Subject and Object

April 5th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Rereading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) is a pleasure, maybe because it feels so comfortable.  The road between Minneapolis and Bozeman means something to me, intersects with my family.  We walked in those mountains.   I’m understanding the identity of Quality with Value with the Tao as if for the first time.   Living is a bit like maintaining a motorcyle.  OK.

I had completely forgotten or overlooked Pirsig’s projection of subject and object on to the dichotomy between science and art.  It’s very, very like Flusser, especially the Flusser of “The Gesture of Searching”.

It’s far from irrelevant that Phaedrus, the character (I do think of this book as a novel, although it succeeds in not really being either fiction or non-fiction.) who taught rhetoric, which is to say writing, goes mad.  Can writing be anything like motorcyle maintenance?

Epistemology Engine

April 3rd, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Fine turn of phrase!  It’s a device that people of a given time and place recognise as a metaphor for knowledge. The “engine” bit implies that  the image drives the acquisition of knowledge.  In the “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemology Engine” article, Ihde and Selinger conclude that despite his engagement with materiality, Merleau-Ponty did not get as far as describing technical inventions in this way.  I think Flusser did, although I’m not sure he understood knowledge in the same way.

It’s brilliant that the authors use the example of a camera obscura — which in turn drives the invention of photography.  I want this to be about subjects and objects, and the possibility of blurring, or even suspending the distinction.  Ihde, Don and Evan Selinger (2004) “Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines,” Human Studies 27: 361-376.

 

Notes on the Gesture of Writing

April 1st, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

I asked the students on the MA Illustration: Authorial Practice course to read the essay.  The discussion ranged far and wide, as usual, and I fear we didn’t get to what I would call the heart of the matter, namely the features unique to writing.  It’s very hard to understand that Flusser is not actually talking about the use of specific media, so much as the way a given medium shapes a prevailing consciousness.  They wondered about the presence of text and image on a single page (entirely reasonable), and the only example I could give was the point in the Writing book where he talks about a mathetmatical equation functioning as a kind of island–visual–within a linear scientific text.  It’s a good example, but actually more complex, saying more about Flusser’s theory than these students were going to absorb at that moment.  There were several comments about the very last sentences, about “writing is necessary; living is not” sounding rather crazy.  They didn’t sound crazy to me.  I would put the difference down at a first approximation to age (I’m way older), and yet more evidence of different relationships to writing, and how dramatically they affect consciousness.

The Gesture of Writing

March 5th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Flusser’s “The Gesture of Writing,” along with my notes about it, has just been published in New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (Taylor and Francis) vol 9 no 1, 24-41 .

The Handbook of Visual Culture

January 4th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Copyright 2012!  This new volume from Berg Publishers, edited by Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell, will be launched very shortly…I’m very pleased to be among the contributors, with an essay on Flusser’s understanding of new communication technology as structurally visual.

Thinking Fast and Slow

January 3rd, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

This is the title of Daniel Kahneman’s remarkable new book.  It  describes and evaluates two very different types of thinking in quite considerable detail: ”intuition” (fast), and something more like calculation, or rational thinking(slow).  Kahnemann does a really wonderful job of demonstrating how profoundly most of us rely on the former, despite thinking of ourselves as essentially “rational” beings, and has many, many interesting things to say about the consequences, both for individuals and for enterprises involving many people. The thinking under consideration seems mainly that required for decision-making, planning and prediction, often  in businesses.  I’m  still wondering whether any positive value attaches to surprises, or what’s loosely called “creative” thinking…which I would think could equally well be fast or slow.

“The Gesture of Photographing”

December 14th, 2011 § 4 comments § permalink

“The Gesture of Photographing,” the essay in which Flusser proposes a phenomenology of photography, appears for the first time in English in this month’s (December, 2011) issue of the Journal of Visual Culture. The article was first published in German, in 1991–the year of Flusser’s death, as part of a collection called Gesten (Gestures).  Assembled from many times and places in Flusser’s past, the articles, each entitled “The Gesture of ..,” testify to the conviction and the daring of his engagement with phenomenology.  Some of the Gestures he selected for analysis are  associated with specific media e.g. the gesture of painting, of filming, of writing–and the gesture of photographing.  But others, such as the gesture of listening to music, or the gesture of smoking a pipe, are not.

Flusser never  separates a writer from the typewriter, a painter from the brush and canvas, or a photographer from the “apparatus.” Ever the phenomenologist, he is unwilling to separate an object from the consciousness that intends it.  He observes the movement — in this case the movement of a photographer around a human subject — as a dynamic interplay between subject and object.  He arrives at the conclusion that photographing is a way philosophising, without language.

Translation for a Recovered Text

October 22nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Image: Simon Warner

Lucy Skaer’s new work Film for an Abandoned Projector is showing–Thursday evenings–at the Lyric Picture House, Armley, Leeds. I was  really, really pleased to be able to give a talk about it last Thursday, October 20.   In the talk, “Translation for a Recovered Text,” I propose seeing the work as a translation, a move from a fairly conventional way of thinking about film into a view of film as projection, of us as projectors.  A recording of the event is up on the Pavilion site (pavilion.org.uk); a written version, lightly edited, is available here, under “On Translation” (see menu on the left). Film for an Abandoned Projector will be on view until December 15.

What to translate

October 2nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

“To class a source-text as worth translating is to dignify it immediately and to  involve it in a dynamic of magnification (subject, naturally, to later review and even, perhaps dismissal)”  George Steiner, After Babel, 3rd edition, New York: Oxford, 1998, 317.

Film for an Abandoned Projector

October 1st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Lucy Skaer's Film for an Abandoned Projector.

I’ve been invited to talk about this work on 20 October, in Leeds.  I’m nervous already.  But the work is wonderful, and will be running as I’m talking…I think..and that’s reassuring.

The projector in question once worked at the Lyric Picture House in Leeds, a city where much of the projection equipment for all the of UK was once manufactured.  When everything about film began to change–the projectors, the stock, the audiences–this particular projector was no longer cost effective, and so was abandoned.  This project reanimates the projector, arranges for “it” to be the reason for making a film, and reassembles an audience…in the present.

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    As someone who writes, teaches writing (often as a means of teaching something else), and marvels at what writing is and does, I have become an enthusiastic reader and translator of the work of Vilem Flusser (1920-1991). Flusser was a philosopher, teacher, media theorist, critic of art, design, literature and language. But above all he was a writer. "I am addicted to alphabetic writing as if to a drug," he once said in an interview, "I cannot live without writing." (Zwiegesprache 88). In his book Does Writing Have a Future? Flusser contends that writing is quickly being eclipsed by far faster, more flexible and efficient technologies for storing, manipulating and distributing information. But he writes, nevertheless.

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