What follows is a few thoughts that derived from the symposium Slowly learning to survive the desire to simplify: a symposium on critical documents, which was hosted by IASPIS in Stockholm, 15-17 September, 2006. The symposium was initiated by the Produktionsenheten, and co-directed by IASPIS and NIFCA.
NUMEROUS DEFLECTIONS ON CONTRIVING CRITICAL DOCUMENTS
CONSTANTINOS TALIOTIS
Still on the periphery of the symposium, and my eyes capture what would become, by the end, an agent to ferment those articulated: Before its news, its Reuters a fast commercial scrolled down the flickering screens in Arlanda Express while the train was cutting through Stockholm. Now, at the other edge of the weekend Slowly learning to survive the desire to simplify: a symposium on critical documents, having left Arlanda and its expressions, I seize the remnants trying to extract and plot a documental critique based upon those one thousand and one narratives, that accumulated like bugs within the greenhouse (metaphorically as well as literally since the heat was soaking the brains) staged by IASPIS to facilitate cerebral brewing.
Which way are they to fly; such a question rings a bell. Hello? You can either spend hours on the phone listening to 8 bit mono jingle tunes while waiting to be forwarded to the one, or hang up and seek elsewhere. The terms dissemination and distribution buzzed more regularly than the flick stones of our lighters. Unfortunately the problematic had to be addressed: criticality does not fly out of the window with the
same intensity as the cigarette buds. Where, then, are critical documents to take off from?
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Faced with a mainstream media that ceased to produce and present the chronicle that elucidates social events, and leans towards a uniformity of politics removed from the realm of the political, according to the distinction provided by Alain Badiou, Stefan Jonsson speculates a role switch between journalism and the canon of aesthetics. That is to say that the latter has become an actor in expressing the political and has undertaken the task of (full)filling the gulf left behind . This proposition put forward in Jonssons article Facts of aesthetics and fictions of journalism, has provided the spark for the gathering, as members of Produktionsenheten, the initiators, explain. Such thesis made me toss around while funning the pages of the symposiums reader. Scratching my head I wonder how come the cultural producer has inherited such a miasma. A burden that maneuvers it towards crusading expeditions to reveal, expose and enlighten Aufklärung with all its linguistic ambivalences that Hito Steyerl remarked; that of revelation and redemption (Aufklärung), that of pornographic voyeurism (Aufklärungfilme) and that of the military reconnaissance to produce the counter narratives, egress and utter the unspeakable and the under-spoken and therefore complement the puzzle of bipolarity: mainstream vs. alternative by the completion of which we can all live happily ever after. I can feel a tail growing from my coccyx as I keep tossing uncomfortably. I toss more between scratching my head and moving my tail.
Tale wins. Tale wins a priori. Prior to bipolarity, and in advance of an empty gulf. The urgency to reveal criticality from aesthetic documents has been falsely perceived inrespect to their proximity to the political (Allan Sekula is by no surprise one of the most critically acclaimed practitioners and apologists of this canon) as though the notion of criticality is a PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) of a real politic endowing. Where tale and storytelling escape victoriously, is on their attribute, not to produce narratives that postulate a responsive capacity in this case to mainstream media - but rather a discursive one beyond the ambit of either the political or politics. Discursiveness and criticality have proved their quality to emerge from narratives beyond the domain of the commitment to the political or the real, in works such as Matthew Buckinghams film Muhheakantuck Everything has a name via a voyeuristic and boring narration of (a) (hi)story on the river Hudson accompanied by the poetic language in the narrated text and Rabih Mroués performance Make me stop smoking which executed the vulnerability of accessing the real especially with the injection of dubiety by Jee-Eun Kim, who was co- moderating the event with Stefan Jonsson, in respect to its factuality, declaring I dont believe a thing of what you just said responding to Mroués presentation or even the brief mention to The Simpsons as a model of combining wide dissemination and effective criticality via frivolity; works that have been perceived, still critically, under the light of a potential fictional route or tail rather than evidence based documentary ones. Effective critique (the change in spelling from c to que is an intentional one), therefore, is not the byproduct of compiling bipolarities (as deconstruction has very well taught us) but of deflectivity; through the employment of discursive methods in the production of documents that hint an odor, that plot narratives not to complete or oppose but to elsewhere; not to verbs but adverbs. What is one to pursue is not platforms and channels for disseminating and distributing criticism or critical documents, but of empowering critiques. And within such critiques, both Reuters and art, regardless of their factuality or their fictiveness, become sources of knowledge, territories for discourse and providers of criticality. After all, the question is not where critical documents can take off from, since they have always already ascended. Never has before the practice of PR integrated to such an extend with that of the cultural producer, that being due to the excessive access to mobility I can hardly remember any of the speakers not praising the quantity of the audience -, or the accessible publishing methodologies flourishing particularly in the internet i.e. iquindici.org introduced by Monica Mazzitelly, that functions as an actor in literature circulation under the copyleft clause, not to mention youtube.com, myspace.com or the blog and vlog cultures. The empowerment of critiques can be triggered anywhere, in hotel bars and corridors, in the boats to Tallinn or in Arlanda Expresses. The quest, therefore, is not for airfields but for critique-al scopes and telescopes.
There has been a simple precondition that differentiated Patrik Sjöbergs
presentation Film, Law and the Culture(s) of evidence from the other speakers that stepped on the podium, which located it in a dissimilar realm. Even though the documents Sjöberg presented were the least contiguous to the so call real unlike those of warfare utilized by Hito Steyerl, the films Angelina Bartl employed in her critique of feminist representation, or even the lists of documents Rabih Mroués accumulated mostly based on documented collective and personal histories due to their technological specificity, the forensic animations screened, ran the menace of remaining critically indisputable. Unlike the rest of the participants that laid within the field of knowledge production, Sjöbergs material descended from a truth seeking institution via the rendition of documents; that is to say the courtroom. Mroués archive presented the commencing and committing dimensions of the archive, the commencement as the arkhé (beginning) of the threads he follows in developing personal projects, as well as the historical or ontological arkhés, and the commitment that maintaining an archive requires. What was left untouched by Mroué, Sjöberg came to occupy. In the first pages of his book Archive fever: A Freudian impression (1995), Jacques Derrida traces the naming of an archive to the principles of commencement and commandment, the latter being where Sjöberg comes from. A commandment that resembles the arkhon, the one who is in charge not only to assemble and guard the archive but also to perceive it. Namely the legal authority, the one that maintains and provides justice.
The speaker stressed very cautiously, attempting to raise an awareness, the deceptive aptitude the animations possessed, mainly by paying particular attention to the use of highly detailed sound as well as the sun reflection in the simulated camera lens - as if the position of the sun is a catalyst for truthfulness - thus acquiring extreme immediacy to the object and site of reenactment targeting affectivity rather than factuality. This same issue of affectivity was also tackled by Hito Steyerl when referring to a documentary immediacy that deprives visibility, arguing on the technical tactics employed in warfare documentation such as pixelated cell phone images or the Homeland Security Advisory System scale (HSAS) created in the United States to represent levels of danger with colours. In Steyerls words the more immediate documentary images become, the less there is to see. Despite Sjöbergs numerous warnings, once he was off the podium he was given a hammer. What followed his presentation was barely a critical approach towards documents - cultural producers proved incompetent in appropriating the Hercules Poirot instinct - but rather a series of pragmatic inquiries. Discursiveness was replaced by interrogation, the auditorium turned into a courtroom - how much does a forensic animation cost?; how could one acquire the technological capacity for creating home forensic animations?. Verdicts were demanded and the production of knowledge was substituted by information providing. Commandment, unfortunately, dashed the tale away for the sake of the real.
To assume that the canon of arts is to shoot towards the leftovers of mainstream media, which is to say to represent and bring justice, runs precisely the danger of shifting to the courtroom premises, and eventually either ceasing fire or firing towards targets determined by the media. In such a scenario the mainstream media becomes the arkhon, while the aesthetic sector is deflated to an antiphonary role its voice being enabled and retained within the pounds of the arkhons hammer. Such is the impotence that derives from establishing the bipolarity of mainstream vs. alternative, that the so-called alternative documents become critical as in criticism rather than critical as in critique (confusingly, the adjectival form of both criticism and critique is critical). Where the two differ is that the former inclines to becoming dogmatic, didactic and instructive and engages with reasoning as a methodology to justify, thus to expose and prove the just and the valid, as opposed to the unjust and the invalid; precisely adopting the role of another arkhon or another judge. (Dont you think there are too many judges in here? - Silence in the courtroom please!). Unlike criticism, critique remains in the discursive sphere avoiding any engagements with reaching a particular verdict, but aiming on thecirculation of knowledge beyond any ambits, simply because it constructs and grazes within its own dominion. For the construction of critiques the significance of the courtroom can be found on the variation of hammer sounds or even on the courtrooms canteen architecture both nevertheless analyzed critically (dont even mention justice). Jean-Luc Godard comes to my tale, to settle me down for good after all this tossing around: it is not about a just image, but just images. Under this light, the proposition put forward by Steyerl seems apropos: to seek for criticality within documents, where it (or they) does not exist, and is yet to come; to territories that are to be invented, appropriated and utilized for the boiling of critical (as in critique) thinking. Again Godard spurs in: to be or not to be. Thats not really a question, revealing the fissure of bipolarity and demolishing it once and for good.
At the outskirts of his article, Jonsoon describes the present state of correlation between journalism and art as a transitional one, in his words in the midst of a vaccination program where aesthetics possess the vaccine for media. The pharmakon, though, is always more than one and more or less two, as Derrida reminds us. It lies within the field of undecidability, being simultaneously a remedy and a poison. Having such a cogent apparatus at its disposal, the domain of art should not waste it trying to straighten out the medias tail. It should instead be used, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, as preludes to other substances; whether those resemble soap operas, classic operas or Soap-powders and detergents, the cultural producer should be in a continual transposition, sharing odors with them, perhaps a couple of drinks, but never sleep with them. We all laughed at (and with) Roland Barthes, to borrow and alter one of Runo Lagomarsinos works, but the next morning we had to wash our own bed sheets.
Postscript. Any similarities with real people, places, and situations are completely coincidental and accidental. Is it true or what?
