REVIEW OF REVIEWS DEPARTMENT
Dasein in the Dark - Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content
"Dasein in the Dark" is the title of Espen Hammer's review of Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) in issue 104 (November/December 2000) of Radical Philosophy. Struck deaf, dumb and blind by the scope of the review (and the reviewed book), the reader may find herself groping in the blackness for a grip on the meaning of aesthetic experience in these, putative, late-modern times.
Agamben is perhaps best known for his brilliant critique of modernity and its attendant philosophy of history. His foremost venture into the former may be his Infancy and History: Essays in the Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 1993); the latter is tackled obliquely in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). All of his various works seem to circle round the same hole in the earth -- the 'diremption' in thinking about what it means to exist, or the massive loss that occurred in the experience of the world round about the middle of the seventeenth century when, accordingly, "the conception of art then underwent a drastic reshaping." This reshaping is the bigger-than-life, all-consuming vacuum that has come to be known as modern aesthetics.
Espen Hammer notes Agamben's quest for a return or recovery of something authentic in our collective relationship to the world actually involves a movement into a zone within time and space (beyond self-reflective narcissism) to where "the work of art must be grounded in what [Agamben] calls the original event of poiesis -- that is, in an original temporal dimension in which 'the poetic status of man on earth finds its proper meaning'." This remark conjures an encounter with the beautiful, gnomic book published by the FruitMarket Gallery (Edinburgh), in 1992, called simply Poiesis: Aspects of Contemporary Poetic Activity*. This book contains a montage of source material, most critically perhaps, the work of contemporary artists working with words and images related to land and sea -- e.g., poet-gardenist Ian Hamilton Finlay, land artist Hamish Fulton, photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, and conceptualist-minimalists Lore Bert, Pieter Laurens Mol, and David Austen. The term poiesis, and most especially its modern deployment, involves a reflection on the Arendtian "space of appearance" or the Platonic "chora" -- a zone where things appear, come to being and are brought up out of darkness in an almost Orphic transposition from 'there' to 'here'. George Baird's The Space of Appearance (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995) is just such a Hannah Arendt-inspired foray into architectural theory. The Alberto Perez-Gomez edited series Chora, from McGill University (Montreal), is a similar collage of essays exploring the ground of cultural representations. Indeed, in this factory of Arendt scholarship, Giorgio Agamben, himself, has launched a critical-political broadside on the necessity of territory vis-à-vis the non status of refugees in post-modern, post-cold war Europe. For this and other dicey matters, see "Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension", an interview with Chantal Mouffe in Grey Room 02 (Winter 2001), or see the various works on the so-called 'uncertain state' of Europe by Massimo Cacciari. But back to Hammer/Agamben: "Now, since the early modern diremption of art categorically implied the separation of genius, and thus poiesis, from taste, it follows for Agamben that any candidate for a non-autonomy-based conception of art must satisfy the condition of uniting poiein, in the sense of bringing something into being or presence, with the experience of art." Presence and absence, those very stylish words, make their appearance in almost every discursus circling round this diremption and its privileged or not privileged presentation.
It is enough to drive one mad. Agamben is to be praised for uncovering one of the most contentious set pieces of modern aesthetics -- autonomy, with its Kantian categorical imperative -- and countering with the habitual insinuation of something else. That something else is extraordinarily slippery because it does not so much inhabit language as haunt language. Therefore, Agamben's analysis is in itself highly poetic and given to elisions and metaphors. "As it stands, this account is potentially tendentious on several fronts. For one thing, Agamben's ontology of rhythm [a key component of this non-art art] seems worryingly uninformed by any actually existing works of art [...] The problem is rather that given his nihilism thesis, no such work can exist: its very existence would completely contradict his view that art has vanished in the night of reflection." Hammer, here, is a bit too heavy-handed. Agamben does not point to works as such for an obvious reason; if one did so they would no longer be outside the description of art itself. Instead, what is really at stake is the defense and fortification of the 'sacred' realm implied by the analytic -- the place where art is not art by any definition we are now comfortable expounding.
Here, in this walled off area, it is safe to bring up the unacknowledged secret. Such an art as Agamben has sketched does exist -- It is landscape. Pace Ian Hamilton Finlay, this realm must be defended from the art establishment. Pace Robert Smithson, this realm must be prefigured (again) in remote, uncanny places (on paper or in the wilderness of the imagination). There have been totally amusing episodes in the past several decades to raise landscape to the level of modern art. All have failed. Indeed, there was even a mostly agonistic essay published in (was it?) The British Journal of Aesthetics pontificating on why "gardens" are not art. The main reason, posited there, was (was it?) "gardens are not original works of art".
Granted! Gardens are not original works of art. They do not have the autonomy of the order of the Kantian imperative. They are incredibly (naturally and unnaturally) intertextual and heterogeneous. By the questionable standards of modern aesthetic experience, therefore, they do not 'qualify'. And for that we should be grateful.
Pathway to The Dark Gaze ...
The Editors
*Graeme Murray (ed.), Poiesis: Aspects of Contemporary Poetic Activity, (Edinburgh, The Fruit Market Gallery, 1992)
We are preparing an extended etude on the subject of shadows ...In the meantime may we recommend In Praise of Mad Shadows as a warm-up exercise?
PS - The essay on shadows is now up and running in Serious Real - The Anti-Journal 1:2 / As further provocation, see Pays de Tendre (RTF / 60 KB) and/or The Given, The Taken, and The Given-Back (RTF / 33 KB) ...
