1.
A love of the cinema desires only cinema, whereas passion is excessive: it wants cinema but it also wants cinema to become something else, it even longs for the horizon where cinema risks being absorbed by dint of metamorphosis… [It] expects everything from cinema, including “that cinema should free [it] from cinema”…. It opens up its focus onto the unknown.
—Serge Daney in “The Godard Paradox” in Forever Godard (Black Dog, 2004).
2.
3.
It is time that thought becomes what it truly is: Dangerous for the thinker and able to transform reality. “Where I create is where I am true”: Rilke. Some think, others act. But man’s true condition is to think with his hands.
I will not denigrate our tools but I’d like them usable. If it is true that the danger is not in our tools but in the weakness of our hands, a thought which abandons itself to the rhythm of its own mechanisms proletarianizes itself. Such a thought no longer lives of its own creation. Man is formed by others.
Who are these others? We know now. They are the laws born of the abandonment of thought. Who is responsible? Not the parties. Not the classes. Not the governments. It is men, one by one.
—Denis de Rougemont in Penser avec les Mains, quoted in Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema 4A (1998). My italics.
4.
I’m going to skip the apologetics about the inadmirable poverty of this blog in recent months, and get straight to work. When I started this blog last year, I had it in the back of my head that on its first anniversary I would write a sort of stock-taking essay, appraising what I’d done to date, elaborating on any themes or lines of thought that had been left hanging (hence above title), and pointing some way forward. Which, eighteen months later, is what I’m now going to do, and then some.
This blog has been host to a couple of different critical projects, all unfinished and mostly unarticulated. The 3 weeks in Berlin posts were an exercise in self-curating cultural experiences—drawing links, associations and lines of thought across a diverse range of stumbled-upon works in an effort to better describe them and experience them—and came out of an impulse that has since since been channeled into actual curating as part of the Experimental Film Club. One of the clearest threads to emerge has been reports-cum-critiques on contemporary art events, exemplified by the Art of Summer series of posts (and also The Fringe, Experimental Spaces and Dublin Guest Stars). The Berlinale reports, a somewhat aborted exercise in on-location quickfire reporting, were an extension of this—and the confessional List of Omissions outlines why all of these posts seemed worth writing to me: “It’s about making links rather than erecting boundaries, and describing and engaging critically with culture in a way that seeks to keep it alive, and make it better.”
There were anomalies: “Notes on Dance” resurrected an old pre-blog dance review to set a marker of (embryonic) critical thought from which to develop; “Which Irish Cinema?” was a playful way of writing about something I usually avoid writing about; while the Lucca posts were supplementary “extras” of a published article.
In my very first post on this blog, I declared my intention to use “blogging as a form of growing rather than collecting: a developer rather than a scrapbook.” The scrappier sequences of posts on this blog may seem to betray that intention—the thesis notes, the ongoing “dear…” quotes, the photo pairings, etc—but I see it more as a loosening up of my original position: blogs are inherently bitty and, while problematic, this isn’t necessarily the literary equivalent of the thought-defying channel-hop; even in the form of short quotational posts, blogs can be a useful laboratory for developing lines of inquiry.
So what connects all these different strands together?
5.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
—William Carlos Williams in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”.
6.
I think writing about art matters. I think this because writing about art facilitates thinking about art (and its implications), and art faciliates the transformation of one’s perceptions of, relationships with and actions in the world. And the transformation of that facilitates: everything. I am not exaggerating for effect: art is one of the best tools for developing a creative, independent, critical and sensitive perspective on life, and developing one of those makes new things possible in the world. If we accept that one of the pivotal problems in the world is a failure of imagination, then engagement with art, and anything that helps one to engage with it, is really important.
Apart from the obvious facts that I enjoy it and I feel compelled to do it, these are the reasons that I make art, write about it, seek it out, present it to others. These things are all, for me, forms of activism in the best sense.
I believe all this, but I’m also troubled by its inadequacy. Art can facilitate transformation—that is, it can create the opportunity for it—but it can’t make it happen. Only we can. Engaging in art, as an artist, critic, curator or any kind of participant, can create new possibilities in our lives, but that doesn’t mean those possibilities will be realised. Given the mass of opposing forces in today’s world, not least our own inertia, entropy and confusion, this last part of the equation—the actions each one of us choose to take, minute by minute, day by day, for the rest of our lives—is by far the most difficult, embattled and important.
But for those of us committed to art, the least we can do is meet those opposing forces as effectively as possible. Part of my concerns about the inadequacy of art are addressable; a lot of artists, even the better ones, could create opportunities with their work more effectively; the art they make could be distributed and exhibited in the world in more sensitive and creative ways; and critics could explore the possibilities opened up by art with more rigour and attention.
One of the key elements, I think, that stands in the way of this, is the confused notions that exist around art and politics, that other pivotal arena concerned with the creation (and destruction) of possibilities. Some of these notions involve the exploitation of one by the other—using aesthetic means to make political points, or using political themes for aesthetic purposes; more prevalently, others assert their independence and disconnection from each other. I see many examples of this in cinema in particular, including film criticism, and including my own work as a filmmaker and critic.
7.
Now is probably an appropriate time to lay my cards on the table. In principle (ie, the way I think things should be, ideally), I lean more and more towards anarchism; and I have a lot of sympathy for and interest in anarchist-associated cultural projects in Ireland and abroad, from Seomra Spraoi to Submedia TV.
I should also admit to respecting some further afield and oft-dismissed points of view such as anti-civilisationism. While mostly wrongheaded in its absolutism and many of its conclusions, the “anti-civ” point of view contains a lot of frighteningly valid analyses of the state of the things, at least when in the hands of astute thinkers like Ran Prieur and Derrick Jensen. As a primer for critical thinking it’s also unbeatable—take even a morsel of it on board and you will find yourself questioning everything—and honestly, it’s refreshing to read a point of view so uncompromisingly radical after searching for inspiration in the neutered and fragmented Left that actually functions politically these days (and seems resigned to dealing solely with symptoms rather than root causes). As someone who finds highly questionable such universal truisms as “progress”, land ownership, accumulation of wealth and the monetisation of labour, I crave political critiques that don’t just try to insert nice things like “social justice” into an industrial capitalist framework. But…
8.
Back to reality for a second; in practice (eg, if you were to ask me, say, who to vote for or what should be done right now about a particular issue), I’m alternately libertarian, socialist and agnostic. I’m not calling for violent revolution and I’m not condemning working within the system. I’m also not pretending that radical social change is actually possible in our current situation, at least in anything more than fragmented ruptures and incremental reforms. The problems are just too vast and entrenched, and the majority of humanity is just too inert, selfish and reactive.
I vote, and I even respect a handful of politicians. I support Obama for the same reasons Ran Prieur does—but when it comes to Irish politics, I find it increasingly difficult to give a damn one way or another, apart from staying as far away as possible from the spineless and indistinguishable main parties. I’d like to support change within the system, but I’m having a hard time finding any party or individual that I can believe to be remotely up for the task. This is peripheral to a more central problem, however, which is that I don’t have any faith in the Irish citizenry. After the Irish government’s recent, predictably savage budget cuts, college students and pensioners were seen protesting en masse on the streets of Dublin. Some hailed this as evidence of an impressive political consciousness and engagement—but I couldn’t see it as anything more than evidence of self-interest: two different groups protesting against two specific measures (the increase in college entry fees and the end of free senior medical cards) that directly impacted on their own pockets. That is, they protested for exactly the same reason that they voted for this government in the first place.
Notwithstanding my sympathy for various radical groups, I’m also pretty alienated from most of those movements here in Ireland, and fond of saying that I’d define myself as an anarchist if most anarchists I meet weren’t such assholes. I agree with Ray Carney when he says that “it all comes down to whatever love and kindness we can give to the world within fifty feet around us”, and I can’t stand people who value ideological purity and “right” opinions over fundamentals like not being a prick to the people around you.
9.
I’m not going to start blogging directly about politics because I don’t feel I have anything to add to what’s already being written out there (cynicism and hopelessness already seem to be in ample supply), but I would like to find a way to incorporate political concerns into my critical writing (something I admire, incidentally, in Zach Campbell’s recent blogging). I hate ideological criticism (Vincent Gallo is still an important filmmaker even if he voted for Bush, and Walter Salles is still an unremarkable one no matter how right-on his allegiances are), so what I’m talking about is not approving films or filmmakers for having the “right” views or messages, but looking at the radical potential of films, as forces for transforming our own perceptions and actions (a potential that isn’t necessarily limited by the author’s own views and intentions). This isn’t just a political point, but it has political implications which seem increasingly neglected, particularly in places like Ireland where material wealth, extensive state funding for the arts, and post-modern theory, seem to have all contributed to a widespread depoliticisation (and general disarmament) of the arts in all but the most obvious ways.
More loose ends coming soon.
[...] autonomous social centre Seomra Spraoi, four essays were written, building on some of themes that have emerged on this blog over the past few months as well as the research and the ideas I developed for my [...]