Wrap-Up
Moderator
Simon DuringLike John, I’ve found it remarkable that this rather strange and to me unfamiliar genre can turn so quickly, skidding into new territories, welcoming different styles and tones and positions, and maybe even obsessions. Our conversation on repetition has certainly not been repetitive; it’s not mimicked the logic of dialogue; it’s not quite been writing in the old sense, either, since it doesn’t get congealed or quite finished. And amazingly it’s found a kind of progress. We’ve gotten somewhere, haven’t we?
So then, another turn: I am fascinated by Drew’s remarks on a new relation between the “surface” of artworks and their “implied reality,” by which I think he means their sources in nature. And I am no less drawn to Amy’s puzzled rumination on how art can so often and powerfully rebuke the suffering and injustices that capitalism (the “DSC”) causes without in any way diminishing that art’s prestige within the system or the enjoyment that those who profit most from the system take from it.
Mightn’t that be partly because so much art can be conceived as, again in Drew’s words, an “aesthetic intervention on . . . the real” rather than actually as real? In the end, of course, what intervenes on the real is real, and if art manages to make such interventions, which (as John reminded us in the live chat yesterday) it often enough does, it’s real too. And surprisingly, as John also has reminded us, it’s often out of modest and practical gestures and projects (I’m tempted to use the Situationist term derives) that art achieves maybe its least modest aim: to be real. I’d say, that, despite appearances, Godard too is a modest artist on those terms.
One of repetition’s promises is, then, to puncture the divide between art and reality: to turn mirroring into repeating with significance and elucidation, to turn aesthetic disinterest into experimental expectancy (precisely not an expectation of the merely unexpected, the novel), or into joining the rhythm of things as they happen and exist in the world.
So I’d say where we’ve gotten to in this discussion is away from haunting. And, more arguably, also away from a desire for the new, the other, the transformative. Call it a progress out of progress toward a future in which is nothing is old and nothing is new.
The improvisatory model Drew comments on in his post is predicated on constant collapse and adjustment; thus it works within a limited set of possibilities. Indeed, its ongoingness may feel hopeful, invested in potential, while all the time aware of what’s lost, but I wonder how sustainable such a formation might be as a politics. Is it necessary that repeated forms work themselves towards a less stable, poorer future? Is the authority given to decay over time certain (I’m thinking here of the instability of the feedback loop, always moving towards an eventual dissolution or quietening)?
As John Malpede’s posts make clearer, repetition and haunting don’t have to be connected. His major claim, that art projects can draw attention to the overwhelming power of democratic state capitalism as ideology, suggests repetition might be a way of “breaking through” DSC: can art do this if it doesn’t occupy an ideal space? “Pressurizing” might be possible, but it’s all too likely that art’s proximity to and dependence on DSC (for support and funding) makes it a difficult site for revolutionary practice. Malpede puts his finger on one of the major problems facing the art world’s efficacy as instigator: its adoption not only by an art world than coins “art stars” but by an educational system that suggests that it might in fact increase one’s chance of becoming an art star. If this carrot’s held out alongside a call to revolution, might it not dampen the power of that call?
The biggest problem, as far as I can see it, is that art’s purview increasingly fragments into cultural niches. Art worlds work in many ways as subterranean aspects of the “real” worlds. Your rich discussion has led me to ask what happens when the repetition under observation is not visual, auditory, or felt but written (and I wonder, more, what the relationship might be between melancholy repetition and linguistic repetition—if we copy a page again and again, the resolution eventually fails. Is this the same thing that happens to a repeated word?). And this, eventually, led me back to a writer I find myself increasingly interested in and perplexed by: D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence has been dismissed over the past 35 years as a pervert and a slob. His writing is not polished like his fellow high modernists; his politics, when recoverable, are simplistic; his view of women, mystical, cryptic, and misogynistic. All of this may be true, but what Drew says happens in musical improvisation happens in Lawrence: language, especially repeated language, breathes: it changes form, adjusts and collapses. A word repeated over a page is an altered word. At times this repetition might be melancholy, aware of a loss; but at other times it gets closer to the giddiness of a joke. Or even, as Drew suggests, to the punctuation of a slap.
A change in pressure: is this the only recipe we have for a revolutionary repetition?