Rhizome 2010 Commissions

My Bloglines tells me that Rhizome's commissions for 2010 have just been announced. Pricking up as they do now at anything remotely altermodern, my ears and eyes settled on two in particular.

Heba Amin's work, Fragmented City, will "research and locate abandoned buildings in Cairo and then populate Google Earth with sketch-up models of these structures to “counteract the skewed understanding of the city’s experience online where only models of historic monuments exist.”" This will be followed by setting up a "tourism bureau in Cairo in order to give tours of these forgotten areas to provide a new view of the city." You can read her essay on Fragmented City on her website.

This layering of city landscapes is familiar through psychogeography. Personally, this sort of project is always likely to excite my interest, proposing as it does a subversion of the experience of a city. Michel de Certeau talks about these sorts of battles between a dominant city mapped out by planners, architects and institutions and inhabitants; he calls them strategies and tactics. The Wikipedia entry on de Certeau has this definition: "Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power, while "tactics" are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies."

Amin's work is interesting from an altermodern point of view because it drags the past, the present and the future into contact with one another, creating sparks like those of conflicting ideas in a debate. Google Earth skews the viewer's understanding of Cairo by presenting only certain monuments. Will Amin's work result in a welcome evening out of this authoritarian impulse, or will be another instance of it? There are many criterias for choosing the buildings - how, where, why - are how these are regulated will be interesting to see. What access does she have? What knowledge?

The second work that caught my eye was Red76's YouTube School For Social Politics. As Rhizome write: "scattered throughout YouTube lie countless points of view, scattered moments of histories, both personal and collective. By arranging these video segments - documentaries, personal missives and old family films, newsreels, music videos - new light can be shed on the sociopolitical landscape of history past, and history present. The YouTube School for Social Politics (YTSSP) invites guest historians, artists, and theorists to construct passages of historical inquiry through the assemblage of clips found on YouTube."

The Wikipedia page on Red76 is small but gives a starting point: "Red76 is a multi-artist collective started in Portland, Oregon ... Red 76's work centers around the practice of grassroots publishing (both zines, small newspapers and online), conversation, and alternative economies which center around a larger theme of the American Revolution and a general revolutionary spirit.

Projects like Ghosttown and Taking Place sought to charge space and create an atmosphere wherein the public may become highly aware of their immediate surroundings, and their day to day activities, is an often recurring element within many of the groups activities."

Red76, then, are also interested in space, with a communal twist. This Youtube project appears primarily to be concerned with the space of public record, public memory. In shedding "new light [...] on the sociopolitical landscape of history past, and history present" Red76 are performing an altermodern process, spreading their practice into all aspects of history (past and present, and, missed by Rhizome's description but surely implicit - future) and collating it in the present. As Bourriaud described back in his exhibition catalogue, they are "tracing lines in all directions of time and space".

David Mitchell Attains Japanese Thought. Or Does He?

The paper I'm giving at the University of Aberdeen in July focusses on the contemporary British writer David Mitchell and whether or not he can be considered an altermodern writer. I call him a British writer a little provocatively, because the altermodern, and definitely Mitchell's novels, question the traditional sense of nationality.

In The Radicant, Nicolas Bourriaud discusses Victor Segalen, his book Essay on Exoticism and his ideas of diversity-as-energy and positive experiences of difference. Recounting how Segalen travelled to and through China and came to write a collection of prose poems Steles, Bourriaud defines Segalen's importance to the altermodern as this: "if the book [Essay on Exoticism] encourages us to seek to understand foreign cultures, it is so as to better appreciate what establishes our own difference. One cannot become Chinese, but one can attain the ability to articulate Chinese thought; one cannot claim as empathy what is merely a tourist's clear conscience, but one can translate".

My thought, which came to me whilst doing the washing up earlier, was that Mitchell attains a similar ability vis-a-vis Japan. Having re-read Cloud Atlas, I have just finished number9dream and am now moving on to Ghostwritten. It is number9dream that interests me here.

What struck me initially was how similar to some of Haruki Murakami's narrator-heroes Mitchell's narrator Eiji Miyake is. His thoughtfulness, stubborness and naivete are all found in Kafka on the Shore's narrator, as well as that of Sputnik Sweetheart and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Now, there are quite a few assumptions being made here - which naturally were I to follow this line of thought I would chase up - concerning how typical of "Japanese thought" Murakami's characters are. And there is certainly room for debate, given the obvious debt of influence he and his characters owe to Western culture - Beatles songs, jazz, pasta. But assuming that Murakami is able to articulate a recognisably Japanese mindset, then the similarities to Mitchell would suggest that the non-Japanese writer gets pretty close too.

My gut instinct says that number9dream doesn't seem mannered. Eiji doesn't come across as the character stuck between a British background and a Japanese present that you might expect. He doesn't seem caricatured or two-dimensional. And in those moments where characters use familiarly "British" words like "bloody", the effect is to make them more vivid and memorable. One might even be able to argue that Mitchell's background actually helps him see Japan more clearly: his experience of difference is translated into country-boy Eiji's impressions of megalopolis Tokyo.

These are very much early thoughts, but suggest that there is some mileage in the David Mitchell-Altermodern idea.

World Literature and the Altermodern

A thesis is emerging. Or an area of study at least.

In 1827 Goethe coined the phrase "world literature" to describe the increased availability of writing from other countries and in other languages. Marx and Engels picked it up and used it in describing characteristics of the bourgeois economy. Recently, David Damrosch has asked What Is World Literature? According to Wikipedia, Damrosch "define[s] world literature as a category of literary production, publication and circulation, rather than using the term evaluatively".

I'm wondering whether these ideas can be pulled into an essay about the relevance or usefulness of Bourriaud's altermodern theories (and other, non-literary theories of contemporary twenty-first globalization) to literature.

If I ask myself the question - are there any altermodern books? the first name that pops into my head is David Mitchell. Especially Cloud Atlas.

I await a reply from Bourriaud to the four questions I emailed him last week. Let's hope he illuminates this question for me a bit.

Benjamin H Brattan @ Postopolis

Dan Hill has posted the whole of Benjamin H Brattan's talk at the end of Postopolis on City of Sound.

It's a fascinating collection of musings on the economic crisis, the internet, design, space, politics; essentially a collation of thoughts on 'the now' from an avowed "out of the closet theorist".

Reading it, I found myself linking it to the things I've been reading recently about the altermodern, and low and behold!, Brattan mentions Bourriaud about half-way through the talk. Lucky then, as I was busy connecting thoughts and intuitions between them and creating new thesis ideas along the way.

There appears to be a considerable dialogue emerging - probably accelerated by the "credit crunch" - looking at the ways we live in the twenty-first century, about the possibilities and opportunities for change but also worries about not taking those opportunities. Do we have the right people in charge to take those opportunities? Does the concept of people in charge inherently damage a possibility for change?

All are in agreement about the growing out-dated-ness of postmodernism. It has reached saturation point, a moment in which postmodernism is becoming passé, washed up; irrelevant! Of course that doesn't mean we are in a post-postmodernism. It just means we are in a gap between post- and pre-. That is what Brattan's talk focussed on.

The main idea I've taken away from it, from a literature/art point of view, is an idea of the "afterimage". The designation "post" is used, Brattan notes, "to name a particular state of things that is somehow eclipsed but not entirely done with." We are in that moment now, a society creating afterimages. Afterimages of what, though? After postmodernism, after politics, after economics? No-one knows. Because we haven't entered a stage that can easily be called "an ism", we are left flailing in a limbo, using up yesterday's leftovers but not cooking a new dinner. Unsettling as this all may be, these sorts of conditions tend to be fertile ground for exciting art and ideas. This is emerging as the topic of my dissertation...

"I imagine entropy as a lukewarm paste"

I've been reading Nicolas Bourriaud's The Radicant, his extended essay on the emerging (or emerged) altermodern world that we now live in. It's fascinating reading, and compared to Relational Aesthetics, which suffered from terrible translation, is lucid, and flowing, and, possibly, a "joy to read".

In a section of the first third of the book, devoted to the theoretical aspects of the altermodern (as opposed to aesthetic or political aspects), Bourriaud gives an insight into a now largely forgotten, though near-prophetic, French poet called Victor Segalen. Arriving in Polynesia as a French navy medic in 1903, he just missed Gauguin, although he apparently found the paint in the easel "still wet". He became a defender of the natives of the islands, passionately fighting (incredibly iconoclastically) against the ravages of colonialism.

Bourriaud writes: "It is truly an aesthetics of diversity Segalen means to write, a defence of heterogeneity, of the value of the plurality of worlds, a plurality menaced by the civilizing machine of the West".

He wrote this defence in a book entitled Essay on Exoticism. As Bourriaud points out, the title is ironic; he quotes Segalen's disdain for exoticism (what Edward Said would later called Orientalism) as a succession of cliches: "palm tree and camel, black skins and yellow sun".

Segalen saw diversity as the source of all beauty, but also as its driving energy. Influenced, (not quite so iconoclastically), by prevailing thermodynamic theories, Segalen saw diversity as the key weapon against an encroaching entropy. Diversity - difference - was a constantly renewing force. This does not mean to keep people in arbitrarily designated boxes, nor does it mean to restrict criticism (I cannot criticise a novel by a black writer because I'm not black, etc...). Later in his life, after returning to Paris and learning Chinese, Segalen travelled to China and wrote Steles, a book that many Chinese consider part of their own literary canon. As Bourriaud writes: "written in French, but on a Chinese wavelength." Segalen's ideas of difference do not mean one can "become Chinese, but one can attain the ability to articulate Chinese thought".

Segalen coined a term for the figure who could travel between cultures, voyage between ideas, experience this difference: the exote. The exote is "one who manages to return to himself after having undergone the experience of diversity".