akhoreuta oneide

"the chorus, an anonymous and collective being whose role is to express, through its fears, hopes, and judgments, the feelings of the spectators who make up the civic community."

Jean-Pierre Vernant & Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

"For even this is music for the wretched, to sing their troubles without chorus."

Euripides, Trojan Women

Nicole Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy

a detailed imaginary of the social

how advertisers decompose (segment) social classes ("groups") for "accurate targeting" to offer their client companies "strategic audience decisioning [sic]" and the discipline of "consistent consumer experience"...

http://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/brochures/mosaic-brochure.pdf

• Consistent consumer experience 
  

• Consistent consumer experience 
  

The question of movement in cinema

The question of movement in cinema refers to two related yet distinct aspects. 

There is first what we call the facticity of movement. It refers to cinema’s technological ability to record and project movement, to create images that do not merely represent movement but themselves move. This is the factual, contingent, and intractable given of the cinema. 

Yet, precisely because movement is something like a given, accomplished in a seemingly automatic way by cinema’s technological apparatus, it becomes a problem for the filmmakers. 

The ease with which movement is accomplished turns it into an object of intellectual and artistic unease. 

The question then becomes, what to do with movement; what shape to give it; how to think it? The movement might be a given, but how do we nevertheless produce it? 

We must therefore speak in cinema not only of facticity but also of the idea of movement—the fictional, necessary, and entirely constructible condition of cinema—which determines the nature and the style of a particular filmmaker or the possibilities and limits of this or that cinematic genre. The idea of movement refers to everything that is not given by cinema's facticity. It forms the transcendental condition of cinema.

The two aspects of movement are, of course, linked; even if a distinction between them should nevertheless be rigorously maintained. It is difficult to imagine that cinema would be able to think without assuming the facticity of its movement-images. But it is equally difficult to imagine how the facticity of movement would be at all that interesting or significant to us were it not motivated (made necessary) by the various ideas or fictions of movement as they are constructed in the works of great filmmakers. 

(As someone once said, “le travelling est une affaire de morale.”)

Modernism and Historicism: Figure/Ground

The terrorizing naïveté of the modernist gesture can be almost point by point opposed to the historicist consciousness of our own moment. 

According to the modernist logic, it is pointless to think that the historical present, the historicity, of a phenomenon could be explained from the perspective of its “surroundings”--i.e. by contextualizing, historicizing the phenomenon--since it is only the cut, which separates a phenomenon from its context, that discloses the context in the first place. It is not the ground that shapes the figure, but the figure of the historical present that, on the contrary, gives shape to, or makes an outline of, the contextual ground from which it is divided by its own tracing.

If one is to grasp a phenomenon in its historical present, one must therefore start from the discontinuity of this present itself and only then proceed to the context or the situation. 

Not the other way around, which describes the method of a historicist approach: beginning with the historical situation as the contextual ground, which is supposed to disclose something essential about the historical present (the historicity) of this or that figure. For a historicist, the essence of the present never arrives: time is essentially the past, it is the ground: not as something in becoming, but rather as that dead weight which is meant to exhaust and consume the present of a figure through the supposition of its indistinction. 

While in the case of a modernist time is the figure of the present, which outlines--presupposes by positing--the ground of the past, against which it stands.

Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo

eisenstein and the comic (10)

August 3, 1947

Alma-Ata

The closer we get to the [dialectical] schema, the stronger the effect.

([Dialectics] presented in a formal and static way.)

My favorite Marx Brothers gag.

“They throw themselves at one door—snowstorm, blizzard, rain, and wind.

They don’t like it.

The rush to the other door.

There—the sun is shining, the birds are singing, perfect seasonal weather.”

(The scene can be scene in Animal Crackers. I was present at the shooting of this film at the Long Island Studio in New York.)

A pure appearance of the unity of opposites—contrary to understanding and against the logic of natural elements!

Analogous to a favorite drawing by Steinberg: [“Exit”]

Equating the unequal and vice versa.

Another good example.

These days there is a popular anecdote circulating around Moscow:

“Teacher: Kogan! How much is 2 x 2?

Kogan: Four, Mr. Teacher!

Teacher: And how much is 3 + 1?

Kogan: Also four. But this is not the same…”

A powerful anecdote.

Completely devoid of meaning, but very effective, because here the mechanism appears clearly: desequalization of the equal—3 + 1 is presented as unequal to 2 x 2. This is the basic Sprungfeder. Mitschwingend: probably also pars pro toto.

Because 2 x 2 and 3 + 1 are equal as wholes (as the result of operations) and unequal in their parts (as processes: multiplication and addition, as well as in their components—2 and 2, 3 and 1).

Claiming that they are unequal (“one is not the same as the other”), Kogan in fact operates according to parts pro toto in its prelogical aspect: the whole is its parts. And since the parts are not equal, so the entities or wholes cannot be equal either.

It is interesting that both fours are “the same” from the point of view of the static and resulting totality. But from the perspective of the dynamics of the process they are effectively different. Just as they are different from the perspective of the quality of the content of these two fours.

One of them: 2²; the other: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1.

Considered geometrically, these two fours are completely different and belong to distinct measurements!

The comic usually proceeds in the opposite way: it presents a dynamic regularity in a static way.  (An adult speaking with the voice of a child means: an adult = a child. In its static simultaneity this appears as comical. In the process—the adult is actually one with the child as are two phases of a single line of development.)

Here, the contrary is the case. The static result—“the impersonal” four that appears as “result”—is from the perspective of “everyday logic”, of everyday “common sense”, genuinely true and real.

From this perspective a certain disparity of the result appears as absurd (nelepost’, non-sense).

Hence the odd, embarrassing Zwitter (hybrid, dual) effect of such acuity. The roots of its effectiveness are not immediately graspable (as we see, they are quite complex), and thus the “embarrassing” taste of “incomprehension”, which makes something comical—funny!

A common—national—characteristic of a nation of Kogans.

Precisely because of this Zwitter—typical of the Jewish dialectic in its metaphysical abstraction and talmudistic casuistry (on Saturday one should not be separated from one’s land—so, when leaving, take some of your land with you in a bag).

[From: Sergei Eisenstein, Metod, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Muzei kino, 2002), 390-2.]

a lesson in dialectics

eisen rhymes

moralizing on the "harlem shake"

Of the multitude of “Harlem shake” videos now on the internet, why are the most disturbing ones those that take place in work spaces?

In a normal office, in which people are either working or passing time in boredom (the difference is hard to tell), the idiotic techno music begins. With the music, there appears a disturbing element—typically a masked or helmeted creature that begins to make obscene gestures. Importantly, this obscene stain of enjoyment is at first ignored, left to exercise its pathetic routine alone, not even perceived by others. Then, suddenly, with a brief caesura in music and a cut in the image, the whole room will explode into a kind of generalized ritual of obscenity, in which individuals will—not without a certain degree of industriousness—hump each other, beat stuffed animals and other objects, perform clichéd versions of all kinds of “eccentricity”, and all in all behave in less-than-animal-like ways. To be sure, any actual orgies will be avoided, for the videos are made to be seen on YouTube and sex would not pass censorship. But, perhaps for the same reason (namely, that nothing here is being smuggled into the image illegally), any comedy or laughter will be absent from the scene as well. It is, finally, only people at work that are seen the whole time.

The videos thus present montaged together two images of a humiliated humanity: in the first image, we are humiliated by what now is labor, what now is our work-space, and our work relations; in the second, by what counts as our fantasy of liberation from the constraint of all that.

It is all reminiscent of a statement often heard from acquaintances and friends as they were slowly sinking into the misery of their well-paid careers: “I will work for 20 years, until I’m 45, make a lot of money, and then I will enjoy my life.” Our times are characterized by this double relation to enjoyment. We can only imagine it as either something to ascetically postpone or as something we should be fully immersed in. Preferably, i.e. if you are a “normal” subject, you will do the former and then only think of the latter. But there are institutions and experts waiting also for those who for some reason (maybe to give the “normal” ones something to look forward to) want to reverse the order. They too are necessary.

This duality—the proper form of superegoic discipline for our times—suggests we have lost all means of constructing any distance to jouissance. We do not know how to catch enjoyment and deflect it in the intelligence of the Appearance; in such a way that we would not have to act as though it is not unconsciously devouring us nor turn it into our supreme and only duty.

UPDATE: It does not seem necessary but perhaps it should nevertheless be pointed out that the above is in no way meant to refer to the actual Harlem shake, the one invented by the Harlemites. The difference between the latter and this recent mass appropriation of it is clear and can be expressed in the following way: what in the more recent viral phenomenon exists as a cut between two images, the image of ascetic boredom and the fantasy of a fully realized juissance, is in the case of the original Harlem shake displaced onto the body itself. The cut is made to appear within the body, which is simultaneously ascetically arrested in its normal functioning and becomes the vehicle of a rather disorganizing force of enjoyment. Instead of two images of a body at work (presented as work and negation of, liberation from work), one gets in this way and very precisely a body that does not not work.

eisenstein on the comic (9)

 February 2, 1947

Alma-Ata

Formalism als Fehlerhaftes.

Vortasten of the true that makes it such.

Vorahnung of the lawful unity of the order through [different] domains and [throughout] history. But the error lies in the establishment of their parallelism and analogy, and not at the level of the reflection of fundamental lawfulness throughout the different historical phases of the different nations, across their inimitable and unique, historically specific, interpretations (chtenia).

…

True in the basic orientation—superficially playful—juggling with analogies—and nothing more in the equations and comparisons above.

Absolutely ridiculous—the theory of formal arbitrariness and of groundlessness of form in the theory of estrangement (ostranenie). Shklovsky’s Natasha Rostova and what it really means [English in the original].

Ridiculous:

To liken Walt Whitman to Pushkin, who in turn resembles Zweig—just because of the similarity of their artistic devices (a typically formalist basic term of formalism).

Ridiculous: W.W. = P. = Z.

Even more stupid: to take as a basis their mutual influence: P. --> W.W. --> Z.

True:

The condition of possibility for the similarity: the principle of the structure of pathos as inherent [English in the original] in and reflecting in itself the structural principle of the movement of matter.

The principle of the metaphor as the basic means of conquering a phenomenon in the first stages in the development of humanity.

Similar and comparable—to the later phases—not on the basis of their sameness, but across historically diverse applications of the laws, in which (in the structure of these very laws) such historically conditioned phenomena of reality were reflected, as subjects and forms.

The fundamental laws of development are reflected—are reflectively preserved—have been reflected in the structure (in the principles of the structure).

The higher the level [razryad] of creation, the more originally the laws are reflected in it.

The principles of the set of tropes: metaphor—metonymy—synecdoche  reflected the historical phase of the first, pre-conceptual, imaginary [obraznogo] conquest of the world with the help of analogies and transfers from one thing to the other.

In the principles of the composition of pathos, however—in the structure of pathos—one finds a deeper historical stage: the principles of the movement of matter.

Etc.

“Confusion” probably lies in the fact that the conception of form is not clearly, consciously, and methodologically distinguished. Form as the appearance [vidimost’] of the object (idiots call it: “the container for content”)—and form as the structure and ordering of things. Instead of the couple content-form we need three “stages”:

content-form-structure (skeleton-body-spirit).

Their specific and functional interrelatedness:

par exemple, metaphor

Structure—it reflects the stage in development in which the conquest takes place by means of transfer;

Form—the way in which at any given stage, with respect to the given content, this particular structure is applied; differently in Mayakovsky than in Homer;

Content—reflection in the consciousness of the given historical epoch, determining the fulfillment through a precise set of elements, and determining (1) why this particular structure and not another has been chosen and (2) why in the given epoch this structure is vested in precisely this or other sensuous effect (form), par exemple why a victim is not hacked into pieces (the Gorboduc of the Elizabethans) but rather has to undergo moral (self-)torture (par example in Dostoevsky).

This can be very well observed in the example of Revenge Tragedy [English in the original].

Revenge is in its structure a reflection of the physical principle of the equality of action and counter-action.

Already this physical principle grows out into a principle of primitive morality of the “An eye for an eye” type and of the similar norms in Roman Law.

It is also reflected in the art of theater. Both, as a reflection of moral norms, but also as a principle of construction—of the structure of the permeating theme of the Avenger as the cornerstone of the early Elizabethan period (see also in Shakespeare: personal revenge, as well as the revenge of Fate in response to a disturbance in the order of things, etc.—similarly in the dramas of antiquity).

With social development and “ideological growth” the aspect of the drama of jealousy changes.

Not yet fully in Richard III (standing with one of its legs in pre-Shakespearean theatre), but fully in Hamlet (with one of its legs already in post-Shakespearean theatre).

Or the conflict between the tit for tat [English in the original] tradition and the jurisprudence and new norms in the Merchant of Venice.

The structure undergoes a mutation, takes on the form of new aspects:

Ancient tragedy as the form of the drama of Fate (man—destiny);

Elizabethan tragedy as the form of drama between people (man—man);

Drama of the pangs of consciousness—Raskolnikov, and Chekhov’s “superfluous men,” and going to the guilt-ridden gentry (man with himself).

In all these manifestations of form, however, lies a basic structure, reflecting “an eye for an eye” as the fundamental physical natural law: “action=counter-action”. Any new manifestation has to be compared to it (the reflection of a physical law in … the feeling of “justice” … and for this reason also an innate [English in the original] feeling).

By the way, one needs to mention that the institute of “trial by jury”—judgment not based on jurisprudence but on the feeling of justice—is not the most monumental confirmation, the expression of the deepest reverence for this innateness—the natural feeling of justice.

In English jurisprudence this comes into question not only in decisions regarding guilt and innocence, but also—in the institution of the “Coroner’s Inquest” [English in the original]—with respect to the question whether the given catastrophe should be investigated as an unfortunate occurrence, a suicide, or a crime.

The same applies to the need for the jury’s verdict to be unanimously accepted: that is, as a categorical—beyond any doubt—expression of the fundamental feeling of justice.

These mutations of the single structure (principle) through different forms of its exposition, differ radically from Aeschylus, to Marlow—Shakespeare—Webster, to Dostoevsky, as they are determined by the difference in the ideal content, which grows out of differing ideological conceptions that in turn reflect the social-historical stages of human development, out of which they have emerged.

(NB. Very important. [English in the original])

[From: Sergei Eisenstein, Metod, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Muzei kino, 2002), 387-9.]