Thursday, September 11, 2003

 
I found the first "art history" paper I've ever written, a singular event to have happened while at RISD. The TA's comments? "A+, Excellent (that was underlined), a pleasure to read." It wasn't anything special: long on description, short on analysis. Interestingly, it was a mixed-media piece by Carrie Mae Weems, A Place for Him, a Place for Her . More interestingly, I was already fixated on gender, on language, on the stories that art can evoke, if not narrate. I believe I was only 16.

From Weems:

"A woman is like a an apricot, eighteen days and she is out of season."
"A man is like the hands of a clock, he points in all directions."
posted by Open Mouth 6:04 PM

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

 
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003): 102-103.

Much like an essay I wrote two years ago, Sontag urges:

"The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers--seen close-up on the television screen--and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent--if not an inappropriate--response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and muderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same / map as their suffering, and may--in ways we might prefer not to imagine--be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark."
posted by Open Mouth 10:33 PM

 
Before I leave New York, I promised that I would read Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to all that,” her essay about being young in New York, so young as to be seduced by the city’s promise of possibilities. She was only to stay six months but left after eight years. New York gets to you like that, where all of a sudden you wonder where all your time went. Those parties seem less important, the opportunities less accessible, the competitive energy draining rather than invigorating. Waking up to a big deflated nothing, it doesn’t seem as glamorous anymore.
posted by Open Mouth 11:35 AM

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

 
Cornelius Cardew: “Everyone’s failing; our entire experience is this side of perfection.”
posted by Open Mouth 11:34 AM

 
Doris Sommer, “Resistant Texts and Incompetent Readers,” Poetics Today 15:4 (Winter 1994): 523-551.

A text does not provide transcendental access to the subject, the speaker, or the writer, as the position of each circumscribes knowledge. Some texts resist complete comprehension and/or universal intelligibility intentionally, to reposition and even protest the reader in an area of limited access.

Since for Sommer, “texts constitute readers through the seductive education that makes us social subjects” (547), her “modest” goal of “incompetence” respects the distances and refusals of the text, so as to delineate the asymmetrical positions of the strange reader and the primary text. Such a strategy means to instruct readers in the respectful use of distance rather than elucidate or interest, yet it must “produce desire in order to restrain or frustrate it” (529). How else “to cast doubt on our capacity to/ know, without allowing such incapacity to float into the comfortingly unmanageable mists of ambiguity” (534-35)? Indeed, our interest in knowing may even be unrequited, non-mutual, declined.

Such reluctance or silence on the part of a text may be read in the epistemological sense but Sommer insists on the urgency of also an ethical sense: we cannot know but also, and moreover, we ought not to know. Sommer’s concerns rest on the all too facile assumption that understanding translates into identification, which becomes replacement. She questions whether knowledge is necessarily liberating (542) and for whom?

Sommer attempts to describe the need to read responsibly, without an attempt for “total assimilation” and identification by the reader of the text, which risks homogenizing specific, autonomous differences (543). “The will to understand the Other is therefore the ultimate violence. It is appropriation in the guise of an embrace. Desire for knowledge is also desire for power” (543, from Adorno).
posted by Open Mouth 2:27 AM

Monday, September 08, 2003

 
George Steiner, 1975: “Like murderous Cordelia, children know that silence can destroy another human being. Or like Kafka they remember that several have survived the songs of the Sirens, but none their silence” (35).


posted by Open Mouth 10:37 PM

Sunday, September 07, 2003

 
Treasures from Outdated Notes

Mauss and Bourdieu both talk about body in image and body v. image

Lifted from my thesis notes is a quote--“Where there is pleasure, there is agency. Freedom, on the other hand, is a rather more elusive commodity”—of whose provenance I have no idea.

“The phantasmagoria of the flaneur: to read from faces the profession, the ancestry, the character” (429 of WB’s Arcades Project). This explains the allure of old portrait photographs.

“Empathy is an interpersonal skill based on identification with [and internalization of] another person’s pain” vs. “Compassion is also an interpersonal skill…through [which] we can appreciate another’s pain but it is not based on identification…. We can hold the experience of being simultaneously present and detached.”

“Legitimate survivial and safety strategies employed by victims (such as resistance, non-compliance, and dishonesty) may conflict with recovery strategies.”
posted by Open Mouth 1:33 PM