Long Sunday

Piracy and Liberty

An excerpt from my ongoings readings on the history of piracy. Marcus Rediker compares the frontispiece of Historie der Engelsche Zee-Rovers to Delacroix's Liberty Leads the People.

Play: Never the Sinner

Please Join Us As

Woodshed Collective

Presents
The New York Return of

Never the Sinner
The Leopold and Loeb Story

By John Logan

Conceived by Woodshed Collective
Directed by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn
The Outer Citric Circle Award for
Outstanding Off-Broadway Play Returns to New York City July 13-28.

Never the Sinner
July 13 – 28

Flamboyan Theater, CSV Cultural Center (107 Suffolk St.)
Tuesday-Saturday @ 8pm.
Sundays: July 15 and 22 @ 3pm
Saturdays: July 21 and 28 @ 2pm

All Tickets $18
www.smarttix.com or call 212-868-4444

(Featuring Long Sunday contributor Stephen Squibb!)

Having just begun

Gabriel Josipovici on Borges, Poe, the novel, Kierkegaard, Wallace Stevens...:

It may be that Borges’ mode of writing is not such as to engage fully with politics and history, like that of Sartre and Malraux; yet I would suggest that despite this his central contrast of the melancholy and resigned translator and the idealist world of Tlön is more deeply political than Sartre and Malraux could ever be, and that it helps to bring out something that is often overlooked in studies of literary Modernism:  that to write about politics without recognising the complicity of forms of writing with the formation of political consciousness is to betray the cause one thinks one is serving, and that writers  like Eliot, Stevens, Beckett and Borges may in the end be better guides to the times than Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Silone and the rest...…

Actually, I think my favorite sentence is this:

...But there’s this deplorable confusion in that modern times have incorporated ‘actuality’ into logic and then, in distraction, forgotten that ‘actuality’ in logic is still only a ‘thought actuality’, i.e. it is possibility.

 

Thoughts anyone?  Certainly a must-read essay.   (Also via RSB, readers may be interested in the new journal, Affinities:  "a web-based journal that focuses on groups, movements, and communities that set out to construct sustainable alternatives to the racist, hetero-sexist system of liberal-capitalist nation-states.")

The distribution of the sensible

Melanie Gilligan asks an interesting question of Rancière. Anyone care to offer a response, thoughts?

"is not at the same time"

Now this is a smart point from T.J. Clark, interviewed in the Brooklyn Rail...

Rail: Right at the start of the book, in the Preface, you say a few words about the difference between what you’re doing in Afflicted Powers and The Sight of Death and ‘the alternative currently on offer in so much of the Left academy.’ It’s pretty clear that you haven’t much sympathy for what passes these days as Left art history. Why not?

Clark: I think it’s stuck with an out-of-date sense of the issues. As if it mattered any longer—as if it had any present political point—to prove for the umpteenth time that what we poor suckers had imagined was a difficult and double-edged picture of the human condition was really, hey presto!, just another instrument of ruling-class oppression… Here’s Bruegel for you—provider of sneering moralistic services for a bunch of bourgeois Puritans. Where does one start with this? Maybe by looking back at the canonical quote from Walter Benjamin, and reminding oneself of what it did and did not say. It did not say that “There is no document of civilization which is not really, when you look at its origins and function, a document of barbarism.” It said: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” This is a dialectical thought, not an anti-canonical put-down. The work of art is a document of civilization and of barbarism. The job of the materialist is to think the two identities—the two kinds of belonging to history—together. Not to reduce one to the other. A materialist will presumably be interested in what it was, in the sets of possibilities offered by a specific medium, a specific practice, that opened the space in which a jolly denunciation of peasant foolishness became something else.

(via 3quarks)

I love Clark's description of the humanities status quo, and I love - and share - his sense of the possible direction out...

(My wife wrote once in awhile for the Rail back when we were of, yes, Brooklyn. Quality publication, and it's nice to see them pulling down great interviews like this one. Someone should add it to our roll...)

He may as well be talking about weblogs

Despicable socialist fantasies, or dedications to the memory of "political surrealism" in literary rag, n+1 (perhaps even those without subscriptions could, you know, opine about it).  Anyway it reminded me of this.   And there's some Hegel in the monster's tail.   Mark Greif:

One of the lessons of starting a magazine today is that if you pay any attention to politics you will collect a class of detractors, who demand immediately to know What and Wherefore and Whether and How...Is it possible you have not endorsed a candidate, or adopted a party?   Within the party, a position?   If not a position, an issue?   The notion that politics could be served by thinking about problems and principles, rather than rehearsing strategy, leaves them not so much bemused as furious.

Spinoza's Cubism

Eadweard Muybridge, Nude Descending Stairs

I say expressly that the mind does not have an adequate knowledge, of itself, its own body, and external bodies whenever it perceives things from the common order of nature, that is, whenever it is determined externally - namely by the fortuitous run of circumstance - to regard this or that, and not when it is determined internally, through its regarding several things at the same time, to understand their agreement, differences, and their opposition. For whenever it is conditioned internally in this or another way, then it sees things clearly and distinctly, as I shall later show. (Ethica II, scholium to prop. 29)

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Dali-wood

This is part 2 of a series of posts inspired by my recent family vacation to Florida. One of the hidden gems of the Sunshine State is the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersberg.  The history of the Museum's location deserves its own discussion, but suffice it to say that it was the brainchild of the local business community to establish a tourist attraction unlike any other in Florida.  Before my visit I had always thought of Dali as the silly surrealist who loved publicity and making lots of money.  In  fact, Andre Breton had coined the nickname Avida Dollars (greedy for dollars) to emphasize his passion for fame and fortune.  But having seen his work in person, I have a new found respect for not only the imagery but the masterful precision of his technique.  He was truly a great talent, even if he spent a good part of his life waisting it. 

What I also found fascinating was the reactionary nature of his politics and his ultimate expulsion from Breton's inner circle.  The Enigma of William Tell (pictured above) could be described as

Pleasure Steamers

I was reminded today of the English artist Stanley Spencer. I doubt he's well known outside of the UK: he was in some ways a very provincial figure. He lived almost his whole life in the small village in which he was born, Cookham-on-Thames, just to the West of London. And very many of his most famous paintings are of Cookham and its inhabitants, as he translates religious edict and prophecy into the vernacular of rural England.

How No Can You Go?

(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium.  It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring.  Update:  Part II is now here.)

Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999

What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti.  I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy.  So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write.  The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion).  This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest.  Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found.  Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here).  Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word.  I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment.  Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that.  However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.

I. Double-Headed Histories

"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson

"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere

With nearly forty years separating us from the first publication of Tronti’s essay “The Strategy of The Refusal”, a document showing that the struggle against work was actually essential to the development of capital, what to make of it now, in light so many radical, and at times even invisible or largely unnoticed mutations in the constitution of contemporary capitalism?  Perhaps some possible answers can be recognized in Tronti’s formulation that ‘against the old forms of struggle and resistance’ should be installed new forms of political organization and refusal.  It seems apparent then, that to think refusal today should invest in the same formulation – this time polemically positioned against Tronti.  Why?  Because from within the paradigm of “The Strategy of Refusal” is a rigorous division of class – and one that seems to run the risk of merely satisfying a dialectic and binary representational machinism; the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘party’ seem to end up installing themselves within the very representations that the workers would have intended to overthrow, a move which became thwarted by their own becoming-major.  So perhaps some solutions to envisioning contemporary forms of refusal might begin along the lines suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: to think minority instead of class.  To say this does not mean denying that there are classes, or that there is a ruling class; only that refusal, resistance – what composes and calls for them - are not reducible to the antagonisms of a class division.  As the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti once said, “language is the motherload of all culture”, and it is without doubt impossible to follow the consequences of Tronti’s initial formulations without encountering and taking into much consideration all the nominations which have entered and continue to circulate through the “post-Fordist” lexicon as a result of the ‘failures’ of the Italian operaismo: social subjectivity, social chain, multitude, social factory, the general intellect, generic will, compositionism, immaterial or cognitive labour…

In coincidence with the workers movement as a particular history of struggles and theoretical works lay another long history of artistic practices and revolutions that could be said to have aimed at constructing solidarities with such resistances and refusals.  If the artists and workers caught up in these histories shared a common enemy it was certainly ‘capital’ – though such an enemy will always express itself in different forms relative to a given situation or milieu.  In Italy it was the factory; with artists, the museum, institution, or gallery.  In both instances there was a resistance toward the system’s control that manifested itself in the engaged and active search for an outside set against received modes of subjectivity and the “conjugations of the axiomatic” (D & G); a search that concerned itself with the invention of new forms of life and work aimed at the embetterment of society as a whole.  This other history, with loose ties to the attitudes of such localized movements as the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists (or for that matter more diffuse movements such as Dada), initiated new inquiries into modes of aesthetic production conceived through a kind of ‘anti-aesthetic’ which intersected with the ambitions of the Italian workers and autonomia during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Such coincidence figures into the attempts made by artists during this period to resist both the sedentary space of an elitist institution and the commodity form of the artwork in what came to known as Conceptual Art.