Hi Matt,

I have been out of town at an Aboriginal Community School and so missed
this post   BTW I think Jon Dovey's Freakshow: First Person Media and
Factual Television, Pluto Press 2000 Chapter Two on Klutz Films is also
worth a look.



I originally conceived the 'aesthetics of failure" (correctly sourced to
Paul Arthurs) as a crisis of agency. Here I was very influenced by Roy
Bhaskar's version of the dialectic.  Briefly this contained  then four
levels, of which the fourth dealt with agency (Bhaskar, R. Dialectic: The
Pulse of Freedom, Verso, 1993).  It seemed obvious to me that there were no
more heroes under the system that now dominates the world, unless one went
into political and military opposition to it.

Given the failure of the liberal intelligentsia/artists to influence
reality and to bring about a better world, inevitably it seemed to me there
was a turn inwards.  But this turn had to be marked by the wider social
failure.

I think this was the source of the disagreement between Plantinga and
myself.  I was offended by his attempt to make the prevaricating liberal,
Morrow, a hero of the McCarthy period.  The only real heroes were the cadre
of the Communist Party of the USA and they too had more than their share of
skeletons in the closet.

I think Plantinga's notion of epistemic hesitation is fundamentally
compromised by his American style liberalism.  It is as if he were the
victim of a happy childhood and cannot see or admit how crappy the world
is.  So we do not have "failure" only "hesitation"

By contrast the proponents of the aesthetics of failure pin their
inadequacies to the mast.  There is no brave new world possible.  Public
discourse has been abandoned and the retreat into the private is in full
swing.  But the realm of the private is not a realm of success
either.  Ross McElwee tortured relationship with his father, Alan
Berliner's sad experiences with his, all tell that the move to the private
is no royal road.

But there is an honesty about these films that does resonate with us.

Nick Broomfield to my mind is simply a fraud and hardly worth discussing.

On the other hand Michael Moore is a true genius and without a doubt the
greatest left wing artist since Brecht.  It now seems to me though that
Moore is best thought of as a performance artist as much as a
documentarist. In theoretical terms I think the most challenging aspect of
his work is that his manipulation of time in Roger and Me, got him very
close to the truth of American Capitalism.

My final thoughts for the moment on the aesthetics of failure would be that
it might be very useful to explore the aesthetics of success and epistemic
certainty.  Colin Powell at the UN before the Iraq War would be a very good
instance of the latter.

For the aesthetics of success I would go to the portrayal of the American
President in Air Force One and Independence Day.  Here the President as
Warrior Prince leads seamlessly to the pictures of the Great Idiot himself
dressed out as Top Gun, grinning in his oh so stupid way at the
"liberators" of Iraq.


Michael Moore got close to a great truth at the Oscar Ceremony when he
talked of how the world of non-fiction had been taken over by the world of
fiction.  He remains to contest the public domain in Bowling for
Columbine.  McElwee and Berliner have largely abandoned that contest but
their films on their own personal inadequacies bear testimony to a wider
failure and so they have within them paradoxically the potential for a
redeemed world.

regards

Gary