During the Flaherty Seminar there was barely time to breathe between the films, discussions, arguments, and drinking… but there’s a lot to say on the subject. So, I wrote an essay that says nothing. It looks pretty (in pink) though. Click above to download the pdf. pdf. pdfff.
Hillevi and I are at “THE FLAAAHERTY”. Having arrived, we’ve added a few self-conscious ‘A’s to the film seminar named after explorer and documentarian Robert Flaherty. I only understood the gathering before through its somewhat cultish mythology, prevelant among the few out there who are absolutely committed to daring non-fiction films. It is a week long and has an ambitous and potentially exhausting schedule of screenings and discussions. Unlike a festival or almost all other cultural-binge activity, the films are kept entirely secret until they are screened. It’s like box after box of crackerjacks; you just don’t know what little prize you might get. With the thoughtfulness of this year’s curator, Chi-hui Yang, however, everyone seems to be expecting the best.
I hope to record some thoughts and reflections here over the course of the seminar, but all I can say right now is that it is a total pleasure to be engaged in this attempt at a temporary utopia. Projects with such pure idealist principals seem few and far between these days, especially outside of the academic sphere. But, given an appropriate level of skeptical awareness, I think they can be really transformative experiences. We shall see. Maybe Hillevi will turn into a frog… she noticed they were strangely absent from Colgate’s idylic campus in Hamilton, NY.
I wanted to share my two final papers from last semester, as both approach projects and issuses of the documentary arts. All comments very welcome!
The subject of the first paper was inspired directly by the presentation of Jonathan Mitchell in The Documentary Bodega Audio Series (thanks UD & Jonathan!). This essay explores Walter Ruttmann’s 1930 experimental radio documetnary Weekend. In particular, as I write, my aim here is to develop an analysis of Weekend in the context of the discourse of documentary arts, sensorial experience, and urban representation. While groundbreaking on many fronts, I am most interested in Ruttmann’s attempt to represent the urban experience in a purely sonic form through documentary recordings. For as Fran Tonkiss writes, “The modern city, for all that there is to see, is not only spectacular: it is sonic.” It is precisely this interplay between the visual and the aural in the context of urban space and its representation through montage that makes Ruttmann’s work so compelling. While my analysis focuses on Ruttmann’s Weekend, I also travel through the work and theory of other avant-garde critics and artists of the time, especially Rudolf Arnheim, Dziga Vertov, Alfred Döblin, and Walter Benjamin. Recent research into the role of the senses in experiencing place conducted in geography and neuroscience helps further develop the framework for my theoretical arguments. Cultural geographer Gerald Pocock writes, “[Sound] is dynamic: something is happening for sound to exist. It is therefore temporal, continually and perhaps unpredictably coming and going, but it is also powerful, for it signifies existence, generates a sense of life, and is a special sensory key to interiority.” It is the auditory faculty’s unique “key to interiority” that can be developed through temporary blindness that grounds my final argument about the new subjectivity suggested by Ruttmann’s Weekend.
You can read listen to the piece and read the whole paper online or download a PDF.
The second paper examines a project that has long been a major inspiration, ABCDF:The Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City, a project produced in 2001 that encompasses a 1502 page book, an interactive CD-Rom and a public museum exhibition. Theoretically, I draw most heavily upon Giuliana Bruno’s expansion of the cinematic field in her discussions of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne-Atlas and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas; George Landow’s writings about hypertext and hypermedia; Umberto Eco’s ideas of performance and openness; and Michel de Certeau’s exploration of the relationship between language and the city. I have chosen ABCDF specifically because I believe it illustrates a unique approach to representing the city that re-invents the dictionary, not as a vehicle for establishing a pretense of total knowledge, but instead as an “open work” that is “performed” through an embodied and active spectatorial subjectivity enacted through walking in the city. Produced on the cusp of the widespread adoption of the Internet and virtual geographic software such as Google Earth, ABCDF crystallizes the potential of hypermedia, not simply to interconnect multiple media objects, but to reveal the hypertextual nature of our physical environments and stimulate a subjectivity sensitive to our place within them.
You can read the whole paper online or download a PDF.
A few days ago, I saw the exhibition, Archive Fever, at the International Center of Photography. The show is a meditation on the various conditions of the archive. One of the most essential functions of the archive is its rendering of and subsequent destruction of collective memory. In the moment that the archive creates collective memory, it replaces the actual event with the constructed memory of the event. There is an interesting passage in the essay by Okwui Enwezor in the catalog for the ICP show that I thought others might enjoy:
“this relationship between past event and its document, an action and its archival photographic trace, is not simply the act of citing a preexisting object or event; the photographic document is a replacement of the object or event, not merely a record of it.”
Oh yeah, and one other thing. For those of you who are coming to the UnionDocs screening of Bill Daniel’s film, Who Is Bozo Texino?, on Feb. 10th, here are a few rambling thoughts on the film and its exploration of the archival impulse:
The central character in the film, Bozo Texino, never appears on screen in flesh and blood. He is only ever revealed as an indexical chalk drawing on the sides of boxcars. The drawing looks like this:
Using his 16mm Bolex, Daniel interviews various hobos and railworkers about Bozo Texino, and each person gives a different answer regarding the identity of the mythical hobo. Most agree that he is a legend who is kept alive at the hand of boxcar graffiti artists.
In the case of Bozo Texino, individual identity is replaced by collective memory, which is generated by a simple chalk drawing on the sides of trains.
That’s all.
Have a nice weekend!
Just heard about this upcoming lecture by one of the first filmmakers UnionDocs worked with…
The Experimental Lecture
“Barbara Hammer: The Cinema of the Optic Nerve”
Film, Video, Performance and Conversation
Friday November 16
7 PM Free
Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway
Room 109 (Lobby Floor)
World renowned avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer will talk and
screen films from a movie career that spans forty years. Hammer will
use a performative style that challenges all our assumptions about
what a “lecture” should be, projecting unseen treasures from her own
eExpExarchive as well as her award winning shorts Optic Nerve and Sanctus.
Barbara Hammer biography:
Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She
is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made
over 80 works in a career that spans 40 years. She is considered a
pioneer of queer cinema.
Barbara’s experimental films of the 1970’s often dealt with taboo
subjects such as menstruation, female orgasm and lesbian sexuality. In
the 80’s she used optical printing to explore perception and the
fragility of 16mm film life itself. Her documentaries tell the stories
of marginalized peoples who have been hidden from history and are
often essay films that are multi-leveled and engage audiences
viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make
social change. Hammer was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Fall 2005
at the Bratislava Academy of Art and Design, Slovakia; she received
the first Shirley Clarke Avant-Garde Filmmaker Award in October 2006
and the Women In Film Award 2006 from the St. Louis International Film
Festival. In February 2007, she was awarded a tribute and
retrospective at the Chinese Cultural University Digital Imaging
Center in Taipei, Taiwan. She lives and works in New York City.
In considering the relationship between art & politics, I was struck by Terry Eagleton’s book The Ideology of the Aesthetic on Saturday at Bluestockings. These are some preliminary passages that struck me in reading the introduction and the chapter on Adorno “Art After Auschwitz.” Possibly some starting points for further developing thinking about how our activity has operated in this field of political action and artistic practice. A couple of particularly salient statements on autonomy, which also reflect certain elements of thinking aroudn The Commons and I v Us.
Why…should this theoretical persistence of the aesthetic typify an historical period when cultural practice might be claimed to have lost much of its traditional social relevance, debased as it is to a branch of general commodity production?
My argument, broadly speaking, is that the category of the aesthetic assumes the importance it does in modern Europe because in speaking of art it speaks of these other matters too, which are at the middle class’s struggle for political hegemony. The construction of the modern notion of the aesthetic artefact is thus inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society, and indeed from a whole new form of human subjectivity appropriate to that social order. It is on this account, rather than because men and women have suddenly awoken to the supreme value of painting or poetry, that aesthetics plays so obtrusive a role in the intellectual heritage of the present. But my argument is also that the aesthetic, understood in a certain sense, provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to these dominant ideological forms, and is in this sense an eminently contradictory phenomenon.
(pages 2-3)
Once artefacts become commodities in the market place, they exist for nothing and nobody in particular, and can consequently be rationalized, ideologically speaking, as existing entirely and gloriously for themselves. It is this notion of autonomy or self-referentiality which the new discourse of aesthetics is centrally concerned to elaborate; and it is clear enough, from a radical political viewpoint, just how disabling any such idea of aesthetic autonomy must be. It is not only, as radical thought has familiarly insisted, that art is thereby conveniently sequestered from all other social practices, to become an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find an idealized refuge from its own actual values of competitiveness, exploitation and material possessiveness. It is also, rather more subtly, that the idea of autonomy — of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining — provides the middle class with just the ideological model of subjectivity it requires for its material operations. Yet this concept of autonomy is radically double-edged: if on the one hand it provides a central constituent of bourgeois ideology, it also marks an emphasis on the self-determining nature of human powers and capacities which becomes, in the work of Karl Marx and others, the anthropological foundation of a revolutionary opposition to bourgeois utility. The aesthetic is at once, as I try to show, the very secret prototype of human subjectivity in early capitalist society, and a vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thought. It signifies a creative turn to the sensuous body, as well as an inscribing of that body with a subtly oppressive law; it represents on the one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on the other hand a specious form of universalism. If it offers a generous utopian image of reconciliation between men and women at present divided from one another, it also blocks and mystifies the real political movement towards such historical community. Any account of this amphibious concept which either uncritically celebrates or unequivocally denounces it is thus likely to overlook its real historical complexity.
(page 9)
The aesthetic…is that privileged condition in which the law of the whole is nothing but the interrelations of its parts.
(page 347)
Culture is deeply locked into the structure of commodity production; but one effect of this is to release it into a certain ideological autonomy, hence allowing it to speak against the very social order with which it is guiltily complicit. It is this complicity which spurs art into protest, but which also strikes that protest agonized and ineffectual, forma gesture rather than irate polemic. Art can only hope to be valid if it provides an implicit critique of the conditions which produce it — a validation which, in evoking art’s privileged remoteness from such conditions, instantly invalidates itself. Conversely, art can only be authentic if it silently acknowledges how deeply it is compromised by what it opposes; but to press this logic too far is precisely to undermine authenticity. The aporia of modernist culture lies in its plaintive, stricken attempt to turn autonomy (the free-standing nature of the aesthetic work) against autonomy (its functionless status as commodity on the market); what warps it into non-self-identity is the inscription of its own material conditions on its interior. It would seem that art must now either abolish itself entirely — the audacious strategy of the avant garde — or hover indecisively between life and death, subsuming its own impossibility into itself.
(page 349)
Art for Adorno is thus less some idealized realm of being than contradiction incarnate. Every artefact works resolutely against itself, and this in a whole variety of ways. It strives for some pure autonomy, but knows that without a heterogeneous moment it would be nothing, vanishing into thin air. It is at once being-for-itself and being-for-society, always simultaneously itself and something else, critically estranged from its history yet incapable of taking up a vantage-point beyond it. By forswearing intervention in the real, artistic reason accrues to itself a certain precious innocence; but at the same time all art resonates with social repression, and becomes culpable precisely because it refuses to intervene. Culture is truth and illusion, cognition and false consciousness, at a stroke: like all spirit, it suffers from narcissistic delusion of existing for itself, but does so in a way which offers to negate all false claims to such self-identity in the commodified world around it. Delusion is art’s very mode of existence, which is not to grant it a license to advocate delusion. If the content of the art work is an illusion, it is in some sense a necessary one, and so does not lie; art is true to the degree that it is an illusion of the non-illusory. In positing itself as illusion, it exposes the realm of commodities (of which it is one) as unreal, thus forcing illusion into the service of truth. Art is an allegory of undeluded happiness — to which it adds the fatal rider that this cannot be had, continually breaking the promise of the well-being it adumbrates.
(page 352)
I’ll be coming to this with more personal comments and edits. Photo tagged with aesthetic from f-auto on Flickr.
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.’
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…
In beginning preliminary research into a possible critical companion to the “I v US” project currently in the works, I found the website of Martin Irvine. Irvine is the Founding Director of the Communication, Culture and Technology Program at Georgetown and appears to be developing a unique body of research and teachings that tie together strands of critical theory, media studies, globalization and contemporary art in ways that might be relevant to our work.
In particular, the work of Regis Debray on “Mediology” could be useful starting point in attempting to uncover work that bridges applies the methodology of Walter Benjamin to contemporary media phenomena (e.g. YouTube, MySpace, etc.). At first glance, the approach appears to share much with Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Debary’s individual site looks interesting, though it is exclusively in French.
