Race Confrontation. Suffolk, VA.
There is a schizophrenia.
In that we oscillate between a subjective and objective gaze— ostensibly neutral, distant onlooking; then a certain oblivion-space between the two; then submersion as fractional individuals into immediate totality, into immediate identity. Academy, not only economic refuge for the counter-revolution’s children, but an emotional refuge. To empty out daily life to approach the scale of abstraction (society, history, ad nauseam)— yes— but also the scale of emotion. That daily life is immiserated— emptied of such passion. French (and always the French) bourgeois disillusionment after 1848 makes itself heard in Flaubert: ‘Passion in the form it is allowed to take these days, that is to say the inactive kind’. The scale, the scale of my apartment, our bed, our kitchen wares so animated by our past labors, congealed, into death— used, drained, and dead again. Into muted life. Into concrete rights. Demands we make on each other. Justice disgusting.
Between an immediate and a societal scale.
The immediate reality: visible, discernable, describable. Unsignified or signified with an apparent object.
And the scale of society, of history, the abstraction, the spatially and temporally distant, flows, boundaries, patterns or without pattern. The latent forces. Potentialities.
One cannot live solely in either. 'Meaning', the purview of art objects, is an attempt to penetrate the immediate reality with the scale of society. This, as we have heard, cannot rely solely on mimesis. It is the individual submerged into a totality. One’s project is to bring the scale of society to the immediate scale of life. Meaning making, art objects, documentation are so many fractions, (dirty, distorted) residue of another world.
Residue without a strategy of negation is witnessing, witnessing relies on a juridical mechanism, a force. Organized residue, organized witnessing (a la ‘Cop Watch’) then is a testament to our powerlessness vis a vis the immediate scale. The scale where the state appears as the police. The scale where the economy appears as personal debt, filial duty, the lovely date or sneakers we afford ourselves. The scale where the social appears as the friend who is less beautiful, less reliable, less shelter than the small home I’ve rented.
I enjoyed your insight on scales: the immediate (micro)and the societal (macro) and their problems of interfacing with one another. It would be interesting to develop both points more thoroughly:
ReplyDelete1. clarify and define more strictly the two categories of scale (think of Lefebvre and de Certeau for example; I would avoid using the term "real" unless you're acquainted and well comfortable with Lacanian theory).
2. explore more thoroughly the kind of relationship running between the immediate and the societal. Do they intersect or simulate one another? Is it imitation or violence that attracts them only to repulse them again?
I'm less excited with this idea of lost "wholeness" insinuated by your text. The Platonic prerogative of totality serves as nothing but to trick us into forgetting what it is we are talking about. For the point is not whether we are oscillating between ends overhanging above an abyss that dissolves all meaning. The argument is that despite our lack, or perhaps because of it, we are trying to re-imagine a world where the race confrontation would not take place and we would not be the witnesses but the makers of our history (a la Kornelious Kastoriades).
Still I think your last paragraph is the most powerful and more dense with argument. Speaking of powerlessness could one play with words and still say what she means, i.e. that we have been circumcised in order that we may be circumscribed? Our "definition" on space and of personhood required that we enter the society with a contract of lack.
This is what justifies the existence of the state. It makes up for what we no longer have, what it seems we have lost or gave up. Imaginary or not, it needs not to be disempowering and mere witnessing (a "residue without a strategy of negation"). No, instead it could turn into a universal acknowledgement of sharing this strange, schizophrenic feature thanx to which we are always, taken-over by the element of absence. It seems to me that we are more united by what we do not have in common, rather than what we have.