Reconstruction 7.4 (2007)
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Theories, memories, bodies and artists / Marc Ouellette
<1> I suppose it might seem self-assuming to supply an introduction stemming from my own situation when I should be contextualizing the contents of the current crop of essays. Rather than a unifying discourse, though, two class discussions might offer entry points to a disparate collection of otherwise unrelated essays. First, I gave my class an essay assignment which asked them to consider Leon Ferrari's work, Civilisacion Occidentale y Christiana (1965) to see whether or not a contemporary viewer, born after 1986, might find a one or two intertexts in a work of art which features the figure of Christ crucified on an F-105 Thunderchief. The second entry point came from the class themselves. They asked me what I made of an installation of US Navy barracks at Coronado which has an unfortunate resemblance to a swastika. In combination, the two images gave me ample opportunity to teach the ambivalences of the sign and the politics of the available readings. The second instance, especially, proved profitable because I was able to address pointedly the character type who has become known as "doesn't apply to me guy" in my classes. This type is the first to remind me that in Cultural Studies we are always "reading into" things when we even begin to study a subject critically. I'm going to run the risk then of attempting to impose a reading upon the collection of otherwise unrelated articles which comprise our annual "open" issue.
<2> Most of the essays, articles and reviews in this issue of Reconstruction were submitted before my term as Managing Editor began. Thus, ours is a chance relationship. Still, one cannot discount the intertexts each of us brings to a reading. Moreover, as Tanya Ury shows, the work of art - either the "theme park" or Ferrari's - need not be a static object even if it is a sculpture. Strangely, though, my class's "doesn't apply to me guy" was actually the one who also wanted to believe the conspiracy theories. I'll direct our readers to Gary Walton's consideration of conspiracy journalism before coming to any quick conclusions. I often wonder if both are a part of the reaction to the cognitive dissonance caused by the revelation of contradictions within the individual's schema. Here, Walton helps, via the notion of the plaisir of the taboo. In such instances, "the reader must confront the very 'stigmatized' knowledge contained in it. In addition, by forcing the reader to distance herself from the narrative and to analyze the text as a narrative, the result is to 'defamiliarize' the trope [...] itself" (par. 21). I have not yet my students' essays on the Ferrari sculpture, but I wonder if any of them noticed the reflection.
<3> After reading Larry Taylor's interview with Fatih Benzer, I went and looked. According to Taylor's abstract, Benzer's "perspective makes for engaging treatment of the otherwise flattening subject of globalization." I cannot think of anything more flattening than a plane load of bombs. As Benzer later suggests shadows and reflections cause tension for viewers: "you don't see your details in the reflection. You see the whole, rather than the details, and that's what scares people" (par. 34). Simply put, Christ is overshadowed. After reading Paula Cerni's study of the body in critical and cultural theory, the reading changed and become more indeterminate, more unsettling. She probably would have predicted this, for she finds a particular duality in post-modern art: "Constructionists, while acknowledging the historical character of the body, see history itself as an arbitrary succession of discursive moments. By 'historicity' they mean its opposite - indeterminacy. Physicalists, on the other hand, offer an immanent, heavy body, immobilised by its own material weight. History for them has ground to a halt" (par. 45). Here, it is not so much that the body is immobilised as the body (of Christ) has been bombed into submission.
<4> In this regard, I found Said Graiouid's conception of the barzakh, if I understand it correctly, to be a phenomenal metaphor. If it is, as Said, suggests, something which keeps heterogeneity in play while at the same time revealing homogenizing tendencies. Yet, Graiouid cautions that "the foregrounding of the political at the expense of the cultural has gradually widened the gap between the conceptual constructs of the intelligentsia and people's worldviews. The personal is political since it is shot through with identity politics whether they pertain to gender, class or race. Institutional politics is not the only viable site of analysis. Rather, what is needed is an approach that highlights the role of culture as a site of negotiation and struggle over meaning." (par. 30). This became more clear as I read Jaroslava Gajdosova's careful comparison of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Crabwalk with my class's reactions in mind. While my students showed me that I can no longer take the Vietnam war as a given, collective guilt is still a real, palpable tension. While they were quite eager to take swastika as fixed sign with a transhistorical signifier, their general reaction to current conflict suggests stunning lack of concern. They have almost no reaction to the present while the reaction to the past is a thoroughly practiced performance which leaves me unsettled about the status of the signified. This is a generation which thrives on short circuit signs.
<5> When reading Tyler Kessel's illuminating essay about Derrida and Deleuze I was reminded of my "anticipation" - to drop a loaded term in this conversation - of a newborn baby as the simultaneous inside and outside when I first read about hospitality. Kessel goes on to consider the event (this also made me recall that I still remain hopeful about the possibility of death as unbirth and therefore as a similarly singular simultaneity), the opportunity expected, accidental or unexpected and whether such an interruption can be met with absolute hospitality. For those of us who are educators, do we view the interruption as an event worthy of a kind of hospitality (that is, inside the classroom but outside the lesson plan)? Can we be hospitable and treat our students inquiries - even their objections - with absolute hospitality?
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