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15 Responses to “Reading Comments Week 6 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y”
Here’s my first question… when Baudrillard is talking about 9/11 in “The Spirit of Terrorism” and he writes, “At a pinch, we say that they DID IT, but we WISHED FOR it,” who is this “we”? Those within the dominant power? Or those without? Or both? And if the latter (which is what I think what he’s saying), how do we differentiate the “we” from the “they” without going back towards universalism?
I’m thinking about his earlier comments on globalization (boo!) and universality (hiss!), and I wonder if it’s starting to get mixed up in my mind.
Derrida and Baudrillard drift towards similar conclusions about “terrorism;” whereas the latter seems to be speaking of the “September 11” attacks in a solely symbolic manner, Derrida does so through a wonderful balance between the human emotion upon witnessing the event, as well as the symbolic discourse it generates.
A criticism of Baudrillard, which I might be inclined to agree with is by Bruno Latour, who states that Baudrillard conceived of society in terms of symbolic and semiotic dualism- Is there a way to separate the “actual” event from the symbolic and semiotic? After reading The Spirit of Terrorism & Other Essays, his arguments seemed so distant from the reality of the situation that they did not seem applicable. On a wider scale, this is a question about theory itself, and since we are in a theory course, addressing this might be a poignant issue.
Is theory completely removed from reality? Can it be applicable to the reality which it attempts to dissect and understand?
There are certain aspects of the dialogue with Derrida that I am questioning:
1) His discussion on globalization (121 +). He states that globalization is “a simulacrum, a rhetorical weapon that dissimulates a growing imbalance” (123). – Is it a simulation of itself? B/c if there was an actual globalization occurring then there would be equal opportunity for all, but we know that this is simply not true. Is that what he is saying?
2) Derrida states that the U.S. goes out of its way NOT to identify the enemy as a religious foreigner, and even though he knows this is untrue, it is definitely better “than the contrary.”
Is the contrary he addresses here the jihadists? At some point in his dialogue he is constantly saying that both sides (for the sake of simplicity I am going to state the sides as Bush vs. Bin Laden) are faulty, but that the western ideals are better, because “[he] would take the side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the name of the political, democracy, international law, international institutions, and so on. Even if this “in the name of” is still merely an assertion and a purely verbal commitment” (114). Therefore, he is picking a side, that which is dominant. I am not sure how I respond to this. On the one hand it presents Derrida as biased, while it also situates him within the current context of the real, b/c he justifies why Bin Laden’s methods are harmful on a global scale.
Another thought which the previous quote invokes is Nietzsche’s master-slave morality (From On The Genealogy of Morality). B/c the slave morality is a reaction to the master- but the problem with this association is that the U.S. is already based on a slave morality as it is founded on Christian beliefs/values- which are still resonant today as is shown through the language appropriated by the heads of the country “God Bless America” & through the inscriptions on their currency “In God We Trust.” However, the United States is a hegemonic power and in its actions with other states behaves as a master consciousness. Therefore, Bin Laden is slave morality in reaction to the master which is the U.S., but which is also a slave. Even though the US is now the dominant power and not a reaction anymore, it still functions on the slave morality terms. This made more sense in my head…
I was struck by a statement made in Baudrillard’s “Spirit of Terrorism.”
“There is no ‘good’ use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions.”
Of primary interest to all of the articles read for this week is the “image making” related to September 11th and how it relates to the media. Baudrillard suggests “the terrorist act in New York has resuscitated both images and events.” As I understand it, Baudrillard is most interested in interrogating 9/11 as a symbolic event or image, however I agree with Buck-Morris when she argues “To see a photograph as purely symbolic, rather than as a trace of the real, is a reductive visual practice—shall we call it visual fundamentalism.” I also see Derrida as engaging in a process of symbolic interrogation though he does reflect on the real loss of life.
Morris suggests the “success” of the attacks were predicated on image making because it was a “mute act. The attackers perished without making demands. They left no note behind, only the moving, deadly image, which the cameras of those who were attacked themselves supplied…” Now I will ask a question which has controversial implications but one we’ve all grappled with at some point. In what way is media complicit in forming the “spectacle of terrorism” (as described by Baudrillard) through its dissemination of images?
When the endless loop of planes crashing and buildings falling made up the bulk of the news cycle in the days after the 9/11 attacks, was the media exploited as a tool for propaganda? I am less interested in the images of 9/11 however than the right wing invective that often appears at the source of images which implicate the mistreatment of “enemy combatants” during the two wars waged over 9/11. Many conservative politicians and commentators fought hard to suppress the images of Abu Ghraib (and did so with some success) making the argument that the images would only foster more outrage and cause the deaths of more soldiers. This is a convenient argument when made by a group attempting to silence the discussion over prisoner abuse and minimize the political damage an image can cause—however, is the media becoming a complicit party to fostering more violence (in the case of Abu Ghraib) or propagandizing for terrorism (in the case of 9/11) when these images are released? One answer might be that the price we pay for a free press is the dissemination of knowledge that attempts to serve the public interest but may threaten lives. In what situation is leaving the public ignorant an act exorcising good judgment on the part of the media?
If media is indeed part of the spectacle of terror, a case I think Baudrillard makes quite well, what is the alternative? I find the question quite discomforting because it implies “dangerous knowledge,” something I have always found to be an adjunct to fundamentalist ideology. The strange paradox here is that one of the staples of a free society (the press) becomes a propaganda arm to terrorism when it disseminates information. I see nothing but a viscous cycle when approaching this question. The reporting of teenage suicides has always been an issue for media, as it has been shown by sociologists to increase the rate of suicide. The answer was to eliminate such reportage—which consequently withholds information from the public. I would never, ever advocate withholding either images or information from the public in these cases, however the question is interesting.
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The reasons behind Derrida’s idea of Europe as an interlocutor between ‘the United States and its enemy,” and the language used to explain this idea, reveal a logic that reinforces the imperialist “power arrangements” it is supposed to question.
I say this because:
- Europe, Derrida writes, would function as an interlocutor because it is the “only secular actor on the world stage…with one of the most advanced nontheological political structures” (275). He also states that doing so involves the “memory of a European promise that is yet to be fulfilled: democracy and emancipation for all…Enlightenment is not dead…” (260).
In these phrases “democracy and emancipation for all” is isolated as an “European promise,” Europe is, once again, presented as setting an example – or as ahead in development – to which all countries should aspire.
This echoes the reason behind the colonial desire to “civilize” and reflects the historicist perspective of linear progression where most of the natives have yet to reach a point (identified by the Europeans) where they can be considered for human rights and other privileges – as in this instance, states that might have experience balancing different religions (or any other relevant insights) are not considered in Derrida’s discussion because they do not measure up to his standard of “secular.”
The idea of “deconstructing boundaries,” particularly the way it has been articulated as an aspect of “development” to which others have to catch up to, also contributes to this argument. The boundaries, the nation-state, a history, and a national identity are often unavoidable products of colonization, which have been thrust upon post-colonial states by their colonizers, and are notions with which these states are constantly struggling. This notion of “deconstructing boundaries,” and de-centered identities goes against the efforts of these newer states trying to hold a disparate population within one nation. Instead of challenging this idea of “catch up development,” ‘universal” development, Derrida, through his language, articulates yet another universalist idea of development, which people must strive towards in order to be equal to some others on the globe.
I have been thinking about media, “spectacle of terrorism” and the image. Here is the question, what happens when the image of terrorism is unclear? I am thinking about Bhutto’s assassination. The image of her murder is debated and therefore how she died is unclear. Within minutes her murder was shown via cell phone cameras by rally members or by people in the area, which included media. However, the photo’s of the assassination raises a lot of questions, such as was she shot? Did she hit her forehead on the front of car (as Scotland Yard investigators have concluded)? Was she shot twice? Where was she shot? In an attempt to piece together the “event”, media outlets, such as CBC show images of Butto in her finial moments:
(http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/02/08/bhutto-scotlandyard.html)
When Baudrillard claims, “there is no ‘good’ use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions” (221 course kit) I wonder how we- citizens, if into this equation? Rally members, who are not “the media,” captured some of the images of Bhutto’s assassination and some of these images were put on utube and other global Internet outlets. I think that we need to address the fact that some images are not linked to media and therefore are functioning outside the structure of the media. Just as Dr. Hayashi stated in class, we need to question and define words such as terrorism and globalization; I would also include “media” in this list of terms.
-sharanpal
To recap my presentation on Monday, and highlight some of the debates we had…
The portions of Buck-Morss’ book that we read laid out the need for and path to a Global Sphere, with emphasis on the role of Islamism and the art world. In her words, “we are looking for a route that will connect critical discourses that have evolved in partial contexts, in order to make them useful for a yet-to-be-constituted, global, progressive Left” (101). In other words we must build on the critical tools of Western and Islamic thought for “original and creative application”, one that produces an objectively global discourse. Islamism is central to this process as it is not derivative of Western discourse, which dominates academia, and therefore changes the parameters of any theoretical discussion, which to date, are usually set by the West. I wonder how it is that we are meant to find the right balance between developing partial discourses (ex. Western), and the Global discourse. Buck-Morss’ conception of the Global discourse seems like a very dynamic one, building on and learning from partial discourses to give us a more complex, nuanced understanding of the world. No doubt she is for embracing the dissonance (as Kate said in class) of the partial discourses in order to find a new, truly Global space within the greater theoretical discussion. She also talks about the new hegemonic power that will ultimately be determined by the Global public (23). Does this mean that the public will have to simultaneously embrace its own partial discourses and the greater Global one? One of the most difficult tasks that strikes me about Buck-Morss’ plan is finding that balance of embracing the Global discourse/hegemony, while still keeping alive on some level the partial discourses – the fuel of the Global one – while not living under their hegemonies (if I can use that in plural here). The continued evolution of partial discourses will be integral to the fostering of the Global Sphere.
Shifting gears…Buck-Morss’ evaluation of the art world looks at the progression from epistemological to ontological evaluations of art, leading to the eventual reification of artists, which in her mind has rendered the art world “socially impotent”. In my view, Grimonprez makes a similar critique of the art world with Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, in which he laments art’s failure to capitalize on the undeniable power of the image to impact society – a responsibility of art – with the result being that terrorists and the media have co-opted that power. For both Buck-Morss and Grimonprez, “language and image…are being appropriate as weapons by all sides” (Buck-Morss, 63). Academics and artists need to reclaim them. Can artists do that, within the current system? Can they do it outside of the system, or does the system itself need to fundamentally change? Buck-Morss thinks artists can go it alone: she believes that artists, with the aid of new media, can create an open-structured space for art within the Global sphere, and in it, “artists would relinquish their impotent power as residents of the gated community of the artworld in return for social relevance” (72). As noted in class, though, this is an uphill battle in a society in which artists struggle with little meaningful support.
In reading Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terror and then viewing Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. I couldn’t help but seek out examples of Baudrillard’s statement of 9/11 as a “Manhattan disaster movie” (29) along with his citing of Ballard’s idea of “reinventing the real as the ultimate and most redoubtable fiction.” (29). It’s rather strange that the film Cloverfield goes right back into Godzilla mode in its depictions of a monster destroying New York. The whole basis for this film’s originality lies in its use of the handycam to further emphasize/project the illusion of realness of the events in the film. Without discussing the terrible plotline and clichéd characterizations, the film only shows footage from the handheld camera and the jumps in time that form the narrative line are the convenient result of injury or accident—the camera only stops when someone falls or dies and then it is passed on to another person.
The camera itself belongs to one of the characters and the tape inside the camera consists of already pre-recorded footage of a love relationship between that character and his girlfriend. The film occasionally splices in parts of this romantic footage in between the disaster footage to authenticate the characters motivation in relation to the progression of the plot and to heighten the emotional tenseness of the disaster footage through contrasts in mood and tone, but most importantly the personal footage works to validate the “realness” of the footage. The film’s narrative works through personal accounts and reactions in an “as if you were there document” that was somehow leaked from the confines of the government.
In thinking about the difference between 9/11, Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. and Cloverfield one has to ask the questions that Baudrillard asks: the pattern of fictional images entering more and more into the territory of the real. I find that nothing has been learned from the media coverage of 9/11. Rather, 9/11 furthered the desire to test the realness of images in a type of cinematic Russian roulette which asks which images are the real bullets? Which images/bullets will hurt us and which images are merely the duds that make the game so exciting. When I say Images as bullets I am playing off of Solanas and Getino’s metaphor for the camera as a gun (tool for revolution) in their essay Towards a Third Cinema. I also say image as bullet because of Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky’s idea that the image can pierce a viewer causing a wound of affect.
I just wanted to be clear about my metaphor as all these different theorists use such interesting metaphors and it is our job to link them together into some form of understanding or as evidence in our own arguments. I say Russian roulette with the image because it seems that there is a small step between the gunshots in the theatre and the gunshots in the streets. It is just interesting that films are working harder and harder to erase the difference between fiction and reality. Even current theme park and 4D theatres are spitting water and air in viewers’ faces to make them feel as it they were struck by something coming out of the film.
In John Water’s satire on the documentary fiction film, Cecil B. DeMented, a terrorist film group hijacks locations and actors all for the purpose of making a fiction film that is real but at the same time a piece of fiction—real in that all the scenes are real hostage situations. They crash a movie theatre in the middle of Patch Adams shooting and screaming and people vomit and pass out in the aisles. Yet the theatre itself is the space where people go to view violence. They are paying to see blood and gore and yet when it appears right in front of the screen but not on the screen, they cannot handle it. For Waters, the media is already dramatising and exploiting dangerous real world situations for the purpose of expressing their projects—it is the viewer’s ironic and passive position (a passive position that secretly wants to be active) that Water’s is satirizing .
All the personal recording devices that are now so accessible can create a selfish and narcissistic desire to be the “first” reporter of images of destruction as if to say “I was the first to come back from the apocalypse and here is my slide show.” (I do not intend to be insensitive to personal trauma accounts but rather inquisitive of the similarity of the (melo)drama behind these documentary accounts to what fiction films utilize in an attempt to authenticate their images as real) This was the essence of Cloverfield and also very evident in the critical strategy of Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y.’s use of the personal accounts of the victims of hijackings. In Dial, there was a certain playfulness or almost erotic excitement of the survivors’ behaviour as they described their accounts that stemmed not necessarily from the (real) events themselves but from the act of (fictionalized/subjective) reporting to the public of those events. These reports strongly contrasted with the non-survival footage such as the images of the woman screaming for her child or the Terrorists themselves being poked and prodded while dying.
These images of blood and death are not safe as they have an immediacy and urgency that the images of the survivors lacked. So I ask: Do “we” (Baudrillard’s we) secretly/unconsciously want to destroy ourselves through the conflation of the real and the fictional as is suggested in films like Cloverfield? Is Hollywood cinema unconsciously communicating something through how these disaster films refer to the media used in 9/11? Is this reference a form of Freud’s death drive (repeated trauma)? Is a film like Cloverfield a form of collective trauma therapy for spectators? If so, which spectators? For me, Cloverfield, is really another shameless form of capitalistic marketing. The suffering victims and terrorists in Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. are the true “real” results of those image/bullets of violence and they embody the difference between films like Cloverfield and Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y.
Okay, I can’t get “The Hustle” out of my head in thinking about dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, so I’m going to blog about the use of this song in Grimonprez’s film.
I guess I don’t know what to make of the song in the context of the film’s meaning. I’m especially confused by its use at the close of the film.
We are presumably supposed to be horrified by the juxtaposition created in the film as Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” plays atop the closing credit montage of crashing 747s. The very inappropriateness of the music selection should unsettle us. What does disco have to do with planes going up in balls of flame and the untimely death of hundreds? (I sincerely hope it’s not a “disco sucks” gesture.) The tasteless juxtaposition of music and image we have here is a not-uncommon device in films today; you can see it at work even in action movies like John Woo’s Face/Off, where a gunfight is “ironically” scored to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Grimonprez, for his part, seems to use “The Hustle” to make a comment on the tastelessness of (American?) media, on their proclivity towards facile, easily consumable depictions of global events as a way to distract attention from the fuller picture (of, for instance, the hijackings recounted in the film and their causes). Yet, Grimonprez also appears to be making a criticism about audiences and the way they consume spectacle, and even revel in it (mere conditioning, or complicity with the media?). How unsettled can we be by the images anyway when Van McCoy’s laying down a big bowl of disco sunshine on the soundtrack? I’m sure I’m not the only one to intuit that Grimonprez’s planes-crashing-to-disco is meant to be darkly humorous, or that it is there as a kind of trap to illustrate our stake in the spectacle of catastrophe: if we laugh, or move a shoe to the groove, we betray our hidden death-drive. That this closing montage is followed by the clip of Clinton and Yeltsin cracking up uncontrollably I think shows Grimonprez’s awareness of the “involuntary” laughter some may experience at his film’s end.
Am I completely misreading this juxtaposition? I’ll continue anyway.
The problem I have with this closing montage (aside from the fact that I think it unfair of the filmmaker to exploit McCoy’s seductive call to boogie in the service of spectacle-baiting) is that for me it creates confusion about the rest of the film’s meaning. If Grimonprez is indeed making any comment about the facileness of the media (I say IF), doesn’t the nature of this juxtaposition—jollity mixed with horror—contradict what we have come to know of the media from the rest of the film, and in our own experience? I mean, in the film we see that the media, even pre-9/11, partake in the kind of grave interpretation of events that approaches—or is already a form of—fear-mongering (the training video for surviving a hijacking, ludicrous as it seems, must have contributed to the growth of unease in the public about hijacking, and served to erase the causes behind it even further). I guess what I’m saying is that the media doesn’t typically find catastrophe funny—it more often milks its scariness for all its worth. The images from 9/11, as re-played again and again in the media, were meant not to desensitize people and make 9/11 palatable, but to impress upon them the severity of the threat America was under and the dangers that lie ahead. In fact, the public very well might have been outraged if the media treated 9/11 as anything less than a serious threat to national security. It seems only artists are capable of playing disco over death without coming across as culpable in any way. (Whew! What a reactionary I am tonight!)
All is not lost yet in this juxtaposition, for there’s still an implication that Grimonprez mainly means to toy with our urge to consume catastrophe as spectacle. We can’t avert our gaze from the plane crash. “The Hustle” mocks us. We know deep down we want to see these images; they’re as irresistible as the music itself (“Do it! Do it” McCoy implores us). We just want death, I guess, and we find it goes down rather well with some musical accompaniment. To paraphrase Bolan: “We dance ourselves into the tomb.” If we’re horrified by the images, perhaps we’re merely projecting our own horror at ourselves, for “The Hustle” has illuminated our death-drive and god knows we must react to suppress it.
I know I’m not the only one who hates this idea that we have an inherent love of suffering. Or that, following Baudrillard, we “want” events like 9/11 to happen to us. Now, I’m as death-obsessed as the next person (call it a perverse comfort in my own mortality), but I can’t see how the desire for the spectacle of catastrophe is innate to human beings. Too many Arnold Schwarzenegger movies as a kid scrambled my brain and made me love explosions. I didn’t think, in my tiny head: “Explosions are great, I wonder if movies have them”; rather the explosions were packaged for me, an impressionable male youth, and meant to inculcate in me a love of war. If we return to what I said about the images of 9/11 not being a desensitizing tool in the media, I seem to contradict myself. How can the media drive home the glitz and palatability of war, and also conversely convince people that destruction is offensive? Well, because the media is a devious, devious thing, and also a very persuasive thing if one is not fortified to read against its grain. The media is capable of many types of conditioning, two of which are: one, the conditioning of movie audiences to love destruction, so as to consolidate their approval of military aggression, and other forms of violence perpetrated by “us” against “them” (the media always assumes you’re on their side); and two, the conditioning of people to see aggression against “us” as a different, more horrifying type of violence.
The spectacle of death is conditioning, not a universal human urge. I’m weaning myself off this type of spectacle (I hope I’ve done so already). All afflicted people, when made properly aware, can do the same.
In conclusion, Grimonprez’s use of “The Hustle” proves points that I don’t entirely agree with.
What did other people make of the ending of the film?
I too hated the way the ending of Dial H. The music not only, to use the weird word I employed in class, ‘jangled’ my senses but made me feel sick. I know that this is what cinema attempts to do to create an impact, a real affect, but it also seemed to go beyond ‘extreme’ into a realm of insensitivity. However, one might argue that extremism always serves its pragmatic cause by prodding those who are normally somnambulent observers into a realization of what is really going on with the portrayal of violence in everyday culture.
Cameron, you mention that you like explosions, and this makes me think of the Zizek comment on how violence (and sex) are how we get to the ‘real’. Maybe I should save this line of thought for next week’s postings…
I really hope I’m entering this in the right place…
Zizek gives three reason for going to war: the 1st – “a sincere ideological belief that the USA was bringing democracy and prosperity to another nation” – doesn’t seem compatible with the other two – 2) “the urge brutally to assert and demonstrate unconditional US hegemony and 3) control of Iraq’s oil reserves.”
If the 2nd and 3rd our true then the 1st cannot be a sincere belief.
Is this Zizek speaking about this in the way he proposes we talk about Judaism/ Zionism and “good” Islam/ “bad” Islam? – where he suggests that we should “…transpose the gap, the tension, into the very core of Judaism [Islam, and for the purposes of my question -the reasons behind invading Iraq).” That we should “conceive of this resistance as an open chance, as “undecidable”…the task is how to work out how to use this ambiguous fact politically.”
What I understand best from what I’ve quoted above, is through this next quote: “transpose the site of antagonism and inconsistency into the very core of the religious edifice, not to dismiss it as pertaining only to the secondary fundamentalist misuse.” And while appreciating this thought, I’m having a hard time applying it to the three reasons he gives for going to war – and I think that is because this reading has challenged the way I conceive of “responsibility.” Who should be held responsible for the war? Who is accountable? One of the main players that comes to my mind is the State (the U.S State) – and I realize that while I critique, discourage and work against “esentialzing” subjects, I esentialize the State. And I’m not sure if that’s something I want to “work against” Can we/ should we apply our ideas of “de-centering,” ideas about the “floating signifier” to the State?
And by asking this question, I’m not saying that Zizek is suggesting that we apply these ideas to the State…because he goes on to talk about “concrete universality,” which sounds like the antithesis of “de-centering,” “pluralities”…
So my last question is - what is “concrete universality”? I can’t seem to put together an understanding of this Hegelian concept through what I found on the internet (and there is no Wiki site for this!! ☺)
What Dial History does, that a post-9/11 film wouldn’t dare, is romanticize a hijacker. This is evident in the poetic opening line, which states “Shouldn’t death be a swan dive, graceful, white winged and smooth? Leaving the surface undisturbed.” The plight of the hijacker is that of the dark horse. He or she strives against all odds. “Get killed and maybe they will notice you.” If they are turned into an object by the image they have arguably become famous, or at least noticed. As the film suggests, “Nothing truly happens until it is consumed.” This romanticization and consumption of the hijacker is exemplified by two stories within the film. The first story concerns the first
Transatlantic hijack, which is carried out by Vietnam Vet, Raffaele Minichiello, who takes an airliner back home to Rome. He is treated like a celebrity afterwards, and the camera captures him as a real life James Bond. The second story is of Leila Khaled, a female hijacker who gained celebrity status in the late sixties for her multiple skyjackings. This film not only romanticizes the hijacker, it also highlights the dramatic possibilities of hijacking. In the 90’s Hollywood became aware of these dramatic possibilities, which can be seen in the plots of numerous nineties films: Die Hard 2 (1990), Passenger 57(1992), Executive Decision (1996), Air Force One (1997) and Con-Air (1997). These films might not have glorified the hijacker, but instead used the dramatic situation as the narrative backdrop. Even though the medium of film capitalized on the dramatic possibilities of skyjacking in the 90’s, television was, and still is, its ideal medium. Ohner suggests that the hijacking process could take numerous days and the television apparatus was able to update the spectator at any time with breaking news on the exciting story with images and sound through a live feed. Anything could happen and it pressed the same emotional buttons as reality television: fear, excitement, joy and sorrow. Ohner’s article states that, “After cinema outstripped the airplane as a dream factory, the dream of flying returned on television as a nightmare.”
Since television is the ideal medium for hijacking, Grimonprez recreates the participatory effect of television in his film through editing and the images he selected. The way in which he edits the images together creates a zapping effect, discussed in further detail in his interview with Obrist. The zapping effect creates an illusion of channel surfing and commercial interruptions. If the television viewer controls the remote, or zapping device, they are able to scan through images at any speed, creating a collage effect, perhaps, without even knowing it. Grimonprez’s example of the collage effect through zapping relates to images of war on CNN spliced together with commercials for strawberry ice cream. The idea of zapping follows the ‘supermarket metaphor, which suggests that the viewer can pick or choose what they want to see when they want to see it. With the ability to fast forward and rewind, the medium of television becomes the controller of time, and thus more participatory. There is even a sequence in the film where the screen is imageless and blue text reads “Insert commercial here.” Using McLuhanism’s, Grimonprez tries to make the hot, passive medium of film, cold and participatory. In the interview with Obrist, Grimonprez states that he “wanted to make films with an ideology of ‘zapping’ which can be thought of as an extreme version of poetry, going much further then a collage”. After watching Dial History it seems as though he has succeeded.
Unfortunately I had to miss this class and discussion, so I can only add a couple of perhaps redundant and obscure thoughts.
I found I absolutely and uncritically loved the chapters by Susan Buck Morss. From the opening characterizations of Chiapas as a cosmopolitan articulation translating indigenous cultural experience, and 9/11 as mute; into the essential observations of Islamism as a modern discourse; through the clear as day examples of an epistemological construct versus an ontological construct in modern discourses around politics; and so on – I found it all enormously readable and relevant.
Her points about 9/11 on pgs 23 and 93 (including Stockhauser’s comment that 9/11 was “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos”) reminded me of a conversation with a Brazilian friend at the time who said he found the attacks to be “Brilliant – Biblical”, his sense of it being that the towers were a symbol of Western vanity and arrogance, and the “global spectacle” created was one of Biblical symbolism and proportions. Clearly these less empathic and more socio-cultural reads of the event were happening a lot at the time, if with much censure.
The Derrida interview made me pause on occasion for the reasons that Ananya has articulated so well, but I did not identify it as clearly at first read. It seemed hinted at in phrases such as “the absence of an Enlightenment age”(122) – as if, obviously, Western Europe is the society to which all others are compared, measured, and in this case found to be lacking. Concern for this kind of value judgment rendered the vital discussion regarding universal human rights feel passionate but not complete.
However I did enjoy his wrangling with the term globalization and the fundamental point that ongoing inequalities render the term questionable – as if the increasing movement of moneys, medias and peoples across borders means nothing if it does not bring forms of justice with it. A noble sentiment.
If terrorism is tre new art, can/should it be able to apply for a government grant? Should we be taking images of people blown up or destroyed buildings into museums? Indeed one might argue that it is government sponsored, depending on how feels government/coporate dealings with the Middle East and its various militias/leaders.
Buck-Morris continues on the discussion of what constitutes art in our contemporary world of synthetics and simulacrums, with a prime example being Guitar Hero, or Rock-Band (y learn to play a real instrument when you can pretend?!?!?!). But we seem to be entering a new emotion with respect to the art world. It seems as though we are creating aculture of cruelty, in which that which is art or even entertainment bust be not simply controversial or provocative, but vindictive.
Terrorism as art, is signaling a sort of public conscious shift towards sadism to which we enter both as creators and specators. Discussions about the images of 9/11 have included the notions of spectatorship, in that the frenzied repetition is “our” way of dealing with the trauma, however the images and our relationship to the images go further than “it was like watching a movie”. Indeed, as we move to towards a more global techno culture and as we slowly become cyborgs, the images of 9/11 best articulate the over feeling of a constant dream like existence, in which the images we watch are by extension “art” or “virtual” not only because they are spectacles meant to comment on culture, but that our inability to understand them, or to actually see them as something real, speaks to psycho-hybridization in which digital saturation of the consciouss produces an anti-thetical resistance.
We have seen this before, it is not real and ergo we are not responsible. Yet, the lingering feeling as exemplified by the repeated viewings suggests that there is still something to to be salvaged.
In our class discussion of this matter, these questions of art terrorism and, as Angelo puts it, terrorism as the new art, emerged. As the ‘happening’ evolved, it was somehow castrated, because what had been new and unusual now had provisions made for it with granting agencies, it had forums designed for it, it had an audience. Terrorism could, of course, function like this too. My own memory of the London bombings and the arrest last year (or longer ago?) of a number of men planning to bomb the Canadian parliament was that people around me were saying that they had grown accustomed to this, that after 9/11, they could no longer be shocked, and I’m sure that one said in hindsight that he had not been surprised by 9/11, that it provoked the same ‘ho-hum’ from him as any other terrorist attack since. It seems terrible to me that we pose our discussion of terrorism around art (the film being seen in our context forces us to, of course) because in most cases even the most participatory public art is made for an audience that is willing to participate in kind. It is not a bomb in a museum. Terrorism affects people who did not agree to its terms - they are not simply bystanders (like Christo and Jean-Claude’s witnesses), rather, terrorism targets people who have not anticipated and will only regret the terrorist’s ‘happening’ that has decided to target them. If a work of art’s sole purpose was the humiliation of its opponents, we would find it very difficult to talk about it as valid art, because undue exploitation is profoundly unartistic, and this may seem old-fashioned but it does persist in the present when our definitions of art and the purpose of the art ‘world’ are so complex and uneven.
To relate this back to our own discipline, the treatment of the terrorist act as art - not the images, not the news coverage, not the discourse that springs up around any such event, but the event itself - is like the treatment of a snuff film (say the Bernardo-Homolka tape) as a film worthy of lengthy analysis, one with debatable merits that we would benefit in our cultural knowledge from watching. I do not contend that discussion is not necessary (I do not contend that terrorism cannot be conceived as art), but some parallels are simply beyond reproach.
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Here’s my first question… when Baudrillard is talking about 9/11 in “The Spirit of Terrorism” and he writes, “At a pinch, we say that they DID IT, but we WISHED FOR it,” who is this “we”? Those within the dominant power? Or those without? Or both? And if the latter (which is what I think what he’s saying), how do we differentiate the “we” from the “they” without going back towards universalism?
I’m thinking about his earlier comments on globalization (boo!) and universality (hiss!), and I wonder if it’s starting to get mixed up in my mind.
February 24th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Something of interest:
Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” I found it useful when thinking about Derrida’s deconstruction of terrorism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieyjfZDUIc
February 24th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Derrida and Baudrillard drift towards similar conclusions about “terrorism;” whereas the latter seems to be speaking of the “September 11” attacks in a solely symbolic manner, Derrida does so through a wonderful balance between the human emotion upon witnessing the event, as well as the symbolic discourse it generates.
A criticism of Baudrillard, which I might be inclined to agree with is by Bruno Latour, who states that Baudrillard conceived of society in terms of symbolic and semiotic dualism- Is there a way to separate the “actual” event from the symbolic and semiotic? After reading The Spirit of Terrorism & Other Essays, his arguments seemed so distant from the reality of the situation that they did not seem applicable. On a wider scale, this is a question about theory itself, and since we are in a theory course, addressing this might be a poignant issue.
Is theory completely removed from reality? Can it be applicable to the reality which it attempts to dissect and understand?
There are certain aspects of the dialogue with Derrida that I am questioning:
1) His discussion on globalization (121 +). He states that globalization is “a simulacrum, a rhetorical weapon that dissimulates a growing imbalance” (123). – Is it a simulation of itself? B/c if there was an actual globalization occurring then there would be equal opportunity for all, but we know that this is simply not true. Is that what he is saying?
2) Derrida states that the U.S. goes out of its way NOT to identify the enemy as a religious foreigner, and even though he knows this is untrue, it is definitely better “than the contrary.”
Is the contrary he addresses here the jihadists? At some point in his dialogue he is constantly saying that both sides (for the sake of simplicity I am going to state the sides as Bush vs. Bin Laden) are faulty, but that the western ideals are better, because “[he] would take the side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the name of the political, democracy, international law, international institutions, and so on. Even if this “in the name of” is still merely an assertion and a purely verbal commitment” (114). Therefore, he is picking a side, that which is dominant. I am not sure how I respond to this. On the one hand it presents Derrida as biased, while it also situates him within the current context of the real, b/c he justifies why Bin Laden’s methods are harmful on a global scale.
Another thought which the previous quote invokes is Nietzsche’s master-slave morality (From On The Genealogy of Morality). B/c the slave morality is a reaction to the master- but the problem with this association is that the U.S. is already based on a slave morality as it is founded on Christian beliefs/values- which are still resonant today as is shown through the language appropriated by the heads of the country “God Bless America” & through the inscriptions on their currency “In God We Trust.” However, the United States is a hegemonic power and in its actions with other states behaves as a master consciousness. Therefore, Bin Laden is slave morality in reaction to the master which is the U.S., but which is also a slave. Even though the US is now the dominant power and not a reaction anymore, it still functions on the slave morality terms. This made more sense in my head…
February 24th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
I was struck by a statement made in Baudrillard’s “Spirit of Terrorism.”
“There is no ‘good’ use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions.”
Of primary interest to all of the articles read for this week is the “image making” related to September 11th and how it relates to the media. Baudrillard suggests “the terrorist act in New York has resuscitated both images and events.” As I understand it, Baudrillard is most interested in interrogating 9/11 as a symbolic event or image, however I agree with Buck-Morris when she argues “To see a photograph as purely symbolic, rather than as a trace of the real, is a reductive visual practice—shall we call it visual fundamentalism.” I also see Derrida as engaging in a process of symbolic interrogation though he does reflect on the real loss of life.
Morris suggests the “success” of the attacks were predicated on image making because it was a “mute act. The attackers perished without making demands. They left no note behind, only the moving, deadly image, which the cameras of those who were attacked themselves supplied…” Now I will ask a question which has controversial implications but one we’ve all grappled with at some point. In what way is media complicit in forming the “spectacle of terrorism” (as described by Baudrillard) through its dissemination of images?
When the endless loop of planes crashing and buildings falling made up the bulk of the news cycle in the days after the 9/11 attacks, was the media exploited as a tool for propaganda? I am less interested in the images of 9/11 however than the right wing invective that often appears at the source of images which implicate the mistreatment of “enemy combatants” during the two wars waged over 9/11. Many conservative politicians and commentators fought hard to suppress the images of Abu Ghraib (and did so with some success) making the argument that the images would only foster more outrage and cause the deaths of more soldiers. This is a convenient argument when made by a group attempting to silence the discussion over prisoner abuse and minimize the political damage an image can cause—however, is the media becoming a complicit party to fostering more violence (in the case of Abu Ghraib) or propagandizing for terrorism (in the case of 9/11) when these images are released? One answer might be that the price we pay for a free press is the dissemination of knowledge that attempts to serve the public interest but may threaten lives. In what situation is leaving the public ignorant an act exorcising good judgment on the part of the media?
If media is indeed part of the spectacle of terror, a case I think Baudrillard makes quite well, what is the alternative? I find the question quite discomforting because it implies “dangerous knowledge,” something I have always found to be an adjunct to fundamentalist ideology. The strange paradox here is that one of the staples of a free society (the press) becomes a propaganda arm to terrorism when it disseminates information. I see nothing but a viscous cycle when approaching this question. The reporting of teenage suicides has always been an issue for media, as it has been shown by sociologists to increase the rate of suicide. The answer was to eliminate such reportage—which consequently withholds information from the public. I would never, ever advocate withholding either images or information from the public in these cases, however the question is interesting.
February 25th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Posted by anonymous. Would the author like to sign this post?
The reasons behind Derrida’s idea of Europe as an interlocutor between ‘the United States and its enemy,” and the language used to explain this idea, reveal a logic that reinforces the imperialist “power arrangements” it is supposed to question.
I say this because:
- Europe, Derrida writes, would function as an interlocutor because it is the “only secular actor on the world stage…with one of the most advanced nontheological political structures” (275). He also states that doing so involves the “memory of a European promise that is yet to be fulfilled: democracy and emancipation for all…Enlightenment is not dead…” (260).
In these phrases “democracy and emancipation for all” is isolated as an “European promise,” Europe is, once again, presented as setting an example – or as ahead in development – to which all countries should aspire.
This echoes the reason behind the colonial desire to “civilize” and reflects the historicist perspective of linear progression where most of the natives have yet to reach a point (identified by the Europeans) where they can be considered for human rights and other privileges – as in this instance, states that might have experience balancing different religions (or any other relevant insights) are not considered in Derrida’s discussion because they do not measure up to his standard of “secular.”
The idea of “deconstructing boundaries,” particularly the way it has been articulated as an aspect of “development” to which others have to catch up to, also contributes to this argument. The boundaries, the nation-state, a history, and a national identity are often unavoidable products of colonization, which have been thrust upon post-colonial states by their colonizers, and are notions with which these states are constantly struggling. This notion of “deconstructing boundaries,” and de-centered identities goes against the efforts of these newer states trying to hold a disparate population within one nation. Instead of challenging this idea of “catch up development,” ‘universal” development, Derrida, through his language, articulates yet another universalist idea of development, which people must strive towards in order to be equal to some others on the globe.
February 26th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I have been thinking about media, “spectacle of terrorism” and the image. Here is the question, what happens when the image of terrorism is unclear? I am thinking about Bhutto’s assassination. The image of her murder is debated and therefore how she died is unclear. Within minutes her murder was shown via cell phone cameras by rally members or by people in the area, which included media. However, the photo’s of the assassination raises a lot of questions, such as was she shot? Did she hit her forehead on the front of car (as Scotland Yard investigators have concluded)? Was she shot twice? Where was she shot? In an attempt to piece together the “event”, media outlets, such as CBC show images of Butto in her finial moments:
(http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/02/08/bhutto-scotlandyard.html)
When Baudrillard claims, “there is no ‘good’ use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions” (221 course kit) I wonder how we- citizens, if into this equation? Rally members, who are not “the media,” captured some of the images of Bhutto’s assassination and some of these images were put on utube and other global Internet outlets. I think that we need to address the fact that some images are not linked to media and therefore are functioning outside the structure of the media. Just as Dr. Hayashi stated in class, we need to question and define words such as terrorism and globalization; I would also include “media” in this list of terms.
-sharanpal
February 26th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
To recap my presentation on Monday, and highlight some of the debates we had…
The portions of Buck-Morss’ book that we read laid out the need for and path to a Global Sphere, with emphasis on the role of Islamism and the art world. In her words, “we are looking for a route that will connect critical discourses that have evolved in partial contexts, in order to make them useful for a yet-to-be-constituted, global, progressive Left” (101). In other words we must build on the critical tools of Western and Islamic thought for “original and creative application”, one that produces an objectively global discourse. Islamism is central to this process as it is not derivative of Western discourse, which dominates academia, and therefore changes the parameters of any theoretical discussion, which to date, are usually set by the West. I wonder how it is that we are meant to find the right balance between developing partial discourses (ex. Western), and the Global discourse. Buck-Morss’ conception of the Global discourse seems like a very dynamic one, building on and learning from partial discourses to give us a more complex, nuanced understanding of the world. No doubt she is for embracing the dissonance (as Kate said in class) of the partial discourses in order to find a new, truly Global space within the greater theoretical discussion. She also talks about the new hegemonic power that will ultimately be determined by the Global public (23). Does this mean that the public will have to simultaneously embrace its own partial discourses and the greater Global one? One of the most difficult tasks that strikes me about Buck-Morss’ plan is finding that balance of embracing the Global discourse/hegemony, while still keeping alive on some level the partial discourses – the fuel of the Global one – while not living under their hegemonies (if I can use that in plural here). The continued evolution of partial discourses will be integral to the fostering of the Global Sphere.
Shifting gears…Buck-Morss’ evaluation of the art world looks at the progression from epistemological to ontological evaluations of art, leading to the eventual reification of artists, which in her mind has rendered the art world “socially impotent”. In my view, Grimonprez makes a similar critique of the art world with Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, in which he laments art’s failure to capitalize on the undeniable power of the image to impact society – a responsibility of art – with the result being that terrorists and the media have co-opted that power. For both Buck-Morss and Grimonprez, “language and image…are being appropriate as weapons by all sides” (Buck-Morss, 63). Academics and artists need to reclaim them. Can artists do that, within the current system? Can they do it outside of the system, or does the system itself need to fundamentally change? Buck-Morss thinks artists can go it alone: she believes that artists, with the aid of new media, can create an open-structured space for art within the Global sphere, and in it, “artists would relinquish their impotent power as residents of the gated community of the artworld in return for social relevance” (72). As noted in class, though, this is an uphill battle in a society in which artists struggle with little meaningful support.
February 27th, 2008 at 2:37 am
In reading Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terror and then viewing Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. I couldn’t help but seek out examples of Baudrillard’s statement of 9/11 as a “Manhattan disaster movie” (29) along with his citing of Ballard’s idea of “reinventing the real as the ultimate and most redoubtable fiction.” (29). It’s rather strange that the film Cloverfield goes right back into Godzilla mode in its depictions of a monster destroying New York. The whole basis for this film’s originality lies in its use of the handycam to further emphasize/project the illusion of realness of the events in the film. Without discussing the terrible plotline and clichéd characterizations, the film only shows footage from the handheld camera and the jumps in time that form the narrative line are the convenient result of injury or accident—the camera only stops when someone falls or dies and then it is passed on to another person.
The camera itself belongs to one of the characters and the tape inside the camera consists of already pre-recorded footage of a love relationship between that character and his girlfriend. The film occasionally splices in parts of this romantic footage in between the disaster footage to authenticate the characters motivation in relation to the progression of the plot and to heighten the emotional tenseness of the disaster footage through contrasts in mood and tone, but most importantly the personal footage works to validate the “realness” of the footage. The film’s narrative works through personal accounts and reactions in an “as if you were there document” that was somehow leaked from the confines of the government.
In thinking about the difference between 9/11, Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. and Cloverfield one has to ask the questions that Baudrillard asks: the pattern of fictional images entering more and more into the territory of the real. I find that nothing has been learned from the media coverage of 9/11. Rather, 9/11 furthered the desire to test the realness of images in a type of cinematic Russian roulette which asks which images are the real bullets? Which images/bullets will hurt us and which images are merely the duds that make the game so exciting. When I say Images as bullets I am playing off of Solanas and Getino’s metaphor for the camera as a gun (tool for revolution) in their essay Towards a Third Cinema. I also say image as bullet because of Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky’s idea that the image can pierce a viewer causing a wound of affect.
I just wanted to be clear about my metaphor as all these different theorists use such interesting metaphors and it is our job to link them together into some form of understanding or as evidence in our own arguments. I say Russian roulette with the image because it seems that there is a small step between the gunshots in the theatre and the gunshots in the streets. It is just interesting that films are working harder and harder to erase the difference between fiction and reality. Even current theme park and 4D theatres are spitting water and air in viewers’ faces to make them feel as it they were struck by something coming out of the film.
In John Water’s satire on the documentary fiction film, Cecil B. DeMented, a terrorist film group hijacks locations and actors all for the purpose of making a fiction film that is real but at the same time a piece of fiction—real in that all the scenes are real hostage situations. They crash a movie theatre in the middle of Patch Adams shooting and screaming and people vomit and pass out in the aisles. Yet the theatre itself is the space where people go to view violence. They are paying to see blood and gore and yet when it appears right in front of the screen but not on the screen, they cannot handle it. For Waters, the media is already dramatising and exploiting dangerous real world situations for the purpose of expressing their projects—it is the viewer’s ironic and passive position (a passive position that secretly wants to be active) that Water’s is satirizing .
All the personal recording devices that are now so accessible can create a selfish and narcissistic desire to be the “first” reporter of images of destruction as if to say “I was the first to come back from the apocalypse and here is my slide show.” (I do not intend to be insensitive to personal trauma accounts but rather inquisitive of the similarity of the (melo)drama behind these documentary accounts to what fiction films utilize in an attempt to authenticate their images as real) This was the essence of Cloverfield and also very evident in the critical strategy of Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y.’s use of the personal accounts of the victims of hijackings. In Dial, there was a certain playfulness or almost erotic excitement of the survivors’ behaviour as they described their accounts that stemmed not necessarily from the (real) events themselves but from the act of (fictionalized/subjective) reporting to the public of those events. These reports strongly contrasted with the non-survival footage such as the images of the woman screaming for her child or the Terrorists themselves being poked and prodded while dying.
These images of blood and death are not safe as they have an immediacy and urgency that the images of the survivors lacked. So I ask: Do “we” (Baudrillard’s we) secretly/unconsciously want to destroy ourselves through the conflation of the real and the fictional as is suggested in films like Cloverfield? Is Hollywood cinema unconsciously communicating something through how these disaster films refer to the media used in 9/11? Is this reference a form of Freud’s death drive (repeated trauma)? Is a film like Cloverfield a form of collective trauma therapy for spectators? If so, which spectators? For me, Cloverfield, is really another shameless form of capitalistic marketing. The suffering victims and terrorists in Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. are the true “real” results of those image/bullets of violence and they embody the difference between films like Cloverfield and Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y.
February 28th, 2008 at 6:34 am
Okay, I can’t get “The Hustle” out of my head in thinking about dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, so I’m going to blog about the use of this song in Grimonprez’s film.
“Bup-bup-bup-budup-budup-bup-buh / Bop-bop-bop-badop-badop-bop-bah . . .”
I guess I don’t know what to make of the song in the context of the film’s meaning. I’m especially confused by its use at the close of the film.
We are presumably supposed to be horrified by the juxtaposition created in the film as Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” plays atop the closing credit montage of crashing 747s. The very inappropriateness of the music selection should unsettle us. What does disco have to do with planes going up in balls of flame and the untimely death of hundreds? (I sincerely hope it’s not a “disco sucks” gesture.) The tasteless juxtaposition of music and image we have here is a not-uncommon device in films today; you can see it at work even in action movies like John Woo’s Face/Off, where a gunfight is “ironically” scored to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Grimonprez, for his part, seems to use “The Hustle” to make a comment on the tastelessness of (American?) media, on their proclivity towards facile, easily consumable depictions of global events as a way to distract attention from the fuller picture (of, for instance, the hijackings recounted in the film and their causes). Yet, Grimonprez also appears to be making a criticism about audiences and the way they consume spectacle, and even revel in it (mere conditioning, or complicity with the media?). How unsettled can we be by the images anyway when Van McCoy’s laying down a big bowl of disco sunshine on the soundtrack? I’m sure I’m not the only one to intuit that Grimonprez’s planes-crashing-to-disco is meant to be darkly humorous, or that it is there as a kind of trap to illustrate our stake in the spectacle of catastrophe: if we laugh, or move a shoe to the groove, we betray our hidden death-drive. That this closing montage is followed by the clip of Clinton and Yeltsin cracking up uncontrollably I think shows Grimonprez’s awareness of the “involuntary” laughter some may experience at his film’s end.
Am I completely misreading this juxtaposition? I’ll continue anyway.
The problem I have with this closing montage (aside from the fact that I think it unfair of the filmmaker to exploit McCoy’s seductive call to boogie in the service of spectacle-baiting) is that for me it creates confusion about the rest of the film’s meaning. If Grimonprez is indeed making any comment about the facileness of the media (I say IF), doesn’t the nature of this juxtaposition—jollity mixed with horror—contradict what we have come to know of the media from the rest of the film, and in our own experience? I mean, in the film we see that the media, even pre-9/11, partake in the kind of grave interpretation of events that approaches—or is already a form of—fear-mongering (the training video for surviving a hijacking, ludicrous as it seems, must have contributed to the growth of unease in the public about hijacking, and served to erase the causes behind it even further). I guess what I’m saying is that the media doesn’t typically find catastrophe funny—it more often milks its scariness for all its worth. The images from 9/11, as re-played again and again in the media, were meant not to desensitize people and make 9/11 palatable, but to impress upon them the severity of the threat America was under and the dangers that lie ahead. In fact, the public very well might have been outraged if the media treated 9/11 as anything less than a serious threat to national security. It seems only artists are capable of playing disco over death without coming across as culpable in any way. (Whew! What a reactionary I am tonight!)
All is not lost yet in this juxtaposition, for there’s still an implication that Grimonprez mainly means to toy with our urge to consume catastrophe as spectacle. We can’t avert our gaze from the plane crash. “The Hustle” mocks us. We know deep down we want to see these images; they’re as irresistible as the music itself (“Do it! Do it” McCoy implores us). We just want death, I guess, and we find it goes down rather well with some musical accompaniment. To paraphrase Bolan: “We dance ourselves into the tomb.” If we’re horrified by the images, perhaps we’re merely projecting our own horror at ourselves, for “The Hustle” has illuminated our death-drive and god knows we must react to suppress it.
I know I’m not the only one who hates this idea that we have an inherent love of suffering. Or that, following Baudrillard, we “want” events like 9/11 to happen to us. Now, I’m as death-obsessed as the next person (call it a perverse comfort in my own mortality), but I can’t see how the desire for the spectacle of catastrophe is innate to human beings. Too many Arnold Schwarzenegger movies as a kid scrambled my brain and made me love explosions. I didn’t think, in my tiny head: “Explosions are great, I wonder if movies have them”; rather the explosions were packaged for me, an impressionable male youth, and meant to inculcate in me a love of war. If we return to what I said about the images of 9/11 not being a desensitizing tool in the media, I seem to contradict myself. How can the media drive home the glitz and palatability of war, and also conversely convince people that destruction is offensive? Well, because the media is a devious, devious thing, and also a very persuasive thing if one is not fortified to read against its grain. The media is capable of many types of conditioning, two of which are: one, the conditioning of movie audiences to love destruction, so as to consolidate their approval of military aggression, and other forms of violence perpetrated by “us” against “them” (the media always assumes you’re on their side); and two, the conditioning of people to see aggression against “us” as a different, more horrifying type of violence.
The spectacle of death is conditioning, not a universal human urge. I’m weaning myself off this type of spectacle (I hope I’ve done so already). All afflicted people, when made properly aware, can do the same.
In conclusion, Grimonprez’s use of “The Hustle” proves points that I don’t entirely agree with.
What did other people make of the ending of the film?
February 28th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I too hated the way the ending of Dial H. The music not only, to use the weird word I employed in class, ‘jangled’ my senses but made me feel sick. I know that this is what cinema attempts to do to create an impact, a real affect, but it also seemed to go beyond ‘extreme’ into a realm of insensitivity. However, one might argue that extremism always serves its pragmatic cause by prodding those who are normally somnambulent observers into a realization of what is really going on with the portrayal of violence in everyday culture.
Cameron, you mention that you like explosions, and this makes me think of the Zizek comment on how violence (and sex) are how we get to the ‘real’. Maybe I should save this line of thought for next week’s postings…
March 1st, 2008 at 3:11 pm
This post is also in Week 7 Reading Comments:
I really hope I’m entering this in the right place…
Zizek gives three reason for going to war: the 1st – “a sincere ideological belief that the USA was bringing democracy and prosperity to another nation” – doesn’t seem compatible with the other two – 2) “the urge brutally to assert and demonstrate unconditional US hegemony and 3) control of Iraq’s oil reserves.”
If the 2nd and 3rd our true then the 1st cannot be a sincere belief.
Is this Zizek speaking about this in the way he proposes we talk about Judaism/ Zionism and “good” Islam/ “bad” Islam? – where he suggests that we should “…transpose the gap, the tension, into the very core of Judaism [Islam, and for the purposes of my question -the reasons behind invading Iraq).” That we should “conceive of this resistance as an open chance, as “undecidable”…the task is how to work out how to use this ambiguous fact politically.”
What I understand best from what I’ve quoted above, is through this next quote: “transpose the site of antagonism and inconsistency into the very core of the religious edifice, not to dismiss it as pertaining only to the secondary fundamentalist misuse.” And while appreciating this thought, I’m having a hard time applying it to the three reasons he gives for going to war – and I think that is because this reading has challenged the way I conceive of “responsibility.” Who should be held responsible for the war? Who is accountable? One of the main players that comes to my mind is the State (the U.S State) – and I realize that while I critique, discourage and work against “esentialzing” subjects, I esentialize the State. And I’m not sure if that’s something I want to “work against” Can we/ should we apply our ideas of “de-centering,” ideas about the “floating signifier” to the State?
And by asking this question, I’m not saying that Zizek is suggesting that we apply these ideas to the State…because he goes on to talk about “concrete universality,” which sounds like the antithesis of “de-centering,” “pluralities”…
So my last question is - what is “concrete universality”? I can’t seem to put together an understanding of this Hegelian concept through what I found on the internet (and there is no Wiki site for this!! ☺)
March 5th, 2008 at 1:08 am
What Dial History does, that a post-9/11 film wouldn’t dare, is romanticize a hijacker. This is evident in the poetic opening line, which states “Shouldn’t death be a swan dive, graceful, white winged and smooth? Leaving the surface undisturbed.” The plight of the hijacker is that of the dark horse. He or she strives against all odds. “Get killed and maybe they will notice you.” If they are turned into an object by the image they have arguably become famous, or at least noticed. As the film suggests, “Nothing truly happens until it is consumed.” This romanticization and consumption of the hijacker is exemplified by two stories within the film. The first story concerns the first
Transatlantic hijack, which is carried out by Vietnam Vet, Raffaele Minichiello, who takes an airliner back home to Rome. He is treated like a celebrity afterwards, and the camera captures him as a real life James Bond. The second story is of Leila Khaled, a female hijacker who gained celebrity status in the late sixties for her multiple skyjackings. This film not only romanticizes the hijacker, it also highlights the dramatic possibilities of hijacking. In the 90’s Hollywood became aware of these dramatic possibilities, which can be seen in the plots of numerous nineties films: Die Hard 2 (1990), Passenger 57(1992), Executive Decision (1996), Air Force One (1997) and Con-Air (1997). These films might not have glorified the hijacker, but instead used the dramatic situation as the narrative backdrop. Even though the medium of film capitalized on the dramatic possibilities of skyjacking in the 90’s, television was, and still is, its ideal medium. Ohner suggests that the hijacking process could take numerous days and the television apparatus was able to update the spectator at any time with breaking news on the exciting story with images and sound through a live feed. Anything could happen and it pressed the same emotional buttons as reality television: fear, excitement, joy and sorrow. Ohner’s article states that, “After cinema outstripped the airplane as a dream factory, the dream of flying returned on television as a nightmare.”
Since television is the ideal medium for hijacking, Grimonprez recreates the participatory effect of television in his film through editing and the images he selected. The way in which he edits the images together creates a zapping effect, discussed in further detail in his interview with Obrist. The zapping effect creates an illusion of channel surfing and commercial interruptions. If the television viewer controls the remote, or zapping device, they are able to scan through images at any speed, creating a collage effect, perhaps, without even knowing it. Grimonprez’s example of the collage effect through zapping relates to images of war on CNN spliced together with commercials for strawberry ice cream. The idea of zapping follows the ‘supermarket metaphor, which suggests that the viewer can pick or choose what they want to see when they want to see it. With the ability to fast forward and rewind, the medium of television becomes the controller of time, and thus more participatory. There is even a sequence in the film where the screen is imageless and blue text reads “Insert commercial here.” Using McLuhanism’s, Grimonprez tries to make the hot, passive medium of film, cold and participatory. In the interview with Obrist, Grimonprez states that he “wanted to make films with an ideology of ‘zapping’ which can be thought of as an extreme version of poetry, going much further then a collage”. After watching Dial History it seems as though he has succeeded.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Unfortunately I had to miss this class and discussion, so I can only add a couple of perhaps redundant and obscure thoughts.
I found I absolutely and uncritically loved the chapters by Susan Buck Morss. From the opening characterizations of Chiapas as a cosmopolitan articulation translating indigenous cultural experience, and 9/11 as mute; into the essential observations of Islamism as a modern discourse; through the clear as day examples of an epistemological construct versus an ontological construct in modern discourses around politics; and so on – I found it all enormously readable and relevant.
Her points about 9/11 on pgs 23 and 93 (including Stockhauser’s comment that 9/11 was “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos”) reminded me of a conversation with a Brazilian friend at the time who said he found the attacks to be “Brilliant – Biblical”, his sense of it being that the towers were a symbol of Western vanity and arrogance, and the “global spectacle” created was one of Biblical symbolism and proportions. Clearly these less empathic and more socio-cultural reads of the event were happening a lot at the time, if with much censure.
The Derrida interview made me pause on occasion for the reasons that Ananya has articulated so well, but I did not identify it as clearly at first read. It seemed hinted at in phrases such as “the absence of an Enlightenment age”(122) – as if, obviously, Western Europe is the society to which all others are compared, measured, and in this case found to be lacking. Concern for this kind of value judgment rendered the vital discussion regarding universal human rights feel passionate but not complete.
However I did enjoy his wrangling with the term globalization and the fundamental point that ongoing inequalities render the term questionable – as if the increasing movement of moneys, medias and peoples across borders means nothing if it does not bring forms of justice with it. A noble sentiment.
March 15th, 2008 at 10:40 am
If terrorism is tre new art, can/should it be able to apply for a government grant? Should we be taking images of people blown up or destroyed buildings into museums? Indeed one might argue that it is government sponsored, depending on how feels government/coporate dealings with the Middle East and its various militias/leaders.
Buck-Morris continues on the discussion of what constitutes art in our contemporary world of synthetics and simulacrums, with a prime example being Guitar Hero, or Rock-Band (y learn to play a real instrument when you can pretend?!?!?!). But we seem to be entering a new emotion with respect to the art world. It seems as though we are creating aculture of cruelty, in which that which is art or even entertainment bust be not simply controversial or provocative, but vindictive.
Terrorism as art, is signaling a sort of public conscious shift towards sadism to which we enter both as creators and specators. Discussions about the images of 9/11 have included the notions of spectatorship, in that the frenzied repetition is “our” way of dealing with the trauma, however the images and our relationship to the images go further than “it was like watching a movie”. Indeed, as we move to towards a more global techno culture and as we slowly become cyborgs, the images of 9/11 best articulate the over feeling of a constant dream like existence, in which the images we watch are by extension “art” or “virtual” not only because they are spectacles meant to comment on culture, but that our inability to understand them, or to actually see them as something real, speaks to psycho-hybridization in which digital saturation of the consciouss produces an anti-thetical resistance.
We have seen this before, it is not real and ergo we are not responsible. Yet, the lingering feeling as exemplified by the repeated viewings suggests that there is still something to to be salvaged.
April 13th, 2008 at 5:24 am
In our class discussion of this matter, these questions of art terrorism and, as Angelo puts it, terrorism as the new art, emerged. As the ‘happening’ evolved, it was somehow castrated, because what had been new and unusual now had provisions made for it with granting agencies, it had forums designed for it, it had an audience. Terrorism could, of course, function like this too. My own memory of the London bombings and the arrest last year (or longer ago?) of a number of men planning to bomb the Canadian parliament was that people around me were saying that they had grown accustomed to this, that after 9/11, they could no longer be shocked, and I’m sure that one said in hindsight that he had not been surprised by 9/11, that it provoked the same ‘ho-hum’ from him as any other terrorist attack since. It seems terrible to me that we pose our discussion of terrorism around art (the film being seen in our context forces us to, of course) because in most cases even the most participatory public art is made for an audience that is willing to participate in kind. It is not a bomb in a museum. Terrorism affects people who did not agree to its terms - they are not simply bystanders (like Christo and Jean-Claude’s witnesses), rather, terrorism targets people who have not anticipated and will only regret the terrorist’s ‘happening’ that has decided to target them. If a work of art’s sole purpose was the humiliation of its opponents, we would find it very difficult to talk about it as valid art, because undue exploitation is profoundly unartistic, and this may seem old-fashioned but it does persist in the present when our definitions of art and the purpose of the art ‘world’ are so complex and uneven.
To relate this back to our own discipline, the treatment of the terrorist act as art - not the images, not the news coverage, not the discourse that springs up around any such event, but the event itself - is like the treatment of a snuff film (say the Bernardo-Homolka tape) as a film worthy of lengthy analysis, one with debatable merits that we would benefit in our cultural knowledge from watching. I do not contend that discussion is not necessary (I do not contend that terrorism cannot be conceived as art), but some parallels are simply beyond reproach.