ARTSpeak on AM1690 and Burnaway - Laura Poitras

Jeremy Abernathy, Editor in Chief of Burnaway, and I had a fine chat about the Laura Poitras exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, O' Say Can You See?

You can hear our discussion and download it from Burnaway, here.

I've written a bit about the Poitras piece at the site where I've been developing my MA thesis, Spectacular Agency and you can view it here.

This was a good Election Day episode. Many huge thanks to both Jeremy and the wonderful folks at AM 1690 WMLB, voice of the arts in Atlanta, for making me sound so good. I really love the intro and outro music.

New Post at The Avant Guardian

I've written another installment of popOp for the avant guardian and it's available for your internet consumption, here.

Also, please consider becoming a fan of popOp on Facebook, if you're into FB and all that.

the fact that you're still calling 

it that tells me you're not ready.

Rancière's "Misadventures of Universality"

Rancière's talk from the Second Moscow Biennial is available at their site, here.

The central concern in the talk is "the way in which the universality of the human rights or people's autonomy appears to be absorbed by [...] a certain idea of the universality of the commodity." To illustrate what he means by this, Rancière brings up Godard's Masculin/Feminin (view the trailer below):

the film where we are introduced to the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. He does this to point toward a newer problem, that during the 60s the protests were supposedly in solidarity and identification with the children in Vietnam, today there is no identification possible because there is only the caricature of who is exploiting whom.

In the 70s Martha Rosler's collages were perhaps powerful critiques, but today this technique doesn't seem to have the same force. The mode is tired. These sorts of collages seem to be just one of millions of such images. Perhaps this is because the Vietnam war was so pervasive in the American dining room - the family could be on the front lines of the jungle warfare while eating tv dinners.

Today this proximity to warfare is a primary means of providing entertainment.

ABOVE: Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
RIGHT: Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (2004).
BELOW: Martha Rosler, The Grey Drape (2008).

Today, while it might be satisfying on some level to throw a brick through a Starbucks window it just doesn't seem to convey any form of urgency to political action. Indeed, on a personal level I can relate a story of exactly this. While there was some sense of political excitement in the Battle of Seattle as the anti-globalization movement began to really ramp-up and a brick in a Starbucks while wearing a vinegar-soaked bandanna seemed a viable political action; only a few years later the gesture became impotent one night in Athens, Georgia when my friend had her store window busted-in by UGA party boys. No bandanna, not purpose other than the thrill of simple vandalism. In short, no universal principle being advocated, except that joy of being rebellious.

The result of this commensurability (you can invoke the same bandanna worn in the Battle of Seattle by purchasing it at Urban Outfitters) as Rancière states it is, "[u]ltimately terrorism and consumption, protest and spectacle are shown as part of the same process, a process governed by the law of the commodity which is the law of equivalence."

He then proceeds in the talk to outline both sides of the political spectrum, primarily focusing on the shortcomings of the contemporary left. The right he simply passes over characterizing it as full of rage at the ambivalences in today's world.

With the left there is talk of the impotence of its melancholic prediction which is, "not about verifiable facts. It is just about the lie hidden in any truth. Melancholy thus turns into a kind of cynical wisdom. It only says: things are not what you think they are." We should perhaps clarify this as, perhaps, an incomplete melancholia. As Judith Butler pointed out in her "Melancholy Gender", Freud saw an ego-accumulating aspect inherent to melancholia - an incorporative dimension in the ego's seeking the lost object. Perhaps this, too, is a universalism that Rancière would characterize as misadventure...

So on the one hand there is this "rupture predicated on the historical assimilation of a critical knowledge of the system by the powerful material collectivity," but also this rupture is the natural result of what Marx stated was capital's ability to dematerialize previous material relations by subsuming them to the demands of market exchange.

To be continued tonight at the Poncey-Highlands Reading Group...

New Post at The Avant Guardian

I've written a little sumpin'-sum at that place of internet jocularity we like to call The Avant Guardian.

There seems to be an arc developing in these pieces: something about social relations and how they've been shifting.

I thank you for your generosity in reading.

Also, many, many thanks to Tom Maxwell for turning me on to the two new blogs I've added over in the side bar there:

• A Journey Around My Skull
• BibliOdyssey

The strawman image here on our left is an illustration from "Za Lahko Noč" Ančka Gošnik-Godec (1964) which I found on A Journey Around My Skull.

Thinking About Creativity

It's going to seem kinda weird, but almost all of my formal training on the nature of creativity to this point in my life has come from studying Classical Chinese philosophies, Confucianism and Daoism.

The title of this blog comes from my thinking about a Classical Confucian text, the 中庸 (Zhongyong) and my reception of that text in light of contemporary Continental philosophers. I'm specifically interested in the works from Roger Ames and David Hall.

Although I recognize that theirs is a somewhat specific and at times controversial project, I can't shake the feeling that even were their translations wholly wrong (which no one seems to say), what they have to say about the nature of humanity, living, the universe, etc. is what needs to be promoted today.

Today we have this amazing capability, broadly distribute, to create through the appropriation of others' work (the mash-up, DJing, etc.) in a manner that just wasn't possible thirty years ago. To this Ames & Hall have already written:

One must be creative to take full advantage of appropriated culture, both in shaping it for his own place and time, and in using it as a structure through which to realize his own possibilities. He must labor assiduously to acquire the culture transmitted from ancient times but must be able to take it a step further in maximizing the possibilities of the prevailing conditions....Thinking Through Confucius (48)

Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) has written a bit about this appropriation activity in his book Rhythm Science where he states, "today, the voice you speak with may not be your own." An uncanny feeling, that I might not be who I state I am; to this Ames & Hall say:

The dynamic of becoming whole, construed aesthetically, is precisely what is meant by a creative process. It is thus that cheng (誠) is to be understood as creativity. Creativity involves both the realization of the focal self and of the field of events, the realization of both particular and context. Self-actualization is a focal process that draws upon an aggregate field of human experience. And the field and focus are reciprocally realized. Focusing the Familiar (32)

The problem of who I am and what is the nature of art are not so distant, it's been discussed and debated by Baudelaire, Breton, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, etc. The problem is this: if who we are is subject to capitalist economic relations, then everything we do, ultimately is a question of how to turn what we do into a commodity to be sold on the marketplace. Don't believe me? Then how do we account for the phrase, "I don't buy it," when we don't believe something? What aren't you buying? Is it that my sincerity is questioned?

The virtue of the term “sincerity” is that it describes a commitment to one's creative purposes, a solemn affirmation of one's self-actualization....Since all selves are constituted by relationships, integrity means being trustworthy and true in one's associations....integrity is the ground from which self and other arise together to maximize benefit. It is not what you are, but how well and how productively they are able to fare in their synergistic alliances. Focusing the Familiar (33)

The world changes and we must respond, but what is typically neglected in that response to change is the creativity necessary to change with the times.

Not only is change an integral characteristic of things, but real creativity is a condition of this continuing transformative process. That is, our immediate experience is composed of fluid, porous events that entail both persistence and the spontaneous emergence of novelty, both continuity and disjunction. In this evolving order, there is at once familiar rhythm to life, and the newness of each moment. Dao De Jing (16)

This cosmic unfolding is not “cyclical” in the sense of reversability and replication but is rather a continuing spiral that is always coming back upon itself and yet is ever new. Dao De Jing (28)

Who we are, fundamentally, is a creative event:  

Cheng (誠) [creativity], then, is the extending of the specifically human activity of actualizing genuine personhood from man himself to all constituents in the process of existence. Thinking Through Confucius (58)

Wolfgang Schirmacher calls this "artificial life."

Society of the Spectacle: Toward the Postmodern

My long-time buddy, Ryland Johnson, was kind enough to respond to my recent posting on Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1 and what follows here is a reply to him.

Kudzu Kongzi is primarily a space for me to germinate my thinking. So I greatly benefit from your input on what is written as I am not an authority on any of it. Below is my reply to Ryland

Thanks for reading, Ryland.

There are some great things in your response, thanks. I'll only just briefly address only a few, not because I disagree with you, but only to kind of elaborate a little more on why I said some of these things here.

First, the blog's really just an off-the-cuff response to what I read today. The blog here serves in some capacity as a place holder for my thinking; but when folks, such as yourself, supplement this with your thinking I get greatly enriched. So thanks, again!

As for invocation of Dasein above: yes. I said it up there, only for the most superficial associative reason - because Dasein is an historic dasein and Debord seems to want to include some of Heidegger's thinking in §11. I agree with you, I think, that Debord, if he writes any more like this later in the book (I'm only reading Chapter 1 here), he's going to have a problem talking about Dasein in a proper way.

This should be said also, about Debord: in reading his works and what I've read about him as a person, I don't get the sense that he's a thorough scholar nor is he particularly interested in giving credit where credit is due.

As for Žižek: yes. I'm sure that there are many other people between 1967 and the rock star Žižek of the past decade, that have written about this advertisement stuff. The obvious place to start, since both Žižek and Debord are very open about their affinity for him is Lacan. I've not climbed the Mt. Doom of Lacan as yet.

At this point, with the minimal exposure to the other SI texts, and largely based on Lefebvre's account in that interview I've linked to here (from the journal October (79), Winter 1997) I'm not sure that the Situationists really had a good idea about the situations they wanted to achieve. In many ways the movement sounds like a collection of very creative, interesting, and angry people. The anger probably fueled their kinetic behavior, but it also probably contributed to the brevity of their moment.

One avenue I'd like to explore more thoroughly would be to better understand something that Ranciére was telling us this past summer: that there is a disconnect between Lyotard and (probably have to include Hal Foster, Bois, et al.) Baudrillard's account of the postmodern and the avant-garde of the early 20th century.

Ranciére seemed to be suggesting that the claims to postmodernity in Lyotard and Baudrillard are problematic in that they fail to account for the work that had been done in montage, surrealism, perhaps futurism, and so on.

So, part of my motivation to read Bréton with Debord is to consider the latter's inheritance from the former and to ask whether Debord has offered something more innovative in light of that inheritance. And also, to some extent, I want to apply what I'm learning in that Harvey lecture course on Capital. This last item is really not remarkable since nearly everyone worth reading from France during the 20th century was a (Neo)Marxist, so there is no surprise to see whole chunks of Marx inserted in sections and just presupposed as true. Were I better read in Marx I might argue some of the finer points of how Capital gets used, but I'm not an authority at all.

A place that I really should develop is at the end there, in talking about the current economic crisis. It's really too simplistic to accept the often-invoked, and largely class-war inspired, trope that it's because too many people were flipping properties that global capitalism started stuttering. That's just not true. What's seems to me more true is that most people on Wall Street don't understand what Value is.

But, beyond this intuition that Debord might be able to help us understand the moment, I'm not sure I've got more than a tenuous gleam. I'd say 30% of me suspects Debord might, but 70% of me thinks that Debord was a bad student and a loudmouth. Here's to learning that I'm wrong.

Jacques Rancière Day 6

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

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.

How the aesthetic revolution is transformed and ultimately canceled-out. It's not so much what Brecht, Baudrillard, or Lyotard said as much as how they construct the relationship between art and politics. The issue of post-modernism is one of re-framing Modernity. Not a new concept, but a re-framing of art and politics. The way in which they will say farewell to Modernity has led to a reconfiguration of Modernity.

"The Ecstasy of Communication" Baudrillard; published in Hal Foster's Anti-Aesthetics.
Attempts to punctuate a turning point of art, is also a turning point in the sensory experience. These texts are dealing with experience; they also recapitulate what Modernity means, a reinterpretation of the aesthetics of Modernism. The way in which they set the stage for this task is interesting.

• Diagnosis of loss or something that is about to be lost: the loss of separation, no longer borders.
• Tow ideas of the sensory: heterogeneity and homogeneity.
• For Baudrillard it's the loss of subject and object, we have lost alienation. This should be a good thing, in Marxist terms, but the issue is trickier.

For Baudrillard, alienation means illusion, but also this difference between inside and outside; so the problem of desire means we have an excess. Communication replacing alienation, there is no longer heterogeneity, only homogeneity.

Now is the reign of hyper-reality. What has been lost with the digital is, on one hand, the spectacle of the world, and the sacred secret of the inner world. Everything is communicable and there is no separation of the inner and the outer. The specificity of artistic experimentation is lost due to digital reproduction.

If the progress of scientific apparatus is responsible for the end of Modernity, it is also responsible for the inception of Modernity. The birth of photography doesn't mean the task of image-making has been perfected but that painting is impacted and Classical pictures depended upon a certain monarchical perspective on the world.

Photography isn't only the possibility of exact reproduction, but also means the end of Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful. §16 is based on adherent beauty vs. free beauty; this was determined by freedom from concepts and perfection of the reproduction in technique.

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Jacques Rancière Evening Lecture

As part of our curriculum at the European Graduate School we must attend evening lectures from the faculty. This evening Jacques Rancière 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.

In a sense, it will deal with negation [as was the case with Alain Badiou's the other night]; but less broad in scope.

I am here concerned with the process of unfolding and dissipation of images. What kind of logic is present in images and their processional narrative? Hitchcock's Vertigo is an example of the perfection of the deployment of image in narrative form.

The logic of the film is apparent as soon as the credits. The dispositif of the images from hereon are _____(?)

Deleuze states that Hitchcock is the peak of the image-movement system, but he is also the symptom of the crisis of narrative action.

(2 forms of passivity) Scottie's Acrophobia, 2 fascinations with Death

Let's also consider Vertov's Man with Camera (1929):

The camera has the radical equality of all movement, the Communism of the equal exchange of all images.

The means of fascination used by Hollywood are the remains of a lost cinematic utopia according to Goddard.

An art is never only an art but also the proposition of a possible world and its techniques and elements employed are often the remains of a previously proposed utopia.

Reconfront the suppositions of movement and the look.

[END OF LECTURE]

Jacques Rancière Day 5

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

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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Jacques Rancière Day 4

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

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 EGS, 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.

Today we will first discuss democracy and equality and then to what montage means.

Let's redefine the reality effect of Barthes.

• The point is not knowing why this object is here but rather the political effect. 
• The reality effect, according to Barthes is a tautological proposition: this object affirms the Real. 
• But for me it is an equality effect - any object is equally capable of being an art object and thus the expansion of the sensible. 
• Our capacity for the aesthetic effect is similar and politically it allows for the possibility of a community gathered in its ability to communicate these experiences.

There is something in action, though. In The Red and the Black we see equality is questioned; also in Leaves of Grass (1855) which had the same democratic effect as Madame Bovary (1856).

The extract "Song of Myself" has the perfect quality of all characters and activities (see page 40 from 1882 edition, right):

All of this becomes a quaint symphony of the city. What interests me is this infinite inclusion where everything is both material and spiritual. All things are equivalent, given by the voice which absorbs all of these.

This is the first time where writing is being extended into something beyond writing through a device, a new construction of totality. Plotinus was a big influence, so there is this procession of the world. The "Song of Myself" is the voice of multiplicity with its equivalence of all things. But it seems impossible to have stable political entities in this because there is political subjectivization when there is a section of society which is not allowed to have a voice.

Here we have, in section 26 (see image on left from 1882 manuscript) the tension between aesthetic democracy and political democracy. On the other hand we have the aesthetic democracy is not so different from the Communist Revolution - look to young Marx: The task of critique is to reveal the world as it is, so the world can do its work; an act of confession, revolution is an act of confession. **

This was 1843; in 1842 Emerson wrote to Whitman something similar. Aesthetic equality goes beyond politics because we can't compose political subjects, it is more than just revolution and politics.
The spiritual link for Emerson and Whitman, as well as the German Idealists (of which we must include "Young Marx") is that the material world is spiritual, a collapsing of the transcendental principle and a lowering of the metaphysical horizon to an immanence. The point here is not to discuss the distinction but to show the two poles from which we can come to this aesthetic revolution.

**NOTE: It seems that Rancière is paraphrasing Marx here, I'm not sure if this is an artifact of translation or his interpretation. The closest I can find to what Rancière says Marx said is from the Introduction to Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843):

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. (itals. original)

Democracy is always an excessive presentation, aesthetic democracy is the equal capacity to live any kind of life or the community to act the enactment of a shared capacity to experience and communicate, to be a member of the sensorium, where we can share that experience in communicating to anyone else.
In a world of economic domination there is no ability to interact with the world (alienation); the fear that Bovary introduced was that everyone suddenly was allowed to question their ability to participate.

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Jacques Rancière Day 3

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

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 EGS, 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.

The question of the aesthetic effect - the result of the aesthetic framing; Kant and Schiller dismiss the efficient model of art which is instrumentalized to teach morality (see Rousseau's Letters on the Theatre).

At the heart of the aesthetic is this dismissal seen in Schiller's Twenty-Second Letter.

• A radical separation of the artist's intention and the art object and its contents;
  
• what is at work is a separation of the interior contents that would be seen as beautiful
  
• it is free of concept and so it is free beauty.
• Schiller says that it produces effect by the general feeling not by the transfer of energies.

The political effects of the aesthetic effect

An upheaval of hierarchies of what is sensible.

• Both experiencing and communicating this effect are now equally available to all.
  
• Based on this universality, embedded in individual sensory experience, is the basis of a new community.
  
• An aesthetic education and revolution - the transformation of experience rather than the French Revolution which was just the same power structure replacing the former power structure.

An experience of doing nothing, a suspension is perhaps better, a revolution of the sensory experience. It is first a potential, but this may be at the very basis of the Communist revolution - it must be more than simply a political revolution. Marx proposed a human revolution.

The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism (Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling) in this text is a call for community where ideas are everybody's, they were avid readers of Schiller and admirers of the French Revolution.

The invention of Abstract Forms, intimately related with Soviet policy, was developed as a new means of creating community. I'm not dealing with Humanism vs. Totalitarianism, but how the transformation of the aesthetic experience transformed the way in which politics is possible and, yes, young Marx was a part of this.

The idea of the sensory revolution is not a principle by which all are bound into a new community of aesthetes (and then to fascism as Benjamin suggests); rather the people can form a community of sharing a capacity to both experience and a capacity to communicate this experience.

There are two models:

1. The artist says, "I want to produce this effect that makes my point," and this is the efficiency model
2. Kant and Schiller are claiming that the relationship between the viewer and the art object produces this aesthetic effect, not the artists' intentions or execution; it is a paradox because artists want, always, to create art that would have this effect.

Hegel's Lessons on Aesthetics (1830s, published posthumously in 1860s)
Probably this was written in 1828. This text and the Barthes text both share the problem of aesthetic equality: how does any subject become an art subject, how can something enter the realm of art?

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Mike Shapiro Day 2

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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 EGS, 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 really recommend looking to webdeleuze and especially in the section called sommaire where you can see Deleuze's class notes on Kant. I think these notes on Kant are better than the book he wrote on Kant.

Kant tries to patch up this fragility by returning to the 2nd critique; Lyotard, Deleuze, and Ranciere do not back away from this.

When talking about method: Ranciere tries to disfigure the hierarchy, not test hypotheses, a relationality that deforms power structures, this is the purpose of the aesthetic approach. It's a way that detours away from the normal modes of figure formation. When the arts reform cliche relationships we have to see this as a challenge to power distributions.

Compare Italian crime novels to Putnam's survey-based study of politics:

• We get a different sense of the politics of the country - we get a clearer sense of justice and normatives in Italy than what Putnam's methodology provides.
• In The Day of the Owl we have a significant dynamic at work. We see that there is an ideational fault line within the cities, an understanding that those in the north of the country are imposing laws on those in the south. He reveals a politics of disparity.
• Rather than aggregating attitudes, the novel shows metapolitical perspective.

Empiricist social science assumes we begin with a clean slate and from this we are able to interpret. Literature assumes that we are embedded in this world and must understand from this filter. Good literature disables our continuous overcoding onto the world.

Onto the Hegel chapter of my new book

Almost every thinker must come to terms with Hegel, to digest his notions of time and space relations.
(As an aside: we should consider what mode of thinking we will do professionally by deciding which types of meetings we want to attend, like it was AA or something)

Temporality is not fixed, we live in a plurality of temporalities.

Why should we have beliefs and not fears (as the Inuit shaman explained)?
Fears maintain groups at a distance. They control how we think.

• In the shaman's society, everyone is responsible for their own safety because when they are hunting they may be also being hunted by a polar bear.
  
• It's not that they are anxious all the time, but that they must be alert and sensitive to the world.
  
• This what critical literature does as well.

...redeeming Hegel. Identity is a process of becoming.

The End of Violence (1997) Wim Wenders


There is an invisible world that makes Brian's life possible and he's not noticed it until now. His body is rather irrelevant - it's mostly a tool of apprehension through technology prostheses. Every now and again we hear Brian talking but it's likely Wender thinking aloud. Here we have the city as surveillance. They never noticed because these were ahistorical beings. In his Violence and Metaphysics Derrida says that the worst violence is the dream that we can rid ourselves of violence. I'm also thinking of Deleuze's discussion of faciality.

We all have different modes of arrival, the question is, how do these modes of arrival become countenanced, how do we face that? Sure, this film was difficult to watch and accept [NOTE: I REALLY COULDN'T GET INTO THIS MOVIE AT ALL], but we can see that this film does present something: Mike Max does change.

Are Eisenstein's films propagandistic? He says no, because Eisenstein's films are opened-out in such a way that we're not sure what we're seeing any more. [NOTE: THIS FILM BY WENDER IS CLICHE IN MANY WAYS, BUT THERE IS SOMETHING OFF AS WELL - THE FILM SEEMS COMPROMISED]

See the book Zeroville - what editing does is take the false film out of the true film.
or Radical Software Group (RSG)'s edited version of Black Hawk Down, now made with no white actors, Black One

For the next class we will watch Falling Down.

[END OF CLASS]

Jacques Rancière Day 2

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

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 EGS, 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.

The possibility of choosing to be alone is impossible in the banlieus; these would have to be spaces where it would be possible to generate useless art and disinterested pleasure

• Who is able to have this or that sensory experience?
• How are matters of capacity and incapacity integrated into structures?

There is a rupture in sensory experience that can be discerned in the "women of the banlieus"

Free beauty is where we can appreciate the form directly and don't need to make any reference to signification or function or the perfection of the work itself; sublimity is not an experience of pleasure - it is the impossibility to apprehend the form.

Free beauty is an experience of the form; sublime is the impossibility of the form's apprehension, a passage through the aesthetic experience. The experience of the sublime is an experience of dispossession, a limit experience, the unrepresentable.

Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
These are meditations on the conditions of experiences. How does this new aesthetic experience show us what are the possibilities of the future of humanity?

Fifteenth Letter §8

Reason, however, declares: The beautiful is to be neither mere life, nor mere form, but living form, i.e., Beauty; for it imposes upon man the double law of absolute formality and absolute reality. Consequently Reason also makes the pronouncement: With beauty man shall only play, and it is with beauty only that he shall play.

Fifteenth Letter §9

For, to mince matters no longer, man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. [...] But it is, after all, only in philosophy that the proposition is unexpected; it was long ago alive and operative in the art and in the feeling of the Greeks, the most distinguished exponents of both; only they transferred to Olympus what was meant to be realized on earth. Guided by the truth of that same proposition, they banished from the brow of the blessed gods of all the earnestness and effort which furrow the cheeks of mortals, no less than the empty pleasures which preserve the smoothness of a vacuous face; freed those ever-contented beings from the bonds inseparable from every purpose, every duty, every care, and made idleness and indifferency the enviable portion of divinity - merely a more human name for the freest, most sublime state of being. [...] It is not Grace, nor is it yet Dignity, which speaks to us from the superb countenance of a Juno Ludovisi; it is neither the one nor the other because it is both at once. While the woman-god demands our veneration, the god-like woman kindles our love; but even as we abandon ourselves in ecstacy to her heavenly grace, her celestial self-sufficiency makes us recoil in terror. The whole figure reposes and dwells in itself, a creation completely self-contained, and, as if existing beyond space, neither yielding nor resisting; here is no force to contend with force, no frailty where temporality might break in. Irresistibly moved and drawn by those former qualities, kept at a distance by these latter, we find ourselves drawn at one and the same time in a state of utter repose and supreme agitation, and there results that wondrous stirring of the heart for which mind has no concept nor speech any name.

Juno Ludovisi (leaving aside the imagery and language of the time) we must remember this is not a pronouncement on the work of art but a pronouncement on divinity and its shift to humanity's self-containment, humanity in a certain sense of wholeness.

Self-containment is not the purpose of art or divinity but the perfection of humanity to be regained.

• The qualities of divinity and perfect humanity is freedom from any purpose; that the perfection of God is free from wanting or doing or being interested in anything.
• This is a break from the traditional view of the efficiency of art - where I show this and you see what should be or should not be done. There is, of course, this old quarrel about mimesis from Plato and theatre; where there is this addiction to imagery. Aristotle said it's about action, not characters. Thus, dance became an art in the 18th century when it could prove that it wasn't just movement but advanced a plot.
  
• From this Aristotellian discussion we arrive at the idea that art will inform us about living a moral life.
• Rousseau asked, "how can we celebrate the entertainment of vice that is the nature of instructing morality through entertainment?"
• Brecht doesn't talk about morality, but about ignorance; Barthes also, we see what the character does not see. Still, we have this representational model - the efficiency of art. An implicit inverse law: people will, after watching this, do the opposite of what they've seen.

What Schiller presents is against Rousseau, we must free from art any thought, or affect, or attitude, unlike Rousseau's call to get rid of representation so as to live together.

Rousseau: "Down with appearance!" A move from appearance to reality and Schiller says the opposite - we have to purify appearance from any pretension to moral instruction or action.

Letter 22 §5

In a truly successful work of art the contents should effect nothing, the form everything; for only through the form is the whole man affected, through the subject-matter, by contrast, only one or other of his functions. Subject-matter, then, however sublime and all-embracing it may be, always has a limiting effect upon the spirit, and it is only from form that true aesthetic freedom can be looked for. [...] The psyche of the listener or spectator must remain completely free and inviolate.... No less self-contradictory is the notion of a fine art which teaches (didactic) or improves (moral); for nothing is more at variance with the concept of beauty than the notion of giving the psyche any definite bias.

Here is the definition of the aesthetic effect and also politics. To the extent that the subject matter....

• This is about form as an experience, the point is not to give an indication of its contents.
  
• It is about the autonomy of the aesthetic experience not being moved by the content; without any mark of the artist's intention.
  
• The effect is separation.
  
• The work is supposed to be the means to an end in the Classical model, but here we see a call to banish representation, a radical call at the time of the French Revolution.
  
• The affirmation of radical rupture from all affect so that the viewer is not denied of their ability, equally, to feel and express this capacity and thus form a community.

A new political potential is possible only if we dismiss any defined affect, it is not just refining the experience but illuminating the new capacity of everyone to feel, discarding the old model so to have a new humanity.

Letter 15 §9: the distance from any instrumentalization of the aesthetic experience; to sum, the word is play. A playing community as opposed to the Roman community, that community of laws as opposed to the free people united by the way they feel together, "the art of living."

• a new way of art and a new politics of living

Guy De Bord's Society of the Spectacle is one where there is all play; Schiller takes form Kant's Critique and says there can be the free play of the faculties.

• Understanding imposes unity on the mulitiplicity of the senses and imagination presents this multiplicity of senses to understanding.
  
• As in aesthetic judgement there is ....
  
• Free play of faculty means there is the riddance of the hierarchy of the senses.
  
• It doesn't deal with the reality of the object, there is the dismissal between activity and passivity.
  
• It's on this idea of free play is not only the basis of judgement but the essence of human kind.

Play is the faculty that is the basis of a new humanity which dismisses the social hierarchy as well as the distribution of the sensible. It's in opposition to the structuring of oppression. At the time of the Revolution there was still this distinction between active and passive citizens, the latter were denigrated by the former; a legacy of the traditional distribution of the sensible.

Those who can play are those who are not committed to the necessity of maintaining life. Play is an activity whose end is itself, thus those that could not play were those who must engage in ends-to-means. In opposition to play is earnestness, that is toward an end.

• Full humanity is possible when there is no hierarchy of occupation.
  
• Play comes to those who know no distinction between activity and passivity; thus a community that is not based on any kind of preoccupation.
  
• The Revolution saw a shift in power but Schiller saw that there was no shift in the sensory experience of the individual.
  
• The idea of a new way of communicating with this new sensory experience that would be the ground of a new community so as to overcome the problems that brought about "The Terror" of the Revolution.

A community united not by restraint, but shared sensory experiencing, the Aesthetic State related in sensory experience. This is a starting point of an idea that accompanies what we call Modernity, a revolution of all human relations. We should have a multiplicity of communities is the idea.

We see these tendencies in Soviet art, but, as Stalin grows more and more into "The Man of Steel", we also see that normative pressure is applied such that the imagery becomes more and more about representing the worker in the worker's paradise and of course more and more like the former modes of repression.

There is the idea of the Aesthetic State, a gathering of individuals enjoying a new form of common life and also it can be interpreted in a pedagogical manner - that people should have an aesthetic education so as to reduce the disparities in the distribution of the sensible. Holderlin, Schelling, and Hegel's letter describes both a new utopian community and is the first event in German Idealism. We have this idea that the common man will incorporate philosophy into everyday life.

There is the idea that we can have a community that shares its new form of experience, that dismisses the occupational distinctions, and is ultimately disinterested.

There is a tension between the new community and the image of people who are truly human when they are acting only for the sake of acting itself.

The Communist community is a prime example of this problem: we must have productivity so as to maintain the State, but the workers are to understand that the highest virtue is doing nothing - a leisurely pleasure and gathering in this leisure that marks the new sensory experience.

Jacques Rancière Day 1

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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 EGS, 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.

My usual way of working is to talk for an hour and then we take questions, of course, if you have questions, ask, but perhaps it is better formulated the next session.

Today I wish to phrase some issues by implementing two images (promotional posters for Chelovek's Kino Apparatom):



Why these? A lot of what I want to say is, here an idea of cinema and art practice in general.

They say nothing about what's in the film but it does tell us about art.

1. The spatial relations suggest something about what is going on - the copy kino (movement) relates man and apparatus in the design here. Man in general to be involved in the Soviet revolution; and also this particular man, the cinematographer, capturing the movement of Mankind.
2. It is not an illustration of the problem - this isn't the problem of art & politics being illustrated - there is no message at all, this is produced at the end of the silent film era. The letters in the posters are visual forms in movement with the bodies. Only parts of the bodies are dancing, a fragmented body - a Modern dancer, an emphasis on the modernity with no form of constraint. Here is the mingling of the mechanical and human body fragments.

Were we to schematize:

• man and machine, the man with the camera in shadow also looks like he is at the machine gun; the presence of skyscrapers suggest a brighter future movement up into the new life promised by the Soviet revolution.
  
• The lady is not even in the film, she represents Art - this is a film with no message, visual fragments, these posters.

These present us with a new sensorium of how cinema will work, a new way of writing, how machines will operate, and the gestures of how the Soviet system will be.

There is the precision of the machine eye, a new body whose body is separated so as to be more energetic.

A new space where image and reality collapse - no difference because the new sensorium of life, these posters reveal this to us.

No more use of horizon to suggest 3-d, a world defined by movement of equality where there is no difference between low and high, between means and ends or the practice of any worker and entertainment. A world dominated by movement is a world of equality.

These posters produce the order of the sensible - the sayable, the do-able, a configuration of the capacity of beings in the world. These posters include themselves and the world that they would coordinate, both their place in the world and create the atmosphere through which they must be perceived.

What is meant by aesthetics?

• Aesthetics doesn't define art or its theory, or the philosophy of art.
• Aesthetics is the sensible texture, the frame through which the artist is able to practice; weaving the sensible texture and so allows us to understand how to coordinate it.
• This is the same in politics.

My main point is this:

• the positing of politics as practice of governing and art as the practice of object making - how do we judge these?
• Before we ask the usual question about art's commitment to a politics, we must understand that in order for politics to exist, those that struggle for power must exist and they must represent themselves and generate a sensibility that can be understood.
• Politics entails new ways of visibility.
• This is also true of art: for art to exist, all practices and their objects must already exist and must be subsumed under the concept of "Art" not "the arts" of historical record.

The liberal arts were practiced by free people (the aristocracy); astronomy, geometry, etc. were practiced in Ancient Greece by those who didn't have to work.

• To name "Art" supposes a dissolution of the distinctions between these class-based distinctions
• The existence of "Art" is possible in a new distribution of the sensible; the new relationships between occupation and their subjects.
• Art became possible after the collapse of the distinction form Free Men; between fine art and mechanical art, Art and Law... the distinction used to only be historical painting (High) and landscapes (Low).

The Classical world used artworks to show the illustrious nature of the royalty. At the inception of the museum (18th century), there was a revolution wherein Art was taken from the Royalty's homes and made publicly visible.

• Aesthetics is the new regime between technical skills, modes of thinking, and modes of feeling.
• If we think in these terms, this is a question of revolution. (emphasis added)
  
• The common world that is being weaved by the artist and the common world that is being worked on in modern democratic practices -
  
• these are the construction of a community through an aesthetic regime.

What I'd like to do is go backward (analyzing the possibility of these aesthetic changes) and then go forward; how is it possible to have these constructions, what is the destiny of these?

The constitution of the very idea of an aesthetic experience and the link to politics.

I'd like to look at historical moments when there were these shifts in the aesthetics and examine the logic of their paradigms.

1. Let's look at the constitution of the aesthetic experience as an experience;
   
2. second, let's look at what equality within art means and what the political potentiality of art might be. Art does the politics of its kind. These posters show us that all the different artists necessary for a film to exist exist simultaneously.
3. My third point will be to show montage as an idea of politics; the formulation of critical art - art forms that ask us to think about and propose discussion between common people and politics
4. My fourth point will be to reframe the contemporary moment, the so-called anti-aesthetic movement.

These posters don't want to be images, but expressions of what is (or will be).

• They were not meant to be advertisements for the film, nor an image of "It's a movie without words"
• These posters were the climax of the visual and the Revolution - both of which were about to collapse
• These posters are without desire because desire suggests a distance, we should not see her as a woman (and so an object of desire), she is only energy, these posters are about movement and [the vital] energy [of the Revolutionary spirit] (my additions are bracketed)

There is a rupture with a certain state of art is what we notice in the Kant and Schiller readings. These create a universe of questions and evidences that we are still dealing with today. A new relation to Beauty, sensibility as a faculty is introduced.

Kant, Part 1, Section 2
The satisfaction which determines the judgement of taste is disinterested

They focus on the idea of the palace, not as it appears and have two negative statements:
"I do not desire it," and "this is not what should be desired," the point is that we know that there are two kinds of hierarchy: what is agreeable from the elite and from the common people.

• There was this idea of two kinds of humanity, those of needs and those of culturedness
• Voltaire said that this was a physical difference, they did not have the same eyes, the same ears, etc. and so the two groups could not mutually sense

Thus in Section 2 we have:

• extrinsic judgement - it is vanity, something to gape at
• hierarchical judgement (art practice) - does it suit the function and obey the rules of Art and architecture?
• Kant dismisses the idea of the body being attached to the capacity to feel,
• thus the aesthetic is disjointed from perception of the perfection of execution.

Section 16
The judgement of taste, by which an object is declared to be beautiful under the condition of a definite concept, is not pure

What is Beauty was decided when there was no concept; we must disconnect the object from a kind of knowledge in order for it to be thought of as beautiful.

Decorative art, for Kant, is beauty; but, abstraction is pure Beauty because there was no conception.

In the 18th century dance was art if it told a story; but Kant introduces a break from insisting that there must be not be judgement of an object as an object of desire or of knowledge, we must judge only its form. So, I decide as the character of anyone and everyone.

There is this new idea of a new universality which overcomes the particularities of the former universalism. This is what disinterestedness means.

Bourdieu lampoons this in his book Distinction, this disinterestedness is a mark of social distinction, only those who can afford these items can judge them.

Kant would say to Bourdieu, "okay, but it happens all the time that the common people say, 'it is beautiful,' it doesn't matter what objects they think are beautiful.

• It's true the social order is twofold hierarchy with two kinds of humanity where the rich train to refine their pleasures;
  
• but in 1790 we are proposing freedom over repression.
  
• How will we organize? It can't simply be by overturning the former hierarchy - it must be a new form of relationships and ways of living."

This is what Kant is trying to achieve in his call to universalism.

Section 60
Of the method of Taste

The argument is a new society needs not only laws of restraint but also common sense.

• It supposes a common sense, that anybody to feel for anybody and that anybody can communicate with anybody these feelings.
• The break is with the distribution of the sensible such that anybody can feel and communicate - if we get away from knowledge and means to ends - we can participate universally.
• The problem is, how do we overcome this tendency?

If we pursue this line of thinking, if Bourdieu is interested in the taste of the common man, then how do we understand this t-shirt that announces, "I marvel at the sunset" from Campement Urbain?

[END OF CLASS]
Rancière has written about Campement Urbain's project I & US here.