Book, book, goose!

I have to sympathize with this author; there surely was no better way to say this, about the use of books in or as artworks (for example, the work on the right, a copy of Janson's Key Monuments in the History of Art, 1959, which has had each of the "key monuments" carved out by the artist Brian Dettmer):

What stands denied by the unapproachable book shape of gallery rather than conservationist display, and thus gets all the more forcefully identified by negation, are the instrumental and informational processes alike of literacy’s social function. Two levels of praxis are thus overruled, while also reasserted, by such disuse, such dysfunction: physical uptake as well as discursive intake. So if demediation has its place in media theory, the diverse objects to be contemplated in the coming pages, in whatever numbers or at whatever scale, are—and in the venerable aesthetic as well as historical and disciplinary sense of the term— each in themselves book studies.

Garrett Stewart, "Bookwork as Demediation" Critical Inquiry 36:3 (Spring 2010), p. 414

But still.

Globalization Needs Jargon

I get that globalization is a complex phenomenon, and if we take seriously Arjun Appadurai's claim that "globalization is itself a deeply historical, uneven, and even localizing process" we're going to need a way of thinking global/local together. That's tricky. Here's one way to do it, with example:

By focalization I mean the process of progressive denudation of local incidents and disputes of their partiuclars of context and aggregating them, thereby narrowing their concrete richness. Transvaluation refers to the parallel process of assimilating particulars to a larger, collective, more enduring, and therefore less context-bound, cause or interest. The processes of focalization and transvaluation thereby contribute to a progressive polarization and dichotomization fo issues and partisans, such that the climactic acts of violence by groups and mobs become in a short time self-fulfilling manifestations, incarnations and re-incarnations, of allegedly irresolvable communal splits bewteen Pathans and Biharis, Sikhs and Hindus, Sinhalese and Tamils, or Malays and Chinese." (Tambiah 1990, 750).

(cited in Appadurai, Modernity at Large, University Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 151)

I hope those last examples help clarify. Can I recommend dialectical materialism?

One man's jargon is another man's... joke?

I propose to complete the quartet as Schapiro's partner, critiquing Derrida's critique of Schapiro's critique of Heidegger, in order to move toward a resolution of the debate and a better understanding of Van Gogh's painting and the meaning of art (history).

-Benjamin Binstock, Vermeer's Family Secrets (Routledge, 2008)

Seriously.

When I first posted this on fb, my friend Kat replied, "I think I made that argument once. But I sure as hell wasn't Shapiro's partner."

Let's just leave it at that.

Put this in your pipe and smoke it: you might understand it better

"Presenting-as" is thus interpreting, and both are synonymous with "representing." "Presentation-as" overlaps these terms while "presentation-to" picks out the demonstrative or performative aspect of representation/interpretation: the address to empirical spectators, the construction or mobilization of virtual spectator positions.

(Harry Berger in Fictions of the pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)

Read it again. And again. C'mon: just one more time.

Kick-off: Mallarmé

It may seem superfluous to accuse the avant-garde of literary excess, the heights (or depths) of which they repeatedly discovered. But I thought I'd start us off with this little gem from Mallarmé, quoted and glossed by the British art historian T.J. Clark. He clearly has serious misgivings about the direction all this is going.

'You will be terrified to learn that I have arrived at the idea of the Universe by sensation alone (and that, for example, to keep firm hold of the notion of pure Nothingness I had to impose on my brain the sensation of the absolute void.' Which leads us straight to Hegel and other disagreeable topics.

- T. J. Clark, The Image of the People (1973), p. 19

Yikes. I look eagerly forward to the next installment.