New York as Predictive City for the Second Modern Moment

It appears that at this late capitalist moment the reprise of the journal-keeping tradition of the Enlightenment period could only have happened on a post-industrial scale of the multitude of self-valorizing individuals that leap with their insta-confessions into the short-circuited eternity of the digital memory of the internet.

A difficultly to access present-value dimension of my urban experience of Manhattan does bring up to my memory other attempts to deal with experience of exile, displacement and diaspora. What I did not expect is that all of these three dimensions are going to be conflated in a single conflictual moment where each struggles to overtake the definition of how my self should find a way to articulate itself in the contingent circumstances of the temporary research stay.

Maybe it is the common fate of all research journals that quickly discover the limitations of the research agendas that they are expected to observe from the margins of the personal experience of the stakes, struggles, and objects that each social field offers to attentive view. Not that the resistance associated with practices anchored in text-regulated relations of ruling, as are the objects of modern and contemporary art, is something new to consider.

Rather in such moments of researcher's personal displacement in social space and historical time a direct confrontation occurs between individual traveling self and the multiple locations that serve as temporary points of arrival. The provisional character of each spatial dwelling must be the circumstance that turns otherwise actualized places into non-places. Relatedly the pressure on the traveling self in the direction of more urgent search for actualization intensifies.

Maybe that's the subtext of all siren calls for going from one place to another. Travel, as a more domesticated form of displacement, not only represses the awareness of the pain and suffering that displacement, as the other side of the coin that going from one place to another mints, has usually entailed. The non-places in this subliminal geography of spatial relations of movement must in this respect share common properties with the spaces of museums that in their progressive development as transparent places where exhibits could claim exclusive attention come to resemble the great many other public places that the first modernity became associated with: train terminals, airports, winter gardens, libraries, city halls, and subways.

While what is conventionally considered to be the private domain comes to mind as a counterpart to public spaces, the extensive crossover in between generically public institutions and private ownership observable in the process of transition from the first towards the second modernity apparently creates hybrid spaces that as non-spaces of corporate headquarters, parks run as public-private partnerships and art museums under certain conditions grant to general public access to the kinds of space that are considered to represent particular good.

One can argue that such hybridization of spaces that serve both private and public interest, as is the case with sponsorship arrangements, art museum bequests and donations, or non-governmental organizations support, goes contrary to the definition of the public sphere as differentiated from others.

One can also argue that legal provisions for the possibility of private support for what lies in the domain of public good violates the autonomy of the latter to the extent that the difference between the public and private interest becomes impossible to draw.

One can further argue that the remarkable indistinction between public and private spaces as is observed in the case of art museums particularly has its roots in the constellation of governmental policies that in their totality represent a mode of regulation that distinguishes one economy from another.

In this respect theoretical reconstruction of metropolitan art museum as institution that is intimately related to the dominant mode of regulation can shed light on the role that cities play in the mode of accumulation that these cities metonymically represent. To speak of New York is to speak of place that has played crucial role in the first modern moment to the extent that one can speak of the long twentieth century as an American century.

Would then Beijing be the metonym for the second modern mode of both regulation and accumulation?

Spaces' Significance as Ruin of Their Signification: From Space to Theory and Back Again

At this point I am concerned with where spatial turns into theoretical as part of the process of applying institutional ethnography to the field of international art biennials. Possibly the whole enterprise hinges on the alienation of the gaze at the same time as suspension of the natural attitude towards words as much as towards pictures.

The structuralist rending asunder of the signifiers and their signifieds should apply to the extent to the spatial signifiers and their spatial signifieds. That's where probably the attempts at founding semiotics of space founder under the weight of their own unrealizable assumptions about the significatory potential of reading spaces as if they were elements of a certain kind of langue as opposed to parole of actual physical existence of urban spaces.

The bad infinity of possible meanings that can possibly accrue to any element of such spatial language has apparently drowned out the structural regularity of spatial configurations that continue to maintain their coherense across times and spaces. However, rather than advocating a revival of some sort of structuralist paradigm, which has never lost its significance and force to rupture many a received idea, I have in mind Deleuze and Guattari's project as extension of the initial attempts to theorize structure in directions of thought that can combine material, social, and discursive into abstract configurations that are capable of neither losing the actual regularities out sight nor falling into reductivist trap of meaning as the sole order of revelance to research into what spaces do.

Spaces can be ascribed agential capacities to the extent that they participate in the relations of ruling that in their totality produce the field of power upon which spatial configurations map in the analytic account of their significance. Therefore, the study of the production of space can recover significance of spaces out of the ruins of their signification.

And that goes beyond the efforts at cultural mapping that one may undertake vis-a-vis spatial artifacts towards the recognition of importance that numerous discursive associations, appropriations, and accretions have for adequate rendering what a structure given to urban space holds in stock for ethnographer of spaces.

Marx and After in the Look at Theoretical Filiation from Marxism to Post-Structuralism

In dialogue with elaborations on the order of information that continue the line of thinking by Karl Marx I want to raise the question of the multiple revolutions that shook the world since the 1850s around which decade his major works were written.

Whole panoply of communications, science, and culture revolutions have remade thoroughly the foundations of modern society as whole scholarly fields were discovered, as civil society institutions sprang up where there were none, and as revolutionalization of capitalist relations of production paced ahead.

It indeed is true that in their famous Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels have charted the lines on which the course of the changes underway and to come. However, the Marxist discourse that has set in in the wake of the scholarly archive of Marx, and here I am using archive in its narrow meaning of corpus of works that came from under his pen, has somehow frozen in the moment it first came to light.

Maybe the two, the archive and the oeuvre, are not identical after all even if used in their narrow meanings since Marx's texts prove to be far more relevant to the present situation of rapid change than the archive of what his theory had been thought to be has ever been. Should the discussion of the relevance of the Marxist terms be ever continued? Should whole new vocabulary be summarily adopted? Should radical break be attempted with the thought associated with the name of Marx?

While Deleuze and Guattari's oeuvre comes to mind what I am mindful of also is the apparent absence of Deleuzian archive in terms of the whole discourse that would be readily recognizable or applicable to situations present and past. The formidable brilliance of their texts seems to have left after themselves a long silence that no superficial borrowing of their terms can break.

Maybe in a sort of Oedipal dynamics their attempted disciples have never been capable of liberating parricide in order that they be able to overcome their discursive figures and charge in their own direction. As in poetry, the influences of the dominant figures of the day seem to be difficult to shake off as long as the whole generation does not change to newly constituted situation of aesthetic sensibility.

By way of a rhetorical question, what a post-Oedipal dealing with the situation could be?

Spaces of Utopia Under the Theoretical Scrutiny of Post-Marxist Gaze

The thick volumes of biennial catalogues inspire awe and anxiety at the same time since beyond the enjoyment of the richness that they represent for their readers and fortunate attendees of their bi-, tri-, or quinqu-ennial events that take more after elaborate theatrical shows, which are on many occasions incorporated into the programming of biennials as distributed institutions, than they do just an exhibition in a white cube of gallery or museum.

Here lies the conundrum of the expanded field of representation that Lefebvre may help to answer since his thesis on production of space can prove to be critical beyond the reception it has received at the time of its publication or translation into other languages it being understood that these events in their majority have happened before the 1990s decade.

Of similar importance would be the unexplored quadrants of the theoretical space that Guy Debord charts in his writings as he addresses the society of the spectacle in its relation to the transition from the first to the second modernity. In his interpretation I see the symptom of the transition to the second modernity rather than accurate description of its principles of operation since I perceive Debord's condemnation of social uses of spectacle in what amounts to late modern society, or the first modernity in my terminology, as the pressure that the contradictions of modernity exercise on its institutions to adopt the loops of reflexivity into their normal operation.

It is exactly this surfeit of complexity as a matter of course that captures my imagination as I develop my ethnographic understanding of second modernity as it manifests itself in biennials, museums, and cultural districts. In this regard it appears important to leave room for realization that the second modernity is less the process of temporal succession then the outcome of what is variously referred to as internal contradictions of capitalism, spatial fix of the next cycle of capitalist restructuring, or change in the mode of accumulation.

Thus dissociated from the vestiges of teleological thinking, the discussion of the second modernity allows for predictive thinkers, cities, or spaces to come into their own in providing both models and prototypes for developments that are at a temporal distance from their historically situated works, cultures, and manifestations. In this frame of reference one can readily appreciate the place of Paris as paradigmatic city of the nineteenth century or even twentieth.

With regard to my theoretical concerns, I see museums, biennials, and urban complexes as those utopic spaces that under the conditions of the second modernity can hold genuine promise for positive alternatives to come true.

On Baudrillard's Obituary: Front Page News From the French Intellectual Field

World writes obituaries to Jean Baudrillard. Some newspapers write short stately pieces on his rise to international prominence as one of the major minds behind the 1960s student uprisings and the change in the intellectual atmosphere in their wake. Others spend more time to divine the producer of Cool Memories, Simulations and Simulacra, and The System of Objects. A great mind sleeps.

Whole generation of thinkers, personalities, and activists has receded into time to make room for their young guard. Somehow modernity never ceases to supply the adrenaline that its each beat of intensity pumps up our veins. The inventor of pataphysics, the writer of post-September-11-th treatise on terrorism, the sociologist of the late modernity has left a trail of cryptic texts and allusions that are sure to occupy the generations to come with puzzlement, amusement, and inspiration.

Even if the legacy of Baudrillard will prove to be negative, as would befit the negative style of his thought, the positive anti-shadow that we will have to supply to come to terms with the shape of the present transition as it takes in the aftermath of the major contradictions, traumas, and narratives that the first modernity has left behind will continue to cast its pall on him. Hurled into the unceasing stream of events, our minds seek a point from which our theoretical glances would be able to see the parameters of the present moment even as it endlessly peels away in the rear-view mirror of our memory.

Now that his oeuvre has reached the quality of completeness of a collectible set of volumes, drafts, letters, and notes, a new wave of interest is bound to throw ashore of public attention the intellectual archive that in bits and pieces will be gathered under Baudrillard's name as another signifier newly afloat in the intertextual sphere of references, citations, and glosses. The work of mourning of the space that his complete works will fill on numerous shelves will be at the same time the work of displacement of the awareness of the historical context around his live onto the image of Baudrillard's thought as finished work.

That invisible touch of the closed brackets with two numbers that his name will be combined with thereafter may prove transformative in how his texts will be exchanging their meaning for hard currency of their reading. Equivalent of varnish on old masters' paintings this day will push his works into endless cycle of their circulation.

The Position of Modernism in Between First and Second Modernity as Material, Social, and Discursive Process

Between documentary film and fictional cinema fall works that attempt to bridge both. How does subject-matter dealing with poverty, abjection, and marginalization get treatment that goes beyond the response always already wrapped into pieces of the narrative that the majority society has produced in the work of social differentiation?

Zygmunt Bauman says that in the governmental setup of modernity the two extremes of privilege and deprivation serves to bring the rest of society into the fold of self-regulated society that generates its dreams and nightmares on the model of those who are assigned the structural position of excess and lack in terms of social distribution of chances for leading lives that are on one hand desired and on the other hand abhorred.

Possibly, the question is born at the conjunction of theory with the after effect of watching the films that rarely get beyond the circuit of festivals, biennial screenings, and art house distribution, which makes them public at the same time as it puts them out of effective reach by the mainstream audience. The question of the archive as virtual construction with components that conjoin in equal measure social, discursive, and material may shed light of the question of the importance of such limited interventions as are the films that go back to the premise of the social realism and avant-garde that rather than entertain seeks to shake its audience out of complacency.

Rather than being merely different the impact of art on the larger society of necessity draws in its force on the very same components that curtail its effectiveness. The analyses of avant-garde propose that art that has reached that stage in its history has confronted thereby the limit conditions of its autonomy in the bourgeois society that permits freedom of expression within the institutionalized confines of museums, galleries, theaters, libraries and cinemas.

However, once the material side of the movement of modernity towards modernism is brought into account the dilemmas of autonomy and involvement that the very conditions of existence of art maintain in permanent relevance may begin looking different from the stalemate that the discourse on artistic autonomy seems to consign the efforts to bring art into concert with developments lying outside its exhibition spaces. In material terms the very spaces for the exhibition of art have to be built for that express purpose, should the mass audience be sought for the works that their creators want to make public.

While the historical discourse on museums stresses generic features of the practice of showing of things in public, the material conditions for gaining large scale exhibition venues for common use have only arisen with the decisive entrenchment of changes that in their sum have become constitutive of the first modernity as formation having social, economic, and political underpinnings. In this light the reclamation of the Louvre Museum as civic institution rather than the royal palace is more indicative of the revolution in the conditions of capital accumulation than it is of the gains for the fledgling French republic in public space since before the last decade of the eighteenth century the command of the material forces that went into erection and upkeep of architectural spaces on the scale of the Louvre were only available to the person occupying the pinnacle of the rigid social hierarchy that pre-revolutionary ancien regime enshrined.

Whether the intuition of the national museum that Louvre has become is also reflective of the ideological need for legitimization of the then newly ascendant republican regime or not, the work of ideology that monumental structures perform has little to do with the substantive nature of the political regime around these structures. For that reason, the material history of the museums can probably more felicitously mapped onto the preconditions for the creation of the wealth of nations than onto the rise of nationalism, as it has more commonly has been.

In the heyday of nationalist movements the whole constellation of sites, sights, and statements has been commanded into the production of the anamorphic illusion of the incontrovertible existence of the nation that only came into its naturalized own in the mirror of the bourgeois self. As the larger situation in which the bourgeois society has gone on to reproduce itself has changed over the course of movement from the first industrial revolution towards the host of revolutions in the growing number of fields the very nature of the connection between the self and the spaces where it was supposed to find its naturalized reflection has underwent changes that justify the introduction of second modernity as term of reference with which sense can be made of the spaces of the disorganized capitalism of the world operating as a single unit.

Thereby the assemblage of the social forces within which art becomes institutionalized in the spaces it does adds to the existing material dynamics that has conjured the productive forces for their construction in the first place. The spectacular growth in the number of museums worldwide, as well as in the countries of the First World specifically, has largely escaped theorization. That leaves room for venturing a hypothesis that the saturation of the urban space with places that are capable of lending themselves to ideological uses can bespeak of the uses for ideology that fall out of conventionally conceived critique of ideology.

In this point I concur with Scott Lash that a new kind of social critique has to be offered in order to adequately account for the changes that the transition from the first modernity to the second has as its precondition. Specifically, it may call for theorization at the speed at which certain significant events are occurring. Such real-time theoretical activity finds its paradigmatically contemporary to the moment of writing expression in blogging when journalistic reportage from around the world provokes the reaction that brings conceptual framework and the information on actual developments into confrontation.

From this perspective the third dimension of the discussion - that of the discourse - gains in relief as museums gain in unprecedented degree to which they are able to dictate the terms of their integration into the daily life. At the same time the scholarly attention to museums becomes ever more important both in terms of impartial understanding of the relations of ruling within which museums have to operate in the second modernity and in terms of cultural map making that different agents in the field of art would appropriate for their purposes in their turn.

In this situation I expect to bring my dealing with the contradictions of the presently occurring foundational change in the defining structures of modernity to bear upon the subject matter of the Guggenheim Museum on one hand and the international art biennials on the other. The notion of the future archive of contemporary art unites these two terms of comparison by virtue of its centrality to the issues of urban culture, minority art, and museum studies.

Documenta's Relevance to the International Art Biennials as Instances of Dealing with Artistic Archives

From the perspective of Chinese contemporary art museums, Documenta's and other biennials' development over last century can appear distant. However, the recent trans-nationalization of the gallery and museum institutions of the country that until a generation ago was still considered an opponent of the Western bloc, China, together with other Asian countries, undergoes the process of re-evaluation it its cultural archive with the purpose of making it readable on a global scale.

The influx of the curators from around the worlds to the projects that numerous museums in mainland China, as well as in its major cities, heralds a process of coming to terms with difficult past that these institutions have inherited as they confront radical change in the conditions of what can be possible in exhibiting, commenting, and curating. This period of relative freedom finds echo in the situation in which Documenta in Kassel, Germany, has started its operation in 1955.

Half a century later this five-year biennial has grown into truly global phenomenon that not everyone hails in positive terms. The shadows of imperialistic past haunt the intentions to encompass in a single urban location the breadth of the contemporary moment. Whether the problematics of staging of the artworks that have challenged successive exhibiting and curating committees of Documenta completely displace the question of artistic archive into the theoretical shadows of its international exhibitions remains important to the extent that there are lessons that international biennials elsewhere can draw from it.

Every biennial in its media presence, list of participants, and institutional relevance of its themes has the international dimension in-built into its mode of operation. At the same time, the comparative perspective has to recognize the process whereby the international art biennial has turned into institution with its distinct set of expectations, forms of support, and relevance to kindred discourses that bring every international art exhibition into communication with all others that share with it positions on the relational field of artistic events.

That this field stretches from the local to the global scale speaks of the transformation in the large context in which artworks and the spaces where they become public are frequently called to reflect, to act upon, or to make a statement about. Even where the discussions around modernism, avant-garde movements, and multiple reactions to these seem foreign, the quality of exploration of what portends to be shared condition remains promising as societies the world over attempt to come to terms with risks, flows, and imaginaries that know no borders.

In this respect the coincidence of the international art exhibition with the change in the mode of capitalist regulation may prove more fortuitous than strictly causal as so many spatially and temporally contingent factors are at play in each instance where centers and peripheries, post-colonies and post-empires, and linguas francas and vernaculars meet.

Documenta Archive as Structure of Allegorical Memory

The instance of Documenta, an international art exhibition taking place each five years, dislocates the coordinates of the usual bi-yearly cycle of art biennials in the direction of greater involvement of the premises on which these international events are built.

Without falling into unreserved apology for the impact that art exhibition can have on their viewers, hosting cities, and represented cultures, even if prevalent curatorial discourse protects the autonomous sphere of artistic expression as such, I want to find my distance from the condemnation that art exhibitions as components of contemporary event culture expose themselves to.

In so far as larger economic situation is not directly influenced by the art exhibitions as such I perceive the attacks on museums, art exhibitions, and biennials as stemming from the post-political situation. As described by Perniola the feature of the post-political situation is the predominance of the network logic of operation where as opposed to the political divisions that separated the political field into contending camps, the post-political situation does not produce a clear-cut pattern or structure of the social field that could be readable in political terms.

The resulting opacity, frequently attributed to the on-set of the society of the spectacle, draws on the network logic of operation where each individual can consider others, as actual or potential network members, in terms of colleagues the interaction with whom is primarily mediated by networks, data, and requirements of the moment. In this respect, spectacular events can hardly lend themselves to political reading in so far as the larger political field has been reorganized on the post-political lines.

Furthermore, the outrage that museums, biennials, and art auctions inspire in the hearts of their commentators appears to represent the symptom of the death of the political since the spaces of artistic representation and discourse are positioned in the remainder of the public sphere that while not able to summon political forces for its reproduction as structuring structure is in need of the spaces that hold the potential of memory of the historical situation when the political as principle of social vision and division has still been in force.

By that token, art works become involuntary allegories of the collective memory that in the process of its multiplication and disintegration into particularized archives of recollection undermines the structuration of the social field on the lines that would correspond to political narrative.

In this respect, politics has given way to post-politics when the reigning discourse in the public sphere has slipped from the narrative grip of the first modernity towards the indeterminacy of the second modern moment where circulation, deterritorialization, and flows take precedence over accumulation, striation, and places.

The End of Enlightenment from Derrida's Perspective on Sings: The Case of Artistic Archive

From the distance of two generations, Jacques Derrida's On Grammatology draws a historical perspective that reaches from the present for himself moment to the beginning of the Western Europe in the Greek and Roman empires. One could only imagine how the availability of certain texts, privileging of certain languages over others, and preeminence of one tradition within European, and briefly global, cultural context has shaped the picture that Derrida saw as drawing to its close.

As it were, he was stepping out of the limits of the world as picture and representation in a move that can be broadly compared to the transition from the modern to contemporary art. For France, and the host of other countries, 1967, the year Derrida has published the work in Paris, has been the annus mirabilis in that it ushered in the transformations of the next year that left no stone unturned in French society at least.

These self-same 1960s as a decade would bring into the exhibition spaces such media as photography, video, and installation that while formally continuing the developments in modern art have pushed the possibilities bequeathed by its archive to their limits. There must lie the response to the accusations in conceptual formalism that an attempt to structurally relate these novel artistic media to painting, sculpture, architecture, and theatre of modern art seems to belie.

Rather than expandable ad infinitum the combinatorial coupling of any two terms into which artistic media hybridize on contact, as would, for example, painting and sculpture into installation, can signify the transition from voice to writing as guiding paradigms of the whole artistic archive. Moreover, the artistic archive in its contemporary realization must have been born at the moment of transition from the logocentric media of modern art to the artistic media that take as their point of departure writing as signifier of absence.

The heavy theoretical load that artworks have suddenly began to carry points to the change in the episteme beyond itself since only that way one form of relationships between representation and knowledge can give way to completely another one. Such momentous transition, to the extend that second modernity captures the revolutionary transformations that it portends, comes laden with social, political, and economic implications that can amply fall into the kind of order that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have described in Empire.

The closure of the Western European civilization as a mode of imagining in a whole variety of fields is on a scale of the global transformation that Greco-Roman empire and its successors have wrought over the course of more than three thousand years. Post-Enlightenment condition that Perniola identifies equals from this perspective the rise in simultaneous availability of multiplicity of cultures and civilizations thus putting Western Europe under critical self- and other-scrutiny.

From Space to Time and Back Again on the Transit Lines of Memory

Do past events get frozen in the stream of time getting father from us with every second or we mobilize changing constellations of past events as we ply our way in the maelstrom of becoming? If objects can carry the agential intention of their makers, why can't events extend their purchase on scale that exceeds their occurring? Likewise, can not places be embedded into far-going networks of action that would make their paradigmatic spaces into semiotic imprint of their relations and acts, each a scene of sociological forensics, to borrow the textual trope from fictional Sherlock Holmes?

Heavily signified environments where public existence in our cities can take place bring in the textual relations of ruling in the mostly abstract of work of selecting, showcasing, and positioning layers of text that make one day different from the other in memory only that we carry with us from one moment of reading to another. The shock of the new has something to do with the flux of news that for Lash hit us with unmediated ferocity of informational projectile that probably tear our symbolic systems into shreds from the remains of which we recollect what real we can have access to.

As possible is the ascendance of the power over mobility over the bio-power of the micro-politics that Foucault saw as encroaching on the everyday life of peasants that the state was turning into Frenchmen and -women. Subjectification by decree. The geometry of Paris that fondles memories of the Sun-King has ghosts teeming along its lines of flight, refuge, and transit. From palatial splendor to guillotines, the transformation of Paris into republican cities became condensed in the buildings and places that post-revolutionary time memorized.

Time became space. Not only in the memory but also in the formulas of architectural, literary, and artistic grandeur that the reciprocity of links between the flux of events and the paths that open and close casts in durable forms of spatialized correspondences. After all, maybe Walter Benjamin meant just that with his reference to aura as that space that each artwork used to produce.

Cinematic Memory as Second Modernity's Arcades

In the age of wired and wireless information everyone can bare whatever one chooses to. Some bare their thoughts, some their bodies, some their possessions. Blogosphere as eBay of the textual equivalent of soundbites provides everyone with his or her fifteen minutes of cyber-fame, microprocessed glamour, and individualized in the extreme image making tools.

The question remains in whose image are the mass- and segment-mediated personas created. If Parisian arcades are created in the image of the modernity itself, its first incarnation, the second modernity may have resuscitated the architectual metaphore of arcades as farce of the post-imperial tragedy of restorationalist France.

Hyper-real shopping malls that resemble at one and the same time arcades, circuses, gardens, and towers remember the tragedy of the trajectory towards the second modernity in terms of erasure that everyday life in de-realized environments places on the farce of its terms. Monumentally white screens of movie houses, incorporated as it where into the shopping-industrial complexes of the revitalized downtowns, go black as the shadows of our manufactured dreams flicker on them into existence the ghosts that haunt places in search of history.

Post-modernity as a proposition that commentators on the second modern moment have essayed to make appears to share in the conceit of modernism that religion is dead. The arrival of post-modernity would be a wish-fulfillment of the world rapidly going down the rabbit-hole of two mirrors looking at one another. Dashed post-modern hopes of transcendence have more in common with farce of repetition than with the tragedy of the end.

The world of immanence that culture parcels out to sell to consumers of mass entertainment and high art alike attempts recollection of what it once was in a flash. At speed of twenty four per second, these abortive attempts add up to the profusion of cinematic memory. Vacillating between tragedy and farce, the memory of cinema provides an unyielding screen onto which to project the collective imaginary.

Words, feelings, and acts escape one single configuration into which the aesthetic judgment on their value would relegate them. As list of credits flowing down to the emptying halls, they demand attention that travels from the everyday towards the documentary.

Moment of Ethnographic Writing as Departure Point of Recollection

Lefebvre says that there are moments that stand out out of the flux of points in time that construct their temporal space on the principle of homogeneity of one point with regard to another. He further contends that these moments fall into relatively finite number of kinds so that there are moments for reflection, moments for change, in other words moments for welcoming the qualitatively different into the eternal repetition of the same.

The infinity of the eternal, from the mathematical point of view, meets these moments as countable events that however many will always be less than the infinity against which they may impose structure on experience. Each moment of directed reflection, with all its eddies of recollection, blindalleys of mental maps, and dust of random words that our past pellets our minds with, can become just another such countable moment that stands out from its self-identical neighbor by virtue of its faulty repetition of the epistemologically privileged moments where ideal, or arche-, type, cracks into the surface of our lives.

There is something uncomfortably collective in generalizing, royalizing, plural pronouns that while extending the shadow of this text to more than the mind that authors it puts under doubt the very stand-alone qualify of this moment of reflective writing. In any case, the gaze of my memory is trained on the iMax marquee that looks over the artificial sea that rather than being oversize aquarium pretends to repeat the delirious realism of the next Disneyland one can reach from discreetly privatized spaces of international airports. Disneyland is also a virtual space say blanket billboards that literally cover horizontal and zigzagging at right angles surfaces of the local LRT.

Surfaces of our lives are entirely rented. That seems to be the latent message of contemporary urban advertising that semiotically carpetbombs our eyeballs wherever they turn. Retinal capitalism strikes back and forth in the movement of amateur flaneurs through the non-places of our late modernity. Our modernity of artificial flowers, mechanical animals, and preprocessed memories.

Blog-Writing as Communicative Medium for Personal Ethnography of the Second Modernity

In my mind there's a video clip that's stuck about a writer who credited her experience of writing with liberating her inner areas of... She called it therapeutic and now it gives me a pause. I reflect on the word choice of what liberating action can be pointed at. Suppression, blockage, tension, unease come to mind.

However, aren't all these things making us up as we are? Aren't our limitations are just lines that our experience draws on the sand of experience? Whether or not the contemporary literature, more properly said the literature of the late modernity, is in the service of the bourgeois project of normalizing our subjectivities in the field of writing, society, and space, the successful critique of such project, or even its diagnosis, cannot but come through appropriation of its technique from the inside.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels come to mind in as much as their revolutionary writing while refounding the radical message of the French revolution, writing as it were at the heart of the British empire, which introduces its own ironies to their message, has attempted to speak to wide audience of literate readers. The question that it poses is whether these readers through the institutions of writing, literature, literacy, press, public sphere, and privacy are not inscribing so constituted subjects into the bourgeois symbolic order.

Mindful of the aporia of the avant-garde art and literature that owes its autonomy to the bourgeois society finds its own undoing in the limits of its existence, I expect the ethnographic writing that I initiate in this blog to explore the possibilities of escape from the literary condition that any self-avowedly revolutionary writing pretends to escape.

In other words, second modern ethnography - ethnography of the fully urbanized self, ethnography of the cultural cartography that any city opens innumerable spaces for practice, ethnography of the documentation of the limit areas where theorization shades off into fictionalized accounts of the spaces that in their totality can be classified as belonging to Lefebvrian heterotopia - poses the challenge to scholarly project that cannot but become personal on its way to opening towards public.

Weblogging offers itself as the medium of its time in search of its conceptualization as theoretically disruptive technology of writing. To be combined with other enmeshments with space, writing, experience, infrastructures, and culture this creative assemblage waits for its exploration.