On Writing Clearly: Philosophy and Accessibility [Section in Progress]

Judith Butler / Martha Nussbaum
bell hooks

On Radical "Being-Together", Precarization, and Schismogenesis: Reframing the Practice and Theory of Contemporary Art as a Counterhegemonic Project

We have no model, no matrices for this tracing or for this writing. We even think that the novel or the unheard of can no longer come about. But perhaps it is precisely when all signs are missing that the unheard of becomes again not only possible but, in a sense, certain. Here is the historicity of our history and the oncoming of the suspended meaning of the old word ‘communism’.¹

Being-in-Common

      We have now arrived at what seems an impasse. To develop a practice and theory of contemporary art that is truly counterhegemonic requires thinking within and without modern epistemology -- an impossible task. 

      In light of this impossibility, we will examine some potential routes as they have been recently been articulated in political philosophy: Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of being-in common, Judith Butler's notion of precariousness and precarity,  and Franco "Bifo" Berardi's notion of schismogenesis. However, to understand what we are up against, we should first begin with a discussion of the structure and techniques of hegemonic politics. A discourse which effectively negotiates equivalence and difference to establish definite meanings which sustain both hegemonic discourse and the subjects it interpellates. Gibson and Graham use the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe, who believe that this can be understood in terms of condensation and displacement:

‘Condensation’ is a kind of conflation that fuses a variety of significations and meanings into a single unity, thereby concentrating meaning by eliminating difference. ‘Displacement’ extends and transfers the signification of meaning of one particular moment to another moment, producing contiguity and equivalence between what had been quite different meanings. 

This understanding allows us to recognize how a particular discourse of political economy has become hegemonic (naturalized, real) and how alternate understandings are treated by hegemonic discourse. This is a politics that fixes meaning and closes the potentially infinite processes of signification within language. The illusory positivity of ‘capitalist society’ is only reinforced by the disappearance of capitalism’s ‘other’ - communism. This ‘specter’ must be treated carefully, for although it is a topic that many would claim has no purchase in this ‘post-communist’ era, Gibson and Graham demonstrate how Jean-Luc Nancy argues the contrary:

...the fascination with communism as an idea, as phantasm, as project or as institution has shaped (and continues to shape) history in our time. Far from simply being a word voided of all substance by Sovietism, communism is also the index of a task of thought still and increasingly open. It is a task of thought that returns us to the common basis or ground of the ‘individual’, encapsulating the quintessentially ethical concern at the heart of ‘society’ --the question of how to live together.

Thus, ‘communism’, beyond its traditional political signification, represents a desire on the part of humanity which demands reexamination. In this sense, the idea of being-together needs to not only be thought of in terms of political action, but also as a philosophical problem:

In The Inoperative Community, Nancy is eager to avoid the sense of community that is built on already constituted subjects who are brought together in a constructed oneness. He argues that the ‘failure of communal models is [...] linked to their embrace of human immanence, that is, of totality, self-consciousness, self-presence’. He wants to revive a notion of community as ‘neither a community of subjects, nor a promise of immanence, nor a communion of individuals in some higher or greater totality (a State, a Nation, a People). For Nancy, there is no common substance, no identity, ‘no common being, but there is being in common’. The association of community with a being that is already known precludes the becoming of new and as-yet unthought ways of being.

Precarization as Political-Cultural Queering

      In Isabell Lorey’s essay Becoming Common: Precarization as Political Constituting, she builds upon Judith Butler’s conception of ontological precariousness and political precarity, to reframe this social insecurity as potential productivity. For Butler, precariousness is understood as the vulnerability of the body, the radical replaceability of every life, and thus becomes that which distinguishes life in general. This vulnerability is an extension of birth insofar as initial survival already depends on social networks and labor (such as a dependence on other people, institutions, sustainable environments, etc). Lorey says, “An ‘ontology of individualism’ is not capable of recognizing the precariousness of life.” The conditions that enable life are the very same that make it precarious, and thus it becomes important to locate those political and social instances where some lives are protected and others are not. This sets up the conditions for Butler’s notion of precarity, a condition of existence defined by social and material insecurity affecting material and psychological welfare. This may be understood in terms of the large portions of the population becoming increasingly affected by underemployment, low income, and blackmailability. For Butler, although this extends to a global scale, precarity should not be understood as determinate. Lorey quotes Butler saying that precarity:

...is at once a material and a perceptual issue, since those whose lives are not “regarded” as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death.

However for Lorey, it is also a potentially productive discourse, “as an instrument of governance and a condition of economic exploitation, and also as a productive, always incalculable, and potentially empowering subjectification.” Precarity opens a space in which multiple counterhegemonic discourses might find commonality, allowing identity politics to be put to one side and begin a process of common political empowerment. This ties back to Jean-luc Nancy’s concept of ‘being-in-common’, and perhaps it would be theoretically/politically advantageous to think of precarity and being-in-common as complementary. In this sense, productive precarity might be a first step towards opening a discursive space in which we might begin to understand a being-in-common. 

An Excerpt from Skizo-Mails

      In Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s book Skizo-Mails (a collection of essays which he wrote on Facebook, Google Mail, and Th-rough.eu from 2009 ), his last entry entitled ‘Check (mate?)’ articulates a sobering analysis of the current state of politics in Europe and the United States:

      In chess, you declare checkmate when, according to the rules, the king of one of the players can’t make another move. The game of chess is a finite game, in the sense that if we want to play this game, we must respect the rules. If we break the rules, we are no longer playing this game. Love, life, history, however, are not finite games, in the sense that there is no rule that would prevent us from breaking the rules. 

If we want to continue playing according to the rules of politics, we can be certain that we will have lost. Democracy does not exist any more, the political power of workers has been destroyed by precarization and the infinite range of the labor market, ignorance prevails over knowledge because education is buried by media disinformation while the complexity of the world extends to infinity, rendering the traditional instruments of government useless. And finally, the negative feedback that made an alleviation of the catastrophic effects of social upheaval possible has been substituted by a form of positive feedback as when a crazed thermostat increases the flame of a hot-water heater. When the right wins the elections, it will destroy the schools, and the destruction of the schools will enable the right to win the next elections. 

      The modern game of politics is finished. The automatons have won, humanity has lost: checkmate. We don’t know if this will lead to the final holocaust, provoked by a war of everybody against everybody, or by the powers of nature running wild, or of a prolonged phase of barbarism, in any case, we can no longer do anything about it. What we can do, however, is break the rules, leave the game, refusing to participate in political competition to build seceding communities which can perhaps proliferate, generating ways of existence and spreading technologies, if any space on the planet will escape the fate of Fukushima.

      Tragic is that form of imagination that recognizes in the human being the impossibility of opposing the superior power of the forces of nature, or of feeling, or of history. We must recognize the tragic character of the effects that financial dictatorship has produced on the planet if we want to begin to perform the only gesture that can perhaps reveal itself to be redeeming. The gesture of physically and symbolically abandoning the territory devastated by capital, to rebuild social solidarity beginning with seceding, proliferating, schismogenetic communities. Modern civilization is finished and a predatory dynamic that is only partially identifiable in groups and social persons (the virtual-financial class) is destroying its legacy. There is no way any more to stop this process, or the violence that it entails. Fighting, acting collectively can’t stop this process, but it’s not useless, because it serves to accumulate the schismogenetic energy somewhere (in places that aren’t necessarily geographical), which if the world remains inhabitable, will create the conditions for post-apocalyptic communism. 

Berardi’s words appear bleak, perhaps some would argue even nihilistic -- yet we can also say that recognizing this tragedy and failure on the part of contemporary leftist political movements becomes itself a form of liberatory politics. The recognition that we are already situated within the collapse of a civilization becomes a discursive starting point that might offer itself as a space for radical reimagining. 

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^{1. [Nancy, Jean-Luc. “La Comparution /The Compearance: From the Existence of ‘Communism’ to the Community of ‘Existence’.” Political Theory 20.3 1992. Web.]↩}

On the Death of Anthropology (and the Erasure of Man) [section in progress]

      This section will revisit the 'ethnographic turn' in the practice and theory of contemporary art, paying particular attention to experimental ethnography and other instances where artists attempt to reframe the institutional codings of art and artifacts. Here we will examine Trinh T. Minh-ha's film entitled Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen, the performance art of James Luna, the primitivist interrogations of Jimmie Durham, and the counter-memory rearticulations of Edgar Heap of Birds.
      Are parody, irony, and reflexivity effective deconstructive tools even if we understand them as simultaneously destabilizing and recentering the subject? Do not these strategies assume dominant definitions of the negative and/or deviant even as they moves to revalue them? In these instances, we must be wary of allowing rhetorical reversals of dominant definitions to stand for politics as such. We must confront not the human sciences themselves, but rather the problem that their very existence represents. This desire to unveil our own non-(un)consciousness.

...this is why the problem of the unconscious - its possibility, status, mode of existence, the means of knowing it and of bringing it to light - is not simply a problem within the human sciences which they can be thought of as encountering by chance in their steps; it is a problem that is ultimately coextensive with their very existence. A transcendental raising of level that is, on the other side, an unveiling of the non-conscious is constitutive of all the sciences of man. (Foucault, The Order of Things, 364).

"Since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity?” (Foucault, 386)

In 'The Savage Mind' (1962) Claude Lévi-Strauss predicts that man will be dissolved in the structural-linguistic refashioning of the human sciences. At the end of 'The Order of Things' Foucault reiterates this famous prediction with his bold image of man "erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." (Foster, The Return of the Real, 179)

...

Foster, Hal. "The Artist as Ethnographer." The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1971. Print.

Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print.

Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen. Dir. Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1982. Web.

Photography [section in progress]

Though an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing, it is still ideology (in the broadest sense) that determines what constitutes an event.¹

The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.²

      This section will consider a photography exhibition by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch entitled Black Power * Flower Power that will be coming to Earlham College in the fall of 2014. The exhibition will be read against the theories of Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, and Susan Sontag. What are the implications of juxtaposing these respectively overdetermined movements with one another? What are the politics of representation at play? What is the significance of this exhibition when read against the identity politics here at Earlham? In what ways does photography interpellate the viewer?

      In the preface to Black Power * Flower Power, Ruth-Marion Baruch begins:

It all started the day I met with Jack McGregor, director of the de Young Museum in San Francisco. 

       “You know,” I said to him, “the next thing I really want to photograph is the Black Panthers, to present the feeling of the people.” Then, I added in a discouraged tone, “But who would show it?”

       “We would!” Responded Mr. McGregor. 

       Or was that really the beginning? Perhaps it all came about because I am Jewish and have experienced prejudice myself. Forbidden housing, as a student at the University of Missouri, and evicted from several, only because I was Jewish, made me feel deeply about being treated unjustly. 

There are two significant moments in Baruch’s disclosure, the first being the motivation and desire to represent the Black Panthers, and the second being the idea that experiencing prejudice allows one to speak to (and grants one the right to represent) prejudice experienced by other subjectivities/communities/cultures. These two instances might very well be deeply interrelated, and in this sense we are reminded of Judith Butler’s essay Imitation and Gender Insubordination when she says, “What if anything, can lesbians be said to share? And who will decide this question, and in the name of whom?” (309). Thus, it is just as problematic for Baruch to consider her personal (‘Jewish’ or 'Female') experience of prejudice as translatable to that of the Black Panther’s experience of prejudice; as it is to suggest that the signifier Black Panther is a coherent identity unto itself, and can therefore be understood to share a common experience of prejudice 'within' itself. This becomes the basis for Baruch’s justification to shoot, while for her husband Pirkle Jones, the justification comes from ‘first-hand’ experience -- Baruch says, “My husband Pirkle came from a Southern family. His father witnessed lynchings and would come home and talk about them, and how they had, ‘cut the niggers thumbs off.’ Years later, Pirkle still cries when he speaks of it.” This becomes a much more emotionally powerful justification, but we should still question whether such an empathy should serve as the justifying basis for taking photographs. 

This is not to say that Baruch and Jones‘ whiteness/jewishness or cultural background disqualify them from shooting, but it nonetheless becomes important to recognize a certain reductionist privilege in their own stated justifications. 

At the end of the preface Baruch is careful to mention, "We do not claim to have photographed all aspects of the Black Panther Party, but we can tell you: this is what we saw, this is what we felt, and these are the people."

...

Butler, Judith. "Torture and the Ethics of Photography." Comp. Julian Stallabrass. Documentary. London : Whitechapel Gallery: MIT, 2013. Print.

Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Culture, media, and identities. London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Print.

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^{1. [Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Print.]↩}

^{2. [Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936.]↩}

Documentary [section in progress]

The Camera gives cheap, prompt and correct facts to the public. 
Nam June Paik, No Idea of the Holy (1957)  



    This section will examine Lucien Castain-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash's film In and Out of Africa against Faye Ginsberg, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Catherine Russell's theories on documentary film/video. How and why does this film succeed as an example of anti-colonial film?

...

Ginsberg, Faye. “Shooting Back: From Ethnographic Film to Indigenous Production/Ethnography of Media.” A Companion to Film Theory. Ed. Toby Miller. By Robert Stam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. "Documentary Is/Not a Name." Comp. Julian Stallabrass. Documentary. London : Whitechapel Gallery: MIT, 2013. Print.

Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print.

In and Out of Africa. Dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash. Perf. Gabai Baare. 1992. DVD.

The 'Ethnographic Turn' in the Practice and Theory of Contemporary Art

      In order to interrogate the relationship between the ‘artist’ and culture, we must first situate the theory and practice of contemporary art within a modern epistemology. For these purposes, Hal Foster’s essay entitled “The Artist as Ethnographer”¹ will serve us here as a foundational text, for the essay demonstrates a genealogy leading up to what Foster refers to as “ the ethnographic turn in contemporary art and theory.”
      Foster takes his title from Walter Benjamin’s The Artist as Producer (1934), an address made at the Institute for the Study of Facism in Paris. Referring to Plato’s desire to banish the poets from the ideal state, Benjamin returns to “the question of the poet’s right to exist.”2 Benjamin called upon the artist to intervene, like the revolutionary worker, in the means of artistic production -- to change the techniques of traditional media and transform the apparatus of bourgeois culture:

A correct ‘tendency’ was not enough; that was to assume a place ‘beside the proletariat.’ And ‘what kind of place is that?’ Benjamin asked in lines that still scathe. ‘That of a benefactor, of an ideological patron -- an impossible place.’

Benjamin’s injunction sets up the relation between artistic authority and cultural politics, a question later framed in the context of theory vs. activism. Foster believes that a new paradigm structurally similar to the old author as producer model has emerged in contemporary art on the left: the artist as ethnographer. Now, instead of understanding the oppositional relation as situated between the bourgeois-capitalist institution of art and the working class, it is the cultural and/or ethnic other in whose name the committed artist most often struggles, “This represents a subtle shift from a subject defined in terms of economic relation to one defined in terms of cultural identity.” In this new framing, the danger of ‘ideological patronage’ for the artist as ethnographer becomes an even greater and complex concern. 

      Foster discusses how Johannes Fabian, in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983) articulates anthropology as being founded on a “mythical mapping of time onto space based on two presumptions,” -- the first being that time is immanent/coextensive with the world, and second that sociocultural and natural relations can be understood as temporal relations. Thus, “...‘over there’ became ‘back then,’ and the most remote (as measured from some Greenwich Mean of European Civilization) became the most primitive.” This naturalized discourse provided the conditions for such conceptions as the realist assumption (the siting of political truth in a projected other or outside, understood not as ideology, but in truth and reality), and the primitivist fantasy (the association of the primitive/prehistoric/pre-Oedipal, the other, and the unconscious; or the assumed connection between the development of the individual and the development of the species/civilization). 

      There are three assumptions from the old ‘artist as producer’ model that persist - FIRST is the assumption that the site of political transformation is the site of artistic transformation. SECOND is the assumption that this site is always elsewhere, in the field of the other, and that “this elsewhere, this outside, is the Archimedean point from which the dominant culture will be transformed or at least subverted.” THIRD is the assumption that if the artist is not perceived as socially and/or culturally other, he or she has but limited access to this transformative alterity, and that if he or she is perceived as other, he or she has automatic access to it.

      The present ethnographic turn in contemporary art practice/theory is characterized by the understanding that anthropology stands as the science of alterity -- the discipline that takes culture as its object. It is also considered to arbitrate the interdisciplinary, and in this sense it is believed to be contextual. But, it is the self-critique of anthropology that renders it so attractive, for it “promises a reflexivity of the ethnographer at the center even as it preserves a romanticism of the other at the margins.” Foster demonstrates how these ‘anthropologisms’³ are engaged by various fields of twentieth-century art. This is the case for surrealism, which often figures the other in terms of the unconscious, art brut or ‘outsider art’ which represents the other as a redemptive anti-civilizational resource, abstract expressionism in which the other stands for the primal exemplar of all artists, the allusion to prehistoric art in earthworks, conceptual and institution-critical art which treats the art world as anthropological site, etc. It is not surprising then that anthropology, along with psychoanalysis, is considered “the lingua franca of artistic practice and critical discourse alike.” 

     Foster then charts the ethnographic turn in contemporary art over the last forty-five years. This trajectory may be understood through a sequence of investigations: first of the material/objective constituents of the art work, then of its spatial conditions of perception, and then of the corporeal bases of this perception (minimalist work, conceptual art, performance, body art, then finally site specific work in the early ‘70s):

Soon the institution of art could no longer be described only in spatial terms (studio, gallery, museum, and so on); it was also a discursive network of different practices and institutions, other subjectivities and communities. Nor could the observer of art be delimited only in phenomenological terms; he or she was also a social subject defined in language and marked by difference (economic, ethnic, sexual, and so on).

These recognitions were not strictly internal to art. Also crucial were different social movements (civil rights, various feminisms, queer politics, multiculturalism) as well as diverse theoretical developments (the convergence of feminism, psychoanalysis, and film; the recovery of Gramsci; the application of Althusser, Lacan, and Foucault; the development of postcolonial discourse with Said, Spivak, Bhabha, and so on), “Thus did art pass into the expanded field of culture that anthropology is thought to survey.” These developments constituted shifts in the very siting of art, from the surface of the medium to the space of the museum, from institutional frames to discursive networks, to the point where many artists and critics treat conditions like desire or disease, AIDS or homelessness, as sites for art.

      Interestingly, the ethnographic turn has come to be indicative of the commissioned ethnographic mappings which effectively function as a museum-event in which the institution imports critique, “whether as a show of tolerance or for the purpose of inoculation (against a critique undertaken by the institution, within the institution).” Art institutions may also use site-specific work for economic development, social outreach, or art tourism. 

      New anthropology understands culture as text, which is supposed to challenge ‘ethnographic authority’ through ‘discursive paradigms of dialogue and polyphony’. Yet because this understanding of ‘culture as text’ reduces social relations to decoding operations, the ethnographic reader is rendered more authoritative, not less -- for it represents a recoding of practice as discourse. Marshall Sahlins, in Culture and Practical Reason (1976), argues that two epistemologies have long divided anthropology, the first being symbolic logic which understands the social in terms of exchange systems and the second being practical reason which understands the social in terms of material culture. Thus, Foster argues that in this same way, contemporary art and criticism situates itself accordingly:

With a turn to this split discourse of anthropology, artists and critics can resolve these contradictory models magically: they can take up the guises of cultural semiologist and contextual fieldworker, they can continue and condemn critical theory, they can relativize and recenter the subject, all at the same time. In our current state of artistic-theoretical ambivalences and cultural-political impasses, anthropology is the compromise discourse of choice. 

This becomes a nuanced and difficult territory to navigate, one in which work often strays from a decentering of the artist as cultural authority to a remaking of the other in “neo-primitivist guise.” Foster asks, “Who in the academy or the art world has not witnessed these testimonies of the new empathetic intellectual or these flâneries of the new nomadic artist?” An interesting example of this was Clegg & Guttmann's “Project Unité, commissioned in 1993 for the Unité d’Habitation in Firminy, France:

Here the neo-conceptual team Clegg & Guttmann asked the Unité residents to contribute cassettes for a discotheque, which were edited, compiled, and displayed according to apartment and floor in a model of the building as a whole. Lured by collaboration, the inhabitants loaned these cultural proxies, only to have them turned into anthropological exhibits. And the artists did not question the ethnographic authority, indeed the sociological condescension involved in this facilitated self-representation. 

Clegg & Guttmann have referred to their interventions as ‘community portraits’, and in the case of Project Unité, this took a literal turn when they photographed those involved for the covers of the cassettes they had donated. Almost naturally the project shifted from collaboration to self-fashioning and little collaboration with the community was effected. 

      Foster gives some examples of artists that expose and reframe the institutional codings of art and artifacts, but these deconstructive ethnographic approaches risk elitism and inaccessibility, “a place for initiates only where a contemptuous criticality is rehearsed.” This deconstructive positioning, which is at once inside and outside the institution, allows the artist to “retain the social status of art and entertain the moral purity of critique, the one a complement or compensation for the other.” This represents a paradox that is implicit to reflexivity, for while it is needed to protect against an over-identification with the other, it can also lead to “hermeticism, narcissism or even a refusal of engagement altogether.” Instead Foster advocates, “parallactic work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other” and in this way negotiate the contradictory status of otherness as both real and fantasmatic. Foster questions reflexivity in contemporary art, “And what does critical distance guarantee? Has this notion become somewhat mythical, acritical, a form of magical protection, a purity ritual of its own? Is such distance still desirable, let alone possible?” Keeping in mind that our intention is to interrogate the relationship between art and culture, it is this space of disciplinary memory and critical distance that we should examine most carefully -- especially since it gestures to the very work we intend to engage with here.

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<sup>1. [This essay first appeared in George Marcus and Fred Myers’ book The Traffic in Culture: Reconfiguring Art and Anthropology under the title ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’. A year later, a much revised version of the essay was published in Hal Foster’s own book entitled The Return of the Real - no longer bearing the question mark.]↩
2. [Benjamin, Walter. "The Author as Producer." New Left Review 1.62 (1970) Web.]↩
3. [Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1971. 345. Print.]↩</sup>

Abstract

   This project was conceived in the fall of 2013 as an attempt to interrogate the relationship between the artist and the communities/cultures they seek to investigate through their work. What kinds of questions emerge when an artist enters a community as an art-maker or with the intention of 'empowering' other artists within that community? Are they telling their own stories or those of their subjects? Should or can the artist become involved in the community/culture of their subjects? Although these questions pertain to contemporary art practice and theory in general, we will primarily address film and video in the interest of narrowing our focus and manageability. The project will approach questions of representation, ethnography, documentary, hybridity, community and culture from a philosophical stance - asking why it is important for the artist to ask these kinds of questions against both an ever-changing contemporary context and a homologizing global world economy.

   The title of this blog should likely be changed to Where I belong insofar as the project is closely related to the questions implicit in my own work as an artist. Having spent time exploring painting, sound, performance art, light installation, etc, my questions/curiosities have recently turned to film and video. I have come to believe that these many interests might be served by the Gesamtkunstwerk that is film/videomaking. It has the potential to involve as many factors as we are capable of being aware of - light, sound, movement, gesture, gaze, perspective, interpellation, voice, color, depth, etc. In this sense, film, video, and the ever-expanding realms of hypermedia are - more than anything else in my opinion - equipped to articulate the complex relations of time and space that characterize postmodern culture. Film and video can demonstrate the unutterable in a way that requires our full presence. Yet it is precisely this potential that requires a greater degree of attention and responsibility. In this way, any interest in social/cultural phenomena and film/video necessitates an interrogation of the questions implicit to documentary and ethnography.  

   With respect to this question of why ethnography? I guess that I have never properly posed the question to myself. I suppose that with all of my other pursuits the impetus began as curiosity - whether those I respected practiced the particular medium or that I thought I simply might enjoy it. Yet the reason why we begin something and the reason we maintain it are quite different from one another. Ethnography is an interesting practice because it is not like a guitar or a paint brush, you cannot simply pick it up and try it out. In this sense one might need both the reason to begin and the reason to maintain before picking up the camera. I am not interested in ethnography as it has been historically practiced, but I am interested in the questions that ethnography (the study of cultural phenomena) has invariably attempted (and failed) to answer. It is the impossibility of representation that draws me in. In this way it is 'experimental' ethnography that interests me - - how to disrupt and reconceive the way social and cultural processes are represented in such a way that we become aware of the fallacy that is supposed documentary truth. How do we remove ourselves from the implied division of the world between those out there (the subjects of ethnography) and those in here (in the theater, audience). Although this these questions seem to be specific to film/video, later I will demonstrate that there is an anthropological quality to contemporary art discourse in general.

   The reason for choosing a blog over the formalisms of analytic paper is that the blog format allows for a greater degree of discursive freedom. Whereas a paper requires a number of different texts to be reduced to a relational thesis, a blog encourages self-dialogue, individualized attention to separate texts and perhaps most importantly, a space that can involve disjunction, internal dissonance, and self-refutation. In this way we must presume that our starting point is not really how we should begin. We are not yet asking the important questions. But it is only through this self dialogue, the active performance and experimentation of ideas in a publicly accessible format, that we allow for the potential of true synthesis.