Banksy and the institution
I know there is something in the Banksy exhibition at the Bristol City Museum that I have missed: some act of vandalism and subversion that I was not subtle enough to find, some artistic whim, antithetical to the institution of art, that was too discrete to find. The archetypal 'art terrorist' has committed some act of treason in the museum, somewhere, somehow, that none of us has found: I feel strangely comforted by the certain knowledge that there is something shocking, unsupportable, and offensive lurking in the gallery.
More illegal than a small piece of skunk next to an ornate bong amongst the pottery; more irreverent than puppet eyes on a Rembrandt self-portrait; more institutionally insulting than a riot policeman on a child's penny-powered rocking-horse-ride; more clever than a suitcase of Diana-head-minted currency in £1000-bundles; more knowing of our day-to-day lives than bird-on-the-wire CCTV cameras and self-vivisecting rabbit coquettes. Something so unseeable, so invisible, so appalling, that none us of can see it. Even if we saw it, our brains would scramble the sight with its cognitive dissonance, such that we'd walk away, unknowing, and no wiser.
I am utterly certain it is there - through a process of unimpeachable logical deduction, I know for a fact that Banksy has beaten us all. The logic is borne out by the history of his career and the evidence of his work. I defy you to find the flaw in my argument.
Banksy starts as a graffiti artist; then moves on to guerilla subversion of mainstream art works; paints murals on the Israeli West Bank barrier. Next Banksy replaces the music stores' display stock of Paris Hilton CDs with fakes; and then places Guantanamo-prisoner-alikes in Disneyland - all of these acts are 'transgressive' in that they offend a good proportion of conservative taste, and are to be celebrated for that reason even if nothing else of the work excites you.
Graffiti is a transgressive because, well, you're not supposed to deface public property: it is, as Bristol Museum puts it, a "form of illegal activity, regardless of its artistic merit." When it is encouraged and sponsored by local councils, it loses any dangerous edge it had, and becomes - at best - wholesome, at worst, limp and insipid community outreach as practised by Christians and others of equally atrophied musculature. Graffiti is at its most aggressive and pure only when it is sure to be erased at the first opportunity by the police of public space, just as action is pure only when it escapes all intellectual justification and argument.
Surreptitiously defacing artworks in public museums and galleries is transgressive because it is an attack on the only possible institution which might redeem the graffiti artist from the clutches of the law, by granting such 'art terrorists' legitimacy; it is a biting of the only pompous, self-satisfied hand that would deign to feed you, just as that hand realises it must recognise you in order to stay relevant. 'Subverting artworks' is transgressive because it is a rebellion against the law of the father; an act of the carnivalesque turning an ossified world on its head.
The political muralism on the West Bank barrier, quite aside from its UK-specific resonance with the 'civil war by any other name' of The Troubles of Northern Ireland, is transgressive because it challenges our bourgeois notion that citizens and artists and painters and hoodies and members of the public have no say, no recourse to action - no escape from Ulrich Beck's characterisation of tragic quotidianism - and hence no action to take, in the face of geo-political calamities; yet at the same time underscores the alien inability of any artist or other member of the Western demos to speak to an open ear of either aggressor or victim. The Israeli wall is the target, but it is the Palestinian bystander who condemns the act of beauty on a terrible medium. A voice where no voice can have effect, nor find a listener.
Subverting the music retail market's obsession with celebrity is transgressive not because it reminds us that Capital is the great Other that dialectically determines our lives, nor that the industry is the instrument of the superhuman machine or the body-without-organs, nor even that the market is the means by which the mass is kept in obeisance to a superstructure of the hegemony. In fact it is the reverse - it mocks the Marxists by reminding us that the act of rebellion generates more value than the cultural commodity: Banksy's fake Paris Hilton knock-off is far more valuable in both material and immaterial terms than any original: the fake is now the only authentic artefact. Adorno, eat your heart out!
Populating Disneyland with Guantanamo-jumpsuited-inflatable-dolls is transgressive because - (as if it needed pointing out!) - aside from the dissonance of imperialism, hypocrisy, war-mongering and injustice that it spotlights, it reminds us that Disneyland and the objectives of the 'coalition of the willing' are essentially the same, after the killing and the brutalisation are done: to displace living from the realm of experience, into the realm of representation. Thus we enjoy the vicarious ride-of-our-lives via the hyperreal news media, assured that if there are victims of hypocrisy and torture in the world, then our own lives must be at the very forefront of progress, luxury and guilt-ridden complacency - the only kind of guilt we allow ourselves to guiltlessly enjoy.
And so of course, I look for the transcendental transgression in Banksy's show at Bristol Museum, suggestively titled Banksy vs Bristol Museum, like a competition - which I interpret as an arms race... a competition to outwit each other; the disclaimers warn as we enter that views expressed are not those of the museum or its partners, and the defacements on display are not real defacements, since "some of the historic relics now on display throughout the museum are fakes". Such framing devices only heighten my expectation that we will find Banksy sock-puppeting the museum into condoning opinions that would otherwise be silenced, and that real, priceless works have been defaced by a Bristolian 'revolutionaire' as only a decadent world deserves to have its valued artefacts defaced.
Or I consider, that since this exhibition has been organised, as the disclaimers proclaim, "by an independent agency", thus the Museum have themselves been subject to the same suspicions as I have entertained, and so will have been expecting Banksy's representatives to hijack the best intentions of the museum's curators; and in turn this agency acting on behalf of Banksy will have been expecting the museum to hunt high and low for any infringements or transgressions. Any act by Banksy to subvert the permanent art, or to render illegal the public space, or to articulate the unendorseable, will have been anticipated; the building combed for booby-traps; any attempt to outwit the strictures of public bylaws and the good taste of the artistic institutional community forestalled and anaesthetised. The anticipations are anticipated; the foreseeings foreseen; the special operations specially operated upon. The each outwitting the other in an ever-contracting spiral of mutual suspicion and cold-war-style conspiracy and paranoia, resulting in the most cutting edge out-manoeuvrings imaginable.
Then, of course: I get it. There is no hidden act of subversion; nothing too unbearable we cannot acknowledge it; nothing so clever we kick ourselves in our credulousness. I finally realise that the ultimate trangression has been successfully mounted: Banksy has defeated my intellectualisation of his work. He has easily capitulated, with paranormally little effort, to a parochial museum, home to ceramics, pottery and geological oddities. He has performed the ultimate transgression of the outsider artist: by selling out - a complete triumph. He has tricked me into romanticising his career and my search for the ultimate meaning in a museum. This is the something that is shocking, unsupportable, and offensive lurking in the gallery - it is the last word in resistance: to resist the pundits; and the last word in not selling out: selling out.
Being and Knowing: World as Diegesis
Tuesday, 14 July, 2009 - 22:52
Another conversation, this time with Shaun, and more thinking through, thinking aloud, thinking thought. Shaun attended all the first year media theory lectures over the last academic year, including the six part series I delivered on narrative. So, he got to hear me rework and reiterate impressionistically over the same endless themes of diegesis and artifice, story and plot, world and representation which I surreptitiously pretended was an overview of narrative theory.
So I was attempting to explain how that period of intense focus on ideas about narrative and, in particular, the phenomenon of diegesis, had since inflected my thought. The diegesis is the storyscape - the integrity of the imaginary theatre we accept when we give over to a narrator the suspension of our disbelief. The diegesis is the internally coherent world of the story - and 'world' is the key word here, since the idea of a 'world' is one of the ways in which I'm trying to muscle into an understanding of Heidegger which I think is going to be central to my PhD thesis. If you are going to read on here, put your Kafkaesque reading hat on and read it all as subjunctive: "I would, God-willing, understand in this way..."
Using a combination of Graham Harman's lucid writing on Heidegger, Timothy Clark's valiant exposition of Heidegger's thought, Hubert Dreyfus' concordance and commentary on 'Being and Time', and the dense source text itself, I've been trying to work towards an understanding Heidegger's concepts of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, theoria and praxis, not to mention Dasein, being there, and being a 'thing that things'. The concept of 'world' in this realm of thought seems helpful to me. Clark says that Heidegger's use of the term 'world',
"is close to the common meaning of the term when we talk about the 'world' of the Bible, or the 'world' of the modern Chinese or modern English - i.e.the fundamental understanding within which individual things, people, history, texts, buildings, projects cohere together within a shared horizon of significances, purposes and connotations. [...] the more fundamental shared disclosure of things within which [we] find [ourselves] in all [our] thoughts, practices and beliefs, providing the basis even of [our] self-conceptions and suppositions."
- all of which seems to be a perfect definition of diegesis if understood as pertaining not only to the fictional worlds we muster, but also the fields of meaning we conjure in every aspect of what we still call 'real life'. In the tool analysis, Heidegger's hammer [makes sense | obtains | is grasped] as part of the world of equipment, which [makes sense | obtains | is grasped] as part of the world of human action. These realms cohere diegetically - they belong to, define and co-constitute each other. In action, we grasp the hammer as a tool, we extend our limbs and 'be' our intentional 'being' in the praxis of carpentry, and by extension, the praxis of existence. We act, and as we do, we are attuned to the world of action and meaning we inhabit: we experience the world holistically - we cease to be figures, and recede into the ground of the diegesis. Praxis is the means whereby we live and dwell - believe - in the diegesis.
The hammer when it breaks, shatters the diegesis: we are no longer engaged in praxis, but in the comprehension of material objects divorced from their diegetic meaning: an extreme Brechtian 'Verfremdung', or alienation from the essence of the hammer. A broken hammer is no hammer: it is a residue, a fragment, a memory, a concept, an idea, an object, a construct, a prop, revealed and separated from its function in the diegesis: a corpse in the theatrical sense - a moment in which the illusion is shattered, the figure of artifice processes and emerges from the ground of the theatre, and we are appalled enough by the shattering of the illusion to be compelled to laugh uncontrollably in the face of the futility of pretence. The broken hammer is an object of our reflective thought, which we diagnose in its symptomatic failure; it is seen as though from above, outside, from nowhere, divorced as it is from the field of praxis. Our consciousness of the broken hammer is the kind of consciousness we simply relinquish in the midst of being. It is empty, shell-like, valueless, objective. It is the transcendental knowledge to which the academy, science, Western materialist thought aspires - and as in the perennial cliche, it pins the butterfly to a board in order to comprehend it even as it dies.
Following Harman, I understand the fate of the broken hammer not to be merely an event in the life of a lone doomed tool, but to be caught up in the being of all things that do their 'being' - the 'thinging' of things, people, starfish and coconuts - the dichotomy between Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand) and Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand). All things which are capable of submitting to the gaze of other things and being translated into the intentional objects of contemplation are uncovered - as are figures processing and emerging from the ground of their diegetic existence - as lifted out of their being, their dwelling in the multiplicities of the interlacing diegeses to which they belong. The object of my reflection is a shadow of its being - the prehensile presence-at-hand of a thing, behind which all its indestructible being - the inexhaustibly rich readiness-to-hand of a thing - withdraws.
In this way, anything we care to articulate or speak of, any 'thing' to which we care to give edges through the process of signification, and by which we mediate a representation of that 'thing' to another, is reduced to a presence-at-hand - a mere one amongst its infinite resource of arbitrarily graspable facets - a reduction; a theory. Thus all representation, articulation and signification is work in the realm of artifice, mimesis - or presence-at-hand; a reductive distinguishing of a facet of an object from the ground of its diegesis - the world of its Romantic potential, its being, its participation in praxis. The insertion of the stethoscope between the healer and patient is no less than a conversion of the human subject into an object of instrumentation, a reduction of the being to one amongst its many facets: a mediated, rythmic, booming pulse stands in for the beating heart of a living being. The sound is a metonymic reduction of the living being of the beating heart.
***
A short recap then: praxis is the unification of human action and knowing - holistic. Theoria (and hence conceptual, reflective, objective knowledge) is the distantiation of the world from the experience of that world. This distanced, alienated knowledge, extracted from the diegesis of its being, is a projection, a paper-thin shell, a shadow - a presence-at-hand, available to our consciousness as no more than a facet of the fullness of being. Being itself never emerges from the ground of diegesis - the integral, coherent, self-consistent, co-constitutive storyscape of the world in which we un-self-consciously dwell.
From these thoughts flow other problematisations, to be dealt with another time, of impartial academic enterprises, traditional doctoral theses, and the very nature of the attempt to document the research process.
stethoscope - fragment
In discussion with Fran - we were going through a box of old and antiquated medical instruments he'd collected, objects of curiosity, memory and history - we noted how the stethoscope serves not only to provide a 'virtual world' as Jonathan Sterne puts it (an acoustical representation), but acts as a sort of 'distantiation device' - a prop which helps the doctor to adopt a role and enter into the performance in which the human body is objectified.
Placing a mediating device between two human beings facilitates the creation of a subject who manipulates an object. We parcel off the problem-of-the-body into an objectified, if not objective, realm which we believe is transcended by the physical theatre of the stethoscope itself, and the disembodied, privileged knowledge of the physician. We defer our formal discomfort by effacing our embodied being.
I imagine a time-lapse evolution depicting the history of the stethoscope: play it in reverse and the long looping cord shortens and hardens into a trumpet; the forceps-like earpieces exit the ear, fuse and widen into the mouth of a horn; the bell and diaphragm device contrived for human contact simplifies into a chest piece with a hole. Then, finally, the whole instrument disappears and the physicians ear falls onto the patient's chest in a tight human embrace.
