This may be of interest to some people…
The Student Run Lecture Series at Ryerson has Michael Snow coming in to lecture on Thursday March 5th, 2009 at 7 pm in ENG 103 (245 Church St.)
In an unfortunate bit of timing, the Faculty of Communication & Design at Ryerson is running Snow, Rokeby, Elder: Three Films, 3 Artists, 3 Stories, which are three 45 minute each films, that I believe are primarily documentary, about the three artists on March 5th at the same time at 80 Gould St, RCC 204.
If you have other questions about them I have emails about each that I can forward you.

“Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” meets “Where is the Rest of Me?”

Affect is confluent with movement, dynamism, and continuity with the contingency that there might be a disconnect, and that disconnect might be (let’s hope) productive. Our experience of this (some)thing is based in the not-yet present, which gives it a sense of immediacy, and this immediacy of experience is intensity which is (a register of) affect.

Affect is all about operationalizing the virtual… but is the difference simply a matter of anticipating the positive or the negative? In calling the positive or negative to arms? On the one hand, in the ‘wrong hands,’ it’s parasitic and opportunistic, on the other, in open-hands-palms-up, it’s an autonomous and an experimental, creative means to move the body… dance, dance revolution style.

I will show the Ronald Reagan “Bear” ad and a clip from King’s Row, and will also circulate JG Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.”

(Rey Chow) QUESTIONS:
An over investment or over-theorization in identity politics may allow the object of study (cinematic image) to disappear, but is this a result of methodology, academic trends or individual approach? (perhaps naïve on my part but) Could we not think of European theories that were not only born out of a specific time and place – ie. post-war Italy (Bazin) or Marxist working class (Benjamin) – as some sort of investigation of identity? Is there any relationship to identity politics in their ideas?

Chow asks us to think of cinematic images as artifice, which will then allow us to think about the relation between economic, fantasy and identity, but from what “standpoint” would one deal with these issues if the images are no longer representing real bodies? Is there really a universal of these relations?

She charges postmodernist trends with identity politics in film as being politically regressive but is her suggestion of seeing Asian cinema as a “reproducible phantom, an exotic yet consumable commodity, made tantalizingly accessible… sustained by and contribute to the global flows of capital” any more progressive? (1393) What would be the implication of studying “Asian” cinema or any cinema this way? Aren’t most commercial HW films seen as reproducible-phantoms-as-commodity already?

Chow notes that Gledhill and Williams characterize the moment as one of “impending dissolution of cinema within globalized multimedia,” but she herself believes that cinema is not yet at risk. However if we were to include cinema as part of this globalized multimedia, can “new media” be seen as a technological advancement or have the potential to bring spectacle, the visual image and technological innovation back into the foreground?

Hi folks–a full update is, well, upcoming, but we ARE back in class on Thursday 5 Feb.

Readings: Spivak/Butler; Miller et al, Urry

Presentation: Julia Aoki

Screening: Jackie Goss’s Stranger Comes to Town + our usual surprises

Hey everyone!

I know we’re not returning under the best circumstances this week, but I’m *thrilled* that we’re FINALLY getting back to doing what we all love to do. Houraaaay!

I’m trying to remember where we are in the syllabus – could someone remind me?!

Looking forward to picking up where we left off…
aimée

Got this e-mail from Ellen, and thought I would spread SOME good news in this upsetting time. Like Janine, I miss our class.

“Just thought I’d let you know that my paper about The Man With the Rubber Head was accepted to the “Instruction, Amusement and Spectacle” conference in Exeter this April.  I’m thrilled because now I get to present at a conference and go to the Sheffield archives.”

Congratulations, Ellen

can’t wait until th strike is over–hope it is soon.  Courage!

Janine

Hi Mike and Janine and Fellow Film 7000 Students,

As I mentioned to Julia when we met on the line,  I’m just enough of a nerd to be saddened by the suspension of theory class. Now on Thursdays I have to eat pastries alone and make sarcastic remarks about Toby Miller to my cat.

Wishing all of you all the best until the strike is resolved.  If you are ever in St Jacobs on a Thursday morning, please come over for coffee and baked goods and a discussion; you guys make me feel like an academic-you are all so brainy!

Warm Wishes,

Ellen

If you have not already heard:

728 at the general members’ meeting
27.3% – No
71.2% – Yes (in favour of a strike)

So no class. But maybe I’ll see some of you guys on the picket line tomorrow.

j

Here’s hoping that by Thursday the University agrees to pay us a minimum subsistence wage or at least agrees to wage increases to cover rates of inflation.

The conversation between Spivak and Butler addresses various conceptualizations of the state and of statelessness and further questions the validity of those conceptualizations both as descriptive frameworks and as prescriptive frameworks for political opposition in our contemporary globalized or ‘post-national’ climate. Drawing from (and critiquing) the likes of Arendt, Agamben, Rousseau, Marx, Habermas, and Derrida, the conversation might be considered theoretical bricolage: as they discuss the various theories, their own notion of statelessness develops (a few theorists that were implicit to their conversation are Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault, although I’m sure there are many more that I could not identify).

In advance of the presentation, I’d like to summarize just a few ways in which Butler and Spivak address the nation-state and the notion of statelessness.

Butler initially provides two conceptualizations of the state: state as nation and state as mode of being (which I understand to mean both positionality and personal experience). These are not mutually exclusive; the geographical, legal and institutional components of the state define a mode of being, specifically the mode of belonging or non-belonging in terms of citizenship. Conceived in this way, the position of statelessness is not what Butler calls a position of “bare life”; to be dispossessed by the state does not put the subject outside of power or politics, but is in fact a position constituted by power and politics. Put another way, the power of the state is a power of categorization and through categorization, the state may include or exclude.

Butler also considers performative aspects of the nation-state. Singing the national anthem is traditionally understood as a symbol of national unity, although in one instance in California to which she refers, the singers are illegal immigrants who sing the American anthem in a ‘non-authorized’ way (in Spanish). Butler asks, is it possible that this articulation “actually fractures the “we” in such a way that no single nationalism could take hold on the basis of that fracture?” (62). Butler considers it to be an assertion of equality and exercise of freedom because “both the ontologies of liberal individualism and the ideas of a common language are forfeited in favor of a collectivity that comes to exercise its freedom in a language or a set of languages for which difference and translation are irreducible” (62).

However, she does not go so far as to say that the act of exercising freedom through the performative act (the freedom of speech and assembly that they do not legally have) is efficacious – Butler distinguishes two rights: “That first right would never be authorized by any state, even as it might be a petition to or for authorization. The second set of rights is the rights that would be authorized by some rule of law” (constitution) (65). There is a gap between the act of exercising freedom and the authorization of freedom, and she imagines that it is this gap that may be mobilized for the purpose of striving toward equality (69).

Spivak complements Butler’s eloquence and “theoretical passion, about the implications of statelessness in California” (71), but provides much needed contemporary political-economic context to the discussion. The nation-state, she says, is in decline due to political and economic restructuring to allow for free(er) flows of global capital. States have lost their redistributive power as priorities become global and we now see ‘polyglot areas’ or ‘critical regionalisms’ cohering as well as extra-state entities such as the WTO. How does this effect Butler’s proposition of mobilizing the gap? “Judith speaks of a right inhabiting a performative contradiction. My point would be that those rights are now in the declarative, in a universal declaration rather than a performative contradiction” (81-82).

I’m still working Spivak’s argument, and hopefully I can provide some more insight on Thursday.

Questions:

1. In preparation for this presentation, I have been trying to find clips to show that don’t just take the nation-state as its subject, but that might be considered a form of articulation that fractures national unity. If enunciations that act as a fissure in national unity become the condition of equality, how might you conceive such an enunciation in cinema? Are these fissures just produced through linguistic differences, or may they be conceived in other ways? Can you provide any examples?

2. How has cinema incorporated shifts toward universal declaration or critical regionalisms?

3. I’m still working on a third question…