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surveillance and modernity

Surveillance in the everyday, routine sense that we know it today is a product of modernity. Indeed, it is one of the features that define and constitute modernity.The same systems that may be feared for their power to keep track of personal lives are established to protect and enhance life-chances – to promote justice in property holding, or participation in political life.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, mural, CBD Adelaide, 2007

Surveillance always displays these two faces, which means that merely paranoid perspectives are almost always inappropriate. And just as surveillance shows two faces, so its negatively-perceived consequences can always be challenged. What Giddens calls a ‘dialectic of control’ appears to characterize all of the new power alignments of modernity, and surveillance is no exception.

reinterpreting the neo-avant garde

As previously mentioned though Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) has shaped the understanding of the avant-garde, there is a need to take the discussion further. It is argued that:

Bürger's basic assumption that one singular intention, the intention of reintegrating art into the praxis of life, could be ascribed to the avant-garde as a whole came under attack. While the construction of an all-embracing frame had created the condition for the development of an inclusive theory of the avant-garde, its critique as an unreliable attribution applicable only to selected sections of the avant-garde called the very foundation of Bürger's theory into question. The neglect which Bürger's theory showed towards differences and contradictions between manifested "intentions" of the various avant-garde movements, the indifference also towards the historical process in which traditional art concepts were dismantled and a wealth of new art forms emerged, call for alternative perspectives of theorising the avant-garde today.

Some had interpreted the neo-avant-garde as meaningless repetition of avant-gardist gestures of yesterday.

The significance of neo-avant-gardist interventions and innovations, however, even the historical significance of the act of "reinventing" the avant-garde after its global destruction in the repressive decades of the 1930s and 40s, remained as unexplored in these treatises as they did in the sweeping rejection which the neo-avant-garde suffered in Bürger's theory of 1974. The fact that artists of the neo-avant-garde exhibited in museums and galleries was sufficient evidence for Bürger to denounce the neo-avant-garde's protest gestures as "inauthentic" - an assessment that is easily discernible as just another consequence of Bürger's misleading definition of the avant-garde's basic intention.

left Nietzscheanism

As we know postmodernist theories emerged from left-wing interpretations of Nietzsche, that Deleuze and Foucault played a crucial role in this process, and that the different kinds of “leftist Nietzscheanism” succeeded in “superannuating ” a Marxist critique of capitalism. Jan Rehmann in Towards a Deconstruction of Postmodern Nietzscheanism in Situations says that Deleuze reading and transformation of Nietzsche in his early book, Nietzsche and Philosophy, is crucial.

Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche is directed against any kind of dialectics. According to him, Nietzsche convincingly opposes the “principle of negation” by the “principle of affirmation,” and overcomes the concept of dialectical contradictions by the principle of difference and of pluralism. As early as 1962, long before the Nouveaux Philosophes make their first appearance, we see an image of Nietzsche as a representative of plural differences raising his voice against the “totalitarianism” of dialectics. The language of this “new Nietzsche” has already the
postmodernist melody of joy, lightness and dance: “Nietzsche’s ‘yes’ is opposed to the dialectical ‘no;’ affirmation to dialectical negation; difference to dialectical contradiction; joy, enjoyment to dialectical labor; and lightness, dance to dialectical responsibilities.”

So we have the postmodernist concept of difference used as a battle cry against a dialectical totalitarianism. Nietzsche becomes a nomadic rebel

Rehmann is not persuaded by this.

Deleuze’s argument is flawed in several respects. First, he draws a caricature of what dialectics is or might consist, i.e. a hermeneutics which allows the conceptualization of a moving and contradictory context is reduced to a set of the most speculative principles detached from any reality. Secondly, Deleuze’s interpretation that Nietzsche’s approach was essentially anti-dialectic is, at the least, very one-sided, since Nietzsche uses all forms of dialectical incorporation when it suits his pleasure.

small screens

In The Weight of Nightmares: Small Screens Social Space and Representation in Contemporary Capitalism in Situations (Vol 1, No 1) Iván Zatz says that the computer heightens collapse between the public and the private spheres begun with television, further blurring (if not wholly erasing) the structural separation between the social cycle of production and the cycle of social reproduction.

Under this new configuration, a series of hybrid spaces and actions begin to emerge: the home office, the automated teller or the voice mail, the chat room, and, of course, the ethereal cyberspace of the World Wide Web. The rhetorical strategies of postmodernity – pastiche and schizophrenic speech, the hybrid and the simulacrum – continue to, nevertheless, be grounded on specific material practices of space in the contemporary world.

The virtual space of the internet has inevitably become “the place” for the new public sphere of late capitalism. If the screen of the cinema and the television produced a more or less unified field of vision, the computer screen is in fact the quintessential locus of postmodern fragmentation.

Zatz says that:

The computer screen demands flexible consumption, as exemplified by the segmentation of the screen into discrete areas which are dislocated; that is to say, areas which are interdependent but have discrete moments of use, and their order of use is prioritized according the type of tasks that come up, rather than by a socially sanctioned and culturally imposed way of “reading” the screen (i.e., th computer does not require the consumption of the entire screen space as a unity, the way film and tv require). The fragmentation of postmodern culture s given by the fragmentation of experience through material practices of space, such as the material practices of the flexible screen space of the computer.

Reinterpreting the avant garde

For 25 years Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) has shaped the understanding of the avant-garde. A quarter of a century on there is a need to take the discussion further.

The first step was a three-day research seminar on the European avant-garde in 2000 at Yale, which was designed to lay the foundations for a comprehensive reassessment of the avant-garde art movements of the 1910s and 1920s which have produced such an eminent wealth of new art forms and new artistic techniques in painting and literature, cabaret, theatre and film. The contributions made to the seminar at Yale have been published together with some invited papers in a volume entitled European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives.

The seminar group agreed to embark on further explorations undertaken of this research field. The research group formed on the occasion of the seminar at Yale have continued working together towards a new theory of the avant-garde, exploring widely the art production of the avant-garde in all its forms, genres, techniques and mutual interactions, and developing neo-avant-garde art as a new field for wide-ranging research in the coming years.

The group is confident that the new theoretical approaches explored and the investigations into the rich material of the avant-garde's art production provided an excellent basis for future research that would greatly enhance current knowledge of the avant-garde. A symposium entitled Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde held at the University of Edinburgh in March 2002 was the next event in the research group's activities, and a publication Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde came out in 2005.

Hans Richter

The conference in Edinburgh had two aims, firstly a consolidation of the new approaches through explorations of further instances of the historical avant-garde; and secondly mapping out and exploring artistic activities of the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s which Bürger had so quickly and short-sightedly dismissed as inauthentic.

hope is memory mobilized around desire.

David Harvey from this interview

My favourite line from Balzac is “hope is a memory that desires” and that was how I wrote Spaces of Hope, around that idea. Everybody has a memory, but memory can become nostalgia when it’s left on its own; nostalgia is not hope. Hope is memory that’s mobilized around desire. So the question is what do we desire and how do we want to desire it? For me, that is the crucial aspect of everything we do. So if I focus on Balzac, to whom I return again and again, I might conclude, “wow, yeah, that’s what’s it about, I desire things, but I can not do this absent of thememory.” As Walter Benjamin says about memory, “memory is not history, its something that flashes up, in moments of danger,” it somehow or other animates things. And actually that’s where revolutions come from — that is my theory of revolution if you want to put it that way.

What the authorities want to do is to corral memory into a monument; they wish to memorialize and monumentalize in some way or other. They don’t want it to be alive, they want t it to be dead. I want it to be alive.The most dangerous thing in the world, Benjamin is right, is memory — which is not contained in memorialisation, monumentalization, and all the rest of it,he’s dead right. Things flash up.

Federation Square+ postmodernism

Fiona Druitt's Towards home and away from home: the networked cosmopolitanism of Federation Square in Crossings in an earlier post on Federation Square.

psychoanalysis + the image

To the opening question: why psychoanalysis and the image? A provisional answer given by Griselda Pollock:

psychoanalysis is one of the major theoretical discoveries and hence theoretical resources of the twentieth century. Its topic: subjectivity or in other terms, the split, sexuated subject, its unconscious and its affections, is clearly central to the arts and humanities. Alongside theorisations of society, language and the sign, textuality and meaning-making, and the elaboration of an anthropological concept of culture as way of life, way of struggle and negotiation, a theory of subjectivity and the specificity of the workings of the conscious and unconscious have been undoubtedly central to modern thought and cultural experience. Psychoanalysis is not an esoteric, clinical field remote from twentieth century culture. With Saussure, Proust, Einstein and Picasso, Freud and his teachings are part of the modernist cultural revolution that asked: what isÂ…?.questions such as: What is the physical universe, time and space? What is language? Asking "what is the human mind?' psychoanalysis has radically reshaped the way we understand not only subjectivity but sexuality, and the subjectified production of meaning through word and image.

Horkheimer and Adorno

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment is a classic exploration of the Enlightenment's self-destruction. Throughout the book, Horkheimer and Adorno explore the ways in which the Enlightenment tradition of critical thought turns back onto itself, changing from a social force that aims to emancipate humanity from oppression to one that undermines individual sovereignty and that contributes to the reign of economic and bureaucratic domination over humanity. The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant."

The criticisms are well known. Their thesis regarding the advent of the totally administered society is overdrawn; Horkheimer and Adorno exaggerate the powers of popular culture to deceive and manipulate individuals; they miss the contradictions embedded in capitalist society; and they pay too little attention to the sources of resistance and opposition offered by popular culture.

philosophical legacies

In this review of After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory by Colin Davis in Postmodern Culture David Bockoven addresses the problem of philosophical legacy:

Unlike Habermas, for whom the concept of the unfinished project of the Enlightenment appears black and white--either you're with Habermas's efforts to complete the early Hegel's abandoned project of communicative reason or you're against the Enlightenment and all the fruits of modernity--Foucault, Derrida, and even Habermas's own Frankfurt School progenitors Horkheimer and Adorno maintain a more complicated relationship with the philosophical past. For Derrida, in particular, "it is the nature of the legacy to be in dispute; and this is as true of Kant's legacy as it is of the legacy of poststructuralism, which we have still not settled" (7). So in looking forward, we also need to look back, but perhaps look back "otherwise." We can no more be "after" poststructuralism than poststructuralist philosophers can be "after" Kant, in the sense of being over Kant.