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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Language, Sexuality and Subversion « Previous | |Next »
February 19, 2007

Courtesy of Glenn over at Event Mechanics I came across Adrian Martin, in an interview in Cinemascope Issue 7. He is talking about how to be truly critical, in a world that silences or castrates critique? He answers this from the perspective of a film culture:

Of course, we all know that ‘the real’ is not something we can simply touch, shine a torch on, and gaze at steadily in an eternal Enlightenment; language, desire, strategy,.poetic imagination will always be needed to pierce the veil or take one groping step further in the treacherous mist. We can never entirely know, in the slogans of an outmoded Communism, ‘what is to be done’, or what is to be said about cinema. If we could know these things in advance, there would be precisely be no use in trying to say any of them in public – and this is the problem of relevance (or rather, irrelevance) of a certain Marxist film critique today. Culture – an alternative, critical, counter-culture – can never be known in advance. Its canons are unclear, to be reformulated from day to day. Doubt and mystery and poetry must be accepted as vital ingredients of any political practice (as the Surrealists and their kin knew).

Martin talks in terms of an ethical orientation is possible: a direction, an intuition towards the future as well as the avant garde understood as creating as ‘new kinds of cinema and new ways of expression’.

In the interview Martin makes reference to the reception of continental philosophy and film theory in Australia which enabled the formation of an alternative, critical, counter intellectual culture in Australia. He says:

Here, I must explain something to you. I have never considered Deleuze an esoteric, cold, abstract or ultra-academic writer. When I was 17, one of the first ‘intellectual’ books I bought was a collection of essays (many translated from French and Italian) edited by several renegade Australians, called Language, Sexuality and Subversion...Could any 17 year old, precocious intellectual resist a book with a title like that? One...of the editors, Meaghan Morris, went on to become one of the best and most inspiring...film critics in my country, and she was literally ‘schooled in France’, in the textual techniques of Barthes and Genette, the ‘urbanism’ of De Certeau, the feminism of Le Doeuff, and the political analyses of Foucault. She brought all of this, and more –Deleuze included - into her work as a columnist for a newspaper that was mainly devoted to financial speculation! She was (and remains) an absolute model for me (you can read some of her great texts in Rouge). So Deleuze was never, for me,
inaccessible: he was the great ‘tool box’ as he called himself, he encouraged his...readers to take his ideas in any direction they wished. He proposed abstract ideas –all ideas are abstractions, after all! – which were designed to inspire concrete applications, experiments in every kind of domain (including film criticism). So, as a young guy, I connected immediately to his powerful ideas about desire, assemblages, the rhizome, multiplicity, etc, well before the project of his cinema books began in the ‘80s.

I remember the Morris, Meaghan and Paul Foss (eds) Language, Sexuality and Subversion (Feral Publications 1978) --I probably still have it in my library. Unlike Adrian Martin I struggled with it for years. It was so alien and difficult.

I wasn't schooled in France as it were, not did I learn the textual techniques of Barthes and Genette, I could understand Morris' film criticism in the AFR, as I had reoiled from both the commercial and cinephilia culture. I never connected to Deleuze's ideas about desire, assemblages, the rhizome, multiplicity until now, and I have not read his cinema books. I made the detour to Deleuze through Marx, Hegel, Adorno, Foucault, Nietzsche, Heidegger. I read Foucault in terms of Nietzsche and Heidegger and I did not even know about Rouge

Glenn makes reference to two other texts:

The “Beyond Marxism?: Interventions After Marx” was edited by Judith Allen and Paul Patton published in 1983 by Intervention Publications. The “Michel Foucault: POwer, Truth, Strategy” was edited by Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton published 1979 by Feral Publications. The Post-Marxism one is interesting because it introduces the problematic of difference for Marxism through esays written by familiar names (Gross, Gatens, Allen, Patton). I haven’t finished the Foucault volume yet.o far the exposition of the post-war ‘French scene’ by Francois Chatelet and translated by Morris in fantastic. Also I have read some of Patton’s comments on the (non)transition of Foucault’s work from archaeology to genealogy. Also Patton and Morris provide several pages of corrections to translations of Foucault’s work.

I spend a helluva long time working my way through these post-Marxist's texts as I was firmly within the Marxist tradition ----it was Nietzsche whom I clicked with. He argued that that we take up the challenge to reeducate ourselves, to wrestle with all our conceptions, “conscious and unconscious”. Philosophy as a way of life or self-overcoming.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:00 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

gary....if i may plug a blog....over at Le Colonel Chabert, there is a long thread between her and me on film....relating to this. Under the "cinema" heading.

John,
Thanks for that. I don't get around the blogosphere that much these days. I'll have a look at the thread under cinema as you suggest.
I like this idea from the link:

... the visual "economy” brings out the alienating effects of image making in a techno-capitalist society. According to the author, we are today confronted not so much with the alienation of our senses (this being a typically modern phenomenon) as with the sensualisation of alienation. In other words, postmodernity has economized sensuality as such, it has turned the image itself into a commodity and by this has hollowed out our perception of reality.

Films are commodities of a very advanced kind. I would accept that if we are born into language we also born into the visual culture and its diverse images. Fim may not be the most important of these images compared to advertising and television.