Final Assignment

1.    Make a team (preferably 3 or more persons).

2.   Choose a text (or a theme discussed by several texts).

3.    Everybody reads the text

-       already when reading the text think about

= what is says about culture

= a point or an idea that strikes you as interesting or intriguing – just one, at least

= how does the text relate to your own experience?

4.    Team meets and discusses the text.

This part is more important than a cute presentation. I do not need resumes to tell me what the texts say, I’ve read them all. The course is not about you being able to reproduce in correct manner arguments pertaining to a set of thinkers. The course is about getting a handle on theory, seeing it unfolding, trying to mess with it even when you are not necessarily theoretically inclined. Trying to see how and where theory speaks of practice and reality, what does it have to say.

5.     In a form of your own choice make a sum-up and presentation about the discussion.

I repeat: not of the text you have read, but what came up in the discussion, how did you understand the text/theme.

The presentation can be a slide-show – a video – a picture (but prepare to verbally explain it a little anyway, to others). It can be a dialogue, a short scene staged by the team. It can be a poem. It can be just the notes from your discussion written out and read aloud. Use the idea of the presentation to give your imagination about the text/theme some scope and kick!

The presentations will be held in Ateljee 14.12 between 10.00 – 12.00 Again, the important thing is to communicate your thoughts and discussion to the others – who then please make their comments. I have reserved time precisely for discussion and comments.

14.12 will be a general ”Critique Day” of the department, so that after lunch (from 13 on) we will continue in Värjäämö with presentations of works from Pia’s Workshop of Contemporary Art, and after that anybody who wants to can present their work from a course – teachers will tell about courses in Spring – students can give feedback – and we’ll end with a departmental Xmas party. All Culture as Production students are welcome!

1.12. Michel De Certeau and The Practice of Everyday

"General Introduction 

This essay is part of a continuing investigation of the ways in which users - commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules - operate. The point is not so much to discuss this elusive yet fundamental subject as to make such a discussion possible; that is, by means of inquiries and hypotheses, to indicate pathways for further research. This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, "ways of operating" or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them. 

The examination of such practices does not imply a return to individuality. The social atomism which over the past three centuries has served as the historical axiom of social analysis posits an elementary unit-the individual-on the basis of which groups are supposed to be formed and to which they are supposed to be always reducible. This axiom, which has been challenged by more than a century of sociological, economic, anthropological, and psychoanalytic research, (although in history that is perhaps no argument) plays no part in this study. Analysis shows that a relation (always social) determines its terms, and not the reverse, and that each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of such relational determinations interact. Moreover, the question at hand concerns modes of operation or schemata of action, and not directly the subjects (or persons) who are their authors or vehicles. It concerns an operational logic whose models may go as far back as the age-old ruses of fishes and insects that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive, and which has in any case been concealed by the form of rationality currently dominant in Western culture. The purpose of this work is to make explicit the systems of operational combination (les combinatoires d'operations) which also compose a "culture," and to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term "consumers." Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others."

28.11. Foucault

Of Other Space: Utopias and Heterotopias

As is well known, the great and obsessive dread of the nineteenth century was history, with

its themes of development and stagnation, crisis and cycle, the accumulation of the past, the

surplus of the dead and the world threatened by cooling. The nineteenth century found the

quintessence of its mythological resources in the second law of thermodynamics. Our own era,

on the other hand, seems to be that of space. We are in the age of the simultaneous, of

juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered. A period in which, in my

view, the world is putting itself to the test, not so much as a great way of life destined to grow in

time but as a net that links points together and creates its own muddle.

...

There also exist, and this is probably true for all cultures and all civilizations, real and

effective spaces which are outlined in the very institution of society, but which constitute a sort

of counter arrangement, of effectively realized utopia, in which all the real arrangements, all the

other real arrangements that can be found within society, are at one and the same time

represented, challenged, and overturned: a sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is

actually localizable. In contrast to the utopias, these places which are absolutely other with

respect to all the arrangements that they reflect and of which they speak might be described as

heterotopias.

Intellectuals and Power: A conversation between Foucault and Deleuze

...

"In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is

local and regional, as you said, and not totalising. This is a struggle against power, a struggle

aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to

"awaken consciousness" that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that

consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a

prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted

alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A

"theory " is the regional system of this struggle."

24.11. Debord and SI

         "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity." Karl Marx, Capital I.

         "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. " Guy Debord, The Society of spectacle.

         "The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living." Guy Debord, The Society of spectacle.

Definitions: SI 1958

constructed situation

A moment of life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of unitary environment and the free play of events.

situationist

Relating to the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International.

situationism

A word totally devoid of meaning, improperly derived from the preceding term. There is no situationism, which would mean a theory of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism was obviously conceived by anti-situationists. 

21.11. Levi-Strauss and Structuralism

Levi-Strauss: The Scope of Anthropology

Bororo village from Tristes Tropiques

17.11. Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin:

Central Park 1.

Laforgue's hypothesis about Baudelaire's conduct in the bordello draws into correct light the whole psychoanalytical perspective which he wishes to confer on Baudelaire. Such a perspective is in step, piece for piece, with the conventional "literary-historical" one. The particular beauty of the openings of so many of Baudelaire's poems: their emergence from the abyss. George translated Spleen et Ideal with "Trubsinn und Vergeistigung , " capturing thereby the essential meaning of Ideal in Baudelaire. If it can be said that for Baudelaire modern life is the foundation of the dialectical images then included therein is the fact that Baudelaire confronted modern life in a way comparable to that in which the 17th Century confronted antiquity.  ...

Central Park 2.

Spleen as a dam against pessimism. Baudelaire is no pessimist. And he is not, because for him there is a taboo on the future. It is this which distinguishes his heroism from that of Nietzsche. In Baudelaire's work there are no reflections on the future of bourgeois society and that is, in view of the character of his intimate notes, astounding. From this one circumstance can be gauged how little he counted for the endurance of his works on their effect and to what a great extent the structure of the Fleurs du mal is a monadological one. ...

Central Park 3.

The "appreciation"or apology strives to cover over the revolutionary moments in the course of history. For it, what matters is the reconstruction of continuity. It lays stress only on those elements of the work which have already become part of its influence. What escapes it are the rough outcrops and jagged prongs which call a halt to those who wish to go beyond. ...

Central Park 4. 

The decisive ferment which, entering the taedium vitae transforms it into spleen, is that of self-estrangement. Of the infinite regress of reflection, which in Romanticism simultaneously expanded living space in ever expanding circles and reduced it within ever more narrowly defined boundaries, all that remains in the Trauer (sorrow) of Baudelaire is the tete-a-tete sombre et limpide (face-to-face, sombre and limpid) of the subject with itself.  ...

Central Park 5.

... Spleen is that feeling which corresponds to catastrophe in permanence. The course of history as represented in the concept of catastrophe has no more claim on the attention of the thinking than the kaleidoscope in the hand of a child which, with each turn, collapses everything ordered into new order. The justness of this image is well-founded. The concepts of the rulers have always been the mirror by means of whose image an "order" was established. - This kaleidoscope must be smashed. ...

Central Park 6. 

... The motif of the perte d'aureole (loss of the aura or halo) is to be brought out as a decisive contrast to the motifs of Jugendstil ... 

10.11. The Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno

The Task of the Institute: Horkheimer:
"Not just within social philosophy in the narrower sense, but in sociology as well as in general philosophy, discussions concerning society have slowly but ever more clearly crystallized around one question which is not just of current relevance, but which is indeed the contemporary version of the oldest and most important set of philosophical problems: namely, the question of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychical development of individuals, and the changes in the realm of culture in the narrower sense (to which belong not only the so-called intellectual elements, such as science, art, and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, leisure activities, lifestyle, etc.)." Max Horkheimer, The Present Situation in Social Philosophy, and the Tasks on an Institute for Social Research.

Adorno on cultural industry:
"THE sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialisation, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.

Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.
...
 Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.

This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organisation from above.
...
Even the technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the fusion of all the arts in one work.
...
Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality.
...
Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema. The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight.
...
The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them."
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer