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Monday, February 27, 2006 |
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Saturday, February 25, 2006 |
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Sunday, February 19, 2006 |
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War and Hypertext |
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Just watched Godard's Notre Musique.
A couple of standout moments: The realization that the foundations of Western Literature, Homer's Lliad and The Odyssey, are both glorifications of war written by people who didn't experience war. So, our western tradition has always been blood and distance in equal measure. In Godard's film, the writer of a fictional essay, "Palestine as Metaphor", discusses the notion of Trojan Poets. If the Trojans had any poetry, he says, it was lost. He wonders whether or not the lack of great poetry is reason enough for a culture to be defeated. Finally, he says, the Palestinians are winning on poetry, and if they ever lose poetry to Israel, then the culture is dead. Palestinians are only known because they've been locked into battle with Israel, and the whole world looks at Israel. Israel is the center of the world affairs. So, the resistance to Israel is what gives Palestinians their power.
Were the Palestinians opposed to, say, Turkey, no problem. On a broader scale, when Al Qaeda's earliest manifestations were battling it out over control of Afghanistan, no problem. It was only the opposition to America that made it powerful. You still see the confusion in the streets, during anti-Dane protests by Muslims across the world over political cartoon hackery. The Danes are a useless enemy, they don't get any attention for the cause. And so at an anti-Dane rally you will see them burning the American flag.
At the same time, I'm reading up on Augusto Boal's "Theater of the Oppressed". It seemed a bit weak to me at first: Writer travels South America, encouraging the audience to participate in the solutions of his dramas. Actors, at certain decisions, turn to the audience, the audience calls out scenarios, and the actors play them out, until the audience is satisfied with the conclusion. At times the plays are specifically mirrors of local political struggles, at times they are stories of wives with cheating husbands. But Boal is careful in his work to explore the stories suggested as manifestations of class psychology.
In one performance, the audience was completely involved, the entire way through, as statues. A woman from the audience came up and molded them, making them take the positions of an event she had witnessed in her home village, where a man was castrated as a result of another absurd and bloody local power grab. The woman's only rules were that she could not speak, but she had to mold them all to reflect the event, showing actors how to pose by taking the pose herself. In act two, she did the same thing, molding them into how she wanted her village to be. And finally, the third act, the audience came down and explored suggestions for the transition scenes.
A woman of a particularly upper class upbringing had molded the scene completely around, but five prisoners, tied and bound by the side of the castrated man, she didn't move. When asked why she couldn't envision their role in the solution, she remarked that they simply hadn't belonged. Others, the revolutionaries, made the soldiers turn their guns to their chiefs; some liberated women made the women grab the weapons. It was all telling of the psychology of class. It was key for understanding the differences between members of the audience, but also key to uniting them into envisioning a common solution- not by "democracy", but by consensus, in the playground of art.
Though it's telling that they all ended up violent. "Why don't people of humanity ever start a revolution?" a character in Notre Musique asks, while driving through Sarejevo. "Humanists don't start revolutions," comes the response, "They build libraries."
The singular thrust of western culture, as a telling of war propaganda in a direct and unchallenged way, was malleable to some extent, coming from the oral traditions where people could ask questions, or challenge assumptions of the speaker. When the recorded medium came along, we got into the unchallenged aspect of those oral traditions: now, the storyteller was unobliged to listen to you. So it gave rise to the master storytelling of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Bush. I don't mean to put Bush on the same "pedestal" as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but frankly, any war fought since the invention of the radio is a new kind of master storytelling.
Augusto Boal's version of the Trojan War might have asked for the Trojan side, might have given voice to some element of Trojan Poetry.
Lastly: Jorge Luis Borges and "The Garden of Forking Paths", tells the story of a Nazi spy who comes across the writings of his ancestor, decoded by a man who has been studying these writings. The writings are chaotic and unexplainable, but everyone says this ancestor, a monk who spent 13 years on it, created a master labyrinth at the same time. What the man studying the monk discovers is that the labyrinth and the writing are all the same, that you cannot use the labyrinth without the writing, or the writing without the labyrinth. The idea is that the story is infinite, the labyrinth is only a map- and the directions can go on forever.
But Borges story, the labyrinth story of infinite variations, is still, essentially, a story about war. And at the end of the written story, the story that Borges actually wrote, the keeper of the labyrinth is killed because his name is the name of the city the Nazi's must bomb, and his death is the only way to communicate the message over German borders.
Posted by
Eryk @
8:37 PM
(0) comments
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Thursday, February 09, 2006 |
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Thursday, February 02, 2006 |
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