ABSTRACT: This paper will attempt to work through Gilberto Perez’s theory of film narrative, clarifying his distinction between drama and narrative as relevant to understanding the singular form of cinematic narration employed in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939). We will also be examining some key features of the implicit audio-visual (cinematic) narrator debate pertaining to claims I-IV. Rather than thinking of film as being of one primary form or another, one should recognize that a) such terms are primarily of functional value and should not be taken as actual properties of film, that b) broadening our terms to include drama—showing as means of enacting—and narrative—showing as means of telling (mediating for the film camera)—gives us more insight in talking about film and frees us from the ontological commitment of having to posit invisible, effaced narrators in film where there is clearly no evidence of them. As illustrated in the discussion of The Rules of the Game, whether a particular film has an audio-visual narrator depends on how the film uses a range of narrative strategies specific to film; an audio-visual medium capable of both showing and telling.

In his essay, The Narrative Sequence[1], Gilberto Perez rejects a priori arguments for the necessity of implicit, audio-visual (cinematic) narrators in film. Such necessity arguments usually suppose that:.

1. Film functions solely as a narrative medium; i.e. that every film is a narration
2. The narrative structure (the showing and telling of a story) is independent of its medium of representation: the same for film, literature, theater etc.
3. There is undeniably a governing intelligence—one in place of and/ or in addition to explicit film narrators, i.e. character narrators or voice-over commentators—that, from a favored, inside point of view, directs our view through the fictional world on-screen and that
4. This cinematic narrator should, even in cases where no narrative presence is obvious in the telling of the story of the film, be assumed to be radically effaced or suppressed,

For Perez, these assumptions stem from a general lack of distinction between the dual elements of drama and narrative working in film and the tendency to want to ascribe a literary paradigm of narration to film. In particular, case III) for the necessity of a cinematic narrator could be explained as either a) mistaking the hidden god-like, governing intelligence for the implied author or auteur inscribed in that film or b) mistaking dramatized showing (directing) or just showing as means of enacting (drama) for cinematic narration.

This is not to say that films do not use narrative techniques or that cinematic narrators never figure into the ontology of films but rather, that these conditions depend very much on how the camera mediates between us and the world of the film. In Renoir’s The Rules of the Game for example, Perez describes an audio-visual narrator who, being neither the actual or implied author, gives us a mediated account of a world that is clearly too large and too complex for any one observer to adequately survey. As with words in a narrative sequence, the mediating gaze’s order, subject and manner of visual capture implies a degree of choice: i.e. who to follow when amid the complex interlocking action simultaneously entering and leaving our field of view the night of the party at le Chesanye’s chateau? Ultimately, it is through our awareness of what is not on the screen and our realizing that we are only being shown so much that, according to Perez, a film like Renoir’s The Rules of the Game functions as a narrative with a distinct audio-visual cinematic narrator.

This paper will attempt to work through Perez’s theory of film narrative, clarifying his distinction between drama and narrative as relevant to understanding the singular form of cinematic narration employed in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. We will also be examining some key features of the implicit audio-visual (cinematic) narrator debate pertaining to claims I-IV noted above.

Perez’s theory of film narrative, as set forth in The Narrative Sequence, takes film to be a medium poised between drama and narrative, between enactment and telling or—in the context of the camera—between enactment and mediation. If a narrative is the telling of a story (something that happened, is imagined to have happened, is invented etc.) then a narrative sequence, by Perez’s terms, is a story told in a given order or succession. Such an arrangement is necessarily incomplete, open-ended and subject to the narrator’s arbitrary choice of sequence (beginning, middle and end) and content. Of course, the camera itself is not making any narrative choices about sequence and content (this task falls to the director, or camera “pointer” as we will see later). The camera is, however, mediating between us and the world it captures in its fictional “gaze,”[2] much like the words of a narrator mediate between us and the world they are telling us about.

On the distinction between drama and narrative in film, Perez is notably suspicious of any attempt at erecting positive distinctions between film forms (i.e. film as either drama or narrative) or of assigning as defining properties what are merely useful ways of talking about them.

“Why distinguish between drama and narrative in film, it may be asked, if film is both a dramatic and a narrative medium? For the same reason one distinguishes between a particle and a wave even if the kind of thing that skips around in quantum physics behaves like both” (64).

In citing the famous wave-particle duality paradigm from physics, Perez adds an important qualification to his endeavor and notably gives himself some conceptual leeway when it comes to positing cinematic narrators. By recognizing that films can work sometimes more like drama and sometimes more like narrative (or sometimes more like both) then, we end up with a less tidy but ultimately richer understanding of how the film works, without being wholly committed to the implications of a single conceptual model. Returning briefly to claim I) for the necessity of a cinematic narrator, the implication of the physics duality paradigm is that, because not all films are necessarily narrative, we need not posit invisible, effaced narrators where no such storytellers are present (claim IV) for the sake of adhering to the literary model of narration.

Given the strong theoretical links between literature and film and the large amount of work already done on narrative and forms of narrative communication/ the narrator in literary fiction, it is not surprising that film theory should use the literary model of narrative as its primary reference point. Of course, one necessarily runs into some theoretical problems when attempting to apply the conditions of literary narration (verbal only) to an audio-visual medium like film where both verbal and visual narrations are possible. One case of false opposition of terms worth mentioning here is the relationship between showing and telling in film. While showing and telling are usually opposed in literature (i.e. a scene shows and a summary tells), in film, showing is often the means of telling. Returning briefly now to Perez’s distinction between drama (enacting) and narrative (telling), it is worth noting that showing is not the same as dramatizing, since drama takes more than just seeing something to make a story feel present before our eyes. To be clear, we would say that narrative is showing as means of telling (visual representation used to unfold a story) and drama is showing as means of enacting (unfolding a story in the form of action).

As if issues with terminology weren’t enough, transposing the literary model of narration onto film also seems to encourage, according to Perez, the insistence for audio-visual narrators in all films. The audio-visual cinematic narrator in film is distinguished from explicit character narrators and voice-over/ omniscient commentators (also present in literary fiction), in that it is an implicit entity that visually guides us through the events on screen. This “cinematic narrator” is posited to be present regardless of whether the film has explicit narrators (in such cases it is said to be suppressed or effaced) and is assumed to be on the same ontological level as the characters and events it observes. Because the implied filmmaker or auteur would necessarily present the world of the film as a fiction (from the outside) it is argued, fictional cinematic narrators are necessary entities in films.

Looking first at claims I) that film functions solely as a narrative medium and II) that the narrative structure is independent of the medium of representation; the implication is that filmic narration cannot be structurally different from the narration in other mediums (literature, theater, dance, music, art etc.) Given that the defining features of literary narration are usually taken to be the defining features of narrative structure in general, claim II) is tantamount to saying that filmic narration cannot be structurally different from literary narration. Since it is generally accepted that literary fiction has at least two levels of narration[3]: the fictional narrative (the story) and, more relevant to our discussion, the fictional narration that presents the narrative as a series of actual events (the narrator), the implication is that all films must also have a fictional, cinematic narrator inside the world of the story (to make sense of the film as a “narrative” and perhaps to compensate for the fact that explicit filmic narrators are not always present). Ultimately, assumptions that a) there is some necessary, causal connection between the narration (telling) and the narrator (the agent who carries out the narration), b) this model somehow guarantees the presence of a narrator in every narrative and c) there is no remarkable difference between modes of narration among media that would warrant against such generalizations, do not seem at all obvious for either literature or film.[4] Though this is a vast oversimplification of the debate, the conclusion Perez wants to draw is that the exclusive use of the literary model of narration, without regard for the drama aspects also working in a particular film (claim I), will commit one to positing hidden, effaced narrators (claim IV) and confusing a range of dramatic and narrative strategies operating in that particular film.

Returning finally to the issue of necessary cinematic narrator and the implied author or auteur, let us look at claim III) that there is undeniably a governing intelligence—one in place of and/ or in addition to explicit film narrators such as character narrators or voice-over commentators—that, from a favored, inside point of view, directs our view through the fictional world on-screen, in reference to Gunning’s[5] quoted argument. In literary theory of narration at least, it is customary to distinguish between the author and the implied author of the work. Depending on how the work is written, the implied author may gives us a sense of his personality or character (which need not coincide with the traits of the real author) and/ or somehow make us aware of the construction of the work without necessarily detracting from our engagement in the story. Contrasting the implied author to the narrator, the implied author is the agent to whom we attribute the work/ fictional story while the narrator is, as noted earlier, a part of the work, an entity telling or showing us the events from within the world of the story. Carrying over this distinction to film, the implied author would coincide with the implied filmmaker, director or auteur of a film and the narrator would coincide with an implicit, audio-visual (cinematic) narrator.

The  “governing intelligence” that Gunning terms “narrator” in his discussion of D.W. Griffith’s works is, according to Perez, really meant to be the implied author or auteur of the films. Through decisions in staging, editing, cross-cutting, long shots, close-ups and other dramatic techniques, the director’s camera thus makes an action present on screen and directs our vision around the fictional world.  Even though Perez is clearly an auteurist, his rejection of necessary narrators does not require that one hold this view: as he puts it, “whether or not an implied author is inscribed in a film, whether or not this is the director, [it] is not a matter of narration” (62). In other words, the showing as means of enacting or dramatization on screen may very well be achieved by the work of the implied author, director, filmmaker (or the unified creative agency responsible in highly collaborative projects) without necessitating explicit or implicit narrators. In response to the claim that a fictional narrator entity is necessary to tell a fictional story as actual, Perez’s own formulation suggests that, at least for dramatic film, an actual author can choose to show us fictional events as actual without the added use of fictional narration. Lastly, by merely noting that we experience film as “a work,” or an intentional product of human intelligence and making, Gunning has not really justified in his argument why this should necessarily apply to cinematic narrators over other creative agents of film.

Perez notes Renoir’s camera style in The Rules of the Game (1939) for it ability to unsettle our expectations of where our attention should be directed and for providing a clear instance of an autonomous, mediating gaze (cinematic narrator) working in narrative film. Usually, the “mediating gaze” of the film camera is indistinguishable and subservient to the drama; doing little more than unfolding the plot, the characters’ actions, perceptions and associated circumstances without a distinct point of view. In the case of the dramatic camera then, we may readily assume that what we are being shown is the best possible view of the action. In the case of Renoir’s narrative camera however, we immediately note a distinctive, autonomous gaze that, by its own way of seeing and rendering things on screen, creates a discrepancy between what we know is happening or is claiming our interest in the world of the film and the extent of it that we are actually being shown on screen. Using long takes and a greater depth of field for example, Renoir’s narrative camera (the mediating gaze of our audio-visual narrator) makes us especially aware of what is taking place just outside our field of vision and in the background. Much like the real world, what happens there can be just as important (if not more so) than what we do manage to see center screen.  As with our working thesis of narrative, the sense is that any overview of events is necessarily partial, fragmented and incomplete: just one individual’s account of the world, one’s choice of what to tell/ show us.

Renoir’s chosen audio-visual narrator gives us the sense of one struggling under the perceptual limitations any embodied observer would face in trying to keep up with the guests and staff at the La Colinière country estate. Like an “explorer who hasn’t gone ahead to scout the territory for us” (91), the audio-visual narrator seems to be making things out as he goes along and is often just as surprised as the audience by the sudden turn of events. This especially reflected by the manner in which he comes upon characters—by spotting them at a distance, obscured by furniture, watching them leave the frame and then suddenly re-enter it in close-up, interrupting and then redirecting his attention from one to the other’s plot as they appear, etc.: all as if by happenstance. Recalling Perez’s assertion that a narrative camera “imitates a gaze,” it is worth noting how this narrative camera achieves this gesture of looking.

In the famous party sequence at the chateau, complete with an amateur stage performance and une danse macabre for the entertainment of guests and neighbors, we spot the estate gamekeeper Schumacher looking for his wife Lisette (maid of the lady of the estate; Christine de la Chesnaye) whom we have just seen kissing Marceau (apprehended rabbit poacher-turned-house servant). Beginning at one doorway, the visual narrator follows him on his search, allowing him to become obscured behind walls and then picking him up again at the next doorway. During one of those intervals, the camera stumbles upon another couple: Christine and guest St. Aubin on a couch in a corner (we know she has recently discovered her husband Robert de la Chesnaye’s infidelity with mutual friend and guest Geneviève, but were given no indication of her having liked St. Aubin until this point; she must be with him on a whim). Surprised as we are, the visual narrator pauses us briefly to look at the odd pair before picking up Schumacher again at the final doorway, where he’s found Lisette and Marceau watching the masquerade performance along with the other guests. After a brief pause on this love triangle, the visual narrator strays a little to the side, only to come upon a sulking Andre Jurieau (the pilot and national hero who has recently completed a solo trans-Atlantic flight and is also desperately in love with Christine). Following Jurieau’s angry gaze back in the opposite direction, the narrator retraces the doorway space, where we catch a glimpse of Marceau sneaking away and Schumacher keeping Lisette from following him, only to come upon Christine and St. Aubin again on the other side. Now feeling Jurieau’s accusatory gaze, Christine and St. Aubin swiftly get up, walking out of the room and out of the camera frame. The camera’s moving and pausing and moving again in this sequence is something we would clearly associate with the act of looking. What differentiates this distinctive narrative view from say, a dramatic point of view shot is that, while the latter gives us a shared glimpse of someone’s consciousness for that given moment or merely imitates the perspective from a given point in space (anyone else standing there would theoretically be able to see the same thing), the narrator’s POV gives us a “compass” for understanding the world of the story.

Taking up this scene again in terms of the narrator’s POV being a “compass” for understanding the story, the fact that we are shown the two plots simultaneously in one uninterrupted sequence (not counting of course the minor developments/ subplots also going on with the servants and other minor guests in the background at the same time) allows us to make parallels between characters that are not immediately obvious but nevertheless important in the context of the story.  Though we can attribute the choice of making this sequence one continuous shot to the director Renoir, we may just as well attribute this distinct view to the visual narrator who, presumably out of curiosity, chose to follow the two love triangles simultaneously. Watching Schumacher, Jurieau, Marceau, St. Aubin, Lisette and Christine, we naturally make a parallel between the two female characters. Though we know Lisette to be flirtatious by nature and uncaring for her husband (she prefers Schumacher to stay in the country while she stays in town as Christine’s maid), Christine’s uncharacteristically taking up with stranger St. Aubin tells us something about her disillusioned conversion from the naive Austrian, unacquainted with the ways of French society (i.e. taking romance seriously), to just another society woman following the rules of the game. Similarly, one would not readily compare Schumacher, the cuckolded gamekeeper, with Jurieau the ridiculous aviator in pursuit of someone else’s wife. But because they never really interact throughout the film, this particular sequence is one of the few instances that allows us to understand why it is that their destinies do come together toward the end of the film (Schumacher ends up shooting Jurieau dead by case of mistaken identity). Unlike the other two men, Schumacher and Jurieau labor under the illusion that they are sincere. They are in effect the only ones that play by the rules, just not the same rules as the others.

Finally, looking at another key sequence where the visual narrator actually takes up another character’s POV (one of a few instances in the film), we are still able to recognize an autonomous gaze with unmistakable insight into the world of the story. Taking up Berthelin’s binoculars with Christine to look at a squirrel on a nearby tree during the hunt, we hear that his instrument is in fact so refined that an observer could “live every detail of the squirrel’s life with it.” As we hear these words, Christine perhaps, magnifies the shiny-eyed squirrel to the point where it is no longer recognizable. Though Christine seems to think nothing of it, we as viewers (courtesy of the narrator’s visual emphasis) are struck by how the small creature’s experience and sensibilities are so alien from our own and how, upon closer scrutiny, all we have done by zooming in is to further distance ourselves from any possibility of understanding the details of that squirrel’s life and habitat. Significantly, it is with these very same binoculars that Christine spies on her husband embracing Geneviève and confirms the adultery that was common knowledge to all but herself. Such focused scrutiny again keeps her from understanding the full context of the situation—that Robert was at that point ending the affair for his wife’s sake—and sets in motion the series of chaotic pairings and elopements at the party.

True to the thesis of narrative in film, the audio-visual narrator chosen by Renoir to mediate between us and the world of The Rules of the Game provides a distinct, perceptive account of the action with noticeable choices in gestures/ manner of looking, subjects of interest, and points of visual emphasis. Unlike Antonioni’s completely alienated, “estranged”[6] visual narrator that deliberately moves counter to the emotions enacted on screen or gives us views that are noticeably incongruous with the tone of the scene, Renoir’s visual-narrator is enough of an outsider from the drama to be bewildered and unable to anticipate character actions and motives—thus supplying the noticeable tension between the action and the picture. Still, the visual narrator is invested enough in the unfolding of the story that he consistently strives to keep the progressively complex and chaotic action under surveillance. The implication is that, regardless of how great the depth of field or how fine the optic focus on a world this large and this complex, one cannot presume to give any real, complete, or accurate account of a world so large and so complex (unless one is working with drama). As in the case of the squirrel, to do so would only create further distortion. Though narrative accounts are the product of one individual’s arbitrary choice of what to show and can be of questionable epistemic focus, tainted by bias, fragmentary, and incomplete, by making us aware of what one is not shown and by assembling choice fragments of specific events as in The Rules of the Game, such narratives do reveal a great deal.

In positing a veritable audio-visual narrator in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, Perez is not contradicting his general theory of film narrative, which, as per the wave-particle duality paradigm of physics, asserts that there is much use in distinguishing between the dual drama and narrative aspects working in film. Rather than thinking of film as being of one primary form or another, or, even worse, of becoming entrenched in the theories of the literary model for film and being forced to posit necessary cinematic narrators for every film, one should recognize that a) such terms are primarily of functional value and should not be taken as actual properties of film, that b) broadening our terms to include drama—showing as means of enacting—and narrative—showing as means of telling (mediating for the film camera)—gives us more insight in talking about film and frees us from the ontological commitment of having to posit invisible, effaced narrators in film[7] where there is clearly no evidence of them. As illustrated in the discussion of The Rules of the Game, whether a particular film has an audio-visual narrator depends on how the film uses a range of narrative strategies specific to film; an audio-visual medium capable of both showing and telling.

Footnotes

[1] Perez, Gilberto. “The Narrative Sequence.” The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998. pp. 50-91, 422-429.

[2] Strictly speaking, the camera does not embody or achieve a “gaze” but rather, “enacts the fiction of a perceiving eye” (75) or imitates a gaze/ point of view with seeming consciousness or perception.

[3] Wilson, George, Le Grand Imagier Steps Out: The Primitive Basis of Film Narration (2006).

[4] Though in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), Bordwell criticizes the need to ascribe a narrator to every film sequence (noted by Perez, p.61) and even gives an “agent-free” account of film narration, he is stuck with his dual endorsement of a version of claim II) *see above.  To deny that films always have narrators would thus be to imply that film narrative is structurally different from other types of narrative (mainly literary narrative), which would contradict his current position.

[5] In D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (1961), Gunning allegedly confuses the implied author with the narrator.

[6] Perez gives an extensive discussion of Antonioni’s work, particularly his film Cronaca di un Amore (1950), which is supposed to be an instance of what Perez calls “estranged vision” or an alienation effect in narration (90-1).

[7] On the grounds that all films are narrative and all mediums of narrative operate like literary narrative.

Natalie Rodriguez (’10) is a Philosophy and Biochemistry major at University of Southern California.

ABSTRACT: The evolution of artistic expression is often understood to be co-productive with a certain apprehended teleology of culture: “progress”, a notion itself instantiated by false axiomatic assumptions concerning biological evolution. These meditations will seek to critically interrogate teleological assumptions by de-structively mapping the future evolution of artistic expression through a radically empirical attention to the flows of cultural raw materials, media-structures, mediums, memes and messages. By attending to processes associated with growing media digitzation, inter-connectedness and fragmenting attention span, these meditations will seek to illuminate a cultural milieu which is comprised of unprecedented structural homogeneity yet capable of equally unprecedented artistic diversity.

—

I. A Biology of Art

The evolution of artistic expression is much like the evolution of biological species. In both cases, the raw material is a product of mutant variation—in biology that variation appears random, in the case of art it is attributed to creativity and, increasingly, strategic deviation from established convention. Across the field of this variation, certain selection pressures determine whether or not certain mutations survive. In biology, those mutants with advantages over previous versions of the organism are apt to proliferate, and that mutation becomes more prevalent in the variation. In artistic expression, different mutations enjoy widespread acclaim and are rewarded by the market, which in turn creates incentives for other artists to produce in a similar vein, or in other words, to embody their own artwork with this new mutation. I will here reflect on the quixotic nature of these mutations in an attempt to circumvent the rigid trajectory so often imposed by historians and social theorists, which assemble the historically constructed chronological assemblages into an artificial linear teleology. Whether this then becomes understood as progress away from barbarism or corruption of a prior Golden Age cannot redeem its arbitrariness. The attribution of some defining purpose of history or Spirit of an Age to ritual, formulaic and aesthetic representation has long characterized critical response to art of all different stripes, and must be resisted. These reflections will hopefully serve as a futurist’s de-structive genealogy[1], which seeks to expose the arbitrary construction of such grand narratives and the bricolage nature of historical condensations of aesthetic culture, as well as suggesting how the cultural raw materials of media structure, medium, meme and message might more forcefully manifest and as these expressive trajectories proceed apace.

The change of creatures, languages and memes over time is often referred to through the language of evolution. However, such language carries unfortunate teleological baggage which requires critical interrogation. One crucial misunderstanding of evolutionary theory can be epitomized in the axiomatic phrase: ‘survival of the fittest.’ This phrase is extremely un-useful, because people who use it almost always define ‘fittest’ as ‘those that are apt to survive’ and empiricists define ‘those that are apt to survive’ based on ‘those that have survived in the past’. Therefore the expression is converted into the tautology: ‘those that survived survived.’ In practice, whatever is meant by ‘fittest’ need not have a central role in determining survival. A meteor descending surprisingly out of a cloudless blue sky can destroy the world’s smartest and strongest man as surely as it can destroy a paraplegic infant. The millions dead of earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes on the one hand and colonialist violence, structural starvation, modern genocides, and terrorist attacks on the other, were unlucky, not unfit. The high propensity of events to happen unexpectedly or for a reason entirely un-related to so-called ‘fitness’ increases the corresponding likelihood that even if there were some ideal organism or some ideal artwork, neither organic nor artistic evolutionary course would veer in that direction.

This misunderstanding, in biology referred to as determinism (or the idea that biology can determine an organism’s superiority independent of an assessment of that organism’s environment) is behind some of the most misguided political actions of the twentieth century. In reality, an entity is only fit relative to its environment. Since an entity’s environment is always operating under changing conditions and is always being partially re-composed through the mutation of other entities, the definition of “fitness” must also be in constant flux. In biological evolution, rising temperature may make thick fur a draw-back when it had once been an advantage, and if those animals have trouble surviving than maybe other animal’s sharp teeth and carnivorous digestive systems will be forced to subsist on vegetable matter, as in the case of the panda which must consume huge quantities of bamboo for it’s meat-designed digestive system to extract sufficient nutrients. In artistic evolution, if a large-scale war is in the making, such political foreshadowing may make impressionistic paintings of bucolic rural pleasantries seem naïve or overly sentimental, disconnected from the current mood or even propagandistic. This was the case among the artists of the ill-fated Weinmar Republic as the approach of the second world war neared. If the government intervenes in the artistic sphere, as in the case of socialist countries, then that will function as powerful selection pressure determining what mutations  actually succeed (although censorship itself is a selection pressure on the population of subversives that ensures that only the most insidiously subversive works become popular). These are examples of the ways in which selection pressures, both market and non-market, determine what forms of artistic expression become prevalent, both drawing on and informing the culture that intertwines them, and give inspiration to new artists to carry on and strategically depart from their work.

A momentary linguistic note: I am using the general term of ‘artistic expression’ to be inclusive of anything that the reader properly deems to be art. While small libraries could be filled with the books that have been written over the question ‘what is art?’ I submit that while it is relatively difficult (and somewhat fruitless) to arrive at a precise (or concise) definition of art, we can amusingly reverse Justice Stewart’s quip concerning the definition of pornography by saying that at least you can know it when you see it. In some ways the process of questioning the boundaries of its own social definition is an intrinsic element of the artistic process, manifest in objects, persons, performances, happenings and so on. Definitions here are not answers to questions that anyone should be asking. Or, as one of my college professors put it: “Art inspires. What’s inspiration? Exactly.”

II. Contemporary Selection Pressures

If we are interested in the future of artistic expression, we must first begin by asking what selection pressures exist, and whether they are primarily directed at artist, art-object, art-buyer or general art consumer. My observations here are not meant to be exhaustive, but primarily to address one particular trend which I feel is unique to our time-period and will have more to do with influencing the future of artistic expression than any other. That trend is the increasing demands placed upon the human attention span. We live during a historical epoch where everyone is expected to be a multi-tasker. Many of the people I know regularly do 4-5 things at once, whether they are working or relaxing. Those activities include: listening to music, checking email, writing email, reading news, checking a social networking service such as Facebook, sending messages through that social networking service, reading a blog or blog-aggregator such as Digg, searching for random cultural factoids and background on Wikipedia, playing some type of internet-based computer game, looking through collections of bizarre or cute images, text-messaging, and watching television, to name a few of the ones that jump most quickly to mind. For those who prefer to focus on labor as the locus of social behavior, it is easy to see how this trend is co-productive with a efficiency-oriented attempt to socialize white collar workers for constant multi-tasking by managers who correctly believed that in the short-term this strategy would increase worker productivity.[2] This multi-tasking socialization effort has proved almost disastrously successful.

This selection pressure is unique for a number of reasons. It exists in a category of persistent and unplanned mass social trends that has few historical precedents. Unlike a war or an economic crash which historically seem to come and go and operate somewhat cyclically, the trend of increasing use of computers throughout the economy shows no signs of calling it quits. And as that computing use becomes more integrated into economic, and subsequently, social life, it is rapidly becoming more sophisticated. Moore’s Law, named for Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, is an observation that the number of transistor on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every eighteen months, making the increases in emerging hi-tech capacity literally exponential.[3] Can you imagine someone a decade ago contemplating the possibility of youtube? Blogs that generate enough revenue that anyone can start one for free? Now youtube videos have become something of a sub-genre unto themselves and blogs of publications like Time magazine and Foreign Policy are outpacing the readership of their print editions. To many, this phenomenal acceleration of high technology seems more enduring even than the governments that may preside over them. One need only to look at the frequent failures and inconsistencies of Chinese internet censorship to see how the conceptual technology and memes that allow information to be organized are outpacing their antiquated opponents by leaps and bounds.

Another element to consider is the target. Of these more enduring forms of pressure, such as censorship or market demand, previous pressures have targeted the production rather than consumption of artistic expression. Censorship targets the writer more than the reader, the artist who can’t sell her paintings suffers more than the patron who can’t buy them, at least materially. The hi-tech pressure on the human attention span affects everyone, but as a selection pressure on artistic expression, the consumer is the focus. Focusing on the consumer has historically not been easy, because of the large numbers of consumers and their de-centralized location relative to artists who have gallery representation and must connect with the art market in order to become profitable. I should note that when I say consumers, I am referring to a new sort of consumer that high technology has made possible, a consumer that consumes without expense, that allows artists to produce money through popularity alone that generates revenue through advertising. This consumer of artistic expression need only view an image or a film in order to have participated in the act of consumption, as opposed to the traditional mechanism of consumer participation; spending money. In this, these new consumers can be juxtaposed against traditional art buyers who are also easier for previous selection pressures to reach, through attendance of gallery openings and art auctions and consumption of a specific sub-genre designed for art buyers. New consumers can be anyone, interested in the professionalized “art world” or not. They vote with their feet (or hands, on their keyboard) instead of their purses and increasingly in is those votes that have come to signify artistic success, along with the traditional markers of critical acclaim and premium market price.

III. Future Mutations

Just as the selection pressure of increasing demands placed on the attention span target the consumer, the consumer transfers that pressure onto the art object. If most consumption of artistic expression in the future occurs at the same time as a number of other activities, then it is reasonable to assume that artistic expression will rise to meet that need. If you are listening to music while you watch TV with the sound off (or on low volume) and write emails to people, you will want to listen to music that is more like a soundtrack rather than a discrete art-object unto itself. You will want that television program, let’s say the news, to communicate its message wordlessly. You will want your form of communication with others to be short and direct. Already, we can observe patterns in music, network news and communication which complement the needs of a consumer base which spends its time doing many things at once.

It is easy to decry the consumer-culture influences as leading only to the pointless and ugly simplifying of artistic expression into uninspiring and repetitive drivel. There are certainly many examples to point to of musicians that sound almost exactly the same as other musicians, television shows with characters that look and act like characters on other television shows, clothing that is designed to blend in with the clothing that others are wearing and so on. It is hard to doubt that the fragmenting of attention span is having a homogenizing influence on artistic expression.

Take the music industry as a good example. Radio disc jockeys have in large part been replaced as music selectors with the Scott SS32 radio automation suite[4], a program developed by Google which shuffles a playlist of 4-500 tracks and tells the DJ when to talk and when to break for ads. These playlists are assembled by market research companies which study the reactions of demographically homogenous groups to hundreds of 7-second song clips. Each member of the market group votes up or down whether or not to add the song to the playlist.[5] Because of this vetting process, music producers are increasingly using digital technology to polish songs to elide anything that sounds like an error, and add elements that make them sound like recognizable hits. This process is becoming an industry standard if it isn’t already.[6] We could blame greedy music producers or soul-less corporatism for this tendency, but the reality is that they are responding to the same selections pressures of a culture that increasingly does many things at once and therefore has less attention to understand a more complicated or non-conforming art object when it comes in over the radio. Next time you listen to the radio (which will probably be while you are driving) think about how long it takes you to decide whether or not to stay with a station that’s playing a certain song, and then think about whether or not you are making that decision primarily based on how innovative or how familiar that song seems to you. The fact of the matter is that the fragmenting of attention has created a market in which it is profitable to conform.

The music industry is an extreme example, however, and we can look at many forms of new media which form new parameters that encourage both homogenization and deviance. youtube is one of the best example of this formula: the medium homogenizes all content to the format of a short, several minutes-long streaming video, but the content is remarkably varied. In the evolution of artistic expression, just like biology, every homogenization along selective traits both decreases the likelihood of variance outside of those traits while increasing the propensity for specialization within them. Once all birds have evolved beaks, different groups of birds will evolve beaks more adept at eating certain foods, such as nuts, creating evolutionary niches. The same principle applies here. Once the pressure of fragmenting attention has concentrated mass-consumed artistic expression in selective mediums, innovation in content and specialization can occur within those mediums and at their periphery.

To continue with the youtube example, at the periphery of the genre of free, short, web-based videos, one might look at the evolution of internet pornography into parallel fragmented search engines such as eskimotube, which in turn organizes sub-genre videos based on viewer predilection into separate, linked search engines and then streams those videos in the same way that youtube does. I should note that I use the word “periphery” only to describe social acceptability and the question of whether or not such productions are legitimately ‘artistic’. If, however, we looked at actual web traffic one would find that internet pornography swamps most other forms of hi-tech consumption of images and video by astounding magnitudes. As this genre and its manifold accompaniments have become more readily accessible through the exact same medium as youtube, they have created separate user-communities viewing different content based on fetishistic and racialized viewing preferences which, in turn, continues the process of internal specialization into different sub-genres that are organized and presented in different electronic fora.

The example of internet pornography is an important case study because it is an instance where numerical superiority of consumer preferences has yet to make a real impact on the social culture of consumption in terms of acceptability. According to the Internet Filter Review’s statistical information for 2006, 70 per cent of all internet pornography access occurs between the 9-5 workday, 20 per cent of men admit to accessing pornography at work, 1 in 3 companies has had to terminate employees for inappropriate web activity and 10 percent of men surveyed admit that they have an addiction to internet pornography. These statistics indicate that internet pornography has not merely a fact but a way of life for literally millions of American workers. While this may be surprising, it shouldn’t be, given that the internet pornography industry currently outpaces the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink combined.[7] This is a prime example of the way in which an aesthetic environment, widely considered deviant, becomes integrated into an overlapping series of such environments within the workplace as people seek everyday ways to satisfy their need to see sexual images. While such a need may be sexually motivated, like it or not, it may also be many workers dominant interaction with any sort of creative production outside of advertising. As this trend and others like it continue to grow and permeate the cultural milieu, they will in turn form a profound selection pressure which will provide the criteria for success or failure of future aesthetic mutations.

Here we can talk about art as not an art-object but as a series of overlapping components: content, medium, and media-structure. For a youtube video of a puppy chasing its tail, the tail-chasing would be the content, the short streaming video would be the medium and the network of youtube.com would be the media structure. While Marshall McLuhan’s quip that the medium is the message may at one point have been true, increasingly it is the media-structure that is dominating the medium which in turn reflects upon the content. Art objects are homogenized, hollowed out, shortened, stripped; the messages are apparent, explicit, easy-to-grasp; the presentation is designed to get attention, to shock and to titillate. These goals will form the principles that the market will use to designate the evolutionary winners in the new highly fragmented field of artistic expression, and it is those winners that will inspire artistic progeny.

For those who will say that the field of so-called “high art” (painting and sculpture) are immune from such influences, I would point to the meteoric ascendancy in the art world of the neo-Warholian Takashi Murakami whose work both thrives under and embodies the aforementioned selection pressures. His art alternates between dividing and combining the abstractly innocent and explicitly sexual, featuring sugary, bright colors and a surplus of cartoon eyes. There are now many artists like him, and increasingly this “high art” is virtually indistinguishable from the “graphic designs” which now appear on custom t-shirts or album covers. Both exemplify the type of eye-catching, provocative artistic expression which was once only a peripheral mutation and now is becoming dominant. This is the type of artistic expression that can catch a person’s attention when that attention is divided between many things. This is the visual equivalent of the type of song that you don’t change the station on because you want to see where it goes, what it does, even though it is not familiar. The challenge of new art will be increasingly to innovate along the lines that they can get enough attention from enough distracted consumers that they will be able to tell a story, represent an idea, or simply be beautiful. In the merging of communications technology through the connected artistic-economic spheres, it is too often this last criteria, subjective to begin with, that gets completely left out. Hopefully, it will be possible for a talented artist to develop new strategies in this difficult environment, to clear a space in which to reclaim it.

IV. Mutations Adapt

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a noise? Probably. If an artist creates an art-object and no other person experiences it, is it art? Perhaps. If yes, the drug addict is the highest and most prolific form of artist. If no, then it implies that art is not located in the artist or the art object, but rather occurs in the space of the encounter between the consumer, whether viewer, listener, feeler or so on, and the art object. Just as all art-objects appear to become more simplified as a result of the proliferation of high technology and the increasing demands placed on the human attention span, the artistic experience itself is becoming more varied and complex. Consider a music producer who is putting together a song with a rock band. Many of the component parts will be quite simple, a simple base line, a steady rhythm, a guitar player, a singer. Recorded separately each track of each instrument may seem mundane and even boring. If there is improvisation, it will likely be done only by one instrument at a time. Yet when the finished song is assembled, it sounds professional and innovative even though that innovation is distributed to only one instrument at a time. The artistic experience is increasingly being accomplished more by the consumer than the work of art, and it being assembled by the consumer at the site of consumption from various component parts, in the same way that a single song is assembled out of different tracks of instruments. The person who listens to music while watching television has assembled, for the moment of experience, a different artistic encounter than either medium would be absent the other. In this way, the rich bricolage artistic experience is accomplished through strategies that we are only just beginning to realize. For now, this assemblage and process of assemblage is not considered art. I would wager that before long, it will be.

The future of artistic expression is with the consumer, not the artist. After decades of killing the author and burying the artist, they really may be dead. New artists will create raw materials for the consumers to assemble artistic experiences with. Perhaps centers will open that will combine mixed media for individual or group performances. We are already beginning to see something like that through artistic collaboration which makes use of high technology, such as those of the poet Anne Carson with choreographer Robert Curry. Commercially, companies will be able to profit by contracting with inter-media artists to produce aesthetic environments that combine complementary assortments of music, film, news media, television, and reading material along with appropriate lighting, temperature and perhaps even scents.

For now, the consumer, often unknowingly fashions these aesthetic environs from surrounding mediums willy-nilly. This will become more planned as more people understand how acclimated consumers have become to a mixed-media environment. It has become increasingly common for bands to pair their performances with film clips in addition to lighting shows, and to experiment even further with projection technology, integrating action in the film with a chorus or climax of their music, such as in the case of RJD2 or Black Moth Super Rainbow. That is one of the beginnings of the new media integration that will occur as people increasingly don’t have the patience to experience any art-object in quantity, but find the jarring over-lap of different incongruous elements to be aesthetically unpleasant. New art will not have a center but will exist as experiences occurring at the intersection of many different mediums and content, where the content will sometimes jump from medium to medium. Some of it will be planned and organized, much of it will simply happen. New forms of planning will generate new genres as well as new mediums for new forms of composure, which will in turn demand new strategies for integration into these new aesthetic environs. Cultural nay-sayers and pushers of cheap nostalgia and sentimentality may continue whining about the virtualization of aesthetic experience, wishing for the “reality” of the ‘60s to return. Such critics do a disservice to themselves by making their criticism irrelevant, much like Adorno’s reactionary complaints about jazz. This future of artistic expression offers possibilities of variance and mutation greater than ever before in the history of humanity. As consumers, it is ours to synthesize.

Endnotes

[1] Marzec, Robert P. An Anatomy of Empire symploke – Volume 9, Numbers 1-2, 2001, pp. 165-168

[2] Butcher, David R. “National Productivity, Multitasking Efficiency, Individual Engagement” Industrial News Room, July 5, 2006

[3] Wolf, Gary “Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity” Wired Magazine, 3/24/08

[4] see “Radio Automation” information at http://www.google.com/radioautomation/products.html

[5] The Word “Why records DO all sound the same” February 26,2008

[6] Ibid.

[7] Jerry Ropelato, “Internet Pornography Statistics” Internet Filter Review, 2006 [http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html]

Edmund Zagorin (’11) is a Philosophy and International Affairs major at University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

Art courtesy of larkie

Abbreviations for Heidegger and other works cited:

QT – The Question Concerning Technology

Ister – Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”

WAPF – What Are Poets For?

SR – Science and Reflection

OWA – The Origin of the Work of Art

PLT – Hofstadter’s Introduction to Poetry, Language, Thought

Zimmerman – Michael Zimmerman’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity

Ferry and Renaut – Heidegger and Modernity trans. Franklin Philip

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Here the question of the saving power potential of art against technology’s worlding as the standing-reserve will be addressed. Section I will provide a grounding analysis of Heidegger’s notions of technology and art and their danger and saving potential, respectively. For the sake of brevity and to avoid pedantry, familiarity with the concepts of technology and art will be assumed allowing focus on technology’s danger, art’s saving power, and Heidegger’s expectations. Section II demonstrates that art cannot play the role of the saving power, primarily due to technology being inescapable as the culmination of western metaphysics and its progress in mastering the world over the past 50 years. The thesis, if you will, posited here is that the conceiving of art as the saving power would be the ultimate victory of technology, having formed humans into thinking of art as a mere means. Section III, following and expanding upon Michael Zimmerman’s work, concludes by tentatively allowing for a ‘way out’ of the metaphysical age through technology ‘taking lessons’ from art to set techne as the primary mode of production-revealing, a unison of production and art.

Why any of this is important might come to mind, and to this I respond that it is absolutely essential to ensure that art is not used as a means. It is our highest dignity, to use Heidegger’s phrase in The Question Concerning Technology, to watch over the unconcealed and pay attention to technology’s revealing. To lose art and poetry to technology would be the final forgetting of Being and our complete transformation into will-to-power automatons, unaware of any world or Being other than the technological ‘one-ness’ we believe we control but are enslaved to. This will be discussed further throughout the following.

I. Technology is not a set of tools. It is not a mere means to further human ends for human benefit. Thinking of technology and science in this way, as a neutral mode of producing, only makes one blind to the essence of technology and its existential effect on us and our worlding (QT 4). Technology is a revealing of the world, humans, and things in the world; it is a mode of truth. However, it is not a revealing of ‘bringing-forth’ from concealment into presence, the process of aletheia as truth, the poiesis that is characteristic of art, techne, and anything that allows entities to reveal themselves on their own terms as one possibility of their being. No, technology is a revealing that orders, challenges, and gathers entities into a specific, exclusive mode of being Heidegger calls the standing-reserve (QT 17). As such, technology takes hold of things and nature in a specific way: As ordered to be ready for use at any time, as energy to be unlocked, stored, and utilized for further extraction and manipulation. This is accomplished through man, by setting-upon him this task of ordering. Thus man is compelled by the essence of technology to view nature and things in it as what technology reveals them to be, namely as resources to be extracted and things as equally substitutable. This whole process is the Ge-stell, the enframing, which calls man forth to order and assemble nature as ready-at-hand in a very restricted sense (QT 19). Enframing is the essence of technology and a useful word for thinking about how technology forms our worlding: It places upon us a framework of ordering-as-revealing that claims to contain within it all that is, and all that will ever be. Such is characteristic of technology, making it a revealing ‘one’ that reveals all Being in its own terms, unconcealing everything the world has to offer as standing-reserve, as truth. This is a very powerful and compelling kind of revealing, which explains why technology has gained so much power over the world, and why people eagerly adopt Ge-stell in their attempts to ease life and their anxiety in the face of the flight of the gods.

It begins to be clear in The Question Concerning Technology that Heidegger has a strong distaste for technology, especially in the passage regarding the technological renaming of the Rhine from its poetic name to one concerned merely with the production of hydro-electrical power. Even earlier in his thought this theme emerges, where in der Ister lectures technology is characterized not as a means but purely as a domineering, conquering kind of unfolding (revealing) that determines the possibilities of human comportment and the actuality of what is and what can be (Ister 53). Strongly influenced by past and contemporary anti-modern romantics such as his famous and controversial friend Ernst Jünger, Heidegger after the rectorship displayed consistent and penetrating insights into the ills of modernity and the problems of technology. The reasons for his disgust of the modern and the technological are manifold and complex.

Technology distorts man, his world, and presents the supreme danger. The Ge-stell of technology, rephrased but with the same meaning in many of Heidegger’s works, poses a great danger to man in that by viewing the world and entities as standing-reserve ready to be ordered, it is but a small and easy step to view man himself in this way; man as standing-reserve, as material, as a function of objectification, as a slave, losing his essence and fundamental relation to Being while encroaching upon nature a disrespectful ‘securedness’ (QT 27; WAPF 113, 115; SR 168; Zimmerman 199). Perhaps even worse than the transformation of the possible authentic man into the necessary inauthentic technological man is this transfiguration’s self-concealment and hiddenness. Heidegger’s discussions are threaded through by technology’s characteristic self-ignorance, a being-concealed of its method and workings that it is not aware of. This is one of the major problems of technology, that it claims to reveal everything but is unaware and passes over its own concealing/revealing, a lack of the understanding of the duality of concealing/revealing paradox that art has a grasp of (as we will see later). So not only does technology cover over the misery it causes, it is unaware of it’s doing so and of the basic Heideggarian notion that whenever something is revealed, something other is necessarily concealed (Ister 44). Closely related to this is another ‘monstrous’ characteristic of technology and science (which are mutually dependent), that of blocking all possibility except the one they reveal as truth. As mentioned above, the technological mode of revealing is extremely exclusive. All other ways of revealing, of aletheia, are dismissed as ‘pointless’, ‘useless’, or ‘without worth’, each accusation being imbedded in the sphere of technological-type revealing. By Ge-stell’s setting the standard for all that can be in terms of the standing-reserve, any other possibility of being is blocked and precluded from truth: Specifically, enframing conceals poiesis-revealing, blocking the ‘shine and hold’ of primordial, original truth and the possibility of its uncovering (QT 26, 28). This is perhaps an even greater danger than the misunderstanding of man himself mentioned above, for it would disfigure all things in nature, not just man. Not only is technology an (in Husserl’s words) ‘empty passing-though’ entities, but also is a doing violence to the very possibility of possibility, entities’ being and presencing.

As if this were not enough to make anyone an anti-technology romantic, let alone the man who thought it up, these aspects of technology’s hold over the world result in what Heidegger names in What Are Poets For? the ‘darkening of the world’ (PLT xv; Zimmerman 26). Having been transfigured into the technological, man loses authentic being and completes the forgetfulness of Being. The earth is destroyed in man’s quest for self-fulfilling power, the gods take flight and God dies as everything sacred (including life itself) loses meaning. Anxiety and unheimlichkeit become the predominant moods of humanity torn from its origins, and the spirit of the West declines as men become a mass fearful of the free and creative (there seem to be strong Nietzschean undertones here). This is modernity; this is the destitute time of the world that Heidegger so clearly despises. A change towards an authentic world must come from art, from poetry, that which still says what is in an appropriate, respectful way (WAPF 92). Clearly, the world is in a crisis from the domination of technology, and the only way out seems through art, poetry.

The world now in its deepest night, the night of destitution and ontological darkness, abandoned by the gods and wanting of poiesis, needs ‘saving’. It needs to be brought to the morning again, when the sun comes to bring light to entities in their own being. In the time of the destitution of the world, the ‘Now’ of the first line of der Ister calls for the time of poets to poetize, to tell something new and begin a new time, the post-technological poetical era (Ister 8). Thus Heidegger places poetry, and art more generally, as that which will bring the world back to the light, out of the night of the global domination of technology and productionist metaphysics. This is something he arrives at repeatedly in his writings, with different argumentation but the same conclusion. Most explicitly seen at the end of The Question Concerning Technology when he famously finds the ‘saving power’ to grow out of the greatest danger of technology, Heidegger clearly calls for poetry and the arts to confront technology and bring poiesis and aletheia back as the primal modes of revealing (QT 29, 35). Because it cannot grow out of nothing, the saving power does exist in a minimal form during the destitute time. Even with the night at its darkest, remnants of the holy stay behind the fleeing gods. The poet is he who attends to these remnants, giving them room to reveal themselves and caring for them against the darkness. This is what poets ‘are for’; the recognition of the traces of the flight of the gods, tracking and attending to them without doing violence, allowing the holy, the sacred, all that which has been covered over by technology, to show us the path out of the night towards the dawn (WAPF 92).

Anyone who reads Heidegger’s later works will appreciate his romanticism, his desire to escape the alien world of modernity to a world defined by art and the letting-be of entities to reveal themselves freely and poetically. This is manifest even in his own physical comportment, as he adopted whenever possible the rural lifestyle, dress, and parlance of the Black Forest folk. His translators and interpreters take this romanticism to town, making it abundantly clear that the saving power is meant to be art, the poetry that attunes man to the curse of technology and opens up the possibility of authentic revealing, aletheia (PLT xv; Zimmerman xx, 77, 93). However clear this might be, we would do well to briefly compare the revealing of art and poetry with the restricted and concealing revealing of technology discussed above to fully show why Heidegger is such a romantic.

The way of revealing of the work of art is well typified by the Greek temple in The Origin of the Work of Art. As opposed to technological revealing which forces upon all things the requirements of the standing-reserve and usefulness, the temple reveals entities in an open and respectful manner. By gathering around and in it the different aspects that make up human experience and life, it gives a relation and context to entities around it by interacting with them, on their own terms, so that they are allowed a space in the context of and in relation to the temple in which they can emerge and appear in themselves as they are (OWA 41). This kind of artistic revealing has one major advantage over technological revealing, other than the fact that it does not exclude other modes besides itself: The understanding of the revealing/concealing duality. As is recurring in Heidegger’s thought, the nature of revealing necessarily entails concealment of something other. One cannot cast light upon something without throwing something else into shadow. Technology does not understand this, so when it casts light and reveals everything as standing-reserve, it ends up concealing itself and its own workings. Art, on the other hand, is ‘aware’ of the paradox of revealing/concealing because its kind of revealing contains within it and reveals both earth and world. It is not necessary to go over all the dynamics of earth and world and their interaction with each other in the rift, for what is important here is that earth is the dimension of concealment, while world is the disclosing openness (OWA 47; Zimmerman 121). Because the revealing of art consists in the duality of earth and world, of concealing and revealing, it has an understanding of its own revealing that technology completely lacks. This is what allows art to ‘let things be’ to reveal themselves self-emergently, the essence of aletheia as truth ‘happening’ in a work of art that refers what the work is ‘about’ in a contextual wholeness that gives it a great breadth of meaning and significance (OWA 54). The ‘letting-be’ and aletheia of art’s revealing is in direct opposition to the kind of revealing of technology, and this is what makes it so attractive to Heidegger, especially since art-revealing is oppositional in the exact ways (open and respectful revealing, awareness of own revealing/concealing) that make technology dangerous, as seen above.

It should be clear by now how and why Heidegger despised technology so, and why art as poetry was his answer to the ills of modernity. He was so strongly invested in his own blend of romanticism and anti-modernism that he was reported to become physically ill when approaching a big city, disturbed by the social displacement and pollution modernity had wrought (Zimmerman, 210). This raises the question of whether his distaste of the modern was a real result of his phenomenology into the essence of technology and art, or whether these were motivated by his own thrownness, his own personal tastes and being-in post-industrial Germany saturated by war, political strife, economic hardship, social unrest and displacement, and all the other problems that rapid, late industrialization brings. This would explain a lot, and would give an explanation for his romanticism and association with conservatives such as Jünger and the early National Socialist movement.

II. Be that as it may, Heidegger clearly posits art and poetry as the saving power against the domination of technology. But this cannot be so. Art cannot ‘play the role’ of the saving power; the reasons why come from Heidegger’s own philosophy of technology and art. First, technology is absolutely global and inescapable, a necessary part of our existential being and how we put the world before ourselves. Secondly, as the culmination of western productionist metaphysics, the essence of technology is an inevitable result of history, one that requires history to be ‘started over’ if we are to escape it. Thirdly and perhaps most powerfully demonstrating technology’s hold over us is that as a kind of revealing, no matter what kind, technology is truth, truth as aletheia, uncovering. All around us and throughout the history of the 20^th century we see the gradual strengthening of technology, its rapid ascension to global domination, which combined with the preceding aspects totally forms humanity in to technological beings. Because we have been distorted so, art cannot be the saving power; for we, as Heidegger does with his nostalgic romanticism, would invoke it as such, as a saving power, which in our technological age and mindset would amount to using it as a mere means for the romantic goal of turning-past technology.

Here it is accepted as established that willing, as a futurally oriented projection of personal plans and projects upon the world (thus constituting the world, ‘worlding’), is a primordial and defining characteristic of man. Willing in the modern age is the will to power, the willing of a pure will over and against the world that is taken to exist for the will’s purposes. The essence of technology is inherent in our average everyday being towards the world, in das Man, in all existentiality except authenticity, which technology has basically excluded the possibility of. Both deriving from and necessarily containing the technological attitude, human willing is the objectification of that which is before us, forcing it under our control and into our supposed dominion; willing, in an act of will, has always already put forward and assumed the world as a realm of producible and manipulable objects (WAPF 108). This kind of attitude is basically inauthentic being-towards the ready-to-hand, which having been man’s predominant mindset was taken by western metaphysics as the ultimate way of being human, most powerfully exemplified by Nietzsche’s will to power.

Heidegger takes Nietzsche, with the will to power, to complete western metaphysics begun by the Greeks (WAPF 111). Technology, as the manifestation of this metaphysics, determines the way we interpret the world. Beginning with the Greeks, metaphysics has gradually identified what is with what is produced. In their conception of truth from whence we get aletheia and their ‘producing’ that freed and released entities, the underlying assumption was that these processes, however closer to Being they are compared to ours, were ultimately something useful for human ends: Plato’s idea of forms was based on blueprints and plans of physical, produced things. (Zimmerman xv, 157). When they looked at things in the world, in their more respectful ‘letting-be’ of entities, the Greeks nonetheless projected a framework upon nature. As this is just the way humans encounter and put themselves in the world, they can hardly be blamed. The thesis-experiencing of the Greeks was a fixing-into-place of entities, making them understandable and approachable, is the origin of the Ge-stell of technology as the founding mode of perception that Plato and Aristotle used in their metaphysics (OWA 83). From there, due to a lack of insight for millennia until Heidegger came along, philosophers built off this productionist metaphysics to gradually, continuously, and more compellingly see all the things in the world and nature itself as ordered and produced for consumption. In Roman and Medieval philosophy the things of the world were seen as ‘objects’ for a ‘subject’, conforming to a principle of rationality that brought them under the control of and existing for a will, epitomized by Kant’s ‘will to will’ (Ferry and Renaut 58-9). This will is concerned only with itself and the categories it ultimately creates (however a priori Kant thinks them to be) that it throws upon the world, supposedly making any experience possible, setting the stage for a fully technological interpretation of the world. Finally Nietzsche comes along and nails the Ge-stell into place with the will to power. Just this phrase ‘the will to power’ alone gives one the sense of the intensely utilitarian, dominating, conquering attitude that Nietzsche elevated to the highest of human virtues, the human telos even, that would inevitably lead to viewing the world as a mere means and material for meeting selfish ends and further propagating power. As this slowly got ingrained into popular and philosophical consciousness, western productionist metaphysics and its embodiment as the essence of technology was completed, as was the Cartesian project of the ownership and control of nature (Ferry and Renaut 59). As the end of metaphysics, technology becomes an inescapable withdrawal from Being that in itself is Being: For Being itself is self-concealing, constantly withdrawing when it reveals beings. Technology is just an ‘artificial’, extreme way of the forgetting of Being over beings. Technology is Being for modern man, the unavoidable consequence of our history, the ultimate framework pulled over our eyes by millennia of intellectual tradition gone awry. Thus technology is inescapable, even with art’s proper revealing on our side, for we always fall back into technological Being: Such is our Being.

There is no thwarting of or rebellion against technology. Because it is the result of completed productionist metaphysics and is the natural way of Being for modern man as a result of this frame of thought, technology is truth. Simply put, technology as a revealing (although in a certain restricted way) has the same characteristics of revealing that aletheia as revealing-truth does. Hence, in its own restricted way, technology is truth. Because technology is the primary mode of Being for man, it is the primary, and sole in our age, mode of truth. When it determines the essence of everything as standing-reserve, technology acts as truth, and when there is no alternative it is truth. Furthermore, man has no control over the unconcealment of technology (QT 18). It is the result of processes wholly outside of mankind’s control: The inevitability of productionist metaphysical history and our own way of being-in-the-world. Unfortunately, decades after Heidegger wrote on technology, we see his worst fears have been realized. Inattentiveness to the unconcealed and the lack of artistic, primal revealing have led to a world where technology dictates the coming of total truth (QT 35). Americanism and the annihilation of the foreign as the way to arrive authentically at oneself have secured the global domination of technology.

Given during the height of the Second World War, Heidegger in der Ister lectures somewhat randomly mentions the entrance of America into the war as the ultimate ‘ahistorical’ act as the intended destruction of Europe, the commencement of western culture and its ‘foreign’ (Ister 54-5). America is presented, perhaps for political and personal security purposes, as the ultimate evil, that which seeks to destroy all roots and origins. However radical this may sound, Americanism is only the reflection of the culmination of European metaphysics in the will to power (WAPF 111). Following the destruction of Germany, the best chance for an authentic artistic era to arise, America was free to spread its ideology and its worship of technology across the globe. The communism of the U.S.S.R., being on an ideological level metaphysically the same as capitalism, did the same in its own geopolitical sphere of influence. Having destroyed Germany, the two technological giants were free to grapple for the technological domination of the earth (Zimmerman 91). Little did they realize that technology was dominating them, turning us into slaves of production and utilitarianism. Today, the specifically American brand of Ge-stell has won out and been cemented by globalization, the final tearing down of all boundaries, traditions, originality and dissent before technology and leveled-down ‘culture’.

Heidegger’s worst nightmare has come true, exemplified by a campus newspaper Macbook advertisement I saw while researching this paper. I was immediately seized by the desire for power (albeit in a limited, cyber sense) it claimed to offer, using the language of the will to power to coax me into a lust for the heightened abilities and capabilities it would give me. Why bother interpreting a poem, or gazing upon a painting, or taking a walk in the woods (whatever ‘nature’ is left in the world) when you can access all the world’s art works and natural locales via a screen connected to millions of other screens across the earth? In our day, with the advent of the internet (which my grammar checker demands be capitalized!), technology has truly become global and dominant, framing our every thought and general being. Because of this art can no longer, if it could have anyway, be the saving power: Our thinking on art will inherently be technologized, we will conceive of it as a means.

A means that might very well serve to deliver us out from technology, but that will only be a superficial freedom. The underlying metaphysical attitude will hold even stronger, only fooling and bringing us further away from Being. The above has shown that people these days are completely technologized, with perhaps a select few (the good folk in our conference, at least) barely poking out of the cloudy mass of Ge-stell, the majority of their being still submerged. Subsumed into the essence of technology, the notion of art as the saving power would collapse in our average everyday understanding, how we normally exist, to just a means by which we can achieve our desire for a more artistic, respectful, primal world. Thus technology achieves its ultimate triumph; the domination of art, the transformation of the poetic from the open letting-happen of truth to a mere method by which people can serve their interests be it self-expression or supposed liberation from modernity. This is clear from modern art, the abstract nonsense Heidegger abhorred, in its celebration of subjectivism and servitude to commercialism (Zimmerman 237). At best, we seem to be doomed to an existence of vicious self-willing and doing-violence, ending in the eventual destruction of the earth some decades from now.

III. Humanity has become irreversibly disfigured as the result of technology. However this does not mean we cannot hope for a better world. While technology’s global domination is for all practical purposes permanent, we can change our attitudes towards it, shielding our essence and dignity from technological revealing. The best we could hope for is that said revealing ‘takes lessons’ from artistic revealing, learning its own limits and respecting (as much as it can) the coming-to-presence of entities.

As a revealing, technology is truth, aletheia. Aletheia is the unconcealing act of bringing that which is concealed into the light, into appearance. The problem with technology is that the being, the appearance, that it brings things into is constrained and disrespectful; the standing-reserve. Originally, with the Greeks, all human creating be it art or craft was called techne. Techne was not just a mode of creation or production, but it was a way of knowing; an episteme that consisted in aletheia, an open revealing of the concealedness of entities (OWA 57). Here the respectful ‘letting-happen’ of revealing by allowing a space for beings to reveal themselves as themselves of art was combined with the power of technology, and here we must return. Modern technology wholly lacks the ‘knowing’ of aletheia aspect of techne, only containing the power and usefulness aspect. What technology as a bringing-forth needs to learn from art is the aletheia-knowledge: The knowing of the concealing/revealing dichotomy, the ability to set entities free into their own presencing (QT 9). So while art itself is not the saving power, it can help us light the way to the combination of production and art. It can allow us the distance and perspective necessary to ‘step back’ from technology to realize its meaninglessness and arbitrariness (perhaps a connection between ‘arbeit’ and ‘arbitrary’ is not so unfathomable), its being as just another historical world that is fundamentally unjustified (Zimmerman 235-6). Indeed, techne is the saving power if there is to be one at all; the fusion of art and production is best for it combines allowance for entities’ own coming-to-presence with truthful disclosure of ourselves, ‘letting ourselves be’ as the necessarily technological and inauthentic beings we are. Here Zimmerman and I are in complete agreement, although he places less stress on our total and permanent domination under technology.

Although I do not see the coming of a ‘post-metaphysical’ artistic age that Heidegger called forth and Zimmerman thinks as possible unless we can convince every person on earth to radically change their metaphysical attitudes or travel back in time to correct every major philosopher with a copy of The Question Concerning Technology, nonetheless great works of art such as Hölderlin’s poetry can still allow us a certain critical distance from technology. Hopefully, while not the saving power itself, art and poetry can allow us the chance to save ourselves from the nihilism of the now near-eternal technological age.

Some personal concluding remarks on Heidegger and technology seem appropriate. While I see where he is coming from and its appeal to the displaced and unassimilated among us, one cannot help but feel an elitist, almost übermensch, mentality behind Heidegger’s romanticism. The desire for a poetic post-metaphysical age marked by the poiesis of art is intimately connected to the rejection of the popular and the easy, technological way of life the majority of us lead. Such rejection of the mass of humanity was clear enough in Being and Time when Heidegger explains and criticizes das Man. This is a major point of contention I have with Heidegger’s philosophy; that it is not really universalizable, and offers ‘salvation’ to only a few. Of these few I have met, many often carry a smug attitude. Furthermore, as Heidegger himself taught us (as well as Fichte’s ‘no I without ‘thou’ critical philosophy), Dasein is never without mit Sein, the self is never without the other. Das Man is an existential and unavoidable mode of being for man. So Heidegger himself was not completely outside his ‘others’, the romantic anti-modernists such as Jünger and poets like Hölderlin that his thought follows closely from. It is important to take philosophies with a grain of salt when their thinkers do not fully apply it to themselves and subscribe to the ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ attitude.

Nestor Bailly (’09) is a Philosophy major at McGill University.

By Asam Ahmad

ABSTRACT: In April of 2008, Yale University’s Aliza Shvarts was accused of a sort of ‘insanity’ that made her unable to make sound judgements and jeopardize her own body for the sake of her art. This paper aims to explore the nature of Shvarts’ artistic project and understand the hyper-reactionary interventions that followed its appearance. I will argue that what caused this hyper intervention and the disciplinary actions that followed was more than just the project itself – it was the very ambiguity of the Event the project was presenting us with, its very refusal to ‘name’ the meaning of that event, and its threatening status in the (patriarchal) public discourse as a result of this ambivalence. In attempting to explicate the threatening (but emancipatory) potential of Shvarts’ insistence on ambivalence, I hope to demonstrate that the punitive measures incurred by Shvarts for refusing to name that ambivalence ["name that ambivalence" not idiomatic. could replace with "disambiguate" or "explain her performance" MH] and thus contain its disruptive potential reveals the ways in which the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourses circumscribe the female body and thus deny the autonomy of the female subject.

…

In April of 2008, Yale University’s Aliza Shvarts was accused of a sort of ‘insanity’ that made her unable to make sound judgements and jeopardize her own body for the sake of her art. As her senior art project, approved and guided by two senior faculty members, was about to be shown at Green Hall (part of the Yale campus), US media felt obliged to intervene, telling us what the project was really about, why and how it was so unbelievably shocking, and making sure to question the ‘mental health’ of the student who was presenting it along the way. What caused this hyper intervention and the disciplinary actions that followed was more than just the project itself – it was the very ambiguity of the Event the project was presenting us with, its very refusal to ‘name’ the meaning of that event, and its threatening status in the (patriarchal) public discourse as a result of this ambivalence. This paper aims to explicate the threatening (but emancipatory) potential of Shvarts’ insistence on ambivalence, and in so doing, to demonstrate that the punitive measures incurred by Shvarts for refusing to name that ambivalence and thus contain its disruptive potential reveals the ways in which the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourses circumscribe the female body and thus deny the autonomy of the female subject.

I.                   Discerning the Potential

Shvarts’ (forced) explanation of her project insists on ambivalence as a fundamental component of her artistic project. Here is the first paragraph of her statement:

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding.

These self-induced miscarriages gain their ambiguous and ambivalent status by Shvarts’ ingestion of the abortifacient near ‘the expected date of [her] menstruation’ cycle. The artistic piece itself consists of a giant cube covered with plastic sheeting onto which Shvart’s blood is plastered with Vaseline so as to stop it from coagulating. Onto this cube are projected images of Shvarts in her bathtub, collecting the blood as it is discharged from her body. As Shvarts herself notes, the ‘performance exists only as I chose to represent it’ – a statement which, unfortunately, will be flatly contradicted by the institutional intervention carried out by Yale’s administrative staff. What is important for now, is the very ambiguity that Shvarts insists upon and its isolation of ‘the locus of ontology to an act of readership.’ The artistic representation forces the reader to name the blood on display – and in so doing, to participate in the normative injunction to ‘literally construct bodies’ through the linguistically and politically ideological and authorial act of naming the blood (as either menstrual discharge or as the result of miscarriage).

Louis Althusser is helpful here in explicating the ways in which the body does not just come into being physically but is already ideologically and linguistically ‘pre-appointed.’ Noting the ‘ideological ritual that surrounds the expectation of a ‘birth,’ Althusser writes: ‘[everyone] knows how much and in what way an unborn child is expected: [...] it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable.’ Even before its birth, ‘the child is always-already a subject (boy or girl).’ These ideological rituals ‘literally construct bodies’ – which is obviously not the same as saying that the body exists only as an ideological or linguistic construct. Instead, it points towards the ways in which no ‘subject’ is or can be formed outside of the patriarchal and (hetero)normative discourse which demarcates the space the subject will occupy, and that even before it is born, there are ideological, linguistic and even political demands that it must fulfill simply in order to be constituted as a subject. Shvarts’ refusal to name that blood then – as either menstrual or a result of miscarriage – deprives the ‘reader’ of the ideological need to partake in these expectant rituals, and requires the reader to locate the ontology of the act and the blood him/herself – to name it – and thus determine its coordinates within the normative discourse as either ‘just menstrual blood’ or the blood of the pre-appointed, ‘irreplaceable’ subject in Shvart’s womb. [I wonder whether this is a genuine or a false dilemma. It would seem possible to "name" the blood in several ways that the author fails to mention - why must the blood of an abortion be the blood of an 'irreplaceable' subject? Why should we even think that a fetus is a subject / person? MH]

Shvarts’ refusal to name that blood, her refusal to allow us to easily digest the piece by self-ascribing a ‘word to something physical,’ is what gets her into ‘trouble.’ The confinement of the ‘something physical’ outside of the linguistic order (and thus inside Lacan’s Real), gives us an idea of the troubling nature of ambivalence – particularly in relation to the female body – and the dominant discourse’s need to remove that ambivalence in order to stabilize and contain its disruptive elements.

II.                The Insistence on Ambivalence

Coincidentally, Shvarts’ own explanation of her project relies most heavily on Judith Butler’s text entitled ‘Gender Trouble.’ Shvarts’ refusal to assign a word to the blood means that the performance (and the act itself) exists only as ‘copies of copies of which there is no original.’ Besides the obvious invocation of Derrida here, one should also note the analogy with Butler’s argument that gender is performative rather than expressive, that it is learnt (imitated, copied) rather than expressing ‘an internal core or substance.’ When Shvarts’ notes that ‘it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex,’ she is implicitly trying to destabilize the (hetero)normative categorizations of gender and (especially) sex as ontological givens, as somehow tied together by some transcendental moment prior to the ‘sexed’ body. She is, in her own words, asking us to see that ‘normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form’ – a mythology that enables the ‘sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective[s].’

Butler’s reading of Julia Kristeva’s Abjection can help us make sense of this seemingly hyperbolic claim. For Butler, the body is not written upon as a ‘pre-discursive entity’ because the body itself does not exist prior ‘to its cultural inscription.’ Butler argues that we must reconsider the body’s status as a ‘blank page,’ as a ‘void,’ and as ‘the inscribed surface of events’ if we are to ‘truly’ emancipate ourselves from the heteronormative construction of a stable male/female gender binary and ‘the implicit hierarchy’ it maintains. In elucidating her argument, Butler notes that to maintain such discursive and ontological stability, the body as a ‘discrete’ entity must first be stabilized – and it is this very stability which Kristeva’s notion of the abject calls into question. Butler writes: ‘[what] constitutes the limit of the body is never merely material, but [rather] the surface, the skin [of the body] is systemically signified by taboos and anticipated transgressions; indeed, the boundaries of the body become [...] the limits of the social per se.’ In Kristeva’s account, these boundaries through which the discrete body and the discrete subject are constituted require the ‘abjection’ of that ‘which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement,’ and for these abjections to be ‘literally rendered “Other”‘ in order for the body to maintain its status as a discretely demarcated entity and a discretely defined ‘self.’

Shvarts’ blood then, as it exists in the artistic installation, is so ‘threatening’ precisely because it threatens to disrupt the stability of these discretely demarcated entities; precisely because it refuses to abject or to name that which must be abjected for the normatively defined and normatively constructed foundation of the body as a discretely demarcated entity to be maintained. We can begin to see now why Shvarts’ makes the claim that these mythologies (of function) enable the ‘sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective[s].’ If the abject is that which ‘confounds [the "inner" and "outer" worlds of the subject] by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes [the] outer,’ it follows that the repulsion, the disgust one feels in the presence of the abject is more than just a biological impulse or an ‘evolutionary’ function – it effectively locates the ‘mode by which Others become shit’ and ‘I’ retain my purity. Read in this way, Shvarts’ blood in the piece, its ambivalent, unnamed presence and its refusal to become abjected as simply a ‘natural’ biological expulsion, threatens more than just the public discourse and the political and normative conventions that accompany it: it effectively threatens us – threatens our constitution of ourselves as subjects and as discrete selves. It refuses to admit to our authorial intervention by its insistence on its ambiguous and ambivalent status, a status that is unable to be contained by the discursive fields which wish it to be absolved, disappeared, and denied.

III.             Containing the Ambivalence

Thus far, I have tried to limit the discussion of this Event in the public sphere in order to explicate what Shvarts’ was trying to do and why it was so threatening to the public discourse surrounding it. It will be instructive now to bring into focus that (hyper) public reaction and the institutional interventions that ensued. Noting this reaction is instructive in different but interrelated ways: it can help us explicate what it reveals about the status of a woman’s body in our culture today, what the normative injunctions are doing here, and how the disciplinary, punitive measures surrounding the woman’s body function, holding it in place, and making sure it does not cause trouble.

Even a cursory glance at the media’s urgent need to name what Shvarts is doing makes apparent that, where Shvarts insists on ambivalence, the characterizations rush to get rid of it, to name her project as either ‘Abortion Art,’ a ‘Hoax,’ or a ‘Rant against the “Patriarchal Heteronormative.”‘ As I have been arguing all along, this immediately demonstrates that the act of naming is an ideological and political act: by containing the disruptive ambivalence of Shvarts’ project, the incitement to name illustrates the destabilizing potential of Shvarts’ disruption of the “Patriarchal Heteronormative.”

The installation was first brought to the public’s attention by the The Drudge Report website. From there it was picked up by various news outlets and discussed excessively in the blogosphere. This discussion was, alas, quick to follow in the ‘shocked-but-not-awed’ mould of the national US media. One website asked readers the question ‘How messed up is Aliza Shvarts?’ – with the only choices being: a) Very messed up, but about what I’d expect from an artist, b) Very very messed up, or c) Put-her-in-jail-messed-up. Conservative news outlets in particular were quick to emphasize the ‘shock’ of a woman performing ‘repeated self-induced’ miscarriages for the purposes of artistic commentary – but they were quick to transmute ‘miscarriages’ into abortions, the a-word having a particularly insidious tinge in American cultural discourse. Even The New York Times, which claims for itself the status of the ‘paper of record,’ sided with the Yale administrators in a lengthy article explaining how, ‘while freedom of expression is important in the academic world, so is providing guidance and setting limits.’ Mario Lavandeira, the owner of Perez Hilton, the popular gossip website, wrote a lengthy diatribe against the sanity of Miss Shvarts, replete with several adolescent ‘Ew[s]!’ and the mandated ‘humanistic’ interventions to ‘save her from herself!’

With this onslaught of superficial, hyper-reactionary characterizations of Shvarts’ project (and disturbingly, of Shvarts herself), the administrative staff at Yale University decided that ‘something had to give.’ That something, of course, was the questioning of Aliza Shvarts, which concluded with the demand that the project and its attendant concealment of what actually transpired had to be publicly divulged. It was thus revealed that Shvarts’ entire project was a ‘creative fiction,’ the redundant adjective inevitably required to quell even the most patriarchal of institutions. This intervention and the following statement released by the Yale administrators reassured all concerned individuals that they need not worry themselves as the sanctity of the patriarchal discourse had not ‘really’ been violated.

While this revelation is extremely unfortunate, as it takes away the initial force of Shvarts’ project, the hyper reactionary characterizations by the media and the institutional interventions by the Yale administrators unmasks an even more disturbing reality. By reacting so forcefully, by denying Shvarts’ right to her own privacy and her rights as an artist, the consequences which resulted from this public revelation reveal even more clearly the controls which the dominant discourse maintains on the female body and the female subject.

Even apart from the fact that only women can give birth to children, I suspect that, all other things being the same, this piece would not have roused nearly the level of frenzy it did or the incitement to disciplinary action it required had the piece been performed by a man. While we can recognize the real ethical concerns outlined by some in the media, it is important to note that what is at stake is Yale’s public disclosure of what actually transpired in the period leading up to Shvart’s public installation. Yale could have easily verified whether the project crossed any ethical boundaries, but instead they chose to publicly disclose the nature of the entire project. This explicitly tells us that the rights of the dominant culture to not be disturbed are more important than the female subject’s attempt to artistically explore why those disturbances are there as disturbances, and how and why they function in the way that they do.

Further, the normative and institutional interventions answer the question of the female subject’s bodily sovereignty explicitly in the negative: not only is the female subject not an equal subject – the female subject does not even have the right to her own body. As one feminist blogger sarcastically notes,

Ours is a quaint, superstitious culture with strict rules about where and when and why and how male and female reproductive materials may touch. There are different consequences depending on the sex of the parties involved. For example, there are no consequences at all for men (unless they are homos). But women sure have a lot of explaining to do if their genetic material touches someone else’s before they have secured the permission of a bunch of authority figures, such as the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick, their dad, their boyfriend, or the U.S. Government.

While we can have a laugh at ‘the ghost of [the] dead Nazarene on a stick’ or the characterization of our culture as ‘quaint’ and ‘superstitious,’ we cannot afford to forget that these differential measures and consequences, apart from being soundly unfair, are extremely destructive not only to the female subject but to our claims for being a ‘just’ and ‘fair’ society. Moreover, they reveal the ways in which our culture maintains its patriarchal and heteronormative stability by restricting different punitive measures for different subjects, and by implicitly demanding adherence to its prescribed ontological categories of being by reserving for itself the right to regularly ‘punish those who fail to do their gender right.’

IV.             Conclusion

Through an explication of both Aliza Shvart’s artistic goals and the punitive measures she incurred by refusing to ‘do her gender right,’ I have tried to show how the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourse maintain their stability and their inevitably sutured coherence. This dominant discourse maintains for itself the institutional, social, and even linguistic apparatuses which make sure that the female subject does not exercise her full autonomy as an ‘ego-driven’ consciousness or fulfill her rights as an individual subject. Certainly, I have not exhausted all of the ways in which and through which the female subject is interpellated, the ways in which even the right to her own body and its processes are denied, and the multiple ways in which this circumscribed space is continually being reinscribed for her. But I have also tried to show that, even as the dominant discourse shores up its discursive unity, structural cracks and possible openings for future interventions appear. Aliza Shvarts’ project may not be shown at the Green Hall because of her refusal to be denied her autonomy as a female subject and as an artist, but the consequences she has incurred and the singularly unfair judgements that have been passed upon her – by the public, by the media, by the institutions of which she is a part, and, of course, by the dominant patriarchal discourse – show us more clearly than perhaps ever before that the emancipation of the female subject remains an ongoing project, and that it is ‘the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore’ not only the emancipatory potential this project contains for all human beings, but also to explore the ways in which we can, and indeed must, help bring it to fruition.

Footnotes

Edidin, Peter. Controversy Over Abortion Art. The New York Times. April 19, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2008. < http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/arts/design/19arts-CONTROVERSYO_BRF.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Shvarts%2C+Aliza&st=nyt&oref=slogin>.

Nizaa, Mike. Sticking to the Bit? Yale’s Abortion Artist. The New York Times. April 18, 2008. Accessed April 18, 2008. < http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/sticking-to-the-bit-yales-abortion-artist/index.html?hp>

Shvarts, Aliza. Shvarts Explains her ‘Repeated Self-Induced Miscarriages.’ Yale Daily News. April 18, 2008. Accessed April 18, 2008. <http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24559>. Unless other indicated, all quotes are from Shvarts’ statement.

Daum, Meghan. It’s Period Art. Los Angeles Times. April 26, 2008. Accessed April 27, 2008. <http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-daum26apr26,1,2249073.column>.

Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. 1505.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Shvarts notes that her project is meant to be an ‘intervention into our normative understanding of “the Real” and its accompanying politics of convention.’ She is, of course, invoking Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic model here, and it is important to note the importance of ambivalence as a disrupting intervention into the seemingly smooth functioning of the Symbolic and Imaginary Orders. See, for instance, Leitch, Vincent. Jacques Lacan. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. 1278-1284.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Leitch, Vincent. New York: Norton, 2001. 2497.

Ibid, 2492-2497.

Ibid, 2492. This has sometimes been read as if Butler is proposing that there simply is no body. Of course Butler knows that there is – but her account of the dangers of maintaining the body as somehow untouched by the discursive fields through which we access it underlines the problems of denying a ‘precategorical soure of disruption’ in our understanding of the body. Another way of saying this is that we must acknowledge and deal with the fact that we have no access to the body outside of the discursive fields of ‘intelligibility’ and knowledge which structure our thought and form the basis of all our emancipatory ideals (2490-92).

Ibid, 2490-2501.

Ibid, 2493.

Ibid, 2494. See also Kristeva, Julia. Approaching Abjection. The Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia P, 1982. 1-31.

Ibid, 2495.

NA. Aliza Shvarts: Abortion Goo Girl Rants Against the “Patriarchal Heteronormative.” American Digest: Dispatches From the New America. April 17, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2008. <http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/bad_americans/abortion_goo_gi.php>.

Nizaa, Mike. Sticking to the Bit? Yale’s Abortion Artist. The New York Times. April 18, 2008. In the interests of space, I will cite the rest of the news sources in the Works cited page, unless two different articles are from the same source.

NA. How Messed Up is Aliza Shvarts?. Zimbio. April 17, 2008. Accessed April 26, 2008. <http://www.zimbio.com/Aliza+Shvarts/polls/3/How+messed+up+is+Aliza+Shvarts>.

Ibid.

Drucilla Cornell’s reinterpreation of Derrida’s Law for a feminist jurisprudence is extremely instructive here. If the Law does not, and even cannot, ‘see’ the literal and symbolic violence it incurs on the female subject – indeed, if it cannot even recognize her as an equal subject under the law, what obligation does a woman have to follow that civic law when it denies or conflicts with her very subjectivity under the Law and as a human being? See, Cornell, Drucilla. Civil Disobedience and Deconstruction. Feminist Interpretations of Derrida. Ed., Holland, Nancy J. NA.

As the owner of the blog I Blame the Patriarchy writes: ‘Because Art is godly and dudely and should always be literally, unambiguously true, and literally, unambiguously devoid of the artist’s ladyparts (which two conditions are really one and the same); anything less shows a shocking disregard for human life, heterosexuality, the rules, the Lord, the exacting standards of misogyny uniformly and eternally endorsed by our august culture of domination, and those baronial Yale benefactors who happen to be anti-choice’. NA. She Couldn’t Just Sign It “R. Mutt” and Call It a Day? I Blame The Patriarchy. April 22, 2008. Accessed April 24, 2008. <http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2008/04/22/yale-art-hoax/>.

NA. Miscarriage Art Cube Provokes “Outcry.” I Blame The Patriarchy. April 18, 2008. <http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2008/04/18/miscarriage-art-cube-provokes-outcry/>.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Leitch, Vincent. New York: Norton, 2001. 2500.

Cornell, Drucilla. Civil Disobedience and Deconstruction. Feminist Interpretations of Derrida. Ed., Holland, Nancy J. NA.

Yale administrators demanded that, unless she sign a statement that her ‘performance [...] was a fiction that she had concocted,’ her project would not be shown. Shvarts refused. Kennedy, Randy. Yale Demands End to Student’s Performance. The New York Times. April 22, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/arts/22arts-YALEDEMANDSE_BRF.html?scp=3&sq=Shvarts%2C+Aliza&st=nyt>.

Asam Ahmad (’10) is a Philosophy and Literature specialist at University of Toronto.