L’oeuvre d’art est le résultat du processus, autant que ce processus lui-même à l’arrêt. Elle est, comme le proclamait la métaphysique rationaliste à son apogée comme principe de l’univers, une monade : à la fois centre de forces et chose. Les oeuvres d’art sont closes les unes par rapport aux autres, elles sont aveugles et représentent cependant dans leur hermétisme ce qui se trouve à l’extérieur.
Citations
Paradoxalement, l’art doit témoigner de l’irréconcilié et tendre cependant à la réconciliation ; cela n’est possible qu’à partir de son langage non-discursif. C’est seulement dans ce processus que se concrétise son Nous.
L’aporie de l’art, entre la régression à la magie et la cession de l’impulsion mimétique à la réalité chosifiante, lui prescrit sa ligne de conduite. Cette aporie est inévitable.
Dans l’histoire de l’art, la dialectique du laid absorbe également le beau ; de ce point de vue, le kitsch est beau comme quelque chose de laid : il fut banni au nom de ce même beau qu’il fut jadis et qu’il contredit maintenant à cause de l’absence de son contraire.
L’expérience cristallise le plus souvent comme essais de possibilités surtout des types et des genres, et réduit aisément l’oeuvre concrète au cas-type : un des motifs de vieillissement de l’art nouveau. Certes, en esthétique, il ne faut pas séparer les moyens et les fins. Cependant, les expérience qui, par définition, s’intéressent presque avant tout aux moyens, aiment à faire vainement attendre le but. En outre, ces dernières décennies, le concept d’expérience s’est fait équivoque. Si, vers 1930, il désignait encore une tentative, filtrée par la conscience critique, contre la continuation irréfléchie, il est entre-temps apparu que les oeuvres doivent contenir des caractéristiques nullement prévisibles dans le processus de production et que, subjectivement, l’artiste doit être surpris par ses propres oeuvres. L’art prend ici conscience d’un aspect toujours présent, mis en évidence par Mallarmé ; l’imagination des artistes n’a jamais pu embrasser complètement ce au’ils produisaient. Les arts combinatoires, par exemple l’ars nova et ceux des Pays-Bas, introduisirent dans la musique du bas Moyen Âge des effets qui ont dû dépasser l’imagination subjective des compositeurs. Une combinatoire – que les artistes, comme aliénés, se firent un devoir de médiatiser avec leur imagination – était essentielle pour l’évolution des techniques artistiques. Mais on renforce ainsi le risque de faire tomber les produits plus bas qu’une imagination adéquate ou pauvre.
Against the grain of the state’s monopolization of ceremony, ceremonies are small and profligate ; if they weren’t everywhere and all the time we’d be dead. The ruins, which are small rituals, aren’t absent but surreptitious, a range of songful scarring, when people give a sign, shake a hand. But what if together we can fall, because we’re fallen, because we need to fall again, to continue in our common fallenness, remembering that falling is in apposition to rising, their combination given in lingering, as the giving of pause, recess, vestibular remain, custodial remand, hold, holding in the interest of rub, dap’s reflex and reflection of maternal touch, a maternal ecology of laid hands, of being handled, handed, handed down, nurture’s natural dispersion, its endless refusal of standing. Hemphill emphatically announces the sociality that Luther shelters. Fallen, risen, mo(u)rnful survival. When black men die, it’s usually because we love each other, whether we run, or fight, or surrender. Consider Michael Brown’s generative occurrence and recurrence as refusal of the case, as refusal of standing. You can do this but only if you wish to insert yourself, and now I must abuse a phrase of Ah Kee’s, into black worldlessness. Our homelessness. Our selflessness. None of which are or can be ours.
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« Michael Brown »
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Boundary 2 : An International Journal of Literature and Culture n° 42
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p. 81–87
Such optimism, black optimism, is bound up with what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, runaway, phonoptic black operations-expressive of an autopoetic organization in which flight and inhabitation modify each other-that have been thrust upon it. The burden of this paradoxically aleatory goal is our historicity, animating the reality of escape in and the possibility of escape from.
Refugees study change not only because they’ve been put through changes but also because changes are what they want and what they play and what they are. Refugees study a mode of study—the contrapuntal intersection of a set of interstitial fields, dislocation in a hole or a hold or a whole or a crawlspace. Such study is inhabitation that moves : by way of—but also in apposition to—injury, which is irreducible in the refugee though she is irreducible to it. There is, in turn, passage in acknowledging the theoretical practice of the one who emerges as if from nowhere, rooted in having been routed, digging, tilling, working, sounding, the memorial future of a grave, undercommon cell. She is the commodity, the impossible domestic, the interdicted/contradictive mother. Dangerously embedded in the home from which she is excluded, she is more and less than one. The question of where and when she enters—where entrance is reduced to some necessarily tepid mixture of naturalization and coronation, which is an already failed solution that is ever more emphatically diluted in its abstract and infinite replication—is always shaded by the option to refuse what has been refused, by the preferential option not for a place but rather for radical displacement, not for the same but for its change. Blackness is given in the refusal of the refugee.
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« Notes on Passage (The New International of Sovereign Feelings) »
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Palimpsest : A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International n° 3
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p. 51–74
I speak of her placement, her position (within a structure), thereby raising, by way of a kind of submergence, the question of her agency, her transverse, auto-excessive intervention in the history of agency. To attempt to locate her agency is precisely to mark the fact that it lies, impossibly, in her position, in an appositional force derived from being-posed, from being-sent, from being-located. Her agency is in her location in the interval, in and as the break. This is what it is to take, while apposing, the object position with something like that dual force of holding and outpouring that Heidegger attributes to the thing…
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« Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape (Preface to a Solo by Miles Davis) »
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Women & Performance : a journal of feminist theory n° 17
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p. 217–246
In The painting of modern life T. J. Clark says Olympia has a choice, working against the definition of the prostitute offered by Henri Turot, for whom prostitution implies ‘first venality and second absence of choice’ (Clark 1984, 79). For Turot, further, the prostitute’s very existence depends upon the temporary relations she entertains with her customers, the subjects, relations that are public and without love. An absence of privacy, then, where privacy implies a self-possession aligned not only with reason, will, choice, but also with feeling or with the ability to feel. An absence of sovereignty where sovereignty implies a kind of auto-positioning, a positioning of oneself in relation to oneself, an autocritical autopositioning that moves against what it is to be positioned, to be posed by another, to be rendered and, as such, to be rendered inhuman, to be placed in some kind of mutual apposition with the in/human and the animal (the black female servant ; the lascivious little cat). The little girl’s image extends a line traced by Clark from Olympia’s pose, to the pose of Titian’s The Venus of Urbino (see Figures 2 and 3). That line moves within the history of the idealization and re-materialization of the nude, the history of the prostitute as artist’s model, the history of the wresting of modeling from prostitution and the yoking of it to pedagogy.
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« Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape (Preface to a Solo by Miles Davis) »
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Women & Performance : a journal of feminist theory n° 17
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p. 217–246