Week 13: Passages
Once again, I’ll invite you this week to share a (relatively brief) passage from one of this week’s readings, one that you’d particularly like to bring forward for discussion. I’ll ask everyone to comment on their choice in Thursday’s class, but you’re welcome to share a few thoughts here, as well.
17 Comments
Alex Riedel
If I may, I have three smaller excerpts which I would like to cite together:
“What matters in ‘Marienbad’ is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images…” (6).
“Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” (9).
“The function of criticism should be to show ‘how it is what it is,’ even ‘that it is what it is,’ rather than to show ‘what it means'” (10).
(Does anyone know how to italicize words on here? Ha!)
Serena
Whoops, misposted this last week!
Tomkins via Sedgwick
“Any theory of wide generality is capable of accounting for a wide spectra of phenomena which appear to be very remote, one from the other, and from a common source. This is a commonly accepted criterion by which the explanatory power of any scientific theory can be evaluated. To the extent to which the theory can account only for ‘near’ phenomena, it is a weak theory, little better than [a description]. As it orders more and more remote phenomena into a single formulation, its power grows. […] We can now see more clearly that although a restricted and weak theory may not always successfully protect the individual against negative affect, it is difficult for it to remain weak unless it does so. Conversely, a negative affect theory gains in strength, paradoxically, by virtue of the continuing failures of its strategies to afford protection through successful avoidance of the expreince of negative affect…”
134, Paranoid Reading
Serena
My questions being:
Does categorizing theories as strong or weak only work for affect theory?
What is the difference between critical and scientific theory? (is critical theory just weaker?)
Which texts are hospitable to paranoid reading, and which are inhospitable?
“Protection” from what?
Alex Lleras
Once again, my excerpt can’t be directly copy-pasted, but it runs from:
“A further problem with these critical practices…” to the end of the following paragraph which concludes “we must admit that the efficacy and directionality of such acts reside somewhere else than in their relation to knowledge per se.” (Sedgwick 140-141)
My apologies, Queen Sedgwick, I was unfamiliar with your game.
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
The game is indeed IMPRESSIVE!
Irene
“This algorithmic automanifestation, infinitizing identification and reduplicating direction, rivets immediacy as theory style for our time. Across a variety of disciplines, theory-the very tool that should help fathom how dominant culture is determined by the circulation-forward base-has now itself been submerged by immediacy as endgame.”( Kornbluh, 151)
Alice Ascoli (she/her)
“Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal of affliction of modern life” (Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 13).
When did complexity become redundant irrelevancy? How might engaging with these “several levels” be a way, in Shklovsky’s words against our unconscious, lazy automatisms, to “live through the making of a thing” — an artwork?
Dana
To what extent might Felski’s methodological shift orient us away from the dialectical methodology or Hegelianism of many of the texts we’ve read this semester? If so, does this shift us back to Kant, or in another direction entirely?
Jodie Kahan (she/her)
From Sedgwick: “Furthermore, the force of any interpretive project of unveiling hidden violence would seem to depend on a cultural context, like the one as- sumed in Foucault’s early works, in which violence would be deprecated and hence hidden in the first place. Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enrolled in the penal system? In the United States and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires ex- posure, there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hyper-visible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle, rather than remaining to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. Human rights controversy around, for example, torture and disappear- ances in Argentina, or the use of mass rape as part of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, marks-not an unveiling ofpractices that had been hidden or naturalized – but a wrestle of different frameworks of visibility. That is, violence that was from the beginning exemplary and spectacular, pointedly addressed, meant to serve as a public warning or terror to members of a particular community, is combated by efforts to displace and redirect (as well as simply expand) its aperture of visibility” (140).
Joanna
Here are my slides for today (with quotes and questions):
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1uy4FJ6yTJZLfrxSILLq_1Fhphk_DQ_oEda7XgBNWrWM/edit?usp=sharing
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
Thanks, Joanna!
Peter
Kornbluh, 151
“Hear in this electric charge immediacy as urgency, immediacy as immersive interiority, immediacy as infintesimal tesselation – and, of course, hear the rhyme with Kausgaard’s acid-brilliant flat ontology: everything is everything.”
We were unsure of how to categorize the narrative style and almost documentarian content of Brim’s essay from last week. This quote from Kornbluh seems to legitimize Brim’s technique as a way forward. I for one am glad that we’ve been seeing more syntactical style, less of the Adorno / Horkheimer monolithically sedimentary prose. The imperative “hear!” is especially interesting.
Francesca
Sorry this is a bit late, but this is from Felski, pp. 5:
Why is it that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, sub- vert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage? What sustains their assurance that a text is withholding something of vital importance, that their task is to ferret out what lies concealed in its recesses and margins? Why is critique so frequently feted as the most serious and scrupulous form of thought? What intellectual and imaginative alternatives does it overshadow, obscure, or overrule? And what are the costs of such ubiquitous criticality?
Peter
Another post..connecting to the notion of immediacy, Sedgewick and Miller’s temporality of paranoia “that burrows both backward and forward” is really interesting..
Sedgewick, 133
“The contingent possibilities of thinking otherwise than through “sexual difference” are subordinated to the paranoid imperative that, if the violence of such gender reification cannot be definitively halted in advance, it must at least never arrive on any conceptual scene as a surprise. In a paranoid view, it is more dangerous for such reification ever to be unanticipated than often to be unchallenged.”
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
I apologize for the late post!
“Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation. Directed to set, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really- or, really means-A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?” (Sontag 3)
Coco Fitterman
Immediacy as self-substantiation metabolizes many flights of late-twentieth-century theory: authentications of situated knowing, elev~tions of personal experience, suspicions of grand narratives, transpositions of politics into ethos, and promotion of autoethnography across the disciplines. At the same time, this metabolic process should not be received as an organic trajectory endogenous to theory, since it so overdetermined by the crush in parallel domains: in literature (autofiction, #OwnVoices, self-help, university writing pedagogy); in the “speak your truth” industrial ·complex (personal branding, confessionalism); in perspectival cinematography and the intimate ambient video stream; in the algorithmic base of i-tech (exponential information organized by binary oppositions of ones and zeros); and in the instantaneity of the just-in-time, ondemand circul_ation economy. The startling redefinition of praxis as deluging self-presencing belongs, in other words, to a bustling market-one that capaciously promotes manifestism as internal redress of its own depravities, and flow as dissolution of its own contradictions. (Kornbluh 157).
I’m feeling torn about Kornbluh’s critique of immediacy as anti-theory… on the one hand, I agree with her that we should look at the turn to the first-person with a wary eye, and when she gets to the marketability of the first-person I am pretty much with her, but on the other hand, i feel like her takedown of some forms of the first-person are just….mean? Like…not all art that deals with the personal is subsumed by capital and is anti-collective, imo… Curious to hear what others think!
Coco Fitterman
Sorry, I also meant to add a follow-up– do we think that Sedgewick’s opening to “Paranoid Reading”– namely her recounting of a personal anecdote, picking a friend’s brain– is an example of the first-person which Kornbluh is trying to critique?? Because that’s where I’d disagree, I think there is tremendous potential in drawing on the personal in this way… but perhaps I’m misunderstanding Kornbluh.