class notes

October 28, 2004

Laura Schultz - PhD student doing work on seeing.

What is seeing?
- analogize to surveillance

How we remember? Status as evidentiary in crises of recent... say Iraq (abu ghraib)
- occular centric metaphor for human recognition
- visual metaphor used to name an ethical relationship - i recognize you, i see you
- visual metaphor of the face (complicated and deep structure of recognition)
- witnesser and witnessing of yourself witnessing

other notion of seeing: the real
- relates to documentation issue
- whether or not what we see is real/fictional (huge part of 9/11 seeing was)

Parenti - wider audience writing
- history of surveillance (more momentum, legitimization now)
- linking surveillance to reality TV

Foucault (Panopticism)
- contemporary theory gets surveillance ideas from Foucault
- one lives in a Panopticon, knowing one can always be watched but never knows if one is

Levinas, Butler
- to think about face, human recognition
- think about seeing as ethical

Zizek
- cultural theorist who was recently popular
- steeped in psychoanalysis
- uses it to think about social operations
- reality seeing problem - it looks just like a movie
- is this real?

Goffman
- he's manic... level of detail and minuteness with which he investigates daily life
- beginning of one of his books, he does a discourse on photography
- his reflections help us think formally about photography
- what the face looks like photographically
- subject vs. model and conflation of those
- capturing a moment that is indicative of a larger process

Hirsch, Schneider
- issues of real, use of photographs
- is it something that continues to happen

class notes

October 21 - Remembering

:( Shannon's little ones are ill.

Julie Naplan and Christina Hagstrom -> going to share their work on the role of remembering and memory in post 9/11.

Pre-amble. What is remembering?

Different formative thinkers. Proceeds from different political/philosophical allegiances. Ways in which performance and memory have been joined.

Nora & Connerton go togother. Trauma as a discourse - Bryson. Then Peggy Falen. Justaposition of trauma, mourning, melancholia. In the dance narrative. Central to Freud's theories. Freud & Eng together. Psychoanalytic model of memory. Benjamin - different type of place.

Nora -> standing on the shoulders of the annales historians - central figures in revisionist history in france... attention to micro-history of particular communities and collectives. less of an emphasis on large scale continuums, more on micro-interactions in medieval communities, renaissance as they performed themselves in various periods in french history.
- informs nostalgia that animates his loss of memoires de noir
- le lieux de memoir -> overt, official forms of remembering, particularly modern
--- like overt memorials, archives, places of memory have a kind of artificial, a see-ability, an overtness -> necessary in modern since we have lost environments of memory (do remembering through daily ritual activity, corporeal memory, part of daily life); history normally implicitly recalled
- anxious about archiving because we're not good at remembering anymore
- de-ritualization of our world (p. 12/534; see last para for reflection)
- problem that resonates from our discussion re: Ong, mnemonics that are built into orality... one doesn't need a written culture (structures within which we phrase) (see p. 13/535)
- qualities of orality (identifying particularlity of medium of performance) -> wraps one in a language that can sound naive/nostalgic to a critical context in which an omni presence of discourse.. how does one articulate without sounding nostalgic without sounding regressive? seeking: pre-nostalgic space.

Connerton
- past is cemented in the body; identify the realm of the habitual
- in what context does bodily remembering, overt inscriptive memory happen? what happens?
- do you start to think of certain practices as inherently inscriptive?

Psychoanalytic section
- mourning and melancholia
- desirability of closure
- in conventional understanding of trauma/mourning, we have an experience of loss and an experience of mourning and/or working through that allows one to move on by accepting or coming to terms with the loss. allow the trauma to become part of the past. what it is to pursue health, to be healthy. to engage in processes of mourning, but allow the past to stay in the past.
- think about whether the processes that have been pathologized (melancholia).. inability to let the past be in the past.. the need to keep it present. ambivalence that turns into an aggression to the ego. can that be thought of as pathological? or as a more complicated (accurate?) of how the past of necessity will remain present in the formation of an ego. making lost objects go in the past might not be appropriate to understanding how it is that we constitute ourselves. might be about maintaining co-presence that's equally important for ego-formation.

david & david | martin jay (making links between freud and benjamin)
- questioning the desirability of closure

benjamin
- preoccupation with questioning the desirability of closure -> for him, it resides from a different sort of place.. historical materialism... identifying important, transformative movements in the classes
- coming to terms with class struggle has to resist a progressive model of history (identifies with the victor)... line up the litany of causes that get us to that end which closes the openness and multiplicity of the present that might have gone otherwise. starting with the end, we foreclose all the buoyancy that was the full presence of the past.
- attaches to messianic presence.. kind of consciousness that has biblical origins... identification that certain kinds of most transformative acts/events of history are moments that break the continuum of time; will make a temporal leap that confounds beginning/middle/end
- counter-intuitive consciousness of time disrupts continuum of history has to be, regardless of mystical, part and parcel to how a historical materialist comes to terms with history
- a belief that one can work with an alternate calendar so that we get ideas of "true picture of past flits by"
- co-presence of past with the present has to be a necessary part of an alternative historiography; from there one can imagine how the dead will not be safe... this has a melancholic sensibility... a will to maintain the presence of the dead.
- p4 of david & david discussing benjamin

presence of the past is interesting in performance -> constant vacillation in performance about whether it is about hyper presence or ephemerality. each terms rely on the other to argue for themselves. a certain sense to argue for exceptionalism. sense: going awayness is part of what it is. equally important sense: performance is about a kind of co-presence in real time/real space that is fundamental and particular to it as a form. one mode of thought emphasizes going awayness, other confoundingly literal hearness

[Individual presentations on what we brought in.]

Rudy brought in great bits about Iraqi War Vets telling activists how to approach them.

What are the ethical issues around the imperative? "We must..." -> Butler trying to get away from it.

We are in a melancholic state. Aggression to oneself, to components of the nation... not resolved, can't come to terms with the object with which you're dependent. cannot fully recognize it.

Individuals identity -> a national identity... that slippage is concerning.

Is the psyche the appropriate place of understanding recognition. In Freud, psyche is the locus of everything that is the problem even if it doesn't know it. You are doing pain upon yourself based on your own histories. A past might bite the present; it comes upon you... your relation to it coming upon you might not be anything that can be anticipated or located in your consciousness.

How do you think about trauma as daily activity rather than special event? Brison posits a "normal" subject and to goal is to re-achieve that "normalcy." This doesn't question the privilege she has... Todd brought in great accounts from hip-hop urban Chicago, challenging this notion of trauma, white-man's war... that these events happen in the ghetto constantly. In a marginalized world, there is no normal... it's about adjusting to a world with constant trauma.

Trauma - derived from German word for 'dream'.

Post-911. "I've been asleep and now I've woken up." US's disavowed relationship with countries other than itself as a part of identity that has been oppressed... now has become recognized.

Notion of nation - national identity.

Mundane life being repeated trauma?

Takes an external pressure to jolt you into understanding how mileux de memoir exist as a nation

[presentations by visitors... on memorial and sound... sadly, can't really summarize]

class notes

Performance - October 14

where is theory being used to resituate/luminate (theory applied to analysis)
where is an event/document being used to resituate/luminate a theoretical problem
where does the piece anticipate/execute its move

economic determinist structuralism vs. social determinism

articulation of parts within a structure



what is her definition of punk?
- or is she moving between different punks
- how did she look when she approached them
- where was she activating the punk signals

sentence or two that links from what is happening in each chapter -> broad overview
- in the reader's mind what to anticipate

organization of a book
- it must break itself down

situate self - you looking at this vs. someone who has never seen this

live visibility -> how does it play and not play into blogging
- what is the visibility of blogging?

considering blogging as its own subculture and/or a tool of various subcultures

start thinking about how i move in the blogging community?
- how my name and prominance affects what it affects
- how do bloggers define/read others' bloggers decisions in their sites

who has the best insights?
- how do you make those choices

who are the safety girls of the blogging world

outsider/insider - they get at different thing -> problematize the insider
- what "truth" does the insider get that is different

class notes

townsend center's newsletter - roundhouse of talks
institute for european studies
institute for race & gender

Orienting Pre-amble
- a look at cultural studies thinking both about nature of populism and nature of resistence
- what cultural studies is
- structure of feeling -> take an analytic tact on it

Cultural Studies
- Marxist, post-Marxist or structuralist desires by scholars who work on culture
- concerned about the limits of a reductionist line of a Marxist analysis [orientation on social life that explains things through an economic determinism; reduces people's behavior to analysis of their class position]
- leftist sensibility... throughout the world there were a variety of social movements that couldn't be explained through a class position
- so many working class or economically marginalized people do not vote with their economic interests, so something else must be going on
- stands in for interdisciplinary humanities, taking a position on mass culture, breaking down high/low art, feminism, anti-racist paradigms
- take much more seriously the realm of the super-structural to consider how its functions in some ways are quite basic

Stuart Hall
- culturalism
- analysis of social beings that doesn't go first to economics entirely or explains away their behavior through a class analysis, but takes seriously how those individuals express, orient themselves.. not necessarily pummeled in a unidirectional way by economic circumstances
- have power of resistance and agency within a constrained economic and social circumstance.
- take seriously they way people view themselves
- Distinctions have to be undone (public and private, work vs leisure)
- work life & tv life -> participates at the same time as things we're used to seeing as separate. public was seen as more important, private as less so
- 80s/90s
- working within and against a definition of resistance... became cyclical. pockets and limits of agency
- linguistics structure, discourse
- turn to the people's experience was posited in some views as a way of invoking experience as an ultimate ground of authority that didn't recognize whatever statements people make about how they interpret the world might not only be the unfettered appearance of experience... discourse analysis
- when hall says that they may be ideology or not just ideology
- about understanding discourse in material practices
- discourse analysis is the method for the structuralist
- within a culturalist approach, there are readings still norm... just read as the expressions of the people
- a good culturalist may also analyzing their expression through interviews

- takes resistance seriously but doesn't underestimate the significance of power
- realizes language, but doesn't take them out of the practices where language exchange occurs
- takes individuals seriously but doesn't overestimate the volition of people

what does a performance imagination say to these goals? turn from theatre to performance theory parallels a turn from literary studies to cultural studies
- rhetoric, performance studies have gone in the direction of cultural studies
- what are the stakes? shared goal.

material practices
- think about corporeal performance, realm of gesture, walking, dancing

brings back questions of role of critique

thinking about certain movements as populist, different way of analyzing a social movement than its rightness or leftness

PUBLIC v PRIVATE
it wasn't just the exerted context that signified public or private, but the individual and their behavior constituted the context. they decided that something was public or a private space, or a public/private context
- public/private not so bounded
- walker has a sense of the city

class notes

This week: Critique - role of theory, critique since 9/11

Political mobilization around not thinking; rhetorical effort to dumb down -> language of common sense, ordinary (such as a political campaign); role of the intellectual getting slammed/positioned

Latour 246.

?Critic - one who assembles?

Foucault. Kant.

Kant: Mobilizing knowledge.

Aufklarung -> often translated as critique, but it's about pursuing clarity. Has to do with power and role of the subject via authority.

Pursuing the limits of knowledge as the basis of mobilization. Knowledge is not just knowledge and you will be mobilized, but understanding the limits of knowledge is key to mobilization. "Do you know up to what you can know?" Primary responsibility is to know knowledge.

Difficult writing. Jargon. "Discourse speak." [Hartunian - professionalization of theory. Professionalization of graduate students. Something hard that we can do. VS Hardest issues need hard language. Mitchell - transmission.]

Assumed connection with leftism.

Taking responsibility for what it is that you say.

Foucault: not being governed, not only by aristocracy, but by something like modern state apparatus. Operations of the state exist partially for public protection, but also for maintaining order. [Libertarian move?] Foucault is often seen as an outsider to the left. Distributed state elements (social welfare) turn into distributed maintenance of normative structures.


Chomsky: critique of premises of knowledge, unfeeling/distanced, dissent as critique, activist writer who isn't using difficult writing

[Chomsky: critique as cognitive models?]

[is the 'end of critique' actually playing into conservative power?][academic money?]

Class Notes - Visitor: Professor Richard Candida Smith

Visitor: Professor Richard Candida Smith, Director of the Regional Oral History Office
-- WWII home-front experience

transcription - no description of gestures. semi? official status - presumptive of reader to interpret other's gestures... how do you convey to the reader the info?

oral history - to sit beneath cover stories; get beyond zone of comfort

develop rapport with person, aesthetic

"The Gleaner's & i" -> objectivity thrown away


what makes language work is that it's incomplete and partial... that which allows us to communicate, prevents us from communicating

subject is constantly circulating through its forms of expression

when we reach a point when we can't express in experience/words, it gets thrown off into a different form

what we can't express in one form, we go to a different form; we turn to art because it articulates aspects of our experiences that we can't articulate in words.

oral history - not everything can be put into words... thus, gestures. performativity of this is inherent to the articulation; words can be trivial, but what they're saying is enlightening

multiple attempts to project history to the world - what are the other forms of expression

where are institutions unable to control cracks.

rosie project: how does a country go from the least militarized to the most? how does this affect the people? social relations of people. [only 1 generation that can tell that story] a culture that was anti-militarist. what does it mean for us who are living in institutions that were created for this. a government that projects its will

is a video camera less intrusive because people are more familiar with how to perform to it?

international oral history association - website

people look dumber on paper because the oral manner doesn't translate

thinking about blogging/im as somewhere between text/oral

narrator: political decision... interviewee has a passive context, as though they aren't doing anything

pragmatic issues & methodology
- not interested in how good the person is as a narrator
- question to self: why am i doing this?
- what do you expect you're going to get other than going into the archives/newspaper? are you going to get trivial recounting? what is other than people's diaries?
- people's stories are not available until you open the door. memory is not like an open file system
- should get people to tell the stories they feel they need to tell. or that they are comfortable telling. but this is a particular type of narrative
- you want the cover stories - tells how the person, group of people come to talk; get below the cover stories... which are partially bs. the preparation lets you get below that, below the anecdotal
- collective understandings of things - informed and filled with tacit understanding... collective unconscious at work - where everyday life decisions are made
- if we put subject back into history... we don't understand how the subject is formed, how s/he leaves traces
- people bring forward their own questions about the historical process
- ask about childhood, birthplace, family.. tension releasing, confidence building way of building the relationship.
- interviewer is always an outsider
- need to decide what boundaries are to be set. flirting is quite common in oral histories. so situational and individual
- in group environments, people dampen their disagreements - they reinforce each other and you lose accuracy. people need to know that you're interviewing other people with different points of view. in individual interviews, you set up a group dynamic and you play on that without having the dampening effects.

URL: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/


what does it meant to do oral histories over the phone where audio is the focus? perhaps this creates a clearer document of what is occurring [difference between oral history and ethnography]