THE ARTS OF OCCUPATION

The Arts of Occupation:  A Call for Crowd Sourcing

Critical Inquiry announces a call to assemble a virtual archive of the Arts of Occupation.  We invite our readers to send images in all media, as well as links, anecdotes, brief essays, reports, games, scripts for performance, and videos that will document the aesthetic as well as the tactical and political side of practices of occupation.  We are interested in the “creative” aspect of the global occupation movement, the ways in which it produces new forms of spectacle, space, face, and inscription.  We are asking for our readers’ aesthetic judgments, not just their political views.  What images and statements have impressed them as especially elegant, powerful, salient, eloquent, penetrating, and—well, yes—beautiful?   What specific images (both metaphors and visual images) have had the most impact, and why?    Is there a new image of the crowd  itself, as a bodily presence in a real place, and as a virtual entity, a mass  social movement?  Is there a new image of the individual, at once non-subject and non-sovereign?  How have the media, both old and new, from Twitter to the People’s Mic, produced and reproduced the emergent forms of democracy?   How is the “sensible,” meaning both sensuous and thinkable, re-distributed by the actions and images of the Occupy Movement?

We do not wish to limit the archive to 2011, though this year just past will clearly stand as the historical beginning of a new sense of the words and images associated with “occupation.”  After a half century of thinking of this word as invariably coupled with military occupation, and with landscapes of  conquest and colonization, a new meaning has suddenly imposed itself.   At the same time the image-concept of the camp and encampment has shifted from a site of detention and dehumanization to one of insurgency and non-violent resistance.  “Occupation” has turned from the sphere of power to that of weakness, disenfranchisement, poverty, as well as resistance, insurgency, and creative direct action.   What are the aesthetic aims and effects of lying down under a red carpet at the entrance to a Chamber of Commerce gala? Camping in a public park until the police remove you?  Erecting a tent city in the midst of Tel Aviv?  Shutting down harbors in Oakland, Long Beach, Portland, and Seattle?  Opening free clinics, libraries, clothing exchanges, media centers, educational projects?  Scribbling slogans, questions, declarations, accusations,  demands, and jokes?  Assembling as an embodied movement on symbolic sites—capitols, city halls, banks, museums, schools, and foreclosed homes.

And, finally, we invite critical and theoretical reflection on the Arts of Occupation.  There needs to be some recognition of the “black arts” of occupation (violence, exploitation, domination) that have mostly characterized the preceding era.  We want to know which arts, and which specific performances, have had the greatest effect in mobilizing this counter-movement?  What have been the failures and successes, and what can we learn from them?

Submit your entry simply by responding to this post.

And to follow Critical Inquiry contributors Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler on the Occupy movement, click on the following links:

Žižek  in the Guardian

Žižek  in the Observer

Žižek on YouTube

Žižek  on Verso Books

Butler on Salon

Butler on Occupywriters.com

Butler on Worlds of Change

REPORT FROM CAIRO–FURTHER THOUGHT

One more furious thought.
The formation of the government is nothing but an outloud catastrophy. In addition to the “ancient” PM, there is a scandal about the minister of Interior Affairs. He was the assisstant of the security head general in Alexandria. For those who are not aware what Alex stands for please recall the murder of Khaled Said, the precursor of the Revolution; and the brutal torture of Sayed Belal for 9 hrs as a suspect of explding the famous Church “the Saints”, that was on the eve of the New Year!! This is just a tiny example of the “new” government. Indeed those people who have been anti the Revolution should relax now, the scene looks familiar. To add more to the farce, this minister is to perform the oath today and soon on the 25th Dec he is to go to court to answer to the accusations of “murdering” protesters of Alex in last January. And…we are still receiving the blessings of the West…
Sent from Etisalat Misr by Shereen Naga, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cairo University

REPORT FROM CAIRO ON THE ELECTIONS

I believe these elections should be listed as one of the biggest treasons in history. While we were being attacked in Tahrir Square, completely desrted by all the political parties, and accused of all nasty things in the media, the voting polls opened and received people who were standing in lines (out of fear from paying the fine which is 100$). All legal violations were allowed by the police and military, i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood were waiting at the gates for the people telling them whom to vote for. Nontheless, all the world raved about the Egyptian elections!! The final results are not out, all we know is the results of the individual candidates (not the lists), and it is apparent that the MB and the Salafis (the very strictly fundamental ones similar to those of Pakistan_) are gaining ground. While the whole society is in panic, the US issued a statement to bless them: “we are proud of democracy and we are able to deal with any government”!! The problem is that nobody is paying attention to the real problem: it is the military rule!! This parliament is absurd, here is the funny process as designed by the military council: elections of the MP’s, writing the constitution, presidential elections, then again elections of a new parliament. Can you believe that? So this parliament is nothing since it is not going to stay, it does not have the authority to dismiss the military council, and it is not allowed to make any decisions concerning the government. Talking of the government, they (MC) resurrected a prime minister who has been a member of Mubarak’s gov., his discourse and rhetoric are poorly senile, his weakness cannot be mistaken, he held a press conference yesterday and it was pathetic.
As I told you the situation is very fluid and every 5 minutes there is something new, and so the head of the Culture Council has become the Minister of Culture! Just like that, over one night…
As we have been completely dumped by all politicians and parties we decided- after a voting- to suspend the sit-in. Many of us have died and several are dangerously injured, not to mention those who lost their eyes permanently.

To be cont.

warmest regards

Shereen Aboueinaga

On Translating Panofsky

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz

[Managing Editor's note: In anticipation of the appearance of their translation (in conjunction with a substantial essay) of Erwin Panofsky's "On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts" in the spring 2012 issue of Critical Inquiry, we asked Jas and Katharina for their thoughts on the project.]

Jas Elsner:  I got into the rather recherché business of translating Panofsky by an odd sidetrack.  As an expert in late antiquity, I decided I needed to know more about the critical historiography that brought this concept into being, and especially about the historical and cultural drives behind the invention of late antique art as a topic of scholarly interest in the late nineteenth century.  The key oeuvre for this is the work of Alois Riegl, one of the greatest of all art historians.  Little did I realize at the time that Riegl’s most acute and committed critic throughout the 1920s and early 30s was Panofsky in his German career.  The first key paper in Panofsky’s rethinking of Riegl (‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, 1920) had been translated in the early 1980s by Kenneth Northcott and Joel Snyder in this very journal [Critical Inquiry], but the hugely important and difficult essay which developed Panosky’s scheme into a system of fundamental concepts for art history remained untranslated and virtually unread by non-German speaking art historians.  I approached Katharina Lorenz to help me (with what turned out to be one of the most difficult texts I have ever read and in one of the most difficult intellectual enterprises I have ever attempted), and we translated ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory’ (1925) for Critical Inquiry in 2008.  However, as we worked, it became obvious that this piece was only the second stage in Panofsky’s most creative process of philosophical thinking in his German career, and that the brilliant, assured and much more readable essay (originally published in 1932) translated in this issue of CI [that is, the spring 2012 issue]—astonishingly never before translated into English and only rarely alluded to in English-language scholarship—was the culmination of that trajectory as well as the foundation of Panofksy’s theory of iconology.

Katharina Lorenz: I have to say ‘On Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’ was much less of a brain ache than the art theory piece we translated earlier—with regard to its language and use of art historical jargon, but not least because for a classical archaeologist of German training it has the obvious attraction of opening with a piece by Zeuxis, and some en passant sneers against Lessing! Yet, what on the surface is seemingly much more straightforward and easier to grasp in the 1932 paper, in fact drills much deeper into how we deal with pictures than the earlier piece ever could, stuck as it is in its lofty binaries and abstract philosophizing. Indeed, what is amazing is how fresh and insightful the 1932 piece still remains as a meditation on both the problems of description and the limits on subjectivity in interpretation. And yet so many of the wild and wonderful things about it were later lost in the English emulations produced by Panofsky himself in his American career.

JE: Of course, it is precisely the distance between the German and the American models of iconology—both produced by Panofsky and claimed by him to be identical—that is so fascinating.

KL: Equally interesting is the paper’s relative insignificance in German scholarship—which is of course a result in part of the eclipse of Panofsky by Nazi-inflected art history after 1933, and of a subtle resistance to his ascendancy in America in the postwar discipline in Germany.  But even where people did use his work, many a time they refer to the later English versions of iconology (or German paraphrases of it), rather than the first German version, despite the palpable fact that the German essay is much more acute and propositional.

JE: Do you think that this is in part to do with the fact that the English versions of the piece— in Studies in Iconology (1939) and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955)—are more general, as it were universally applicable, and without the rich empirical base of numerous specific visual examples from which the argument is constructed?

KL: One thing that is really interesting here is how important are pictures to the argument. I am wondering to what extent the 1932 discussion of Grünewald and others, like Franz Marc (which are cut in the American versions of the piece), are essential to Panofsky’s argument. Would the essay have worked in the same way with other pictures? Certainly, his American focus, or entrée, not on an actual work of art but on an action event—the episode of greeting someone on the street, which opens Studies in Iconology—shifts the emphasis of his argument. In the 1932 German version, he had only used that type of social encounter to demonstrate some aspects of his notion of “intrinsic meaning”; but by the time he reformulated the paper in America, it comes to stand in for the interpretive model as a whole. The way Tom Mitchell dissects Panofsky’s use of this social event, and contrasts it with Althusser’s greeting parable, is indicative of the fact that Panofsky did himself and his pictorial enterprise no favours by moving from painting to event. This aside, on a personal level, one thing I find particularly exciting about the 1932 paper is Panofsky’s implicit insight into how thoughts are governed by language (and then again also by images), and how the use of specific choices in language bears upon both interpretation and argument. This, along with the comparison between his choices of language here and those he will adopt in English later, is much more telling of the process his thinking undergoes between German and English than his own statements on the matter later in the 1950s.
JE: I certainly agree with this. But it may also be observed that because the stakes are raised so high by what happened in Germany in the 30s and 40s, and by Panofsky’s choice to confront Heidegger in the 1932 paper, the problems of one’s choice of terms, one’s ethics of argument, the limits one should apply to willfulness in interpretation, are more acutely and pointedly raised by the 1932 paper than by most writing in the history of the discipline.

Occupy Time

Jason Adams
Williams College

“Time and I, against any two” – Baltasar Gracián

[Author’s Note: this piece was composed while Occupy Oakland, Portland, Denver, and other cities were under attack, prior to the eviction of the epicenter, NYC’s Zuccotti Park. The events of the past weekend, it would seem, render the already developing shift from space to time necessary, as well as inevitable.]

Until recently, a casual observer might have thought that Occupy had developed a time management problem, that it was increasingly managed by a static image of space. While it initially began with the declaration that September 17^th would be the starting date and that it would continue for an unspecified period, the focus soon shifted to a general strategy of occupying public space. While this produced many victories, a certain ossification also emerged. What should have been one tactic amongst others began to harden into an increasingly homogenous strategy. For many of those involved, maintaining this spatial focus became the sine qua non of the movement, even in the face, for instance, of the changing of the seasons and ongoing police evictions. In nearly every history-altering moment of the past however, from the Paris Commune to the antiglobalization movement, it was the element of time that proved most decisive. There is a reason, for instance, that the clock towers were the first target chosen by the French communards. Occupy is no exception: as the Jesuit thinker Baltasar Gracián held, beyond all other considerations, it is time rather than space that best positions one to win. Indeed, even those events of the past that are currently narrated as failures can always be renarrated as successes, in that they have left behind possible successes that remain to be actualized. The recently viral image of police surrounding the 2012 Olympic Countdown Clock in London is evidence enough that the primacy of time is well understood in some quarters.

Rather than maintaining this spatial strategy at all costs, what is most interesting about Occupy now is that it is increasingly complicating static images of space: it is, in short, occupying time. This has meant a shift to a more fluid, tactical approach, one not only appropriate to the specifics of constantly changing situations deployed from above, but one that more importantly, allows it to bring forth new ones, from below. Indeed, the initial introduction of an open duration for the Occupy events already oriented the subsequent events primarily towards the temporal and the tactical rather than the spatial and strategic. This was truly its greatest strength and is the major reason the spatial strategy did as well as it did. While Ken Knabb and others have linked Occupy to the Situationists’ promotion of factory and university occupations during the French Events of May 1968, what was most central for the latter was once again not space but time. What they called for and what Occupy is increasing calling for was the “creation of situations.” Already this approach has made it impossible for the actions to be declared a failure once and for all, since it was the temporal focus that enabled the creation of hundreds of new “situations” nationwide and worldwide.

For instance, when one occupation was evicted by police, more often than not, several more have simply appeared elsewhere. Or, if laws governing public parks were cited as an excuse, existing occupations simply moved to private rather than public space, such as abandoned buildings or foreclosed homes. As one online commenter put it, while Rome wasn’t built in a day, it wasn’t dismantled in a day either. The tactical innovation the open timeframe enabled also allowed the coordinates of each situation to be produced by the enactors themselves, on their own, distinct terms. Thus, while the originally spatially-oriented events in lower Manhattan gave birth to Occupy Wall Street, it was the temporal structure that enabled the emergence of Occupy the Hood in Queens several weeks later. Had it simply been billed as a conventional one-day protest confined to a single space, the few hundred who initially showed up in the streets near the New York Stock Exchange would not have even registered in the media, let alone countless peoples’ affective attachments, as is now the case.

Perhaps then, if transforming the collective situation remains the primary concern, some consideration of the space/time as well as strategy/tactics relationships is in order. For instance, consider the temporal quality of the moment in which Occupy has emerged. Today, the experience of time has become greatly accelerated, much more so than just one decade ago. Whether or not one has access to the social media sites or smartphones that are increasingly turning the old, spatially-defined continents into new, temporally-defined telecontinents, trillions of dollars in financial transactions still speed around the globe daily. Beyond the rhetoric of the “digital divide”, this continually creates new realities that everyone is faced with. The most recent example is the economic crisis. It was not only attributable to unsustainable, individually-purchased mortgages, but more importantly, to what brought them to market in the first place: the massively increased pace at which global financial transactions occur. This is one reason, perhaps, that the spatial strategy is evolving into a temporal tactics. As Karl Marx argued in the Grundrisse, economics is ultimately a matter of time. The less time required to accumulate money in the first place, he held, the more time available to mobilize other forces to produce more of it. Thus ever-increasing speed is a primary basis for the contemporary mode of production. Today it is not time is money but money is time.

While speed is often mobilized from above though, this is not the only form it takes. Accelerated capitalism forces its subjects to spend more and more of their time working, but even this is subverted constantly. For instance, on-the-job chatting, texting and websurfing are all increasingly narrated as in need of monitoring and management. Indeed, it is often through the very means introduced to control time more thoroughly, that such activities are rendered possible. In Marx’s terms, the means of production are brought into conflict with the relations of production. While today’s accelerated capitalism attempts to intensify accumulation through continuously revamped social communication technologies, with each new innovation it also enables its reversal by movements like Occupy. This is why accelerated capitalism is faced with a “counter-temporality”, the creation of, rather than response to, situations. Paul Virilio has creatively engaged this question with respect to the tactic of the work stoppage. Rather than just occupying space, as he felt was more effective during the feudal era, he argued that in the modern period it was the strike that is most powerful. For him, this was because “it spread to a whole duration. It was less an interruption of space (as with the barricade) than of duration. The strike was a barricade in time.” This is particularly the case with the general strike: such temporal tactics do have a history in the United States, but in the years prior to the Oakland General Strike, the Seattle WTO protests were the closest one of its major cities came to pulling one off in many decades. It is worth considering the relationship of these two latest attempts, because in both cases the tension between space and time were as central as that between strategy and tactics.

While it is well known that the Seattle WTO protestors occupied the downtown space, the first significant event of November 30, 1999 occurred earlier in the day. At that time, thousands of workers and students disrupted the predictable rhythms of transportation, restaurant, stevedoring, and educational industries by walking out, calling in sick, or taking the day off. Time was also key to the eventual success of the later events. The spatial strategy of the Direct Action Network (DAN) had been that all protests downtown would consist of a nonviolent occupation of every street, sidewalk, and greenspace surrounding the Convention Center. Likewise, that of the AFL-CIO was that they would march in a big circle from Memorial Stadium towards the Convention Center and back to the starting point. Crucially though, the union leadership had assured the Seattle Police and the Secret Service that they would specifically not venture into the city’s core, where it was well-known that direct actions would be underway. Finally, the Seattle Police and the Secret Service based their own approach on what they had learned from DAN/AFL-CIO. As a result of this knowledge, their reasoning went, they would simply flush everyone from the downtown actions back into the labor march as they were making the loop back towards the Stadium. In other words, they would link all three strategies such that the already-existing hierarchy of time would not be interrupted and the WTO conference would occur as scheduled.

But that of course, did not happen. The main reason the Seattle WTO protests successfully forced the cancellation of the conference was that this static image of space was overcome both temporally and tactically. At the very moment the AFL-CIO members would have been rounding the corner back to the stadium, thousands of rank-and-file members of the International Warehouse and Longshore Union, Sheetmetal Workers, Steelworkers, and other unions broke off and marched through a line of parade marshals to join the actions downtown. At that same moment, the black bloc, homeless youth, and, as might surprise some Occupiers, many who had proclaimed nonviolence began countering the police assault on the protesters, which had intensified long before any windows were broken. Between these two breaks from the interlinked spatial strategy, a new countertemporality was introduced at the very moment the Seattle Police and Secret Service had intended to mobilize it to their advantage. This is why the two protest groups—around 25,000 mobilized by DAN and about 25,000 mobilized by the AFL-CIO—are not remembered today simply as the 50,000 who were flushed out of the downtown space, like so much refuse. Rather, they are remembered as the 50,000 who shut down the meetings of one of the most powerful arms of global capitalism: “Seattle,” today, requires no further qualifier. While space was occupied temporarily, time was occupied permanently.

The Story of an Eyewitness: Occupy Oakland, 25 October 2011

Tarnel Abbott

At 14th and Broadway, in Oakland, California, looking at the Jack London oak tree around which the police would not allow peaceful protestors to gather, I sat on a bench on the sidewalk and was blinded by tear gas at point-blank range and deafened by a flash grenade. When you are blinded and deafened it is hard to disperse.

I had marched with this spirited crowd of about 1,000 people for several hours. They were mostly (but not all) young, and ethnically diverse. There were a few people with children in the crowd. One kid scampered over someone’s car, but that is the only disorderly act I witnessed. I felt so proud of the peaceful nature of the crowd. I had a sense of joy also; they were full of life, full of determination, full of hope. It was a hope that is born of knowing that the old social order must change, that we can and must move to a better future than what is programmed for us by the 1 % at the top—the 1% who control the money and the power. I was made hopeful because this crowd could articulate so beautifully, so simply, and so powerfully their unwillingness to be disenfranchised. These people are aware that their country, their society has been hijacked by the wealthy, the corporate elite, and the media. I looked at these people around me and felt that we shared a desire for economic justice, freedom, and democracy. If we are unsuccessful, the Iron Heel will come down harder than ever.

Around 8 p.m. the marchers stopped at Broadway and 14th Street. Apparently an order to disperse was being read by the police but could not be heard at the back of the crowd. I went forward with another woman who was trying to find out what was going on. I told the officers that they should be protecting our First Amendment right to peaceful assembly. I saw a young cop pleading with his eyes and nodding in sympathy. Heartbreaking. I asked who was in charge; of course none of them could answer because they had gas masks on.

As I got closer to the front I could hear the order to disperse, which included a threat of bodily harm. I saw a veteran in a Navy uniform with his flag standing with the crowd. I saw confusion, fear. I sensed a bit of panic. No one knew what to do. I walked to the sidewalk and occupied a bench. My sign said “99% R FED UP.” I hadn’t come to be arrested, but at that point I would have been willing to be arrested for defending my right to peaceful assembly.

It is true that Jack London is my ancestor. He is my great-grandfather, but, more importantly, he is a working-class hero and a visionary. I looked at the Jack London oak tree in front of City Hall and felt possessed by the spirit of the great man. I thought of him standing there on his soap box making socialist speeches and getting arrested because he didn’t have a permit. I thought of him writing “Revolution” and Other Essays, The People of the Abyss, and The Iron Heel. I felt that I was witnessing the Iron Heel of fascism being challenged. I knew that I too had to resist it. Something came over me so that I was completely unwilling to be bullied into leaving. I felt like a mother protecting her young. I felt calm, but angry. I remember hearing a countdown, then a man who had jumped up on the bench beside me leaned down and said, “Are you brave enough to stay here?” I answered, “I don’t know.” A woman behind the bench gave my shoulder a squeeze (her name is Anne Weills). I felt the moment of calm before the storm,and I was overcome with being in the moment. Nothing was thrown at the police.

The next I knew, everything changed. There was tear gas spewing from a canister near me, and I felt paralyzed, transfixed by the billowing white stuff. Then a flash of blinding light and the boom/crack of a flash grenade shot into the crowd in front of me, and I was deafened. And still I sat until I was enveloped in the gas and blinded, my eyes and face and throat felt on fire, and the limits of my body made me stumble away, fall to my knees and retch. A shocked young man was yelling, “They shot someone, they shot someone” (Scott Olsen, a Marine veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq had been gravely wounded by a police projectile). I was rescued by Anne Weills, who is a lawyer-legal observer, and a kind young man who helped me get my breathing under control.

Occupy Theory

Nicholas Mirzoeff

“Mic check!”

General assembly, sparkly hands, consensus, concern, temperature check, block, process: this is the vocabulary and embodied performance of occupy theory. Each word has an equivalent embodied gesture, which is the means of indicating how you’re feeling about a proposal: fingers up for feeling good, horizontal for not sure, down for against.

The strongest sign is raised, crossed arms for a block: an ethical or safety concern over a proposal that might cause you to leave the movement. Proposals are “consens-ed” by facilitators so that a clear majority approve. It’s not always quick but it is always interesting. It’s occupy theory.

Don’t make the phrase into a noun: it’s not a theory of occupation. Occupy theory is what you do as you occupy. It is the process that has become in some sense the purpose of the direct democracy movement, known by its signature instance Occupy Wall Street, or #ows.

There have been a variety of star theory people come to Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street is based, and to Occupy Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village from Zizek to Spivak and Andrew Ross. Given the performative nature of occupy theory, it’s not surprising that—to judge from the Twitterstorm and Facebook frenzy—it has been Judith Butler who best captured the moment. She presented a set of demands for the impossible, echoing the Situationist slogan “Be realistic: demand the impossible.” Seen in printed form in which the line breaks represent a pause for the “human mic” that has become a signature of the movement, Butler’s talk is a prose poem.

So what is this occupy in occupy theory? While occupation of public and private spaces is a long tradition of industrial protest movements, there have been concerns from indigenous and Palestinian groups about the term “occupy.” In New Mexico, they have neatly re-rendered the term as “(Un)occupy.” So somewhere between occupy and un-occupy—or more exactly oscillating between them—is occupy theory. It’s the latest version of what I have called the “right to look” which is at once the invention of the other and the consent for the other to invent you.

The first claim of the right to look is the right to existence, the right to be seen to exist. The people posting on “We Are the Ninety-Nine Per Cent” a collaborative blog, have used the webcam format to have their stories told and made visible. These assembled self-portraits together present a set of claims. The individual self-photograph transforms a data point within the statistics of debt, unemployment and insurance disaster into a person. This person is not performed for the sake of pity or charity but as a constituent member of the emerging “people.”  As Rancière has put it, “a `people` of this kind is not an assemblage of groups and social identities. It is a polemical form of identification that is drawn along particular lines of fracture, where the distribution of leaders and led, learned and ignorant, possessors and dispossessed is decided.” That is to say—we are the ninety-nine per cent.

Nor is the performative expressed “Occupy Wall Street” quite as simple as it seems. The occupation is not on Wall Street but round the corner at Zuccotti Park. Named for the director of Canadian conglomerate Brookfield—the company hoping to bring tar sands oil to the U.S.—Zuccotti is occupied because it is a private-public park, a zoning variance that has the requirement of permanent public access to a generic piece of urban landscape in exchange for extra height to a building or other such one per cent goodies. Much as New York City Mayor Bloomberg is itching to expel the occupiers—and he may yet succeed in finding a way—he has no legal recourse at present. Washington Square Park, as city property, is always closed between midnight and six a.m. so the occupation there cannot be permanent. Occupying is being done in the variant space between the security-regulated public commons and the deregulated zones of the neoliberal private market.

In Memoriam: Friedrich A. Kittler, 1943-2011

Photograph by Isabell Schrickel

Friedrich A. Kittler, Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and Media Studies at the Humboldt University, died October 18^th, 2011, following a protracted illness. He was 68 years old. In a career that spanned more than three decades and well over one hundred publications, Professor Kittler contributed to a profound reassessment of literary and media production. At the center of his work was the controversial claim that “media determine our situation.”[1]

The conventions of obituaries and elegies seem ill-suited to praising an author who consistently exhorted his readers to eschew the mirage of the author in favor of an empirical analysis of the apparatuses, procedures, institutions, and techniques that regulate discourse. Even so, a brief summary of the life and work attributed to the name “Friedrich A. Kittler is in order. Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in Rochlitz, Saxony, in 1943. During his childhood, his mother would sometimes take him to visit the site where engineers had devised the V2 rocket, and he carried memories of World War II and subsequent occupation throughout the rest of his life. In his sweeping accounts of media and technological change in the twentieth century, both the war the rockets would return as protagonists. In 1958, his family fled to West Germany. From 1963 until 1972 he studied Romance languages, German, and philosophy at the University of Freiburg. He subsequently taught at his alma mater as a graduate assistant while completing his postgraduate studies.

Kittler gained international recognition for his 1985 book Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, originally prepared for his habilitation. The text proved so vexing and controversial that it had to be reviewed by a team of thirteen senior professors (instead of the usual committee of three) before finally being accepted—ruefully, by some accounts—as a worthwhile contribution to the study of German literature. In it, he proposed a radical reinterpretation of Romanticism and modernism as two distinct modes of discursive production whose style and logic derived from what could be translated as the “notational systems” or “discourse networks” peculiar to their epochs. He defined these networks as “technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.”[2] According to Kittler, in the early nineteenth century the universal alphabet, the techniques of maternal instruction, and the rise of widespread literacy were among the most decisive features of a discourse network that produced the techniques of authority and interpretation characteristic of the great Romantic works. Kittler argued that the authors of these texts—most notably Goethe—were artifacts or illusions of this system of textual production and reception rather than the immaculate origins and originators of meaning. Taking eccentric inspiration from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the madman Daniel Paul Schreber, Kittler argued that in the twentieth-century literature was dislocated within technical media systems that destabilized authors and psyches alike. Despite the lukewarm reception of Kittler’s thesis by some of his supervising professors, the book became a sensation in literary studies and a foundational text for the then-emerging field of cultural studies.

His subsequent book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) elaborated and radicalized his earlier analysis to develop a new approach to media history based on specifying, in ever-greater detail, the networks of inscriptions, transmission, and receptions (what other critics might refer to as novels, movies, musical recordings, or psychoanalytic case studies) that developed in and around a host of modern media. Though often seen as a celebration of the end of the written word—Kittler claimed that media had shattered the monopoly of writing on modern culture—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter mapped out new methods by which literary criticism could extend its analysis to laboratories, factories, mathematics, circuit boards, or any other site for the recording, processing, or reception of inscriptions.

Steve Jobs: What Is the Big Deal?

Steve Jobs and the Poetry of Gadgets

What is the big deal with Steve Jobs?  I have read my share of commentary on him, and tracked the phenomenal media attention that surrounded his death, but I still don’t feel that I get it.  Only the onset of war or some other catastrophe could have competed with the attention given to his death, the endless paeans to his extraordinary creativity and his boundless confidence in his vision of things.  The death of a president would have outstripped it.  But I can’t think of any other star in the firmament of mass culture whose death would have been covered so broadly (maybe Michael Jackson?).  Yes, I know he supervised the invention and marketing of the totemic gadgets of our time–call them our churingas–in the form of iPods, iPhone, iPads, and Macs.  Yes, I know he had a “storied career,” and was a complex person who could be a real asshole when he wanted.  Bullying, tyrannical, etc. are some of the labels that circulate around him.  But what precisely was the source of his celebrity?  Was it the money or the totemic aura?  Four billion and mounting, little of it so far, I gather, going to charity.  Is it the ruthless and relentless style, linking him with  earlier titans of industry like Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford—the visionary capitalist?  Who is he, in fact, comparable to?  Is it his early, tragic death?  Or is it just the things themselves, the merger of commodity fetish and pleasure principle, in these sleek, powerful portals into new social and psychological formations, awakening new new kinds of needs that these objects promise to satisfy.

I write this on the eve of the October 14, 2011 release of the new iPhone 4Gs (on my MacBook Pro…).  Why do I care one bit about this?  It seems completely irrational.  Can anyone explain to me what is the big deal?   Has somebody written a great essay on this topic?   If it hasn’t been published, send it to Critical Inquiry.

–W. J. T. Mitchell

Bill Ayers on Oral History in Cyprus

Background…

Cyprus, one of the smallest countries in the European Union, is also the last divided country in Europe, Nicosia its last divided city. Winning its independence from Great Britain in 1960, Cyprus has been roiled in ethnic conflict, violence, and division almost from the start; everyone of a certain age remembers the troubles of 1963-1967. The 1974Turkish invasion and subsequent occupation sealed the fate of Cyprus for decades.

The troubles of the last 50 years are not unrelated to Cyprus’ strategic location at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, a place that has long attracted and continues to draw the great world powers. Rome ruled, as did Istanbul and England. Richard the Lion Hearted took a piece of the island on his way to the Crusades, Paul the Apostle was given 39 strokes with a lash by the Romans for preaching the Gospel, Othello’s Castle is on the southern coast, and Lazarus died on the island. Cyprus has always been a storied jewel of the Mediterranean.

Today UN peace keepers patrol the buffer zone between north and south, and England maintains a massive presence, tens of thousands of military personnel, and two air bases (which were used by the US most recently to launch into Afghanistan and Iraq) constituting 10% of the land mass. Some Cypriots complain that the great powers see Cyprus as little more than a huge, unsinkable aircraft carrier.

While there has not been a shot fired since 1999, and while the border between the north and the south opened in 2003, for the generation now in its sixties, memories of the early days are both vivid and raw, and, indeed, for most Cypriots of every age, Cyprus still bleeds. That bleeding—its interpretative meaning and its pervasive imaginative power today—is the focus of this work.

Our project is simply this: to record in notes and photographs and sketches, on audio or video, the voices and words of the people of Cyprus themselves, from every community, to capture their memories, understand their specific meaning-perspectives, illuminate their lives. Our guiding light is every person a philosopher/every day another story. We will create as rich and varied an archive as we can, and we hope that participants will see themselves in this collection as three-dimensional, grass-roots makers of history, and that their descendants will better understand how their ancestors—like all human beings: free and fated; fated and free—shuffled through this mortal coil. We hope, too, that future historians will find material to aid in their own searches for deeper meanings and fuller understandings. We hope, finally, to add ground-level, individual perspectives toward uncovering and teaching the conflict, and in this way, through oral history, to assist the process of truth-telling and reconciliation.