Readings for Week One:
This is an article by WJT Mitchell, who came up with the idea of Visual Culture as a field of study.
This is the intro to the previous edition of Mirzoeff’s reader. It has an alternative definition of what Visual Culture is as a field of study.
This is a reflection by bell hooks on the work of Paolo Freire, the radical educator. In it she discusses the strengths and shortcomings of his thinking on pedagogy. It is from Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1994.)
And to give you an idea where Freire was coming from, here is a chapter from his famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Continuum, 2005.)
READING FOR WEEK 2
For week two I am assigning four short article excerpts. In addition to the reading I made a short slideshow intro to the work of Karl Marx that I recommend you check out unless you’re already familiar with the labor theory of value. In addition I am putting in prompts for each article, that you should come ready to address in class.
Roland Barthes “Excerpt from the Rhetoric of the Image.” I put the slides from January 26 which deal in part with Semiotics in the Lecture section of this website to remind you of the different types of signs. I also put a link below to a longer explanation of semiology.
Raymond Williams Keywords:
What makes his way of defining a word different from that of a dictionary?
What does his way of thinking about language and words offer us that more traditional approaches do not?
Karl Marx The Fetishism of the Commodity – Commodity Fetishism is a key concept of Marx’s.
Questions: Why? What do you think makes this idea significant outside of the field of economics? Think about the relationship between this concept and the concept of ideology.
W.E.B. Dubois Double Consciousness
Questions: One key line is “How does it feel to be a problem?” What is he suggesting here? Think about Rene Decarte’s idea that “I think therefore I am.” How does Dubois suggest that the Black subject has to address that notion?
QUESTIONS FOR BARTHES:
- Barthes tells us that he is going to ‘skim’ off the various different messages that are in the spaghetti ad.
- He talks about denotative and connotative meanings. What are those?
- He talks about a “code.” Which of the three types of sign is that?
- He separates signifier from signified, sometimes finding more than one meaning in a particular sign. He points to four specific signs in the image. What are they?
- He also mentions a “pointer.” What type of sign is that?
- He mentions several “messages” emerging. The third one is tautological, he says, “a message without a code.” What might that mean?
- Finally he speculates on how this packages of multiple messages works to create its effect. Think about that combo. Do you see what he’s going for?
Raymond Williams Keywords.
Questions:
What makes his way of defining a word different from that of a dictionary?
What does his way of thinking about language and words offer us that more traditional approaches do not?
Guy Deborde – The Society as Spectacle
Question: In the reading notes I suggest that Deborde has identified a society where an industrial society with its ‘hard goods’ has been replaced with one where information itself is a commodity. With that in mind, and thinking that he is writing in the Post WW2 period which saw the rise of television and mass advertising, how do you understand his idea of a relationship between ‘reality and the image?’
Here is a link to Semiotics for Beginners. We went over this in lecture, but here is a much fuller explanation of the ‘science of signs.’ If you see something in the Barthes piece you don’t get, take a look here.
http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/
And here is a short slideshow that attempts to explain some of Marx’s basic concepts:
READING FOR WEEK 3
For week three I am assigning two articles,The article by Walter Benjamin is one that you may have read already but it is important both in itself and as a link to John Berger’s thinking. We will discuss “The Moment of Cubism” by John Berger. You will also find a link below to John Berger talking about art in a BBC show. It is a good intro to his thinking as well as to Walter Benjamin. I also include a brief intro to Benjamin and Berger. Be ready to answer questions relating to the Berger article.
There are some notes here about Benjamin and Berger, which include a link to Berger’s famous television program “Ways of Seeing”
Walter Benjamin “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Reading the Moment of Cubism
In this essay Berger characterizes cubism, a short-lived artistic movement, lasting some seven years before the outbreak of World War I as “a revolutionary change in the history of art.” It takes the whole essay to get to what that change includes. What makes Cubism revolutionary for Berger?
Berger carefully places cubism in a larger geo-political context. Then he uses Cubist poetry, Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire, to link that moment to its artistic expression. The moment before WW1 was a moment of globalization with certain parallels to ours and explicit differences that Berger alludes to. What are the unique aspects of that moment socially and politically for humanity, according to Berger?
He goes on to suggest that Cubism “marked a break in the history of art comparable to that of the Renaissance in relation to medieval art.” (145) As you read, ask yourself whether you feel he is correct. How does he back up his argument?
Berger elegantly suggests the way a painting was understood in the Renaissance, and in the later Mannerist (Baroque) period. He then goes on to look at 19th century painters and the role of personal experience (the “impression” that gives this work its name) in relation to nature. We are also at a moment where we prize personal artistic expression. What might make our moment different? Relatable?
John Berger “The Moment of Cubism”
If you want to read more about some of the ideas about changes in human sense perception of space and perspective that we discussed in the seminar you should take a look at the seminal thinking of Erwin Panofsky: Erwin Panofsky – Perspective as Symbolic Form
READING FOR WEEK 4
Last week we looked at Cubism. John Berger suggests that one useful metaphor for Cubist art is that it acts as a diagram.
“The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram: the diagram being a visible, symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearances: but these too will be treated symbolically as signs, not as imitations or re-creations.” (150)
What are those processes? How can art represent them? Berger goes on to say it like this:
The role of Cubism, “…re-created the syntax of art so that it could accommodate modern experience. The proposition that a work of art is a new object and not simply the expression of its subject, the structuring of a picture to admit the coexistence of different modes of space and time, the inclusion in a work of art of extraneous objects, the dislocation of forms to reveal movement and change, the combining of hitherto separate and distinct media, the diagrammatic use of appearances – these were the revolutionary innovations of Cubism.” (160)
This week we’re going to look at mapping. Maps are diagrams, symbolic representations not just of geography, but of political jurisdictions, demographics, terrain, vegetation, and more. They can serve multiple purposes, whether those of power or those of resistance. And they offer multiple vectors in the same context. This week we are reading two articles that use mapping to explore forces and spaces.
Reading Teddy Cruz
“Mapping Non-conformity: Post-Bubble Urban Strategies (in The Visual Culture Reader, p.32) and on the web here:
Last week we looked at how people at different times and places perceive the world on a cosmological and spacial level. As New Yorkers, a lot of what we see is the city. The visual aspect of urban life is defined by a mix of buildings, streets, commerce, parks, etc. Some of this is planned, and some isn’t. Teddy Cruz seeks to redefine the role of the architect and city planner, moving away from a strictly ‘top-down’ approach, to one that acknowledges the conflicts between rich and poor economies, between the artificial political divisions created by city zoning and international borders on the one hand, and the needs of human survival and creativity on the other.
As you read Cruz’s article, think how his redefining of his practice as an architect allows him to see “invisible” forces and find spaces for creativity and intelligence where others see squalor and chaos. Think also about how his search for new forms of sociality –and for ways of representing them — can coincide with the goals of documentary filmmakers and other artists. And of course, look at the way he organizes information, for instance the rings or bands of different types of land use on both sides of the Mexico-US border.
Here (as ‘additional reading’) is an article by Teddy Cruz entitled “Tijuana Case Study.” It will give you a further idea of his thinking:
And here is a link to an interview:
https://www.politico.com/video/2015/06/how-teddy-cruz-is-reimagining-the-american-dream-000285
Ariella Azoulay
“The (In)human Spacial Condition” in The Visual Culture Reader, p.15.
And here:
Ariella Azoulay is an Israeli documentary filmmaker, photo critic, and curator. Her essay reflects a curious inversion of architecture; she uses photo dossiers and architectural drawings to detail the different forms of destruction and spacial control the the Israeli Defense Forces deploy against the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Eyal Weizman has dubbed this kind of work “forensic architecture.” Look at how Azoulay analyzes three different kinds of control of space and the movement through it. Also worth noting how how she develops on the idea of the spectacle, in this case, of the disruption of public space.
For more on Azoulay, see:
http://cargocollective.com/ariellaAzoulay
READING FOR WEEK 5
Art and Technology
One place to start is with what technology is. (The question of what art is, we address, if not answer, elsewhere in the course.)
That’s important because in one way, it’s not clear where Art and Technology diverged. An art used to mean a skill. And techne is a classical Greek concept that refers to making or doing.
With that in mind we can read Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology.
A very different take comes from Marshall McLuhan. We’ll look at one of his easiest reads, The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan draws from systems thinking, seeing technology particularly media technologies, as complex extensions of the human sensorium, and hence, sort of like an external nervous system for humanity, asking us to reverse field and ground.
One reason Art and Technology are seen as distinct, even oppositional, emerges in the computer era in an ideological approach to technologies, especially emerging media and communications technologies.
One influencial article first emerged on nettime, a legendary listserve of internet critique created in 1995. Barbrook and Cameron’s “The Californian Ideology” pinpoints the way that an idea of technology masks a set of economic and social relations.
Other Reading:
C.P. Snow “The Two Cultures” This 1959 essay by British novelist C.P. Snow charts a growing divide between the arts and humanities on one side, and science, engineering and technology on the other.
Vilem Flusser “Into the Universe of Technical Images” This 1985 book outlines of the history of communications technology as one of increasing (and problematic) abstraction. You can access JSTOR through the Hunter Library website.
Flusser, Vilém, and Nancy Ann Roth. Into the Universe of Technical Images. NED-New edition, vol. 32, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttttcq8. Accessed 2 Feb. 2023.
Check out Leonardo, a group dedicated to linking art, science and technology.
READING FOR WEEK 6
For Week 6 we are shifting to a discussion of colonialism and its legacy in the field of representation. We are watching a film and reading an article about how it works. The article is “Raoul Peck’s Lumumba and Lumumba: La mort du prophèt: On Cultural Amnesia. and Historical Erasure.” As Franz Fanon said in The Wretched of the Earth (1961):
Colonization is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and
emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of
perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts,
disfigures and destroys it.
Where up until now we have looked more at how seeing is a form of control, in a colonialist context we find a space of obliteration. In 1991 Haitian director Raoul Peck released a documentary, “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet” focused on the African anti-colonial leader from the Congo who led his country as it freed itself from Belgian rule in 1960, only to be assassinated a few months later. The article by Burlin Barr lays out the approaches that make Peck’s film a profound investigation of how colonialism (and post-colonialism) create spaces of historical amnesia, and how Peck’s work uses an approach that drops us into those complex spaces.
Lumumba: Death of a Prophet
password: viscult
Reading Burlin Barr on Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of a Prophet
This article compares two films by Raoul Peck on the same topic, a documentary from 1991, and a feature narrative from 2000. Barr gives a careful reading of how Peck’s documentary uses a a variety of approaches to attack the amnesia and historical erasure that are the legacies of colonial and post-colonial rule.
I would suggest that you watch the film first, or at least watch part of it, and form your own sense of Peck’s filmmaking. Then read the article and see how his insight compare with your own. Be prepared to speak to the following issues:
In the section “The Museum Scene: Containing the Historical subject,” Barr quotes Michel de Certeau, the author of The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), saying, “Modern Western history essentially begins with a differentiation between the present and the past.” How can we understand this rupture? Think who gets to represent the now, and who the then. How does Peck, according to Barr, disrupt that “comfortable” reading of history? Does your viewing of the film back that up?
One scene in the film is actually set in a museum. Does the placement of African history and culture in a “Natural History” museum have any relevance in the US?
Barr also suggests that Lumumba’s assassination continued after his death. How do you understand that second “assassination?”
In the section “Political Aesthetics,” Barr sees several tactics, the first is one of de-location. The second is that the camera is an actor, perhaps even a witness. And thirdly, the voice of the film is not one of authority. (p.99). Thinking through the film, do you believe Barr is correct? Where do you see examples in the film that prove or disprove him?
On page 100 Barr says, “It is not so much about who Lumumba was but how Lumumba was and is shaped, how he is referenced, how he is rediscovered.” What backs up his claim?
On page 102, under the heading “Interweaving the Personal, the Political, and the Historical,” Barr looks carefully at the opening of the film. Please look carefully at that opening yourself, and see where you can find this interweaving. Ask yourself how it works, and what it is “braided together,” as Manthia Diawara, suggests.
Starting on page 109, Barr looks at Peck’s fiction film Lumumba (2000). You don’t need to read that section. However, it is highly instructional to take a look at the film itself, which is available on Kanopy with a Hunter library card.
Peck on Peck
Here is a short piece from Raoul Peck: Stolen Images where Peck contextualizes the making of the documentary.
Additional Reading: This is a link to Stuart Hall’s article “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990). This is not required reading, but you may find it useful.
READINGS FOR WEEK 7
This week we are looking at the Philippines, a country conquered by the US in a more or less forgotten (in the USA) but brutal war at the turn of the 20th century. There are two articles and a film to watch. Plus some very short films from the early days of cinema.
Nick Deocampo’s Article “Imperialist Fictions: The Filipino in the Imperialist Imaginary”:
And this from Mark Twain
Twain To The Person Sitting in Darkness
And here is a link to Kidlat Tahimik’s film Perfumed Nightmare (1977) about village life in the post-colonial Philippines in the shadow of NASA. The password is “viscult.”
EDISON SHORT FILMS
Nick Deocampo’s article references a series of short films that were produced by Thomas Edison in 1899. As you watch the films, think how you might understand his claim that the camera takes on “an imperial gaze.” He talks about the “construction of subjects supportive of war.” And think how these films are from a time before the discourse of cinema had split into separate areas including “fiction” and “documentary.”
Shooting Captured Insurgents
August 5, 1898 (0:24)
https://criticalcommons.org/view?m=NaaFRTXL5
Capture of Trenches at Candaba
June 5, 1899
https://criticalcommons.org/view?m=S55M4Ssxg
Filipinos Retreat from Trenches
June 5, 1899
https://criticalcommons.org/view?m=N8qgyK7un
Admiral Dewey Taking Leave of Washington Committee on the U.S. Cruiser “Olympia”
October 2, 1899
https://criticalcommons.org/view?m=cfc7yaHue
ADDITIONAL READING FOR WEEK 7 (not required)
The final chapter of Frederick Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic, is devoted to an analysis of Kidlat Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare. He mentions the film’s “crucial move from imperialism as outright political domination and gunboat power to imperialism as cultural domination in a far more contemporary media sense.”
And another more personal view of Tahimik from the Philippines:
READING FOR WEEK EIGHT
The article, by Terry Smith looks again at mapping and details several different ways that mapping offers control in the context of Austrialia’s colonization. The author also links the mapping to related efforts in landscape painting, which ties in to our previous discussion of early Dutch maps and related paintings. Look at how he compares those practices to the aboriginal Australian mapping practices where the “map” offers a completely different way of understanding the world and the human place in it.
And Tarek Bouraque is kindly making his film Time Machine (2020) available to us. We spoke in the context of Nick Deocampo’s article about how European imperialism places the rest of the world’s peoples in a kind of mythic past, on the other side of a divide from the modern world. As you watch Tarek’s film, think about how he develops a counter-strategy that re-animates alternative histories, and how the counter-flows of tourism and migration he depicts depend on the “imaginaries” those histories link to.
password: timemachine123
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People Linda Tuwahi Smith (London: Zed Books, 2012)
Reading Decolonizing Methodologies
For this week we’re moving more from looking at colonialism to the active stance of ‘de-colonization.’ Linda Tuhiwai Smith asks to rethink our basic assumptions about research and the nature of Western science as we do so.
As she says, “Decolonization is a process that engages with imperialism and colonialism at multiple levels. For researchers, one of those levels is concerned with having a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values which inform research practices.”
As she points out imperialism produces both an ideology and a kind of imagination (what we have called an ‘imaginary’ or a future imaginary. Hence her call for oppressed peoples to ‘decolonize their minds.’
Smith suggests that a key part of that decolonization process is letting go of several assumptions about ‘history.’ Look at this part carefully and ask yourself which of her ideas strike you either as problematic or intriguing. Be prepared to address these ideas in class.
Smith mentions Hegel. In his Philosophy of History he lays out an idea of history as progress toward freedom and self-actualization through pre-civilization through classical societies such as Greece and Rome, then through empires such as China to modern societies such as the early 19th century Germany he writes from and in, which for him represent the highest form of human thought and freedom.
In earlier discussions we looked at how colonialism sets the colonized world outside of time, marking it as ‘primitive’ and locked into a kind of vague past for eternity. Think about when you look at Smith’s sense of what the task of reclaiming history is all about. She doesn’t mention Foucault, but he is one thinker who makes the direct link between history, power, and the trauma of erasure.
READING FOR WEEK 9
The article “De Margin and De Centre” was written by Isaac Julien and Cobena Mercer for Screen, a British magazine of cinema and theory. In it they look at the politics of representation of race and point up some complex ideas about how identity emerges in films, particularly documentary, as well as critiquing the field of cinema studies. Isaac Julien’s work includes Looking for Langston (1989). He is one of the founders of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective (1993), created to highlight Black culture in the UK.
Looking for Langston (1989) password is “viscult”
Julien and Mercer discuss “Word is Out” a 1978 film by the Mariposa Film Group; the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identity made by gay filmmakers, the film had a huge impact when it was released on public television.
The group made a trailer for the re-release of the film thirty years later.
ADRIAN PIPER
Adrian Piper is a key figure in American conceptual art. She had a major retrospective at MOMA in 2016: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3924?
Yinka Shonibare MBE is a British-Nigerian artist living in the United Kingdom. His work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalization.
Here is an interview with him about a recent project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5ZFBM3eP6Y
And here is a link to a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/yinka_shonibare_mbe/
Jack Halberstam “Queer Faces: Photography and Subcultural Lives”
Halberstam is a gender and queer theorist and author who teaches at Columbia.
MORE ON LACAN
Lacan was a psychiatrist who re-theorized Freudian psychology using a structuralist linguistic approach. For Lacan, the Real exists, but as we grow up and start using language to describe the world, we basically get caught up in a symbolic universe without access to the Real. His theories have had a lot of play in the world of Cinema Studies. A good intro to Lacan can be found here:
https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandevelop.html
I also include a very short piece written by Lacan from the 2nd edition of the Mirzoeff book.
And here’s a short video that looks at Lacan’s ideas about identity and the mirror phase of development:
READING FOR WEEK 10
This week we are moving on to look at how we understand the complex relationships between the body and visuality, both in terms of seeing/not seeing, and being seen/being unseen. We will be reading two articles:
Georgina Kleege “Blindness and Visual Culture”
Amelia Jones “The Body And/In Representation” (p.363)
The two articles move us into another section of our seminar. As Mirzoeff notes in his intro, W.T.J. Mitchell’s article we looked at the beginning of the term put out a challenge to “Visual” culture, that it must include a meditation on blindness.
This brings us to Kleege whose article offers us a complex journey through the links between sightedness and blindness. She spends a fair amount of time with Descartes, and his “hypothetical blindman.” The relevant, and very short, section of Descartes’ writing is actually also in our book, and worth reading as well.
The Amelia Jones article follows up on some of the themes that emerged last week about the image and the self or subject, as well as ideas from our discussion from Seminar 3 about cosmogeny and perspective. Here is what Mirzoeff says about her article:
The art historian Amelia Jones asks: “Who sees? Who is a picture?” Noting that all imaging in post-Renaissance Euro-American culture has been perceived as the “manifestation of a human subject,” Jones examines “the complex inter-connectedness of visual representation and concepts of the self.” She accomplishes this across a remarkable range of materials from Renaissance perspective to poststructuralist philosophy via Nietzsche and Heidegger. She suggests that “the body extends into and is understood as an image-but an image understood itself, reciprocally, as embodied.” Her project centers on artists that explore this tension directly. Her first example is a video installation by the artist Pipilotti Rist called Sip My Ocean (1996). Literally and metaphorically immersive, this piece mixes images of the artist floating in a blue fluid, while singing a song. Jones offers us a technical psychoanalytic reading, building on her earlier analysis of Joan Copjec and Jacques Lacan and then she says: “If I could have Pipilotti Rist, if I could be Pipilotti Rist, I would be simultaneously completely free … and completely situated.” Jones makes a surprising turn and compares this immersive experience to the Catholic doctrine of trans-substantiation, in which the communion wafer becomes the body of Christ (hoc est corpus meum, in the traditional Latin liturgy). Here the signifier achieves complete equivalence with the signified, a gesture she sees as being performed by Mel Gibson’s controversial film The Passion of the Christ (2003), which claimed to represent the “true” Christ. In each case it is “never enough-the tendency of the body when rendered representationally through technologies of visual imaging to exceed oppositional models of signification.” Following Lev Manovich, Jones allows for the possibility that digital and computer-aided media might work this relationship differently “without disavowing the inexorable gap that haunts the human relationship to the world of things.”
In her piece Jones mentions another key article from the history of cinema studies, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) included as ‘additional reading’.
Also worth experiencing is Teju Cole’s essay on Caravaggio:
READING FOR WEEK 11
VISUAL CULTURE SEMINAR • READING FOR WEEK 11
We are watching Rea Tajiri’s 1991 documentary History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, as well as reading two articles this week, Anne Friedberg “The Mobilized and Virtual Gaze in Modernity” and Marita Sturken “History and Memory’”
Tajiri’s film asks complex questions about how we learn about history, and how we can represent history to others. Look carefully at the strategies she uses. How does she handle interviews? How does she deal with historical ‘facts?’ How does she portray the archival?
Anne Friedberg’s article contemplates new human possibilities for seeing the world that emerged in the second half of the 19th century, opened up by a broad combination of factors, including both a new kind of city with ‘rapid’ transit, tall buildings, electric lighting, signage, etc. that invited people to look at its spectacles (spectacles including new forms such as the panorama, the diorama, etc., while offering at the same time new forms of surveillance and control using visuality.
Many of the new forms of being and seeing are embedded in our own experiences, particularly in a city like New York. Think about how the cities we know today retain the possibilities for being a “flaneuse” and how modern surveillance relates to the ideas of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.
At the same time that the modern city arose in the late 19th century, new forms of recording imagery emerged, and just as importantly, ways of recording sound. As Susan Sontag noted in Regarding the Pain of Others, throughout most of history people thought of history in relation to language, speech and story (oral history). But today, if asked, people tend to think of historical moments in terms of images.
Marita Sturken’s article specifically examines the links between personal experience and the larger collective memories of a society. She looks in particular at how audiovisual records, e.g. video, insert themselves into the social circuits where collective understandings are created. She deploys a term from Freud, that of the ‘screen memory’ to suggest that the links between the personal and the historically sayable are traumatic ones.
Marita Sturken “The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions”
Anne Friedberg: The Mobilized and Virtual Gaze in Modernity
READING FOR WEEK 12
We are reading two articles this week. One is Sumathi Ramaswamy “Maps, Mother/Goddesses and Martyrdom in Modern India” (Mirzoeff, p. 428) that looks at the production of national identity in the origins of Modern India,and the other is a section from Arnold Benedict’s Imagined Communities, a chapter that looks at how the collapse of pre-modern worldviews created a kind of vacuum that the nation-state could fill.
Imagined Communities Chap. 2
Anand Patwardan War and Peace
Patwardan is one of India’s leading documentary filmmakers. This is a segment of his 2002 epic. The first half hour will give you an update on how Hindu mythology and high tech weaponry form a potent catalyst for Indian nationalism. Pass is ‘viscult’
This week we are looking at the production of the modern nation state, both at how the imagined past of a nation is created and how very modern aspects of a state (like nuclear weapons) can be linked to that past.
With this in mind, please take a look at the Benedict Arnold essay and be able to speak to the following issues: Look carefully at how he identifies the emergence into modernity as linked to the end of a world of large faith-based communities. He is one of the first thinkers to identify an ‘imaginary’, in this case a ‘national imaginary.’ Look also at how he understands the human subjective experience of time, and how that changes with the arrival of the nation-state in the modern era. And then look at how he understands the role of literature, specifically the novel in book form and how he sees in relation to the production of national consciousness.
Then use this approach in relation to the production of an image of ‘Mother India” and think through for yourself what kind of approach to nationalism it might encourage. Think about parallels in terms of modern nationalisms, both in the US and elsewhere.
And finally, take a look at the Anand Patwardan film. Try watch the first half hour, up to the BJP rally at around 31 minutes. Of course, you are free to watch the whole thing (which is actually only the first half of the film.) Think about how the filmmaker situates himself both in terms of the history of India, and in terms of the people and communities he interacts with. What kind of history is he producing? How does it differ from the kind discussed in the Ramaswamy article? What does he think the state should ask of citizens, and not ask, for instance?
PRODUCING NATIONALISM
This is a short Op Ed piece from the New York Times by the documentary filmmaker Tom Hurwitz:
READING FOR WEEK 13
We are reading Allan Sekula “Dismantling Modernism”
And Hal Foster “The Artist as Ethnographer“.
Alan Sekula was one of a group of artists coming out of UC San Diego to challenge the nature of documentary photography that also included Martha Rosler and Fred Lanidier.
One of his most important works is Fish Story, which looks at the invisible and visible aspects of modern marine trade. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/164247
If you are interested in the work of Huillet-Straub, mentioned in the reading, I put some info on the Artists page of this site: https://wordpress.com/page/imavisualculture2019.home.blog/149
Foster is an art critic, associated with the influential magazine of critical art theory October. Foster’s criticism focuses on the role of the avant-garde within postmodernism; in 1983, he edited The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, a seminal text in postmodernism and art. This essay is from his 1996 Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century.
READING FOR WEEK 14
Based on the schedule we are only doing presentations on May 11. Therefore, the reading for this week goes under the category of (un-required) additional reading:
We are reading Brian Massumi “On the Superiority of the Analog” (Mirzoeff, p. 637) and Faye Ginsburg’s article “Rethinking the Digital Age” (Mirzoeff, p. 605) Brian Massumi is the translator of Deleuze and Guattari’s 1000 Plateaus, and Capitalism and Schizophrenia. He has developed ideas based on Deleuze in a series of works, including his Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002) that this essay comes from. Along with thinkers like Eve Sedgewick, he is associated with the development of Affect Theory.
Reading Massumi
When you read anything by Brian Massumi you are entering a strange universe. It is the one we live in, but thought about in a way that is more or less the opposite of the way we usually think about it. Rather thinking about things, his approach asks us to think about forces – everything is a verb, not a noun.
Massumi became known as the translator of two important works by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychiatrist Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. They in turn build from a minor trend in philosophy that includes Henri Bergson. Bergson was a philosopher of forces and movement. He saw everything that way. For example, he noted that everything in the universe is always in motion, and that if you move anything, it has the effect of changing the relationship between everything in the entire universe, albeit in a way that might be immeasurably small. Bergson was one of the earliest theorists of cinema, noting the paradox that the motion in a motion picture isn’t motion at all, but a series of static images. He went on to say that in fact, we don’t really perceive motion at all, but rather assume it from seeing things in different positions. This seems weird, but you have to read him – the proofs are hard to refute.
Deleuze wrote two books about Cinema where he developed Bergson’s ideas to create a theory of cinema. He suggests that films create a type of special image that is bound up with action and/or thought (the crystal image of time). One of the ways he does this is by granting agency to non-human forces, in this case, to a movie camera. So in Vertov’s famous Man with a Movie Camera, it is the camera that creates vectors emerging from human thought and action, redirecting them back, allowing for a new type of triangulation of human thought. The idea of non-human agency is a tough one, but this again derives from the idea that forces are more important than things per se.
The article we’re reading “On the Superiority of the Analog” comes from a book entitled Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. One of the other things that develops in this Deleuzian universe is that forces are felt, and that feelings are accompanied by affect, akin to feelings although not quite the same thing. This is another area where Deleuze’s thinking has been highly influential in the arts, especially in cinema studies, under the rubric of Affect Theory. It is worth remembering that in general we are taught to separate thoughts from feelings, the rational from the emotional. For Deleuze that is a real misunderstanding of the way we are.
An early example from Deleuze is a bird singing. The bird at dawn moves around its territory and sings to mark where its boundaries lie. We can hear the song and derive affect from it, the music is beautiful, the bird sounds cheeky, energetic or whatever. But the key is in the dynamics; the bird uses positionality and song as it expresses itself and builds a kind of musical force field that defines its turf.
An example that Massumi uses in another chapter of Parables for the Virtual is a game of soccer. The game has a set of rules that organize how the forces work. The game is centered around the ball, which becomes a vector of those forces, and hence has a kind of agency.
The ball is the subject of the play. To be more precise, the subject of the play is the displacements of the ball and the continual modifications of the field of potential those displacements effect. The ball, as a thing, is the object-marker of the subject; its sign. Like the goal and the ground, the ball as a substantial term doubles the subject of the play, which itself is invisible and nonsubstantial, the catalysis-point of a force-field, a charge-point of potential. (73)
So the ball is both a thing and a vector of forces. And we watch the game exactly because even though some force applications have predictable results, the outcome of play is always opening up new possibilities. These possibilities relate to the category that our reading starts with: The Virtual. The virtual links to the potential of any thing, the point beyond which is it becoming. At this point I am going to put in another paragraph from the introduction to Parables.
Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are in-folded and sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life). The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites co-exist, coalesce, and connect: where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt – albeit reduced and contained. (30)
All of this is a real headscratcher. One way that I begin to understand this is how it links to what happens when you meditate. In meditation you try to ‘be in the moment’ and let go of thinking about the past (memory activity) as well as worrying or planning for the future. The trick is that you can be in the moment, maybe, but it is very hard to let go of the apparatus that ties us into a timeline and admit that this moment is the only moment and that you can live in it but only realize you’ve experienced it when its gone. What you try for in meditation is exactly “an awareness that is bigger than thinking.”
Faye Ginsburg’s article looks at indigenous media production.
See Inuit Broadcasting: http://inuitbroadcasting.ca
One indigenous American artist and filmmaker who is exhibiting in New York currently is Sky Hopinka. His work contemplates dislocation, language and cultural survival.
Here is a link: http://www.skyhopinka.com/visions-of-an-island
Here is an article about Hopinka’s work by IMAer Jason Fox:
https://filmquarterly.org/2020/01/04/can-documentary-make-space/
Also worth taking a look at are Ojibwa artists Adam and Zach Khalil. See: http://www.inaatese.com
Visual Culture Seminar 2023 