Like a scene from a movie (repeat)

Meteorite-like object falls in Latvia

Readings for session six

Please note that the readings for session six are the following two texts by Guy Debord, replacing the Futurist Manifesto.

Détournement as Negation and Prelude (1959) http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/3.detourn.htm

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988) http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html

joyce on facts

Re all the facts and judicial processes we've been discussing, this passage from Finnegans Wake came to mind:

Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible where his adjugers are semmingly freak threes but his judicandees plainly minus two. Nevertheless Madam's Toshowus waxes largely more lifeliked (entrance, one kudos; exits, free) and our notional gullery is now completely complacent, an exegious monument, aerily perennious.

So much going on here: deed-poll becomes leg-pull, Horace's line Exegi monumentum aere perennius ('I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze') becomes a gutted shell (another crypt?). Earlier in the book we're told:

'in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightiness that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls'

notice the riff on Scheherazade: in lieu of pure fact/truth, we have endless narrative, at stake in which is a woman's life: if she stops narrating, she gets the chop!

we are connected through...and through

Ken Loach's piece in 11'09"01 September 11

I saw this when it came out in 2002. IMDB

Interview with Alfredo Jaar from December 2008

http://www.euroalter.com/2008/interview-with-alfredo-jaar/

It was like a scene from a movie!

"Taken together, the energy crisis and the ecological mise-en-scène are themselves a disaster movie, in the same style (and with the same value) as those that currently comprise the golden days of Hollywood. It is useless to laboriously interpret these films in terms of their relation to an 'objective' social crisis or even to an 'objective' phantasm of disaster. It is in another sense that it must be said that it is the social itself that, in contemporary discourse, is organised along the lines of a disaster-movie script."

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation (Sheila Faria Glaser, trans.)

link to PM talking about climate catastrophe

mind map from 12.10.09

Reading and Catastrophe

Here's an article on reading and catastrophe I found in the latest issue of Geist, a Canadian literary magazine. A bit sentimental but good read.

http://www.geist.com/opinion/reading-time-catastrophes

Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice Series, n. 16. 1994-96

Eurydice, Bracha Ettinger

Bracha Ettinger was the artist/theorist/psychoanalyst I mentioned in class, and there is a good section on her work in a book by the art historian/cultural analyst Griselda Pollock, 'Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, space and the archive' (Routeledge, 2007), which is in itself eerily relevant to lots of what we seem to be talking about in class.

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is central to Ettinger's work, she posits a distinction between an 'Orphic' and a 'Matrixial' gaze in the art-viewing experience: as we look back (in time), like Orpheus looked behind him in the myth, we consign Eurydice (the viewed subject) to objectivity, abandoned at the mouth of Hell. Ettinger's series entitled 'Eurydice' (1994-8) uses photographs (sometimes of her mother, for example as a young woman in Lodz in 1937-8), which she photocopies, interrupting the copying process so the photocopic dust does not fix to the paper. Crucial to her theory (the bit I forgot) of ''reconnaissance'', a word which the artist splits up into its constituent parts (re-co-naissance), a 'co-re-birthing' of subjectivity, Ettinger then uses tiny horizontal brush strokes of coloured paint to 'join up' the gaps in the dust, to build a a membrane between the image looking out, and the gaze of the viewer. Pollock says it better: "colour in its vibration creates space, and the space it creates becomes an affective threshold that reaches out to embrace the viewer in a thickening of what lies between viewer and image, now and then/m, that binds seer and seen, world and subject, image and psyche.''

The Matrixial gaze (as an alternative to the Orphic aggression of looking as possessing), is an idea which is linked to Levinas' idea of 'matrixial painting', and to say it with Pollock once again, it is related to a way of looking in which "our unsighted eyes become what she [Ettinger] calls 'erotic aerials' of the psyche.''

If I'm clever enough I'll post some images from the Eurydice series, so get your Matrixial glasses at the ready...