Notes on modernism

Literary Modernism and Photography: (2002) – Paul Hansom
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

See also Sara Danius book on how modernism was influenced by new media in general.

Review
“Although literary modernism is famously associated with probing interiority while photography is two dimensional , the two moved into prominence concurrently, intersecting in ways that these essays explore. The volume considers documentary uses of the image; the relation between photographers’ aesthetics and their deployment of images; photography as a literary trope; and the transition into postmodernism.”–American Literature

Book Description
The developments in narrative experimentation that marked the modernist period in Europe and the United States provide an interesting crossroads with the development of visual representation during the same time. In this collection of fourteen original essays, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the ways in which the photograph became a vital emblem of the transformative processes of modernism, offering a new aesthetic and psychological model for the new zeitgeist. The interdisciplinary methodology of Literary Modernism and Photography melds literary, cultural, and photographic theories to offer a challenging literary framework for this period. The essays address the problems surrounding the photograph’s ostensible “factuality”-its presumed ability to represent the real world-and suggest the difficulties inherent in aestheticizing the real into fictive forms, while also examining how the photograph shaped and reflected the new, modern artistic self-consciousness of figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Vanessa Bell, and Willa Cather. If literary modernism heralded a re-visioning of the world, then the photograph was the concrete rendering of this new vision.

A positive review of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses

WHEN IT IS published in the United States, John Carey’s polemic The Intellectuals and the Masses will probably startle reviewers. It certainly caused a flap when the British edition came out in the summer of 1992. Though an Oxford professor, Carey is a blunt literary populist: he argues that the fundamental motive behind the modernist movement in literature was a corrosive fear and loathing of the masses. Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, T S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Graham Greene all strove to preserve a sense of class superiority by reviling the mean suburban man. They convinced themselves that the typical clerk was subhuman, bestial, machinelike, dead inside, a consumer of rubbishy newspapers and canned food. The intellectuals had to create this caricature to maintain social distinctions in an increasingly democratic and educated society. Many of these writers ultimately disposed of the masses through fantasies of wholesale extermination, usually rationalized on eugenic grounds. –Jonathan Rose quoted in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), this copy sourced http://www.autodidactproject.org

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

An article on postcards in relation to modernism:

The very definition of Modernism has always been contentious. Did it begin with the advent of photography, which liberated the visual arts from the obligations of realism, or was its starting point the experiments in the application of color by such Post-Impressionist painters as Cézanne, van Gogh and Gaugin? Did Claude Debussy’s gradual abandonment of tonality, the cornerstone of Western musical composition since J.S. Bach, lead inevitably to Arnold Schoenberg’s polytonality and the sound experiments of Webern, Stockhausen and Cage? Do the honors of introducing non-representational theatre belong to Pirandello, to the German Expressionists or to the Italian Futurists? And where do Kafka, Musil, Svevo and Joyce fit in? –Anthony Guneratne via http://www.co.broward.fl.us/library/bienes/postcard/modernism.htm [Nov 2006]

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

Appreciative criticism

I completely agree with Steven Shaviro and the Reading Experience to”only write about books [and films etc…] I like, letting the ones I don’t be passed over in silence.”

One of the earliest people to defend this was André Bazin:

André Bazin is known as a proponent of appreciative criticism, wherein only critics who like a film can write a review of it, thus encouraging constructive criticism.

Jean Duvignaud on the nouveau roman

I had speculated before on the filmic qualities of the nouveau roman and see it confirmed here:

Thus, contemporary literature is moving towards a representation of man based on the event, where the action described is more important than any commentary, and the instantaneous revelation of reality is more important than its description. Such an attempt must end with turning the novel into a screenplay for a film which will never be made and the cinema into an unfolding of an event which never actually occurs. —The Sociology of Art, 1967

See also: sociology – art – visual arts

Edgar Morin on film

The Stars (1957) – Edgar Morin
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Who can tell me who the lovely lady on the cover is? Barabara Steele?

I discovered this book via the excellent Midnight Movies (1983) by Jeffrey Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum

Book Description
Worshipped as heroes, treated as gods, movie stars are more than objects of admiration. A star’s influence touches on every aspect of ordinary life, dictating taste in fashion, lifestyle, and desire. Edgar Morin’s remarkable investigation into the cultural and social significance of the star system traces its evolution from the earliest days of the cinema – when stars like Chaplin, Garbo, and Valentino lived at a distance from their fans, far beyond all mortals, to the postwar era in which stars like Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe became familiar and familial, less unapproachable but more moving, and concludes with an analysis of the furious religious adulation surrounding the life and death of James Dean. Ultimately, Morin finds, stars are more than just creations of the movie studios; they serve as intermediaries between the real and the imaginary. Today, with the cult of fame more pervasive and influential than ever, The Stars remains a vibrant, vital, and surprising work.

About the Author
Edgar Morin is director of studies emeritus at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and president of the Association pour la Pensee Complexe. He is the author of over thirty books and numerous articles on topics ranging from scientific method and anthropology to politics and popular culture.

Richard Howard, poet and critic, teaches at the School of Arts at Columbia University. He has translated many books of French criticism, including works by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Tzvetan Todorov. His most recent translations include Absinthe: A Novel and The Charterhouse of Parma.

Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist who was born in Paris on July 8, 1921 under his original name Edgar Nahoum. He is of Judeo-Spanish origin (Sefardi). He is known for the transdisciplinarity of his works, in that he covers a wide range of interests and dismisses the conventional boundaries between academic disciplines. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Morin [Nov 2006]

See also: 1957 – cult of personality – cult movie stars – movie stars – film – sociology

The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man (1956) – Edgar Morin
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Book Description
When The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man first appeared in 1956, the movies and the moviegoing experience were generally not regarded as worthy of serious scholarly consideration. Yet, French critic and social theorist Edgar Morin perceived in the cinema a complex phenomenon capable of illuminating fundamental truths about thought, imagination, and human nature – which allowed him to connect the mythic universe of gods and spirits present within the most primitive societies to the hyperreality emanating from the images projected on the screen. Now making its English-language debut, this audacious, provocative work draws on insights from poets, filmmakers, anthropologists, and philosophers to restore to the cinema the sense of magic first enjoyed at the dawn of the medium. Morin’s inquiry follows two veins of investigation. The first focuses on the cinematic image as the nexus between the real and the imaginary; the second examines the cinema’s re-creation of the archaic universe of doubles and ghosts and its power to possess, to bewitch, to nourish dreams, desires, and aspirations. “We experience the cinema in a state of double consciousness,” Morin writes, “an astonishing phenomenon where the illusion of reality is inseparable from the awareness that it is really an illusion.”

See also: 1956 – illusion – imagination – fantasy – film – sociology

Borat (2006)

Just saw Borat with my daughters (the youngest of which is 7 (quite surprisingly Belgium is the only country in Europe which rated the film ‘suitable for all ages’)). My girls loved it and so did I. Satire at its best, the joke is on the U.S.. Borat goes after Pamela Anderson but finds his true love. Hilarious. Every time Borat thinks of Pamela we get hear “Ederlezi” (and a live version here) of Time of the Gypsies, one of my fave tracks.

In search of a precedent for the Borat character we arrive at Paul Kaye’s Dennis Pennis, of whomI was a huge fan in the mid nineties. I remember one of Pennis’s line in an interview with Pierce Brosnan. “When I went to see GoldenEye, I was glued to my seat…….otherwise I would have left.”

Some Dennis at Youtube.

Some books on Bataille

Some books translated into English by Bataille. This post inspired by a 2003 post by Spurious on Bataille’s (who hid Walter Benjamin’s manuscript of Paris Arcades in the Parisian Bibliothèque Nationale when Benjamin fled from the Germans to Spain) time during WWII:

The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille (1999) – Georges Bataille, Mark Spitzer [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The Wall
A hatchet
give me a hatchet
so I can frighten myself
with my shadow on the wall
ennui
feeling of emptiness
fatigue.

Inner Experience (1988) – Georges Bataille, Leslie A. Boldt [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The book, “Inner Experience”, was compiled post-humously from notes Bataille kept with the intention of putting into book form. Nonetheless, “Inner Experience” is very comprehensive and essential to understanding Bataille’s philosophies of base materialism, expenditure, the sacred and the need to transgress the limits of experience.

Chronology of Inner Experience via Spurious:

1941: Begins ‘Le Supplice’, the great central section of Inner Experience.
1942: Bataille completes Inner Experience during the summer. It is published by Raymond Queneau.
1943: Inner Experience is published. Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness are published in the same year.
1943: ‘Nom de Dieu’, a text written by the Surrealists, argues Inner Experience evidences a simple minded idealism.
1943: Blanchot reviews Inner Experience in Journal des débats in May.
1943: Sartre publishes a long, unfavourable review of Inner Experience in Cahiers du Sud. Bataille’s reply is found what will be published in 1945 as On Nietzsche.
1944: Marcel [Moré] reviews Inner Experience more or less favourably. But he accuses Bataille of complacency and self-satisfaction. —Spurious

The Unfinished System Of Nonknowledge (2004) – Georges Bataille, Stuart and Michelle Kendall [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Following Bataille’s lead, as laid out in his notebooks, editor Stuart Kendall assembles the fragments that Bataille anticipated collecting for his summa. Kendall’s introduction offers a clear picture of the author’s overall project, its historical and biographical context, and the place of these works within it. The “system” that emerges from these articles, notes, and lectures is “atheology,” understood as a study of the effects of nonknowledge. –from the publisher

The Impossible (1991) – Georges Bataille [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

When I discovered Bataille in the early 2000s, I remember reading a quote which goes something to the effect of: “sex starts where words end” which illustrates the transgressiveness of sexuality and the inadequateness of language to describe experience. Can somebody pinpoint this quote? [Nov 2006]

L’abécédaire de Deleuze

L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze laced with the back matter of Jahsonic.com:

A as in Animal, B as in ‘Boire’ <Drink>, C as in Culture, D as in Desire, E as in ‘Enfance’ <Childhood>, F as in Fidelity, G as in ‘Gauche’ <Left>, H as in History of Philosophy, I as in Idea, J as in Joy, K as in Kant, L as in Literature, M as in ‘Maladie’ <Illness>, (N as in Neurology, O as in Opera, P as in Professor, Q as in Question, R as in Resistance, S as in Style, T as in Tennis, U as in ‘Un’/One, V as in ‘Voyage’/Trip, W as in Wittgenstein, X,Y as unknown, Z as in Zigzag. —http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~wrankin/deleuzeABC.html

And from the abécédaire itself, some comments by Deleuze on literature, especially his love for Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Restif de la Bretonne:

Parnet refers to Deleuze’s love for secondary literary authors, like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Restif de la Bretonne, asking if he has always cultivated this affection. Here, Deleuze covers his face with one hand as he responds that he finds it truly bizarre to hear Villiers referred to as a secondary author [Deleuze laughs]. If you consider that question… [he pauses, shrugging his shoulders] He says that there is something really shameful, entirely shameful… He recalls that when he was quite young, he liked the idea of reading an author’s work in his entirety, the complete works. As a result, he had great affection not for secondary authors, although his affection sometimes coincided with them, but for authors who had written little. Some works were too enormous, overwhelming for him, like Hugo‘s, such that Deleuze was ready to say the Hugo wasn’t a very good writer. On the other hand, Deleuze knew the works of Paul-Louis Courrier nearly by heart, quite deeply. So Deleuze admits to having this penchant for so-called secondary authors, although Villiers is not a secondary author. Joubert was also an author he knew deeply, and one reason why he knew these authors was for a rather shameful reason, he admits: it had for him a certain prestige to be familiar with authors that were hardly known… But that was a kind of mania, Deleuze concludes, and it took him quite a while to learn just how great Hugo is, and that the size of work was no measure.

And some more comments on Leskov:

Deleuze continues in this vein, agreeing that in so-called secondary literatures… He insists that in Russian literature, for example, it’s not limited to Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, but one cannot call [Nikolai] Leskov secondary as there is so much that is astonishing in Leskov. So these are great geniuses. Deleuze then says that he feels he has little to say on this point, on secondary authors, but what he is happy about is to have tried to find in any unknown author something that might show him a concept or an extraordinary character. But yes, Deleuze says, he has not engaged in any systematic research [in this domain].

But in fact, this whole section on literature is very interesting, we find Deleuze commenting that “ he knows that every great philosopher is a great writer”. This is something I have first heard by W. F. Hermans.

Notes on my blogroll entries

Below are answers to the question: why I read the blogs I read:

dadanoias
- Since about six months I’ve been reading Dadanoias, a young woman from Barcelona whose interests are sex and music. She has very good tastes in both, but her forte is the first.
Giornale Nuovo
- Been following the work of Misteraitch for about two years now. Misteraitch buys antique art books and then scans plates of them for us to share. Unique content, excellent tastes. Misteraitch is British but resides in Finland. Works in IT (I think).
Girish
- I discovered Girish only two months ago via the Reading Experience literary blog . He is at the center of a group cinema critics who rival the best of offline critics. His blog is immensely popular. Outside of film, he is into music, especially eighties dance but also reggae.
gmtPlus9 (-15)
- One of the earliest blogs I started to follow, maybe four years ago. The author lives in Taiwan. His main interests are the visual arts and old weird americana (bluegrass, rockabilly, etcetera…).
greencine
- Cinema blog, incredibly prolific, I suspect that David Hudson research and posts all day. Greencine is an American video-on-demand service provider. Very knowledgable, and not only about film.
groovy age of horror
- Been reading Curt since two years now. He feeds my interest in ‘low culture’: paperbacks, fumetti, movies and comics of the 1970s horror boom.
K Punk
- A perennial favourite since about 1 year. The author Mark Fisher has a degree in philosophy and literature and resides in the UK. He keeps me abreast of the intellectual core of the blogosphere and all things Otherian, Zizekian, Lacanian and postmodern. What fascinates me in his work is that I don’t understand half of it. Someday I will.
notes from somewhere bizarre
- At the center of the fashionable blogosphere, with an emphasis on eroticism and technology.
PCL linkdump
- Got acquainted with this European outfit through Groovy Age of Horror. Emphasis: fun pop culture. An interesting sideproject is Mr Dante Fontana’s visual guidance who posts the best of Youtube music videos so you don’t have to find them yourself.
phinnweb
- I’ve known Phinn since practically my first steps on the internet around 1996. We share an interest in just about everything. His specialities are electronic music and Finland, where he was born. Last year he ran a very personal blog, recently he just posts about ‘cultural things’, much like I do.
Radio Nova
- Not a blog but the best radio station in the world, met them twice: first when stuck with my brother on the Paris ring, then when Matthieu sent the entire corpus of nova CDs to me in 2002.
rare erotica
- From the people who run disinfo. Erotica is the interest we share.
sauer-thompson
- I have known this Australian duo since the early 2000s. Philosophy is their thing.
spurious
- I found this anonymous writer through the Reading Experience. He is a specialist on French literature (Blanchot, Bataille, …) and writes beautiful prose poetry.
The Pinocchio Theory
- I became familiar with the work (e. g. Doom Patrols) of Steven Shaviro somewhere in the late nineties. He is a specialist on postmodernism based in the United States or Canada and at the center of the – mainly continental philosophy – blogosphere. Friends with K-Punk, writes about music and film and literature too.
The Reading Experience
- I found this blog somewhere in May of this year when I was researching the concept of realism in literature. He keeps me abreast of the online literary criticism world. His blog introduced me to a whole list of other blogs. Much like Girish he is at the center of the literatisphere.
woebot
- I’ve known Woebot’s work since May 2004. He buys a lot of records, some really obscure ones too. Works in the graphic sector. Resides in the UK. At the center of the musiblogosphere. Check his Top 100.

That’s all. Thank you.

Mediazation, experience and aura

Prompted by this post by The Reading Experience blog on John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) I started thinking about the concept of mediazation, a word to which one only finds 344 references on the web. A much more common word that denotes the same quality is mediated, of which there are 77 references on Jahsonic alone, most prominent of which are the references to mediated sex and mediated violence. Mediatedness and mediazation are key concepts in modernism and postmodernism. One might even argue that if modernity started after the Middle Ages and the arrival of print culture for the happy few, postmodernity started with the advent of the mediazation of mass society, with the replacement of aura and direct experience by the media (which coincides with the arrival of print culture for the masses). If one follows this through it would appear that the shift from modernity to postmodernity is only one of degree.

From the web:

For Shaviro, Cronenberg is not simply an illustration of postmodern media theory. Rather, “the brutally hilarious strategy of Videodrome is to take media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard completely at their word, to overliteralize their claims for the ubiquitous mediazation of the world.” Footnote But the difference between Cronenberg and (for example) Baudrillard is Cronenberg’s insistence on the palpability of mediated experience: –William Beard via http://iceberg.arts.ualberta.ca/filmstudies/Videodrome.htm [Nov 2006]

Experience, quipped Oscar Wilde, is the name one gives to one’s mistakes. Does aesthetic experience then name the central blunder of modern aesthetics? Though long considered the most essential of aesthetic concepts, as including but also surpassing the realm of art, aesthetic experience has in the last half-century come under increasing critique. Not only its value but its very existence has been questioned. How has this once vital concept lost its appeal? Does it still offer anything of value? The ambiguous title, “the end of aesthetic experience,” suggests my two goals: a reasoned account of its demise, and an argument for reconceiving and thus redeeming its purpose.

[…] Modernization and technology, Benjamin likewise argued, have eroded aesthetic experience’s identification with the distinctive, transcendent autonomy of art. Such experience once had what Benjamin called aura, a cultic quality resulting from the artwork’s uniqueness and distance from the ordinary world. But with the advent of mechanical modes of reproduction like photography, art’s distinctive aura has been lost, and aesthetic experience comes to pervade the everyday world of popular culture and even politics. Aesthetic experience can no longer be used to define and delimit the realm of high art. Unlike Adorno, Benjamin saw this loss of aura and differentiation as potentially emancipatory (although he condemned its deadly results in the aesthetics of fascist politics). In any case, Benjamin’s critique does not deny the continuing importance of aesthetic experience, only its romantic conceptualization as pure immediacy of meaning and isolation from the rest of life. –Richard Shusterman via http://www.artsandletters.fau.edu/humanitieschair/end-aesth-exp.html [Nov 2006]

Scott Walker

The Drift (2006) – Scott Walker
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

[i]f you are a fan of Diamanda Galas (who is about the only person who can compare in terms of anguish and horror and pain [apart from maybe Arthur Russell]), Lydia Lunch, later Marc Almond, or dark, slow goth music full of tortured anguish, then you stand a good chance of liking this. –[euchrid] (UK) for Amazon.co.uk

There is a 10 minute Scott Walker documentary at Youtube. Phinn on Scott.

Scott Walker is the stage name of American born singer-songwriter Noel Scott Engel. Born in January 1943 in Hamilton, Ohio, he was named after his father. Walker has long resided in England.

Walker’s own original songs of this period (emerging solo work) are a late, last flowering of a dark Romanticism tinged with Surrealism and Existential angst. They are influenced by Jacques Brel and in some inchoate way, the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and early twentieth century European thought, poetry, art and music (despite the fact that by then Existentialism was waning as a philosophical and literary fashion). Walker explored European musical roots while paradoxically expressing his own American experience and alienation. He was also inching to a new maturity as a recording artist. This would bear incredible fruit with his marvellous country recordings in the early seventies.–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Walker_%28singer%29

Digression: “Starsailor” by Tim Buckley on Youtube. My fave Tim Buckley song (and the only one I own) is “Sweet Surrender” (taken from the album Greetings From L.A. (1972)). I have it on the best compilation of the 2000s: Underground Moderne.