“Politicizing Art”: Benjamin’s Redemptive Critique of Technology in the Age of Fascism

Subtitles book review by Christoph Wahl

Christoph Wahl
Wider die Illusion der Einheitlichkeit
Atom Egoyan / Ian Balfour (Hg.): Subtitles. On the Foreignness of Film. London: The MIT Press 2004. 544 S. 41 s/w, 77 farb. Abb. Gebunden. USD 35,00.
ISBN: 0-262-55057-1.

[1] Ein Buch über Untertitel
– ausgerechnet aus Nordamerika 1

[7] Für Rich ist die Untertitelfeindlichkeit statt dessen im Zusammenhang zu sehen mit einer Furcht vor anderen Sichtweisen und einer Erhebung der Einsprachigkeit zu einem nationalen Wert (was gleichzeitig eine Abwendung von der mischsprachigen Realität des eigenen Landes bedeutet). Amresh Sinha attestiert der Untertitelung gar einen »un-American character« (S. 172). Sein Ansatz der Betrachtung von Untertiteln ist in seiner (etwas weinerlichen) Polemik höchst politisch und bildet damit in nuce die Grundfrage des gesamten Buches ab: Wo liegt die Schnittmenge zwischen ›Globalisierungsgegner‹ und ›Filmliebhabern‹? »Subtitles«, so Rich in ihrem Schlußsatz, »are a token of peace« (S. 168).

My Publications

Book:

Millennial Cinema: Representations of Memory in Film, ed. Amresh Sinha, Terence McSweeney, and Gillian Harkins (in process.)

Peer reviewed articles:

1. “Postmodern Skepticism or Guilt by Association?,” Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, February, 2007 (forthcoming).

2. “Sign and Symbol: Gedächtnis and Erinnerung in Hegel’s Philosophy,” Sign Processes in Complex System. Proceedings of the 7th International Congress of the IASS-AIS, ed. Schmitz, Walter (Dresden: Thelem) (Forthcoming)

3. “Forgetting to Remember: From Blanchot to Benjamin,” Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique, issue 10, November 2005.
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue10/sinha.pdf

4. “Same Old New German Cinema,” Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no, 15, March 2005
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol9-2005/n15sinha

5. “The Use and Abuse of Subtitles,” Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, ed. Egoyan, Atom and Ian Balfour (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004), pp. 171-192.

6. “The Intertwining of Memory and History in Alexander Kluge’s Films,” Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media Inc., 2002), pp. 383-401.

7. “Alexander Kluge,” German Culture and Society: The Essential Glossary, ed. Holger Brill (London: Arnold, 2002), pp. 76-77.

8. “Globalization: ‘Making Geography Irrelevant,’” Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, vol. 24, nos. 1-2, January-June 2002, pp. 181-191.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713745390~db=all

9. “Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory,” In Practice: Adorno, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, eds. Briel, Holger and Andreas Kramer (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2001), pp. 145-159.
http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html

10. “Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly: The Spectacle of Transvestism,” Spectacular Optical, eds. Antelo-Suarez, Sandra and Michael Mark Madore (New York: PASSIM, Inc. (July 1998), pp. 36-41.

11. “The Intertwining of Remembering and Forgetting in Walter Benjamin,” Connecticut Review, vol. XX, no. 2, Fall 1998, pp. 99-110.
http://www.wbenjamin.org/remembering.html

12. “A Critique of Poe’s Eureka: From a Hegelian Standpoint,” The Making of Modern Bihar: Brijnandan Prasad Centenary Volume: 1893-1993, ed. B. P. Sinha (Patna: Tapan Printing Press, 1993), pp. 261-271.

Journalism Articles published in India

13. “Werner Herzog: ‘One against all,’” Patriot, Jan.1. 1980.

14. Since 1977 I have been a regular contributor to Indian newspapers and periodicals. For the national newspaper in New Delhi, Patriot, I wrote a column on Film Directors that included Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Zoltan Huszarik, Tomas Alea, Fred Zinneman, Humberto Solanas, G. Aravindan, and Shyam Benegal. I contributed to the political journals Mainstream (New Delhi), Frontier (Calcutta) and Zammer (Gujrat).

MY Profile at NYU

Amresh Sinha
B.A., M.A., Ph.D.; Adjunct Professor. School of Visual Arts, the New School; producer/director of "Convict & the Trial," and "Quit India Movement" both documentaries for Indian television; published film scholar; published articles in Patriot, Connecticut Review, Spectacular Optical, In Practice: Adorno, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies," German Culture and Society: The Essential Glossary, Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies;


Department Affiliation
› Design, Digital Arts, and Film

Courses Taught
› The Language of Film X34.9504
› The Art of Editing X34.9622

Philosophical Conversations

Adorno: art & mimesis « Previous
February 12, 2007

I've always found the category of 'mimesis 'in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory elusive. It was very very elusive in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. I appreciate that it is a counter rationality to the hegemony of instrumental rationality, but I have always found his aesthetic rationality difficult to pin down, due to the complexities around the paradoxes and contradictions. So I was pleased to come across Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory by Amresh Sinha.

He says that art takes refuge in mimesis in order to escape from the irrationality of the death-like intensity of the reified world:


Mimesis, in Adorno, mediates between two elements: life and death. In such a dialectical context, if we assume that art's survival in the midst of its potential annihilation by the bureaucratic irrationality of the world depends on the fact that it must partake in the process of rationality, which itself is the reason for its irrationality, then its relation to death is what is manifested as its relation to life. Despite the historical fact that art emerged gradually from the fetters of magical principles, it cannot simply go back to its natural origin, when faced with the rational composition of the irrational, reified, bourgeois world. It is already a part of it. Art's emergence from the shackles of the magic world testifies to its rational principle. But it does not fully indicate the separation of subject from the object. For Adorno, the "varying positions" of art signifies two distinct features. In the first place, the work of art is endowed with the principle of rationality, which indicates its separation from the dominance of the magico-mythical realm; secondly, art also stands in opposition to the rationality, the real domination. In both instances the actual process of art is "inextricably intertwined with rationality" (AT, 80).

I presume art standing in opposition to the rationality, the real domination, refers to instrumental rationality and not rationality per se, since art is a form of rationality--an aesthetic rationality.


Sinha says that:


The dialectic of mimesis and rationality reveals the compatible but irreconcilable tendency of one to the other. Art's mimetic character is revealed in its disenchantment from and secularization of magic from the archaic period. It thus conveys the rational side of art, as well as its refusal to allow the domination of rationality to turn it into a technological perfect being. In art the resistance is felt in both directions as nothing but the mute suffering of its expression. For neither does its mimetic rationality permit it to regress to the magical realm, in order to separate itself from that type of cognition which aims at a singular conceptual grasp of the world, nor the knowledge of the "magical essence" let it slide towards the destruction of its self-identity.

So modern art swings in the wind between its alienation from magic and ritual and from instrumental rationality.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The article was awkwardly written, at times, it seemed to me, barely in English. But its author did get the fundamental point right: "mimesis" for Adorno is a mode of behaviour, of a responsive, receptive sort, and not primarily a matter of representation. That's the key point because not only is mimesis the point of transmission of the external world and its objective social and natural processes to "subjectivity" and the pre-subjective objectivity of the embodied "subject", but, as an involutary spontaneity, it connects up with what is virtually the foundational concept of Kantian, and hence German Idealism, namely, spontaneity, conceived as the originary "freedom" of the subject/mind/spirit, by which it transcendentally constitutes the world. In other words, Adorno deploys "mimesis", as at once the exteriority of and the antipode to the rationalized "subject" with its knowledge of self and world derived from and shaped by its intrication in objective processes of rationalization, "strategically" to deconstruct the at once inflated, conflated and inverted conception of knowledge and "free will", human agency, and their interrelation, bound up in the illusory performance of transcendental constitution on the part of idealist metaphysics/reigning ideology. Under such idealist metaphysics, knowledge of the world, theoretical cognition, is subtended by the moral-practical will, "freedom", and becomes a drive to the rational mastery of the world, while the "end" of freedom becomes the will to knowledge, entirely determined by the objective "necessity"of such knowledge, and hence subjected to the given order of the world that it illusorily "constitutes", effectively converting into its opposite. It is because mimesis is at once spontaneous, involuntary, and pre-subjective, yet, at the same time curiously aligned with both the founding conception/intention of German idealism and with objective processes of rationalization by which the world is "constituted", that it picks apart the distorted conception and formation of both knowledge and agency. So then wouldn't "Aesthetic Theory" be a kind of occluded and absented conception of practical reason, an anti-and-post-epistemolgical ethics aimed at retrieving knowledge, agency and the objective world from the domineering will to knowledge?

Posted by: john c. halasz | February 14, 2007 10:22 PM

Teaching Experiences

Department of Media Culture at The College of Staten Island, CUNY
1. Introduction to Film – Spring 2006
2. Major American Directors II - Spring 2006

Writing Program in English Department at Rutgers University
1. Expository Writing – Fall 2005

Cinema Studies Department at New York University:
1. History/Memory/Authorship - Spring 2005
2. Film Theory - Fall 1999

Department of Culture and Communication, New York University
1. The Role of Media in Hollywood Films – Fall 2005
2. Critical Reception of Popular Culture – Fall 2002 - Spring 2004

Liberal Arts, McGhee Adult Division, New York University
1. Reading Visual Images - Fall 2001 (Course combined film and painting)

Department of Film, Video, and Broadcasting, New York University
1. Language of Film—Summer 2000 – Spring 2006 (onsite and online)
2. The Art of Editing—Spring - 2001 – Spring 2006
3. Sex on Screen—Summer, Fall, Spring – 2006

Department of Film and Video, School of Visual Arts
1. Film Theory and Criticisms I & II - Fall 1998 - Spring 2001
2. International Cinema I & II - Summer 2000 -
3. Film History – Fall 2001 -

Department of Art History, School of Visual Arts
1. History of Photography – Fall 2004

M.A. courses in Media Studies at The New School:
1. Introduction to Film Theory – 1997 - 2000
2. Film and Society - 1997 and 1998
3. Filmmakers and their theories - Spring 1998
4. Critical reception of Popular Culture - Summer 1998
5. Foundations of Media Theory - Fall 1998- Spring 2000—live and online

Film Department, Brooklyn College, CUNY
1. Film Language - Spring 2000

English Department, Centennial College, Toronto.
1. English Literature – Summer 1995- Spring 1996

Nietzsche on Forgetting

The opening paragraph of Nietzsche’s The Use and Abuse of History accords a certain privilege to the concept of forgetting that also marks the distinction between the history of man and the history of beast. For, in forgetting, the demarcation between the “painful” and “sorrowful” history of man is counterposed to the “unhistorical” life of the beast, of whose “happiness” he is nonetheless envious. Nietzsche writes:

"Consider the herds that are feeding yonder: they know not the meaning of yesterday or today; they graze and ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up with their little loves and hates and the mercy of the moment, feeling neither melancholy nor satiety. Man cannot see them without regret, for even in the pride of his humanity he looks enviously on the beast’s happiness. He wishes simply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all in vain, for he will not change places with it. He may ask the beast—“Why do you look at me and not speak to me of your happiness?” The beast wants to answer—“Because I always forget what I wished to say”; but he forgets this answer, too, and is silent; and the man is left to wonder."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. by Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1975), 5.

Review: Reanimating Critical Thinking

Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of the objective world generally was perceived by the human sensory apparatus. It no longer is. Expression nowadays lives on only in art. Through expression art can keep at a distance the moment of being-for-other which is always threatening to engulf it. Art is thus able to speak in itself. This is the realization through mimesis. Art’s expression is the antithesis of ‘expressing something.’ Mimesis is the ideal of art, not some practical method or subjective attitude aimed at expressive values. What the artist contributes to expression is his ability to mimic, which sets free in him the expressed substance.” - Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“Rationality is immanent to art, and this rationality is in many ways similar to the rationality of the outside world, but it is also, at the same time, different from the rationality of the conceptual order. No artistic work can exist in complete isolation from the “rationality governing the world outside,” yet it may not reproduce or imitate the strictures of the governing logic that condemns it for having irrational features. What appears as irrational expression in art in the “eyes” of the conceptual ordering is actually the expression of the “forgotten experiences” that themselves cannot be understood by “rationalizing them.”” - Amresh Sinha.

Amresh Sinha at http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html#fn1#fn1 begins to elucidate the critical distinction between the rational and irrational which has the capacity to rebuke the trend towards “spirituality” as a commodity fetish and to open up a “new” rationalism in the order of Spinoza’s mind body connection revealing the limitations of dualistic thinking which has been appropriated by the trend of nouveau humanists / spiritualist / capitalists to romanticize spirit while negating the relationship of real and imagined lives. He goes on to say, “ The artworks reach the highest stage of their vulnerability at the moment when they seek to transcend the limit set by their own principle of negativity, a boundary that expresses the negation that “each and every work…seems to say: non confundar” … “That the strength of artworks lies in the fact that they can transcend the limit also makes them, at that point, the most vulnerable to their own deception and fictitiousness. For the artwork’s truth content lies not in communicating something other than itself; rather it is a mediation, a “participation,” in history. The great works of art do not transcend the boundary of their own illusion, because their illusion represents their truth, an illusion of truth, i.e., their falsity. Aesthetic truth transcends illusion, but the artworks themselves are illusory.”–Jonathan Genkin

Review

http://www.newstatesman.com/200501010060

New Statesman
Text messaging

Sukhdev Sandhu
Published 01 January 2005

Subtitles: on the foreignness of filmEdited by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour MIT Press, 544pp, £22.95ISBN 0262050781

Ultimately, and this is what makes the book so rich and resonant, to talk about subtitles is to talk about the boundaries that we construct, or that are constructed for us, to separate the local from the foreign, "us" from "them". Amresh Sinha even argues that subtitles themselves are illegal aliens in the republic of cinema, existing "on the borderline between image and voice. They remain pariahs, outsiders, in exile from the imperial territoriality of the visual regime." Other writers des-cribe them as "symptomatic, foreign-body disturbances" and, pointing to the high proportion of subtitlers who are Jewish, speculate about the relationship between nomadism and multilingualism.

Sukhdev Sandhu's London Calling: how black and Asian writers imagined a city is published in paperback by Perennial

Review

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0412/is_2_34/ai_n16832655

Journal of Popular Film and Television, Summer, 2006 by Angelica Fenner

SUBTITLES: ON THE FOREIGNNESS OF FILM
Ed. Ian Balfour and Atom Egoyan. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. 544 pp. $35.00 cloth.

"Amresh Sinha points out that this ideology of invisibility is threatened on several fronts. Verbose subtitles may not only rob attention from the image but may fatigue viewers struggling to synthesize visual, aural, and textual signification. However, adopting a more colloquial language could be perceived as an act of domestication. And if the translation is from a former colonized language into a formerly imperial language (say, from Hindi to English), one runs the danger of being reproached for engaging in cultural colonialism. Such challenges are further compounded by the difficulty of translating slang, puns, and sociolects, where there is the risk not only of unintended humor but also creation of stereotypes offensive to entire social groups."

That's me at La Guardia Airport.

Benjamin on Remembering and Forgetting

Benjamin, in "The Image of Proust," writes:
"For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust's mémoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory? And is not this work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warf, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting." (Illuminations, p. 202)