The Individual and the
Enemy
by Jocelyn Braddellİ2005
Jean Baudrillard's point, worth considering here, is
that what is
important is not arriving at the point where one
says "I", but rather
being in the condition where it's no longer of any
importance whether
one says "I" or not.
The problem I approach is the
crisis evident among all those wishing to communicate as
writers: for, who is the writer?
Is this an individual searching a tool of language for
his thought? - or the egotist whose thought is
established and corroding into words......
The function of memory creates a possible alter-ego whose
sifting exercise of experience provides another
perspective.
This problem has reached a real crisis point in
history.
Primarily every effort is being made politically and
socially to destroy the human potential of the
individual. A century of conceptual art carries the blame
for creating and then destroying individuals at their
most intimate level.
An art that creative individuals had hoped in the early
1900s would carry not only the heavy messages of social
responsibility but alternatively the perfect message of
rest - beauty.
However, within western society, the social services and
through education, the secret human individual,as well as
anyone who uses the obvious casual affinities, is courted
by professional confidants; not friends, but by those
with a close knowledge of dependence, in order to place
the victim on the pivot of their personal relationship
with the Other.
The concept of the Other is now a weapon for those who
wish to destroy the potential of human
individuality.
A person may be a succesful professional, even a
'celebrity', or one imprisoned within a social stasis.
That imagined space where the public and private converge
is the projected position for this repressive course - -
the position where a wrestling with, or conquest, of
stress is bound to occur, which becomes an arena
untenable for most individuals.
.Within this active arena a person may only gain resource
from insignificant modes of behaviour, or even the herd
mechanism of drug addiction with its fraudulent message
of "difference" ; behaviour of a kind that does
not securely differentiate one from anyone else (futile
domestic habits, noisy entertainment etc.), and the
individual's resilience is broken down and a pathetic
path of self-reference is then followed that is utterly
destructive.
This is a a path that may then be reproduced in written
or artistic work..
The media plays the game and it is the philosophy of the
winner and looser.
The purpose is to destroy humanity's wonderful and
singular resource, the stranger, the individual, whose
thought patterns are based entirely on realising freedom
as the central pivot of a life lived.
Individuals are
under the greatest pressure to be eliminated that has
ever occurred. The "leader" of great
governments or industries, of schoolyards or the media is
now the puppet always of financial resources or victim of
the insecurity of a pseudo status to which he/she is sure
to be susceptible .
Language, it
has long been realised by these enemies of the human
race, is the weapon that must be distorted and
become their weapon to prevent the emergence of strong
individual thinkers and activists.
Weakness must be exploited at every level of
encounter in life.
The difference between the spoken and the written word
must be broken down until they are one and the same thing
- ie. encounter the word and you must submit to a greater
power.
A straight historical line of
"supreme" influence, as from those ancient
dispensers of "wisdom" the Babylonians,
purveyors of those most ancient writings of trade in
agriculture in the Middle East.
Words that subsequently became the servants of myth
and history.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was god ;
death that created the fearful mysteries of Time.
But because trade was actually the creator of the written
identification of owner and trader, the word as the
artefact of trade is now the main artefact of the
political will to destroy individuality in the human
psyche.
Everything that goes around comes around.
In England,
in my childhood and adolescence, I began to understand
the quota of influence contained in education that almost
irrepressably forces itself on the child. Time, as the
child learns to differentiate the days by weather and
sunlight, by air and rain, so is that very delight stolen
by the wonderful school clock.
The use of the right-hand the first encounter which I
parried with mirror writing, followed up in art lessons
taught by rigorous pattern and admonitions against free
drawing of the objects of organic and material life, or
mapping.
In the 1940 - 50's the artist became the initiator of a
new escape from human categories - the self-consciousness
(so we were told) of abstract art wherein the great
dictation of the inner conscience appeared to speak.
But what was this inner voice?
The weals of suffering conjured from childhood grew and
grew until the monsters of self indulgence became very
ugly indeed.
Science,
the neurosciences in particular, are seeking to discover
the supposed source of the individual's pernicious revolt
against civilisation.
The brain is examined in such incredible detail that it
is supposed there will be a complete analysis of and
potential end to all manifestations of a unique will.
Every manifestation of language is "now" a
mirror representation of the exterior world - and no
longer the store result of contemplation.
Spontaneity has now crushed history, everything is new.
The exterior world is merely on the move in the manner of
a machine or many machines.
Work, the toil of everyman that was only a pleasure for
the artist is now ended. The artist's ideas can only be
reproduced by assistants. And those ideas represent the
true void of a mind.that seeks no observation, and no
solution. The vague diaphanous nothing that is everyman
standing before a panel of a hundred reproductions. The
scale is determined by the order and the object is
determined by the polarisation of measure - rigorous or
random measure. Coloured streaks or areas of passionate
display of nothing. Absolutely nothing. Shock no longer
exists, sorrow no longer exists, and love no longer
exists.
Beauty?
Buy or sell beauty and you are known as a trader that
bargains on a rise in price.
Make a gift of beauty - ? - not on, it is a sign only of
another agenda.....?
Greeting and gesture
Those who watch apprehensively find themselves cauterised
by a new censor - history. Growth and renewal in all
around must we see!
Can the
words we choose to read and write redeem us?
Can laughter be heard beyond the ordinary nation and
peoples of Ireland, as we desecrate the grasp of history
itself by creating our resilience to the international
template?
Nietzsche said, "...there is no 'being'
behind doing, effecting,
becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to
the deed -- the
deed is everything".
Jocelyn BraddellİOct.2005
The Rebirth of the
Author
======================================================
~Nicholas Rombesİ~
(excerpts)
Roland Barthes's famous prediction about the death
of the author has come to pass, but not because the
author is nowhere, but rather because s/he is
everywhere.
Indeed, the author has grown and multiplied in
direct proportion to academic dismissals and
denunciations of her presence; the more roundly and
confidently the author has been dismissed as a myth, a
construction, an act of bad faith, the more
strongly s/he has emerged. The recent surge in
personal websites and blogs -- rather than diluting
the author concept -- has helped to create a tyrannical
authorship presence, where the elevation of the
personal and private to the public level has only
compounded the cult of the author. We are all
authors today.
Perhaps it was all a mistake, a terrible act of
misreading. .........................
The problem, now, is easy to see. Whereas Barthes
(and others....) offered theories in language that was
playful, slippery, aphoristic, and often poetic,
the academics who subsequently applied their
theories often did so in prose that was deadly dry,
pedantic, serious, stripped of the slippages and humor
that made readers want to believe.
..............If, as Craig Saper has noted,
"[I]n the academy, auteurism was considered
~passe~ at best" [5] in the wake of
poststructuralism, then in erasing the very
personality of their own writing style film
scholars and theorists demoted themselves to a
level of invisibility and even obsolescence.
Generations of graduate students trained to strip
all traces of bourgeois personality from their prose
awake now to find that they have no audience for
their ideas, because their ideas have no expressive
confidence.
And yet, there is a gradual return to the pleasures
of the text, not as something to be studied merely,
but performed. In his preface to a collection of
essays by Malcom Le Grice, Sean Cubitt demonstrates in
his opening paragraph an approach to writing that
recognizes that beauty and power in prose need not
be something to hide:
Have we already
forgotten? Why we got into this in the first place?
How it was that the moving lights, the washes of colour,
first brought us to this world and thanked us, with their
generous presentation of
themselves, for being there with them?
Has the memory faded so
radically of those first inklings of beauty, scattering
in all its ungraspable ephemerality across our skins as
much as our eyes, beams traversing and dragging into
motion muscle and bowel, as music drags us to dance? From
a politics of renunciation through an aesthetic of
minimalism to a phenomenology of ecstasy, Le Grice's
films return us to a primal encounter with the physical
power of our first perceptions. [6]
Does Cubitt's prose here teeter dangerously close
to nostalgia? ................ Cubitt recognizes
that humanities-based academic prose is better
served by avoiding the deadening safety and boredom of so
much writing in the social sciences today.
More than anyone else, it is Jean Baudrillard who
has pointed the way out. "As for ideas,
everyone has them," he has written. "What
counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis.
That alone can justify writing, not the wretched
critical objectivity of ideas. There will never be
any resolving the contradictoriness of ideas, except in
the energy and felicity of language." [9] A
recent article in the ~New York Times~ -- "The
Powers Behind the Home-Video Throne" --
begins: "When Steven Spielberg directs a movie,
he gets final cut. But the last word is more likely
to come from Laurent Bouzereau. Mr. Bouzereau, 43,
is barely known to the world at large. But in the
clannish, status-obsessed corridors of Hollywood,
he has a growing reputation as Mr. Spielberg's
personal DVD producer, one of perhaps a dozen
players who have mastered the young art of turning
the video edition of a film into a sui generis
event." [10] As what was thought of not too
long ago as mere bonus, extra, or supplementary
material begins to equal and in fact take precedence
over the so-called "feature presentation"
of DVDs, a new ~auteur~ develops as someone whose
narrative contributions threaten to overtake the
pallid, homogeneous films now buried in hours of special
features. [11]
...........denunciations of authorship have always
tended to strengthen the cult and authority of
those doing the denouncing. In fact, it was Barthes
who called the author into being and whose denunciations
helped create the conditions for the dictatorship
of the author in
the digital era.
In any case, despite the good intentions of
post-humanist academics for whom the Author was
symptomatic of a capitalist symptom to be cured,
now we witness the viral spread of the author concept
into the very structures of academic expression.
Today, anonymity is a sign of guilt, or failure. As
academics embrace the web -- and blogs and vlogs
specifically -- as legitimate sites of knowledge creation
and dissemination, then resistance to the author
function withers. For wasn't one of the engines
that drove the cult of the death of the author the
secret desire by academics to be authors themselves? Not
authors who wrote obscure articles that were
inevitably consigned to
the dark stacks of enormous libraries, but authors
who tested their ideas in the public sphere,
authors whose ideas mattered beyond the narrow
handful of specialists who would pass predictable
judgment on their work? Authors whose ideas
mattered enough to be praised or damned? Confronted
with the specter of the public sphere, academics
are learning how to write again. The crisis of the
scholarly publishing subsidy system portends an
enormous shift wherein the
discredited author concept is resurrected. Rather
than the utopian dream of collective, collaborative
authorship that many theorists first saw in
hypertext and blogs, we see instead the proliferation of
~auteurs~ vying for public space in the public
sphere.
Stripped of aura, of mystery, of distance, we are
known today as mapped elements in a database.
Surveilled, recorded, and marked, we are becoming
the function of our components -- our decoded genes, the
number of hits (hourly, daily, monthly) on our
websites, our on-line purchasing histories. It is
perhaps ironic that it is in the very forms of
authorship that post-humanist critics strove to erase
that we find our best chance of theorizing -- and
resisting -- our own disappearance.
.............................The author is stronger than
ever today because s/he reminds us of an identity
memorable for its utter failures. And to be
reminded of our failures is to be reminded that we
are human.
Perhaps it was easy to dismiss the Author when
there was so little at stake. But now, as we
approach the time when it will be possible to lift
the veil on our very own codes, we find that it is
precisely in human authorship -- with its mistakes,
its errors, its slippages, its ambiguities, its
reversals and contradictions, its irrationalities,
its surprises -- where we can reassert ourselves
against the very destruction that once, because it
was myth, we so eagerly desired.
Notes:
[5] Craig Saper, "Arftificial Auteurism and
the Political Economy of
the Allen Smithee Case," in _Directed by Allen
Smithee_, Jeremy
Braddock and Stephen Hock, eds. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota
Press, 2001. p. 33.
[6] Sean Cubitt, "Preface: The Colour of
Time," in _Experimental
Cinema in the Digital Age_, by Malcom Le Grice.
London: British Film
Institute, 2001. p. vii.
[9] Jean Baudrillard. _The Perfect Crime_. Trans.
Chris Turner.
London and New York: Verso, 1996. p. 103.
Originally published in
French by Editions Galilee, 1995.
[10] Christian Moerk, "The Powers Behind the
Home-Video Throne," ~The
New York Times~, 3 April 2005.
www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/movies/03moer.html.
p. 1.
[11] For a good discussion of the emergence of DVD
"supplementary-ness," see Graeme Harper,
"DVD and the New Cinema of
Complexity," in _New Punk Cinema_, Nicholas
Rombes, ed. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2005. pp. 89-101.
Nicholas Rombes is an associate professor of
English at the University of Detroit Mercy, where
he co-founded the Electronic Critique program. He
is the author of _Ramones_ (Continuum 2005), the
editor of _New Punk Cinema_ (Edinburgh University
Press 2005) and is at work on the book _Digital
Poetics_, forthcoming from Wallflower Press in
2007.
http://professordvd.typepad.com/
_____________________________________________________________________
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