K8 Hardy– video and performance artist, LTTR editor, among many other identities probably too numerous to mention–has a studio here at UnionDocs. She’s arranged for a presentation here of the following project from Berlin. There will be some really interesting work discussed, so come by tomorrow night.

Friday, March 30, 7.30 pm at UnionDocs

normal love
precarious sex. precarious work

exhibition künstlerhaus bethanien berlin

curated by renate lorenz, in collaboration with pauline boudry

The point of departure for the exhibition were the photographs and texts of the »maid of all work« Hannah Cullwick, who lived in Victorian London.

Hannah Cullwick not only cleaned from early in the morning until late at night in various households, she also produced a series of remarkable staged photographs, numerous diaries, and letters. She was very proud of her »masculinity«, of her strength, and her fetishes, her muscles, her dirt and her big, red hands.

Her portraits and self-portraits, which show her not only as a domestic servant, but also in »class drag« or »ethnic drag«, were part of a sado-masochistic relationship that Hannah Cullwick was involved in with Arthur Munby, a bourgeois man. Interestingly, it was elements of her hard work in the household that provided the material for their SM scenes.

Building on this connection between sex and labor, »normal love« looks at the role of sexuality in how power functions within the field of work. The exhibition asks whether the crossing of social hierarchies of class, gender, and race that Hannah Cullwick staged and that she so obviously desired have today become generalized into a paradoxical requirement. How are we interpellated or addressed in the field of work? What role does sexuality play in the »voluntary« taking on of long workdays or hierarchically organized »places«? What happens if these places are mobilized and crossed? How can they be reworked or »queered«? The contributions by the participating artists do not refer back to power, but rather show an »engagement with power« (Muñoz).

with: hannah cullwick und/and laura aguilar, oreet ashery, pauline boudry, alexandra croitoru, ines doujak, ghazel, kai kaljo, deborah kelly/ tina fiveash, stefan hayn, klub zwei (simone bader, jo schmeiser), ins a. kromminga, zoe leonard, marth, karin michalski/ sabina baumann, tracey moffatt, christian philipp müller, henrik olesen, adrian piper, carole roussopoulos/ delphine seyrig, runa islam, del lagrace volcano, gillian wearing.

Check out this story on NPR’s All Things Considered, featuring our former co-conspirator Paul Kiel, now a reporter/blogger for the political blog Talking Points Memo. The blog - and specifically the investigative reporting sub-blog TPM Muckraker (which Paul edits) - is credited with breaking the recent Alberto Gonzales/US attorney firings story. As the All Things Considered piece points out, a pretty concrete indicator of the mainstream sea change blogging and participatory media are effecting. Cheers.

In response to the evolving conservations about Slavoj Zizek, I purchased Interrogating the Real today. In the author’s introduction, he provides a useful investigation of the relationship between the individual and the collective today. A full transcription of pages 14-15 seems in order.

Along the lines of this constitutive ‘homelessness’ of philosophy, one should rehabilitate Kant’s idea of the cosmopolitan ‘world-civil-society’ (Weltburgergesellschaft), which is not simply an expansion of the citizenship of a nation state to the citizenship of a global trans-national state, instead, it involves a shift from the principle of identification with one’s ‘organic’ ethnic substance actualized in a particular tradition to a radically different principle of identification. Recall Deleuze’s notion of universal singularity as opposed to the triad of Individuality-Particularity-Universality — this opposition is precisely the opposition between Kant and Hegel. For Hegel, ‘world-civil-society’ is an abstract notion without substantial content, lacking the mediation of the particular and thus the force of full actuality, i.e., it involves an abstract identification which does not substantially grasp the subject; the only way for an individual effectively to participate in universal humanity is therefore through a full identification with a particular Nation-State (I am ‘human’ only insofar as I am German, English …). For Kant, on the contrary, ‘world-civil-society’ designates the paradox of the universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypasses the mediation of the particular by directly participating in the Universal. This identification with the Universal is not the identification with an encompassing global Substance (’humanity’), but an identification with a universal ethico-politcal principle — a universal religious collective, a scientific collective, a global revolutionary organization, all of which are accessible to everyone. This is what Kant, in the famous passage of his ‘What is Enlightenment?’, means by ‘public’ as opposed to ‘private’: ‘private’ is not one’s individuality as opposed to one’s communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification; while ‘public’ is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason. The paradox is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the ‘public’ sphere precisely as singular individual extracted from or even opposed to one’s substantial communal identification — one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities. And what we find at the end of this road is atheism — not the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of the heroic defiance of God, but insight into the irrelevance of the divine, along the lines of Brecht’s Herr Keuner:

Someone asked Herr Keuner if there is a god. Herr Keuner said: I advise you to think about how your behaviour would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You already decided: You need a God.

Brecht is right here: we are never in a position directly to choose between theism and atheism, since the choice as such is already located within the field of belief. ‘Atheism’ (in the sense of deciding not to believe in God) is a miserable, pathetic stance of those who long for God but cannot find him (or who ‘rebel against God’). A true atheist does not choose atheism: for him, the question is irrelevant — this is the stance of a truly atheistic subject.

The standard critical procedure today is to mobilize opposition of human and subject: the notion of subjectivity (self-consciousness, self-positing autonomy, etc.) stands for dangerous hubris, a will to power, which obfuscates and distorts the authentic essence of humanity; the task is thus to think the essence of humanity outside the domain of subjectivity. What Lacan tries to accomplish seems to be the exact opposite of this standard procedure: in all his great literary interpretations — from Oedipus and Antigone through Sade to Claudel — he is in search of a point at which we enter the dimension of the ‘inhuman’, the point at which ‘humanity’ disintegrates, so that all that remains is the pure subject. Sophocles’ Antigone, Sade’s Juliette, Claudel’s Sygne — they are all these figures of such an ‘inhuman’ subject (in contract to their ‘human counterpoint: Ismene, Justine …). To paraphrase Nietszche, what one should render problematic is what in us is ‘human, all too human’. One should not be afraid to apply this insight also to politics: it is all too simple to dismiss Nazis as inhuman and bestial — what if the real problem with the Nazis was precisely that they remained ‘human, all too human’?

Johanna also passed along this essential NY Times op-ed article by Zizek following Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s ‘confessions.’

Thinking about airplanes recently. For years, flying made me panic and then I got over it. A difference, in my case I think, between an inward view and an overview. The trick’s toggling between them, I guess.

This video of the Saab JAS 39 “Gripen” - a Swedish fighter jet used in the Swedish, Czech, Hungarian, and soon, South African Air Force - is totally mesmerizing. Especially if you don’t think about things like this. From Flightlevel 350, a site with hundreds of aviation videos.

In a conversation last night with Christopher, we posed the question, “who are the major philosophers today?” Somehow, I feel, this has always been a question of mine, as it seems that despite the passing of large chunks of time the main figures in discussion remain the same. In beginning initial explorations, came across two blogs of interest: Long Sunday and Theoria. I hadn’t really considered it previously, but the emergence of blogging surely must be making a significant impact of the process of publication for academic researchers, including those investigating theoertical and philosophical topics. Look forward to further investigations…

From Black’s Law Dictionary (Abridged Eighth Edition) (I think strictly defined legal langauge is described ‘terms of art’ - please correct me if I’m wrong):

ACT 1. Something done or performed, esp. voluntarily … 2. The process of doing or performing; an occurrence that results from a person’s will being exerted on the external world.

INTENT The state of mind accompanying an act.

MALICE The intent, without justification or excuse, to commit a wrongful act.

NEGLIGENT Characterized by a person’s failure to exercise the degree of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised in the same circumstance.

RECKLESS Characterized by the creation of a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm to others and by a conscious (and sometimes deliberate) disregard for or indifference to that risk; heedless, rash. Reckless conduct is much more than mere negligence: it is gross deviation from what a reasonable person would do.

The above has a strange emotional resonance - partly the distancing effect of familiar terms technically defined, partly the spin-cycle from too much thinking about the (potentially fictional - thanks CA) ‘reasonable person.’ Mostly, though, it’s the practicality. Or rather, it’s the practicality next to the awfulness. Thinking about malice as “the intent, without justification or excuse, to commit a wrongful act” both heightens and dulls the term. That tension’s compelling.

Less abstractly, here’s some more on the Sean Bell case indictments. There was a lot of coverage today, which indirectly prompted this post.

Currently, the two most recent local instances of a particularly intense and troubling confluence of individual, collective and body:

From the NY Times, March 15th and March 17th.

Watched this for a long time. First it was soothing, and then my narrative mind kicked in. Are there any possible actual scenarios that might account for the positions of the three men? Would such scenarios necessarily be coolly tragic?

From Trinity Animation, Inc., which seems to focus on architectural models and things like that. Kind of the temporal opposite of documentary.

This is really wrapped up in a lot of the great work that’s been done on the borders of fiction, history, science and documentary (e.g. Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, David Wilson and the Museum of Jurassic Technnology, etc.)

Really.

Board members of UnionDocs were contacted recently by Leslie Kelen, executive director of The Center for Documentary Arts in Salt Lake City, who had a curious and somewhat disturbing matter to bring to our attention regarding the way we describe ourselves.

A non-profit organization in Texas is apparently near the end stages in the process of trademarking the name “documentary arts.” If this pending trademark is granted, Kelen’s organization and many others (such as UnionDocs) may no longer be able to use the same words to characterize their focus.

We were all pretty shocked and also a little intrigued – intellectual property has been one of the subjects we’ve been researching for an upcoming project. When we decided on our description, it was clear to us that “documentary arts” was an established term to described a specific class of work… a genre, more or less. The Tate Britain Musuem for instance has a collection titled 1930s Documentary Art.

Leslie Kelen

Kelen agreed, explaining that in 2000 his organization had changed their name from The Oral History Institute to The Center for Documentary Arts to reflect an expanded range of activities and interests. They also felt the need to differentiate their approach from both academic and popular ideas of the word documentary. “We understood that some documentary work straddled a very interesting and unusual border between formal documentation and the arts.”

Alan Govenar, founder of the Texas-based Documentary Arts, Inc., however, saw things differently. Kelen says that it was directly after the newly re-named Center for Documentary Arts reached out seeking support from an organization with similar interests that Govenar’s organization began pursuing a trademark for its name.

Alan Govenar

Though both companies were registered non-profit, Govenar apparently perceived a major threat to the identity of his organization in sharing this somewhat loosely defined space.In the application for the trademark, Govenar claims to have coined the phrase “documentary arts” and suggests that the pairing of the two words creates an oxymoron. In this view, documentary is a discipline striving for pure objective communication; whereas art is a discipline that thrives exclusively on subjective expression. Pairing the two is simply a contradiction.

Theoretical discussion and etymology aside, it seems that that protection may be granted to Govenar. The trademark commission has dismissed an objection filed by members of The Center for Documentary Arts and they have just a few weeks to make an appeal. The prohibitive cost and time required for lawyer fees may make putting up a fight difficult, but Kelen has been reaching out to others who use the term in an effort to find allies.

One thought has been to attempt to take this out of the legal arena and see if a community of concerned individuals would be able to dissuade Govenar’s organization from following through with the application. And of course, there are limits to the power of trademark. A common word, phrase, or other sign can only be removed from the public domain to the extent that a trademark owner is able to maintain exclusive rights over that sign in relation to certain products or services.

If you have any thoughts or ideas about this conflict please comment on this posting. We would like to create a sort of informal petition recording people’s opinion.