Category: CORE course

CREATIVE JOURNAL—Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes—Artist/Audience

Today, not for the first time (or the last time, probably), I misunderstood Walter Benjamin’s meaning.

On our Core course we’ve just moved into an area entitled ‘Authors and Author-ity,’ for which the first reading texts are Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer1 and Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author2.

In The Author as Producer, Benjamin begins by outlining the ‘correct tendency’ of works, for them to be useful for revolutionary activity, quoting Brecht: “not to supply the apparatus of production without, to the greatest extent possible, changing it in accordance with socialism” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 214).

He isolates the ‘literary tendency’, and the ‘quality’ of it as being essential to politically correct work:

. . . the tendency of a literary work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That is to say the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency. And I would add straight away: this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency, alone constitutes the quality of the work. (Benjamin, 1977, p. 213–4)

He is here countering what seems to be a rather blinkered opinion on his audience’s part. To introduce the above quote, Benjamin speaks rhetorically for his audience “You can declare: a work that shows the correct political tendency need show no other quality. You can also declare: a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality.” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 213).

My misunderstanding stemmed from the phrase “of necessity” in the last quote which I understood to mean “by default”, so completely changing the meaning of this section. Although if I’d thought it through with reference to what is said later, I should have realised my mistake.

So, in the main quote above, Benjamin explains the stress on the quality of a work is necessary for its effectiveness as revolutionary material. This takes the form of using the methods of bourgeois society to transform it from within into something other:

What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is, readers of spectators into collaborators. (Benjamin, 1977, p. 216)

  1. Benjamin, W. (1934). The Author as Producer. In Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London, 1982. pp. 213–216.
  2. Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press. pp. 142–148.

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CREATIVE JOURNAL—Lab—Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. and Debord

The Lab session today extended our discussions about postmodernism with a showing of Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. (2004) by Johan Grimonprez and Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film « La Société du spectacle » (1975) by Guy Debord.

Both films have a somewhat similar formal quality – they present a collection of seemingly disparate film clips with a voice-over. The Debord film (of which we only saw 5 minutes) uses commercials and sequences of a military character, overlaid with Debord himself (I believe) speaking about the critical reception of his earlier film La Société du spectacle (1973). His voice seems to be coming over a bad telephone connection, it’s very harsh and distorted. Grimonprez’ film also uses footage and voice-over, but there is a connecting narrative to the whole of a record of a number of airplane hijackings.

In my mind, both films present a number of critiques. To summarise two such critiques, you could take them as indictments of the media’s manipulation of events and their audiences, or as comments on the viewers blasé reactions to such events (or both at the same time, of course).

Looking at it from the point of view of the texts we’ve just been reading regarding allegory and postmodernity’s love of the layered text, I can see how these each take their collections of film clips to create a whole (the overall film) which sets up a negotiation with the viewer resulting in a set of possible readings. The films in themselves are more or less opaque to this process, creating their own readings at the same time as creating an alternative space for the viewers’. There is always a context which dictates certain of the possibilities of the reception, but this is just one of a potentially infinite number of readings, each one dependent on a particular viewer and conditions in which they come to the film.

Trying to pick out some relevant quotes from our recent texts about postmodernism. Andreas Huyssen in Mapping the Postmodern says:

The point is not to eliminate the productive tension between the political and the aesthetic, between history and the text, between engagement and the mission of art. The point is to heighten that tension, even to rediscover it and to bring it back into focus in the arts as well as in criticism. (Huyssen, p. 337)

Thinking about allegory, from the Craig Owens’ text, adds many dimensions to the two films. I don’t really know how Debord would view such a reading, but I doubt if he would have been happy.

Or perhaps that was one of his points – any statement is always already usurped into some other order, the order of the system or the audiences self-created orders of reception. By saying ‘always already’ I am of course implying that any reading is always implicit in any statement, which would be a very Derridean point of view?

  • Huyssen, A. (1984). Mapping the Postmodern. In Preziosi, D. ed. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. pp. 329–337.

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CREATIVE JOURNAL—Allegory

. . . the allegorical supplement is not only an addition, but also replacement. It takes the place of an earlier meaning, which is thereby effaced or obscured. Because allegory usurps its object it comports within itself a danger, the possibility of perversion . . . (p. 327)

Well, that’s always been the problem and possibility of allegory, and in particular postmodernism’s use of allegory.

At our last Lab session we watched the film Heidi (1937), with Shirley Temple, juxtaposed with Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s film Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone (1992) which appropriates the Heidi mythos, subverting it with violent and sexual references.

The discussion afterwards gave us the opportunity to rehash the old arguments about a work being the sum of itself and it’s history, context and whatever else we know about it. No longer do we have the luxury (?) of divorcing the piece from the situation in which it was created, shown or received. As much as I think this was only ever an intellectual exercise in the past, it’s become more or less unacceptable to even consider this now. So we have TJ Clark’s social art historical interpretations, the postmodern view of the artwork as text, with its ‘true’ or final meaning forever deferred, etc. all of which encourages us to see the work not just as an ideal object, but as the catalyst for our further creation of meanings for it.

So really this changes the nature of ‘the meaning’ of the work from a potential fixed point of reference, to a transformative space, adjusting itself to our knowledge and understanding and biases. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, as long as these are recognised and drawn out at the same time.

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COLLEGE—Creative Journal

This is something that I should have done a long time ago, but have eternally procrastinated about.

For the Core Course we are expected to write a “Creative Journal” every week, discussing some aspect of the course and our response to it. I’ve found this incredibly hard to do, it’s become almost some kind of mental block with me now. However, it counts for 50% of the mark for this part of the course, so I have decided to buckle down and start really working on it.

Technically, I should have been writing c.200 words a week since the beginning of the course, so by the end I would have around 4,400 words in total. I have so far written 800 words, and most of that was at the beginning of last term. So essentially I have a lot of catching up to do.

I thought I would turn this con into a pro (as I always try to do . . . ) by creating a journal which makes a virtue out of this stalled process. My thought was that the journal itself would reflect the lapses between writings in it’s structure in some way. I think this will manifest itself as some kind of timeline running through the book with massive gaps at the beginning, with (hopefully) a more consistent set of writings from now on.

I feel this would be an interesting exposition of my process and failings. The question however is, how relevant is this to the subject-matter of the journal (and of course, does it need to be)? Perhaps one can be too open and honest about some things and perhaps there are things that are best left unsaid?

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