Jacques Rancière Day 5

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Jacques Rancière taught a class entitled: POLITICS OF AESTHETICS wherein we discuss the relationship between what is allowed to be seen and the dominant political regime.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

Kinoeye as a practical activity: it's the peak of the Communist aesthetic and it's the new sensorium with the idea of art as art beyond...

We have a text today by Brecht (1939) "On the Experimental Theatre" that bids farewell to the idea of aesthetic utopia. Critical art as a mediation that is able to change reality by prompting decisions. Political art as mediation in a struggle for Communism.

Brecht reads this as an initial division, entertainment and instruction. This is a decision, Brecht seems to forget that those that made agitprop wanted to dismiss, by making theatre another activity in the world. Meyerhold wrote a lot about this - no distinction between work and entertainment.

Blending two forms of activity - media as performance, an activity with its ends in itself; at the same time this is a blended with theatre as working activity that must be rationalized like any other industrial activity. Meyerhold makes similar parascientific investigations as Eisenstein. All theatrical activity has to be identified and defined with in a multiplicity of competences.

Brecht seems to ignore all of this.

Meyerhold realized a radical Constructivism, and Reinhardt transformed natural, would-be showplaces into stages: he performed Everyman and Faust in public places. Open-air theatres saw productions of A Midsummer Nights' Dream in the midst of a forest, and in the Soviet Union an attempt was made to repeat the storming of the Winter Palace with the use of the battleship Aurora. The barriers between stage and spectator were demolished. At Reinhardt's productions of Danton's Death in the Grosses Schauspielhaus actors sat in the auditorium, and in Moscow Ochlopkov seated spectators on the stage. (3)

These were matters of abolishing the conceit that an actor is on stage and there is an auditorium but the spectator should be a passive recipient - theatre as a site of agitation. People no longer gathering to observe a spectacle but to take part in the spectacle :

At times the theatre did well in endowing social movements (the emancipation of women, perhaps, the administration of justice, hygiene, even, in fact, the movement for the emancipation of the proletariat) with definite impulses. Still it cannot be secreted that the insights which the theatre permitted into the social situation were not particularly profound. It was more or less, as the objections pointed out, a mere symptom of the superficial character of society. The intrinsic social legalities were not made perceptible. Consequently the experiments in the province of the drama led to an almost complete destruction of plot and the image of man in the theatre. The theatre by placing itself in the service of social reform suffered the loss of many of its artistic efficacies. Not unjustly, though often with rather dubious arguments, do we lament the prostitution of artistic taste and the blunting of the stylistic sense. In fact, there prevails over our theatre today as a consequence of the many diverse kinds of experiments, a virtual Babylonian confusion of styles. On one and the same stage, in one and the same play, actors perform with utterly dissimilar techniques, and naturalistic acting is done within fanciful scenic designs. (5)

Brecht resists the the aesthetic of montage and its break with the idea of aesthetic unity. The assemblage of montage was to shatter the idea of unity and instead produce specific shots and shocks. Farewell to the idea of the aesthetic revolution. Brecht sees that there has been this transformation in the methods of sensory perception but these don't add-up to an aesthetic revolution where ends and means fuse; they are simply techniques and these don't transform the performance. Thus he says the Revolution never existed.

What happened to the international avant-gardes?

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Slavoj Žižek Evening Lecture

As part of our curriculum at the European Graduate School we must attend evening lectures from the faculty. This evening Slavoj Žižek spoke to us.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing. This is certainly the case here with Žižek as once he starts talking, he will carry on for sometime. My notes, then are going to be problematic. To overcome my limitations I will embed the lecture here as well:

"Trauma and Israel"

Sometimes the world changes and not for positive reasons, for example √-1 which was discarded but now it is understood as i. Perhaps capitalism will be so treated. Capitalism is always in crisis, surviving only by borrowing from the future. Maybe what distinguishes Man from Animal is the rise of a new impossibility.

That which separates us from noumena are ethics, etc. There is no reality outside what appears. Noumenal real is overpowering and shocking. In the moments before certain death we can see reality not human reality.

Jews are both upper and lower class; too smart, too sexual; these are the classical stereotypes of the antisemitic tropes. In early Modernity the pressure was to force Jews to convert to Christianity, but in the late 19th century conversion is useless. For the Nazis the guilt of Jewry is in their very being. This began to be the case at the moment when Capitalism was developed and so the stereotypes of miserliness, etc. became qualities others sought. Thus deprived of what they were, Jews became the Absolute Jew and so condemned for some other more fundamental guilt.

Antisemitism in Europe began as Europe came out of the Dark Ages, when currency began to circulate as Capital.

Zionist antisemitism, the inheritors of Spinoza, those who still hold to the public use of Reason. Is the logic of antisemitism not that of global circulation and fluidification? It's hard to understand the critique that Western European democracy at its root is antisemitic when the greatest contributors to the development of democracy were radical, nomadic European Jews. It seems that Israel the State has become antisemitic.

Symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface; the fetish is not this. The fetish has a constructive quality that allows us to cope by clinging on when reality is too traumatic. Fetishes can operate in two ways: we are unaware of it, or we are aware of it.

• But let's further distinguish between dismissive cynical fetishism as opposed to populist fetishism. 
• False universality - where we advocate equality but privilege a secret group. 
• Fetish mystification - where anti-capitalist struggle of the working class is transferred over to the struggle against Jews.

Jews are the fetish for fascism; the last thing that is seen before outright class struggle. It's very rare to get Nazis to become Communists, that is, it's hard to rationalize someone out of their fetish.

Mao's statement that everything is in chaos so everything is okay means something more than what is being said here.

The provocative conclusion

We are caught in an antagonism: the Liberal West vs. Radical Fundamentalism. What we need is a more radical Left. The true opposition, though.

Kierkegaardian repetition, Deleuze says there is no difference between repetition and the new.

[Does this mean the future of the world is Confucianism? He said we should repeat Lenin.]

"Perhaps the Left will resurrect good manners."

Mike Shapiro Day 4

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Mike Shapiro taught a course entitled GEOPOLITICS IN CINEMA. This class attempts a rethinking of the planetary impact of media such as cinema as a challenge to political thought.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

I've always been interested in the imaginary geographies of the world, it began with Machiavelli, and when I read Kundera's Ignorance I was struck by the vertical depth of the spaces. When the novel opens there is the surprise question to the expat: it shows that those that don't get confirmation of where they are aren't anywhere.

Identity is a relationship, as Lacan said. You need a model of difference in order to have identity; Levi-Strauss worked always toward this identity economy.

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Jason Wirth at the Mike Ryan Lecture Series

Jason Wirth, long-time friend to the Philosophy Student Association, leading Schelling scholar, and authority on the philosophy of zen, gave a talk for the Mike Ryan Lecture Series, "Mountains & Waters: Zen Master Dōgen and the Sutra of Nature" on the 12th at Kennesaw State University.

***Please be aware that, as is the case with my notes from the European Graduate School, what follows are my notes to the presentation and as such may not do justice to the presenter (although I am a big fan of Jason)***

"Friends of wisdom love their friends like other people love gold..."

I'm going to attempt to allow Nature to reveal itself through Dōgen's thinking. When discussing Dōgen you have a real dilemma: either you say what is true and risk not making sense to the 90% of the audience that has never been exposed to Dōgen, or you barely communicate Dōgen's thinking at all. It's a rock and a hard place scenario.

I want to see if Dōgen can help us express Nature in language. Dōgen begins by asking us if we can even hear. If our minds were mirrors which reflect everything we saw and these mirrors were dirty, what would we see? We'd see filth everywhere: the world would appear dirty to us. We would assume that everything we saw was dirty; not that we were the dirty-minded.

It's difficult to communicate this. If the mind was dirty, then all it heard would be dirty, and so we couldn't hear the truth of how dirty our mind is.

We look to the Pāli canon: there is this dialogue between the Buddha and Bhâradhvâja. Bhâradhvâja asks the Buddha with whom he should study. This is a good question. How do you know who is a good teacher without first receiving their teaching? Buddha says, look at what kind of person they are: are they greedy, full of hate, or fully-deluded? What kind of mind do they have? What they teach, think, and value reflects directly on the kind of person they are.

Dōgen takes this to a whole new level.

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