote Seth Stevenson of Slate Magazine: “At least it’s not all about sex.”

Wood, Elements #8 ©2009 Wendy Edsall-Kerwin

How important is the history of a piece to your enjoyment of it?  How important is the cultural environment surrounding an artwork—the when and where of its creation?

I was at a meeting of the Creative House of Lancaster last night and we were participating in a grad student’s project involving a free-form discussion based on different theories.  There was a series of quotes taken out of context for us to riff off of.  One of them particularly struck me and made me think of the questions at the top of the post.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking one element:  its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.  …the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity…the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.

—Walter Benjamin  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)

One of the most important parts of my artworks to me is the part of its history which no one else who sees it will experience.  The creation of the idea and the process of designing and physically making the piece are very meaningful to me.  This is a part of the work’s history.  But then it moves forward, following its own path.  It might be in exhibitions.  It might be in a book or magazine.  It might be work by one person or by many.

But when you look at a piece of artwork, does any of that matter to you, or is it how it makes you feel in that moment?  Does knowing the history of a piece change your relationship to it?  Go ahead and get existential in your comments.  Start a conversation!

Wednesday night I saw director Daniel Schlusser’s auteur take on Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, first staged at the VCAM in 2008, now re-staged at the Storeroom (which, people, now has air-conditioning!).

It’s an outstanding piece of theatre that I may write something more complimentary about over the weekend, but, in the meantime, there’s an element to it—something that it briefly makes use of—about which I’d like to say a few complaintive words: pop music.

Item the First:

Schlusser’s play—can I call it Schlusser’s play? I’ve no idea, but the promotional materials make it sound as though I can, so—Schlusser’s play finishes like this: Johnny Sigismund is king, everyone who wants to be married is married and there’s a nu-metalish (maybe DEP?) cover of Massive Attack’s ‘Angel’ trumpeting through the Storeroom’s sound system.

Why Massive Attack’s ‘Angel’? The reason is not immediately apparent, to me, at least. Is it only for the menacing bass line? Or is it to remind us of that scene in the movie Go where the song plays and the dude tells the chick to take her top off (you know, like, it’s the end of the show so we should all, like, go)?

Or, perhaps, is it to remind us of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History?

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

In the end, life in Calderon’s Schlusser’s mock Poland, under the mostly benign rule of King Johnny Sigismund, goes on much as it did before, under the old king—the discipline of cups of tea, punishment and comfort does not apparently change. It is only that, after the quote-unquote civil war, the disorder of torn papers and wrecked commodities strewn about the stage has increased. The cast assemble for their bows, looking out into the appreciative audience, a ritual marking the play’s conclusion, before, by the custom of theatre, and the irresistible violence of our cheers, they are blown from view, whereon, as we make good to depart, we may observe on the deserted stage the debris symbolical of progress.

Item the Second:

So now then, earlier this month I saw and reviewed Mutation Theatre’s The Corpse of Hamlet (here). Just over halfway through that production, as the walking, talking corpse of Hamlet is being stripped and washed, Nick Cave’s middle-soul gospel ballad, ‘Carry Me’, from The Lyre of Orpheus album, starts trumpeting through the Bellaunion sound system.

Fast forward three weeks to Life Is a Dream, and, again, just over halfway through, after Julia (a revolutionary guard) has been stabbed by Johnny Sigismund and is being laid out by Josh (another revolutionary guard), Nick Cave’s middle-soul gospel ballad ‘O Children’, the track which immediately follows the afore mentioned ‘Carry Me’ on The Lyre of Orpheus, starts trumpeting through the Storeroom sound system.

I think I’m on pretty conventional ground when I say that, literarily speaking, Hamlet and La vida es sueño aren’t a million miles from one another other. Without going too far into it, there are, I believe, certain metaphysical similarities in some of the major speeches as well as between the characters of Hamlet and Sigismund and, more generally, in the peculiar genius of both W. Shakespeare and Calderón de la Barca.

I believe there are also—and, again, I don’t want make too much of it—artistic similarities between what Mutation Theatre and Daniel Schlusser are each doing with their respective classic texts, besides of course the Nick Cave thing: themes, select monologues and snatches of dialogue are lifted from the text and bundled into an alternate vision of the play that figures a contemporary personality (or personalities) above or beyond the original (meta) but looking down or back through it (as narrative).

So I don’t think it’s a random fluke that both productions arrived so closely at Nick Cave. It’s the inevitable coincidence of attitude and material at time and place. But what such a coincidence does is definitely articulate a trend. Two different productions: similar materials and attitudes: near identical production element: trend.

It makes clear a tendency that I’ve suspect these last few years and one which I dislike and one which I take this opportunity to argue against.

Argument:

Simply pressing play on your DAT or CD player, stepping back, staring significantly at nothing at all and letting Nick Cave speak, because Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have already said exactly what you want say so much better than you have the time or money or nous to say it with, is a cheat.

A cheat? Is that what’s going on in these otherwise interesting, original and deeply thoughtful productions?

I think so, and I’m against it.

The use of commercially recorded pop music to advance a theatrical argument pales the experience of theatre. I’m talking about the pre-recorded stuff, not so much live covers of the same, which presents a different problem. Also, by pop music, I really mean, broadly, any kind of contemporary rock, pop, RnB &c. that most of the audience would be able to identify.

Creative or progressive productions can, if they so choose, use an audience’s (given) familiarity with mass-marked cultural commodities, such as pop music, to good dramatic effect, perhaps having a little serious fun with our easy fluency in trivia, smashing up our sentimental attachments some, subverting our associations and assumptions, &c. Indeed, both TCOH and LIAD contain examples of this. But that’s not what’s going on in the bits I’m talking about.

During the respective Nick Cave episodes in LIaD and TCoH, by simply pressing play and standing back, offering only on-stage attitudes of grave reflection (LIaD) or churchly rituals (TCoH), Schlusser and Mutation Theatre show a general lack of interest in all pre-existing associations we may have with the recordings. They instead want for us to appreciate the innate character of these songs. They want us to hear them as Nick Cave originally intended them. That is, for example, in the case of ‘O Children’, as a down-beat tragedy on how life is all fun and games until someone loses an eye or a generation of children.

By drawing a direct equivalence between the innate character of the song and whatever is going on on-stage, the director is letting Nick Cave develop the argument for them.

The problem is not only that this is lazy, but that it doesn’t work. Pop music does not have any innate character except that which is inherent in the fact of its mass-production: it is the same character which is innate in all examples of kitsch. It has been removed from its original compositional context and subjected to millions of ‘consumer interpretations’. All that its un-elaborated re-production in the theatre does is bring back for us, the audience, our individual, pre-existing associations with the music, our ‘consumer interpretations’. That is, brings back to us the experience of listening to Nick Cave. Great. There I was, being thrilled by theatre. Here I am, remembering listening to Nick Cave.

Although mass-produced cultural commodities have neither universal relations nor fundamental meanings, their marketing depends on the suggestion of such relations and meanings. What I said above about the innate character of  ‘O Children’ is, obviously, totally specious. I invented it just now on the suggestion of a few lyrical scraps and its minor key. I am no surer that Nick Cave wrote the song as a down-beat tragedy on how life is all fun and games &c. than I am that Daniel Schlusser intended Massive Attack as a reference to Benjamin’s Angel of History. No-one can be. It’s all speculation. The latter, however, unlike the former, is not a nostalgic presumption but a creative supposition.

It’s like when you make a mix-tape of all these really amazing songs for someone and they’re all, like, meh, yeah, I’ve heard’em, they’re ok. You presume that these songs, which are really important to you, will inspire the same nostalgic sentiment in your mix-tape friend … and of course they don’t.  You might then try to force on them some bogus complaint about how they don’t know shit about music and how this or that song is the greatest anthem for the human heart ever written, or whatever. You might try and reconstruct your feeling for the song as an argument for its greatness, ignoring the fact that it’s not your feelings about the song per se, but the fact that the song can inspire a diversity of feelings in different people, which makes it potentially great.

That mix-tape scenario is pretty much what I think is happening with pop music in the theatre. The director’s reliance on pop music’s imaginary innate character, his or her appeal to a single sentimental presumption about what the songs means, sucks the life out of theatre. It pales the thrill. It dulls the intensity. It doesn’t work. Instead of the promised original sentiment, the moment where Schlusser meets Cave, we get only the moment that the audience member meets Cave, again and again. Somewhere behind this, the play dies.

But what about the Angel of History? Well, here’s the thing. I’m not against the incorporation of pre-recorded material in live performance. Truly, I don’t know why Massive Attack’s ‘Angel’ was chosen to close the Schlusser show. Maybe it was only to remind us how Del Naja’s (successful) attempt to grab cash from epic post-rock noise ruined both trip-hop and epic post-rock noise forever, but, whatever the case, it is effective, or, at least, interesting. It is not simply a pre-determined experience being parcelled out to the audience, as with ‘O Children’.

In Life Is a Dream, ‘Angel’, just like, for instance, Ivanka Sokol’s pre-recorded video work with Liminal, shatters the aura of theatre, which is a very different and more consequential thing than merely paling the experience. We can, like Benjamin, afford to be contrary about whether the aura of theatre—its persistent claim to authenticity in the digital age—is a good or a bad thing. There is much in its claim that is bogus and needs to be unpacked, or shattered. But that’s for another time …

And So …

I’m used to thinking of this use of popular music either as a crutch for high school media studies students—like when you’ve got in your head this idea for a short film, and it’s just exactly like that Nick Cave song, but you can’t think of any better way of realising the idea than to just make yet another video clip for ‘The Mercy Seat’, or whatever—or as a technique for melodrama where the desired effect is precisely the kind fuzzy, suggestive sentiment inherent to nostalgic kitsch.

But maybe this trend is becoming a new dramatic convention? Are we, the audience, being trained, much as, for instance, Calderon’s audience was trained in such conventions? Whenever there’s a serious this-is-no-longer-ironic-posturing-we’re-really-seriously-contemplating-our-own-mortality-type moment you slap on a Nick Cave disc? Or Cat Power? Or Trent Reznor? Or Silver Mount Zion? Or any of the other cuts of commercially recorded pop music that have been rolled out in Melbourne theatres this year?

Again, I’m not against the incorporation of pre-recorded or programmed materials into a live performance. I’m not even against the ironic use of commercially recorded pop songs for the advancement of the moral (as opposed to the argument). But I am against directors and writers propping up their theatre on an assumption that we feel as deeply about these hits as they do.

To synthesise the above, what we’re talking about is the difference between progressive theatre and a theatre of nostalgic kitsch. Both plays I’ve talked about here are a kind of progress, without doubt, replete with the ruin and rubble such progress entails. But, nostalgia creeps, and will congeal upon convention.

I’ve got a post over at Anthropoliteia in reaction to some provocative commentary by Jonathan Simon on the current UC Strike.  Here’s a tidbit:

What Jonathan’s work in Governing through Crime has shown, however, is that one of the few remaining–maybe the only remaining–domain in which the violence of governance seems legitimate to American voters is in the domain of crime control and punishment. It therefore has become the trope through which all American governance is filtered.

What we’re left with is, on the one hand, a massively inflated, impractical and unjust incarceration system and–importantly–on the the other hand, no way of conceiving any other legitimate form of governance.

This is not a question of corporate greed versus educational egalitarianism, or even good guys versus bad guys (as much as I’d like to hate on Mark Yudof along with everyone else), but of finding a way–literally–of justifying the very real kinds of violence involved in supporting education; of including higher education into the political calculus of life and death.

via Jonathan Simon’s provocative thoughts on the UC Strike « Anthropoliteia: the anthropology of policing.

Over at Governing through Crime, UC Professor Jonathan Simon has some provocative words for those participating in the current 3-day UC strike:

….We ought to be united in mobilization to save higher education in California. But in choosing to make the fight a convenient and ideologically satisfying (but for the most part phony) story about privatization, down-sizing, and pernicious, corporate minded university leadership, UC’s unions and their student and faculty allies are missing a historic opportunity to engage our fellow citizens in a critical dialog about our state’s future.

That future has been mortgaged to expensive dysfunctional prisons and a bipartisan law-enforcement establishment that is committed to mass incarceration at any price. But across three decades in which that project of exiling tens of thousands of largely poor and minority Californians to a prison archipelago of mammoth proportions (which yet remains grotesquely overcrowded) has been constructed, the supporters of higher education in this state have remained silent, assuming that the incarceration of people who don’t go to college anyway is not our problem. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

via Governing through Crime: Strike Against Prisons not Education.

I think Simon is dead on here, and offers a framing that explains some of the ambivalence I’ve had about the political mobilization that’s been developing.

Most of that ambivalence, I think, revolves around my hesitation at some of the explanatory narratives that have been used as organizational and motivational tools by unions and protesters… what Simon calls the”convenient and ideologically satisfying (but for the most part phony) story about privatization, down-sizing, and pernicious, corporate minded university leadership”.

Part of what I’ve been trying to point out, both vis-a-vis the strike and in my work on French policing, is that–as both Max Weber and Walter Benjamin have shown–all politics is necessarily about violence.  This includes, especially includes, such mundane acts of governance as budgetary allocations.  As everyone from Michel Foucault to Nikolas Rose have also tried to show, these decisions are literally choices between life and death.  This is one aspect of what scholars are referring to when they talk about the biopolitical.

On the other hand, Californians are not completely comfortable with this violence and, for good reasons which I’ve also tried to explore, have tried to devise ways to limit it as much as possible.

What Jonathan’s work in Governing through Crime has shown, however, is that one of the few remaining–maybe the only remaining–domain in which the violence of governance seems legitimate to American voters is in the domain of crime control and punishment.  It therefore has become the trope through which all American governance is filtered.

What we’re left with is, on the one hand, a massively inflated, impractical and unjust incarceration system and–importantly–on the the other hand, no way of conceiving any other legitimate form of governance.

This is not a question of corporate greed versus educational egalitarianism, or even good guys versus bad guys (as much as I’d like to hate on Mark Yudof along with everyone else), but of finding a way–literally–of justifying the very real kinds of violence involved in supporting education; of including higher education into the political calculus of life and death.

Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History

221-244 in

Petro, Patrice. ed., Fugitive images, from photography to video (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)

p.221

[...] Benjamin persistently conceives of history in the language of photography, as though he wished to offer us a series of snapshots of his latest reflections on history.

What comes to light in the history of photography, in the history that is photography, is therefore the secret rapport between photography and philosophy. Both take their life from light, from a light which coincides with the conditions of possibility for clarity, reflection, speculation, and lucidity; that is, for knowledge in general.

p.223

Photography prevents us from knowing what an image is. It is in fact no accident that Benjamin’s essay “A Short History of Photography” begins, not with a sudden clarity that grants knowledge security, but rather with an evocation of the “fog” which he claims surrounds the beginnings of photography and clouds both knowledge and vision.

From the very beginning, then, the fog disturbs the possibility of a linear historical account of photography’s origins.

If a fog encircles the childhood of photography, it is part because, in the experience of the photograph, it is as if we cannot see a thing. In the twilight zone between seeing and not seeing, we fail to get the picture.

p.224

[For Benjamin, Hill's graveyard portraits] bear witness to the recognition that we are most ourselves,most at home, when we remember the possibility of our death. This experience of our relation to memory, of our relation to the process of memorialization is not at all accidental: nothing is more characteristic. Subjects of photography, seized by the camera, we are mortified: objectified, thingified, imaged.

Although what the photograph photographs is no longer present or living, its having-been-there now forms part of the referential structure of our relationship to the photograph.

p.226

The forgetting of the photograph’s ghostly or spectral character corresponds to what Benjamin refers to as “the decline of photography.”

[...] photography’s decline does not coincide, as one might expect, to a decline in the technical efficiency of the camera, to a decline in its capacity to register what is photographed. Rather it corresponds to the technical refinement of the camera’s performance.

The conquest of darkness by the increased light of photography conjures a link of fidelity between the photograph and the photographed. Yet it is precisely the conviction in this coincidence, in the photographic possibility of faithful reproduction, that marks the decline of photography.

[...] the decline of photography needs to be understood as a structural element of any photograph, rather than as merely a moment in a temporal process.

The decline of photography names the photograph’s own decline, its movement away from the schema of mimetic reproduction. It suggests that the most faithful photograph, the photograph most faithful to the event of the photograph, is the least faithful, the least mimetic one – the photograph that remains faithful to its own infidelity.

[could relate to forgetting]

…

Why create art?  Walter Benjamin wrote that it is only when the artist politicizes his art that he solves this most fundamental problem of art-making.

The question unsettles the modern mind; it would have offended the Renaissance soul and the Enlightened heart.  Until the modern era of reproducible art making there was a objective reason to create art, one that had conventional sanction behind its very existence: art served a pedagogical purpose where the artist was called in to marshal the public herd into a cult of ritual.   Though there existed other reasons to create art, they were all internal reasons, objective reason supported only one of those reasons, that of mutual advantage commercial exchange for expression and public salvation.  The buyer-critic allowed the seller-artist to bid up the price of the work only to the point of the natural constraint: neither party to the transaction could leech off the other for fear of assignation to a circle of hell.

With the reproducibility of art the deal was broken; the aura of authenticity and truth was left in tatters.  Neither the artist nor the buyer needed any one particular piece of art to stand for something eternal, and neither needed the other inelastically.  The buyer no longer ruled over his ant hill; the artist could no longer say something true since the concept of truth was run through with doubt.  Nothing specific could stand for something general.  In the modern era, this move to specificity has meant that, in and out of principle, nothing can refer to anything else without some argument.  It is the argument that is doing the work.  It is the choice to import meaning into the work ex poste facto that makes a caption, or an inscription the thing that aestheticizes politics.  A certain drawing of a hooded man can stand for anything at all, including a miserly member of the KKK, as well as a victim of torture in Abu Ghraib.  To make that choice ex ante, is to politicizes the work, and, for Benjamin, a move that, finally, naturally sorts craftsmanship from blind, and therefore manipulable, creed.

For Benjamin, then, being a Marxist art is tantamount to creating art for a social purpose, one that forces the artist to make aesthetic choices that are consistent with his prior beliefs on social justice and the plight– and flight– of modern man.

I want to say that this is a purely pragmatic move by Benjamin.  He admits that all artists are unbound and that pure expressionism is a choice as much as any other aesthetic choice.  However, he argues that expressionism that is given only to itself can be coralled by a autocrat to fit the populist purposes that lie underneath the surface of the artist’s expressionism.  He is afraid that, like the Futurists Boccioni and Marinetti, supposing art qua art a superior expression of one’s life over all other concerns is a step removed from thinking that adherence to any other action that takes that expression seriously, a worthwhile pursuit.  Hence, if an autocrat were to seek to show war as pure experience and that experience could unchain the artist in fits of pure expression, then war could be thought of as beautiful.  As the Futurists thought, movement and material could be placed at the feet of the war machine; the world, cleansed of all other order, would begin anew and this pure expression, where art was thought itself, would, at the limit approach the Platonic Ideal.

For Walter Benjamin, Marxism and its foundational base of political economic equality of welfare would under cut all that.  Marxist art would keep Fascist art at bay.  Nevertheless, I think there remains some doubt whether choosing to politicize art in this manner serves to do something greater than to only short circuit a move toward Fascist art.  Walter Benjamin demonstrated how a drawing in signs does a different thing than a painting in marks; how the way in which we conceive of a work determines the manner of its consumption.  He intimated the ways in which painting and photography that dealt with the real problems and real spaces in which contemporary men lived their hard fought lives was superior to action art that fed the inner genius.  Nevertheless, once the artist settles upon his politicized art, he find himself one step removed from the fundamental problem: though he has an answer to the question, why create art, he is still undone by the question of how to create art?  This question cannot be answered by relying on some deterministic concept of politicized aesthetics.

In a forthcoming piece, I’ll examine the ways in which two of my favorite artists of the 19th Century, Jacques Louis David and Francisco Goya dealt with this problem.  In answering this question, I’ll reach back to the fundamental question of why create art in the first place.  I’ll want to say that there remains sufficient doubt that the artist can determine ways to create art that somehow follows from Benjamin’s politicized Marxist aesthetic.  Hence, I’ll find both sets of answers to the questions wanting.  I will say, however that one of the two artist’s seems to be more compelling as a creator of objects that even now, sometimes, haunts my uneasy nightmares.

Benjamin, Walter., ‘A Short History of Photography’ One-Way Street (London: Verso, 1979; 1997) 240–257

p.243

Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will recognise how alive the contradictions are, here too: the most precise technology can give its productsa magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us.

No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully he posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.

For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other, in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.

p.250

What is aura, actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.

The stripping bare of the object, the destruction of the aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness – by means of its reproduction.

p.255

[on fashionable creative photography]

Therein is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connexions in which it exists, even where most far-fetched subjects are more concerned with saleability than with insight.

Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations – the factory, say – means that they are no longer explicit.

p.256

The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder. This is where the caption comes in, whereby photography turns all life’s relationships into literature[.]

But must not a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate? Will not the caption become the most important part of the photograph?

The ruins at Désert de Retz were built on the eve of the Revolution, between 1774 and 1789 by François Racine de Monville.  They present a rich and playful, temporally complex example of the Romantic obsession with ruins, close to Schlegel’s famous observation, “the works of the ancients have become fragments; the works of the moderns are fragments at their inception” (quoted in Levinson, 1986: 10). With over 17 follies packed within just 35 acres of landscaped garden, Monville juxtaposed the ruins of a gothic church with an Egyptian pyramid, a decaying Greek temple, and a series of rustic altars.  Although Diana Ketcham might call the Désert an “architecture of fantasy” (1994: 1), it is a fantasy rooted in the figures and forms of architectural history and rehearses in stone what Panini and Piranesi achieved in paint and acid.

The Broken Column, Désert de Retz

At the centre of the garden lies what is known as ‘The Broken Column’ an enormous Doric column 55 feet high and 50 feet wide.  Inside, a spiral staircase connects 5 floors and approximately 20 rooms making Monville’s column a ruin that functions, a ruin in which to dwell.  The formal, antiquarian response to the column might be to follow the proportions of the Doric order, imaginatively reconstructing the 400-foot temple that the column suggests was once existent.  Nevertheless, the column demonstrates a demand for time, however gargantuan, fictional or fantastic; it demands time and a narrative explanation of its presence.

Cross-section view of the Broken Column

“Let us bring to our gardens the changing sets of the opera,” writes Louis de Carmontelle, contemporary of Monville and originator of the term ‘pay d’illusions’, “let us see there, in reality, what the most able painters could offer as decoration, all times and all places” (quoted in Bandiera, 1989: 83).   As an attempt to synthesize all times and all places, Monville’s pays d’illusions generates and discloses the narrative frames we impose upon objects of ruin.  The ruins are allegorical in Walter Benjamin’s sense, generating their allegorical content through, what Benjamin called, “the highly significant fragment, the remnant” (2003: 178).  The allegorical provocation rendered by Monville’s follies goes some distance in foregrounding their narraratological, semantic productivity.  It is the untimely nature of the ruin, an “untimeliness […] evident in how past, present, and future conspire to converge,”  that gives the ruin its allegorical force (Trigg, 2007: 131). The Broken Column and the follies that surround it stages a performance of this convergence; not only does the Column suggest a time of use and a past that could never have existed, but it wilfully confuses our attempts to divide the time of architecture according to notions of waste and want. Monville’s Column demonstrates the fundamental noncoincidence between the ruin’s outer appearance, the fragmentary distance between past, present, and future, and our narrative attempts to reconcile this noncoincidence.  The ruin demands an impossible narrative, an impossible reconciliation between these dispersed and converging times, disrupting our sense of the contemporary and the security of the ‘now.’  The Désert becomes spectral in Derrida’s sense, prompting the “disjointure in the very presence of the present, this sort of non-contemporaneity of present time with itself (1994: 25). If we make sense of ruins by imposing the temporal frames, the time of use and waste, for example, then Désert de Retz frames those frames and brings their plastic imposition to our attention.

Andre Breton's Surrealist Group, among the Ruins at Désert de Retz

So the time of ruin is a time that generates narrative.  We might explain some of the Romantic obsession with ruin by pointing towards ruin’s temporal malleability and intractability, its capacity to symbolise both the transience and endurance of material things.  The narrative multiplicity of ruins is a response to and translation of objects that seem, by their very nature, to lie in fragments.  We have seen how ruin-narratives do not simply resolve the rents and fissures of the ruin, but, by displaying their narratological tricks and tensions, these narratives can simultaneously display the fragile terms by which we compose and decompose meaning.  Indeed, the fabrication and projection of ruin puts the distinction between waste and want under particular scrutiny, disclosing how the time of architecture depends on whether buildings coincide with the projective time of human activity.  Whilst the ruin makes and narrates the passing of time, the making of ruins reveals how materiality is always matter both in and of our time.

[A longer version of this text was presented in June to the Romantic Realignments series, Oxford]