***
I finally figured out that when logged in you can "compose" up here and am doing that this time because only here can you place photos.
Yella afterthought, following exchange w/Anirban: as said in class, in retrospect, the viewer becomes conscious of credit and credibility--the film's associating the viewer's suspension of disbelief with the wishful not noticing that economic business as usual depends on. When that happens it questions and plays on the assumed rhetorics of shots in a specific way. Viewers are likely to credit to this shot because it's part of a narrative action:
When going back to look for where the fantasy is located, there's a tendency to locate it after the action is over, in the water while this shot marks a gap in the visible action, and a spatial distance from it:
as "subjective"/first person and not seeing the distant shot of the bridge as "objective"/third person. Petzold makes this point by repeating the distant shots from the first scene.
This one is after the second, "actual" crash:
The reflections in the water are a little different. But, why should we believe it this time?
*******
"the Ukrainian painter Kuindzhi"
Right before Jameson's "glove" figure that we read in class today is this moment of almost self-parody of his "learnedness": [about Joseph Conrad] "Such passages virtually fashion a new space and a new perspective, a new sense of depth, out of sheer color, in that perhaps less like Western impressionism than certain of its Slavic equivalents, in particular the work of the Ukrainian painter Kuindzhi." Who, what? I looked it up and it's this:
idk, I think this is kind of hilarious...
Rei
*******
I appreciated Lloyd’s idea that the subaltern is a function of the intellectual who desires to do representational work. I’m not sure I can follow Lloyd’s normative distinction between ways to respond to the call of such limits (‘suicide’ vs. ‘deconstruction’). Identification with one’s limits is not always a ‘guilty pleasure,’ since there can be an identification which is principled beyond the pleasure principle. Identifying with one’s limits can be a matter of shame, of avowing one’s ‘sacred interior’ (e.g. French Muslim women who cover themselves despite the ban), and thereby such identification may be an act with political agency, contrary to Lloyd’s belief. In this sense we might understand the suicide under discussion to be a matter of shame, not guilt, with potential political agency.
ReplyDeletePerhaps one way to do intellectual work without presupposing a representational regime would be Anjali Arondekar’s book For the Record: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in which Arondekar asks, can we do archival work that does not depend on recovery of a subject? If an archive lacks the subaltern which is desired by the researching ‘intellectual,’ might there not be a way of seeing this lack itself as an excess of the intellectual’s desire over the archive? For example Arondekar cannot find a queer subject in the archives she studies; however, Arondekar finds traces of queer subjectivity in partial objects, like scraps referring to a popular “India Rubber Dildo,” and thereby Arondekar ‘wins back a little satisfaction.’
Similarly Adachi can be understood as constructing an archive on the same principles, since in title and content AKA Serial Killer avoids any attempt to represent Norio Nagayama while we nevertheless are exposed to many traces of Norio Nagayama that slightly satisfy our desire to encounter Nagayama. As small as this satisfaction is, it is more satisfaction than the zero satisfaction of seeing a representational documentary of Nagayama, since in such a case the presence of Nagayama would have been completely absent, replaced by a representation.
So I knew I wasn’t going to be seeing any pirates when I saw that our movie this week is The Pirates of Bubuan; at most we see a “ghost pirate.” It was a just a little satisfying.
[I’m not sure Lloyd’s appropriation of Kant was drawn from the right passages; it seems disingenuous to use reflecting the judgment the way he did, absent of its context in differing from determining judgment, especially since the presented/represented distinction is clearly established in the first Critique anyway, right?]
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI want to write more before Wednesday, but in the meantime a few things I'm trying to think through... this shouldn't be understood as a response to all the readings or materials but there are a few salient questions that I keep returning to. These are not unrelated questions.
ReplyDelete1) what do we see in Imamura's film? esp. given the way in which most of us are interacting with it (through a computerized translation [would it be different if it were 'human'? what does this mean?]), it seems that there are at least two lens which shift the way we read the film...
English -> Japanese -> Badjao & Tausug (and Tausug descriptions of Badjao might be a 3rd, Badjao descriptions of the eponymous Pirates a 4th; both of these however could also be considered wrt "Japanese translation")
The interviewees literally do not speak and their words do not match the audio of Japanese translations. (this makes the points where this breaks down interesting -- most stunningly at around 25:30 where the singing appears to be untranslated). Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but ALL the interviews were in the Japanese, right?
I'm also curious to hear the experiences of anyone who didn't rely on the English subtitles -- whether Japanese speakers, another subtitled language or without subtitles at all.
2) what are the conditions of possibility for Imamura's film? by this, I mean specifically, how do historically contingent legacies of colonialism enable the type of documentary work that he is engaging in. This seems to also impinge on the question of relationality and the types of relations implied in Imamura's project.
3) who are the pirates?
Similarly to Michael's comment above, I am not surprised that the "pirates" did not make an appearance -- although the symmetry between the wreckage in the opening scenes and the "ghost pirate" at the end is one maybe worth exploring -- but in another sense there is an appearance of what I am, perhaps haphazardly, conceptualizing as a type of piracy.
Early on in "Can The Subaltern Speak," Spivak comments on the appropriation of the term "Maoist" to encapsulate a particular French intellectual phenomenon which has the effect of "[rendering] 'Asia' transparent" (272). And I guess I'm wondering to what extent we could understand appropriation as somehow similar to piracy. I've heard piracy understood as a type of re-appropriation, would an "appropriative piracy" be a useful concept?
This is interesting to me because it seems to make possible the idea that, in this film, the Pirates -- the ones committing the appropriating piracy -- are Imamura's film crew. The mechanisms the film uses to "render legibility" seem to have an appropriating thrust to them although... I can't right now figure out what that might be.
New thread/loose association. - I read a lot of things like this, and I'm always not sure why anyone else would want to read them, although in principle I think that scholars should read their enemies. And so I'll link it here....
ReplyDeletehttp://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4796.html#comments
"These issues are glaringly obvious at a global level. The United States and Europe are full of people who tut and cluck about poverty and misery in the erstwhile Third World and elsewhere. But no one imagines that “mobility” in the sense used in domestic politics would be an acceptable answer. If we are honest, do we want, would we even remotely tolerate, any sort of political change that gave our children “equality of opportunity” with children born in Gabon today, holding the global distribution of outcomes constant? Obviously not. We might embrace a fig-leaf “level playing field”, where advantages we can reliably provide would ensure our kids the 90+ percentile lifestyles we consider civilized despite some self-aggrandizing formal equality. (All hail the meritocracy!) But we would resist with the full horror of our armaments any reform that meant our kids should face anywhere near the probability of deprivation and poverty implied by a fair lottery of the global distribution of outcomes."
I suppose that yes, that does come out with it.
rei
I. “Representation becomes the most general category to determine the apprehension of whatever it is that is of concern or interest in any relation at all. All of post-Cartesian and even post-Hegelian discourse, if not in fact the whole of modern discourse, has recourse to this category to designate all the modifications of the subject in its relationship with an object. The great question, the generative question, thus becomes, for this epoch, that of the value of representation, of its truth or its adequacy to what it represents”. –J. Derrida, “Envois”
ReplyDeleteLloyd’s contribution to this double problematic, via Spivak, is that of foregrounding the historical contingency of “the very determination of experience as subjective, that is, representational,” and by extension, the intellectual’s pedagogical role in reproducing and safeguarding the bounded regime of political belonging. (I can’t really comment on the accuracy or not of Lloyd’s use of Kant, but sense enough people have argued along similar lines that his point might survive accusations of textual misappropriation.)
So, some follow-up thought-questions about versions (levels?) of non-relationality, and the relationship experience bears with it re: what we read/saw this week. I began by assuming this as the hypothesis: the subaltern channels the intellectual’s desire to represent non-relationality through a fictive relationality, which then becomes for him an ethical resource/position to inhabit. I wondered what relationship this could have with the “lining” of structures we’ve been trying to think. Then I realized I wasn’t convinced by the hypothesis, and am no longer sure that it’s there, but encourage comments on this.
Now I’m wondering more about the role “representation” is playing in these two essays. In Lloyd, representation and totality nearly collapse into each other: “For these disjunctions affect the very system of representation that is the overarching framework of modernity in its self-conception, and not merely the empirical or methodological problems regarding the adequacy of a historical narrative to its objects” (Lloyd 6).
Am I totally off-base wondering whether “the overarching framework of modernity in its self-conception” resembles, or is, a totality?
Derrida, on this, and for which reason I feel, like Michael, less optimistic than Lloyd about the supposedly enabling effects of deconstructing representation:
(p.s.I know we didn’t read this, but every other sentence in Lloyd recalled it to mind, and Spivak was writing within a few years of its original publication):
“The authority of representation constrains us, imposing itself on our thought through a whole dense, enigmatic, and heavily stratified history. It programs us and precedes us and warns us too severely for us to make a mere object of it, a representation, an object of representation confronting us, before us like a theme. It is even difficult enough to pose a systematic and historical question on the topic (a question of the type: ‘What is the system and the history of representation?’) now that our concepts of system and of history are essentially marked by structure and the closure of representation.” (“Envois” 304).
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6990485/Sending-On-Representation
Ok, so apparently I have to write in installments...
ReplyDeleteI am maybe being too simplistic in analogizing representation and totality; it’s probably because I sense that representation’s non-relationality in Lloyd approximates the kind of non-relationality we’ve been thinking about with respect to totality. Like the shadow relations cast within or by the non-relationality of totality, the “double session” of representation makes it impossible to communicate with: it at once “regulates the very possibility of modern political life” as well as “a process of perception given as natural” (Lloyd 13), i.e. subjective experience—experience as subjective. How to affect such a system?
I will quote selectively from top of p.14:
1. The psychic or moral history of the formation of the citizen-subject…
2. The political history of the formation of the state as the general representative of the particular interests of society as a whole…
3. The history of history itself…
II. Pirates: the interviewers of the film remain mired in frustration when unable to wrest a narrative out of the interviewees… There is a point where the interviewer keeps asking the leader of the Badjaos where the Badjaos came from, and the old man seems annoyed by the apparent deficiency of his answer. Siasi, Siasi…In other words, it curiously does not seem deficient for him. (loose connection: Afro-pessimism talks about “native alienation,” and it strikes me again that the framework with which we/intellectuals set our/themselves up to make moral judgements are already thoroughly saturated by historically-contingent expectations that are productive of a certain version of subjectivity—one that is inherited, as Lloyd proposes, and forecloses “space” for what falls outside the version (Lloyd 23; 27—perpetual metaphor, to be found as textual “spacing” in Spivak: “That inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text is what the postcolonial critic of imperialism would like to see developed…that text-inscribed blackness” (294).
And yet, can we really think otherwise?
Ex. of these historically-contingent expectations: that one should have, want, and know one’s father’s name—Patriarchy, again, not non-relational, and, yet not relational, I was struck by how it rears its head throughout the film in a way that even seems to want to build pathos for the plight of the discriminated Badjaos—smiling eligible female faces covered in white rice-powder make-up; “Will you sell me your daughter?” No. [But obviously I could’ve if I wanted to.] the scene with the white-powder faces emblematizes a version of the citational structure we discussed in Adachi: a “natural” representation authorizes/supplements commentary on something non-relational (and potentially non-existent—the pirates.) Weird.
Spivak: “Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is ‘evidence.’ It is, rather, that, both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (287).
The connection is mainly thematic, ok, but the metaphor of shadows continues to disquiet.
III. Contamination by shadows.
ReplyDeleteBelated response/free association with Rei’s clarification of relationality v. nonrelationality from last week. Was immediately reminded of a passage from F.Wilderson’s intro to Red, White and Black (and just thought I’d cite it—without justification.)
When I was a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a Black
woman who used to stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East- and South
Asian students, staff, and faculty as they entered the university. She accused them of having
stolen her sofa and of selling her into slavery. She always winked at the Blacks, though we
didn’t wink back. Some of us thought her outbursts too bigoted and out of step with the
burgeoning ethos of multiculturalism and “rainbow coalitions” to endorse. But others did
not wink back because we were too fearful of the possibility that her isolation would become
our isolation, and we had come to Columbia for the express, though largely assumed and
unspoken, purpose of foreclosing upon that peril. Besides, people said she was crazy. Later,
when I attended UC Berkeley, I saw a Native American man sitting on the sidewalk of
Telegraph Avenue. On the ground in front of him was an upside down hat and a sign
informing pedestrians that here was where they could settle the “Land Lease Accounts” that
they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He too, so went the scuttlebutt, was “crazy.”
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure,
that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the
grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the
only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw
our attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised
and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s
capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for
them no less! (2)
Another go at phrasing a view of Imamura's *Pirates* (new stuff begins about halfway through this post--like Parisa's, in parts because there's a character limit). In one thread, Japanese > Filipino gets complicated by Japanese: Tausug/Badjoe, expressed sometimes as Japanese & Tausug > Badjoe and sometimes as Japanese & Badjoe > Tausug. (This would get even more complicated if "Japanese" could acknowledge ethnic differences internal to Japan.) Meanwhile, the diegetic timeline says Japan - Bangua (Tausug) - Cabucan (Badjoe) - Pirate; beyond, unseen on screen are more "pirates" (the bad pirates that Asaali claims he protects people from). Since the threat of people farther away from the judgment point, more and more on the "outside," can always be used to civilize those who are comparatively close, and since the series never ends, and people on the outside are out there for different reasons (exploitation vs. criminalization), and the line's apparent values are not real values but illusions created by comparison--all those things together imply that Japan is not the apex but amid an endless line, counting as primitive to someone else while, like the Tausug, using themselves as a standard of civilization. This ought to make them question the whole system. The Japanese are tactfully left alone to get this and therefore allowed not to get it. This is all a "genealogical" argument, Imamura arguing that positions are structural and come from historically created ideologies that he can retrace. I'm thinking of the passage of Spivak that says of Guha, "Investigate, identify, and measure the specific' [practices of a people]: a program could hardly be more essentialist and taxonomic." Yet, citing Guha, "taken as a whole and in the abstract...this [subaltern] category...was heterogeneous in its composition and . . . differed from area to area. The same class or element which was dominant in one area could be among the dominated in another. This could and did create many ambiguities and contradictions in attitudes and alliances" (284).
ReplyDeleteYet, what it means for the Badjoe to be revealed as merely people of poverty and discrimination and not primitives, is that they are brought into the circle of possible identification by being associated with actually particular "universal human values": industry, familial piety, religion…even the desire to be white (women's makeup). "Universal reason becomes aware that this independent other, the thing, is also itself" (Da Silva 77). In Da Silva's terms, they are approached through the two bad choices of exclusion from civilization or "engulfment" (forcible inclusion in the "human" as universal). Both tactics build up the position of the transparent "I," the first by allowing him/her to categorize others and the second by allowing him/her the fantasy of access through identification to any desired position. The genealogical insight leaves this second fantasy untouched. Da Silva points out the "notion of particularity that encompasses the material, contingent immanent moments that need to be engulfed" (75).
ReplyDeleteAll of the above is relevant to the notion of potential that lies within the unevenness of capitalism or on its diminishing outside. Imamura makes a point of showing that the Badjoe interact with markets, but without accumulating wealth or exploiting others. They are the subsistence gatherers whose labor is the basis for exchange value, but they aren't themselves part of it. They are only in the most liminal way part of the Philippine state (their country is "Cabucan," they pay tax but it is like paying the pirates). While these elements of their life might distance the Japanese audience from them, to Imamura (not the character who appears in the film, but as director) I suspect that they are great, that they constitute resources for people caught in capitalism who want at least a way to live differently within it. (How would Adachi respond to Cabucan?) Garrett's idea that space is portrayed differently once the camera gets inside their boat contributes here. -It's likely that finding subalternity inspiring for continued life within capitalism is also an effect of runaway identification. Cf. Da Silva's sentences on the sociologist who admired African-American spirituals
-- "suggest[ing] that only subalternity provides the conditions necessary for 'Negroes' to actualize their 'true being'" (Da Silva 162). It would be for sure if Imamura associates goodness with the condition of being exploited. But would it be, if he associates goodness with the condition of owning little? This is what's at stake in Imamura's narration over the meal after the fishing trip: "It's fresh and it's good." This also is geared to the Japanese position (fresh/good aren't natural, so he's saying "you, Japanese audience, would find it fresh and good"). Even so, I think Imamura is bringing a different pressure to bear on the audience there, showing something that they don't necessarily have (not all of them, every day…). Likewise the sharing sleeping space as a community. I think there is something in those scenes, something that gets in the film whether it was Imamura who placed it there or not, and despite the fact that he did it in a still-essentializing way. Per Spivak, the risk of essentialism isn't automatically the worst thing that can happen, and the distinction between it and structural analysis is sometimes "spurious" (Spivak 296); rather than essentialism/nonessentialism being the only possible criterion, it would matter why and how Imamura is showing these things with their essentialist risks. Another kind of example of a possible resource appears in the interview with Ubu (32:07). Ubu's answers to questions are all slant; in his way, he rejects the terms of the questions, though he also rejects saying anything like "I reject these questions." "Which do you prefer, Tausug or Badjoe women?" The answer, "Tausug women are more intelligent," could mean "Badjoe women," but it also averts preference. "Who are better divers?" "The Badjoe dive deeper I think." "Do you want to beat them?" "They scare me." Ubu keeps forming a space beside yes/no. This is where Imamura (the narrator) soon moves from "irritation" to "shame," by his own account at least. His irritation, however, already indicates that he's in the presence of some challenge. In the move to shame, he loses the irritation. This is where the transition from the Badjoe to the pirates occurs. Imamura marks the end of investigating the Badjoe ethnographically ("I had had enough") and this puts the focus back on what he thinks of them, if only in retrospect. But this dialogue may leave something behind it, the space that the irritation and then shame used to take up.
ReplyDeleteThanks, reading this was really helpful.
ReplyDeleteFew thoughts re: whether and how Imamura is mining resources in subalternity to render life in capitalism more tolerable/possible for the Japanese audience: owning little=good, for example. The question that would remain for me is, what kind of feeling would Spivak have about that gesture?
It seemed that a large part of Spivak’s frustration in the beginning of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was Deleuze and Foucault’s disavowal of the concept of ideology—a disavowal and disdain based upon a “mechanistic” opposition of desire and interest. This was problematic for her because it created a “parasubjective matrix, cross-hatched with heterogeneity…” (274). She complains that in D&F Power and Desire come in to usurp the place of the absented Subject, and that therefore “The critique of ideological subject-constitution within state formations and systems of political economy can now be effaced, as can the active theoretical practice of the ‘transformation of consciousness’” (275).
I think Da Silva rehearses Spivak’s contention with D&F pretty clearly: “this challenge of transparency addressed primarily the figure of the ‘western’ subject of anthropological (social scientific) knowledge while his objects were left alone with their difference, seemingly beyond the reach of the questioning of transparency, representation, and experience” (“Can the Subaltern of Racialty Speak?” 325)
So, slowly trying to make my way to the issue I’m facing in light of Rei’s post: who are these "values" for?—the ones we’re identifying in the interview scene, the sleeping scene, etc—the value that comes with wanting little, with not desiring the earth, or a family lineage? I just wonder what stops this from being like the image of the cows grazing in Nietzche. (Let’s just be more like the cows.) It’s not that I have a problem with the gesture itself, but I find myself confused about what Spivak would think of it. (Not sure about Da Silva, either, but I actually find their thinking to be quite different than Spivak's.)
If for Spivak denying dividedness to the subaltern comes at the cost of neglecting a critique of ideology (and for her, ideology is not schematic, but textual, and therefore exempts nobody—neither the intellectual, nor the capitalist, nor the subaltern) then how do we assess the way we assess values coming from we-know-not-where (there is no subject there, just a crew, some filmcraft, a feebly populated island, and invisible pirates).
Or, is it that the subaltern IS exempt from ideology critique because s/he is *not* part of the subject-constitution within state formations? Ok, that would resolve the issue...but I'm not sure I'm convinced that such a position can be anything other than the desired fiction of the intellectual--the formula Lloyd was lamenting in what we read last week.
Yes, totally. "It's likely that finding subalternity inspiring for continued life within capitalism is also an effect of runaway identification"--i.e., whenever details of Cabucan are viewed as resources, then identification and appropriation are in play. I don't think that Cabucan is ever implied to be beyond ideology, because their situation is contemporary and liminal: the ideology of Cabucan is not that their practices are natural but that they are explained away as necessary reactions to threats ("land," "pirates": "Why don't you buy an engine?" "The pirates would take it"). That would be part of the dividedness of Cabucan. But even the fact that the film can show subalternity as divided doesn't inoculate it against the returns of identification, or the horizon of exportation to Japan. What I'm asking about is that in and amid all that, I find a surprisingly large impact, or crater, made in the film by the invocation of use value. There's nothing inherent about what one finds useful, so it's not a natural value, but whatever isn't-exchanged. I experience the denotative sentence ("it's fresh and it's good") and the end of the other bit of dialogue I was pausing at as having some kind of destructive effect, marked by the silence around them. This is enigmatic to me and I wouldn't be surprised if other people experience them in the opposite way (as moments of sealing-off).
Deletethree q's about yesterday's class:
ReplyDeleteone just a request for more information about the way in which Hegel differentiates between degrees of reality, how and why he does this...
two: We were talking, in the beginning of the class, about ways of relating to the whole. So, where Hegel invests in a reconciliatory therapeutics toward it, Adachi experiences anxiety--an anxiety that we are allowing, I think, the possibility of giving us something, or being productive of something...we don't know what, and even when we try to describe it, that not-knowing-what just seems built into its structure (and so this relieves us of the problem of deciding whether it's good or bad). I don't know how to place the I Don't Want to Sleep Alone characters' relation to the whole, in the context of Hegel and Adachi--although, in the scene we dwelled upon at the end with the outstretched hand, we seemed to locate a hidden moment of transparency there (a la Hegel?)
three: this refers back to the second. Well, we asked "what makes one turn out one way and the other a different way?" (Hegel v. Adachi's attitude). Isn't the obvious answer that when you get to be, or get to attach yourself in some way to the victorious side of history, that you would be much more likely to adopt the Hegelian therapeutics? You'd get some benefit out of doing so. (And this would speak to class differences within degraded racial formations, possibly gender differences, but I'm not sure about that). If you have no possibility of even remotely attaching yourself to victory, even the fantasy of victory, how could the Hegelian position be detected on your list of options? I guess this is where the debate about religion comes in. Right? (This is just an open question because for me the answer to the q seemed too clear to be right, so I assumed I must be missing information...)
one more q (sorry): are we counting in the category of totality psychic structures? or is it that mental structures are what obfuscate the category of totality to begin with, and disrupt its supposed nonrelationality? (since psychic structures are "responsible," in one way or another, or at least in part, for the shadow relations we are interested in investigating...) Is this the thing with which we're further complicating the distinction between interiority (psychological sense) and other kinds or levels of interiorities (what the interior is interior to, and so on)? (The problem we ran up against with Tsai's film--confusion between "literal" interior spaces and hallucinatory fragments of mental life.)
ReplyDeleteSpeaking from the not-Hegel side, it seems we can't not count as totality mental structures. (Like nonrelational totality, might not there be something about mental life that can't be affected from within itself (cf. concreteness, mental illness)...? If I can't affect myself (and I'm positing the possibility that I can't), I am nonrelational to myself, even if this nonrelationality is different than the other kinds...I don't know if I'm going too far backwards to O.R....
I was thinking something similar to jelly in regard to thinking the whole as either therapeutic or as anxious. And in the end I was worried (anxious?) about the way we were reading the Tsai film, or maybe it's just the way the film gives itself to be read. I felt uncomfortable, whilst watching, with the juxtaposition of the guy in the coma and the homeless guy. And once you get beyond, I think rightly so, the bare life reading of either, I feel really strong Hegelian dynamics. If neither are not nothing (one because of status as citizen, the other, because of his transactional interactions), then there's a strong suggestion that the man in the coma is an in-itself and the homeless man a for-itself. The complicating scene is the stretched hand. If we are lined-up with the body that reaches, and I take that we may well be, we are in Da Silva's terms sharing the exterior (maybe in Levinas' terms we are "the third"). We are then dangerously close to being the transcendental I in which we, as Da Silva says, "will no longer threaten the interior thing because, in the scene of engulfment, exteriority becomes a moment of the trajectory of the transcendental I." In other words, we rebalance the interior conflict by not actually engaging it because if we were to engage it we couldn't share it. But for what end are we rebalancing? Is this where to locate Adchi's anxiety vs Hegel's therapeutics? I feel anxious about where we are so maybe that follows. Then maybe the question for us would be what's the relationship or the difference between rendering the medium visible and transparency? Still, I don't think rendering comes back around strongly enough to limit. In fact, isn't the anxiety that the limit which could have been in the way was in fact passed? We passed it in our sharing of the exterior, in our reading, but probably it was passed too, and isn't that Tsai's point, by global capital. The latter shares the exterior, too, of course. Do you need to get that far to introduce Pasolini's perspective? To get to that which is dragged into the text?
ReplyDeleteI have problems with that. But to pursue it what does that passing give us, if we do not like Hegel rejoice in it? Maybe that's the way to get to experiential non-relation, where the non-relation is actually not the limit, but the passing of it, in which what's passed is still there (as shadow). And then I'm back to the guy who cares for the homeless guy: intimately, habitually, accidentally; things fitting together too tightly. Could we read the too-tight as the inside of the deeply-depopulated outside? I don't know, I'm not happy, I'm still anxious, but maybe that's the point.
I hope to post a few more things in the next 3 days (including going back to Meredith's request 2 meetings ago for a clarification of "representation" in Spivak v. Lloyd). For now I'm thinking about Tsai.
ReplyDeleteFirst, where Tsai comes in: introducing the 3 meetings called "subalternity, subterraneity," I mentioned that their contribution to the problem of having no relation to totality was a "But wait!" tangent. These sets of texts go back to ask, effectively, whether the previous construction of totality, & therefore the pressing quality of restrictive totalities, holds up under the challenge of discontinuous time and space. (1) For subaltern studies (e.g. Guha, Chatterjee), the totality in question is capitalism. For them, in the earlier writings, the uneven development of capitalism is so uneven that it's discontinuous, in part because "the same" objects and systems are literally not the same when located in different representational systems and subject to different competing pressures. Hope for difference, jamming the system, the world system's getting in its own way, was found there: capital might not know what it's getting into as it moves around the world. Chatterjee vs. Chibber shows that around this point there's an epistemological conflict: if you think that there is somewhere a pre-, post- or sub-perceptual real, you won't agree that things are "literally not the same" in different representational systems. On the one hand, I don't believe that there are natural objects or logics apart from any representational systems that people use to perceive them with, but on the other, I guess I believe that the representational systems that capitalism depends on are, like capitalism per se, possibly saturating at this point. Languages vanish as well as farms or whatever; and they regenerate, but maybe only partially (there's a problem of keeping pace)? Another question is whether you can have a discontinuous totality (arguing yes might be a smarter Marxian arg. than the ones Chibber makes). (2) The latter might be Deleuze's issue. For Deleuze spacetime is folded, and a lot of emphasis falls on the idea that richness and singularity, internal difference, are created by its not being flat. In "The Fold" essay though it's explicit that there's surface difference and underlying unity--closer to Chibber and Hegel, although Deleuze's liberatory rhetoric sounds otherwise. Still, folding is one way to raise the question, if you had a different topology, e.g. a shape that was closed in on itself but perforated, or containing areas filled with different kinds of time, would you want to count that as the same sort of restrictive totality? (3) So Tsai enters here and for me it's really a question, what the film is doing. I didn't state clearly what it's doing because I don't know what it's doing and would like to know what people think. Though I would've liked to ask clearer questions about what you think it's doing. ;> I am really pretty torn about (1) and (2), and wonder whether Tsai is.
One thing I want from the films is their capacity to do theoretically conflicting things simultaneously. Theoretical texts do this too of course, but coming from film back to them can help show how they do it. I gravitate to the scenes that contemplate something that isn't made to be contemplated--in class, the scenes in the construction site most of all. The contemplations don't really end, and it feels like character, director, or viewer is working on animating the site but it neither "takes" nor
gets dropped. I associate this animating effort with the "spell" that binds much of the film. For me, that's neither good nor bad, I'm glad it's there. There are some stray references to placebo effects, constructive and destructive--the social trust that backs up money is unfortunately one (cf. the swindler's rage that the homeless man gives him empty paper: "I"ve prayed and consulted the gods. How can you give me blank paper?"); the "very effective herbal syrup" the workers mention when they bring home the injured homeless guy, another. Maybe this logic can extend to practices like Rawang's preparation of his room. The glowing object, as Michael was saying, is interesting because it's both commercially produced and a very effective happiness drug--it IS made to be contemplated, but it still works--and it's got for free or very expensively. (There's something more there I can't phrase yet, has anybody got anything?). But I agree that the last scenes jump out of this middle ground, like an out of body experience, a fantasy of transparency, of people in love (including the viewers) being able to share the same body. Tsai's idea might be to put the thought of transcendence on a continuum with these other little everyday sacred things that are actually known to be imaginary but work a little anyway. As Willie said, if anything saves it it's that these scenes are explicitly wishful and "impossible" - so the glowing object appears there as literally an intelligent being, that's a comic/apologetic element that may help a lot. It all "fills a space in my heart," that notes that the space is still there--this is the way people usually talk about art? (cf. the many uses of song in the film: "what is pitiful love but an execution ground? tears, death, misery, a fair lady ridden by love and drowned by sorrow...a drop of kindness for a million sorrows...I sought the wisdom of Buddha"). But anyway, to introduce art suddenly on that scale, even as fantasy of art, does something different from sticking with looking at the water and it does bother me. The conclusion I'm trending toward is that it's very hard for people to say these kinds of things about discontinuous space-time without introducing transparency and so becoming contradictory. I don't know if I want to say yet that it's impossible though.
ReplyDeletep.s. Question about the silence in Tsai about how the homeless guy acquires the glowing object--it means we don't know whether its acquisition fell outside exchange or not. Can that = "for this object, it doesn't matter whether it fell outside or inside exchange"?
ReplyDeleteI would like to ask a question regarding Alberto Moreiras' article "Infrapolitical Literature": what would be a good way of understanding the term 'facticity' as it is used by Moreiras? We can find it for instance in page 192, but also in 189. My Dictionary of Critical Terms states that facticity refers to the contingency of being, that which non-essential.
ReplyDeleteA recalcitrant, reasonless state of affairs that can't be otherwise?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.artnews.com/2013/10/25/piper-pulls-out-of-black-performance-art-show/
ReplyDeleteAdrian Piper pulls out of 'Radical Presence' show as 'Mythic Being'; last year for her birthday she did this
http://www.adrianpiper.com/news_sep_2012.shtml
"you may wish to refer to her as The Artist Formerly Known as African-American"
(if you click on the image you can read the text underneath the photograph)
I can't help but think about the Undercommons 'Blackness and governance' 3-9; the dialectic of luxuriant withholding, withdrawal, disavowal, dismissal, differentiation, improvisation of Technik and Eigetnlichkeit, desires animating the ideology of uplift... in context of Piper's gesture of withdrawal and her eclectic body of work. I do not wish to use her work as an illustration of theory, as subordinate to the powers of theory; she is very much a theorist (and a Kantian at that) and sees this as an essential part of the work.
Heres one of her books
http://www.adrianpiper.com/rss/docs/PiperRSSVol1HC.pdf
In the series of self portraits titled "Food for the spirit" she stands nude enveloped in darkness obliterating or reconciling figure and ground in a black and white photograph.
http://www.nyphotoreview.com/NYPR_REVS/NYPR_REV1508.html
Her piece "cornered" is here:
http://vimeo.com/10547710
Piper also did several calling cards, one is here:
http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/exhibitions/radicalism/piper1.shtml
How can we think about Piper's work and her gesture of withdrawal in Morerias' terms of obscure ground and infrapolitics?
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhjri9xLdU1qeirxso1_500.jpg
ReplyDeleteThank you Rei for helping understand facticity. The formulation 'can't be otherwise' is really interesting to me, as it implies a necessity and talks in an interesting way with the notion of 'best possible world', as it is part of the more traditional, progressivist discourse about society.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I was thinking about writing in to withdraw that part. :) "Recalcitrant" seems like more than enough.
DeleteBut in connotation Moreiras, individually, seems to want the fundamental?
DeleteI guess for me the question is what is being registered in Yella? It seems clear where that registration is taking place: in the transformation of inner life from a space of security and expectation to a rupture of sensory perception, and habit. Early on we are tipped off on habit: the first scene in which she pulls the train curtains close, and then the post-crash scene where she does the same. The rupture in sensory perception is present throughout, where familiar scenes are newly laced with anxiety. Specifically in the scene where she is walking, wet having just come from the crash, and she hears the birds and looks into a driveway where a couple's intimacy (Dr. Gunthen it will turn out) is particularly confronting. And the previously established becomes invasive (such as in the first hotel lobby scene with Philip's rhetorical question).
ReplyDeleteBut then the rupture,—and this is to my question about what is being registered—the increase in invasiveness is maybe just the weight and persistence of the past? For instance the presence of cash in the film. The first instance of cash is when the old East German father gives Yella cash as she moves to the West to work in an accounting firm—she seems embarrassed to receive it. But then she can't get away from it, it remains consistent through her experiences: the first hotel cashier scene; the pig-skin portfolio; the 25,000E; and a failed deterrence for Ben (a form he can understand?). There's lots of opacity and insecurity and at best repetition (taking Philip to Wittenberg is one of the only times she seems happy).
And so to go back I'm thinking from last week about neither/nor spaces and about fact which has at first to be registered and then non-instrumental fact can be read out. I'm unresolved, hence the question, as to the effect of registration and whether in Yella it opens anything. The most neither/nor shot I can think of is when she and Philip are at the water in Wittenberg the same water where she crashed. And after Philip's proposition "Want to join me?" and their embrace, there is a shot just of the water (107:40-107:49). But it's completely overdetermined, in obvious ways. It's suffocating, actually.
So, second question, what does the film give us to think about space? Last week Kirsty had said FM opens up the neither/nor space, not so much as a potentiality, but something that could be neither this nor that, we can just decide not to decide what it is; it could be de-signified. But, and there's no necessary reason to think about Yella in these terms, it seem for Petzold the neither/nor space is gone: the leaves and branches really are the foil that covers a body. And so what is left behind either stalks (literally with Ben), or remains consistent and hard to get away from (cash; Wittenberg; water). And then in the end we find out it was never actually left. Why, because impossible?
a few rough questions on Yella...
ReplyDeleteAs with Tsai's film, there are occluded moments, particularly when Yella is rescuing herself from a bad situation--getting from the river to the train or from where the taxi (with her first new 'boss') pulls over to her hotel. If those spaces in Tsai's film suggested possibility (whether or not that is a good thing), they might suggest impossibility here. The miraculous is established via/as a category of omission. The end provides one frame for reading these moments, but I am wondering if there are other ways people experienced them during the film. What do they suggest about the feeling or qualities of capitalist totality, particularly at the point of dissolution?
I was struck by the moment in the hotel room when the new boss/boyfriend marks his own question, "are you packing?" as a phatic utterance--the limit and ground of relation--by analogizing it to similarly over-interested neighborly behavior, "are you taking out the trash?"--and Yella treats this second example as if it offered real relational capacity, insight into her situation. Was anyone else drawn to this scene? Thoughts?
As the film progresses, a series of identifications accumulate. It might be interesting to talk about the relationship (can't get away from the word!) of identification to relation and to non-relation, what kind of strategy or failure identification marks here.
If we are finally to understand Yella's failed escape / failed future as occupying the space of a flashback...what is there to take away from that?
Are there any moments that seem to offer respite from the grip of capitalist totality? I am (skeptically) wondering about the waves on the screensaver and the broken glass at the meeting. These are obviously over-determined as traumatic triggers, but is that all they are? Both moments also mark steps ostensibly (if entirely illusorily) forward for Yella--steps back into the center of the capitalist totality from its periphery. They seem to shatter the first layer of fake relation and yet the relations they give onto are only more eagerly within the system. Is there anything to salvage of their betweenness?
My reaction to Yella centered around the idea of unrecoverable experience. The sensory phenomena mentioned above (leaves rustling, birds crying, the glass breaking, the sounds of water) are experienced as haunting, as something other than what they should be. (Maybe this is just because Yella is, ostensibly, dead. Maybe what's being signaled by her dysphoria is the impossibility of her existence in these moments, but that's also too easy an answer, I think).
ReplyDeleteYou are here mentioned that "It might be interesting to talk about the relationship (can't get away from the word) of identification to relation and to non-relation, what kind of strategy or failure identification marks here.
Maybe (esp. in Yella) identification does not signal/correspond to/condition the possibility of relation or non-relation. This parallels the experience described in the Tiqqun article: recognizing/identifying the baker, and yet that identification is insufficient. You might be able to identify something/someone/positioning-in-anticipation-of-a-relation while simultaneously failing to relate, to recover the relation that identification is supposed to herald. This idea obviously corresponds to the part of the film where Philip describes to Yella all the possible gazes/interactions/gestures/relations, identifying them. And yet the act of identification points to something more, something beyond.
To take another tack for a moment, the ending of the film was initially disappointing to me, sort of like the possible final reading of the Tsai film which would make the homeless man some sort of manifestation of the coma-man's dream life. Framing Yella as a hallucination/fantasy is sort of a cop out. But maybe the ending doesn't have to be read like that. Maybe there's something to be said for it as an attempt to represent an impossible future --> working out the ramifications of this reading.
Also anybody have a good read on all the enclosed moving spaces? Cars, trains, etc.?
Agility, composure, dispassion, the fantasy and quality of sealed-off-ness and self-containment demanded of the (female) body which would conform to the aesthetic sensibilities of late capitalism—these are embodied at the level of Yella’s physique, and what I found to be probably one of the most disturbing elements of the film . She oscillates between her desire to be a mobile, self-sufficient individual (who can find a job based on her expertise on balance sheets rather than her sexuality, who doesn’t need her father’s cash) in short, leave behind or reform her femaleness in favor of its “modernization” and assimilation into a regime which nevertheless still also demands a normative level of femaleness (but just the right kind and the right amount at the right moments)—patriarchy displaced and dispersed, its seeds dispatched. (This is not your father’s patriarchy.) At the same time, the ambiguity Yella feels about her own desires are revealed both in her interactions with men, and with herself. (In a way, she seems to have acquired the new job in Hanover just to make her father proud. The pride is explicit in her refusal to take his money. And then, there is the giddy moment she calls him from her hotel room to tell him she’s found a new job—the way one would call a best friend confide about a new date.)
ReplyDeleteMost of Yella’s interactions take place with men. We don’t know anything about her mother. Apparently she has no friends. The only other woman in the movie (as far as I remember) is Dr. Gunthen’s wife. Is Gunthen’s wife supposed to represent the other side of Yella’s would-be or should-be desires—the desire to be a wife, mother, have a family, etc? This might sort of seem like a regressive gesture for the film, were it not for the fact that Yella does not have any kind of straightforward reaction to Gunthen’s wife and the desires she represents. Envy, yes, perhaps. But also something different in quality and kind. These desires are also not hers, in the way that the desires to be a finance maven seem not to be properly “hers” either, and it is the discrepancies between these two clashing sets which triggers the sense of deep melancholy which saturates Yella’s character to the core—it’s not that she doesn’t know what she wants. In fact, she does know exactly what she wants. It’s that she seems hyper-aware that her desires are overdetermined from without; deprivation of the ability to gauge how to feel about one’s own desires when they can’t possibly exist as property—this signals the central confusion, maybe. It reappears more explicitly when she describes to Philip her sadness about the fact that she thinks she may have left her first husband because he’s ended up in financial ruins. “I don’t love him because he’s ruined…that’s why I have a bad conscience.” The fact that her romantic attachments are so thorough saturated by the logic of capital, and that she seems to have no control over this saturation, is related to her lack of control over the saturation of *all* her desires by that logic. That the desire to be a wife and a mother could escape this formulation falters under the weight of the reality that love in this world is mediated by capital no matter how one spins it.
You Are Here: About your last comment, “Are there any moments that seem to offer respite from the grip of capitalist totality? I am (skeptically) wondering about the waves on the screensaver and the broken glass at the meeting. These are obviously over-determined as traumatic triggers, but is that all they are? Both moments also mark steps ostensibly (if entirely illusorily) forward for Yella--steps back into the center of the capitalist totality from its periphery. They seem to shatter the first layer of fake relation and yet the relations they give onto are only more eagerly within the system. Is there anything to salvage of their betweenness?”
DeleteI was struck in this scene by the (intra-diagetic?) music—there’s such a sparse soundtrack, it’s hard not to notice when there’s music. On the one hand you have Germany’s robust intellectual and cultural heritage—so, Beethoven playing in the background. On the other hand, what Beethoven is playing? none other than the Moonlight Sonata==probably one of the “stockiest” pieces of classical music ever. (The screensaver image of the wave on the laptop also evokes stockification, which is how I made the connection in the first place.) Moonlight sonata would also be a popular ringtone, for example. Philip asks Yella if she knows English. She replies “Business English.” The English language’s historical usurpation of the hegemonic role of knowledge production and exchange—could this not be connected to the commoditization of German high culture, and the implications of this historical process (evol. of capitalism) for the film’s plot? (I’d like to come back to this now convoluted point, somehow, later.)
So, every little piece of something to be salvaged is threatened by the capitalist totality. In the scene with the broken glass, you have Yella experiencing something that changes her comportment, and might then be read as potentially emancipating. When Philip leans back in his chair, Yella rejects her prescribed cue to lean over and whisper something to him as he’s wanted—instead, she make an important connection about something on the balance sheet (a connection she makes to a devaluation figure her ex- mentioned in the car on the way to the train station). So, yes, she circumvents the passive position Philip has tried to strap her into. On the other hand, she’s escaped it for what? For the ability to be a better venture capitalist? To make him more money? If this is now the only kind of victory available…then the in-between spaces are no longer in-between. Perhaps, as Chris points out, they no longer exist as neither/nor but as all that there is. The trees, the water, the music, the sex—capitalism owns it all. What’s worse is the possibility that there might be something else, and isn’t. There just never is anything else. It doesn’t matter whether Yella is still alive or dead—the post-crash life that awaits her is pretty much the repetition of the pre-crash life, except worse because it’s a confirmation that there couldn’t have been another kind of life anyway (bracketing what we think of her distance or proximity to the “capitalist center”). When her ex reappears in the scene in the hotel room he says that the company ruined their relationship: “I’ll go back to work, as an electrician…We could rent a small apartment somewhere in a big city. We’ll fix up the apartment. It’ll look nice. Do it all ourselves. Simple and neat. ’You’re so talented, my hero, that’s what you used to say.’” Then Yella tells him to leave. In other words, there’s no going back to a better “pre” or “before.” Nor is there a future. Just when we think there might have been carved out a space for Yella and Philip to demonstrate something like an actual love affair, the hope dissolves. There’s that moment Chris refers to when Philip asks Yella to join him, and she smiles and they embrace, and then there’s the cut to water. Shortly after Yella returns from her negotiations with Gunthen to find Philip lying in bed. She lies next to him and strokes his head. “You should find someone else. Not even a small-time shit bank would hire me now,” he tells her. She responds, “I love you.” This scene counteracts the previous hypothesis that all relations are mediated by the logic of capital. Still, just as soon as the movie holds out these moments of possibility, plausible as they are, it retracts. In the next scene, they are in an office waiting for Gunthen, who is late. Philip, seated on the desk, leans down to kiss Yella, and just as he’s whispered “I love you,” in her ear, Yella sees Gunthen’s ghost in the window. (Earlier, before swerving off the bridge to their deaths, her ex had said, “Yella, I love you.” Love, in both of these contexts, is immediately chased by death—and not just any kind-- murder.
DeleteHer death is almost a gift in this context. (Ok, sorry for the deep gloom—I am sick. Which usually amps up my nihilistic inclinations…)
Came to a similar reading of Yella yesterday :) Some things to add to this constellation of ideas:
DeleteFor most of the film Yella's interactions with capital/cash are sort of incidental. Her father gives her cash, Schmitt-Ott tries to buy her, Philip exchanges it for her presence, Ben wants it from her, but she doesn't actively seek it out until the end, when she extorts Gunther. And the reason she wants cash at that point is to sustain the fantasy of her and Philip's future as capitalists/partners.
Yella is an independent female character (see Jelly's rundown above) and the men she interacts with are substitutable, repeating each other's words and actions. If Ben "stalking" her can be read as a hallucination, maybe we can read it as part of her policing herself/haunted by the capitalist/patriarchal totality she's failing to comply with/relate to in a normative way?
The connection Jelly makes between the utterances of love and death makes sense. The normative naming of the relation signals the closing off of other relational possibilities (a sort of death).
Yea. It’s like she can’t get outside the thing because the thing is inside her. Could this be a quality of non-relationality? Totalities are non-relational because they can’t be affected from within. Yella is not just inside the totality—the totality subsists on the inside and is supported through and by her. (There are no representatives of patriarchy; women perpetuate it, even and despite the fact that they are more exploited by it.) This sense of homogeneity—“it’s everywhere the same” is captured in the monochromatism of the landscape and in the minimal variation of facial expressions throughout the movie. The only character who might be said to show any passion at all is Ben (and this is something I’m really curious about). His passion is like a leftover artifact from more archaic times. (I would want to juxtapose this with the fact that there is the blues song playing in the car as he pulls up in the beginning—trace or spector of blackness, and all the repression of Germany's colonial history there entailed--the irrecoverability of *that* memory —I think we could arrive at something rather profound through the fact that the only music in this film is Beethoven and Julie Driscoll.)
DeletePhilip might be comparable to Ben in all sorts of ways, except for the fact that he has no passion. His passion is stealing money—and the reason he likes stealing money is so he can steal more money (dialogue at the end about the oil drills). He’s already admitted to Yella that he will cheat on her, and she’s agreed she doesn’t mind.
It’s almost like, rather than being everywhere, the totality is nowhere—its effects just as marked. All of the movement through space (Wittenberg to Hanover to Hamburg to Wittenberg) mark a sort of desire for escape from the totality, even though it’s rather that movement within the totality is also what sustains it.
This is from Willie. His account was being uncooperative:
ReplyDeleteSome thoughts about Yella:
I think it's as pertinent here as it was in Tsai's film to explore the things that the film doesn't tell us. What does Petzold leave out? What effect do these occlusions and lacunae play in how the precarity of Yella's circumstances is portrayed? And her experience of it? For example, similar to the homeless man in Tsai's I Don't Want to Sleep, we are never fully aware of the conditions in which she works. Petzold withholds these details. What is the legal standing of her job with AirWings such that the firing of the man who hired her results in her own termination? What is the nature of the business relationship between Yella and Phillip? We assume from the fact that he offers her a 1000 euros cash at the end of their first meeting that Yella has signed no formal employment contract. Did they at least agree to a price for her services beforehand? We don't know. The analogy between the conditions of contemporary white-collar labor and those of the informal economy – even prostitution – hovers over the film. What are the employment conditions of the Phillip himself? He receives a call from his boss early on, then later on he receives a job offer in another city, but we know little else about his situation except that he, in contrast to Yella, has cash sufficient to stave off intrusion and dependence...at least at first.
Another version of Petzold's careful selections of details is the information that is revealed over time: take, for example, Yella's relationship with Ben. When he first appears, we assume him to be some sort of ex-romantic involvement; when he first follows her down the street from the train station, he makes the sort of comments that confirm that he knows her intimately. But it is only after Yella is caught stealing from the Phillip that we find out that she was, in fact, married to him. What is the effect of allowing the viewer to speculate for the first 30 odd minutes of the film?
I'm curious about how this silence in particular becomes our initial cue that we are to construe the handful of individuals with whom Yella interacts as so many features of the landscape of capitalist totality (the natural foil of which occupies a prominent place in the film as well. Does Yella find in nature - the rustling leaves of the trees, the idyllic surroundings of Dr. Gunthen's house, the sound of chirping birds that fill the hotel room after Yella and Phillip sleep together - a break from this totality? Or is nature, rather, a constitutive feature of this totality's embedded escape fantasies – which include the fantasy of suicide (here I'm thinking of the elements of nature that trigger Yella's PTSD)?). We can't help but noticing that they all exhibit similar traits: they are white (which we can read as an assurance of German/EU citizenship – i.e. we are not dealing with the immigrant undercurrents of the European labor market, but rather its putative natural, vital core) men in positions of power.
(cont...) It looks like they are powerful because of the social (market) position they occupy – loan officer/investment broker, aerospace engineering executive, (aspiring, but ultimately failed) computer engineer/tech industry-related job. Or is it that they occupy these positions because they are men (Is such a position accessible to Yella? We might think that she takes on such a role at the end of the film, but this ends in disaster)? Despite moments of human emotion and interaction with these men (many of which could be interpreted as thinly veiled versions of market relations: e.g. Schmitt-Ott's insinuative caress of Yella's arm in the taxi; even Yella's own reason for falling out of love with Ben - “I don't love him anymore because he's ruined”), we get the impression that her experience of each of them is much the same – at least the insecurity and unequal dynamic of power that regulate the interaction remains constant. Is Petzold saying something about the point at which even ostensible relation between humans becomes a shadowy relation with non-relationality?
ReplyDeleteThe most powerful delayed revelation in the film, of course, is that Yella's stalking husband, Ben, is actually a memory, a ghost. What does this say about the relationship, that it persists in spectral form even after its over, even after he's died? I'm curious about how the final replay of Yella and Ben's car crash scene might lead us to conclude that all of Yella's relationships have a spectral quality to them. We assume that the scene takes place as Yella's daydream, an alternate ending flashback while she is sitting in the taxi. But, similar to Rei's thought that we see Tsai's film as the hallucination/dream of the paralyzed man, the way Petzold cuts the last few scenes leaves us wondering if Yella is not a ghost throughout.
I'm also interested in exploring associations between private space and affect and public (market?) space and a certain form of stoicism, especially as the transience and precarity of Yella's employment situation seems to bring about a continuous impinging of the (putatively) public on the (putatively) private. A few examples: at hotel reception - “I just need to get some sleep,” but a deposit is required; the ever-open door of the hotel room, and the stream of unexpected visitors/intruders; crying in the taxi after the Dr. Gunthen's suicide; also the domestic scenes with Dr. Gunthen and his wife; the poker face with which Yella enters the Phillips car after attempting to send the un-deposited 25,000 euros to Ben, and her desperate, pleading attempt to explain her rationale for betraying the deal-maker's trust - “My ex-husband is following me...”This last example seems to me the most poignant evidence that, for Petzold human relation is supplanted by non-relation: she tries to explain; he gets out of the car and walks away. And in the very next scene Yella's plan to book a train out of town is foiled by, what we assume is, an unresponsive computerized reservation system.
What does this say about the “lining” of the (informal?) economy of an extremely flexible and oligarchically-controlled labor market in conditions of global competition? What sort of picture of political interiority in the context of European austerity/the intrusion of neoliberal policies into the EU/German welfare state does Petzold paint? How is it similar/different from the inside of the “peripheral” economic space (e.g. Tsai's film)? The (mythical) outside of the totality (e.g. Imamura's film)? I think these scenes depict a certain collapsing of not only the circumstances that isolate the private from the public (ironically often understood to be an emergent feature of a capitalist economy, as compared with historically prior modes of production), but of the very relevance of the categories themselves.
(cont...) What is it for something to be public, to be private, to be transactional/commodified, to be personal/emotional in the totality of capitalism? Through the ever-shifting terrain(s) of Yella's life, Petzold depicts a way in which the very categories through which one attempts to understand or analyze one's experiences – the proper ways of displaying emotion, intelligence, sexuality, vulnerability – are obscured. The result is a new homo economicus, strategic and calculating indeed, as Yella is throughout the film, but also plagued by an emotional (and at times physical) violence always “rippling under the skin (Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 31).” Petzold's capacity for exposing this morphing anthropology of the totality is, I think, enhanced by the sheer familiarity of the circumstances that he addresses: the jobs in Yella are the jobs of middle class economies of the “center.” Thus, I felt their inexorable ghostliness/shadowiness conveyed as even more palpable than in the other films we've seen. Petzold's final judgment is also more pessimistic than that these prior films, dealing as the film does with conditions perhaps more familiar to him as well. Perhaps without just cause, I suspect that Petzold is closer to his subject matter than Tsai to the homeless man or Imamura to the badjoe or the pirates. Does totality preclude hope of an outside at certain intimate distances that it doesn't when viewed from farther away? While there may be hauntings of ethical responsibility (suggested by the ghosts of the film) - a vestige of some other existent form of human relationality - even these hauntings form part of a larger cycle from which escape is... impossible?
ReplyDeleteDoes anything escape the structures of global capital in Yella? What about the scene in the hotel room where she and Phillip drink coffee and she talks about her circumstances with Ben? By offering her a chance to continue working with him, does Phillip engage in some sort of extra-market altruism? Or is this what Adorno calls “selflessness as speculation (Minima Moralia, 24)?” Is it latently transactional in nature? Phillip comes to take on the role of the protector (a paternal figure, who even peels his oranges the same way as Yella's father), but at the price of Yella's affections – and her valuable contributions at the negotiating table. What about Yella's decision to stick by Phillip, even though he has “ruined” his job prospects just like Ben? In this scene, it appears that the roles have switched. Yella is empowered as protector/provider. While she had shown the power of intelligence and quick wit in prior meetings, her meeting at Dr. Gunthen's home is the first time she steps into the role of power herself. But Yella's first foray into investment game ends in tragic suicide, foreclosing any progressive reading: foreclosing escape from a ghostly existence.
What about the music in the film? On many occasions it appears as a form of momentary catharsis/emotional relief, emerging diegetically from Yella and Phillip's “private” and shared moments. Is this Petzold's gesture to an outside? Do these fleeting moments in some sense remain un-captured by the totality?
I was thinking about what Jelly had said: "What’s worse is the possibility that there might be something else, and isn’t." I agree that this is an affect of the film, that the "new" things it holds out are there only to be held out, in the same way the past is apparently withdrawn, but there only to be withdrawn (and as such persisting). I find these affects to be significant ones in other places. But, I just don't trust them in Yella. Something that Willie said above triggered a feeling I've been having: that in Yella there is an intentional play on the connection between familiarity and palpability. This is something that pisses me off about immaterial labour/capital more generally (the thinking about it, not it itself). It's quite straightforward: now! now it's happening to us too!
DeleteIn a conversation the other day Willie said that implicitly Yella provides a critique of the positioning of the subaltern in Tsai, because it doesn't even try. However, surely this is an unwitting position; it's not a recognition or an attempt at taking seriously conceptual limitation and then the thinking that that would necessarily entail, and that's frustrating. In fact, and this is to the mistrust, to me it's an effect of wanting to theorize immateriality but not carrying that through on the level that was just able to theorize that immateriality. If you are serious about immateriality—that it represents a new form of capital, with new affects and relations, including the possibility of relation itself—you can't just reinstantiate the categories that we were just implicitly told have been surpassed, because of immateriality. And so, really there ought not to be in Yella such a strong overlay of the affect "there might be something else, [but] isn't." Fine, bad dialectics, so what? If Petzold is trying, and I think he is, to mobilize a critical concept of totality the question is what happens when you establish a concept in this way (the bad dialectics way), even, and especially if it's a critical one? What happens before he uses it, what's already happened, before application, in creating it?
I think this problematic plays itself out. In aforementioned conversation, Ana had said that all the male characters are functions: Yella needs a sidekick, but they are substitutable; it's clear that she can read capital but not produce it. Someone said that Yella is then a floating function, she's obviously a qualitatively different character then the male characters, an agential—in the film's limited scope for that—character. So more immaterial because less functional, because floating. To continue, I really like Ana's idea about policing as ways of reading the following: why Yella sees Dr Gunthen dead before she sees him dead; that Ben's stalking is Yella's policing of her own self-projection of her "normative" over-stepping. And so I was thinking about policing as a remnant of materiality that comes back into immateriality: the remains of the normative rules of patriarchy and capital. I think these are ways of thinking about immateriality. But—and here's where Petzold's concept collapses—to go back to something Jelly said: "So, yes, she circumvents the passive position Philip has tried to strap her into. On the other hand, she’s escaped it for what? For the ability to be a better venture capitalist? To make him more money?" I agree, and so in Yella there's no way to actually follow through on the effect of something like immateriality. I was thinking there was a way with the idea of thinking of things less as a possibility but rather as a threat, and the latter as a shadow of non-relation. But I can't see it in Yella, and actually I don't think there's non-relation, because the move toward immateriality, where there really might be non-relation is subsumed back under the already existing relations we know too well.
Interesting review of Yella: http://cinemaguild.com/homevideo/ess_yella_2.htm
ReplyDeleteRecalling our seminar discussion about borderlines, marginality and the outside, I thought this article by 'our own' Stephen Barker might be of interest:
ReplyDeletehttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v006/6.1barker.html
I'm writing up a question that I had in last week's class. I was interested in the way that Parisa was positioning the concept of representation in her paper and the way in which the critique of that regime of representation developed through her analysis of Yella to a point that I think exceeded it. And then I was interested how that attached and potentially departed from James' paper.
ReplyDeleteSo at first I took Parisa to be suggesting that Yella (intentionally or not) plays out the following logic of representation, quoting Parisa: "Difference must be subordinated under identity so that representation can take place: “it is not in the first instance the antagonistic recognition of difference which constitutes the discourse of racism but the subordination of difference to the demand for identity,” (Lloyd, 71) a subordination constitutive for the formal demand of representation." Lloyd had mapped this dialectic of representation onto the dialectic of capital (subsumption of use-value under exchange-value) and then I was taking Parisa as saying that this is the form of representation in the film, knowingly communicating back to the place of representation in the “narrative of culture,” where the viewers are able to "interpellate" Yella. I was trying to work out whether this was because it is felt to be the only regime of representation available, and so itself a critique? Or whether (probably also an "and") it is Petzold's comment on contemporary capital, i.e., the subsumption of use-value under exchange-value? Either way, and although this can be the frame with which to read Yella through, I think there was something else going on.
What I was thinking was triggered by James' paper in which he argued that "the Black does not exist as such, but only through a non-relation with a white world." That non-relation is formed out of the way in which whiteness premised particularity upon non-differentiation (as unamed). The unamed James wrote "is a ghostliness or deathliness called Blackness." As such ontology is only available as an effect of antiblackness, and blackness is then anontological: it is "the breaking in that breaks." James' suggestion in his ship metaphor—'you are never not talking about blackness, you can disavow blackness , but you are still on the ship'—seemed to me to retain the ontological structure particularity--non-differentiation. James' interest was then in the space between particularity and non-differentiation, that, quoting James, "gap between humanness and blackness, across which relation is impossible (but not empty)": "nothing is not absence" (Moten). So this is really interesting and it links up with the way in which which non-differentiation is constitutive ontologically (and by extension anontologically for James) for Lloyd's critique of representation and capital.
DeleteHowever, what I was thinking then was that the argument that Parisa makes in her paper actually exceeds the critique of representation, i.e., that difference is always subsumed under identity, and moves toward breaking down the structure that Lloyd and James use (albeit for generative purposes beyond it): particularity--non-differentiation. Parisa's argument seemed to be that what is going on in Yella is the collapse of non-differentiation--particularity. Particularity is stock-ness and as such not particularity at all. So my question was what happens when that ontological distinction is said to disappear? That seemed to be where Parisa's analysis of Yella took us. Where you could have an answer to the question what's worse than the beyond of conflict. My concern is that the limit of the critique of representation is (ought to be?) non-relation. The dialectic of representation is the dialectic of capital as relational totality. Parisa's argument with Yella was pushing us to ask: if the non-relational is considered as that which no longer produces a relation between particularity and non-differentiation, and there is no real particularity, how ought we think differently? This seems especially significant in terms of what it means to be "inside". I don't know if this needs to, or whether it even does, have an impact on James' positioning of the socionom and paraontological. It may do in the sense that James positioned the socionom and the paraontological both in terms of "inside". The former as "an attempt to think the intrusiveness of the social structure," and the latter "as an attempt to think through an existence that is so inside of the social structure."