Introduction,
a Short Discussion of Research and Practice
There
is a dialectical relationship between research and practice. "Research has
always been a modality of practice, with its own creative edge;"
"creative practice stages thought [research] in innovatory ways."[1]
What
does this mean? We take research to indicate a spectrum of related activities,
but primarily it is what we could say is pure scholarship, performed within the
institution of the university, that is, by people employed as scholars and using
institutionally generated and maintained repositories of knowledge like research
libraries. A bit more abstractly, by pure scholarship we mean the decision-making
process that draws connections between otherwise disparate elements by creating
narratives, or as Deleuze might characterize it, "making something issue
from chaos."[2] These
connections, which form the basis or credibility of scholarship, how it stands
or falls, are proven by the scholarship to be inherent in the material studied,
to make sense by virtue of that connection. At the same time, scholarship is
also persistently self-analytical in its awareness of the potential for false
conclusions and the interference of subjectivity as categories of analyses are
constructed. This reflexivity extends to interrogations of the very nature of discursivity
itself, of conceptual thinking, and of language as they function in any given
project.
By
practice we mean, at least initially, the non-linguistic, non-discursive
singularity of the thing studied, the goal of the scholarly pursuit. Practice
is often understood as "art practice" insofar as art is understood in
its capacity to "make felt the ineffable,"[3]
but we can understand art and practice, in their ability to shed the
requirements so central to scholarship as we know it of participating in strict
criteria of objectivity, as being by degrees closer to the object of "study,"
of allowing themselves to suppose that they can set aside pre-formed judgments
and allow objects to appear on their own terms. Outputs for art and practice
are not, we presume, determined. They can be anything from an actual object to
a poem to an experiment in human relations. Scholarship, on the other hand, has
traditionally been confined to having research results appear in journal or
book form, rhetorically keyed to the codes of university communication and culture,
in many cases quite specialized. We can make an (anachronistic) comparison to
the activity of a cobbler making a shoe: the object of study, but also the
artistic output, is the shoe. We can assume that research and practice,
scholarship and art, have an equivalent desire to convey, in some ways to make
exist, the shoe. Yet research and scholarship stand aside, as it were, from the
shoe, while artistic practice tasks itself with actually making one, and so is
by degrees "closer" to engaging the quiddity shoe.
Clearly,
however, there is as mentioned a dialectical relationship between research and
practice, so that they're each constantly creating each other, co-composing, and
there is a range of complications we can begin to introduce into this dynamic.
For instance, how does a practitioner become aware of various tactics for
producing an aesthetic object, how do they learn their trade? Their previous
experience of that object could be said to lead to connections and categories
not unlike the narrative truths imposed by scholarship, and indeed artists and
practitioners can be assumed to have often been enabled by scholarly research
outputs. On the other hand, those scholarly research outputs cannot be
understood apart from the artistic object itself, such that the
"ineffability" of the artistic object is constitutive of the impetus
for analysis that research itself performs. The artistic object everywhere
infiltrates the "wherefore" of scholarly work (particularly in
disciplines like art criticism). In other words, the being outside language
contributes to the scholarly drive to convey something with and through
language, since that "bringing in" to discourse is required if any
knowledge about that thing is to be shared. Here we can say that (a) the
aesthetic object contains at its root a discursive safety net or demand for
being placed inside language, while (b) research at its best is going to give
voice to a radically non-discursive object, is going to be so radically
committed to communicating a non-discursive entity that it must necessarily
hold its own discursive underpinnings in question. The best artistic object
approaches discursivity, the best research output is barely recognizable as
such.
Politically,
we can associate disciplinary power,[4]
governmentality,[5]
control,[6]
the discursivity of history,[7]
knowledge as information, with the more straightforward understanding of
research. Once the object is presumed to be understood it then circulates in
the same channels as other, pre-existing objects. Hence, once the object is
presumed to be understood, it is misunderstood,
since it then exists "according to" what has come before. Global
capital has its say, and it's here that we can see how research, and artistic
practice insofar as it honors its internal drive to achieve discursivity, leads
to a reactionary shoring up of empire. We don't presume that the forces that
lead, for example, to Taylorism, where every aspect of the human personality is
quantified and guided into the service of capital, have disappeared simply
because its most extreme instances were, say, finally rejected by labor.[8]
The reliance of global capital on research-based structures of knowledge is
more intense than at any time in human history, only promising to become more
so. Contemporary neoliberal forces, summarized by ideas of knowledge that
spring directly out of the university, stand at the ready to subsume even the
most seemingly irrelevant versions of immateriality, from subtle bodily
functions to the emotional instincts of children. Research and governmentality
are, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have written, a type of "drill bit"
ceaselessly boring for new sources of life.[9]
We are in an extreme state of governmentality, of research. At the same time,
as a kind of backlash, we approach explication in any form as a sign of
deficiency. Our exit point, in both these scenarios, in this singular scenario,
is precisely to cease speaking, to become, for all intents and purposes, mute, to
become image-based. Language must close up shop, that is, practice must return
in the most radical way possible, at exactly this moment of hyperconnectivity,
to perform a re-set.
Some
of the complexity of this "re-set" is beyond the scope of this paper,
but what I would like to do is address the research/practice duality through visuality
as it functions in the work of Walter Benjamin, as it constitutes an approach
to knowledge creation that recharacterizes both scholarly research and artistic
output. I then look at the activity of a gallery space, the London-based E:vent,
as an attempt to embody the Benjaminian image. The third and last section
discusses Marlena Shaw's "Woman of the Ghetto" as another reference
point for how ideas of research and citationality work in tandem with an
emergent non-discursivity.
Visuality in
Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
"An
astoundingly rich and provocative collection of outlines, research notes, and
fragmentary commentary," writes Susan Buck-Morss[10]
of Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project.[11]
The book is also described as "just over a thousand pages of citations,
commentary, fragments and notes, with little in the way of overarching
explanatory apparatus."[12]
"Materials assembled," "reams of notes and sketches," "countless
notes and excerpts," "several hundred notes and reflections of
varying length," "a monumental fragment or ruin," a
"torso," "a mere notebook," "oppressive chunks of
quotations."[13]
These impressions constitute at least a first glance at Benjamin's single most
major work, which he called "the theater of all my struggles and all my
ideas"[14] and
worked on for over a decade, in the final years of his life. The work is both intentionally
collected—appearing all of a piece, its various sections neatly divided into
thematic categories, files or Convolutes—and
not collected, seemingly dispersed, as scattered and random as a bin of odds
and ends at a consignment shop. In this latter sense, it is incomplete, and
what is meant by "incomplete" is that the level of research at which
narrative threads, as we typically understand them, between disparate elements
are drawn has not been engaged. This lack of "explanatory apparatus"
is commonly seen as the great problem of the Arcades. We experience a collective disappointment at the project's
incompletion, at what it could have been, at the fact that it was cut short.
And
yet Benjamin himself provides us with the resources to see the work, and by extension
scholarship, research itself, otherwise. "Method of this project: literary
montage" (N1a,8).[15]
The very point of the project is
juxtaposition, a filmic cutting back and forth. The very point of the project
is precisely to not explain or make
connections, such that as we approach the Arcades
Project it makes little sense to impose standards of traditional scholarship
or even of comprehension. "I needn't say
anything. Merely show" (N1a,8). "[T]here must be no continuity"
(N7,7). Thus what we understand by "notes," which is often a notation
toward something else, for some larger purpose, is here rearranged to mean
notes as ends in themselves, and not merely as textual entities, but as
Benjamin implies by invoking "montage"—a concept that was being
developed in Soviet film theory in the 1920's as Benjamin was beginning the Arcades Project[16]—and
"showing", a textual entity that was visual. For Benjamin, the image,
visuality, is defined as and through how we experience text as notation, and
text, textuality, runs parallel to how we make connections visually. We do
better then to take the Arcades Project
as it comes to us, as a book specifically about how notation operates, how it
perhaps redefines research, and that as a radically visual process, than to line
it up with epistemologies it specifically sets out to confront.
The
image is never not also text for Benjamin, and the Arcades Project, and much else in Benjamin's oeuvre, announces an
intertextuality that would become only too relevant, even up to our own time. We
can take a cue from works like Benjamin's "Little History of
Photography," where he characterizes our experience of the photograph in
much the same way as we might experience a notation in the Arcades Project, as we "feel an irresistible compulsion to search
. . . for the tiny spark of contingency, the here and now, with which reality
has, so to speak, seared through . . . to find the inconspicuous place where,
within the suchness of that long-past minute, the future nests still
today."[17]
Compare this description with the repeated descriptions of the textual notation
that appear in the Arcades Project,
where Benjamin would like to "discover in the analysis of the small
individual moment the crystal of the total event" (N2,6), where he
describes a "telescoping of the past through the present" (N7a,3).
Finally, the construct we are most concerned with is an overlap of the
imagistic and the linguistic, in the dialectical image. "It's not that
what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light
on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in
a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is
dialectics at a standstill." And further, "only dialectical images
are genuine images . . . and the place where one encounters them is in
language" (N2a,3). Visuality and textuality are on equal, identical
planes. They both carry with them an intertextual materialism that is messianic
in that it deconstructs time, reinterprets the past as the harbinger of the
present in such a way that the telling of history becomes a radical act, a
seeing through fragmentary surfaces toward a network of connections that lay
dormant in individual material objects, which appear as images and texts.[18]
To
take one concrete example from the Arcades
Project itself, as illustration, almost at random—but one that mostly eschews
even the occasional commentary scattered throughout the Arcades Project—I'll attempt to discern how the dialectical image
functions at its root, through its purest incarnation, as citation. How are we
to read Benjamin in this way? How do we read the Arcades Project? Exactly how is the Benjaminian citation
functioning?
Each
Convolute, designated by a letter, contains subsections in outline form, such
that we then use numbers, lowercase letters, then again numbers to provide a
hierarchical structure of topics (though these are not specified). Many of
these parts contain more than one section, forming small series running
throughout any given Convolute. To take a series of what are more or less pure
citation, where nothing is "said" to connect them, let's take the M5
series, part of the M Convolute, entitled "The Flaneur" and occurring
on pages 426-427. It consists of eight entries, the first five of which are in
bold to indicate their mostly citational nature (a formatting convention added
by the editors) and the last three of which are in regular type, to indicate
their status as primarily commentary or Benjamin's own words. I'm going to
focus on just the first two entries of this series.
What
I'm engaging in here is a close reading (as part of a purportedly scholarly
paper, it should be noted), but of course my reading, anyone's
"reading" of the Arcades
Project always has the status of a reading of a reading, since the Arcades Project calls out reading as
such, since in reading it we'll forever be attempting to formulate how the
author, Benjamin, was himself reading the texts he cites. At some level, this
is how we read any text, view any image, making a more or less conscious attempt
to suss out how someone else is reading or viewing the world. Benjamin
radically foregrounds this phenomena. My question of how citation is
functioning is also the question of the text itself, the answer to which leads
into the experience of reality Benjamin is after, or what we can summarize as
"dialectics at a standstill," or the indication of how the
dialectical image in fact operates. The dialectical image is going to encompass
a number of elements, including this expanded notion of visuality.
M5,1
Brief description of misery; probably under
the bridges of the Seine. "A bohemian woman sleeps, her head tilted
forward, her empty purse between her legs. Her blouse is covered with pins that
glitter in the sun, and the few appurtenances of her household and toilette—two
brushes, an open knife, a closed tin—are so well arranged that this semblance
of order creates almost an air of intimacy, the shadow of an intérieur, around her." Marcel
Jouhandeau, Images of Paris (Paris
<1934>), p. 62.
As
with all sections of the Arcades Project,
Benjamin's own words carry their own kind of significance, as opposed to the quotations
themselves. Here he finds it necessary to characterize the following citation
as a "brief description of misery" so that "misery" is
apparently the operative thematic of this section of the Convolute—and we
therefore want to think of the flaneur, the archetype of the Benjaminian seeker
after knowledge, the Benjaminian scholar, researcher, but also artist, dreamer,
hashish addict, as particularly concerned with misery. Benjamin then
characterizes the misery as happening "under the bridges of the
Seine," so that we are in an out of the way place, typically unnoticed, a
place of darkness, the underworld, but that happens alongside the main
thoroughfare, the body of water known as the Seine, and its accouterments, the
bridges. So begins the citation, taken from a twentieth century text
contemporary to Benjamin (1934)—the bulk of Benjamin's citations are taken rather
from ninetieth-century works—by Marcel Jouhandeau entitled Images of Paris, and we immediately note the key word
"images" in the title of the book (and this is the only time this
book is cited in this section).
The
approach is set. Benjamin will now, after these introductory clauses, this
framing, make a point, say something, through the medium of a long citation of
another work. This is the decisive Benjaminian move, the holding up or putting
forward of the example, the exhibit, which constructs the history of the
arcades, within that context of the flaneur, of beyond that context Paris in
the nineteenth century, and beyond that the city and contemporary life. It is making
a case. And we must be immediately struck by the link between the bohemian and
the flaneur, by the link between the flaneur and Benjamin himself, the
researcher, the historian. We can pick up themes already present in the Arcades Project of flanerie and
dreaming, such that the sleeping bohemian becomes a perfect cipher for the
flaneur, the "empty purse between her legs" a cipher, an allegory of,
an empty womb, a barren centrality, a lack we can associate with the lack, in
the Arcades Project, of traditional
narrative structure, which might organize fragments. And we see here that the
situation of the bohemian woman—this in some sense photographic image of her as
it makes its way from the imagination of the author of the original text through
Benjamin's hands and into his own text, a making sense of a certain type of
historical artifact that is, as I'm trying to say here, the object of the Arcades Project—acts on another level as
an uncanny descriptor of the overall Benjaminian project, since just as the Arcades Project is a collection of
seemingly random concrete objects (images) where we need to intuit an order or
rationale for arrangement, so to the "appurtenances of her household and
toilette" are "so well arranged" that they create a
"semblance of order." Objects like "pins that glitter in the
sun," tiny flashes, tiny "sparks," to quote "Little History
of Photography," of light not unlike those that emanate from the
dialectical image itself. Finally we come to the section of the citation that
acts as a quantum leap or climax: the environment the bohemian woman has
created around herself, and here we are brought close to the underlying nature
of the Arcades Project, of a critique
of research and scholarly objectivity, which has "almost an air of
intimacy, the shadow of an intérieur."
One
sits back at this point, saying "ah yes, precisely, that is what my
reading of these scattered notes has produced," a centrality but an empty,
shadowy one. But how deep does that shadow go? This description of the quite
subjective nature of the Arcades Project
was we remember not written by
Benjamin himself, but literally forms part of the history of the city of Paris,
a concrete, material example that appears in another text but through which we
are given to visualize the intimate nature of the present project. Can any
historical detail function this way? We have nothing more than text to give us
actual history, and it is through a reading of this text that Benjamin brings
forward his own project, his present-tense interieur,
his "semblance of order," his household, his toilette. There is much
to be said here for how Benjamin's gaze makes use of the gaze of the cited
author, particularly taking account of the role of gender, the generative
failure of the powerless empty womb, the implied but concrete threat of the
phallic "open knife" of historical detail, but we should note how we
see history at all, the particular layered process that dispenses with the
distinction between past and present through an arrangement in a particular
space of concrete images that are simultaneously text based. This is precisely
how the dialectical image functions, as a seeing through surfaces, one that
tells the literal story of the past, or perhaps any story, but that
simultaneously, the more it is allowed to exist or is read more closely on its
own terms, in fact gives us the story of or creates the present we inhabit.
We
proceed cautiously to the next entry in the Convolute. We want to know what
could possibly be added to such an extraordinary summation, example,
performance, of not only the overall point of the Arcades Project itself but of the movement of research and history
writing, which is also a dialectics of seeing. What could it be? What could be
next? Part of me is reluctant. The reading of the Arcades Project is an extremely slow process, demanding active rearrangements
and re-readings of the particular intérieur
of its very audience, a seeing through textuality and visuality, as part of
what reading means.
M5,2
"<Baudelaire's> 'Le Beau Navire'
<The Good Ship> created quite a stir. . . . It was the cue for a whole
series of sailor songs, which seemed to have transformed the Parisians into
mariners and inspired them with dreams of boating. . . . In wealthy Venice
where luxury shines, / Where golden porticoes glimmer in the water, / Where
palaces of glorious marble reveal / Masterworks of art and treasures divine, /
I have only my gondola, / Sprightly as a bird / That darts and flies at its
ease, / Skimming the surface of the waters." H. Gourdon Genouillac, Les Refrains de la rue, de 1830 à 1870
(Paris, 1879), pp. 21–22.
Yet
I do proceed. The next entry picks up the positioning (again, non-citational,
deliberately introduced by Benjamin) in the previous entry of the bohemian
woman specifically next to the Seine, a body of water on which, in this
instance, in this entry, we might find sailors, which here all of Paris, the
city as a whole, has become, has dreamed itself into, and this through a text
of the central figure (for the Arcades
Project) of Baudelaire. There is a collective or mass citational practice
or reading here—echoing our own status as readers—that, once again, mirrors the
movement of the Arcades Project as a
whole. We begin with a text, or in fact a mental image presented through a
text, in this case Baudelaire’s "The Good Ship," and build another
life. Here we are presented with no extra-citational text of Benjamin's own
words and have pure quotation: everything is in quotes except for the
completely straightforward bibliographic information at the end of the entry.
But what does this mean? We're aware of that status of the quotation but as
readers of the Arcades Project we
read the words in a very particular way, as if they were written by Benjamin.
We should take note here that this is how Benjamin approaches his object, the scholarly
object of research, as I mentioned earlier. It is sheer indirection but it is
an indirection that produces a singular intimacy with the historic object, such
that this indirection, this citational method, is the primary way to approach
that object, to approach the citational nature of existence itself. Benjaminian
visuality can thus be seen as citational, or a situation where anything that is
presented to us is shot through with what it is not, what came before it and
what it leads or points to, what follows it.
But
here, how does the citation operate? How is the dialectical image formed? We
look here at one simple transfer point in the montage, we make a link here, for
Benjamin as it were, between two juxtaposed elements, doing our own telling,
our own reading. Elements of continuity we have to draw on are the overarching Arcades Project itself as a history of
the nineteenth century, the history of Paris, of the city, and within that the
Flaneur section specifically, which relates to the city dweller, and by extension
the researcher and historian, Benjamin himself, seen through the cipher of
Baudelaire, as well as the reader of the Arcades
Project. In this section, this city dweller is collectivized, meaning that
the effect of the cited text from Baudelaire courses through the city as a
whole, resulting in multiple versions of the original text of the "The
Good Ship." The section, the quote, the citation itself includes an
extended quotation of, presumably, one of the knock offs or derivative
creations, a quote that seamlessly becomes part of the main text, since there
are no quotation marks, such that this history of Paris, if we read the quote
closely, rightly, with accuracy, is first of all given by the quote from
Genbouillac to be in opposition to luxury and masterworks and once more defined
in terms similar to how the Arcades
Project itself might be understood or seen, as, like the gondola, a
"sprightly" "skimming the surface" of the images reflected
in the water. Once more this version of history and historiography consists of
a text published in and about the nineteenth century, a text that itself uses
another text, Baudelaire’s poem, to convey its own point about how history
develops as a kind of reading, in this case a history that sets itself up in
opposition to bourgeois luxury and aesthetics through another reading.
Thus,
through these two sections the Arcades
Project puts its material forward visually as the raw data of the citations
themselves, using the quotes as exhibits. There is a concrete force to every
section of the Arcades Project, where
each is like an element in a collection of objects, a presentation that is
purely material. But—and we might say this impacts our understanding of the
nature of data itself—the presentation does not stop there, so that the
internal makeup of each section, its character as the data or building blocks
of historical narrative, is defined by an ongoing re-evaluation of its own
status as a concrete object, that is, functioning as a window through which not
only a construction of the past appears but also a story about the construction
of that past. What's extraordinary about the Arcades Project is that Benjamin does this work of re-evaluation
through the language of the quotes themselves, making of Benjaminian
citation—where we find traces of information theory and textuality studies—not
simply a diversion or deflection from one thing to another, but something that
includes at its root an act of looking, a dialectics of seeing, from one thing into another, a dialectics that is
formative of contemporary experience itself. This is that status of the
historical detail and the research object, this is the event of their coming to
light, of their being perceived or seen into, visuality as such a construction that
contains them, within and through which their "presentation" occurs.
E:vent
Gallery, London, 2003-2011 (eventgallery.org.uk)
Though
not setting itself up specifically as a Benjaminian project, we can view the
work done by the E:vent gallery as a citational practice, perhaps modeling a
future not only for gallery activity but for explorations of research and
practice working their way through the dialectical image. E:vent's mission
statement is not extensive, but it includes an express commitment (evidenced by
the gallery's name) to
exploit
the potential of the experimental event, focusing on the role of agency and
action to find alternative and progressive ways of communicating art. E:vent’s
fundamental politics are founded on the microscopic; relating to algorithmic
operations; emergent orders; and random encounters.
We can
associate each of the gallery's major themes with the operation of Benjaminian
citation. For instance, "ways of communicating art" is how the
gallery situates itself. It will use the event and the potential contained
therein to arrive at, to see into, new modalities of our experience of art. Effectively,
the gallery would like to set up or posit, just as does a Benjaminian quote,
entry points into a larger story, a history of its own making, these entry
points being the events themselves. We can see each event as a data point,
arranged or set up deliberately, through "agency and action," but
reliant on its own micro-specificity to the degree that an improvisatory
non-interference, allowing in an element of chance, with its basic character
and outcomes is a key component of how it contributes to the larger construct.
The encounters are "random" or "emergent" at the same time
as they are "progressive." Theirs is a politics of removal and the
absence of intervention, just as the Arcades
Project (at its best, I would say) is a refusal to put forward any type of
continuity or explicit connection between its monadalogical fragments. At the
same time as the gallery keeps front and center the key role of agency in
formulating how we understand, create, and experience art, there is a
self-reflexive discovery process similar to that invoked by the Benjaminian
fragment, and this becomes our best access to making connections, telling a
story, creating a history.
But
does this framework play out? What does it look like in practice? Events that
seem representative of what E:vent set out to do might be the following
selections, from the approximately 120 events hosted over the course of its
operation from 2003 to 2011. E:vent has archived brief descriptions of its
events on its website, which I will quote from, letting them in some sense form
their own citational network, and use as the basis for my own discussion.
Winter2Space3. Friday, November 28, 2003
Winter2Space3 is
a large-scale video installation accompanied by live improvised music by
Off-Shoots classical quintet. The video is set in a snow storm, large
(computer generated, 3D) snowflakes swirl against a night sky. As the viewer
moves in front of the screen a motion detector sends a signal to specially
developed software prompting the snow flakes to sway and change direction as if
by a gust of wind. These movements form an open-ended score for the
Off-Shoots music. Off-Shoots are positioned upstairs in the bar of the
gallery where a CCTV monitor transmits the action from the gallery. The
music is then piped back into the gallery space creating a looping circuit of
sound and image that is continuously responding and improvising.
We thus track
each event by what is put in place and what is left to chance. Here no single
element is the primary focus of the event but what we could call a third
construct that results from the other experiences. Hence, the audience is
subsumed within the snowflake video installation, a work in its own right
created first of all by what we could say are programmers (designing the algorithm)
and videographers (the general design and output), and secondly by the
audience's own movements, which cause the snowflakes to change direction
"as if by a gust of wind." Video games with advanced response to
player physicality had of course been developing for years at this point in
2003, and this work could be seen as a precursor to app technologies that would
incorporate ever more subtle biological functions, such as bodily movement,
into their operation, into their more and more realistic reproduction of the
natural world. What I'd like to do here however is point out what is set up as
the secondary element of the piece, the addition of sound through the
effectively off-site performance (since it could have happened anywhere and did
not necessarily need to be in the gallery) of the Off-Shoots quintet, which was
given the mandate to improvisatorially respond to the movements of the gallery
goers, the musical group in many ways attempting to behave exactly in parallel
to the snowflake algorithm, a comparison drawn then between human and computer
response. If we can assume here, as seems likely, that the classical quintet
was not part of the original conception of the video installation, and that the
combination of the two was conceived by the gallery itself, and indeed made
into the primary rationale for the entire event, then the gallery can be said
to be citing, through the random experiences of its visitors, a
"mediauric"[19]
entity that is sparked by the double randomness of seeing snowflakes respond to
their bodies and, on top of that, hearing the quintet respond as well. One
imagines that visitors would fairly quickly realize their own "agency,"
begin their own "action" or improvisation with the algorithm and the
quintet, performing a role in creating responses and in defining the overall
piece. Thus the historical thread created here by the gallery, the primary
citation, is a story of digitally enhanced public agency, one that includes
secondary citations of visual images and sound images we ourselves have a role
in creating but that are, so to speak, further citations of the natural world
and traditional (the "classical" nature of the quintet) modes of representation.
Looking
through the archive of events at or sponsored by E:vent gallery, which
admittedly is limited to the short paragraphs of descriptive text on their
website, it seems clear that it is events like the one just described, where
there is evidence of the gallery's own agency, that most fully correspond to or
highlight the gallery's mission statement and where we see the gallery functioning
both as more than simply a venue to highlight or host someone's work and as
moving through a singular citationality characteristic of the Benjaminian
dialectical image.
location, location, location. Saturday 1 May 2004 until Sunday 16
May 2004. Peter Gomes. Curated by Colm Lally, Brian Reed
Artist
Pete Gomes makes large-scale drawings using chalk and a Global Positioning
System (GPS). location, location,
location is Gomes latest work, a drawing spanning approximately 1km sq
around Bethnal Green. The work augments the existing physical urban
structures with markings and measurements that follow globally referenced
longitudes and latitudes.
Just as in
some sense the gallery was displaced by the essentially contingent location of
the Off-Shoots classical quintet in Winter2Space3,
here again in one of the first events the gallery hosted the location of the gallery
itself becomes redundant in an overtly stated, through the work's title,
interrogation of place. In this work, history functions through the dialectical
image in the way a citational network of geographical coordinates is revealed
to be both digitally, invisibly, and seemingly eternally present, as indeed a
fact of nature, through the GPS software, and is only made visible through
human intervention, even as the human touch has the ephemerality of chalk and
requires the artist (or actant[20])
to in some sense prostrate himself to mark out the coordinate text on the city
street or surface. Again, and as with Winter2Space3,
there is a kind of double citation taking place, one that in this case is
sponsored by the gallery but in such a way that that sponsorship reveals the
gallery's agency to the degree that the gallery's redundant presence is made
manifest, and the spark between these double or overlapping citations
constitutes the object of the event. A natural universe of geographic
coordinates is cited, but only insofar as the human, contingent, and ephemeral can
act as a conduit. We can say here that visuality is text-based and ephemeral, a
momentary public witnessing of almost primitive personal fealty to an invisible
scientific truth to which our otherwise impersonal digital devices have much
more direct access. We need to repeat the word "location" because its
meaning only arrives multiply, mirroring the iterative nature of lived
experience.
I
want to conclude this consideration of the E:vent gallery and how it
interrogates or works with a model of Benjaminian visuality and the dialectical
image by looking at one of its later events, an event that illustrates a more
developed sense of community involvement and citationality and that situates the
gallery as perhaps the sin qua non for the engagement of the dialectical image,
and hence as the arbiter of discourses of research and artistic practice that
point toward a contemporary relevance, a relevance that is determinative of a
more liberatory framework of new knowledges.
NARCISSUS
TRANCE: Saturday 26 June 2010 until Sunday 8 August 2010.
Ben Washington, International Necronautical Society, Joe Watling, Karl O'Connor & Mick Harris, Mark Titchner, Rose Kallal & Mark Beasley, Sara VanDerBeek, Sayshun Jay, Takeshi Murata, Wade Guyton. Curated by Shama Khanna, Paul Purgas
“The
present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole
field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of
integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day… Because inherent in the artists
creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental
change. It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused
by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his
work to prepare the ground for it.”
Marshall
McLuhan, March 1969
The
exhibition explores McLuhan’s premise that the technological dynamics of the
present are concealed from human perception via an innate protective mechanism
he defined as the Narcissus Trance. A process that anaesthetizes the nervous
system in order to allow technological media to merge with the mind. During the
advent of consumer electronics, McLuhan warned that the new dawning age of
instantaneity would produce an accelerated phase of transition that would lead
ultimately to ‘pain and identity loss’ in humanity as the nervous system
struggled to compensate for an ever increasing rate of change. He believed the
only hope for the future given this predicament was to break the feedback loop
imposed by the trance, and instead access technological media through a state
of active conscious awareness. Within his ambition he proposed artists to be
the instigators of this mass shift in perception.
Reading McLuhan forty years later, when human
DNA is now being shorthanded as ‘software’ and the internet is deemed as
important as electricity, his warning still rings clear. Although many of the
artist practices put forward by the exhibition make use of technology on a
habitual basis, their work is a result of processes that short circuit the
defined functionality of its purpose as a simple tool. It is logical that
several of the artists adopt the hypnotic formalisms of the trance itself,
almost folding the mechanism back on itself, using the media to push the viewer
further inside as if the only way out might be through. In a world where
creative impulses have been eroded by the convenience of our relationship with
endless appliances and applications, the artists return to atavistic and
heightened perceptual currencies to affect a ‘tuning out’ of this self-fulfilling loop.
Of course this
exhibit frames itself as purely citational in nature, even referencing a 1969 text
from Marshall McLuhan and asking that its artists/practitioners/actants put
forward a reading of McLuhan. While presumably these practitioners were already
doing something like a reading of McLuhan with their work, which is why they
were "curated" or invited to participate in this show, we can note
how research, defined as a reading of or exploration of McLuhan's text, and the
practice, defined as the artists’ work, dialectically overlap to create a
relationship to past, present, and future, operating according to parameters of
the dialectical image, and hence visuality, and the Benjaminian citation. For
here a product of our reading of McLuhan as he theorizes the Narcissus Trance,
our lingering over this text from a previous century, over this citation,
imaginatively transports us back to the context out of which it emerged, to the
degree that we honor its singularity and read it on its own terms. But this is
exactly the moment, the moment of our deepest and closest reading, that we are,
so to speak, sparked into a renewed or re-arranged experience of present time,
since as we comprehend the text we are breaking the trance or gaining awareness
of the technological environment that saturates us. To put this in terms of the
visual, we can say that the "seeing" of McLuhan's text is neither
more nor less that "seeing through" that text, that research object, "back"
into our own present. Visuality is citational in Benjamin in just this way, citation
just as much visual as it is textual.
Now,
what this particular show at E:vent does, a move that gallery work has a particular
claim to, is position this type of reading or seeing as artistic, as
non-interpretive, as practice-based. As McLuhan's writing describes, the work
of the artist alone is what redeems technological society and saves it from
control, it provides us with a "visible present" that is also
future-based and technologically coherent since it outlines a way humanity and
technology can coexist. The gallery is what honors or brings forward artistic
work (as much as this can be broadly defined as one likes), breaking the
Narcissus Trance as much as any individual artwork might do on its own. What
this show at E:vent does is, through citationality and arranging a McLuhanian
framework, operate on multiple levels of group dynamics, curatorial
specificity, the analysis of technology, and close reading to point toward and
enact a contemporary realization of a human personality that is not determined
by outside forces, that is a present day version of a liberation schematized in
1969 by McLuhan.
Thus
it is possible to trace the citational dialectical image through the gallery's
programming. What this shows us about the functioning of visuality is that it
is as much about the intellect as the eyes, and with that understanding to
build from theoretically, the world becomes a very different place. Why? We can
return to Benjamin's descriptions of the flaneur, whose experience is of a
"visuality" that combines each of these dynamics, where anything seen
is seen through, in a kind of dream or drug-induced state. "We know that,
in the course of flanerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the
landscape and the present moment." This visual dialectic is very much what
our research and our practice are ultimately based in.
Marlena
Shaw's "Woman of the Ghetto"
Finally
I want to discuss how we can productively locate the visuality under discussion
here within the operation of a fairly well-known song, "Woman of the
Ghetto" (1969), by Marlena Shaw. It makes sense here to take what might
appear as a detour because part of the assumptions underlying this application
of the dialectical image and citationality is that, as with the flaneur, it is
precisely the urban environmental construct that gives the richest play to
citationality. The flaneur, the arcades, exist in a city, in fact defining the
architectural environment and the human experience of that environment at once.
The urban is what visuality comes out of and leads back into.
What
we have in the Shaw song (see that attached lyrics in the Appendix, but more
importantly the version of the song currently available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_BeN75XgfQ),
is first and foremost an encounter with the urban, with the city, which is
given as central to the experience of blackness. The song also dictates the
establishment, through the incantation or repetition of its first refrain,
"ga ga ging ga ga ging, la la la la"), of a primitive or guttural
substrate that re-surfaces explicitly, nearly unbearably, at moments of intense
emotion in the song, while forming the emotional stage or environment on which
the song plays out. We remember it, we wait for it to come back. It is always
there, a seemingly originary chaos out of which the speaker, the singer, the
artist, emerges or is born, just as she is born "in a ghetto," out of
which her identity is formed but back into which that identity always threatens
to dissipate and return. We know and feel that the "g" of the ghetto
is the "g" of "ga, ga, ging" and from the start the song
merges the two.
Outside
of these basic features of the characterization of the contemporary ghetto, or
we might say the provision of the image of black experience, there are three
primary elements of the song, the address to the legislator, the reference to
the middle passage, and the prostitution scene ("ga ga ging"
re-surfacing throughout). I'd like to focus on the middle passage reference,
which goes as follows:
Puts me
in the mind of
Come and
cross the water in a boat
Chained,
tied, together
They said,
no, no, they're really not men, and women
Just
chain 'em up, tie 'em up, chain 'em up, tie 'em up
Chain 'em
up, tie 'em up, work, work, work
There's
where the movement came from
Shaw draws a
comparison between the experience of the woman in the ghetto under the
treatment of the legislator (a white male, it may be assumed) and the
experience of black Africans as they were placed in the hold of a ship and
brought across the Atlantic as slaves. This is a purely citational moment that
operates in exactly the same manner as the Benjaminian citation or dialectical
image, its access to the past, and in fact parallels a key moment in Jewish
thought, the reliving of the historical experience of bondage, echoing
Benjamin's own ties to a whole body of Jewish thought. In any case, we
recognize here a dialectics of seeing and feeling that situates the present as
a working through of the givens of past experience, as in fact an ongoing
repositioning of that experience within the temporal flow, or emotional
progress, of the song, by virtue of which progress it is finally atemporal, in
some sense looking backward. The achievement of this song is its saying "I
am a woman," but its image, the visuality we are given to comprehend or
experience, is of a strength of affirmation that arises from accessing a
chaotic emotional substrate—an "anarchic epistemology of passage"[21]—that
works as a denial of humanness, "they're really not men, and women."
The citation here functions as a portal into an ongoing oppressiveness or
regime of control that, rather than closing down independent action, resistance
and affirmation, in fact initiates it, gives birth to it. The woman is born
there as much as she is born in any ghetto, citation in this context proving a
key tactic of this liberatory movement, here seen as deeply constitutive of the
personal and the political at one and the same time. "That's where the
movement came from."
At stake
is precisely what it is that the thought of middle passage, that remaining in
the supposedly viewless confines of the hold, makes it possible to imagine and
improvise. It’s not just that there are flights of fantasy in the ship’s hold
but also that such fantasy calls into more refined and brutal existence every
regulatory structure through which we identify the modernity of the world. The
problem has to do, in the end, with the exhaustive deprivations—in their
relation to the revolutionary forces—that mark the lived experience of
statelessness, which is, before its exclusionary imposition, a general and
inalienable sociopoetic insurgency. In other words, the operative distinction
is [ . . . ] the relationship between the state, however it is conceived and
instantiated, and statelessness. How do we inhabit and move in statelessness?
How is statelessness not only an object but also a place of study?[22]
To pick up
from Fred Moten's text, we can note throughout how improvisatory Shaw's song
is, which is precisely how it identifies its own contemporaneity through the
image or dream of the brutal regime of the slave ship, the hold. It is my
contention that Shaw's chaotic substrate is a place of statelessness, a
"general and inalienable sociopoetic insurgency," and that the
Benjaminian citation or dialectical image, how visuality itself, is precisely
the answer to Moten's final question of the merger of object and place of
study.
Conclusion
The
co-composition of research and practice tie these threads together: the
openness of a research that facilitates the appearance of its object to such a
degree that it displaces itself to give priority to that object, that it almost
betrays itself as it gives birth to alternate discursivities; the rigor of a
citational practice that, as a research model, operates as a threshold beyond
which new spatio-temporal implications of text and image circulate; the non-institutional
work of designating a locale for artistic activity that defines itself as a
citational intervention into our relation to technology, history, and the
natural world; and finally, perhaps one of the strongest statements of all of
these, a sociopolitical cry that surfaces through an arrangement of an
anachronological re-living of a defining historical crisis, interpreting that
crisis as, proving it to be, its "movement," a kind of citational
research that is constituted by a nondiscursivity.
Every
time we address research we address a decision we know will be fateful for the
object we care about enough to give our attention to in the first place, an
object we would like to discuss, communicate, bring into a discursivity that
is, finally, our own, and not, insofar as it is our own, part of any
discursivity that might characterize the object in the first place. Our
decision then relates to an overlap, at the point at which the singularity of
what we are doing, writing, attempting to achieve, comes into contact with the
singularity of what we are attempting to discuss, the object of attention. We
decide where these singularities overlap, the "event" of their coming
into contact, and give sanction to whatever then emerges.[23]
What
I hope this paper exemplifies are various inroads into this complexity, this
dynamic of knowledge creation and how it operates both textually and visually,
how it is engaged by Benjamin and how citationality and the dialectical image
further these concerns as they manifest through gallery work and more
individual (as much as it references a collectivity) constructions like Shaw's
"Woman of the Ghetto." Since finally, and this seems to be precisely
what Benjamin points to with the Arcades
Project, as subjects of global capital we construct histories and research
outputs that are constantly in the position of saying too much, of standing in
the way of past, present, and future all at once, reinscribing the operative
assumptions of forces already at work. In the dialectic of research and
practice we see the pendulum swing all the way toward practice as our most
viable response to control, but just as with the dialectical image and
citation's "seeing through" its immediate object, we textually and
visually experience as well the (re)emergence of discursivities that challenge
and trouble a whole range of untenable positions.
Appendix
Marlena
Shaw, "Woman of the Ghetto"
I was born, raised in a ghetto
I was born and raised in a ghetto
I'm a woman, of the ghetto
Won't you listen, won't you listen to me,
legislator
How do you raise your kids in a ghetto
How do you raise your kids in a ghetto
Do you feed one child and starve another
Won't you tell me, legislator
Enthralled through
I know that my eyes ain't blue
But you see I'm a woman
Of the ghetto
I'm proud, free
Black, that is me
But I'm a woman of the ghetto
How does your heart feel late at night
How does your heart feel late at night
Does it beat with shame, or does it beat with
pride
Won't you tell me, legislator
Puts me in the mind of
Come and cross the water in a boat
Chained, tied, together
They said, no, no, they're really not man,
and women
Just chain 'em up, tie 'em up, chain 'em up,
tie 'em up
Chain 'em up, tie 'em up, work, work, work
There's where the movement came from
Say no, no
My children learned just the same as yours
As long as nobody tries to close the door
They cry with pain when the knife cuts deep
They even close their eyes when they wanna
sleep
Now peace, you say
Is all that you ask
But self-respect is a separate task
You may be sitting up there
In your ivory tower
60 stories tall
I know that you may have checked out at least
one ghetto
But I wonder have you lived there at all
Places like watts,
Ah, Harlem, tell me
Chicago, ah tell me
Washington got some too
I have been up on the mountains, I
And I'm free at last
I say I'm free at last
I've seen the children dying
And I've been one of the mothers who was
crying
I am a woman
I am a woman
I am a woman, yes I
I said that I am
I mean that I am
I'm the woman, I'm the woman
I'm the woman of the ghetto
Strong, true
A woman
A woman
You can walk through the streets of the
ghetto at night
Whole lotta pretty, some ugly sites
Along comes the sleek limousine
Say hey baby I got ten
Look at me, I'm clean
So she takes a little dope
What the hell everybody got to go
I got a baby
I got a baby
I got a baby I want to feed
And I'm not really giving it all
Up, just a little ten-cent piece or two
Ah, the black woman
But I ain't gonna raise your babies no more
I got a few on my own
I wanna keep strolling
I say I am a woman
I am
I
I am
I am
Remember me
I'm the one who had your babies, I
I am
I am
I am a woman
Of the ghetto
Woman
I'm a woman, yeah yeah yeah
Just a woman
Bibliography
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———. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
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[1] Erin Manning and Brian Massumi,
"Toward a Process Seed Bank: What Research-Creation Can Do." Journal of the New Media Caucus
(2015).
http://median.newmediacaucus.org/research-creation-explorations/toward-a-process-seed-bank-what-research-creation-can-do/
[2] Even as that chaos itself "does not exist" apart from the
narrative, or "screen," that makes something emerge from it. Gilles
Deleuze, "What Is an Event?" From The
Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: The
University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
[3] Manning and Massumi, pg. 2.
[4] See, among other works by Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheriday, New York: Vintage, 1995.
[5] A concept found in Foucault be see
also Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Studies. Wivenhoe: Minor
Compositions, 2013.
[6] See for example Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000.
[7] See for example Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography,
Reaktion Books, 1983.
[8] See for example Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the
Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005.
[9] See Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, pg. 54.
[10] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989.
[11] I'll refer throughout to Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project,
translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA, and London:
Harvard University Press, 1999.
[12] Peter Buse, et al, Benjamin's Arcades: An unGuided Tour. Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 2005.
[13] Quotations taken from the Translators'
Foreword to the Arcades, as well as
Rolf Tiedemann's "Dialectics at a Standstill."
[14] Arcades
Project, x.
[15] Section numbers refer to the Convolutes
section of the Arcades Project.
[16] Most basically, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_montage_theory
[17] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability and
Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, pg.
276.
[18] Tiedemann and Buck-Morse are very
clear on these points.
[19] See Samuel Weber's Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. This in fact is a complex term, but
appropriately here. It indicates "auratic flashes and shadows that are not
just produced and reproduced by the media but which are themselves the media, since they come to pass in places that
are literally inter-mediary" (106). Also quoted in Laura Chiesa, Space as Storyteller: Spatial Jumps in
Architecture, Critical Theory, and Literature. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2016.
[20] See, for example, Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to
Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
[21] Fred Moten, consent not to be a single being, Durham: Duke University Press,
forthcoming.
[22] Ibid.
[23] See Manning and Massumi for the
"event" as it relates to research-creation.
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