Kitsch

Kitsch objects share a degree of the biographical similitude with the migrating body and both affect a unique intervention upon the other. This is not intended to be reductive of migrant struggle, nor should such a claim establish itself for discussions of precarity. Commonality lies between the two since both have particular orientations to the past that avoid nostalgia. Kitsch comes through appeal to retro sentimentality. This differs to nostalgia in its true sense as the painful return home. In this way, kitsch is the fissure in an order of things that is couched in continuity. Kitsch form is ascribed by intellect[1], the appearance of kitsch placed in succession[2] intensifies interlace between present and past[3]; displacement. It is defined by its empty essence and not a retort through algos . In this way kitsch is the most sophisticated form intellect attains. As part of the labour of society, it is the great accomplishment of kitsch as a signifier of vacuous tolerance; the site upon which ambiguity dwells. We might take red as an example for vessel of kitsch form. By itself does red have affective agency? On different occasions we might think this to be precisely the case, at these times the presence of red might intensify or relax tension. However it is not only one’s own intellect that delineates a contingent assemblage of red, when given over to the aggregate, the vacuous surface becomes a multiplicity for a qualitative progression; the result of which may indeed mediate one’s continued virtual participation with the renaissance in Nowa Hutta, Poland.

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[1] ‘Of the discontinuous alone does the intellect form a clear idea’ (1928: 163)

[2] Succession exists ; I am conscious of it ; it is a fact. When a physical process is going on before my eyes, my perception and my inclination have nothing to do with accelerating it or retarding it.’ (1928: 357)

[3] ‘To represent that a thing has disappeared, it is not enough to perceive a contrast between the past and the present; it is necessary to turn our back on the present, to dwell on the past and to think the contrast of the past with the present in terms of the past only, without letting the present appear in it.’ (CE:311)

Bergson: Organs and Wonkavision

I have recently finished reading Bergson’s magnum opus and Nobel prize winning Creative Evolution (1907; 1911 Eng trans). Most significantly I think the continual relevance of this text is that it provides the reader with a vocabulary of becoming.

In recent fashion, it appears for credence, philosophy be legitimated by its ability to be adequately appropriated to struggle and resistance. Previously, I have heard both arguments Bergson, 1) that he is an impotent bourgeois intellectualist that provides no handle for contemporary struggles 2) his anti-intellectualism and rejection of modern science allow us to extrapolate a philosophy of resistance from Bergson’s writings, that this arrives usually in two modes a) the Deleuzian development b) a form of parallelism between life as creative evolution and social change. A somewhat startling development of thought as indeterminism is central to the Bergsonian conception of the individual.

I want to comment briefly upon some of my own reflections that are contra to both the above positions while embracing the ideal for potential that Bergson’s system has contemporary relevance.

I am not at all adequately informed to comment upon Bergson’s intervention from the viewpoint of biology/physics or from the perspective of a broader evolutionary debate. This as Suzzanne Guerlac points out, such a reception is unlikely to have been Bergson’s intent.

I begin by noting that Bergson is not shy of repetition. It will become clear in a moment that this is not a complaint angled at Bergson’s literary style but instead is potentially an experiential tactic that illuminates Bergson’s concept of duration, while at the same time permitting Bergson’s mild mannered polemic project against certain evolutionist theories of his day (mechanism/finalism). Eventually Bergson will resolve the evolutionary debate (in the first chapter!) and offer what he calls the original impetus, which is behind us a not determined (contra to finalism indeterminism champions).

On the issue of repetition, Bergson give us the image of a kaleidoscope (which appears for the first time in Matter and Memory). The kaleidoscope is the antithesis of the cinematographic philosophy underpinning a current that runs through ancient Greek philosophy (Plato to Plotinus) to modern science. The ontological conflict Bergson invigorates falls back upon our common sense notion of the interval, or more commonly understood in a spatial understanding of time (i.e. along the line of flight we might determine a trajectory of time rather than a succession of becoming). The kaleidoscope analogy provides Bergson a scene capable of encompassing his premise of human indeterminism and his fluid position for human action. For as it is the action emanate of the body that effects change in the kaleidoscope, the displacement of colours and shapes merges with the effecting movement in the unification in duration between action and change. 

At every moment this assemblage, of which the body is centre, is a result of intuition, which, is less contingent and formulaic than intellect while at the same time superior in attention-to-life than instinct. Through action, the body and material are antecedent to the rhythm of measure; it is such a utilitarian meeting between an interaction-of-becoming across the body-object assemblage that produces creative evolution. While intellect that animates the material object, it is intuition that orients our body along such a line of action.  

Stephen Linstead in 2002 described this as ‘a quality of a shifting relationship embedded amongst other shifting relationships, affected by them, and whose quality shifts with its relevance and pervasiveness as a focal thought.’

While I might feel that I am reading Bergson’s view on change (the relation of the part to the Whole – specifically gold in Bergson’s example), I feel I am reading it at a distinct separate interval to any previous encounter with words organized around the theme of a kitschy infantile plaything. While this is true, what I fail to acknowledge in this “sense” (which Bergson alerts us to is perhaps a genealogical hangover from the accidental experiments of the ancient Greeks and the linguistic structure I have adopted i.e. adjectives/substantives/verbs) is that in reality a system of process is occurring, not least of importance is that the past while enduring melts into present. At the same time and this is perhaps Bergson’s most infamous snowclone, “in reality the body is changing at every moment”. The intension of time, in duration, within itself becoming movement as one precession, not in any linear sense but instead past or present unfold through and between the flux of the unfolding of my own body. It is in this sense we arrive at the crux of Bergson’s philosophy, a subjective experience of time.

It is thinking around a theme of organs that I sense (in duration of course) the contemporary value of Bergson’s philosophy (as culminated in CE). The unorganized, or disorder for Bergson is an illusion. That is for us and our perception it is an illusion given to us by the expectation of order. Two types of order in particular, one given to us by intellect the other by instinct. In this way Bergson convinces us, it is the absence of order in which we find disorder, that is in Nothing. At this point it is almost an exercise in formal logic that reveals to us the nothing(ness) of nothing and the becoming of nothing. The system of organs and the body, the jig of becoming they dance, and the line of action our intuition orientates intervention within the material context is Bergson’s libratory project. For me, perhaps Bergson’s most radical achievement in this flight is the productive inversion of the idiom ex nihilo nihil fit

I believe the challenge par excellence to theory to think seriously through the cotemporary implications of what Bergson describes as the trillions of reverberations that circumscribe the body and are current through the body-in-action and ubiquitous of duration. Of particular issue to this challenge is the possibility of the bodies occupation simultaneously of two discrete “spaces” or territories. Bergson’s employment of tension was circumscribed by the limits of the physics, today we are embedded in a network of flows of information and virtual action that  clearly transcends Cartesian boundaries of the subject and extension, does this increased intensity imply simultaneous material reverberation between two planes?  Perhaps this has been though out to its logical conclusion in theoretical physics, quantum theory or thermodynamics. It is my initial persuasion that to consider this seriously as fundamental to an individuals’ being, will permit the social theorist new insights around issues of migration, displacement and diasporas; specifically contexts where embeddedness is undetermined as past and present unite in one unfolding stream of consciousness; duration.

Here Bergson offers:

“The mobile flies for ever before the pursuit of science, which is concerned with mobility alone. In the smallest discernible fraction of a second, in the almost instantaneous perception of a sensible quality, there may be trillions of oscillations which repeat themselves. The permanence of a sensible quality consists in this repetition of movements, as the persistence of life consists in a series of palpitations. The primal function of perception is precisely to grasp a series of elementary changes under the form of a quality or of a simple state, by a work of condensation. The greater the power of acting bestowed upon an animal species, the more numerous, probably, are the elementary changes that its faculty of perceiving concentrates into one of its instants”

On a final note, and this is fleeting and incidental, despite a comprehensive exegesis of Greek philosophy and the short comings of modern (for Bergson) post-Galilean physics I was quietly surprised there was no retreat to Heraclitus. For those with greater knowledge on this subject perhaps this may not be so unsatisfactory, but I can help but pine for at least on expression of the 20th century process philosophers indebtedness to this ancient Greek thinker.

Absence and Presence in the Case of Flight 447

"In the symbolic order nothing exists except upon an assumed foundation of absence. Nothing exists except insofar as it does not exist.” (Lacan, 1966:313)

“If I could stick a knife in my heart, suicide right on the stage, would it be enough for your teenage lust?” Jagger & Richards - It’s only rock and roll (But I like it)

Contrary to Jagger’s claim, it’s not only rock and roll. In fact the It underscores every sphere of contemporary life, this is more evident where virtual action has come to predicate both territorialization and deterritorialization. This is easily demonstrated. In the beginning (1964), it was the Beatles who appropriate the signifier of the aeroplane as the automation of the symbolic order.  Today the narcissists’ “runway experience” is available to us all upon the condition of the appropriate orientation of our capital and desiring flows.

Flight 447 is perhaps the most illustrative example of Zizek’s recent claim that “one of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible.” Capitalism evades the Real. The Real is turbulent, an interruption, and while capitalism has often sought to appropriate the Real, (see Freidman’s disaster capitalism), the Real is incompatible with capital’s project since there is no lack in the Real.  Absence is a fundamental requirement for capital’s σύστημαιστημι (also see my earlier remarks on The Fear). Absence “creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it” (Lacan In the case of flight 447, the filler is the 228 bodies that accompanied the 200 tonnes of composite materials.  Enterprise inhabits the Symbolic order, “an open space or ‘lack’ whose operative function is not to ‘exist’ in the usual sense but to structure phantasmic attachment” (Jones & Spicer, 2005:235).

A difficulty exists to this end in that the Symbolic arrives with no readymade critical political economy. To be sure, elsewhere symbolic value/capital has receive significant attention. For the purposes here, when Freud declares there is an “economy” of libidinal energies, we must hold the discoverer of the unconscious to his word and demand an exposition of exchange proliferating between the circulation of psychic energies. In this sense our point of departure occurs where Marx identifies ‘the action of labour-power, therefore, not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above it’. While action at this stage is notable for its ambiguity, the first task of analysis therefore is to refine the encompassing ontology of this category without abandoning any aspect of social relations. 

The missing airbus A330-203 somewhere approximately 1300km from Fernando de Noronha is prescient in demonstrating for our project the importance of attending to both the affective and perceptive elements of absence. This of course correlates squarely with Bergson’s dualism real and virtual action.

Consider our opening evocation to Mick Jagger’s offering of suicide on stage, this serves to highlight a fascination between presence and death. However, as excited voyeuristic subjects, the promise of our enjoyment (in this case of Jagger’s untimely finitude) is only emitted from Jagger’s body through virtual action; that is by perception, which ‘measures our possible action upon things… The greater the body’s power of action (symbolized by a higher degree of complexity in the nervous system), the wider is the field that perception embraces’ (Bergson, 1910:57). In common terms virtuality has come to be understood as technologically mediated, this is not an unfair application of Bergson’s conception. The disappearance of one of capitalisms crowning achievements as well as facilitator envelops the relationship between virtual action and technology. In the case of flight 447, the definitive marker of the absent object is perhaps its presence across a fundamentally symbolic space, the system of images otherwise know as mediascape. Here, at the intersection between the Real and the Symbolic exists a peculiar inversion facilitated only by technology and virtual action. As noted previously capitalism finds the Real unproductive. However to fail to impress upon the virgin forest is also contra the capitalist project.

The above outlines capital’s emulation of the Real through the network of technologically mediated channels for virtual action. In this way capital completes the magic of presenting a missing object.

From this departure it would be interesting to develop a discussion of value and it’s relation to the unconscious.

ATACD @ University of Bologna, 23-24 April 2009

 

This week I visited the charming city of Bologna, Italy for the fourth colloquium in the ATACD series. Details of the speakers and the papers presented can be found here. While this was my second event in the series, I had attended the colloquium in London in 2008, the meeting in Bologna was the fourth the group has organized. 

Coming away from Italy, I’ve had time to reflect upon the theme of the colloquium which was “mobility and borders” and more specifically some of the papers.

I thank Sanjay Sharma and Nirmal Puwar for the invitation to rethink my own relationship with Coventry, and unattractive concrete buildings in general. These researchers shared with us their experiences organizing a celebration of materiality and community at the site of the cathedral in Coventry. Here I found a really fascinating exposition of the way community mobilizes the rhythm of a construct, to say more, I read into their work the fluidity inherent through the material sphere that is at once localized by the necessity of action. Ultimately each progression forces the very sociality, which. renders the concrete into a becoming, thrusts the product of movement into the translucent realm of inscription. At the very moment of inscription, the line of flight refracts, the rupture invites new investment and interpretation, simultaneous reinscription. And hence, material flows.

The difficulty of course is to resist the temptation of thinking everything in terms of your own personal research interest. However, I’ll suspend such manners. Now, when I think of memory, and borders, I am perhaps inclined to rely upon the Freudian conception of the trace. However to understand everything else Henri Bergson is so much more useful! “The Trace” of course has found inheritance in the later works of a vast number of thinkers, i.e. in French post-structuralism. Trace in this sense is favourable to thinking of borders as the trace is immaterial, like the border. However if we were pressed to identify purpose, the necessity of the trace is to circumscribe experience in a way that renders the past aetiological. This is precisely how border manages to remain antecedent to a landscape (which incorporates bodies) that is fluid. While it is not necessary that the aetiological movements of border correlate to the fluidity of the material landscape, the former dictates within a vast system the limits of action; all action in this sense is resistence, but not all acts of resistance are necessarily action.

Alice’s adventures in Bologna.

On a personal note, I read Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll during this visit to Italy, the following is my attempt at a short expression of Alice’s relationship to the cityscape of Bologna…

“Why don’t you ask abut all the graffiti here?” imposed the Cheshire cat, while  a lavish grin.

Alice paused, somewhat out of rhythm with the way the conversation had until this point progressed, she was confounded by the contrary nature of this animal, who until now had demonstrated the Heraclitian ability to refuse change in any aspect of his being, that is apart from every aspect of his form, for now he seemed quite opaque and whole, for once thought Alice.

“This must be cat’s way of being quite seriousness” Alice said out loud to herself “I had decided that the graffiti here was nothing more than the urination efforts of your feline sort” the pale girl asserted.

“But without territory, how do you know which way you are going?” replied the smug being.

“I know which way I am going because I arrive there, of course”, upon this retort Alice realised she had been tricked by the materiality of the Cheshire cat’s words, she had a sense she was admitting to some kind of teleology. She remembered seeing that word in a book of her fathers: A Teleological guide to the Carnigie Workers uprising by Charles Freidman.

“I suppose you think the only important thing is taking down the dusty old signs?” the young girl retracted with a playful naivety.

“what do you think” in staccato the animal pressed with indifference.

“well let me see, what does this one say…antifasimo*”

And upon uttering this word Alice was interrupted by a thunderous

“OFF WITH HER HEAD” a bellow from the almost impossible distance which the Queen of hearts had comfortably inhabited away from Alice.

“One has not time for reading the relics of old times, for this bigot has the birthday party of a princess to attend”.

* I have reason to believe this is the Italian word for catharsis.

m. Leicester

Fear and Trembling: Drag me to the Cinema

This blog is not intended to be a regular commentary on popular film. For this reason it is perhaps most appropriate that the first post here should deal with the issues raised during my last cinema venture.

Drag me to Hell is the recent offering from Raimi, the same director that brought us the Evil Dead series. Allow me to contextualise my critique here. My partner is away for the weekend at a family wedding. at precisely 7:00pm i eat a large portion of takeaway chips covered in hot chilli sauce. About 7:23pm I consume about 10g of mushroom, by 8:52 I am sitting alone in a theatre witnessing the most recent innocuous orange film advert featuring Emilio Estevez, and I thought he was going to “make me famous”.

The Fear, is my main topic of concern here. What is scary? Not necessarily in any sense of a genre of horror, since Raimi once again demonstrates for us that the horror genre is closer to comedy than any other. In this sense, horror falls short of dread. I seem to remember the author to which the title of this blog eludes to saying something like man always looks to the outside for happiness. This I believe to be the case for Fear. I am yet to ascertain whether as with absolute Happiness, absolute Fear is located within. However, following our first violently hilarious exchange between the films protagonist and the gypsy Other, for some curious reason I was prompted to leave my seat and explore the foyer of the cinema. visit the toilets, that’s a reasonable thing a person of sound mind might do. Already the hyperrealism of the cinema environment was inducing all kinds of playful sensory experiences. It was then I noticed the popcorn bin was in fact full of teeth, I didn’t hang around to ascertain whether they were human or not, too weird for a man of my persuasions.

It has never been formally disclosed. but the first cinema was designed on the same principles as Twycross zoo. A fact I chanced upon during polite conversation with a elderly relative I don’t care to name here. Zones are the key here to understanding the cinema as a centre for passage. There is of course the zone of personal relations, this is regulated by a series of temporary and contingent borders that materially demarcate passage; here you are expected to wait and converse with a fellow cinema goer, an exercise in rehearsing the most mundane of the system of notions. At this stage the body is antecedent to and circumscribed by the invitation sociality extends you to convene. Thus follows the zone of obscurity. This zone is nostos to pre-financial capitalist exchange. So, which of your psychic needs must you satisfy. Orality, anality, visual gratification or sadism are channels available at the expense of the bondage of minimum wage workers. Of course, here you will recall one necessarily accurate meaning of Desire since you realise your object a is rampantly quantified and standardized. The final zone is Russellian in the sense of categorizing classes. It is a zone of a zone, at the level of complicity, the zone must always circumscribes and encumber itself. To be sure, the body remains at a centre of a system of images, however there no longer remains inclination for action. For 120 minutes we outsource the labour of memory to a 20x10m projection and the illusion of a living archive.

Despite the nervous distraction of an aggregate of images which have come to think of as dread. I arrive at one tentative conclusion about place of the Fear in relation to Drag me to Hell. I am petrified. That is, becoming of stone toward the demonization of the Other that is rampant throughout this film. In a time where Disney mass produces the genre of dread which involves the rehearsal of colonialist mythologies. The re-emergence of the image of the curse casting, ill-hygienic gypsy body that capital struggles to organize through conventional means such as mortgage repayments, smacks of holocaust propaganda.