From Persona: Cinema of Interpretation, David Boyd
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3697385
"...to confer on all events, without indications to the contrary, an equivalent degree of reality: everything shown on the screen is there, present."
"Under the pressure of such contradictions, a chasm opens up between the interpretive situation inside the text and outside it, between the interpretant on the screen and the interpreter in the audience."
"This gap, furthermore, exposes not only the basic limitations of the interpetive metaphor on which the film has been based, but also the theoretically unresolved problems that underlie our interpretive practice in general:
- The unavailablility of a pre-text, a prior reality, in which to ground our interperetation of the text (the problem in other
words, of the referentiality of fiction)
- The difficulty of explaining one part of the text by reference to another, since everything within the text is equally in need
of interpretation (the problem of the hermeneutic circle)
"This sort of metaphorical breakdown ultimately signals an underlying theoretical scandal. It places in jeopardy, not just a particular interpretation of a particuar text, but rather the very possibility of interpretation. For some critical approaches, however, this situation presents itself not as a threat but rather as an opportunity. The same sort of breakdown which might seem to threaten an end to interpretation can equally well afford a beginning to deconstruction, to the rhetorical analysis of the text in order to reveal the ways in which it renders itself susceptible to incompatible, but equally legitimate, interpretations."
"Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of the text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself."
Monday, January 31, 2011
The Eye that is Not I (notes for abstract)
Remembered images all find themselves in reality,
Beckett wrote in his notebook while a trip to Hamburg .
In regards to trauma, what is the relationship of remembered images with the current reality - do they superimpose themselves into the fabric of our current surroundings ? to they "find themselves in reality", neatly arranged among the other perceived factors and forces?
remembered images of trauma flash like snapshots atop experience in the present. it is their uncanny ability to
activated by the primary processes of displacement and condensation
"Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect [..] as the mark of separation and the beginnings of the dimension of the symbol[...], placing me in that universe of artifice and symbol which I try to make correspond, as best I can, to my experience of reality", writes Kristeva.
literary creation as testimony, fiction as modality.
Elaborating on Kristeva's notions, can it be said that, in the construction of alternate authorities of authorship in narratives of trauma, the 'semiotic' and the 'symbolic' become the communicable marks of an affective past that cannot be assimilated?
trauma can be defined as a displacement of the relationship of affect and language.
Hanna Segal : separation (i.e. the experience of rupture) leads to language in infant development ---> the condition for the symbol is the lack, which it is to fill.
yet there is an alternate mode :
the symbol, the fiction, does not step in in lieu of the void (the rupture) : it evokes it, it is made of the fabric of the rupture itself, transforms it into a third agent.
fiction creates a world that is other to the lost world and a model for an alternate reality.
if the individual is separated form his/ her past through the traumatic experience, fiction / the symbol is that which is erected in order to access it again.
"this identification, [...] secures the subject's entry into the universe of signs and of creation"
"aesthetic - and, in particular, literary - creation [...] proposes a configuration of which the prosodic economy, the dramaturgy of characters and the implicit symbolism are an extremely faithful semiological representation of the subject's battle with symbolic breakdown."
->how can representation be effective as a realignment of the modalities of the Real, and how can the unspeakable be spoken through representation, find its way back into a form that can, if not be told, then affect?
destabilising the position of the "voice" of the author -
what is put in a position of precarity - and thereby, attacked - is the integrity of the authorial position. The experimenting ground is the persona of the author itself.
cf. performance art that experiments or puts in peril the performer itself.
contrast with clinical symptoms of schizophrenia: the splitting of the "I", the dispersion of the narrator.
cf. dispersion of the original traumatic event. compulsion to reenact: make a second incision.
"the poetic art that transposes the affect into an elliptical, lacunary prosody formed by condensation and allusion." p. 12
Beckett wrote in his notebook while a trip to Hamburg .
In regards to trauma, what is the relationship of remembered images with the current reality - do they superimpose themselves into the fabric of our current surroundings ? to they "find themselves in reality", neatly arranged among the other perceived factors and forces?
remembered images of trauma flash like snapshots atop experience in the present. it is their uncanny ability to
activated by the primary processes of displacement and condensation
"Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect [..] as the mark of separation and the beginnings of the dimension of the symbol[...], placing me in that universe of artifice and symbol which I try to make correspond, as best I can, to my experience of reality", writes Kristeva.
literary creation as testimony, fiction as modality.
Elaborating on Kristeva's notions, can it be said that, in the construction of alternate authorities of authorship in narratives of trauma, the 'semiotic' and the 'symbolic' become the communicable marks of an affective past that cannot be assimilated?
trauma can be defined as a displacement of the relationship of affect and language.
Hanna Segal : separation (i.e. the experience of rupture) leads to language in infant development ---> the condition for the symbol is the lack, which it is to fill.
yet there is an alternate mode :
the symbol, the fiction, does not step in in lieu of the void (the rupture) : it evokes it, it is made of the fabric of the rupture itself, transforms it into a third agent.
fiction creates a world that is other to the lost world and a model for an alternate reality.
if the individual is separated form his/ her past through the traumatic experience, fiction / the symbol is that which is erected in order to access it again.
"this identification, [...] secures the subject's entry into the universe of signs and of creation"
"aesthetic - and, in particular, literary - creation [...] proposes a configuration of which the prosodic economy, the dramaturgy of characters and the implicit symbolism are an extremely faithful semiological representation of the subject's battle with symbolic breakdown."
->how can representation be effective as a realignment of the modalities of the Real, and how can the unspeakable be spoken through representation, find its way back into a form that can, if not be told, then affect?
destabilising the position of the "voice" of the author -
what is put in a position of precarity - and thereby, attacked - is the integrity of the authorial position. The experimenting ground is the persona of the author itself.
cf. performance art that experiments or puts in peril the performer itself.
contrast with clinical symptoms of schizophrenia: the splitting of the "I", the dispersion of the narrator.
cf. dispersion of the original traumatic event. compulsion to reenact: make a second incision.
"the poetic art that transposes the affect into an elliptical, lacunary prosody formed by condensation and allusion." p. 12
Friday, January 28, 2011
"Foucault examines the question of life from three points of view. The
first approach, tied to the valorization of the archive, consists in detecting
the traces of ‘the taking of power over the ordinariness of life’ (Foucault,
1994b [1977]: 245) in the fragmentary accounts of anonymous men kept in
the records of the General Hospital and the Bastille in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Indeed, prior to the flattening of these ‘cases’ in the vocabulary
and descriptive apparatus of administrative procedures from the 19th
century, these fragments of anonymous existence struck Foucault by their
mixture of violence and poetry, of extreme dramatization and savagery, that
he recovered in the project ‘Parallel Lives’, a series that includes the journal
of Herculine Barbin. This interest in the ‘lives of infamous men’ (Foucault,
1994b [1977]) is motivated by the attempt to understand the interweaving
of the narration of minor or insignificant lives and the strategies of power,
and to express why ‘the things that constitute the ordinary, the unimportant
detail, obscurity, inglorious days, life in common, can and must be spoken
– preferably written’ (1994b [1977]: 248)."
(Judith Revel. “Identity, Nature, Life: Three Biopolitical Deconstructions”. Theory Culture Society: Special issue on Foucault, Vol 26, n. 6 (2009).
p. 52)
first approach, tied to the valorization of the archive, consists in detecting
the traces of ‘the taking of power over the ordinariness of life’ (Foucault,
1994b [1977]: 245) in the fragmentary accounts of anonymous men kept in
the records of the General Hospital and the Bastille in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Indeed, prior to the flattening of these ‘cases’ in the vocabulary
and descriptive apparatus of administrative procedures from the 19th
century, these fragments of anonymous existence struck Foucault by their
mixture of violence and poetry, of extreme dramatization and savagery, that
he recovered in the project ‘Parallel Lives’, a series that includes the journal
of Herculine Barbin. This interest in the ‘lives of infamous men’ (Foucault,
1994b [1977]) is motivated by the attempt to understand the interweaving
of the narration of minor or insignificant lives and the strategies of power,
and to express why ‘the things that constitute the ordinary, the unimportant
detail, obscurity, inglorious days, life in common, can and must be spoken
– preferably written’ (1994b [1977]: 248)."
(Judith Revel. “Identity, Nature, Life: Three Biopolitical Deconstructions”. Theory Culture Society: Special issue on Foucault, Vol 26, n. 6 (2009).
p. 52)
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
ON MEDIA AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS: VIDEOGRAMS OF A REVOLUTION Benjamin Young
http://dare.uva.nl/document/171928
Catastrophe is the unexpected interruption that television's realism of temporal continuity cannot assimilate, at least not immediately. Rather than the regulated, modulated punctuality of news flashes and ads for the newest, hottest commodity, catastrophe on television inflicts a traumatic shock resistant to the ideology of liveness, of which the loss of signal is the most disastrous. In the pre-programmed and minutely calculated flow of television, only when the signal is unexpectedly broken, lost, or terminated can it really be immediate, instantaneous, truly 'live' or 'direct'. The condition that guarantees television's referential connection to events is in fact its failure to broadcast at all.
Catastrophe is the unexpected interruption that television's realism of temporal continuity cannot assimilate, at least not immediately. Rather than the regulated, modulated punctuality of news flashes and ads for the newest, hottest commodity, catastrophe on television inflicts a traumatic shock resistant to the ideology of liveness, of which the loss of signal is the most disastrous. In the pre-programmed and minutely calculated flow of television, only when the signal is unexpectedly broken, lost, or terminated can it really be immediate, instantaneous, truly 'live' or 'direct'. The condition that guarantees television's referential connection to events is in fact its failure to broadcast at all.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
The Affectivist Manifesto - Brian Holmes
the affectivist manifesto
"Artistic activism is affectivism, it opens up expanding territories. These territories are occupied by the sharing of a double difference: a split from the private self in which each person was formerly enclosed, and from the social order which imposed that particular type of privacy or privation.
When a territory of possibility emerges it changes the social map, like a landslide, a flood or a volcano do in nature. The easiest way for society to protect its existing form is simple denial, pretending the change never happened: and that actually works in the landscape of mentalities. An affective territory disappears if it isn’t elaborated, constructed, modulated, differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs and conjunctions. There is no use defending such territories, and even believing in them is only the barest beginning. What they urgently need is to be developed, with forms, rhythms, inventions, discourses, practices, styles, technologies – in short, with cultural codes. An emergent territory is only as good as the codes that sustain it. Every social movement, every shift in the geography of the heart and revolution in the balance of the senses needs its aesthetics, its grammar, its science and its legalisms. Which means that every new territory needs artists, technicians, intellectuals, universities. But the problem is, the expert bodies that already exist are fortresses defending themselves against other fortresses.
Activism has to confront real obstacles: war, poverty, class and racial oppression, creeping fascism, venomous neoliberalism. But what we face is not so much soldiers with guns as cognitive capital: the knowledge society, an excruciatingly complex order. The striking thing from the affective point of view is the zombie-like character of this society, its fallback to automatic pilot, its cybernetic governance. Neoliberal society is densely regulated, heavily overcoded. Since the control systems are all made by disciplines with strictly calibrated access to other disciplines, the origin of any struggle in the fields of knowledge has to be extradisciplinary. It starts outside the hierarchy of disciplines and moves through them transversally, gaining style, content, competence and discursive force along the way. Extradisciplinary critique is the process whereby affectively charged ideas – or conceptual arts – become essential to social change. But it’s vital to maintain the link between the infinitely communicable idea and the singularly embodied performance.
World society is the theater of affectivist art, the stage on which it appears and the circuit in which it produces transformations. But how can we define this society in existential terms? First, it is clear that a global society now exists, with global communications, transport networks, benchmarked educational systems, standardized technologies, franchised consumption facilities, global finance, commercial law and media fashion. That layer of experience is extensive, but it is thin; it can only claim part of the lifeworld. To engage with affectivist art, to critique it and recreate it, you have to know not only where new territories of sensibility emerge – in which locale, in which historical geography – but also at which scale. Existence in world society is experienced, or becomes aesthetic, as an interplay of scales.
In addition to the global, there is a regional or continental scale, based on the aggregation of populations into economic blocs. You can see it clearly in Europe, but also in North and South America, in the Middle East and in the East Asian network. Make no mistake, there are already affects at this scale, and social movements, and new ways of using both gesture and language, with much more to come in the future. Then there is the national scale, seemingly familiar, the scale with the richest sets of institutions and the deepest historical legacies, where the theaters of mass representation are overwhelmingly established and sunk into phantasmatic inertia. But the national scale in the twenty-first century is also in a febrile state of continuous red alert, hotwired to excess and sometimes even capable of resonating with the radically new. After this comes the territorial scale, long considered the most human: the scale of daily mobilities, the city, the rural landscape, which are the archetypal dimensions of sensibility. This is the abode of popular expression, of the traditional plastic arts, of public space and of nature as a presence coequal with humanity: the scale where subjectivity first expands to meet the unknown.
And so finally we reach the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings, the scale that goes from families and lovers to people together on a street corner, in a sauna, a living room or a cafe. It would seem that intimacy is irretrievably weighted down in our time, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks. Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century."
"Artistic activism is affectivism, it opens up expanding territories. These territories are occupied by the sharing of a double difference: a split from the private self in which each person was formerly enclosed, and from the social order which imposed that particular type of privacy or privation.
When a territory of possibility emerges it changes the social map, like a landslide, a flood or a volcano do in nature. The easiest way for society to protect its existing form is simple denial, pretending the change never happened: and that actually works in the landscape of mentalities. An affective territory disappears if it isn’t elaborated, constructed, modulated, differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs and conjunctions. There is no use defending such territories, and even believing in them is only the barest beginning. What they urgently need is to be developed, with forms, rhythms, inventions, discourses, practices, styles, technologies – in short, with cultural codes. An emergent territory is only as good as the codes that sustain it. Every social movement, every shift in the geography of the heart and revolution in the balance of the senses needs its aesthetics, its grammar, its science and its legalisms. Which means that every new territory needs artists, technicians, intellectuals, universities. But the problem is, the expert bodies that already exist are fortresses defending themselves against other fortresses.
Activism has to confront real obstacles: war, poverty, class and racial oppression, creeping fascism, venomous neoliberalism. But what we face is not so much soldiers with guns as cognitive capital: the knowledge society, an excruciatingly complex order. The striking thing from the affective point of view is the zombie-like character of this society, its fallback to automatic pilot, its cybernetic governance. Neoliberal society is densely regulated, heavily overcoded. Since the control systems are all made by disciplines with strictly calibrated access to other disciplines, the origin of any struggle in the fields of knowledge has to be extradisciplinary. It starts outside the hierarchy of disciplines and moves through them transversally, gaining style, content, competence and discursive force along the way. Extradisciplinary critique is the process whereby affectively charged ideas – or conceptual arts – become essential to social change. But it’s vital to maintain the link between the infinitely communicable idea and the singularly embodied performance.
World society is the theater of affectivist art, the stage on which it appears and the circuit in which it produces transformations. But how can we define this society in existential terms? First, it is clear that a global society now exists, with global communications, transport networks, benchmarked educational systems, standardized technologies, franchised consumption facilities, global finance, commercial law and media fashion. That layer of experience is extensive, but it is thin; it can only claim part of the lifeworld. To engage with affectivist art, to critique it and recreate it, you have to know not only where new territories of sensibility emerge – in which locale, in which historical geography – but also at which scale. Existence in world society is experienced, or becomes aesthetic, as an interplay of scales.
In addition to the global, there is a regional or continental scale, based on the aggregation of populations into economic blocs. You can see it clearly in Europe, but also in North and South America, in the Middle East and in the East Asian network. Make no mistake, there are already affects at this scale, and social movements, and new ways of using both gesture and language, with much more to come in the future. Then there is the national scale, seemingly familiar, the scale with the richest sets of institutions and the deepest historical legacies, where the theaters of mass representation are overwhelmingly established and sunk into phantasmatic inertia. But the national scale in the twenty-first century is also in a febrile state of continuous red alert, hotwired to excess and sometimes even capable of resonating with the radically new. After this comes the territorial scale, long considered the most human: the scale of daily mobilities, the city, the rural landscape, which are the archetypal dimensions of sensibility. This is the abode of popular expression, of the traditional plastic arts, of public space and of nature as a presence coequal with humanity: the scale where subjectivity first expands to meet the unknown.
And so finally we reach the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings, the scale that goes from families and lovers to people together on a street corner, in a sauna, a living room or a cafe. It would seem that intimacy is irretrievably weighted down in our time, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks. Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century."
Sunday, January 16, 2011
residua
"There is a building constellation in Siena which has purportedly been built over some eighteen centuries. It has been growing by accretion, swallowing up in fits and starts ancient buildings and even streets, and incorporating them entire into its fabric. At the very bottom of this vast structure cave dwellings can be found, while at the top ample loggias are still being built to overlook the Tuscan countryside. For centuries the city hospital grew and adjusted its fibrous body to this concoction of stone, mud, iron, lime, wood, sand, glass, and darkness. Many a citizen of Siena who was born in the hospital died there willingly, too. From its awkwardly decorated flank facing the cathedral, to the mass of residual protrusions and windows facing the fields, this protean monster is still throbbing with life that started it on its journey. And if I were ever to search for a physical model of my book, I would gladly point at the hospital in Siena as its closest substitute."
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