Sunday, September 09, 2012

Documents, documentary, documentality, documentarisms - Oh my!

There's something that irks me about writing on contemporary art: it's all the discursivity, frameworks, situatedness, contigency, flows, archives. It's the symbolization (as opposed to just symbolism), positionality (not just positions), potentiality (not potential). And the nominalization: Not reality, but THE real, not politics, but THE political. Granted, revolutionary ideas need revolutionary concepts. But all the attempts to grasp new forms of articulation, new forms of political imaginary, alternative forms of identification, etc. end up sounding just like the same old, same old. We're on the left, we're oppressed and we want our freedom. So let's start but inventing some new terms.

With a title like "The photographic Documentary Effect vs. Hyper-Real Mutations" you think: this article is going to be really hard core and theoretical. And you think, this person could have used a better editor. Given that there are EIGHT full paragraphs that constitute the introduction, which prepares you for a book-length argument in article form -

"I would like to approach..."
"I will examine the term..."
"Secondly, I will approach..."
"To grasp the political of representations of presence/absence, I will relocate it..."
"Two additional implications contribute to my decision to..."
"The second implication concerns my interest in analyzing..."
"My interest, however, is situatied..."
"In the conclusing section of this essay I will..."

- I'll just offer this one particularly delicious gem, which describes a diagram:

"We should recall that hysteria is generated by the absence of the positive first term: presence. The fourth term, AIDS, is produced by the negative of the third term, hysteria, which is already marked by negativity. 'Thus the fourth term represents a negation of negation. Because of this double negation, it is the least explicitly specified of all the four terms and therefore the most production of new complications and insights.' [footnote] It is from the double (elusive) negativity of the fourth terms that the 'new' is likely to emerge. For the fourth term carries within it the most open and critical potentiality [footnote.]"

I would be happy to read a gloss on this article on photography and AIDS.

- Marina Grzinic, "The photographic Documentary Effect vs. Hyper-Real Mutations"
 in The Need to Document (ed, Havránek et al, 2005)

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