Zizek on Anthropology

Zizek on Anthropology - fairly old but a few points

1. Shame (excess jouissance, the real) comes first, culture is how to deal with the embarrassment

2. We are a society of "belief" more today than in the past but the modality of distance has changed. ie from respect for power of appearance of rituals to mistrust of symbolic institution and "really meaning it"

3. Anthropological errors started with "phenomenological evolutionary illusion", ie "when researchers found a certain gap between reality and beliefs or between form and content, they mistakenly posited an original moment when people really 'meant it.' 

4. Cultural as institution: Even if you superstitiously change an 'unlucky' number on a house you must go through the proper channels for it to be symbolically effective. Institutions act as minimum reification to take the game seriously.

5. Alienation is irreducible (cf some marxist, phenomological), can't reconstitute an early pre-alienated moment or a future when authenticity of meaning is reinstalled.

6. Anthropology of everyday life moves from implicitly racist attitude of studying the eccentricity of others, to adopt the same view of ourselves. It is much better as a double alienation.

7. (Linking to that newspaper series I cant refind the link for):

 You remember Florida, the scandal elections and the first Bush victory. A guy somewhere from Africa wrote an article imitating that sort of journalistic report, you know, an enlightened Western journalist goes to Africa, where they allegedly have some election and he mocks the election, "ha, ha, what corruption." Well, this guy wrote about Florida in the same way, saying there are votes disappearing, the brother of the candidate is the local government, you know, describing Florida as a provincial Banana Republic case of cheating. It was a wonderful result. It was anthropology at its best.

8. Concept of "habit" -  not  rules, habits tell you how to obey or disobey rules. Especially social prohibitions never mean what they appear to mean.  Zizek claims that at precisely this level, ideology has survived.

9. Lacanian ethics and desire: Lacan of the fifties and sixties, it is the ethics of desire to not compromise your desire. But later Lacan, desire is a priori something hypocritical, inconsistent. Realisation of desire is to stage a scene where that desire as such emerges. There is a pleasant obstacle preventing it all the time. This is fantasy.

10. Sometimes, respect is the most disrespectful category. Respect here is like telling a child false things so not to hurt him, not taking them and their beliefs seriously.

11. Some other stuff: Brain sciences, western universalism and Islam...

12. On Neoliberalism as a category:

But my first doubt would be about the process of describing the fact that something new is emerging. I don't think it is adequately described by the way neoliberalism describes itself. For example, saying "the rule is no longer state intervention, but free interaction, flexibility, the diminishing role of the state." But wait a minute, is this really going on? I mean, take Reagan's presidency and Bush's presidency today. While bombasting against big spending Democrats - that is to say, big state - the state has never been as strong as it is today and there is an incredible explosion of state apparatuses. State control today is stronger than ever. That would be my automatic reaction: yes, there is something new but, when covered by the label neoliberalism, it is not adequately described. The self-perception of today's era as neoliberal is a wrong self-perception.

Even leftist critics all too often accept this self-description on its own terms and then proceed to criticize it, saying, "no, we can't leave everything to the market." Wait a minute, who is leaving everything to the market? If we look at today's American economy, how much support there is for American farmers, how much intervention, military contracts, where is there any free market? I mean, sorry, but I don't see much free market here.

Just look at this paradox, which I think is the nicest icon of what goes on today. You know the problem of cotton in the state of Mali I think, which is the producer of cheap cotton far better than the United States' cotton. The country is going to ruin because, as you know, the American cotton producers get more state support than the entire Gross Domestic Product of the state of Mali. And they say there, we don't want American help, what we want is just when you preach about corrupt state intervention and the free market, you play by your own rules. You know, there's so much cheating going on here.

So that would be the kind of anthropological study that's needed: what neoliberalism really means. That's what we have to do.

Process as work - the diagram

A friend commented on the possibility of diagrams being aesthetic and final objects in and of themselves, citing this exhibition.

I know if nothing else I would find looking at a book of artists diagrams and charts fascinating, having seen some of Mark Lombardi and Thomas Hirschhorn.

I'm not sure if theres an analogue (analog?) for this type of work way back in the past, but I guess on the one hand you could think about art historically with respect to the politics of the frame (boring), but on the other hand maybe a diagram represents a different modality of knowledge that isn't quite linguistic or sensory and so opens up a a particular vector. That is to say, if we follow diagrammatic logic/form even further where does that get us?

New York New York

http://m.aljazeera.com/story/2013121065856922461

Character sketch

Raf and I just saw rented island at the Whitney and after seeing mike smith were discussing how all everymen have a great silhouette : Chaplin, houlot, Hitchcock, nick cave at times, David Byrne , Simpsons characters... It's about thinking character in terms of physicality.


Anyway , working on my panza office art assistant - basically he is an overgrown m high kid on the adult scale, except takes a bit from Walter banjamin and Keynes, physically


Note the half untucked shirt, something universally understandable but in practice very specifically from my own experience, pointing to the never becoming adult and never knowing if you are at work under neoliberalism . Def Harry potter element.

I have joined a 12 piece Psych Rock band...

Its called Carl and the Jung Archetypes

 

More Tim Morton

I'm not really that much over/into TIm Morton's work but somehow it seems to be topic of the week.

(1)  Really I was meaning to post on the fact that he touches on the Orientalist dynamic in responding to "contemplative" works, and then this in comparison with our earlier discussions of the East v West and the social.

  

(2) The second aspect relates to me seeming to want to be more contemplative and introspective and less socially-engaged at the moment, while also considering these terms within an East v West paradigm.

I think this is actually what I was getting at with the archive - methodology, as a long winded way of saying that I feel I am at a point where I can't really go further without addressing my own desires within this whole process, and the world at large. One ultimately needs desire to be the engine that drives the machine.

Within this context over-theorising becomes just a strategy in which one seeks "objectivity" to disavow the "subjectivity" of their position. I feel that in social practice this can happen a lot, but the best works don't do this. I think this is what Hirschhorn always does well, and I think you do it well too. Overall though, it's not so much a question of personal history, it is more about recognising one's own personal investment in things, and particularly for me to be a bit more alive to these things. Or to go even further in my case, to maybe in some way acknowledge that one of the things that attracts me to art is that on the whole I find that many artists display a personal investment in the world of a magnitude that I feel is much greater than my own capability. Maybe this is the domain of drive, the desire for desire. Maybe it is even in a way saying that by my actions I am actually some sort of idealist, who really only sees the world as something producing the pleasure of my own thoughts.

(3) Last night I saw an interview with Morton in the Brooklyn Rail and I feel compelled to post on it.

Firstly, I found it interesting that he compares critical practices to Romanticism, which is what we have touched on before especially in Rancierre:

"There's a lot of art that's about revealing the process of production - that is one of the lineages of the Romantic period. It goes back through Benjamin to Wordsworth really - showing the wiring underneath. I think there's a deeper thing here, which is that just noticing how constructed things are really doesn't change things. .... Things are more profound in their relations , as far as I'm concerned, and just showing how things relate is never enough. What we really need are disturbing encounters with discrete entities."

(For example meeting a replicant from blade runner which forces you to confront reality through the anxiety that you yourself may not really be a person, which is by definition 

human self-consciousness. Secondly to not refuse this anxiety but acknowledge it.)

 

And later:

"I think that the dominant way of thinking about art, at the moment, is basically a modulation of a 200-year old way of doing it, which is , basically, critique. I've got to be able to see through my world in order to be outside of reality and see it from the perfect point of view. And the trouble is, according to my view, you can't do that - that's strictly impossible, So these attempts to jump out of it don't end up working so great."

I think this maps pretty directly against Hal Foster's defence of critique against Bruno Latour. For my mind, my hesitation with Morton's approach is it still seems to position the problem of "global warming" on some level of conceptual understanding. I don't understand how global warming is a really a question of ontology or our understanding of it, and not really just a question of political will, which is to say that there are some powerful people invested in global warming and stand to gain from it while others do not. I don't really see how incorporating "hyperobjects" and "meshes" (aren't these just "assemblages", except particularly of human and non-human things as a set of causal relations) really gets us anywhere other than saying that these non-human things also condition us and vice-versa. Isn't that just dialectics 2.0?

Anyway he continues wrt to art making and basically advocates a deeper non-anthropocentric understanding of materiality ( it is anthropocentric to think of paint as a material when it is actually made of plants mixed with eggs etc) which doesn't interest me much and I am doubtful will lead to interesting works.

 

(4) Given that I have raised this question of non-critical methods, I'll just footnote that I really enjoyed this interview of Andrea Fraser and My Barbarian, as well as her classes. She basically distinguishes between negative/critical/deconstructive/reactive practices on the one hand, against constructivist/affirmative/creation-of-worlds approaches on the other. And of course they don't have to be exclusive of each other. Her hesitation is with goody too shoes social practice that is not critical enough, and I do not think anyone really disagrees with that. 

One thing she said was that social practice often very heavily reasserts the framing device; as in some social relations are within-the-frame as relations for being transformed /constructed, while all the back-wiring of the social relations that enable the project are repressed out of the frame, and that in many cases this means the project produces and transforms a whole raft of other unintended social relations, so to keep that in mind. Especially when considering that some work can be read as a poor replacement for social services in a context where, while not conclusively, there is economic evidence to suggest that by way of neo-liberal funding models, contemporary arts has actually directly and indirectly absorbed money that has been cut from social services.

 

Response to Tim Morton's Phd Advice as a Model for Artistic Practice

Its an interesting proposition, to use Morton's advice for writing a Phd as a model for constructing an artistic practice. At the same time, I think I am a little unclear on what the direct analogues between archives and methods within an artistic practice are.

There's a part where he talks about not second guessing the Other, which I guess is his way of saying not to anticipate every possible critique of your work and then counter it within the work itself because it seems to lead down a rabbit warren of endless parsing, much like Xeno's paradox. I think we've talked about this before, that you don't need to go through the agonizing process of over analyzing your own work as that leaves no room for, or should actually be the province of the critic, audience, curator etc. So I definitely overthink works, to the point where it interferes with the formal expression of it, and I think it's a problem. But I also think that your have to have a certain amount of over-self-reflexivity in order for the work to be valid, but it's a matter of 'holding the thought', or leaving it a little unresolved in the minds eye and then giving it up to the world to reorganizing the unique proposition you've proffered.

The way I've constructed this in my work seems now to be through process of reading and thinking, building the archive and then, using the formal frameworks of anthropological 'fieldwork' and artistic 'social practice' as a methodology to mediate, correct and contradict that archive. At that point, you engage in rebuilding the archive as an artistic work, where the conceits of the original archive of interests, theory and research are tempered and beaten into shape in the forge of Hephaistos which we might call reality and lived experience which you then use to transmute and sublimate a new archive which one might call an artwork but which is also an index of a universe you've created.   

If you go to a traditional artschool, you'll get talk after talk about methods and techniques-and though it may seem superficial, it is worth considering the analogy between how Morton uses the term 'methods' and how it is used in art history to determine the efficacy of it as a productive comparison or model. A 'method' in art practice I think is understood as a haptic and sensorial control of ones body and certain tools, the pressure of a brush against canvas, the weight of a thumb in a piece of clay, and it is the product of the manipulation of form by the body as a subject which is read as a correlative and consequential analogue between thought, sense, action and form which is what we call artistic method. The method 's' are the various and manifold codifications of these practices over history and I feel like, if we break artistic methods down into purely phenomenological phenomena then, a individual using his tools and instruments to effect 'living as form' then we can understand art in an expanded field and Beuy's 'social sculpture' and emergent discourses of social practice, relationailty etc..  Within this constellation, what is the analogue of the archive in artistic practice? Presumably 'content' and 'personal mythology' over form. I guess another question for me is, what is the relationship between the archive and the self-ie. Do you need to have a Chinese mother from Africa to take the Chinese in Africa as your archive? And, if we go back to the academic context, I don't believe anyone questions the legitimacy of Brautigan's interest in the subject despite a lack of a personal mythology attached to the subject. So the question becomes, 'how to choose ones archive?' and 'must the archive be a personal archive?'