Long Sunday

further animalia, this time without pictures

More utterly hilarious Cliché War fallout from "The March of the Penguins" here.  Penguins, yes, those deceptively difficult to caricature creatures in a savage land whose greatest feat is having mastered the cocktail party effect.  I've since updated my previous post, in case you only skimmed the horrendous bloglines version (many thanks to S. for pointing out that penguins don't actually "prune" themselves, as in spontaneously lop off their own limbs, so much as "preen," etc.)  What follows are a few more thoughts on 'the animal', patched together from a further reading of John Berger and then turning toward Agamben.  Apologies in advance for their somewhat scattered, well bloggish quality.  Any comments or criticisms more than welcome.

Penguins: Hopping Across the Frozen Bathos

“For we shall have to ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene.”

–Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I am (More to Follow)”

You can imagine the shock the world felt–if kept silent–when for once the Americans took something that was French and made it better.  Thankfully though, there are still some people trying desperately to fuck it up:

Spectacles for the Gods

Heidegger’s essay on the Age of the World Picture remarks on the distinction between a time when man was a spectacle for the gods, the object of a perception which was itself beyond conception, and a modernity wherein man is fundamentally the perceiver of a world that offers itself to him as or is posited as a picture. Benjamin, in his Artwork essay, also alludes to man’s former status as an object or show for the gods. Fascism, he famously remarks turns humanity into a spectacle for itself. At the same time, the gigantism of this spectacle – the rallies, the giant screens, the massive advertisements careering towards the random city dweller from the sides of buildings, magnifies man to God-like proportions. The modern citizen is miniaturised before the Olympian powers of industrial society but also watches them, agog, and lives vicariously though them.

The older sense, of an inhuman presence watching humanity means that there is a dimension of existence which is incalculable, unknown, beyond your ownership or objectification. The subjective stance corresponding to this doctrine is, therefore, a kind of humility and receptivity to an Otherness which has preceded us both temporally and ontologically and which we can, so to speak, never get round the back of. If we are all, equally, objects for an inconceivable Other, we are less likely to become objects to onanother, so it goes. According to some, the place of non-human Other is supposed to be a kind of guarantee of humaneness.

Footnote: Rendering

Painting. Debt. The Commodity.

Qui me rendrà mes chaussures?

Pourquoi dire toujours de la peinture qu'elle rend? Qu'elle restitue? [Why do we always say of painting that it renders? That it restores/repays?] - Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture

A Removeable Feast

R.Mutt: Looking for the meanings in Belshazzar's feast, it may be helpful to remember that it's a story about interpretation; and I think that Daniel's explanation of the writing already points to all the paradoxes of Rembrandt's painting. Daniel says "you have praised the gods of silver, and gold, or bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see, nor hear, nor know. And you have not glorified the God in whose hand is your breath and all your ways."

Fair enough, but how does the God in whose hand our breath is manifest himself? He is present first in the "golden and silver vessels" taken from the temple. After that he expresses himself in money: a mina, a mina, a shekel, and half minas. A price tag - not so different from the gods of silver and gold. That contradiction seems be at to work on every level. While the story is a play on the "embarrassment of riches", at the same time as an oil painting it is what John Berger calls "a celebration of private property". And Rembrandt goes even further by turning the feast into a painting that, like you said, attempts to make its value, the magic of gold, concrete...

Alphonse van Worden: Do you think this could be the divine here straining to expand to accommodate itself to the greater abstraction of the prime relation of the social order, property? It - god, property, the divine principle - can't be stuck in this specific statue or estate, although it has a kind of preference for these sensual things, a gravitation toward them. But it has to be mobile as light, and yet tangible, detectable and incontestable all the same.

The contradiction here is provoking the radical style, this new art in this newly important medium. And so the relation of content to surface works out a complex relation to 'the ineluctable modality of the visual' which Calvinism and related protestant Christianities also put into action. Samson's blindness is the route to the divine; and the visual obsession of the (catholic) Paul - where the divine is seen directly, without metaphor, in its true form, and the eyes are the perfectly adequate organs of revelation - is critiqued as both inescapably fetishist and sort of artistically (as it is commercially) stagnant. More scuro, less chiaro! The relation of service between light and shadow is reversed from the great commercial Italian culture to the greater commercial and at least quasi-capitalist Dutch empire.

Property's presence - the idea of wealth as well as its form - strains to retreat from the golden goblet, the gorgeous object of art/craft, and becomes instead a vaporized and gaseous version, a golden glow in the atmosphere. And the value which adheres in this golden-ness only grows more powerful and intense when the edges of the objects it inhabits are in the shadows, mutable, permeable, and the spirit of property (or the divine) which was trapped or locked into figures is revealed as not reducible to them; not latched to these unique material condition nor limited by the dimensions of objects. This is commercial wealth in the very act of transforming into capital proper.

Law and Disorder/Looking Backward

Oh, radio...Following on from here, and for all you libertarians out there, a fascinating discussion of surveillance cameras from WBAI.  (Who are the real paranoiacs, those thinking and talking about the implications of public surveillance, or those putting the cameras there in the first place?)  It's an hour long mp3, but worth it.

Update:  If you'll permit me a lengthy side note, I thought I'd share some excerpts from an essay John Berger wrote in response to Susan Sontag's book On Photography.  It seems rather pertinent.

Update II:  See also this issue of Surveillance and Society (courtesy of wood s lot).