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.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, January 22, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
