Reinserted following brief dawdle down the Rhine, temporary Schnitzelmanie
&c, largely unimpaired. As an import (forgot to buy sausages) I grabbed
some Jahrbuch 2000, littered with the recent among Deutsche Lyrik, some of
which seems at-first-glance-garbagey, some perhaps not -- don't have the
book to hand but may post some names perhaps interesting, if listites find
themselves wondering. Wished to reply to this, from Chris:
"I suppose what I must have meant by this, in relation to the paradox of
artifice we've mentioned, is something about how difficult it is (I'd
suggest) to activate alienation strategies in film currently. Most of the
tonal / structural / diegetic toggles that might be used are now,
effectively, not just familiar tropes but actual phonemes of cinematic
language. Those elements and sleights which most insist on artificiality
in recent cinema - aggressive discontinuity, scratch-style jump-cutting,
self-referentiality - serve not to disrupt but to extend the scope of the
experience: and as such would probably have more in common with Artaud
than Brecht."
This is on the button for me. The leap into poesy from here requires
little faith, surely the same crisis of superabundant defamiliarizers is a
rash of ours, that the possibility of instructive alienation has been
bracketted by an -intrinsically festive- tendency to luxuriate --
Mandeville flits across mental halfmap -- in styles of language evidently
intended to disrupt apprehension? So that this evident intent has become
rabbity? Similar experience I feel with much current installation
art: the circuit of apprehension supposedly democratized results in what
I'd call a synthetic aura, the final gratification always something to
which we rather revert than aspire. Felt this in Cologne, muttering among
ironized rubbish-tips and race-issues heaped up haphazardly, surfaces
polished so far you might eat your breakfast off them. Synthetic
aura being then the default outcome of apprehension not mediated
otherwise than by parallel suppositions, not into dialectic (ah,
dialectic) but a kind of bad ping-pong / they nearly all live in
NY. Get over Hegel's D by -not being interesting enough to warrant it-.
I prefer on this list to say negative things. Of course there is a way to
blow the circuit: invent your own parallel suppositions. E.g., this
language does not free me from the minor oppressions of an overbearing
author who tells me what to think -- instead, its glazed
here-and-thereness and putative taintlessness is actually supremely
oppressive, since it -forces me to suppose that my reaction to it is a
free one- and -forces me to suppose that I am myself creating the work
through active particpation as reader-, when I know very well that (A) it
isn't (B) it's not just ME who does this, it is not THE READER (as Barthes
and then all the Langpos say) who does it, but ME-IN-MY-CAPACITY-AS-RECIPIENT
-OF-AN-INSTRUCTION-TO-ACCEPT-THAT-I-DO-SO. (Godammit I paid 10 DM etc)
Gettin busy with the Caps Lock, K
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