Saturday, February 01, 2003

 
Although I read this a while ago, I find this increasingly important to remember:

"It is not just that some are treated as humans and others are dehumanized, it is rather that dehumanization is the condition for the production of the human, in which a self-defined Western civilization seeks to define itself over and against a population understood as definitionally illegitimate. In this sense, we can say there is no human without state violence, and no violence against the state that does not risk dehumanization in the sight of the law.--Judith Butler's lecture, as reported in IRWaG's newsletter
posted by Open Mouth 12:17 PM

 
On 01/26/03:

Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989).

Methodology
Criticism NOT for historicism, not for placing in a continuum, a cultural pantheon of influences and disciples BUT to evoke a history with which to waken audience from the dream of reality (34, also Proust and Freud) in a combination of sociohistorical and metaphysical approaches

Writing without prognosis, without judgments, without theory, without conclusions; that is, with a certain ambivalence, without guarantee concerning the future, so as to recognize all present possibilitiesà an antiauthoritarian approach to pedagogy

Phenomena “read” as speech in which a “historically transient truth (and the truth of historical transiency) is expressed concretely” (27) à history and ideas made “legible within perceived experience” by visual analysis (27)

Obligated to the revolution, to develop the contemporary and political in my own thinking, NOT to mask them in outmoded forms from the tradition of culture

Truth embedded in my own historical experience and addressed to my peersà where is my most relevant material?

Influences as “distant thunder,” not driving my work

Beware of modern myths projected onto history’s screen

Limit examination to necessary, irretrievable social past, NOT arbitrary biography—objective expressions, NOT subjective impressions

Every work of history starts from awakening from history to face the forgotten life

Objects of study: motifs, historical figures, social types, cultural objects to link with historical phenomena

Concrete representation of history, to make visible ideas already embedded within objects

History without a totalizing frame, not completely coherent nor non-contradictory as a whole an alternative only in idea—as a utopian promise, not material politics
BUT ground utopian thinking in actual historical conditions

Collective fantasy in commodities: “Commodities here as elsewhere (like religious symbols in an earlier era) store the fantasy energy for social transformation in reified form” (29).

Not a yes/no question, but of how long

Nazi project: to recapture past as myth, as pseudo-history

WB’s project: to present history to demythify the present

Scaffolding?

“Too soon to tell:” Ho Chi Minh and WB’s meta-story of suicide (37)

public space entering unconsciousness and imagination

Industrial objects as traces of living history, to be read from surviving objectsà “fossils of natural history”

“ ‘progress’ as the fetishization of modern temporality, which is an endless repetition of the ‘new’ as the ‘always-the-same’ ” (56)

art as social, not art historical, objectà to reveal social conditions with artwork

turn paradoxes into dialectical arguments

Selected Works Cited
E. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 1919
Walter Benjamin, “Naples”—selling the past to tourists
WB, “Ring of Saturn,” at beginning of Konvolut G
WB, “Paris, Capital…” version 1, 1935 (esp. for section titles and divisions)
Non-fiction Radio references in note 63 (389)
J.F. Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type (in which passengen become Gallerias)


posted by Open Mouth 12:32 AM

Sunday, January 26, 2003

 
¡°This willingness continually to revise one¡¯s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.¡±
--Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999): 7.

Scarry¡¯s philosophy tears down prejudices against beauty, remakes it for a non-innocent appreciation. Her language, clear and precise, draws no heat from me.


posted by Open Mouth 6:35 PM