Formalism in Science & Technology Studies

When this blog first kicked off I used a different mission statement, which explained its humble origins: I thought that working on it with my mate Deridata provided a little "interaction ritual" to generate some extra solidarity for our friendship. I also worried about hard drive crashes, the failures of memory supplements which might mean valuable things would be washed away, like "tears in rain", as Batty so eloquently put it in his soliloquy at the climax of Blade Runner. There was also the problem of sending/receiving things, and not having an easy search functionality to access them wherever I happened to be. For a person still using a dial up connection, the idea was very appealing of walking into the library, with a personal archive at my disposal, along with all my bookmarks, on a broadband connection.

I raise these points only to emphasise the primary purpose of the blog as a research tool between 2 friends, in recognition of the fact that there is little to stop other people accessing and possibly misusing some of the material put on here. Hence again, as I've said with respect to the Vandenberghe piece and other items, please do not cite the following. It was given to me by my supervisor Paul Jones, and fair use of the item would involve citing it from the journal published version. No other form of citation or reproduction is permissible. I will remove the item on the author's request.
Preamble
The idea for this paper arose from a peculiar kind of semi-articulated collegial ‘insistence’ I had felt – and resisted - to read Bruno Latour’s work. Superficially at least, Latour seemed to be reinventing some rather old social constructivist wheels within science studies that I had already met within the sociology of journalism, for example (and reading time is a precious asset). It also struck me as odd that while Latour’s work is now increasingly being cited within ‘cultural theory’, those who so cite him seem to be blind to his own dependence on a much earlier set of similar arguments within what what would now be called cultural theory (namely formalism and structuralist semiotics). Moreover, the highly comparable work within the project of the cultural theorist on whom I have done the most work, Raymond Williams, tends to be set aside in the same eddy of intellectual fashion. But more than mere fashion (or interdisciplinarity or the cultural turn) seemed to be at stake here and, as it happened, this phenomenon was one to which Williams had paid specific attention via his discussions of avant-gardism and formalism within his his late sociology of culture. That said, the reader should be reminded that this is a preliminary exercise. Time and space constraints have meant I have had to set aside, for example, a detailed examination of Latour’s and Williams’s versions of a social constructionist analysis of technology.

Raymond Williams: setting aside some interpretative anomalies
In many accounts of ‘British Cultural Studies’ and the now global forms of cultural studies which have developed in its wake, Raymond Williams is usually positioned as a ‘founding father’ alongside Richard Hoggart, the founder of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). The risk of conflation of the two is considerable and even Williams joked about being shadowed by a mythical ‘Raymond Hoggart’. The differences are considerable and highly relevant to this paper.
Hoggart did practise a kind of status-challenging ethnography of working class culture in his seminal 1957 The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1976). This genuine innovation drew much critical approval, including that of Jean-Claude Passeron (1972), and was one of several influences on the subcultures research of the later CCCS under Stuart Hall. Williams too wrote appeciative reviews of Hoggart’s book but was also quite stringent in his criticisms of Hoggart’s relative politico-cultural conservativism (Jones, 1994).
Williams, like Hogggart, had been trained in ‘Cambridge English’ literary studies but did not move towards ethnography methodologically. Yet it is Williams who is usually accredited with the corresponding conceptual shift within English language usage of ‘culture’: from an allegedly élitist restrictive ‘high culture’ to an all-embracing ‘whole way(s) of life’one. This attribution, most notably promoted by Stuart Hall, is erroneous as Williams insisted on the conjunction of both senses of culture. ‘High culture’’ needed to be sociologically placed and immanently criticised. Formalist methods – within which Williams includes the structuralist project - were highly relevant to this immanent process but insufficient as they tended to be blind to the immanent emancipatory norms of ‘high culture’. Williams so moves to a position which is closest to Lucien Goldmann, and often closer to Adorno and Benjamin (and Habermas’s conception of ideology critique) than the more common celebration of Gramsci or Bourdieu within cultural studies and cultural sociology (Jones, 2004).
In practice this meant Williams’s own work outside ‘literary studies’ was a particular kind of socio-cultural history based in his ‘social formalism’ and what became his sociology of intellectual ‘formations’ (Jones, 2004).
‘Technicist’ Formalism, ‘Social’ Formalism & Critique
Williams’s critique of aesthetic formalism starts as a dissident position in literary studies and grows into a key component of his ‘social formalist’ alternative within his late sociology of culture. Towards the end of his life it is increasingly used as an organizing principle in what is effectively a sociology of knowledge. The pervasive problem within this last area to which Williams sought a solution was the ‘eternal recurrence’ of formalism as a first resort of critical intellectual practice.
As Doložel has pointed out, 1970s Western textbook accounts of structuralism - on which much English language reception of that project was based - tended to share a particular narrative of its development. Saussure’s initiatives in structural linguistics and the work of the Russian & Prague Formalists were regarded as important precursors, but ‘structuralist poetics’ per se, for example, was regarded as foundationally French. In a curious anticipation of future narratives of the formation of cultural studies, what was influential in Paris became the criterion of selective historical emphasis in these 1970s accounts. Jan Mukařovský’s 1946 Paris lecture on Prague structuralism went unnoticed, as did Goldmann’s attempts to shift the terrain of discussion of the Parisian structuralists twenty years later. Thus were crucial innovations of Prague structuralism sidelined.
Williams constructs an alternative narrative of formalism’s legacy that recovers both Mukařovský’s critique within the Prague circle and the then recently translated (into English) critiques of Russian Formalism from the ‘Vitebsk’ group: Vološinov (1973), Bakhtin & Medvedev (1986). It is this body of work – along with that of Goldmann and some other elements of ‘Western Marxism’- that he uses to shape his ‘social formalist’ alternative. There is a certain ‘realist’ dimension to this alternative – as in the familiar criticisms of the strong sense of ‘arbitrariness’ in the Saussurean model of the signifier/signified relationship within the sign. However, Williams’s main focus, like Mukařovský’s and Vološinov’s, is normative. That is, while, for example, a prime step is the recovery of greater recognition of semantic content of texts per se, this recognition is tied to a particular mode of immanent critique rather than a naïve realism or ‘humanist’ psychologization of authorship. Thus the strongest challenge Williams mounts towards what should from hereon be considered ‘technicist formalism’ is that it is effectively blind to the immanent normative content of the texts it analyses. ‘Technicist formalism’ is thus more commonly allied with a form of critique where ‘external’ criteria are brought to bear on an analysis of the form of the text or even where perhaps no normative orientation is seen as required, so leading to a potentially ‘affirmative’ interpretation. As we shall, it is the latter which tends to be the case in Latour.
The ‘level’ at which such immanent social formalist analysis operates in Williams varies from the historical semantics of his very carefully chosen ‘keywords’ (Williams, 1983) to his more elaborated analyses of aesthetico-literary and other writings.
Formalism, Technological Determinism and ‘Projection’
In 1986 Williams’s chief example of formalism was the theoreticist purism of Althusserian ‘structuralist’ Marxism that had then recently dominated the Birmingham CCCS (Williams, 1986). However, he’d launched a very similar swingeing critique of formalism in Marshall McLuhan’s work in 1974 (Williams, 1974). It moves in perfect parallel with Williams’s better known critique of McLuhan as a technological determinist.
What these different theoretical formalisms – or technicisms - have in common for Williams is an emphasis on the functionality of devices within self-reproducing systems. For Russian Formalists the central methodological concern was of course how to isolate the aesthetic function for analysis. For Shklovsky at least, this was a matter of identifying appropriate aesthetic devices and techniques that performed the aesthetic function. McLuhan’s famous insistence was that meaning was entirely borne within the medium – and that new media were to be understood entirely within the aesthetic sense of the term – as if they were as much as, but not more than, new palettes for experimentation. This, for Williams, was an analogous formalism that facilitated a technological determinism.
Both these technicisms were thus largely oblivious to the social production of the devices they celebrated. Within his sociology of art, Williams takes classic instances of changes in dramatic devices – the soliloquy, dramatic naturalism’s three-walled room – and demonstrates their dependence on – or homology with - changing social circumstances by means of his social formalism. ‘Micro-cultural’ analysis so articulates with ‘macrosocial’ analysis, usually with strongly normative implications.
Within his sociology of means of communication – which restores a ‘social shaping’moment to accounts of ‘new media’- the procedure is remarkably similar to his social formalist anlaysis (Williams, 1981). McLuhan provides a more precise example too of the risks of ’accidental’ legitimation of a status quo. It is the technicist formalism – not the technological determinism – that Williams focusses on in his critique of McLuhan. His work was for Williams ‘…a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory: a development and elaboration of a formalism which can be seen in many fields, from literary criticism and linguistics to psychology and anthropology, but which acquired its most significant popular influence in an isolating theory of "the media". (Williams, 1974, 126)
This isolation enables a further step, the projection of de facto social theory of a highly affirmative type – the retribalizing effects of television in the new age of the ‘global village’. It is important to reiterate here that Williams’s target is not formalistic techniques as such but the associated ‘denormative’ technicism and projection that results from their isolated usage.
Avant-Gardism, Intellectuals and Critique
The methodological isolation Williams challenged was closely informed by his developing sociology of intellectuals. One way of unpacking Williams’s position here is to use as a foil the work of Stuart Hall - the former Director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies - as a foil. In the 1980s Hall tirelessly promoted the Gramscian model of the organic intellectual as the most appropriate alternative to the then still-common (in Europe) Leninist one of the subordinate of the vanguard party (e.g. Hall, 1986). Since then Hall has always characterized the role of the Birmingham CCCS – and much later work in cultural studies - in terms of its struggle to adequately achieve the organic intellectual role (e.g. Hall ,1997). This has suited very well later cultural studies’ function as an incubator of intellectuals from subaltern social groups. Williams, very much an organic intellectual in this sense himself, had made his own break with Leninist vanguardism in the 1930s and 40s and was one of the first major advocates of Gramsci’s relevance following the partial translation of The Prison Notebooks into English in 1971 (Williams, 1973). However, Williams never embraced the organic intellectual model. Williams seems to have detected that for all his apparent respect for the role of democratic institutions, popular culture and civil society in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practice, Gramsci’s overarching organic intellectual remained that of the Leninist party.
Of more immediate relevance here is Gramsci’s binary contrast of a hegemonic contest for intellectual leadership between established traditional intellectuals and the organic intellectuals of the rising class who draw primarily on the culture of that class. Williams’s view of tradition and traditional intellectuals is far more subtle than this. Traditions for Williams had no necessary class - or other social - belonging. Social power was certainly demonstrated in selectivity and exclusions in the composition of traditions but these are seen as nonetheless part of a common culture open to intellectual debate and quite possibly critical redemption. So something like a cultural public sphere is always assumed by Williams. The task of the subaltern intellectual was first and foremost to contest this terrain of common intellectual culture with challenges to the dominant selective traditions. Williams rarely saw a need for wholesale dismissal of or opposition to, such traditions. Rather, his own practice usually entailed at least three steps: (i) an immanent critique of the dominant tradition or its informing ethos; (ii) a sociological placement of the intellectual groups responsible for the tradition’s development (formational analyses designed to capture the organizational fluidity of informal intellectual groupings (e.g. the Bloomsbury group) and (iii) the development of an alternative counter-tradition. Cultural and intellectual history thus play a crucial role in Williams’s project but their use is a long way from that of an arcanely disengaged history of ideas. Rather, cultural history might reveal fruitful ‘paths not taken’ within the dominant intellectual culture while the aspirations of subaltern social groups might provide the means of completion of the emancipatory promise of the project of modernity. Most of Williams’s best known works on literary and intellectual traditions operate in this mode e.g. Culture and Society (Williams, 1990), Modern Tragedy (Williams, 1966), The Country and The City (Williams, 1975). One of the major preoccupations of the mature sociology of culture is the articulation of this practice of socio-cultural critique (Jones, 2004).
As the influence of structuralism, postmodernism and post-structuralism grew within the academy, Williams sought to sociologically place these developments as well by applying his method of socio-cultural critique. That is, he treated these developments as new traditions but, like all other intellectual traditions, necessarily selective ones. What had grown from a dissident position Williams had developed within literary studies and developed into a sociology of aesthetic culture was increasingly looking like a sociology of knowledge. Williams thus combined a history of the structuralist enterprise with a sociology of avant-gardism and his own tentative construction of an alternative tradition of the key movement for him in these developments, modernism. It was this project – The Politics of Modernism: against the new conformists (Williams, 1989) - on which Williams was still working when he died in 1988 but its basic shape is reasonably clear.
The central premiss is similar to Susan Buck-Morss’s account of the role of avant-gardism in the formation of Theodor Adorno and Frankfurt Critical Theory. As the model of Leninist vanguard is rejected as a template for intellectual politics, that of an avant-garde – leadership by experimental example - tends to fill the vacuum (Buck-Morss, 1977, 32). For Williams, however, there are further dimensions. Not only do aesthetic avant-gardes tend to prefigure developments within the dominant social class within which they are often formed and against which they rebel; critical intellectuals also increasingly take their lead from aesthetic avant-gardes at the level of intellectual content. Here Bakhtin and Medvedev’s thesis that Russian Formalism was the theorisation of the practices of the Russian Futurists is pivotal for Williams (Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1986). When combined with Frederic Jameson’s account of the dependence of French structuralism upon Russian and Prague Formalism (Jameson, 1974), Williams felt he had a powerful account of a seductive ‘formalist trap’ into which may of his contemporaries were falling. This too was a selective tradition with hegemonic effects.
Crucially, however, those swayed by this hegemonic intellectual leadership were not the general population or students but intellectuals who increasingly identified themselves as cultural theorists. For Williams ‘the formalist trap’ was a kind of intellectual alienation from any capacity to practise redemptive immanent critique, to form solidarities with non-intellectuals or to engage in the development of policy alternatives.
More specifically, the recurrence of technicist formalism as a critical intellectual preference also depended on the adoption of an avant-gardist impatience with tradition such that conventional scholarly protocols were not always in play. The Althusserian advocacy of ‘epistemological breaks’ with ‘empiricist’ and ‘humanist’ intellectual precursors, for example, bore striking resemblance to avant-gardist breaks with prior aesthetic traditions. To these we might add the limited selection of materials available in translation and the tendency for many early English language advocates of formalist-structuralist methods from the 1970s to write within a minimalist self-referential style that often advanced its case by seductively succinct examples in the mode of, say, the early Roland Barthes.
Latour: from ethnomethodology to literary formalism?
To suggest Latour is guilty of technicist formalism seems absurd at first glance. Unlike Williams, Latour has actually conducted fieldwork into ‘ways of life’ – specifically the ‘laboratory life’ and similar practices of scientists. So the further implication that his work is socially isolated or affirmative of a status quo is at least counter-intuitive.
Latour’s adoption of an overtly ‘semiotic’ position in the 1990s is relatively well-known (e.g. Akrich & Latour 1992; Latour 1993a & 1993b; cf Barry & Slater 2002). However, his employment of semiotics and formalistic literary analysis dates from at least as early as his and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (Latour & Woolgar, 1979). In that work Latour argues that laboratories can be understood as principally sites of ‘literary inscription’ (Latour & Woolgar, 1979, 51ff). This follows from the genuine insight that in the laboratory he investigates the consumption and production of scientific papers is quite pivotal, leading to ‘a central prominence of documents in the laboratory’ (Latour & Woolgar, 1979, 52), rather than the commonsense ‘realist’view of the dominance of practical-experimentation. This leads Latour directly into formalist analysis of actual papers on the basis of ‘the modality of their statement types’ by which he means the forms of propositions employed in the papers but not, at any level, their overt ‘content’. Latour so surmounts the problem that, for the character through whom re reports his results, his ‘anthropological observer’, the scientific papers read like ‘Chinese’.
While the category of inscription is attributed to Derrida, the more significant ongoing influence from this moment is A.J. Greimas’s semiotics (Greimas & Courtés, 1982; Greimas, 1983; 1987; 1990). Latour’s most notable debt to Greimas is his highly infuential conception of actant, the core of his ‘actor network theory’ (ANT). This position aims to break with the limits of social shaping and other sociological approaches. These allegedly depend on structure versus agency and nature/culture dichotomies as well as the use of ‘external’ appeals to social interests. Latour employs the concept of actant to characterize those forms of manufactured objects that have a kind of agency – doorclosers and speed-humps are two of his favourite examples (e.g. Latour, 1992). If we acknowledge actants’ capacities for action – albeit highly predictable action – then, for Latour, the structure/agency binary is unsettled and many other similar assumptions begin to unravel. Latour would thus replace structure/agency binaries with networks of actors and actants.
It is a glossary of semiotics that provides my favourite fictional example of an actant, the Batmobile (Colapietro, 1993, 5-6). Greimas’s own dictionary of semiotics quite properly sources the term to Vladmir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk-Tale, the classic Russian Formalist source of structuralist models of narrative (Propp, 1968). For Propp, the concept of actant is needed to account for the narratively active role of non-human agents in folk tales i.e. usually magically endowed animals and objects that acted as helpers to the hero. From this conception of narrative, via Greimas, Latour is able to provide a critique of naïve narratives of ‘normal’scientific practices and ‘progress’. Moreover, he is also able to practise of form of self-reflexivity in his own writing up of his ethnomethodological practice via the form of a delegated fictional character such as ‘the observer’ of Laboratory Life.
Perhaps this is what Latour means by the later slogan ‘Semiotics is the ethnomethodology of texts’ (Latour, 1993b: 131). However, while ethnomethodology can be placed within the anti-positivist tradition as a likely bearer of verstehen/understanding, its correlate in textual analysis would surely then be a form of hermeneutics that paid similar attention to substantive content. However, the subtitular social constructivism of the ethnomethodological work Laboratory Life is itself formalist to the significant degree that it focusses on the the fomal-textual dimension of the construction of scientific facts. To reverse Latour’s slogan we might say his ethnomethodology – or rather its interpretative moment - is as formalist as his intellectual sources.
There is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with such a formalist position. Formal techniques can reveal properties of social phenomena insusceptible to other forms of analysis. Williams himself insisted that sociology should recognize that cultural forms are indeed ‘social facts’ susceptible to formal analysis. His critique of technicist formalism only comes into play if the formalist techniques Latour deploys isolate their ‘objects’ from their social determinants and/or are allowed to become a projection, a de facto social theory. This does seem to be a trend in the later Latour.
As noted above, Latour believes his conception of actant unsettles structure/agency binaries that underplay the social dimensions of ‘objects’ and indeed the ‘black box’ bracketing of scientific and other techniques in much sociology, social theory and science studies. To focus on objects/actants – or indeed to adopt ‘their’ perspective - reveals otherwise hidden social relations. One simple example is his fictive/illustrative account of the breakdown of a humble overhead projector (Latour, 1994, 36) . In Latour’s narrative the breakdown leads to ‘swarms of repairmen’ descending on the projector and opening it, so rendering it and its components a social centrality usually repressed. Latour’s point is well-made but the assumption of the likely entry of the deus ex machina of ‘swarms of repairmen’ is itself a social one easily challenged by anyone who works in an underfunded teaching or research institution. In such circumstances the black box would not only remain unopened, it would be abandoned until repair at a later date and still remain equally ‘hidden’. It is not the adoption of the perspective of the actant that is the problem here but how this perspective is used to reinform - or articulate with - ‘macro’ sociological accounts. Latour’s oversight here is symptomatic. He assumes in a blackbox manner the background presence of a very affirmative characterization – that infrastructural resources will always be readily provided in times of crisis - of the very social relations he claims ‘sociologics’ overemphasize to the detriment of actants. His assumption so has a normative dimension that Andrew Feenberg has characterized as conformism (Feenberg, 2003). For Feenberg, this risk emerges precisely because Latour overprivileges his operational actor-networks over all else, and most especially over any claims to transcendental social norms. More particularly, he privileges the knowledge he obtains from his practice-oriented fieldwork on scientists and engineers (and related actor-actant networks). As Judy Wajcman has put this problem more explicitly, ANT’s ethnomethodological orientation is ‘similarly ill-equipped to deal with power as a structural phenomeneon’ (Wajcman, 2002, 355). As we have seen, this privileged ethnomethodological evidence is heavily dependent on literary formalism for its interpretative frame.
Latour, McLuhan & Visual Mediation
We saw earlier that the work of Marshall McLuhan provided Williams’s paradigmatic case of formalistic projection. Parallels between McLuhan and Latour have been noted (Stalder, 1998). Latour’s mid-90s work on ‘technical mediation’ certainly moved within a somewhat McLuhanist mode of argument in that it implied a possible reconciliation between objects and humans via the delegation of agency to the actant (as McLuhan had argued of ‘the medium’). Latour has recently drawn the parallel with McLuhan himself (Latour, 1998, 422). As with his earlier invocation of Greimas and, by implication, Propp, the turn to ‘McLuhanism’ derives from a defensible employment of formalist methods. Latour’s interest has now expanded to visual as well as ‘literary’ inscription and mediation of scientific practices (e.g. electronic microscopy imaging) .
Now, we saw in his earliest work that Latour not only practised a formalist narrative analysis ‘upon’ scientific texts and practices but appeared to use a formally self-conscious literary device in his ‘delegation’ of his own narration of his ethnomethodological findings to a quasi-fictional character. To this extent we could say he even practised a kind of literary ‘modernism’ as part of his contestation of a naïve scientistic ‘realism’. In the case of his interest in the visual he has gone far further in this aesthetico-practical direction to the practice of visual art curatorship.
In 2002 he co-curated an exhibition in Germany (ZKM Center for Art and Media) entitled Iconoclash: beyond the image wars in science, religion and art. In his opening paper for the book of the same name, he outlines his own understanding of the exhibition’s juxtaposition of images from religion, science and contemporary art. Such juxtapositions, he suggests, may help increase recognition of the modes by which all such images are constructed: that they were made by human hands - not gods - in the case of religious icons and that they are not transparent representations of nature in the case of scientific images:
We have not brought religious images into an avant-garde institution of contemporary art to have them again subjected to irony or destruction, nor to again present them to be worshipped. We have brought them here to resonate with the scientific images and show in which ways they are powerful and what sort of invisibility both types of images have been able to produce. …
Scientific images have not been brought here to instruct or enlighten the public in some pedagogical way, but to show how they are generated and how they connect to one another … what peculiar type of invisible world they generate..
As to contemporary art pieces, they are not being shown here to compose an art show, but to draw the conclusions of this huge laboratory experiment on the limits and virtues of representation that has been going on in so many media and so many bold innovative enterprises… (Latour, 2002, 11-12)
Having so played with a range of possible instititutional signifiers to attach to this event – avant-garde exhibition, pedagogical museum, scientific laboratory - Latour immediately proclaims the exhibition ‘an idol-chamber, similar to the ones made by Protestant desecrators when they tore the images away from the cult, turning them into objects of horror and derision, before they became the first kernels of the art museum and aesthetic appreciation’(2002, 22). However, later in the paper he concedes that the practice of such invocation of intertextuality by montage-like juxtaposition has an impeccable aesthetic modernist pedigree (Latour, 2002, 40).
From Williams’s position it is reasonable to observe here that avant-gardist aesthetic experiment has contributed to an inadequate de facto social theory. Indeed the whole enterprise bears more than a passing resemblance to McLuhan and Fiore’s The Medium is The Massage (1967) and, perhaps even moreso, to Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay that placed McLuhan within a new imagistic sensibility that might transcend the literary bias of the old (British) ‘two cultures debate’ (between science and culture as represented by C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis respectively) (Sontag, 1968). McLuhan and Williams had both been trained in Leavis’s ‘Cambridge English’ in the 1930s. Williams’s whole early project was framed as an immanent critique of Leavis’s quasi-sociological thesis that only Great Literature – his ‘great tradition’ - bore the legacy of lost organic communities of the past. McLuhan simply declared that television provided instantaneous means of establishment of such organic communities. The formalism and technological determinism in McLuhan that Williams challenged followed directly from that position
But despite the evident parallels with McLuhan and the tendency towards formalistic projection, Latour’s position is much better characterized as an ambiguous balancing act of ‘amodernism’.
(A)modern Critique?
Behind Latour’s idol-chamber metaphor lies his own understanding of those who defend a project of ‘modernity’ – their alleged naïve confidence in science, modernization and verifiable ‘truth’ castigated throughout We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1993a). But behind the continuing invocation of aesthetic modernism and its formalistic theoretical legacies lies a somewhat anomalous suspicion of avant-gardism – both aesthetic and theoretical - which also briefly surfaces in We Have Never Been Modern’s attack on the exhausted avant-gardism that fuelled much of the postmodernist surge. Baudrillard and Lyotard, Latour says, ‘…are simply stuck in the impasse of all avant-gardes that have no more troops behind them’ (1993a, 62). The proximity to Williams here is uncanny, right down to the stickiness of the metaphor. Williams put it more bluntly: he refused to be ‘stuck in the post’ (Williams, 1989, 35).
Most recently, Latour has pointed to explicit problems with an ‘amodern’ quasi-avant-gardism in his own work. In 1997, for example, he complained (perhaps playfully) about the shift in common usage of the term ‘network’. Whereas twenty years ago it conveyed a critical sense (for Latour, of transformative/translation practices along a network), now it signifies communicative immediacy (via the internet etc). This, says Latour, is the ‘great danger of using a technical metaphor slightly ahead of everyone’s common use’ (Latour, 1997a). Williams could have reasonably predicted such an outcome with his historical semantics. Many of his famous keywords were chosen precisely because they sat at the intersection of popular & critical intellectual usage (e.g. tragedy). Intellectuals from subaltern social groups were, in Williams’s view, often the best-placed to detect such semantic locations. The critical task was not the quasi-avant-gardist one of keeping slighly ahead of popular usage but of locating the contested signifier within an alternative tradition to the dominant. Williams’s historical semantics thus moves hand in glove with his practice of critique.
Latour’s own practice of critique has fared little better than his semantic quasi-avant-gardism. In 2004 he admitted he was horrified to discover an echo of his own undoing of ‘scientific certainty’ within the Bush Administration’s contestion of the scientifiicity of claims about global warming (Latour, 2004, 226-227). This echo is consistent with Feenberg’s charge of conformism. Latour has so turned his more recent attention to the practice of critique – and of a critical avant-garde - in something like the auto-critical manner of the later Foucault.
While such a qualification of his amodernism is fruitful, even here, however, there is little sign that Latour has learnt the lessons of the fictional engineer, Hans Castorp, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: that the Enlightenment practice of critique – and the related conception of modernity - is not reducible to the destruction of false idols in the name of an objective ‘realist’ science. Such an unmasking or defetishisizing critique was only ever half the story, certainly of social critique. The other half - immanent critique - was never wholly destructive – it was as much about the holding to account of those who made Enlightenment promises of emancipation as about the removal of apparent forms of subordination and their legitimative ‘distortions’. This was Williams’s complaint against the pseudo-science of the Marxist-Leninist tradition (as opposed to Marx) up to and including Gramsci: its inability to distinguish between bourgeois propaganda and a bourgeois public sphere. Some might say – Williams in his lifetime and Latour today – that that distinction is becoming harder and harder to make in recent times and that an overly abstracted conception of modernity isn’t sufficient to this task. But the technicist formalism on which Latour still appears to rely offers no more towards a renewal of critique. To move beyond such limitations is beyond the scope of this paper but one of many potential starting points may be, nonetheless, the synergies between Williams’s mature sociology of culture and Latour’s call for a rethinking towards a renewal of the practice of critique.
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The Bodies of Denis Lavant

"...and the final, seemingly unaccountable, release of affect."

"Galoup's acrobatic dance appears to take place in the same Dijbouti disco/nightclub featured throughout the film— the same back-wall mirror, the same flashing lights. And yet, the space no longer serves the same narrative purpose, nor is it filled with the same crowd. Deleuze identifies the indeterminacy of location in modern cinema—achieved in the proliferation of the "any-space-whatever"—with the ability of space to change co-ordinates suddenly and without apparent justification. In these instances, space may be said to change faces, to disguise itself under an array of masks or cloaks that render it as seductive as it is unfathomable.

"During his final performance, Galoup/Lavant increasingly lets his body be overtaken by the rhythm and abandons himself to a kinetic pattern whereby he seems to lose control of everything except his ability to be immersed in the rhythm. Unlike the Lacanian model of specular (mis)recognition, which describes the child as deriving a sense of jubilation from the illusory coordination and wholeness projected in front of his uncoordinated body, Galoup/Lavant seems to derive jouissance from a maddening loss of control, perhaps not so much of a corporeal centre as of a fixed sense of corporeal limits or boundaries.

"One of the most compelling features of Galoup/Lavant's dance is that it doesn't follow a smooth or consistent rhythmic pattern. Instead, it can be described as a hesitant pattern of fits and starts, and of abrupt, deliberate stops. Such kinetic fragmentation is nonetheless consistent with Galoup's character, which wavers between a militarised and rigid control of the body and the final, seemingly unaccountable, release of affect."

"Performing the narrative of seduction"
Elena del Rio

"Almost Completely Ruined Today...."

As the year is starting to draw to a close, various deadlines have bedeviled this blog's contributors, and, alas, postings have become more infrequent. Be this as it may, my attention was captured the other day by something I had been after for years. In fact, ever since I first heard about Jerry Lewis's legendary lost film, The Day the Clown Cried, I have yearned to see it.

Well, my dream didn't exactly come true, but I have come across a brilliant website, which not only features youtube clips but also the script, along with some amazing photos. Jerry is more often than not dismissed as an extremist, an embarrassment, on account of his masochistic reliance on infantile abjection as the basis of his comedy. Luckily though, there are scholars working against these facile dismissals. I am thinking here of people such as Steven Shaviro, who managed in The Cinematic Body to build upon the pioneering work of Scott Bukatman, who's "Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis's Life as a Man" inaugurated this area of investigation. I should probably qualify the latter claim though, as one would also need to refer to Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins and Leo Bersani's provocative piece, "Is the Rectum a Grave?", for comparable research, albeit without specifying Lewis per se.

What we have here are a series of works concerned with the ecstasy of abjection, the perverse pleasure following from the relinquishment of a proud male [erect] subjectivity, to a libidinal economy predicated upon loss, abandonment. One of the reasons I raise it here is that I think this critical tradition has bearing on my previous postings on "erasure". Here the problem, the perversion, may follow from a model of self that is too finely attuned to others. Overflowing with the milk of human kindness, maladaptive misfits to the core, Shaviro suggests an unconscious anarchism at work in such instances. When contrasted with the fatuous overbearing authority figures portrayed in Lewis's films, the dark secret of bourgeois family socialisation is revealed: it is the "competent" figures who are the true narcissists, because only they have the cognitive ability to successfully navigate Sennett and Rorty's contingent, "disordered" world, thereby securing their desires.

I do not assert this position as a viable constructive alternative to the aforementioned dramaturgical metaphors of selfhood. What I do argue though is that such reductions of the self to the level of abjection, to shit, a state prior to anything like an identity, have elsewhere served as a departure point for evaluating the ethical valency of shame. Unlike guilt, shame is irreducible to failure in one task, that could in turn be rectified by successfully repeating a ritual task. It relates more to an entire sense of individual worth, and as a result is not amenable to resolution. "Mother I've tried hard believe me/I'm doing the best that I can/I'm ashamed of the things I've being put through/I'm ashamed of the person I am", so sang Ian Curtis, and Henry Rollins eventually engaged the same trope, "I wonder if you can see/I wonder if you can tell/I wonder if you see right through the mask I wear so well/I'll never let you know what's going on inside me/my shame keeps me down".

One of the things I'm currently working on, which is distracting me from updating this blog, is the theoretical attempts to tease out some of the ethical implications. Shame might serve as a democratic sensitising device, alerting one to the needs of others. By the same token, it might have a purely corrosive effect which inhibits any capacity for normative reconstruction. In such cases it seems appropriate to speak, along with Bukatman, of "paralysis in motion". To my mind, Bukatman's archetype is an underexplored resource in rock music writing. Afterall, these performers are fascinating in part because we, the audience, get to play voyeur, by trying to figure out the interplay between the public/private personas. If I applied the abjection/shame trope to performers such as Jonathan Richman and Iggy Pop, it might become justifiable to trace a common lineage even further back, to Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Notes from Underground. Iggy chose the former as an album title, and Howard Devoto clearly referenced the latter in A Song from Under the Floorboards. How much of the status anxiety and attendant overcompensation in some of these cases may resonate with Bachelard's observation, "a creature that withdraws into its shell is preparing a way out", is an interesting question that also seems worth following up. In this spirit I venture the hypothesis that Richman might be the Professor Klump, "the Nutty Professor" of rock n' roll ("Hey little insect!!"), while Iggy is possibly its Buddy Love, "I've being dirt/and I don't care/cuz I'm learnin'".

Regretfully though, there are few in contemporary cinema able to approach the edginess of Lewis's best films. While it may be hard to match the intense vicarious thrills of becoming hopelessly perverted and evil, which follow on from watching Robin Williams, particularly Patch Adams, his body of work generally does not hold up in comparison with Lewis. This convinces me that it may be more fruitful to explore musical avenues when it comes to demonstrating the potentially expansive nature of this trope.

But I wouldn't dream of pointing anyone in a musical direction until they've fully explored this site:

http://www.subcin.com/clowncried.html

An Oblique Strategy: How Ironic is Brian Eno?

Here is a rejoinder to my previous post. I made some brief critical comments about Lou Reed and Gary Numan, but neglected to mention Brian Eno. Afterall, who can forget his endorsement of Richard Rorty's "contingency", suggesting that Eno's "ironic" persona is predicated on the promise of release from the ego as a paranoid authoritarian structure. Or rather, as Simon Reynolds has more aptly put it, Eno subscribes to a program for creatively shaping the self that is directed by zen and cybernetics. Scary how Eno here is seemingly close to some of the territory broached in my comments on information theory, but with the qualifier that he appears ill-equipped to tackle the danger of the "erasure" strategem with respect to the violence foregrounded by Brian Dillon? Afterall, the problem for Rorty, and by extension, Eno, is that they can't consistently explain why or how would it matter to such a contingent, ironic "self" if it experienced any form of violence (remember, protection from "cruelty" is Rorty's baseline minimal condition of mutual respect) when it could presumably just "siphon" them off?

Why is Eno so taken by Richard Sennett's The Uses of Disorder rather than his coauthored book with Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class? Is the former more compatible with a liberal tolerance for contingency? Is it coincidental that Sennett later became by default Tony Blair's "house philosopher"? (as revealed in Sennett's interview in The Guardian). Again, with Cobb, Sennett focused more on gradations of value, leading the reader to understand how living in a society based upon injustice cannot leave one content to merely adjust to a series of negative prohibitions. Sennett subsequently appeared to neglect this aspect for the next twenty years or so, (until he revisited his interviewees from Injuries in a study of the "new capitalism"), turning his attention to dramaturgical metaphors of selfhood, and one might surmise that herein lies some of the appeal to performers such as Brian Eno. According to Sennett, living with contingency, or "disorder", comes to require a similar process experienced by musicians who learn to play and listen with their "third ear"; by withholding some personal resources during performance, the musician can learn to judge themselves more objectively, ensuring the availability of energy reserves which allow them to subsequently refine their work. Sennett thus gradually developed the more expansive thesis that a degree of [ironic] detachment ensured a public life outside of the self remained intelligible, in the sense that such a self becomes strong enough to move around in a world dominated by injustice.

There is not a great deal of difference between Sennett and Rorty in this regard. While Rorty doesn't seem to think, with Sennett, that anything like a "third ear" is integral to the conduct of "private life" [sic], he in effect agrees with Sennett that such a form of detachment is an essential ingredient of the public sphere.

To borrow the title of Cary Wolfe's telling critique of Rorty, the problem in both instances though has to do with how they might make "contingency safe for liberalism". As demonstrated by Injuries, sometimes it is important to distinguish between a self's prospective ideals that should not be deterred from realisation, forced into ironic resignation, by systemic asymmetrical distributions of power. For this reason it is inadequate to soley rely on dramaturgical metaphors of selfhood, because they can't offer much clarification on the relationship between personal and social autonomy. The important difference has to do with how rigorous the ethic adopted by a self is; can it distinguish between and thus prioritise a value system capable of identifying forms of "disorder" that are damaging to its integrity? In other words, while it may be useful to some degree to acknowledge how disappointment can socialise a person in ways preventing them from becoming a megalomaniac, not every effort to collectively redress social injustice is deserving of such liberal accommodation. The problem then is how modernity may provoke some suspect features of autonomy, witness Eno's "aesthetic" flirtation with the ethical dilemmas following from "revelations of erasure". Perhaps this means that it is not so much the self that is erased in toto, but rather its potentially most radical impulses. Were this true, it would seem to indicate that the connection between the technological functionalism of autopoiesis and liberalism did not materialise for the first time when Brian Eno started dabbling in electronic music, cybernetics, and liberalism. No, this conjunction has been ascendant since the the 16th and 17th Centuries, as pointed out in Otto Mayr's Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe. This book convincingly demonstrates that ideas of self-regulation (autopoiesis) were instrumental to the shift in European political philosophy away from authoritarian centralism to Enlightenment philosophies of democratic liberalism. The self-regulating Invisible Hand of Adam Smith's market philosophy is one of the latter's most resurgent characteristics, up until today's neoliberal climate where liberal humanism is increasingly imperilled by association with possessive individualism and self-regulating machinery. This might also explain the ambiguous status of the intellectual property rights accruing around artists who deploy autopoietic techniques: they are in effect cyborgs who are also rational subjects already constituted by capitalist forces. How comfortably does this sit with what N.Katherine Hayles calls the "constitutive premise for liberal humanism", that one "owns" oneself? This might go some way towards explaining why "loops" (not coincidentally, also a fundamental term in the autopoietic sciences) and "samples" are sometimes controversial in musical circles, with respect to sacrosanct notions of "originality" and copyright.

And so, at least for the moment, I find myself returning to Alessandro Ferrara (much by way of critical response to Sennett) and Hans Joas (eloquent replies to Rorty) for a more constructive alternative.....

Richard Rorty and Brian Enoby Gregory Taylor

In addition to his activities as a composer, producer, and performer, Brian Eno reads. Anyone who is at all familiar with either his interviews and/or writing will occasionally catch a name dropped here and there: Stafford Beer, Morse Peckham, and - a bit more recently - the American philosopher Richard Rorty. I think that much of Brian's recent thinking and writing on the relationship between kinds of decision-making and the language with which we make judgements of value in a world where all kinds of views are represented owes a lot to the Rorty that Brian's read. In fact, I don't think Eno's antiessentialism would be as articulate without Richard Rorty's writings. The following is a very brief description of Rorty's philosophical writings. Although Eno most often refers to the book "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity," I'll try here to provide a little background to the whole of Rorty's writings; I think that to do otherwise would be a little like describing Eno's output *only* in terms of "Music for Airports/Thursday Afternoon/Neroli."
Richard Rorty's career bears some superficial resemblances to Eno's, in that he begins his career in a position in which he's essentially located somewhere in the "mainstream" (as Eno's first exposure occurs in the context of British "pop" music with Roxy Music), at some point heads off in what seems to be a radically different sort of territory (which leaves some of his philosophical colleagues longing out loud for his "early stuff"), and in the process finds himself drawn into quite another set of alignments. And - this is more of a stretch - *both* Rorty and Eno are in some respects interested in looking at the work of "non-practitioners" - the notion that one occasionally finds novel solutions to a given dilemma by consulting people who are "nonmusicians" or "nonphilosophers."
When asked about his work, many philosophers (those in the Anglo-American tradition, anyway) will generally say something supportive about his earlier work as one of the major American analytic philosophers. They're referring to his work in the philosophy of mind, language, and truth, and will usually mention his 1979 book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature."
But of late, his interest for folks like Eno and people interested in cultural studies and literary theory begins when he pretty much completely repudiated his earlier analytic work for a kind of pragmatism which is a lot more in sync with the philosophical positions of continental European philosophers and theorists such as Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Habermas, and Foucault.
By now, your little PostModern Theory detectors should be clicking away (should that surprise *any* serious Eno fan?); but I think it's helpful to pause for a moment and provide a brief outline of Rorty's earlier work: it's easier to see where he wound up if you know where he started.
"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" was an important work for analytic philosophers in its radical critique of the traditional ideal of knowledge as a faithful representation of reality. In this traditional view, the mind is a kind of mirror which reflects the real, and Philosophy has the job of testing and repairing this mirror so that our propositions will do a better job of "reflecting" reality. Rorty is critical in his book of this idea that Philosophy can somehow "fix" the conditions of knowledge in a way which is unaffected by social practices, or the games and vagaries of language itself. In short, he argues that this notion that Philosophy's ability to fix these things in a way that's ahistorical or independent of any and all "frames of reason" (to quote from the Eno/Cale song) is a hollow pretension.
Proceeding from this, he comes up with three basic ideas which are pretty far outside of the traditions of the analytical tradition from which he comes, but a lot more like the kind of Phenomenology that one finds in European philosophers.
1. Irrationalism - You begin by recognizing that there is a kind of contingent character of the context of any kind of inquiry. A consequence of this contingency is that you're not so much "discovering" truth in inquiry, but "making" it, using the tools given you by your frame of reference.
2. This kind of antiessentialism is applied to the language that we use for things that philosophers try to describe in *noncontingent* terms - that is, notions like "truth" and "language" and "morality".
3. Instead of philosophical theorizing (which cannot escape the trap of contingency), we ought to substitute a more modest kind of "practical reason." In this sense, he can be thought of a kind of Pragmatist along the lines of the American philosopher John Dewey.
So, I think we can now begin to see where Brian Eno might start quoting him a bit: Since we create both language and truth about the world, we ought to be interested in the reconstruction of language to make it more useful and rewarding and to make the world more "satisfying" to our desires.
Since Rorty views creation and construction as more important goals or more comparatively useful ends than discovery and objective description, you can imagine how his thinking takes a kind of radically relativistic and aesthetic turn. It should also come as no surprise that Rorty would claim that Philosophy (as practiced) may not be as useful for answering the questions of ordinary people as writers or poets or artists, who make it their business to wrestle with questions of contingency and the construction of meaning from objects at hand.
This brings us to the book that Eno says all those nice things about, "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity". Whenever you hear the Eno talking about things like "final vocabularies" and what he calls "ISMism", he's pretty much repeating Rorty. "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" works on coming up with a kind of "private" ethic of personal self-enrichment and self-creation combined with the "public" political morality of traditional Philosophical Liberalism. The advantage of Liberalism is that it brings with it a kind of procedural sense of justic which is of practical use; one desires to avoid giving pain to others so that each person may be free to pursue a private vision of perfection.
In "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," language is still a primary material, but it's no longer the incarnation or instantiation of reason; it's a primarily aesthetic tool for self-fashioning instead. By retelling our stories using different sorts of contexts and vocabulaties (without the resort of a "final" or objective one) we reconstitute ourselves and our society.
(Since I worked so hard to get this far, I'll take the writer's prerogative to editorialize just a little bit. It seems to me that there's a little problem with Rorty's view here (or something I don't fully understand) in the way he seems to depend on a pretty serious split between the public and the private that separates the language of concensus from the language of creation. It would seem to me that such a split would affect our use of a stable and shared language which is "public" for our common practical purposes and our political concerns for notions like "justice." That may not bother the rest of you, of course.In the end, if may turn out that I'm more interested in Pluralism than Relativism as a position. I hope that this doesn't mean that I have to turn in my Oblique Strategies.).
I'm still gtaylor@fullfeed.com
Back to silence, back to nothing

Brian Eno, 2002
WITH PETER HALLEY
Legendary musician, producer, and artist Brian Eno would much rather talk about urbanism, new computer applications, or emergence theory than something as pedestrian as EQ levels or his own brilliant musical history. And while he might mention the classic albums he’s made, like My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, or the seminal records he’s produced, like U2’s Achtung Baby, it would only be to underline a point that he’d like to make. Eno has a passion for dialogue and knowledge, and the wide-ranging intellect to support it.
index publisher Peter Halley met up with Brian on a recent trip to London. Leeta Harding photographed his orderly studio, filled with CDs, computer equipment, musical instruments, books, and current visual art projects.
PETER: I’m such a workaholic that the only way I can even make friends with people is by interviewing them. [laughs]
BRIAN: I make most of my friends through working situations as well.
PETER: I had a hunch.
BRIAN: It’s how you get to know somebody on the level that you might really be interested in knowing them. Even my visits to foreign countries usually happen just because I have to do something there, an exhibition or a show.
PETER: I’m the same.
BRIAN: It’s a nice way to meet people. You’re there with your work so they know what you’re up to. They have some reason to talk to you other than just to make idle conversation, and there’s a task to be done. You can understand a lot about the texture of a country by working in it and seeing how people arrive at decisions. You see which things are available to them and which things aren’t.
PETER: This might be a very male point of view, but I have the idea that, even though friendship is often defined as a leisure activity, it’s really about alliance — people who believe in the same things and therefore want to talk to each other.
BRIAN: I think that’s a very good definition. But it actually seems like quite a female idea of friendship.
PETER: How so?
BRIAN: When I watch my two little girls play, the thing that interests me about their games is the very laborious sets of relationships they’ll construct between the characters. You know, “You’re the auntie, but the mother doesn’t like you because you did this.” It’s terribly complicated, and there’s never any game at the end of it. The building of the network of relationships is just about all that ever happens.
PETER: That’s said to be a skill that’s prominent in women.
BRIAN: Yes. It led me to my theory that cities are places built for women.
PETER: Wow.
BRIAN: In cities, you have the opportunity to do all the things that women are really specialized at: intense social relationships and interactions, attention to lots of simultaneous details. And of course in cities you can do very few of the things that men are good at.
PETER: Like what?
BRIAN: You can’t break anything in a city. Everything is valuable, so you’re limited in how much you can test the physical nature of things — which I think is a big part of a man’s make up.
PETER: Many urbanists say that public life in the eighteenth century — which is when the modern city began to take shape — was available only to men. Do you think a female city was always there under the surface?
BRIAN: I do. One of the peaks of civilization in the west was the salon. They were nearly always the invention and ongoing project of women.
PETER: I’m a real devotee of the German sociologist, Norbert Elias. He would say that the first female-oriented societies were the aristocratic courts, and that the salon would be an outgrowth of that.
BRIAN: Don’t you think the court is in a way the original city? It’s a congregation of people who aren’t related, so it’s not a clan, and they’re in very close proximity, which always gives rise to manners.
PETER: Elias also gives the court credit for the invention of psychology.
BRIAN: Oh that’s interesting.
PETER: What have you been reading lately?
BRIAN: I recently read Richard Sennett’s book The Uses of Disorder. It’s a very intelligent anti-planning book, and I thought, “This is fantastic, but nobody’s ever going to read it.” So I decided to condense it. I wanted to present the argument of the book in three thousand words. I went through it with a yellow highlighter, marking the bits that really got the germ of the idea. Then I photocopied all the parts I’d marked and collaged them together. After that, I had this idea that every serious book should be publishedin two forms. There should be the full version, but preceding it by a month or so should be the filtered version.
PETER: It would be even better to ask ten different people to do that and put all the versions into one volume.
BRIAN: It took me about a week to do the Sennett book. I had it all pasted up on a huge sheet of cardboard, which I gave to several people who would never have read the book otherwise. And they all got the idea. One of them went on to read a lot of other Sennett books.
PETER: Have you read his “The Fall of Public Man”? He was only about thirty when he wrote it.
BRIAN: That’s a very good book. >PETER: I think that a lot of radical American writers who were operating in the ‘60s were edited out of American cultural history. If Sennett were on the other side of the Atlantic, I think he’d be hailed as a genius.
BRIAN: Sennett’s gathered steam over here during the last ten years. There’s been a slowly building feeling that he is one of the important American writers. Somebody else who might be better known here than in America is the philosopher Richard Rorty.
PETER: He’s actually quite widely followed in the art world here. I haven’t read his work.
BRIAN: Rorty tries to imagine how we can deal with a world in which we’ve abandoned the concept of absolute values — the idea that there’s some greater wisdom to which we can appeal. He’s asking, “Suppose that it’s the case that we designed our own mental universe, suppose that all the things we call good and evil are our own projections, that they aren’t givens …”
PETER: That sounds so much like Heidegger or Sartre. I don’t understand what makes Rorty different.
BRIAN: He’s an optimist. It’s not, “We made it all up? Oh shit, so there’s nothing at the bottom of it all?” To me, Rorty’s work is a celebration of what humans do best of all, which is to imagine.
PETER: Is there one thing you would recommend I read by Rorty?
BRIAN: I would say the introduction to his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It’s only a few pages long and it’s so good. The book is about Nabakov and Orwell, and about writing and the idea that works of imagination are the way that we arrive at new social concepts, rather than works of so-called rational deduction. In the end, what Rorty turns out to be saying is that philosophy is just another kind of writing. It doesn’t have any special grasp on the truth.
PETER: I think that philosophy is a codification of what’s already going on more widely in the culture. If you think of Barthes’ Mythologies, for example, it’s such a summary of what people were thinking about in the late ‘50s.
BRIAN: My problem with twentieth century philosophy is that so much of it was entirely reactive to other philosophy. It became hard for me to follow what anyone was saying — or why they would bother saying it. I responded to Rorty because I could see how his ideas made some difference to the way I think about my life.
PETER: That’s such a great feeling. The same happened for me with Barthes and Foucalt. BRIAN: To tell you the truth, I never found Foucalt very easy to read. Barthes was a very entertaining writer. With his work I thought, “Yeah. That’s right. I knew that.” [laughs] It rang very true to me.
PETER: I’d like to bring up Norbert Elias again. In one of his books, he kind of refutes the idea of individual consciousness. He says consciousness only resides in the group. That seemed enormously important to me.
BRIAN: I recently read a book about the CIA’s experiments in the ‘60s and ‘70s using psychedelic drugs as interrogation tools. In the end, they found that what worked best was old-fashioned solitary confinement. It drove the subjects completely mad.
PETER: It seems that almost the biggest pain humans can feel is total aloneness.
BRIAN: Occasionally I go off for a few days just to sit somewhere on my own. I refer to it as “going into the abyss.” I don’t even take books because they’re another way of engaging in the group consciousness. The idea is that I’ll spend some time in a quite boring place where I don’t know anybody and I don’t speak the language.
PETER: What’s that like?
BRIAN: It’s actually very traumatic. The first two days are especially disturbing. I lose sense of the value of anything I’ve been doing — it all starts to look completely meaningless. If I were actually depressed, I would never do this because I could very quickly end up topping myself. [laughs]
PETER: Does it eventually become a positive experience?
BRIAN: Yes. It’s a fantastic moment. Suddenly I’m no longer desperate. All these things that I had thought were wonderful suddenly look like shit, but there’s still something great about being alive. It kind of reaffirms everything.
PETER: Do you still feel connected to the world of mainstream music?
BRIAN: One often used to hear high art people saying that pop music was so boring and formulaic. I never thought that was true. All that formula and repetition is like a great big vehicle for carrying the moment of difference — the tiny point where something happens that didn’t happen before. As a listener, the first question I ask myself is, “Why am I moved by that? Why does that difference matter to me?”
PETER: The best thing about music today is that it’s available to a large audience at a low price.
BRIAN: What I value more than anything else about the music business is its distribution system. Records, record shops, and concerts are ways of distributing things to a lot of people. I like the idea of saying, “Here’s this incredibly well organized, powerful and pervasive machine — I want to be part of it.” If something I do gets criticized, I would never say, “They didn’t understand me,” or “What I did was too good for them.” I would assume there was something wrong with what I was doing.
PETER: Well not necessarily wrong. There’s nothing wrong with appealing to a very small audience.
BRIAN: I do a lot of things that I know won’t interest thousands of people, but I release them for the hundreds that will be interested. Sometimes I’m wrong, and it turns out that quite a lot of people actually do like them. Or, on the other hand, nobody does. [laughs]
PETER: I really don’t think the artist can tell.
BRIAN: I’ve often thought that there are two varieties of artists. There’s the fussy type, which I tend to be, who always censor themselves, and then there are people like Miles Davis and Prince who just say, “Look, if it came from me, it’s probably good.” There’s a certain generosity in that. Which category of artist do you fall into?
PETER: I’d say I’m half-and-half. [laughs]
BRIAN: I’m trying to get myself more into the latter camp, but it’s not natural. I tend to be nervous about everything.
PETER: But you have such a huge body of work.
BRIAN: I’d probably have about four times more if I hadn’t censored so much.
PETER: Jasper Johns is famous for holding on to his work.
BRIAN: A few years ago I was interested in what was happening to the act of curating. I’d seen a few shows in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, where the name of the curator was bigger on the poster than the names of the artists. It’s like saying, “Here’s somebody who can draw an interesting line through our culture. He can connect a few things which you’ll probably find worth taking seriously.”
PETER: As an artist, I'm not sure how much I like that trend. In Europe, most of the exhibitions tend to be poetic in their conception. I get a big kick out of all the titles, like "The Cooked and The Raw." It seems like, especially in Belgium, the exhibitions all have very poetic titles. And the way exhibitions are curated is not systemic at all.
BRIAN: It’s very much a creative act rather than an academic act. We’ve dropped the pretense that what these people are doing is assembling the most important things on some previously agreed-upon scale. We accept the idea that they’re telling a story using the available materials of culture. I think this is the way that ordinary people make their own culture. You own these records, you like those films, you’ve got these reproductions on your wall. You believe in a bit of this religion and a bit of that one, but at the same time you have candelabra that belong to yet another.
PETER: I also think that to a lot of people, culture has become like tourism. Instead of visiting London, you put on an Oasis record, or you go see Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum.
BRIAN: Cuban music is a good example of that. How many people, Americans especially, have been to Cuba? Very few. But somehow that culture has come to represent sexy, sophisticated life. And it’s all based on four records!
PETER: This gets us into the idea of importing the exotic while ignoring the reality.
BRIAN: When David Byrne and I released My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, I felt that there were so many things wrong with it. I had just started to get what rhythm was about. I had just become aware that there were people who did it a whole lot better than I did. The Village Voice reviewed it, and the only other review on the page was of a record by a black punk group from Harlem. They had appropriated all of the clichés of punk music and were praised roundly, while we were condemned as being neocolonialists.
PETER: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts struck me as being the opposite of neocolonial. There were things like Islamic Maqam singing on it, but it was right after the Iran Hostage crisis and it was like, “There are all these people out there, and their worldview is not the same as ours in the west. And we should listen.” At the same time, the album referenced this new American landscape that not only included technology, but also right wing preachers.
BRIAN: As an English person living in America in the early-’80s, I was much more receptive than a native would have been. I didn’t have many friends there, so I would just listen to the radio. There were complete lunatics on the airwaves — people whose views seemed so objectionable. I started recording them just because I wanted to show my friends in England what people in America were listening to.
PETER: I also used to tape things off the radio at that time. Maybe that’s why I responded to that record so immediately. We probably weren’t the only ones recording off the radio, but you were able to make a work of art out of it.
BRIAN: I already saw it as art, so I only needed to put a little context around it and it was dynamite. It was like discovering a totally exotic culture where I never expected one. I’d just been to Thailand before moving to America, and it was far less foreign to me than New York turned out to be.
PETER: Your trajectory from the early ‘70s to the mid-’80s seemed to encompass all the things that would become postmodernism in the ’80s. You went from an exploration of sexual personae, to skepticism about the emotional authenticity of pop music, to experiments that later became known as ambient music, and then an involvement with world music. You covered it all.
BRIAN: Things always look much more calculated in retrospect. I agree that you can draw a line through the things that I did, but at the time they all seemed chaotic to me. I just kept thinking, “When am I going to find out what I actually do?” I still think that actually.
PETER: Isn’t that a rather old-fashioned thing to worry about? [laughs]
BRIAN: I know. But it’s interesting that within one head there can be this childlike fascination with doing everything and the adult saying, “Why don’t you ever tidy up in here?”

The Revelation of Erasure

After almost two consecutive weeks of retiring for the evening to the accompaniment of Thomas Koner or Steve Roach on headphones, I had a disturbing epiphany: what if Derridata's previous posting, which wondered"where have all the people gone?" in the discussions of hauntology, and by extension "isolationism", could be extended to consideration of violence, and hence, the active exclusion, or rather, the erasure of people. Without question the first intrusive thought in my mind was the powerful [mute] testimony I experienced when visiting the empty camps as a European "thanatourist" in 2002. I say "mute" because we all agreed there was an immediacy to these encounters which began before any of us had made contact with any of the work done by historians on the site to situate this terrible period of history.

But beyond the exceptionalism, and even the unspeakability of such encounters, an intimation of erasure arises more frequently at the quotidian level situating Derridata's posting. If this becomes an intimation of horror to those bearing witiness to it, this occurs in exact accordance with admissions of indifference on the part of those for whom this is the most capable they are of offering any form of self-analysis. To pick two prominent examples, which greatly disturbed me during my adolescent years, what does it really mean for Lou Reed to proclaim, "I don't really have a personality", or for Gary Numan in "This Wreckage" to solicit his own "erasure"? What form of alienation is attestified to by such casual admissions in the context of a postindustrial society, where the circulations of communication, of bodies and information, indicate each other at every point? What else are workplaces such as offices or factories if not this? In these terms, a stranger is not so much "a friend one hasn't yet met", but rather "a blank", perhaps waiting to be filled in via the gathering of more data...

In his fascinating description of the Tate Gallery's "Erasure" exhibition, Brian Dillon almost speaks directly to these points. Consider how he describes one of the ultimate fantasies of modernist art as that of "a world without memory....a tabula rasa from which all styles of the past had been erased." Small wonder then that postmodernization is regarded by critics as the realisation of this tendency, to the extent that a de-differentiation of "culture" and every other societal sphere has taken place. Hence all those attempts to "fill in the blanks" by evoking some notion of "the Real", absence as in actuality articulated to politics, to the stubborn, enduring materiality of "the body", and so forth. Could it be then that "holy minimalism" is also a paradoxical attempt at re-enchantment? The spirit, the ghost, is an inactual presence...thank you Brian Dillon for helping to spur these reflections:

"More than any other image, an erased human face remains horribly eloquent. In fact, a face cannot be made to vanish completely: it stays sufficiently human to horrify by its exact lack of humanity. Hence the unnerving effect of Georges Franju's film Eyes Without a Face (1959), in which a young woman, disfigured in a car crash, is subjected to her father's insane and murderous plan to give her a new face. We never see the daughter's ravaged face, but the featureless white mask she wears for most of the film is enough to suggest her uncanny oscillation between human and inhuman. Something of that enigma is captured too in the digitally manipulated photographic portraits of Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher, from whose Dystopia series (1994-1995) the features have been removed, leaving a smooth, affectless but somehow tragic surface.

In his book Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (2004), the Swiss historian Valentin Groebner links this double valence of the disfigured face to the term ungestalt: a word used to describe the literally formless features of those lying dead on battlefields: "Violence was shown in and with pictures, but the pictures showed only a terrifying void." Similarly, in the collection of doctored or defaced Soviet-era photographs amassed by David King for the book The Commissar Vanishes and the exhibition of the same name, the most affecting images are not those in which individuals have been entirely removed by the retoucher's art, but the photographs from which, in private, the faces of the victims of Stalin's regime have simply been rubbed out.

If the erased face always conjures the image of some primal violence, the expunged word inevitably attests to a repression of some kind, whether psychological or political. In the coy ellipses with which, in the novels of the eighteenth century, readers were invited to imagine undescribed erotic adventures, on the blacked-out pages of classified documents, or in the cancelled lines of a prisoner's censored letter, the lost word denotes the intercession of authority.
In an essay entitled A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad (1925), Sigmund Freud proposed a deceptively simple image of the relation of the conscious and unconscious mind. The object in question is a child's toy, a resin or wax tablet over which is laid a thin transparent sheet: "One writes upon the celluloid portion of the covering sheet which rests upon the wax slab. For this purpose no pencil or chalk is necessary, since the writing does not depend on material being deposited upon the receptive surface. If one wishes to destroy what has been written, all that is necessary is to raise the double covering-sheet from the wax slab by a light pull, starting from the free lower end." Conscious thought or feeling, in other words, is made to vanish into the unconscious. But as anyone who has played with such a toy as a child will recall, the words survive as faint impressions; hold your Etch A Sketch at the right angle to the light, and all your previous inscriptions are still visible.
A work by Joseph Kosuth, entitled Zero & Not (1986), points out both the psychoanalytic attitude to language and the tendency of Freud's words to assert their authority despite our efforts to wipe them out. A Freudian text is printed on the gallery wall, then struck through with black tape, so that it is erased but still insists. It remains more or less readable: its lesson - the lesson of psychoanalysis; a lesson, after all, about the impossibility of erasure - simply won't go away.

The fondest, least plausible dream of Modernist art and literature was of a world without memory: a cultural tabula rasa from which all trace of the styles of the past had been erased. The arts of evacuation imagined by the likes of Samuel Beckett, Yves Klein and John Cage aspired to a deliberate vacuity: a vacant stage, an empty gallery, a silent orchestra. But in each case the project is impossible: some sound, image or word will intervene to recall the world left behind. The point is made, belatedly and in the most banal way, in Michel Gondry's film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which takes French artist Pierre Bismuth's elegant and witty idea - writing to friends to inform them that they had been erased from his memory - and turns it into a predictable tale of love's mnemonic power: there will be no real forgetting of the crossed-out lover, and erasure, after all, will be just like starting over.

"What we require is silence, but what silence requires is that I go on talking," declared Cage in his "Lecture on Nothing": the silence dreamed of by the art of the last century is always expectant, about to be spoken into. In 1996 the artist, writer and curator Jeremy Millar interviewed the novelist J G Ballard, began to duplicate the tape before he transcribed it, and accidentally erased hours of the great man's thoughts. The ruined cassette, one long pregnant pause, could only become an artwork: Erased Ballard Interview (1996-2001). You listen, heart in mouth, just as Millar must have done, hoping that Ballard's cultivated tones will, any second now, interrupt the hiss. And at the same time you hear everything in this piece: the whole history of the avant-garde affair with emptiness, the dematerialisation of the work of art, its evanescence into pure idea or gesture, up to and including Rauschenberg's erasure of de Kooning's drawing - all of it, suggests Millar's blank tape, is merely an absurd error.
Maybe the total erasure of a work of art, or the making of a work that had an utter absence at its heart, was never possible to begin with, or maybe it's simply a fantasy to which contemporary art is no longer willing to give itself over, except playfully. Ignasi Aballí's Big Mistake (1998- 2005), in which the artist painted a Modernist black square on the gallery wall, then overpainted it with Tipp-Ex, or Correction (2001), which does the same thing to a mirror, are reminders that something is always left behind, like the Cheshire Cat's grin in Through the Looking Glass: "'I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make me quite giddy.' 'All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone."

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue8/erasurerevelation.htm

Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet magazine, and author of the memoir In the Dark Room. He is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, to be published in 2008.

Eastern Promises

"I've said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation. From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run.

"A rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power from an original screenplay by Steve Knight, Eastern Promises is very much a companion to A History of Violence. Both are crime thrillers that allow Viggo Mortensen to play a morally ambiguous and severely divided, if not schizoid, action-hero savior; both are commissioned works that permit hired-gun Cronenberg to make a genre film that is actually something else. As slick as it is, Eastern Promises could, like A History of Violence, almost pass for an exceptionally well-made B-movie."

Still Cronenberg: An accessible narrative belies something much darker, and stranger, in Eastern Promises
J. Hoberman
September 11th, 2007 1:15 PM

"No doubt about it, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is a tight, clean, adrenaline rush of a movie. It is 100 minutes of precise filmmaking that delivers one of the best thrillers to hit the screen in a long time. The production is so well done and so taut that I was almost too busy enjoying the ride to think about any deeper meaning other than the brilliant screenwriting, editing, photography and overall technical mastery that left me glued to the screen.

"When the movie ended, I knew I had just seen a really great piece of filmmaking, but when it came time to thinking about what it all meant, I was left kind of blank. I mean, Eastern Promises is a gangster movie, first and foremost, and as such it follows the generic structure of the gangster film and its depiction of organized crime as a family of men that mimics the state and is ingrained with homoerotic/phobic tension. That was all quite obvious, and I wasn’t really sure where to go with it. Then of course, like everyone else who’s seen this movie, I was blown away by the naked fight scene in which Viggo Mortensen’s completely nude body (including swinging balls) battles brutes in a public bathhouse. And in fact, I was pretty much blown away by the hyper-eroticization of Viggo’s body in general, including two other stunning scenes – one in which he sits nude on a chair while he is inspected and interrogated by the Russian mafia and another when he sits naked in a red velvet booth while a man tattoos his body. The latter scene was so painterly that it could have been lifted straight out of a Caravaggio painting."

KDD on Eastern Promises



"David Cronenberg’s latest, Eastern Promises, is a powerful movie, better than nearly anything else (David Lynch aside) being made in the English-speaking world these days. But even though it had a powerful impact, I felt blank afterwards thinking about what could be said about it. This has something to do with Cronenberg’s tightness and closure: like many of his more recent films, Eastern Promises is so tightly organized, and so perfectly self-enclosed, that it doesn’t leave the viewer with any wriggle room. But also, Eastern Promises seems less interesting, somehow, than Cronenberg’s previous excursion into the crime/gangster genre, A History of Violence."

The Pinocchio Theory


"But even when people's bodies undergo terrible things in a Cronenberg film (the exploding heads in Scanners, the transformation into an insect in The Fly), there's a sense of respect for the body itself. Violence in Cronenberg is ineluctable, brutal, and repellent, but it matters. There's none of the blam-pow jokiness of the post-moral, video-game school of filmmaking. Rather, he's interested in the social uses of violence, whether as a tool of the powerful, a rite of initiation, or an erotic game. And even when—here as in A History of Violence—you're not quite sure what his meditations on the subject add up to, you leave his movies feeling unsettled in the best sense. Eastern Promises is only deceptively genre-bound; it's a conventional gangster film that morphs, Jeff Goldblum-style, into something far richer and stranger."

Eastern Promises: The metaphysics of David Cronenberg's violence
By Dana Stevens
Posted Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007, at 5:35 PM ET