Saying ‘No’: On Power And Reality

by Jochen Szangolies

Sharpie-altered map showing a falsified projection of hurricane Dorian’s projected landfall in 2019. Image credit: The White House/public domain

Politics does not come naturally to me. Part of it is because I have a tendency to be interested mostly in the view sub specie aeternitatis, in the deep truths of the world, what it is, what we are, and how it all hangs together, rather than in the accidents of human squabbling. I like to uphold an idealized image of myself as engaged in the pursuit of Truth and Beauty, and there seems to be little of either in politics.

Yet this is a stance of luxury. An ideal world may permit the secluded scholar in the ivory tower to disengage from worldly affairs, safe in the certainty that everyone’s base needs are met. But we very much do not live in this world: people suffer needlessly because of bad politics. To disengage is to be complicit in this suffering, in the last consequence. So while, with the late, great Daniel Dennett, I begrudge every hour spent worrying about politics, I find it rarely leaves my mind these days, romantic pursuit of capital-T Truth notwithstanding.

The other reason I prefer to avoid politics is that I’m not very good at it. The mode of thought that unravels complex interpersonal alliances, social scheming and behind-the-scenes maneuvering is difficult for me. Even in social settings, I often find myself having missed some subtext entirely obvious to others. This is self-reinforcing: my lack of interest feeds my lack of ability, due to not engaging with it enough to get better, and my lack of ability makes developing an interest difficult.

But there is an opportunity in being bad at things: it means you get to go slow. If you don’t grasp a mechanism in the large, break it down into its components; if you lack the intuition for great leaps, be explicit along every searching step. That way, sometimes, the outsider looking in might even notice something buried beneath the implicit assumptions just obvious to the seasoned practitioner (or expose themselves as a know-nothing out of their lane).

Thus I write about politics only with some trepidation and in the hopes that my own halting explorations might be of use to others who, like me, have been left dumbfounded by recent events. Read more »

Monday, January 7, 2013

Jonas Mekas: Serpentine Gallery, London. Until 27 January 2013

by Sue Hubbard

_MG_3195 press pageHow do we remember? Before the invention of the camera most people never possessed a likeness of themselves or those they loved – a lock of hair, a letter, were the heart’s most treasured possessions, the artefacts that conjured the past. Photography democratised the ownership of images. A portrait need no longer be in watercolour or oils, it could be an informal snap taken on a box Brownie: a casual moment sealed in the proverbial amber of memory. With the technological advances of the 20thand 21st centuries, with film, video and digital technology and the predominance of surveillance equipment it might, theoretically, be possible to record a whole life from the moment of birth till the second of death. It was only a decade or so ago that the French Postmodernist social theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that the images which assault us – on our TVs, in film and advertising – are not copies of the real, but become truth in their own right: the hyperral. Where Plato had spoken of two kinds of image-making: the first a faithful reproduction of reality, the second intentionally distorted in order to make a copy appear correct to viewers (such as a in a painting) Baudrillard saw four: the basic reflection of reality; the perversion of reality; the pretence of reality, and the simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever”. Baudrillard's simulacra were, basically, perceived as negative, but another modern French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, has described simulacra as the vehicle by which accepted ideals or a “privileged position” can be “challenged and overturned”. Reality has become a complex issue.

_MG_3266 press pageJonas Mekas was 90 on Christmas Eve, which means that the film-maker, artist and poet, often referred to as the godfather of avant garde cinema, has lived through a lot of history. Born in Lithuania he spent part of the war in a forced labour camp, then after the hostilities ended, another four years in various displaced person’s camps such as Flensburg, Hamburg, Wiesbaden, Kassel – first in the British Zone, then in the American. With nothing much to do and a lot of time he read, he wrote and went to the movies, which were shown free in the camps by the Americans. So began his long relationship with film. Later, when he commuted to the French Zone to study at the University of Mainz, he met André Gide who told him to “work only for yourself,” and watched a lot of French cinema. After arriving in America he bought his first Bolex camera in 1950, which he used to film everyday scenes in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the Lithuanian immigrants who lived there. Describing himself and his brother as “two shabby, naïve Lithuanian boys, just out of forced labour camp”, it was not until some 10 years later that he decided to assemble the footage into a film.

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