by Tina Mai Chen cultural critique No.58 (autumn, 2004), pp82-114
internationalism, film consumption
"Nor do analysts generally consider forms of consumption located in noncapitalist contexts that promote alternative globally situated subjects."
"soviet union's Today is our tomorrow."
"how consistency, in the domain of the popular, of slogans that associated the (good) Soviet Union with China's future enabled a malleable internationalism to remain 'popular' even across the divide of the Sino-Soviet split at the end of the 1950s. " "internaltionalism referred not only to Sino-Soviet relations; it invoked a utopian vision of an alternatively ordered world order premised on international proletarian revolution as well as the pragmatic politics of a Cold War world in which the strength of nation-states figured prominently."
Korean War-- soviet films "gongke bolin" elements of a larger ongoing common struggle
model women
reference: Tina, Tina Mai. "Female Icon, Feminist Iconography? Socalist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China." Gender & History 15, no.2 (August 2003):268-95
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Plastic (1957 Roland Barthes)
Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyetheylene), plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy. At the entrance of the stand, the public waits in a long queue in order to witness the accomplishment of the magical operation par excellence: the transformation of matter. An ideally-shaped machine, tubulated and oblong (a shape well suited to suggest the secret of an itinerary) effortlessly draws, out of a heap of greenish crystals, shiny and fluted dressing-room tidies. At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-god, half-robot.
Doing Cooking (Luce Giard)
One day finally, when I was twenty, I got my own small apartment, apart from school barracks, that included a rudimentary but sufficient facility in which to prepare my meals. I discovered myself invested with care of preparing my own food,delighted with being able to to escape from the noise and crowds of college cafeterias and from the shuttling back and forth to face preordained menus. But how was I to proceed? I did not know how to do anything. It was not a question of waiting for or asking advice from the women in the family because that would have implied returning to the maternal hearth and agreeing to slip back into that discarded feminine model. The solution seemed obvious: just like everything else, these sorts of things could be learned in books. All I had to do was find in a bookstore a source of information that was 'simple','quick','modern' and 'inexperience', according to my then naive vocabulary. And in order to secure the means to do so (at least, so I thought), I undertook the close study of a paperback cookbook devoid of both illustrations and 'feminine' flourishes. To my mind, this absence endowed the book with eminent practical value and sure efficiency.
From the groping experience of my initial gestures, my trials and errors, there remains this one surprise: I thought I had never learned or observed anything, having obstinately wanted to escape from the contagion of a young girl's education and because I had always preferred my room, my books, and my silent games to the kitchen where my mother busied herself. Yet, my childhood gaze had seen and memorized certain gestures, and my sense memory had kept track of certain tastes, smells and colors. I already knew all the sounds: the gentle hiss of simmering water, the sputtering of melting meet drippings, and the dull thud of the kneading hand. A recipe or an inductive word sufficed to arouse a strange anamnesis whereby ancient knowledge and primitive experiences were reactivated in fragments of which I was the heiress and guardian without wanting to be. I had to admit that I too had been provided with a woman's knowledge and that it had crept into me, slipping past my mind's surveillance. It was something that came to me from my body and that integrated me into the great crops of women of my lineage, incorporating me into their anonymous ranks.
I discovered bit by bit not the pleasure of eating good meals (I am seldom drawn to solitary delights), but that of manipulating raw materials, of organizing, combining, modifying, and inventing. I learned the tranquil joy of anticipated hospitality, when one prepares a meal to share with friends in the same way in which one composes a party tune or draws: with moving hands, careful fingers, the whole body inhabited with the rhythm of working, and the mind awakening, freed from its own ponderousness, flitting from idea to memory, finally seizing on a certain chain of thought, and then modulating this tattered writing once again. Thus, surreptitiously and without suspecting it, I had been invested with the secret, tenacious pleasure of doing-cooking.
From the groping experience of my initial gestures, my trials and errors, there remains this one surprise: I thought I had never learned or observed anything, having obstinately wanted to escape from the contagion of a young girl's education and because I had always preferred my room, my books, and my silent games to the kitchen where my mother busied herself. Yet, my childhood gaze had seen and memorized certain gestures, and my sense memory had kept track of certain tastes, smells and colors. I already knew all the sounds: the gentle hiss of simmering water, the sputtering of melting meet drippings, and the dull thud of the kneading hand. A recipe or an inductive word sufficed to arouse a strange anamnesis whereby ancient knowledge and primitive experiences were reactivated in fragments of which I was the heiress and guardian without wanting to be. I had to admit that I too had been provided with a woman's knowledge and that it had crept into me, slipping past my mind's surveillance. It was something that came to me from my body and that integrated me into the great crops of women of my lineage, incorporating me into their anonymous ranks.
I discovered bit by bit not the pleasure of eating good meals (I am seldom drawn to solitary delights), but that of manipulating raw materials, of organizing, combining, modifying, and inventing. I learned the tranquil joy of anticipated hospitality, when one prepares a meal to share with friends in the same way in which one composes a party tune or draws: with moving hands, careful fingers, the whole body inhabited with the rhythm of working, and the mind awakening, freed from its own ponderousness, flitting from idea to memory, finally seizing on a certain chain of thought, and then modulating this tattered writing once again. Thus, surreptitiously and without suspecting it, I had been invested with the secret, tenacious pleasure of doing-cooking.
Monday, January 10, 2011
comments on the society of the spectacle
Guy Debord translated by Malcolm Imrie (London, NewYork :Verso 1990)
P8-9
In 1967 I distinguished two rival and successive forms of spectacular power, the concentrated and the diffuse.... Since then a third form has been established, through a rational combination of these two, and on the basis of a general victory of the form which had showed itself stronger: the diffuse. This is the integrated spectacle, which has since tended to impose itself globally.
....
The intergrated spectacle shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learnt to employ both these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards concentration, the controlling center has now become occult: never to be occupied by a know leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse side, the spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the full range of socially produced behaviour and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this-- that it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today,no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality....
It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labour suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety; all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalised disapperance of all real ability. A financier can be a singer. a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophise on cookery techniques as if they were landmarks in universal history. Anyone can join in the spectacle, in order publicly to adopt, or sometimes secretly practise, an entirely different acticity from whatever specialism first made their name....
P8-9
In 1967 I distinguished two rival and successive forms of spectacular power, the concentrated and the diffuse.... Since then a third form has been established, through a rational combination of these two, and on the basis of a general victory of the form which had showed itself stronger: the diffuse. This is the integrated spectacle, which has since tended to impose itself globally.
....
The intergrated spectacle shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learnt to employ both these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards concentration, the controlling center has now become occult: never to be occupied by a know leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse side, the spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the full range of socially produced behaviour and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this-- that it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today,no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality....
It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labour suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety; all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalised disapperance of all real ability. A financier can be a singer. a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophise on cookery techniques as if they were landmarks in universal history. Anyone can join in the spectacle, in order publicly to adopt, or sometimes secretly practise, an entirely different acticity from whatever specialism first made their name....
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
What is cinema? II Andre Bazin
An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism
p26-27
Every form of aesthetic must necessarily choose between what is worth preserving and what should be discarded, and what should not even be considered. But when this aesthetic aims in essence at creating the illusion of reality, as does the cinema, this choice sets up a fundamental contradiction which is at once unacceptable and necessary: necessary because art can only exist when such a choice is made. Without it, supposing total cinema was here and now technically possible, we would go back purely to reality. Unacceptable because it would be done definitely a the expense of that reality which the cinema proposes to restore integrally. That is why it would be absurd to resist every new technical development aiming to add to the realism of cinema, namely sound, color, and stereoscopy. Actually the "art" of cinema lives off this contradiction. It gets the most out of the potential for abstraction and symbolism provided by the present limits of the screen, but this utilization of the residue of conventions abandoned by technique can work either to the advantage or to the detriment of realism. It can magnify or neutralize the effectiveness of the elements of reality that camera captures. One might group, if not classify in order of importance, the various styles of cinematography in terms of he added measure of reality. We would define as "realist," then, all narrative means tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen. Each introduces, for didactic or aesthetic reasons, abstractions that operate more or less corrosively and thus do not permit the original to subsist in its entirety. At the conclusion of this inevitable and necessary "chemical" action, for the initial reality there has been substituted an illusion of reality composed of abstraction (black and white, plane surface), of conventions (the rules of montage, for example), and of authentic reality. It is a necessary illusion but it quickly induces a loss of awareness of the reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its cinematographic representation. As for the film maker, the moment he has secured this unwitting complicity of the public, he is increasingly tempted to ignore reality. From habit and laziness he reaches the point when he himself is no longer able to tell where lies begin or end.....
p31
The style becomes the inner dynamic principle of the narrative, somewhat like the relations of energy to matter or the specific physics of the work, as it were. This it is which distributes the fragmented realities across the aesthetic spectrum of the narrative, which polarizes the filings of facts without changing their chemical composition.
p32
It calls for the ease and sure eye of Rossellini,Lattuada, Vergano, and de Santis. In their hands the camera is endowed with well-defined cinematographic tact, wonderfully sensitive antennae which allow them with one stroke to get precisely what then are after.
p26-27
Every form of aesthetic must necessarily choose between what is worth preserving and what should be discarded, and what should not even be considered. But when this aesthetic aims in essence at creating the illusion of reality, as does the cinema, this choice sets up a fundamental contradiction which is at once unacceptable and necessary: necessary because art can only exist when such a choice is made. Without it, supposing total cinema was here and now technically possible, we would go back purely to reality. Unacceptable because it would be done definitely a the expense of that reality which the cinema proposes to restore integrally. That is why it would be absurd to resist every new technical development aiming to add to the realism of cinema, namely sound, color, and stereoscopy. Actually the "art" of cinema lives off this contradiction. It gets the most out of the potential for abstraction and symbolism provided by the present limits of the screen, but this utilization of the residue of conventions abandoned by technique can work either to the advantage or to the detriment of realism. It can magnify or neutralize the effectiveness of the elements of reality that camera captures. One might group, if not classify in order of importance, the various styles of cinematography in terms of he added measure of reality. We would define as "realist," then, all narrative means tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen. Each introduces, for didactic or aesthetic reasons, abstractions that operate more or less corrosively and thus do not permit the original to subsist in its entirety. At the conclusion of this inevitable and necessary "chemical" action, for the initial reality there has been substituted an illusion of reality composed of abstraction (black and white, plane surface), of conventions (the rules of montage, for example), and of authentic reality. It is a necessary illusion but it quickly induces a loss of awareness of the reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its cinematographic representation. As for the film maker, the moment he has secured this unwitting complicity of the public, he is increasingly tempted to ignore reality. From habit and laziness he reaches the point when he himself is no longer able to tell where lies begin or end.....
p31
The style becomes the inner dynamic principle of the narrative, somewhat like the relations of energy to matter or the specific physics of the work, as it were. This it is which distributes the fragmented realities across the aesthetic spectrum of the narrative, which polarizes the filings of facts without changing their chemical composition.
p32
It calls for the ease and sure eye of Rossellini,Lattuada, Vergano, and de Santis. In their hands the camera is endowed with well-defined cinematographic tact, wonderfully sensitive antennae which allow them with one stroke to get precisely what then are after.
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Condition of postmodernity
17 Time-space compression and the postmodern condition
the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation: new organizational forms and new technologies in production----- vertical disintegration reduce turnover time
parallel acceleration in exchange and consumption--- the mobilization of fashion and shift from the consumption of goods to the consumption of services
volatility and ephemerality
1 a temporariness in the structure of both public and personal value systems crack-up of consensus and the diversification of values within a fragmenting society
2 difficult to engage in any long-term planning "yuppie flu" schizophrenic mentality
3 production of volatility entails manipulation of taste and opinion constructnion of new sigh systems and imagery
p289 "The emphemerality of such images can then be interpreted in part as a struggle on the part of the oppressed groups of whatever sort to establish their own identity(in terms of street culture, musical styles, fads and fashions made up for themselves) and the rush to convert those innovations to commercial advantage(Carnaby Street in the late 1960s proved an excellent pioneer.)"
simulacrum
4 the loss of a sense of the future except and insofar as the future can be discounted into the present
a merging of the cinema of distraction with the cinema of futuristic universes (what does "cinema of distraction" mean is it opposed to "cinema of attraction"?)
5 a crisis of explanatory logic "the triumph of effect over cause, of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of surface and of pure objectivization over the depth of desire"
an explosion of opposed sentiments and tendencies: insurance, religious revival, the search for authenticity and authorities in politics photographs become a generator of a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of consumerist culture and fashion. The home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space compression.
money as unreliable representation of value and a crisis of representation in advanced capitalism
money has never been a clear or unambiguous representation of value, and on occasion it becomes so muddled as to become itself a major source of insecurity and uncertainty.
298 The rapidity with which currency markets fluctuate across the world's spaces, the extraordinary power of money capital flow in what is now a global stock and financial market, and the volatility of what the purchasing power of money might represent, define, as it were, a high point of that highly problematic intersection of money, time, and space as interlocking elements of social power in the political economy of postmodernity.
The central value system, to which capitalism has always appealed to validate and gauge its actions, is dematerialized and shifting, time horizons are collapsing, and it is hard to tell exactly what space we are in when it comes to addressing causes and effects, meanings or values.
The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities)in the same space and time. a) divergent possibilities cultivating a whole series of simulacra as milieu of escape, fantasy and distraction b) the search for secure moorings in a shifting world place-identity
the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation: new organizational forms and new technologies in production----- vertical disintegration reduce turnover time
parallel acceleration in exchange and consumption--- the mobilization of fashion and shift from the consumption of goods to the consumption of services
volatility and ephemerality
1 a temporariness in the structure of both public and personal value systems crack-up of consensus and the diversification of values within a fragmenting society
2 difficult to engage in any long-term planning "yuppie flu" schizophrenic mentality
3 production of volatility entails manipulation of taste and opinion constructnion of new sigh systems and imagery
p289 "The emphemerality of such images can then be interpreted in part as a struggle on the part of the oppressed groups of whatever sort to establish their own identity(in terms of street culture, musical styles, fads and fashions made up for themselves) and the rush to convert those innovations to commercial advantage(Carnaby Street in the late 1960s proved an excellent pioneer.)"
simulacrum
4 the loss of a sense of the future except and insofar as the future can be discounted into the present
a merging of the cinema of distraction with the cinema of futuristic universes (what does "cinema of distraction" mean is it opposed to "cinema of attraction"?)
5 a crisis of explanatory logic "the triumph of effect over cause, of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of surface and of pure objectivization over the depth of desire"
an explosion of opposed sentiments and tendencies: insurance, religious revival, the search for authenticity and authorities in politics photographs become a generator of a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of consumerist culture and fashion. The home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space compression.
money as unreliable representation of value and a crisis of representation in advanced capitalism
money has never been a clear or unambiguous representation of value, and on occasion it becomes so muddled as to become itself a major source of insecurity and uncertainty.
298 The rapidity with which currency markets fluctuate across the world's spaces, the extraordinary power of money capital flow in what is now a global stock and financial market, and the volatility of what the purchasing power of money might represent, define, as it were, a high point of that highly problematic intersection of money, time, and space as interlocking elements of social power in the political economy of postmodernity.
The central value system, to which capitalism has always appealed to validate and gauge its actions, is dematerialized and shifting, time horizons are collapsing, and it is hard to tell exactly what space we are in when it comes to addressing causes and effects, meanings or values.
The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities)in the same space and time. a) divergent possibilities cultivating a whole series of simulacra as milieu of escape, fantasy and distraction b) the search for secure moorings in a shifting world place-identity
Thursday, January 8, 2009
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