NOVEMBER 2005

The Individual and the Enemy
by Jocelyn Braddell©2005
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 Braddell©Oct.2005

 The Rebirth of the Author
 ======================================================


 ~Nicholas Rombes©~
(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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