Polaroid Landscapes… again

One eye sees, the other feels.

-Paul Klee

 

I’ve been finding it hard getting the Tarkovsky polaroids out of my mind over the past few days. Quiet moments between writing sessions find me flipping through them. I spent most of the afternoon sitting in Lee Rosy’s trying to put pen to paper…

My point of departure is an interview published at the back of Bright, Bright Days with the art historian Boris Groys. He describes the effect of the polaroids as one of “documentary romanticism.” For Groys, these are images that speak to the romanticism of a Caspar David Friedrich painting while attending to the documentary impulse of the photographic medium. Here’s Groys’s gloss: “It’s like a combination of Chekhov and Caspar David Friedrich – a kind of cottage-life with a bit of the decadent Russian aristocracy. These images are nostalgic, but not for the Soviet culture of the Russia that he left. Rather, they’re nostalgia for Russia before the Revolution” (2008: 124).

While there is something to recommend in these views, I don’t think they get the full measure of the signficant aesthetic claims at stake in the polaroids. That they ‘imagine’ a kind of intimate utopian refuge amidst the “collective space” of the Soviet Union is hardly remarkable. They were, after all, intended for private consumption. I would like to pursue another line of flight, however, and read them alongside the recent work of the philosopher Jay Bernstein. 

Bernstein has written extensively on German philosophy and Critical Theory in its various incarnations and afterlives (see especially his magnificent Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics) and his first sustained foray into modernist art, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, tracks these concerns as they find concrete form across the range of modernist artistic production. The argument draws on a now familiar story involving “the disenchantment of nature” (Santner, 2009: 286) under the sign of an advancing modernity. As Eric Santner has recently noted in a re-reading of Bernstein:

“‘Disenchantment’ signifies here a process that delegitimates our experience of ourselves and our being-in-the-world as vulnerable and dependent beings, disqualifies the dimension of emphatic experience in which sentient embodiment, the felt-fact of aliveness, still bears a normative significance in relation to the object world and other human subjects” (2009: 286). 

Santner also seizes on a passage in Bernstein where he focuses on “what has been excised from the everyday” which is to say “the emotional significance of sensory encounter, sensory experience as constitutive of conviction and connection to the world of things” (Bernstein, 2006: 3). These are, I realize, dense opaque passages. What Santner is, I think, interested in working through are the affordances that Bernstein makes for reclaiming “lost forms of human vitality and animation” (2009: 284). If this has been for Bernstein at least, a defining characteristic of modernist art,  I’m especially interested myself in the degree to which the kind of picture-making we find in Tarkovsky’s polaroids can plausibly be understood as an exercise in capturing and holding onto a form of sensuous particularity. Whatever claims to modernism are at stake here, I do think it is possible to explore these images as scenes of “significant sensory encounter” (Bernstein, 2006: 7) that are capable of relaying both the felt materiality of the polaroids as well as the dense sensuous textures that are conveyed in the images whether they are portraits and scenes of everyday life or atmospheric landscape compositions. Taken together these images represent a significant contribution to advanced photographic practice and, if anything, only further radicalize the kind of demands that they put on the way in which photographs are meant to be seen.

Berliner Lyrik

The well-known German writer Günter Kunert turned 80 this year. Born in Berlin, he was denied a grammar school education as his mother was Jewish (she would later die in a concentration camp). After the war, he remained in the GDR and studied at the Academy of Applied Arts between 1946-1949. Increasing dissatisfaction with the vagaries of ‘real-existing Socialism’ marked his work from the 1960s onwards though he would only come to settle in West Germany in 1979 after his SED membership was revoked in the wake of the Biermann affair. 

A versatile writer whose prolific output includes literary criticism, short stories, film scripts, and television plays, he is probably best known for his lyrical poetry. The widely damaged Berlin of the postwar years came to feature heavily in his poetry and the deceptive simplicity of his poems became a tool for not only rewriting the city in poetic form but also for rehearsing what Theodor Adorno once described as the “social nature of lyrical poetry” (2000: 215). “The lyric poem,” writes Adorno, “is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism” (2000: 219). For Kunert, Berlin became a key topos through which subjective expression and social standpoint were fused. It it is perhaps therefore not surprising that his latest collection of lyrical poems (Als das Leben umsonst war) begins with another Berlin poem entitled “Eingedenken.” I can’t think right now of a more suitable and thoughtful distillation of the author’s longstanding relationship  with the city: 

 

Berlin, Berlin ein fernes Licht

und Spiegel meinem Angesicht. 

Nachts Stille und auch morgens Früh’

nach allem Dasein schewerer Müh’. 

Die ganze stadt umfängt den Raum, 

darin ich war: Als wie ein Traum. 

 

 

Freedom or should I just swallow the blue pill?

“[...] we must abandon the illusion that freedom is a reality so as to salvage the possibility that freedom might one day become a reality after all”

                                                                        -Theodor Adorno (2006: 203)

 

Theodor Adorno and Gilles Deleuze. Not exactly Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Jules et Jim, or even Starsky and Hutch. I’ve just put down an excellent article by Daniel Smith (2007) in Parrhesia on the question of desire in the work of Deleuze and its crucial role in setting out what Smith refers to as an “immanent theory of ethics.” The article raises two main questions:

1) What is an immanent ethics? How does it abjure the transcendental that is usually subsumed under the banner of ‘morality’?

2) How is the question of desire an ethical problem? 

Readings these two together (via Spinoza, Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Freud among others) leads Smith to reflect on a key problem of our own modernity which is namely our  desire to be “separated from power” and from “ our capacity to act” (68). In other words, how have we come to collectively desire our own repression, servitude, and unfreedom. For Deleuze, coming into active possession of one’s own power is crucial to any form of immanent ethics.  There is much more that could be said about this but the particular line of flight in Smith’s article that intrigues me is the relationship of desire to notions of freedom. Smith ends with a suggestive passage where he argues “that the concept of freedom—which plays such a decisive role in Kant’s philosophy—also assumes a prominent place in Deleuze’s own philosophy of desire, albeit in a new form—namely, as the question of the conditions for the production of the new” (75).

The connection to Kant and the recasting of freedom in Deleuze as the problem of desire brings me to Adorno and his tremendous lectures on “History and Freedom” (1964-5). These lectures were part of a series of 4 lecture courses that Adorno gave in the early 1960s and which form the immediate backdrop to the publication of Negative Dialectics in 1966. Coincidentally, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition was published in 1968 and while the two books diverged on the practice of dialectical thinking, they both “challenged the ‘identifying’ character of postwar advanced capitalism” while vindicating difference in rather different ways (Bonnet, 2008: 46). I’m looking forward to working my way slowly though the Adorno lectures when I get back from Berlin. There is a clarity and quiet modesty and even a gentle humour to the way in which he lectures that one sometimes loses in the polyphonic textures of his written work.

Ultimately, my quarry is to think through the possibilities of a theoretical point of contact between Adorno and Deleuze that focuses on the question of freedom. For Adorno, any form of objective freedom has been thoroughly compromised by a late capitalist society which reduces difference to function and freedom to narcissistic self-preservation. Subjective freedom is similarly threatened by “ego-weakness, addiction to consumption, conformism” (2006: 4). And yet, if according to Adorno, an individual can only rehearse the “gestures of freedom” (2006: 265), he also points to the role that certain kind of impulses and what he describes as “mimetic behaviour” play in the spontaneous experience of ‘freedom’ (213). I wonder how far we really are here from Deleuze’s seemingly different world of drives, desires, and motivations. That Adorno had preceded his lectures on freedom by exploring the problems of moral philosophy may plausibly suggest that it is partly in the form of an immanent ethics that we may still find a capacity (call it a capacity to act or a modest will to power) for recovering the good life in a bad society.

‘Crooked’ Wanderings: Krumme Strasse Mk. 2

“Noisy, matter-of-fact Berlin, the city of work and the metropolis of business […] has more – not less – than some other cities of those places and moments when it bears witness to the dead.”

                                                                                                                                                     -Walter Benjamin (SW2: 613)

In my daily meanderings in Charlottenburg, I often find myself on Krumme Strasse (or ‘Crooked Street’). As I posted earlier, the street is largely remembered today as a key flashpoint for the new social movements which emerged in West Germany in the late 1960s. But it is also the ‘crooked street’ whose paved stones absorbed the footfalls of Walter Benjamin on his way to the municipal swimming pool for lessons he would soon come to dread. The pool was renovated in the 1970s and 1980s  (it was severely damaged during the Second World War) and is located right at the slight turn or kink that has given the street its name.

 

Municipal Swimming Pool on Krumme Strasse

 

 

For Benjamin, to find oneself on a ‘crooked street’ was to also take leave of the linear and hard-edged one-way street that he explored in an eponymous text of 1928. Benjamin famously commented in the Berlin Chronicle on his desire to find appropriate spatial form for the performance of his own autobiographical corpus. “For a long time,” he writes, “I have toyed with the idea of structuring my life- bios – graphically on a map” (SW: 596). Indeed, it is hard not to understand Krumme Strasse as a structuring device for the complex topographical (even perhaps topological) space through which Benjamin’s remembered self unfolds itself in both the Berlin Chronicle (1932) and the later and more stylised Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932-1938).

Benjamin has always been one of my more faithful companions in Berlin. His books are never far from my side and have been sadly reduced to the status of so many dog-eared well-worn Baedekers especially as I, like Benjamin before me, try “to get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated” (SW 3: 344, original emphasis). But to follow Benjamin down Krumme Strasse is to ultimately follow the lead of Vanessa Berry’s excellent posting on her blog. I leave you to check out her own words as a suitable retracing of Benjamin’s earlier wanderings.

 

Benjamin's "Crooked" Street