Showing papers in "October in 1992"

Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered

Abstract: Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"' is generally taken to be an affirmation of mass culture and of the new technologies through which it is disseminated. And rightly so. Benjamin praises the cognitive, hence political, potential of technologically mediated cultural experience (film is particularly privileged).2 Yet the closing section of this 1936 essay reverses the optimistic tone. It sounds a warning. Fascism is a "violation of the technical apparatus" that parallels fascism's violent "attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses"-not by giving them their due, but by "allowing them to express themselves."3 "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."4 Benjamin seldom makes sweeping condemnations, but here he states categorically: "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."5 He is writing during the early period of fascist military adventurism-Italy's colonial war in Ethiopia, Germany's intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Yet Benjamin recognizes that the aesthetic justification of this policy was already in place at the century's start. It was the Futurists who, just before World War I,

Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization

Abstract: In a sense, the whole matter of my paper is involved in a preliminary question: In what language will it be uttered? Neither my language nor your language, but rather a dialect between French and English, a special one, a dialect that carries no identification with any group. No tribal dialect, no univeral language, only an in-between dialect, constructed for the aims of this discussion and guided by the idea that the activity of thinking is primarily an activity of translation, and that anyone is capable of making a translation. Underpinning this capacity for translation is the efficacy of equality, that is to say, the efficacy of humanity. I will move directly to the question that frames our discussion. I quote from the third point of the list of issues we were asked to address: "What is the political?" Briefly and roughly speaking, I would answer: the political is the encounter between two heterogeneous processes. The first process is that of governing, and it entails creating community consent, which relies on the distribution of shares and the hierarchy of places and functions. I shall call this process policy. The second process is that of equality. It consists of a set of practices guided by the supposition that everyone is equal and by the attempt to verify this supposition. The proper name for this set of practices remains emancipation. In spite of Lyotard's statements, I do not assume a necessary link between the idea of emancipation and the narrative of a universal wrong and a universal victim. It is true that the handling of a wrong remains the universal form for the meeting between the two processes of policy and equality. But we can question that encounter. We can argue, for example, that any policy denies equality and that there is no commensurability between the two processes. In my book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, I advocated the thesis of the French theorist of emancipation, Joseph Jacotot, according to whom emancipation can only be the intellectual emancipation of individuals. This means that there is no political stage, only the law of policy and the law of equality. In order for a political stage to occur, we must change that assumption. Thus, instead of arguing that

Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity

Abstract: There is a lot of talk today about social, national, and political identities. The "death of the subject," proudly proclaimed everywhere not so long ago, has been succeeded by a new and widespread interest in the multiple identities proliferating in our contemporary world. These two movements are not, however, in such a complete and dramatic contrast as one might first believe. Perhaps the death of the Subject has been the precondition of this renewed interest in the question of subjectivity. It is perhaps the very impossibility of referring a multifarious subjectivity to a transcendental center that concentrates our attention on the multiplicity itself. In short, the founding gestures of the 1960s are still with us, enabling the political and theoretical explanations in which we are today engaged. If there was a temporal gap between the theoretically thinkable and the actually achieved, it was because a second, more subtle temptation haunted the intellectual imaginary of the left: that of replacing the transcendental subject with its symmetrical other, of reinscribing the multifarious forms of undomesticated subjectivities in an objective totality. From this temptation derived a concept that enjoyed great currency in our immediate prehistory: that of "subject positions." But this, of course, did not transcend the problematic of a transcendental subjectivity (that which haunts us as an absence is still very much present). "History is a process without a subject." Perhaps-but how do we know? Doesn't the very possibility of such an assertion require what it wants to avoid? If history as a totality is a possible object of experience, who could be the subject of such an experience but the subject of an absolute knowledge? Now, if we try to avoid this pitfall, what becomes problematic is the very notion of "subject position." What could such a position be but a special location within a totality, and what could this totality be but the object of experience of an absolute subject? At the very moment when the terrain of absolute subjectivity collapses, the possibility of an absolute object collapses as well. There is no real alternative between Spinoza and Hegel. But this locates us in a very different terrain: one in which the possibility of the subject/object destination results from

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity

Abstract: Those who deny the existence of these problems and who would suppress discussion of them are not without their politics; they simply promote their orthodoxy in the name of an unquestioned and unquestionable tradition, universality, or history. They attack challenges to their ideas as dangerous and subversive, antithetical to the academic enterprise. They offer themselves as apostles of timeless truths, when in fact they are enemies of change. The cry that politics has recently invaded the university, imported by sixties radicals, is an example of the defense of orthodoxy; it is itself a political attempt to distract attention from the fact that there are serious issues at stake and more than one

Citizenship and Political Identity

Abstract: It is through the question of political identity that I have decided to approach the theme of this conference on "identity." More precisely, I intend to ask the following question: "What kind of political identity should a project of 'radical and plural democracy' aim at constructing?" and I am going to argue that such a project requires the creation of new political identities in terms of radical democratic "citizens."

Freedom's Basis in the Indeterminate

Abstract: testimony of minorities within the geopolitical division of East/West, North/ South. These perspectives intervene in the ideological discourses of modernity that have attempted to give a hegemonic "normality" to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, and peoples. Their critical revisions are formulated around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the "rationalizations" of modernity. To assimilate Habermas to our purposes, we could also argue that the postcolonial project, at its most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies-"loss of meaning, conditions of anomie"-that no longer simply "cluster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely scattered historical contingencies."' These contingencies often provide the grounds of historical necessity for the elaboration of strategies of emancipation, for the staging of other social antagonisms. Reconstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more than a simple change of cultural contents and symbols, for a replacement within the same representational time frame is never adequate. This reconstitution requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written: the rearticulation of the "sign" in which cultural identities may be inscribed. And contingency as the signifying time of counterhegemonic strategies is not a celebration of "lack" or "excess" or a self-perpetuating series of negative ontologies. Such "indeterminism" is the mark of the conflictual yet

Reflections on Identity

Abstract: The cold war, which dominated nearly all U.S. public life for most of the latter half of this century, interrupted a debate about the crisis in modernity that had erupted at the turn of the century and occupied much of philosophical and social thought until World War II. Most anti-Stalinist intellectuals were fiercely committed to modernity's putative achievements-individualism, democracy, and social (if not always cultural) pluralism-which had their basis in ideas as old as the era of revolution that accompanied the rise of the middle class in the seventeenth century and reached their apogee with the liberal revolutions during the following two centuries. For both socialist intellectuals and the modern liberals who presupposed them, these values were typically framed in terms ineluctably connected to universalism and its cardinal principle, faith in progress. According to this doctrine, the history of humankind was, in Croce's felicitous phrase, "the story of liberty."' Featured in this narrative were the beneficent effects of industrialism driven by scientific and technological knowledge and the division of labor, which stood alongside liberal democracy and individual rights as goals whose achievement was as inevitable as the eventual eradication of poverty and hunger. At the center of progressivism-the political expression of modernity-was the striving individual. Yet one of the perplexing questions for Anglo-American philosophy was how to establish the ground for individuality in an increasingly complex social world dominated by the growth of large economic enterprises protected by a centralized state. The proposition that the individual is identical with itself is one about which Locke had no doubt. For even if identity cannot be established by the positing of unique substance, the agency of reflexive consciousness, of which memory is the crucial faculty, unites past and present.2 Locke's doctrine of conscious-

Commodification as Censor: Copyrights and Fair Use

Abstract: "Fiveand six-year-olds at three Florida day-care centers," an article on Disney's aggressive pursuit of copyright infringers tells us, "appear on the national nightly news to say how sad they will be if they can't keep pictures of Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Goofy on the walls of their playgrounds. But a Disney lawyer who directs anti-piracy efforts out of New York says that a nursery school is no less a profit-making enterprise just because little children are involved."'

The Richter-Scale of Blur

Abstract: a statement about the relations that exist between the object, optical-technical equipment, and perception: namely, that the extension of the object is not altered by the changed conditions created by optical-technical machinery. And just as one does not see less, one also does not see more, for such opticaltechnical equipment cannot be used to "deepen" or "expand" one's perception of the global object known as the world. Richter's "field" remains an impenetrable entity, a natura naturans, to which perception, as natura naturata, is related, but which is not revealed in the latter.

Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter's Negatives

Abstract: Of all the issues raised by Richter's paintings, perhaps the most intractable is that of where to place them within a critical history of contemporary art. For it is a paradox of Richter's work that while it derives both its force and its modernity from the consistency of its address to a single problem-the problem of the continuing possiblity of painting as a historically significant activity-it is precisely this consistency that threatens to cut it off from the wider history of which it is a part, to enclose it within the horizon of a self-contained will to paint and thereby, implicitly, to block off that very future for painting which it might otherwise be thought to have opened up. There is something exceptional, something historically exceptional, about Richter's work that has yet to be fully clarified. And this is not because it avoids or is in any way displaced from the issues of its time, but rather because of the specific form and, indeed, the peculiar success of its engagement with them. Furthermore, it would seem to be something about the particular temporal logic of this engagement-what Stefan Germer has described as its "dialectical mediation of proximity and

Streetwalking around Plato's Cave

Abstract: [In Naples] building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways . .. to become a theater of the new ... This is how architecture, the most binding part of the communal rhythm, comes into being here, .... [in] the baroque opening of a heightened public sphere ... What distinguishes Naples from other large cities is [that] ... each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life.

Kiefer in Berlin

Abstract: German newspapers never tire of pointing out that Anselm Kiefer's reputation as the most successful German artist since Beuys was made in the United States, and there, it is intimated, by a mysteriously homogeneous group of Jewish-American collectors. The subtext is that those misguided souls bought his art at a time when the German critical establishment knew that Kiefer, with his Teutonic image worlds, his Wagnerian monumentalism, and his nebulous disposition toward myth and catastrophe, was an irrationalist and a reactionary, if not a protofascist.' Kiefer and Syberberg, consensus has it, were the twin evils of an otherwise reputable culture. Still today German critics often reproach the American reception of Kiefer in toto for its lack of critical awareness and pictorial skepticism toward an art that is said to rely on facile fascination and bombastic mise-en-scne.2 America is said to have given in to the lure of morbid images of an aestheticized apocalypse and to the hype about the artist as redeemer. German and American views stand in a strange reciprocity: while the Germans believe that Kiefer's problematic "Germanness" has undeservedly enhanced his reputation in the United States, the American triumphalists have embraced Kiefer as an artist who is not properly appreciated in his home country for political reasons.3 While there is some truth to both propositions, such judgments betray mainly projective needs and the temptation of scandal: Whose Kiefer is it? And how German is he? For they block the more interesting question of how this Germanness functions differently in the United States and in Germany. When American critics praise Kiefer as the lone artist-hero who

Ernst Junger and the Transformed World

Abstract: In modern industrial societies, no matter what their political orientation, it is possible to observe a shift beginning in the early 1920s from a form of selfdescription based on the written word to a new type of self-representation based on the photographic and cinematic image. This general, paradigmatic transition and its repercussions were attentively observed, described, and analyzed in the Weimar period by many scholars, artists, writers, and journalists. Perhaps more important is the fact that while the most lucid analyses of the nascent mass media were found on the Weimar left, and while the programmatic use of the photographic book in the Weimar years has usually been identified since with a leftist political position, it was the conservative and reactionary right that was actually the first to make effective use of these new forms.

The Inevitability of Nation: German Intellectuals after Unification

Abstract: The German 1980s could be described as a decade obsessed with memory. Wedged between the Berlin Prussian exhibition of 1981 and the recent burial rites for Frederick the Great at Sans Souci, there has been a trail of anniversaries of the key moments in twentieth-century German history, replete with public debate, television documentaries, and media commentaries. Most of these fiftyyear anniversaries were of a deeply troubling nature, and all of them had to do with the dark side of the German nation: 1983-the fiftieth of Hitler's rise to

You Thrive on Mistaken Identity

Abstract: Since the early 1980s Barbara Kruger's work has insistently shown female bodies bound up by sadistic violence-acts of shattering, slicing, stripping, piercing, biting, stabbing, choking, smothering-and by masochistic enslavement-being framed, pinned, or frozen in ritual poses, being or making themselves objects, especially of the gaze, fusing with or being absorbed by powerful others. And the text messages superimposed over these pictures ritually intone masochistic slogans: "We are the objects of your suave entrapments"; "We have received orders not to move"; "I am your almost nothing"; "I am your slice of life." The female masochistic identity Kruger puts on view turns out to be, however, not fixed or frozen, as in the stereotype it parodies, but multiple and shifting. Pronounced from a range of positions, including those of submission, resistance, reversal, and irony, these phrases-written on bodies-both enact and problematize female masochism: "We are unsuitable for framing," "Do I have to give up me to be loved by you?" "Use only as directed," "It's our pleasure to disgust you," articulating masochism across a space susceptible to rearrangement and to reframing. The framework within which Kruger repeats scenarios of domination and submission is one of oscillation, a charged space of movement in which identification is painstakingly worked over; it is this more than anything else that defines it as a fantasy space. Kruger's compendium of masochisms can be related to a project of feminist theory: to rethink masochism through the psychoanalytic model of fantasy itself.' A number of writers have argued that the strict gendering of sadomasochism-in which masochism is feminized through the devalued gender attributes of passivity and submission and opposed to sadistic fantasy,

Fox Movietone Follies of 1929

Abstract: "So, then, Oxford Street, you stony-hearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee: the time was come at last that I no more should pace in anguish thy neverending terraces, no more should dream and wake in captivity to the pangs of hunger. Successors, too many, to myself and Ann have doubtless since trodden in our footsteps, inheritors of our calamities: other orphans than Ann have sighed: tears have been shed by other chldren: and thou, Oxford Street, hast since, doubtless, echoed to the groans of innumerable hearts. For myself, however, the storm which I had outlived seemed to have been the pledge of a long fair-weather .. ." This passage from the Confessions of an Opium Eater immediately follows Thomas de Quincey's account of his encounter, in a nearly deserted house he had rented for lodgings, with a poor child terrorized by ghosts, suffering from cold and hunger, who would huddle up close to him for warmth and comfort at night. Then, there is the moving story of the little London prostitute, Ann, with whom Quincey, on his darkest days, would sadly walk the Oxford Street pavements, and who once may have saved him from dying of starvation with a glass of spiced port from her thin purse. Despite the appeal of the most dazzling scenes in Fox Follies, they are necessarily surpassed by two far more arresting images, which reveal that street magic-sometimes sparkling, at others somber-which creates the marvelous jewel box, velvet-lined, within which, suspected or not, lie glistening a young girl's heady tears. . . . There's the girl, pretty but too modestly dressed and plaintive, standing in front of a sumptuous shop window until the wax figures come alive in dream, drawing her to them, trying the finery on her. There's the girl who sobs beneath the falling snow, while a crowd of shady folk of all sorts stir about in flashes, with inexpressibly absurd gestures. These are both Little Match Girls straight out of children's tales, or orphans out of melodrama. There are those who don't cry: the sirens bobbing up and down in a submarine ballet along enormous algae, like the mysterious bottle-imps in majestic motion

Hand-Made Photographs and Homeless Representation

Abstract: The debate around cultural distinctions-high and low, elite and mass, cultivated and vernacular-has largely descended into unproductive exchanges between hardened, warring positions. A point has been reached where it will not be easy to recover, for purposes of dispassionate examination, what has been the key question in the art and criticism of this century. If this is to happen, patient and detailed reexamination of overlooked aspects of the issue will have to do their cumulative work.