From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
Sent: 22 February 2006 21:39
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: If this Space is For Rent, Who Will
Move In?
_____________________________________________________________________
CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 29, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
1000 Days 034 22/02/2006 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
*************************
1000 DAYS OF THEORY
*************************
_____________________________________________________________________
If this Space is For Rent, Who Will Move In?
From Modernist to Postmodernist Forms of Criticism
Criticism as Art or Advertisement?
===================================================
~Menachem Feuer~
This Space for Rent
-------------------
Fools lament the decay of criticism. For its day is long past.
Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a
world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was
possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on
human society. The "unclouded," "innocent" eye has become a lie,
perhaps the whole naive mode of expression is sheer
incompetence. Today the most real, the mercantile gaze into the
heart of things is the advertisement. It abolishes the space
where contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes
with things as a car, growing in gigantic proportions, careens
at us out of a film screen. And just as the film does not
present furniture and facades in completed forms for critical
inspection, their insistent, jerky nearness alone being
sensational, the genuine advertisement hurtles things at us with
the tempo of a good film... For the man in the street, however,
it is money that affects him in this way, brings him into
perceived contact with things. And the paid critic, manipulating
paintings in the dealer's exhibition room, knows more if not
better things about them than the art lover... The warmth of the
subject is communicated to him, stirs sentient springs. What, in
the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what
the moving red neon sign says -- but the fiery pool reflecting
in the asphalt. [1]
-- Walter Benjamin
Writing years in advance of television and the internet, Walter
Benjamin's vision of the future places the new sensibility created by
mechanical reproduction at the forefront of modernity. The most
important aspect of this sensibility is the radical immediacy it
lodges into the heart of modern life. Benjamin understood, quite
clearly, that all aspects of life would be affected by this immediacy
in a way quite similar to Karl Marx's vision of capitalism in terms
of an ecological (read: total) change of society. The danger of such
a change, as Benjamin and Marx understood it (both understood
capitalism as creating social and cognitive changes), was the threat
of homogenization and mindless consumerism. Indeed, Benjamin's
colleague at the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, believed the
"culture industry" turned everyone into consumers and foreclosed the
possibility of thought and heterogeneity.[2] Benjamin took a much
different approach, instructive for us in our post 9/11 crisis
culture wherein homogeneity is circulated by reducing the world to a
Manichean struggle between democracy and terror. He argued that,
rather than taking a position that merely reacts to the media,
intellectuals should imitate it and use its strengths in the name of
revolution and heterogeneity. For this reason, he argued that
criticism should incorporate aspects of film and, strangely enough,
the most open media expression of capitalism: the advertisement.
Now, given this paper's epigraph, we must ask the question of the
hour for theory, which Benjamin asked nearly a century ago -- should
theory become the "genuine advertisement?" Walter Benjamin certainly
thought this an imperative not to be taken lightly as the "space,"
perhaps of the critic, is "for rent." In other words, the space that
the "objective" critic once occupied is now on the market. To make
things more intense and to force an eviction of sorts, Benjamin's
message to critics of his time (and of the future) is to realize that
what was once called criticism is "long past." As Benjamin sees it,
the critic refuses to leave or, more precisely, acknowledge that
criticism must change. For Benjamin, this acknowledgment must begin
with accepting the possibility that the critic can, and most likely
will, be replaced by what Benjamin elsewhere calls "mechanical
reproduction," but this replacement, although "mechanical," still
touches us. It is something more tactile and projective than
objective criticism ever could be.
Money also touches us. According to Benjamin, it brings the "man of
the street" into "perceived contact with things." Indeed, Benjamin
tells us that money does the same things a good film or advertisement
does. Furthermore, a paid critic who plays the role of an artistic
"interior decorator" for his patron has a knowledge which is even
greater than the art lover; money brings him a different, if not more
intimate, knowledge of art which, although highly subjective and
profit-driven, brings warmth and contact with the "subject." For
Benjamin, this is central; and if art criticism can't do it, then
perhaps it isn't good enough. The tone of these assertions puts
criticism on the market, which, as we saw above with Adorno, is the
very thing one must resist to protect critical thought.
But these fatal blows to the greatness of criticism do not spell its
absolute end; Benjamin tells us that criticism must change and the
model for this change is the advertisement or, simply, anything that
creates a "perceived contact with things." Like advertising,
criticism must touch and fascinate readers: because they are touched
by it, blown away by it, or simply "warmed by the subject," people
desire it. In a more theoretical sense, Benjamin tells us that
criticism, like advertising, should affect the reader with visceral
projections of "fragmented" intensity which circumvent any form of
contemplation. This intensity, something like a "burst of energy,"
affects the very life of the subject.
Harold Bloom, in his book, _Agon_ [3], identifies this burst of
energy with the sublime, but associates it with a more mystical
image, "an invisible breath or emanation."[4] It hits on something
hidden, one might even say repressed, and, in doing so, releases a
charge of energy. However, for Bloom, the energy that comes out of
this marks a fear central to the destruction of that repression --
the "invisible breath" is "a breeze that precedes the start of a
nervous breakdown or disorder".[5] Likewise, the advertisement
exposes the reader to what Bloom calls the aura of fragmentation that
hits him/her, as the car that "careens at us out of a film screen,"
and, in effect, "leaves them thinking" about what hit them
(post-facto) -- like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). Bloom
argues that this is what the "aura" does; but in doing so, it looks
back at us as if to say that there is something in what we see that
involves who we are. Bloom cites a letter of Gershom Scholem which
provides his understanding of this aura: it is like the "dissolution
of Angels once they have sung their hymn."[6] This image, or in
Hebrew, Zelem, is, for Bloom, the remnant of who we are after the
catastrophe of modernity -- "the final evidence of an authentic
individuality... The aura is a final defense of the soul against the
shock or catastrophe of multiplicity, against masses of objects or
multitudes of people in the street."[7] According to Bloom, this
zelem is the combination of two contradictory things: "the shock or
reversal and loss...and what he (Benjamin) calls in his beautiful
essay on Leskov, the beautiful halo of the storyteller."[8]
Bloom's comparisons of the aura to the sublime, it should be kept in
mind, are based, in large part, on his reading of Benjamin's
relationship to the city as evidenced by his essays on Baudelaire and
Leskov. Bloom's readings of Benjamin's relation to the city are
instructive as they identify the modernist moment, which is both
destructive and creative, as it simultaneously engages in a
self-destructive moment and "shines" in the process. Thus, the
shocking image of the Angel screaming its last song is redemptive.
Can the same be said for Benjamin's comments on criticism that makes
use of advertising? Is this exposure to the projecting car, which
touches us, a sublime and redemptive moment? Is seeing it similar to
the thrill someone on the street receives from exposure to the
"catastrophe of multiplicity" while, at the same time, resisting such
exposure (what T.S. Eliot in _The Waste Land_ calls a "shoring up of
fragments" against fragmentation)? Tyrus Miller uses this idea as the
thesis of his book _Late Modernism_.[9] He cites Chaplin as a prime
example of the simultaneous exposure and shielding against exposure
found in "late modernist" literature and film. According to Miller,
mimicry of multiplicity is a way of being while not being destroyed
by it. Hence, given Miller's understanding of late modernism, a
celebration of advertising and other forms of knowledge that destroy
criticism is redemptive. The voice that says this, perhaps the voice
of SPACE FOR RENT, is the redemptive voice of a criticism (and a
subject) that has destroyed itself, yet is still there -- alive. To
affect this destruction, Benjamin not only tells us that criticism
has been destroyed by advertising, he also tells us that objective or
traditional criticism does not collide with people; all it can do is
die. Benjamin wants us to feel this death. Hence, he tells us that,
like a dead body, criticism "decays"; but as it decays, advertising
lives on and, for Benjamin, spells the end of a vocation that has
lasted for centuries. Witnessing this death, its advertisement, in
fact, touches us more than criticism itself.
How could we accede to this death if it implies that criticism will
become just another agency of homogenization, which will be
accomplished through its mediated immediacy? Shouldn't we preserve it
against this death, as Adorno argues, so as to save thought and
culture from being effaced by capital? Here, Benjamin would argue
that these elements could actually encourage thought and
heterogeneity. In fact, the death of criticism will enable us to get
closer to the forces that shape the world and actually change their
current direction, as this death puts us in "perceived contact with
things." In other words, for Benjamin, a relation to heterogeneity
begins with such contact; it cannot come out of the "naive" albeit
objective contemplation of heterogeneity.
Hence, after being aware that we have entered into a relation with
heterogeneity that has put us in "perceived" contact with things,
wherein criticism's demise would be obvious, Benjamin tells us that
only a "fool" would lament the "decay of criticism." Rather than
mourn this death, Benjamin, during the first quarter of the century,
calls for an affirmative or celebratory attitude toward this
superceding of objective criticism by the fragmented immediacy put
forth by film and advertising.[10] He was, arguably, the first critic
to do so. That his message was neither heard nor understood for
decades is evidence that the time was not ready for it. It is even
more noteworthy that, although Benjamin called for critics to hear
this message, it was only the efforts of artists which made it first
audible. In fact, it was only with the advent of the London based
Independent Group's 1956 exhibition entitled "This is Tomorrow,"
which displayed collages of popular advertisements and comics ("the
throwaway object and the pop package" [11]), that Benjamin's message
(concerning the importance of advertising as an art and as a cultural
novelty) was publicly recognized, but not by critics - by
artists.[12] (Criticism's reception of Benjamin's ideas would come a
few decades later.)
One of the founders of the Independent Group, Edwardo Paolozzi, came
up with a new artistic creation which he called "bunk": a
juxtaposition of different advertising images in a collage.[13] Hal
Foster argues that the creation of "bunk" marked the beginning of the
"first pop age".[14] Prior to the first "pop age," Walter Benjamin,
in his experimental work, _One Way Street_ (quoted from above),
created what Paolozzi might call "bunk criticism." This term is quite
significant. For, although Benjamin and Paolozzi came from entirely
different time periods and cultures, they shared an interest in
making use of "pop"; as artists, they saw a need to respond to a new
mutation in culture found in both film and advertising. Both
understood what many high cultural critics and artists failed to
understand: that neither art nor criticism could ever be the same
after the advent of advertising, film, and pop. Unfortunately, it has
taken a long time for theorists to get this message. Although
Benjamin, in the wake of advertising and film, calls it foolish to
feign objectivity, not many people took (or take) this "seriously."
Perhaps they have a difficult time facing death, or better, the
death-drive? Perhaps, like Nietzsche, he was writing for critics to
come who would also say that criticism is "long past," or better,
"dead"; it has lost its value as it has ceased to touch us. This
death is belated -- strangely enough, we don't notice the stinking
corpse in front of us. The corpse is too novel or shocking as it
exposes us to the finitude of our endeavors and language itself
which, Benjamin argues, is in ruins. Likewise, the importance and
relevance of the second age of pop art, initiated by Andy Warhol and
Roy Lichtenstein, was not immediately perceived: it was too novel
perhaps because it was so familiar. As far as belatedness goes, it is
only over the last two decades that their work has been adequately
assessed with respect to criticism and postmodernism by thinkers such
as Fredric Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, Roland Barthes, and those who
have followed their lead. Regardless of criticism's belated awareness
of pop art, it has, at its inception, been influenced by and has
influenced comics, film, advertising, mass media and music in the
United States and Europe.
Indeed, pop art is a business, but is it the business of criticism?
Although Jameson, Huyssen, and Barthes find it essential to use it as
a basis for reflecting on postmodernism, the question as to whether
or not it should affect critical writing has, since Walter Benjamin,
not been properly raised.
It would be a mistake to assume that Walter Benjamin pronounced
criticism long past and called for a criticism that was like
advertising and film yet did not produce any examples of such
criticism. Benjamin's _One Way Street_ is an example of such
criticism. In fact, it can be argued that it is the first example we
have of pop art; a predecessor to what Foster calls the first pop
age. What makes Benjamin's work pop art or pop criticism? For one,
Benjamin's work fits the criterion he has laid out for criticism. It
is fragmented, "jerky," "hurtles things at us with the tempo of a
good film," and "hits us between the eyes." The structure of the text
consists of subject-headings that are taken from headlines which are
structured to get your attention: "Travel Souvenirs," "Fire Alarm,"
"Germans Drink German Beer..." and so on. Furthermore, the fragments
he includes are as jerky and cinematic as their image; like images
found in 1930s "flicks," these images are hard to place: "Alleyways
like air shafts. A well in the marketplace. In the late afternoon
women about it. Then, in solitude: archaic plashing."[15] Reading
from fragment to fragment gives one a sense of turning through or
scanning a newspaper or, to use a metaphor we are familiar with,
switching from channel to channel. Like the pop art from the
Independent Group, it juxtaposes advertising images and cinematic
images. In the midst of this, Benjamin provides a number of
criticisms, like THIS SPACE FOR RENT, which are theoretical in
character and comment on the enterprise of criticism.
Benjamin's _One Way Street_ can also be placed within the tradition
of modernist literature. Like a good modernist novel or poem, such as
_Pale Fire_ by Nabakov or _The Waste Land_ by T.S. Eliot, it provides
the reader with both a text and an interpretation of the text. It
also provides a meditation on the sublime, as only the best works of
modernist literature do, since it evokes something beyond language
yet within language. The language of the fragment is used by Benjamin
to suggest a transcendence which is indicated by absence and, as
shown above with respect to Bloom's comments, self-destruction and
redemption (qua the aura). Like the sublime, the fragment hits us and
leaves us thinking about something which transcends the text and
marks our identity-in-transcendence. This something is beyond words,
yet it is through words that are fragmented and through the failure
of contemplation on the "completed form" that this transcendence can
be experienced. This notion is Romantic in nature as it suggests a
communion with the universe through the fragment; yet it is odd since
this fragment is connected to not just words but images,
advertisement, and, in the last section of _One Way Street_ entitled
TO THE PLANETARIUM, technology. In this section, Benjamin suggests
that moderns need to return to a different understanding of the
universe which is based on "the ecstatic trance":
For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain
knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest to us,
and never one without the other...It is the dangerous error of
modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and
avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic
rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and
again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it,
as we made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt
at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers.
[16]
The commingling with these cosmic powers is through technology:
"Gases (and) electrical forces were hurled into the open country,
high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new
constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths
thundered with propellers....in the spirit of technology."[17] Here,
Benjamin is telling us that technology is used to touch nature; and
in SPACE FOR RENT, he tells us that it touches our bodies. Both
suggest an "ecstatic trance"; a suspension of knowledge. It also
suggests what Freud calls a death drive and a Nietzschean obsession
with de-individuation. Here, his work is similar to the Surrealists
who created art that took the fragments of mass culture and endowed
them with psychic energy. This, in effect, aims to destroy stable
notions of selfhood and, according to Hal Foster's thesis in
_Compulsive Beauty_,[18] installs the death drive at the heart of
existence.
(Yet, as pointed out above, Bloom thinks there is a moment of (let's
say) higher individuation when the subject becomes one with these
cosmic forces yet protected from their violence through the zelem
(image) of this de-individuation: via "storytelling," here about war
as an expression of a desire found in technology to "touch the earth"
and obviously be touched in the process.)
Given the above, the novelty of Benjamin's work is that it
transformed a form of modernist pop art into criticism and, at the
same time, effaced the fine line between theory and art as well as
high and low culture. _One Way Street_ is a clarion call to
criticism to destroy itself and think of itself as no different from
anything else that can touch someone, regardless of the fact that it
competes with the feelings money generates. Whether it is a person
making a deal in the street or a paid critic does not matter, but can
they touch you? According to Benjamin, it is through an often
repressed psychic drive that they can touch us: the death drive which
can be manifested through money and advertising.
The question we began with remains: can such a criticism, in a post
9/11 world "wage the war against totality" and homogenization? Indeed
it can. But it does so by providing us with a mirror image of our own
fragmentation: it goes from subject to subject and hits us, reminding
us of how we flip through channels, web pages, and advertisements.
Ultimately, a criticism like this can foster thought not just by
fragmenting it, which is done quite well by TV and the internet, but
by mimicking the process. Indeed, Benjamin believed that such
mimicry, found most often in children's play,[19] can bring us closer
to a heterogeneous and tactile understanding of the world. This, for
Benjamin, brings us one step closer to changing the world. Therefore,
even though such mimicry, which is ultimately destructive, may be
thought of as a death drive, it is clearly a drive to take things
apart and remake them in ways that are not typical. Indeed, it
embodies the things it takes apart and reanimates them in an entirely
different way. This is especially important in this post 9/11 world
where mimicry of the homogenizing drive of the media can be a means
of reclaiming the media. For this reason, even Michael Moore's
employment of the media can be seen as an attempt to destroy a
homogenous discourse and introduce a variety of other perspectives
that contradict such a discourse (even though Moore also has an
agenda, which, though leftist in nature, insists on its construction
as proof). His film, ~Fahrenheit 9/11~ brings us in touch with
documentary media by undermining it, and it brings us into a
"perceived contact with things," which is more critical than
consumptive.
Benjamin is the first major thinker to show us that, contrary to
Adorno, boundaries between high and low culture as well as proper and
improper criticism need to be dissolved if revolutionary work is to
be done.[20] Indeed, these boundaries only repeat a homogenous system
which underpins the essence of all capitalistic thinking. Therefore,
just as Marx sees the destruction of the boundaries of the
nation-state by cosmopolitan capitalistic drives for new markets as a
positive force which can be used to create a global form of
communism, Benjamin sees the effacement of boundaries between
criticism and the advertisement as a prelude to a higher form of
criticism which would be more "vital" and revolutionary.
Benjamin's insistence on the effacement of boundaries between high
and low culture or proper versus improper criticism has found its
"afterlife" in the work of Avital Ronell and Steve Shaviro, though in
ways that either question or affirm the transcendence discussed by
Benjamin. Both critics, like Benjamin, are interested in what hits
us, which is "in the street," and want to bring the street into
criticism. As such, they play on that to which we are addicted,
thrilled by or simply bored.
Ronell and Shaviro -- Criticism As?
-----------------------------------
Avital Ronell is truly an anomaly. Highly influenced by French
deconstructionists and continental thinkers such as Martin Heidegger,
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice
Blanchot, she incorporates their work into books which take popular
motifs as their focus. These range from telephone and drug addiction
to Rodney King, and stupidity, which are used as topics that are
addressed in a manner that might be described as Heideggerian.
However, of all her influences, she has been most influenced by the
work of Jacques Derrida, some of which she translated into English,
and Benjamin. Their work is something of an obsession for her. These
theorists represent two sides of her work. Like Derrida, Ronell is
interested in altering the form of critical writing. In _Glas_,
Derrida employs the novel approach of presenting different texts in
opposing columns. It evokes the notion of "intertextuality" which is
a practice of modernist literature appropriated by literary criticism
(for instance Julia Kristeva's work "Stabat Mater"). This
appropriation no doubt blurs the fine line between criticism and
literature. Benjamin's _One Way Street_ does this as well, but not in
the same format. Benjamin's text uses the subject-heading of each of
the fragments as an index for advertisements or newspaper clippings
as his intertext; whereas Derrida uses a Genet text and an essay on
Hegel as inter-texts. According to Andreas Huyussen[21], Derrida's
effacement of the fine line between theory and literature is not
postmodernist; rather, it marks an effort to preserve literature from
cultural interests and postmodernism.[22] For Huyssen, the obsessive
interest in language and the effacement of the fine line between
literature and theory is synonymous with the survival of modernism.
Benjamin's intertext, although modernist due to its obsession with
the fragment and its use of fragmented narratives, uses culture qua
advertising as an inter-text and can be seen as a foreshadowing of
postmodernism's effacement of the fine line between high and low
culture. Benjamin and Derrida cross different borders; and rather
than say one can either go one way or the other (modernist or
postmodernist), the evidence shows that both thinkers are concerned
with phenomenology, deconstruction, and popular culture.
Ronell's first experiment in bringing pop art to high criticism was
_The Telephone Book_.[23] The most obvious signifier of this can be
found in the book itself which looks like a telephone book. Its
exterior shape is that of a telephone book; its interior is also
indexed as a telephone book. This may be considered pop art in a
Warholian sense as it is a reproduction of something mechanically
reproduced (a phonebook) just as Warhol produced reproductions of
mechanically reproduced Campbell's Soup cans. But as Roland Barthes
points out in his essay entitled "That Old Thing Art...",[24] the
reproductions of pop art "rediscover the theme of the Double" but
efface it since here "the double is harmless -- has lost all
maleficent or moral power."[25] Moreover, it effaces transcendence
and the deeper meaning which may hide behind it: "beside, not behind:
a flat, insignificant, hence irreligious double."[26] (Strangely
enough, Benjamin finds this destruction of the aura -- auratic.
Warhol, according to Barthes, does not. Ronell, in her humorous and
playful appropriations, also seems to be circumventing this.)
Ronell's book also engages in postmodern parody as it personifies and
inserts figures like Heidegger, Goethe, Kafka, and even Alexander
Graham Bell into a fiction of her own making which involves telephone
calls and seances (many of which play on the erotic nature of the
phone, collect calls, and wrong numbers). By doing this, Ronell, like
Derrida, effaces the boundary between theory and fiction; yet, she
also flattens these characters out, as Warhol does with, say, Marilyn
Monroe or Liz Taylor, by repeating them. By doing so, she doesn't
take on the project of uncovering their essence; rather, she enters
them in a game of speculation and humor. Furthermore, according to
Barthes, it can be argued that Ronell's repetitions of Heidegger,
Kakfa, and Goethe, like pop art repetitions, "induce an adulteration
of the person"[27] and "teach us that identity is not the
person."[28] For the academic pop world, the stereotyped stars
include these personages and through their repetition Ronell becomes
the Andy Warhol of the academic world. In fact, what Barthes says of
Warhol could equally be said of these personages Ronell addresses:
"nothing is more identifiable than Marilyn, the electric chair, a
telegram, or a dress, as seen by Pop Art; they are in fact nothing
but that: immediately and exhaustively identifiable."[29]
In addition to flattening out and playing on major academic
identities, _The Telephone Book_ makes several contributions to
philosophy, psychology, and comparative literature. The book has
implications for theory with respect to Heidegger's notions of
mitsein, technology, and art as well as the theorization of
schizophrenia by R.D. Laing, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guatarri, in
addition to the phenomenology of the other by Levinas and Blanchot.
By writing this theory with a humorous, albeit "pop attitude," she
effaces the objectivity that theory has traditionally aimed to
provide, an objectivity that Benjamin saw as always-already
circumvented by "advertising." Indeed, Ronell's writing, like
Benjamin's, hits you, but it hits you with laughter, which, though
less traumatic than a car projecting at you from a screen, is another
mode of advertising. However, this mode is less interested in
celebrating the ecstatic by hurtling things into space, than it is in
celebrating a form of schizoid logic -- making prank phone calls in
an attempt to address the reader. The phone calls can also be quite
serious: one of the calls made in _The Telephone Book_ is to Martin
Heidegger. Unfortunately, Ronell tells us, he refuses to answer,
because with answering there is responsibility. (It is interesting
that this phone call to Heidegger mimics a collect call to "Martini
Heidegger" in Jacques Derrida's book _The Post Card_.)
Although a popular medium and a technology, the phone becomes, in
Ronell's book, a medium of thought and thereby defies the notion that
writing is the primary medium for thought. Here orality is localized
through a technological medium which mediates thought rather than
language; in other words, to use a metaphor used by Alan Turing,
machines think. We don't just use machines to call people; Ronell
shows us, following Marshall McLuhan, that machines extend or amplify
desire and play and, in effect, the nervous system. They reach out
and "touch us" like Benjamin's advertisement. For this reason, Ronell
points out again and again that the phone is like a prosthesis of a
nipple; in this capacity, it can be read either as a replacement or
as an extension of a missing organ. Here technology trumps
traditional literature because her book is not a book which belongs
to the domain of language: it belongs to the telephone (hence, the
title).
Another of Ronell's books, _Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction,
Mania_, also draws on motifs of pop culture.[30] This book probes the
nature of addiction in an unusual manner. She demonstrates, through
literature, philosophy, and psychology, that doing drugs and the
popular rhetoric of drugs indicated by phrases such as "getting blown
away," "wasted," and "destroyed" are linked to deeper ontological
questions. She effaces the distinction between high and low culture
by demonstrating how Heidegger's Dasein is addicted to drugs and how
the rhetoric mentioned above demonstrates a death drive inherent in
our very Being. Furthermore, she does a "narcoanalysis" of Madame
Bovary with respect to drug addiction and in doing so she rewrites
Madame Bovary, transforming her into a figure reminiscent of Courtney
Love.
The structure of the text, instead of using advertisements, is based
on the rhetoric of drugs. The table of contents lists, chapter by
chapter, this rhetoric: 1) Hits; 2) Toward a Narcoanalysis; 3) EB on
Ice; 4) Shame; 5) Scoring Literature; and 6) Cold Turkey. Benjamin's
influence is obvious here as this is the language of the street that
he wished to bring into theory. Furthermore, by including Heidegger's
reading of Dasein in this book as a major motif, she takes Heidegger
out of high discourse and puts his work in a more democratic space of
"low culture," which is the culture of drugs. This takes what Levinas
calls the "virile and heroic aspect" of Heidegger's Dasein away and
substitutes it with a Dasein whose "throwness" and passivity (to use
Blanchot and Levinas' term) is more relevant to a wider readership
who might otherwise find Heidegger's work inaccessible. Hence, in
this book as in _The Telephone Book_, Ronell rewrites a word and
concept that has become stale with overuse -- Dasein -- and gives it
a new identity; but this cross-dressing of Dasein does not make it
new. Rather, it rewrites and revises the concept to include notions
more relevant to an understanding of the relationship between
addiction and the death drive -- addiction and responsibility -- as
well as addiction and selfhood (or loss thereof). These "hits," in
the tradition of Benjamin, are definitely ecstatic in nature and lift
criticism to the level of street drugs as well as advertisements,
both of which blow us away, though in different ways.
Like Ronell, Shaviro has cross-dressed continental philosophy.
Shaviro's project shares similarities with the work of Maurice
Blanchot, George Bataille, and Gilles Deleuze. However, the main
thesis of Shaviro's book _Cinematic Bodies_[31] draws most of its
strength from Benjamin since Shaviro, in this book, is primarily
interested in how film destroys the aura, effaces the contemplative
mind, and hits the body with an "excess" of sensation.
Shaviro views Harold Bloom's reading of the aura as a "misreading,"
which is something Bloom advocated. In fact, Shaviro argues that
individuality (the subject), like the aura, is destroyed by film.
Individuality does not remain, and, as will be argued below, the
destruction of the aura effaces the modernist drive to protect the
subject from dissolution. Bloom thinks otherwise, and at least one
current of Benjamin, which valorizes the fragment with respect to the
allegory and the work of mourning, concurs with him. Shaviro would
argue that the fragment from _One Way Street_ and also the essay "Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" demonstrate an altogether
different current which celebrates the dissolution of the subject.
Shaviro's writing mimics the energy felt in films. Citing Blanchot,
he argues, like Benjamin, that film destroys any self-willed
objectivity by creating a fascination for and a passivity to filmic
images: "The power of the ego is ruptured at the point of what
Blanchot calls fascination: the moment when 'the thing we are staring
at has sunk into its image, and the image has returned to that depth
of impotence into which everything falls back.'"[32] Shaviro explains
that fascination happens when we lose our power over the image, "when
we are no longer able to separate ourselves, no longer able to put
things at a proper distance and turn them into objects."[33] This is
connected to passivity:
I do not have power over what I see, I do not even have,
strictly speaking, the power to see; it is more that I am
powerless not to see... I cannot willfully focus my attention on
this or on that. Instead, my gaze is arrested by the sole area
of light, a flux of moving images. I am attentive to what
happens on the screen only to the extent that I am continually
distracted, and passively absorbed into it. [34]
This continual distraction is a distraction which effaces the
concentration necessary for objective thought. As in a dream, film
and the criticism Shaviro proposes as a response to film become
endless digressions, seductions, and titillations of the body and
desire.
Shaviro's following book, _Doom Patrols_,[35] examines passivity in a
different manner: he looks at it from what one might call a pop
perspective. The passivity referred to in this book is a Warholian
passivity. Like the passivity mentioned above, it is distracted, but
unlike it, this passivity does not feel any shock in the destruction
of the aura. The target of this Warholian passivity is Benjamin's
notion of shock. He argues that in the postmodern world we are more
like Warhol who is not shocked by anything at all than like Benjamin
who sees the shock value of films or advertisements in the fact that
they destroy the "aura" of objectivity. Warhol simply shrugs his
shoulders at fragmentation. This shrugging of the shoulders is the
ultimate "passivity" toward consumer culture.
In a section on Dean Martin, whom he likens to Andy Warhol, Shaviro
argues that what makes Dean an exemplar of passivity is that he has
totally surrendered himself to a host of cliches yet with a
difference. His passivity to these cliches is different from Elvis in
that Dean doesn't care about who he is. Unlike Elvis, who had to
conform to his image, Dean Martin effaced his image in not caring for
it; nonetheless, he still played all the cliches. According to
Shaviro, this passivity effaces Dean's ego and manifests something of
a death drive. But Dean's self-destruction is not something to marvel
at; it has, in Derrida's words, always-already happened and will
happen again and again. This is a phenomenon of our postmodern
culture that is distracted and at the same time as powerless to the
images of mass culture as Andy and Dean. Most importantly, this
passivity reveals the power the visual medium has to render us
powerless and fascinated. For Shaviro, this is not something to
deplore.
_Doom Patrols_ catalogues a number of sites where, I would argue,
criticism makes passivity manifest and actually engages it. In fact,
Shaviro incorporates his object into his criticism of it. His work is
not about Warhol or Acker or _Doom Patrols_: it parallels the
passivity found in these works. Shaviro is what Ronell might call the
ultimate "junkie." He is addicted to sites of passivity in mass or
popular culture and is definitely touched by them in a way that
baffles many academics.
In _Doom Patrols_ there is no limit to self-destruction and
re-creation. But, according to Shaviro, there is no remnant to mourn,
qua its prior or missing unity; rather, it should be celebrated. This
celebration is counter to Melancholia, which he associates with
Benjamin's reading of fragmentation found in his allegorical
meditations. (I will quote Shaviro's reading at length to illustrate
the difference):
Craig Owens and Celeste Olalquiaga, among others, suggest that
Walter Benjamin's analysis of allegory is particularly
appropriate to postmodern culture. In allegory, signs become
materially insistent in their own right, detached from
referential meaning; the mechanical piling up of fragments takes
the place of organic completion or symbolic translation. The
postmodern landscape is evoked by J. G. Ballard as a vista of
garbage-strewn high-rise apartment buildings, shattered concrete
littered with husks of burnt-out cars, snuff videos in incessant
replay. Benjamin sees melancholia as a compulsive response to an
intolerable situation: one in which everything seems to be
fragments and ruins, in which we know that we are irrecuperably
estranged from a supposed 'origin' to which we nonetheless
continue compulsively to refer. Allegory "represents a
continuous movement towards an unattainable origin, a movement
marked by the awareness of a loss that it attempts to compensate
with a baroque saturation and the obsessive reiteration of
fragmented memories" (Olalquiaga). We imagine that these ruins
once were whole, that these abandoned structures originally had
a rational use, that these signs formerly had a sense, that we
used to be organic bodies instead of robots. Dubious
assumptions, to be sure; but as Nietzsche puts it, one has
recourse to such fantasies and such arguments "when one has no
other expedient." Anxious critics today, like Adorno and Eliot
before them, feel cut off, with nowhere to turn; and so they
shore up fragments against their ruin, seeking desperately to
assuage their narcissistic wounds. But as Nietzsche knew, every
proposed remedy to nihilism only increases the strength and
depth of nihilism. We invent our lost objects posthumously. The
more we brood over supposedly estranged origins, the more those
origins take form retroactively, even as they recede from us.
Melancholia is a recursive, self-replicating structure: it
continually generates the very alienation of which it then
complains. I want to suggest, therefore, that allegorical
melancholy is less a mark of postmodernity per se, than it is a
symptom of the desperation of traditional humanist intellectuals
(whether of the Marxist or the conservative variety) who find
themselves unable to adapt to what McLuhan calls "postliterate"
culture. These people should get a life. In the postmodern world
of DOOM PATROLS, we couldn't care less about the decline of
print literacy, of the nuclear family, of historical awareness,
or of authentic class-consciousness. We play gleefully in the
rubble, for we know that such antiquated notions will never
subvert anything; the grounds of contention and debate have long
since shifted elsewhere.
Postmodernism is distinguished, then, not by any tendency to
meditate on ruins and to allegorize its own disappointments; but
by a propensity to invent new organs of perception and action,
as Burroughs, McLuhan, David Cronenberg, Michael Taussig, and
Donna Haraway all in various ways recommend. The cyborg, Haraway
says, is a monstrous hybrid, "resolutely committed to
partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity." Pragmatically,
this means that the fragmentation that Eliot bemoaned in _The
Waste Land_ has come full circle. In works like DOOM PATROLS,
dispersion and fragmentation are positive, affirmative, and even
entertaining conditions. [36]
Should criticism delve into Shaviro's postmodern world of _Doom
Patrols_? Is a change of attitude toward fragmentation all that is
needed? Should criticism just let go of the memory of what was lost
if it is to, as Fredric Jameson phrases it, "renarrativize" the
fragment? Shaviro thinks so. Criticism, in his opinion, should
reflect this not only in what it chooses to focus on, as he focuses
on comics, comedians, tangential writers, filmmakers, and cyborgs,
but also in how it writes about them. Both Ronell and Shaviro
represent this new trend, and it is important to follow the lead of
this avant-garde because it will determine whether or not we embrace
the exciting possibilities of hybridity or miss them because we are
too busy reanimating traditional criticism. Benjamin's graphic
metaphor will simply be seen as an illusion. In that case, the "dark
side," melancholy, will literally have won and the "propensity" to
invent "new organs of perception" will be defeated. Strangely enough,
for Shaviro, passivity to sites of passivity, whether in Warhol,
Acker, or in a comic called _Doom Patrols_, is the mother of all
critical invention. It is only through such passivity that criticism
can be, in Benjamin's words, "the fiery pool reflecting (the neon
light) in the asphalt."
These words may be hard for many of us to understand, as passivity to
"sites of passivity" seems a validation of capitalism which would
rather we be "passive" than active. In other words, we should consume
"junk" culture rather than rebel against the current political order:
passivity is also a means of resisting the system. It is enthralled
with "new organs of perception" which can help us to perceive and
indeed be touched by things that the media does not share with us.
This is a radical departure from homogeneity in the post 9/11 world
as it enables us to steer clear of a Manichean attitude which has
divided the world into neat categories.
Marx argued in _The Communist Manifesto_ that the bourgeoisie had
created the axe that would eventually destroy it. But as Benjamin
(and Derrida) understood Marx, this axe was not just a class called
the proletariat; it is also lodged in technology and in language. The
excess found in both, which is actually a product of capitalistic
"over-production," can break down the homogenous system. But the
novelty of Benjamin, Ronell, and Shaviro is that they do not simply
see this as happening naturally. Rather, their criticism, in
mimicking and incorporating the language of advertising, the street,
and film, provides us with a heterogeneous experience of mass culture
which can also transform it. Indeed, this type of criticism can hit
us in a way that will make the world and ourselves stand apart from
blind consumption and meaningless drifting from one commonly held
opinion to another.
After noticing that THIS SPACE (IS) FOR RENT, we need to inhabit it
critically. This can be done by working with what is already within
this space. For in doing this, we will have made it our space; as
Benjamin dreamed, this space is a utopian space whose contents are
endless in their beauty and strangeness. But although this space
could be the space of journals, Benjamin ultimately believed it was
the space of the street. Today, the information highway is our new
street. Can we inhabit it or is it, precisely, uninhabitable? If it
is uninhabitable, why has the homogenizing force of post 9/11 culture
made countless efforts to make this space its headquarters? TV and
the internet are indeed final frontiers, but the fact of the matter
is that neither have been totally taken over. Not yet. And,
hopefully, criticism can have a say in that.
Notes:
------
[1] Walter Benjamin. _Reflections_, Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York:
Schocken Books, 1986.
[2] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. _The Dialectic of
Enlightenment_, trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1993, pp.
120-167.
[3] Harold Bloom. _Agon_, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
[4] Ibid, p. 230.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, p. 232.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Tyrus Miller. _Late Modernism_, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999.
[10] Given Benjamin's interest in the Trauerspiel (the mourning
play), this is quite interesting. Benjamin's interest in mourning
fragments and the trash of history is central to much of his thought;
SPACE FOR RENT tells, however, a different story. Benjamin saw the
importance of affirmation in this instance because he believed that
the tactility afforded by film and advertising had revolutionary
potential. In his essay on art, "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction," he sees this potential in film rather than
in advertising.
[11] Hal Foster, "On the First Pop Age," _New Left Review_ (January
2003).
[12] However, there was one notable artist who took an interest in
advertising's relationship with art: Wyndham Lewis. In his play
"Enemy of the Stars" (first written and in 1914 and republished in
1932), a landmark in modernist aesthetics, he plays on the meaning of
advertising and even includes advertisements in the published
version.
[13] Foster, p. 94.
[14] Ibid, p. 95.
[15] Benjamin, p. 84
[16] Benjamin, p. 93.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Hal Foster. _Compulsive Beauty_. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.
[19] Susan Buck-Morss. _The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and
the Arcades Project_, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. pp. 262-286.
[20] Fredric Jameson. _Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism_, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
[21] Huyssen, Andreas. _After the Great Divide_. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986.
[22] Ibid, p. 207
[23] Avital Ronell. _The Telephone Book_, London: University Of
Nebraska Press, 1989.
[24] Roland Barthes. _The Responsibility of Forms_, Trans. Richard
Howard, New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1985.
[25] Ibid, p. 24.
[26] Ibid, p. 25.
[27] Ibid, p. 24.
[28] Ibid, p. 25.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Avital Ronell. _Crack Wars_, Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1992.
[31] Steve Shaviro. _The Cinematic Body_, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
[32] Ibid, p. 46.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid, p. 47
[35] Steve Shaviro. _Doom Patrols: A Theoretical fiction about
Postmodernism_, London: Serpent's Tail Press, 1997. (All citations
come from the on-line essay.)
[36] http://www.dhalgren.com/Doom/ch01.html
--------------------
Menachem Feuer has taught philosophy, literature, and humanities at
The State University of New York at Binghamton, Ryerson University,
Centennial College and Humber College. He has published essays on
postmodern Holocaust art and literature and is currently writing a
book on the theme of difference and reconciliation in Israeli
literature, African-American Literature, and post-Holocaust
literature, film, and art.
_____________________________________________________________________
*
* CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology and
* culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in
* contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
* theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
*
* Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
*
* Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Paul Virilio (Paris),
* Bruce Sterling (Austin), Siegfried Zielinski (Koeln), Stelarc
* (Melbourne), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (NYC), Timothy Murray
* (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen
* Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross (NYC), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough),
* Maurice Charland (Montreal), Gad Horowitz (Toronto), Shannon Bell
* (Toronto), R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Richard Kadrey (San
* Francisco).
*
* In Memory: Kathy Acker
*
* Editorial Assistant: Ted Hiebert
* WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET)
* WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman
_____________________________________________________________________
To view CTHEORY online please visit:
http://www.ctheory.net/
To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit:
http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/
_____________________________________________________________________
* CTHEORY includes:
*
* 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory.
*
* 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture.
*
* 3. Event-scenes in politics, culture and the mediascape.
*
* 4. Interviews with significant theorists, artists, and writers.
*
* 5. Multimedia theme issues and projects.
*
*
* The Editors would like the thank the University of Victoria for
* financial and intellectual support of CTheory. In particular, the
* Editors would like to thank the Dean of Social Sciences, Dr. C.
* Peter Keller, the Dean of Engineering, Dr. D. Michael Miller and
* Dr. Jon Muzio, Department of Computer Science.
*
*
* (C) Copyright Information:
*
* All articles published in this journal are protected by
* copyright, which covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and
* distribute the article. No material published in this journal
* may be translated, reproduced, photographed or stored on
* microfilm, in electronic databases, video disks, etc., without
* first obtaining written permission from CTheory.
* Email [log in to unmask] for more information.
*
*
* Mailing address: CTHEORY, University of Victoria, PO Box 3050,
* Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 3P5.
*
* Full text and microform versions are available from UMI, Ann Arbor,
* Michigan; and Canadian Periodical Index/Gale Canada, Toronto.
*
* Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/
* Documentation politique international; Sociological Abstract
* Inc.; Advance Bibliography of Contents: Political Science and
* Government; Canadian Periodical Index; Film and Literature Index.
*
_____________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________
ctheory mailing list
[log in to unmask]
http://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ctheory
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous
content by the NorMAN MailScanner Service and is believed
to be clean.
The NorMAN MailScanner Service is operated by Information
Systems and Services, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
====
This e-mail is intended solely for the addressee. It may contain private and
confidential information. If you are not the intended addressee, please take
no action based on it nor show a copy to anyone. Please reply to this e-mail
to highlight the error. You should also be aware that all electronic mail
from, to, or within Northumbria University may be the subject of a request
under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and related legislation, and
therefore may be required to be disclosed to third parties.
This e-mail and attachments have been scanned for viruses prior to leaving
Northumbria University. Northumbria University will not be liable for any
losses as a result of any viruses being passed on.
************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************
|
