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David:

I guess, first of all, I would point to our performative sensory environments. I find them wonderfully stimulating. They are created by Chris Salter. They go on tour. One time, one of them ended up in Berlin, and my job as an anthropologist is to interview people after they've been through one of these experiences. They would last for about 20 minutes where there are no labels. There are no frames. There's just this swirl of impressions. People come out of it making all kinds of free associations. What we try and do is both find out where it's taken them. But also, we use that information to actually improve the experience for the next time we do the installation. So, that's one experience that I think is really key.

Another thing that I was thinking about was an experience I had at the Rijksmuseum, which was of a very interesting project. They had made a 3D print of Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride. It's a beautiful painting, and they had made a 3D print of it. It was bas relief. It wasn't completely in the round, but you could feel the scratchiness of the clothing. You could feel the roundness of the pearls. And so, in that regard, it was a lifelike three-dimensional model of a two-dimensional representation. Is this the way to go? Because, we could do 3D prints of everything in the collection.

To me, I wasn't sure because, first of all, Rembrandt was famous for being a sculptor of paint. He applied the paint so thick that it was almost three-dimensional already to begin with. He used his fingers sometimes because, actually, that direct impression of the fingers that is there.

And so, when there's so much tactile richness to Rembrandt, have we done that evocative quality of his painting style an injustice when we have modeled it in 3D? Should we? Is that not the way to go? I think that there'll be so many technological geniuses out there. That's the way they want to go. They make everything into a 3D printout. But, to me, it would be understanding the importance of touch to Rembrandt, which is only what an art historian can do. You need the skill to read the sources to get at that kind of information, and there's just no other way to do it.

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“Le Grand Camouflage” (“The Great Camouflage”) By Suzanne Césaire

Crammed against the islands are the beautiful green blades of water and silence. Around the Caribbean Sea is the purity of salt. Down there in front of me is the pretty square of Pétionville, planted with pine and hibiscus. My island, Martinique, is there, with its fresh garland of clouds prompted by Mount Pelée. There are the highest plateaux of Haiti, where a horse is dying, struck by lightning in the age-old murderous storm of Hinche. Nearby, his master contemplates the land he used to believe was solid and generous. He does not yet realize that he is participating in the islands’ absence of equilibrium. But this outburst of terrestrial insanity illuminates his heart: he starts thinking about the other Caribbean islands, with their volcanoes, their earthquakes and their hurricanes.

At that moment a powerful cyclone starts to swirl in the open seas off Puerto Rico in the midst of billows of clouds, its beautiful tail sweeping the length of the Caribbean semicircle. The Atlantic flees towards Europe in great ocean waves. Our little tropical observation posts start to crackle out the news. The wireless is going mad. Ships flee — where can they go? The sea swells, this way, that way, with an effort, a luscious leap, the water stretches out its limbs as it gains greater awareness of its watery strength; sailors clench their teeth and their faces are streaming wet, and it is reported that the cyclone is passing over the south-east coast of the Haitian Republic at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour as it heads for Florida. Those objects and beings still just out of reach of the wind are gripped with apprehension. Don’t move. Let it pass by…

In the eye of the cyclone everything is snapping, everything is collapsing with the rending sound of tumultuous events. The radios fall silent. The great palm-tree tail of fresh wind is unfolding somewhere in the stratosphere where no one will follow its wild iridescence and waves of purple light.

After the rain, sunshine.

The Haitian cicadas consider chirping out their love. When not a drop of water remains on the scorched grass, they sing furiously about the beauty of life and explode into a cry too vibrant for an insect’s body. Their thin shell of dried silk stretched to the limit, they die as they let out the world’s least moistened cry of pleasure.

Haiti remains, shrouded in the ashes of a gentle sun with eyes of cicadas, shells of mabouyas, and the metallic face of a sea that is no longer of water but of mercury.

Now is the moment to lean out of the window of the aluminum clipper on its wide curves.

Once again the sea of clouds appears, which is no longer intact since the planes of Pan American Airways pass through. If there is a harvest in process of ripening, now is the time to try to glimpse it, but in forbidden military zones the windows remain closed.

Disinfectant or ozone is brought out, but it hardly matters, you’ll see nothing. Nothing but the sea and the confused lay of the land. You can only guess at the uncomplicated loves of the fishes. They stir the waters, which give a friendly wink to the clipper’s windows. Seen from high above, our islands assume their true dimensions as seashells. The hummingbird-women, the tropical flower-women, the women of four races and dozens of blood ties, have gone. So too have the canna, the plumeria and the flame tree, the moonlit palm trees, and sunsets seen nowhere else on earth…

Nevertheless they’re there.

Yet it was fifteen years ago that the Caribbean was disclosed to me from the eastern slope of Mount Pelée. From there I realized, as a very young girl, that, as it lay in the Caribbean Sea, Martinique was sensual, coiled, spread out and relaxed, and I thought of the other islands, equally beautiful.

I experienced the presence of the Caribbean once more in Haiti, on summer mornings in 1944, which was so much more perceptible in the places from which, at Kenscoff, the view over the mountains is of an unbearable beauty.

And now complete lucidity. My gaze, going beyond these perfect forms and colors, catches by surprise the torment within the Caribbean’s most beautiful face.

Because the thread of unsatisfied desires has caught the Caribbean and America in its trap. Since the Conquistadors arrived and their technology (starting with firearms) developed, not only have the transatlantic lands had their appearance changed, they have learned new fears. Fear of being outdistanced by those who remained in Europe, already armed and equipped; fear of being confused with the colored peoples who were immediately declared inferior in order to make it easier to bully them. It was necessary initially and at any price — be it the price of the infamy of the slave trade — to create an American society richer, more powerful and better organized than the forsaken but desired European society. It was necessary to take revenge on the nostalgic hell which vomited its adventurous demons, its convicts, its penitents and its utopians over the New World and its isles. The colonial adventure has continued for three centuries — the wars of independence being only one episode — and the American peoples, whose attitude towards Europe often remains childish and romantic, are not yet freed from the old continent’s grip. Naturally it is the American Blacks who suffer most from the daily humiliations, degeneracies, injustices, and shabbiness of colonial society.

If we are proud to proclaim our extraordinary vitality throughout the Americas, if it seems to promise us a definitive salvation, we need the courage to say that subtle forms of slavery remain rampant. Here, in these French islands, it still debases thousands of negroes, for whom a century ago the great Schoelcher demanded, in addition to liberty and dignity, the title of citizens. We must dare to point out, caught by the implacable spotlight of events, the Caribbean stain on France’s face, since so many of the French seem determined to tolerate no shadow of it.

The degrading forms of modern wage labor still find a plot of land upon which to flourish unchecked among us.

Who will cast out, along with obsolete factory machinery, the thousands of sub-industrialists and grocers, that caste of false colonists responsible for the human decline of the Caribbean?

As they drift along the streets of the capitals among their European brothers, an insurmountable timidity fills them with fear. Ashamed of their languid accent and rough French, they sigh for the calm warmth of their Caribbean homes and the patois of the Black da1 of their childhood.

Prepared for any form of betrayal in order to defend themselves against the mounting tide of Blacks, they would sell themselves to America (if the Americans didn’t claim that the purity of their blood is more than suspect) just as, in the forties, they proclaimed allegiance to the Vichy admiral: Pétain being the altar of France for them, Robert2 had to become the “tabernacle of the Caribbean.”

Meanwhile, the Caribbean serf lives miserably and abjectly on the “factory” lands, and the mediocrity of our market towns is a sickening sight. Meanwhile, the Caribbean is still a paradise with the gentle sound of palm trees…

That day the irony was that, a garment gleaming with sparks, each of our muscles expressed in its own way part of the desire scattered over the blossoming mango trees.

I listened very attentively to your voices lost in the Caribbean symphony which launched downpours to assault the isles, but could not hear them. We were like thoroughbreds, held in check but chafing at the bit, on the edges of this salt savanna.

On the beach were several “metropolitan officials.” They stood there uneasy, ready to flee at the first signal. Newcomers have difficulty adapting to our “old French lands.” When they lean over the baleful mirror of the Caribbean Sea, they see their own delirious image. They don’t dare recognize themselves in that ambiguous being, the West Indian. They know the métis has some of their blood; that they both belong to Western civilization. Of course, “metropolitans” are unaware of color prejudice. But their colored descent fills them with fear, in spite of the exchange of smiles. They didn’t expect this strange burgeoning of their blood. Perhaps they would prefer not to respond to their Caribbean heirs who simultaneously cry out and do not cry out, “Father.” Yet they have to reckon with these unexpected sons and charming daughters. They have to govern this turbulent people.

Here’s a West Indian, the great-grandson of a colonist and a Black slave woman. Here he is in his island, ensuring its “smooth running” by his deployment of all the energies once needed by avaricious colonists for whom the blood of others was the natural price of gold and all that courage needed by African warriors in their perpetual struggle to wrest life from death.

Here he is with his double strength and double ferocity, in a dangerously precarious equilibrium: he cannot accept his negritude, but nor can he make himself white. Listlessness overcomes this divided heart, and with it come habits of trickery, a fondness for “fiddles”; this is how that flower of human servility the colored bourgeoisie blooms in the Caribbean.

Along roads bordered with gliricidia pretty Black children, relishing the cooked roots — salted or unsalted — that they eat, smile at the posh car as it passes. They suddenly feel, in the pits of their stomachs, the need one day to be masters of a beast so supple and shiny and powerful. Years later, stained with the fat of comfort, they can be seen miraculously giving a quivering of life to rejected carcasses, in order to sell them for a song. The hands of thousands of young West Indians have instinctively weighed up the steel, considered the joints and loosened the screws. Thousands of images of gleaming factories, unwrought steel and liberating machines have swelled the hearts of our young workers. In hundreds of sordid sheds where scrap iron rusts, there is an invisible vegetation of desires. The impatient fruits of the Revolution will inevitably gush forth from it.

Here among the mornes smoothed by the wind is the Free-Men’s Estate. A peasant, in whom the mechanical adventure still inspires no excitement, leans against a giant mapou which shades the whole side of the morne, feeling a dull thrust of vegetation welling up through him from his bare toes as they sink into the mud. Turning towards the setting sun to see what the weather will be like tomorrow — the orangish red indicates that planting time is near at hand — and his gaze is not only the gentle reflection of the light, but becomes oppressive with impatience, the very one which stirs the Martiniquan earth — this earth which does not belong to him yet is his earth. He knows that it is in league with them, the workers, and not with the béké or the mulatto. And when suddenly, in the Caribbean night decked out with love and silence, the drum roll explodes, the Blacks get ready to respond to the desire of the earth and of dance, but the landowners, immured in their beautiful mansions behind their wire gauze, appear like pale butterflies caught in a trap under the electric light.

All around them the tropical night swells with rhythm, Bergilde’s hips have assumed, in the oscillations that surge from the chasms on volcano flanks, their appearance of cataclysm and it is Africa itself which, beyond the Atlantic and the centuries before the slave traders, dedicates the look of solar lust exchanged by the dancers on its West Indian children. Their cries proclaim, in a raucous and generous voice, that Africa is here, present; that it is waiting, immensely chaste despite the stormy, devouring colonization by the whites. And across these faces constantly bathed in the effluvium of the sea around the islands, across these bounded and small lands surrounded with water like huge impassable gulfs, passes the remarkable wind that has come from a continent. The Caribbean-Africa, thanks to the drums and the nostalgia for terrestrial places, lives on in the hearts of these island peoples. Who will satisfy their nostalgia?

Yet Absalom’s canna bleeds on the chasms and the beauty of the tropical landscape goes to the heads of passing poets. Through the shifting tracery of the palms, they see the West Indian blaze swirling over the Caribbean Sea which is a calm sea of lava. Here life is kindled by a vegetal fire. Here, on the warm earth that keeps alive geological species, the plant, through passion and blood, through its primitive architecture, establishes disquieting chimes surging from the dancers’ chaotic loins. Here the liana, vertiginously balanced, assumes aerial poses to charm the precipices, hooking trembling hands to the ungraspable cosmic trepidation that mounts right through nights inhabited with drums. Here poets feel their heads reeling and, imbibing the fresh odors of the ravines, they seize the spray of the islands, listen to the sound the water makes around them, and see the tropical flames no longer revive the canna, the gerbera, the hibiscus, the bougainvillea and the flame trees, but instead the hungers, the fears, the hatreds, and the ferocity that burns in the hollows of the mornes.3

And so the conflagration of the Caribbean Sea heaves its silent vapors, blinding for the only eyes able to see and suddenly the blues of the Haitian mornes and the Martiniquan bays fade, the most dazzling reds pale, and the sun is no longer a crystal that plays, and if the market squares have chosen the tracery of Jerusalem thorns as luxury fans to ward off the sky’s ardor, if the flowers have known how to find just the right colors to make you fall in love, if the arborescent ferns have secreted golden essences for their croziers, coiled up like a sex, if my West Indies are so beautiful, it shows that the great game of hide and seek has succeeded and certainly that day would be too lovely for us to see it.

Suzanne Césaire, “The Great Camouflage,” originally published in Tropiques nos. 13-14 in 1945. This edition was published in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, edited by Michael Richardson and translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. Verso 1996.

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Gardner, Ritchie and Underhill: ‘The Moat of Oblivion’

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/1031461X.2024.2322485?needAccess=true

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An excerpt from ‘Dream Geographies’ Alexis Wright

Praiseworthy is now a published book that I can barely believe I was capable of writing; its skeleton is these notebooks, the slender, bony, more-like-fish-bone remains, a sketch map in total, all bound together on top of a bookcase. Yet their pages remain as keys that can still prompt, open the faded memories, that come flooding back from the internal vault, the burial place when the life you had given the living manuscripts ceases to live.

In the deep recesses of the brain, the mind has learnt how to store completed challenges during the recuperation period, of healing the senses and the body, that comes after the completion of a book. The emotional part of writing, the toll of the memories of working on Praiseworthy, has now mostly faded, but memories of becoming lost in the work return from time to time. These belong to a thousand different ways of losing the way, that sometimes still run like stray dogs prowling in my dreams. Perhaps, it is only the ghosts that will occasionally return to say, let sleeping dogs lie. What was once constantly worked through in the mind while developing the book is now finished.

As I think about what comes next, I wonder how literature might again become an endeavour for building lasting value, one of trying to reach impossible horizons. The equivalent, say, of those deep thoughts that have been carried in epical story lines, those story laws from ancient time created by our ancestors, the spiritual creation-beings who wrote the country and left behind everlasting stories of laws in the traditional song lines of millennia. The ancient story maps that have lasted the distances; that have been kept solid and maintained through the minds of generations of our people adhering to ancient systems of law, knowledges and wisdom; kept alive through the responsibility of holding the future of all times continuously; and have remained as the crisscrossing of the routes taken by the creation-beings through an interweaving of the relationships tasked with responsibility for keeping these storyline laws strong.

In another way, we might look to Antoni Gaudi’s Basílica de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona, the monumental cathedral he devoted his life to building for his God who was not in a hurry to see it finished. Why not then take time to strive for great art as it attempts to speak about the harrowing depths from which the overwhelming imbalances between the sorrows and the joys grow?

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*A note on Jae Hwan Lim's introduction https://field-journal.com/issue-27/reciprocity-over-unilateralism-introduction-to-issue-27/

Grateful for Jae Hwan Lim's writing, practice, and the work of FIELD. Lim's invitation to develop a "reciprocal art field over artistic unilateralism" is a helpful guide in working within the arts.

Below the editorial for Field's Spring 2024 Issue by Grant Kester.

* * *

The artist is to see the situation of this land and this era. If this situation is filled with contradiction and corruption, it is the command of our conscience that tells us to direct a focused attention there…

Manifesto of the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists (July 1979) [1]

I am pleased to introduce FIELD’s Spring 2024 issue, edited by Jae Hwan Lim, a member of the FIELD Editorial Collective. This issue is devoted to contemporary socially engaged art in South Korea. Jae has assembled a set of articles which examine both the complexities of activist art in South Korea, and the tensions that have emerged around cultural politics more generally in that country. The production of engaged art in South Korea today is conditioned by two significant historical factors. The first is the tradition of Minjung or “Peoples” art, which emerged in conjunction with the broader democratic movements against military authoritarianism that unfolded across South Korea beginning in the late 1970s. Drawing inspiration from the Mexican Mural movement, Buddhist folk art traditions and the Chinese woodcut movement, Minjung art was often developed as part of student protests and pro-democracy demonstrations. Groups such as the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists and Reality and Utterance sought to challenge the formalist escapism of abstract, monochromatic painting (known as “Dansaekhwa”) that dominated the institutional artworld at the time. The second factor is the more recent emergence of South Korea, and Seoul in particular, as a major hub of the global art market. In 2022 South Korean galleries and auction houses generated over $750 million in sales, driven largely by wealthy young Korean millennials and Gen Z collectors. The intoxication of the market is exemplified by influencers such as “RM” (Kim Nam-joon), a 29-year-old “rapper” associated with the K-pop group BTS, who recently announced his purchase of Roni Horn’s cast glass sculpture Untitled for $1.2 million dollars on Instagram. In Horn’s account, the work “isn’t two things. It’s everything. It’s synthesis; not this and that. It’s a state of integration,” epitomizing the routinized evocation of categorical indeterminance that serves as the default aesthetic horizon of a vast swathe of contemporary, market-based art. Engaged art in South Korea today is, thus, poised between a radical, or at least oppositional, past and a present defined by the eager assimilation of art to the circuits of global cultural and economic power. What options exist for artists today who seek to contest this process? How might the legacy of Minjung be mobilized in the current neo-liberal moment? And what forms of resistance, organized or nascent, might provide a foundation for future practice? We are very grateful to Jae and his contributors for their work and dedication, and delighted to be able to share their important insights with our readers.

Grant Kester

[1] Sohl Lee, Images of Reality/Ideals of Democracy: Contemporary Korean Art 1980s-2000s (Ph.D. dissertation, Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester, New York, 2014), p.64.

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making sense of remains

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HJS - again in writing (in all things and any) her literary style makes me melt.

this is her academic introduction dep. English Vanderbilt University:

https://as.vanderbilt.edu/english/bio/hortense-spillers/

Having taught in the U.S. academy for three decades now (and counting), I am reluctant to look back for all those mythical reasons that warn against the backward glance. (I never figured out why doing so might turn one into a pillar of salt, but it is alleged from quite reputable sources to have happened to at least one person!) In any case, when I conjure up 1974, when I started post-doc teaching at Wellesley College, I always find something to cut the memory short, since remembering is to suggest that you have more past than future, but it doesn’t feel so to me at all. Actually, I feel as though I’m just getting started good!  Though I think I wouldn’t have been half bad at either, I am nevertheless grateful to myself that I didn’t pursue a career in the practice of law, or tv/radio broadcasting, having spent my last two years in undergraduate school at the University of Memphis as a disc jockey at WDIA radio in Memphis. This historic organization—among the first, if not the dead absolute first, all-black radio station in the United States—might have been my launching pad, I’d hoped, to a career in national news; as I recall, I was preparing to take the broadcasters’ examination, administered by the Feds (and the equivalent of our SATs, or in those days, CEEBs) and about to cut a tape, at their request,  to post to the executives who ran WHER in Memphis—the first all-woman radio station in the country, I think. But after all that, William Blake’s prophetic books won the charm offensive! Is that not a surprise, or what! Not many things were more interesting to me then than Walter Cronkite, Pauline Fredrick, and Edward R. Morrow, unless it was “Vala, or the Four Zoas”! And one thing led to another and another and finally a career of literary and cultural interrogation that has taken me literally from my birthplace on the southern tier to the East and Mid-West of the country and several decades later, back again. It would be an understatement to assert that it is not today the same South from which I departed my parents’ driveway in my little Buick Skylark, three months after MLK’s assassination, enroute to Boston and Brandeis.  The changes have been momentous for everyone and precisely frame my own professional development.

Try to imagine this: I hired someone to type my doctoral dissertation, though I was competent enough to have done it myself. But one hired out the work before computers because the professional typist was expected to be very fast, very capable, and expert at the proper formatting. You did everything else. The distance that separates the mid-70s from the turn-of-the-century world is a matter of light years, but I wonder how we are doing today with an old-fashioned aim in mind, and that is to say, teaching reading and writing in the age of twitter, although we apply far fancier names to what we do. It is likely that I wrote my dissertation on the rhetoric of black sermons by hand first, then made a rough copy of it on my Olivetti, then gave the secretary the rough draft from which to make the perfect draft. I think I paid the lady $200.00 and change, as the first “real” painting I bought from the same era—a striking head of Miles Davis on a black ground-- cost five hundred. Living in Haverford rather than Philly, Ithaca rather than the Big Apple, not taking a job in Chicago, but staying in central New York, I survived the 80s, 90s, and the new millennium; what bothers me now is that we haven’t figured out yet the implications of inflated costs, e.g;, that of higher education and the speeds that are supposed to match the global flows of capital.  I think we need to spend a little time trying to imagine what all the latter mean to and for the tasks of higher education.

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Una Rey on Yhonnie Scarce

The Myth of Empty Country And the Story of ‘Deadly’ Glass

https://www.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/atoms/files/una_rey_the_myth_of_empty_country_and_the_story_of_deadly_glass.pdf

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Tuputau Lelaulu, Taloi Havini

https://www.youtube.com/live/f7D4Kg5Z1SY?si=D1bGZd0d2-xIPMEZ

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https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/5192/the-strelley-mob/

Enjoyed reading Jess' review on the exhibition "The Strelley Mob" held at John Curtin Gallery co-curated by Darren Jorgensen, Sharon Hale, and Barbara Hale ✨ 

"Rather than an archival poetics that primarily confronts colonial archival logics, these continuances work from the artistic and pedagogical experiments and resistances of the past, centring uniquely Noongar and Nyangumarta epistemologies."

A note: worth reading Inge Kral & Darren Jorgensen's article "The Illustrated literature of Solomon Cocky: turning the Dreaming into books"

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Kyle Powys Whyte

a note after a video call with Jess.

https://kylewhyte.marcom.cal.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2018/07/Our_Ancestors_Dystopia_Now_Indigenous_Co3.pdf

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Transcript: Ruth Wilson Gilmore & Paul Gilroy

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-ruth-wilson-gilmore

Paul: Yeah and maybe those crowds in the streets are being exposed to an accelerated learning that the colour matching and corporate tinkering that involves the rearranging of the deck chairs on the sinking ship, that these things are of limited utility to the existential perils that police murder and their particular demands and stresses of the Covid, of the Covid epidemic, these things lose their appeal in that context. I think people have been - I know it is mostly young people, but it isn't only young people actually - the people have been emboldened by recovering their proximity to death. That the proximity - our government has been much, much more able to control the flow of images out from those emergency rooms and the pile of body bags and the health care workers who work in those environments are being bullied and intimidated into silence, gagged, and their phones - they don't shoot that footage on the phone that we saw coming out of New York, that we saw coming out of Italy. So we don't have the visual record and in a way that serves their purposes because it helps them to contain the narrative, but on the other hand the existential, the anxiety - anxiety is the master word in our situation - those anxieties are intensified in the absence of that visual record in a society that's so dependent on visual stimuli, and those anxieties are really active in the daring, in the boldness of the young people who are out on the streets. And yes they know, they know they don't want to take the virus back to the communities and endanger their elders - they are perfectly appraised of that - but they also know that the value of their own lives is already compromised and that's what they learnt from looking at that video - the latest of these videos which is endlessly repeated and shared and circulated. So, I think their sense of vulnerability, their sense of anxiety compounded by the very limited and intense channel of visual images that they can access, and this makes them bolder. I won't say it makes them reckless, I don't think I've seen any recklessness yet, maybe - that has to be there in that demographic, we were all reckless troublemakers at one point - but there's something about that existential anxiety which makes the people more bold, makes people more daring, makes them calculate the difference between their own desire to be safe and secure, and the security and safety of the larger communities to which they affiliate, which is very very striking and which I find very moving.

Ruth: I think you're absolutely right. I'm going to say something I'll probably take back later, but I'll say it: I think that in many instances over the years, the constantly circulating images of particularly, although not exclusively, black people being murdered, dying, lying dead in the street, have elicited very strong responses. But I think if we were to analyse those responses, we'd find a lot of pity and a lot of contempt - to use my friend Daryl Scott's words - pity and contempt. But not necessarily this strong sense of that that I'm watching is somehow an expression of how I feel - how I feel that I can't necessarily say - and I can't go down the rabbit hole of affect theory because I don't understand it. And I don't want to. But there is- well let's go to our friend Raymond Williams: that people are living through a gargantuan shift in the narrative arc of structure of feeling. And it happened because of Covid and plus because of under employment and unemployment and plus because of how governments are differentially responding and how news of that circulates visually and then other ways. And that creaking infrastructure is making people turn and start in a direction they might not have ever gone in before, and they feel like their feet are on some ground that they're just gonna have to try out even if they can't see it through the smoke and the tear gas. I think I pulled off the metaphor. So, I think I think that. I'm not gonna take it back yet.

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An obscure thing before it is said

In that respect, modernity has a double discourse, one side of which is materialistic while the other is rather difficult to qualify. I, for one, call it metabasism, and we will see why. The materialist discourse dominates; it reduces the human to the living and the living to physics. It is illustrated by the mechanistic worldview of CMWP. Starting with Descartes, this worldview has developed a counterweight by making human subjectivity into a separate domain irreducible to the laws of matter. However, the dominant tendency is reductionist, intended to create a physics of the mind. The imperialism of physics that makes the universal laws of objects into absolutes promotes its symmetrical opposite: as a result, the individual subject becomes an absolute. The social sciences have to a certain extent applied the latter process to cultures, as social phenomena irreducible to physics. Nevertheless, the polarity remains the same: in other words, fundamentally dualistic. In that context, reductionists will say that nature controls culture; we call this determinism. The others say that culture is autonomous and projects itself onto nature. I call this metabasism, in other words, the foreclosure of the foundation constituted by the earth. A recent example is the closure of the sign onto itself in the philosophy of someone like Derrida. 

It is clear today that this double discourse does not lead to anything good, for its effect is a-cosmism; it de-cosmizes existence. In simpler terms: it deprives us of the qualitative unity that forms a world, a life milieu where earth and heaven are allied and which can be simultaneously experienced as true, good, and beautiful. Modernity has disassociated this and continues to do so more and more. Without even speaking of the Good or the Beautiful, that is, of morality or aesthetics, we are incapable of reconciling the two dimensions according to which we conceive of the True today: the ecological and economic dimensions. The first tells us that our world is heading for a fall; the second, that we need to stay the course.

-----

Augustin Berque, aka landscape bae.

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Toni Morrison, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 2016

For the stranger is not foreign, she is random; not alien but remembered; and it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known—although unacknowledged—selves that summons a ripple of a alarm. That makes us reject the figure and the emotions it provokes—especially when these emotions are profound. It is also what makes us want to own, govern, and administrate the Other. To romance her, if we can, back into our own mirrors. In either instance (of alarm or false reverence), we deny her personhood, the specific individuality we insist upon for ourselves.