Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects

204 Pages·2015·4.37 MB·English

by  Natasha Chuk

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NATASHA CHUK
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Deftly deploying Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘unexperienced
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photography, film, and emerging media. Addressing works ranging
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VANISHING POINTS
Articulations of Death,
Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced
Experience of Created Objects
intellect | www.intellectbooks.com
Vanishing Points
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Vanishing Points
Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the
Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects
Natasha Chuk
intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA
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First published in the UK in 2015 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2015 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Production manager: Claire Organ
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-476-2
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-478-6
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-477-9
Printed and bound by Gwasg Gomer Cyf / Gomer Press Ltd, UK
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Contents
Foreword by Victor Vitanza vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Ruptures: Negation in the Created Object 11
Chapter 2: Art and Unexperienced Experience 29
Chapter 3: Memorialization and Objects of the Dead 43
Chapter 4: The Apparatus and the Unfixed Vanishing Point 67
Chapter 5: Presence, Absence, and Play in the Hyperreal Spaces of Computation 93
Chapter 6: Traces of Absence in Photography: Dina Kantor and Alec Soth 115
Chapter 7: The Cost of Burying the Dead: Six Feet Under 141
Epilogue: Resisting Arrest: The Elusive Vanishing Point 173
Bibliography 179
Index 187
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Foreword
Victor Vitanza
What is hidden in laughter must remain so.
—Georges Bataille
In the bugginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance.
Instead of the sentence, the sounddance.
—Norman O. Brown
The foreword is written by someone other than the author of the book,
usually by an authority in the field who brings credibility to the book
and the author while celebrating the written work.
—Anonymous
Time, readers, please?
Let us re-begin with notes. A Performance of—a romance with, virtually an affair with—
comically-farcically as it may become—the book: Vanishing Points.
About Nothingness.
The Foreword keeps trying to climb on top of the book, ‘becoming sexual.’ Erratically so.
To make new books.
Writing a Foreword that is an assignment until it becomes an assignation …
The immediate question, henceforth, is Who wrote this book? Who is the author, or
rather auteur? As in cinema. The object of our desires? This ‘I’ has searched and searched
and has found a few clues. Left by someone for someone, but for whom?
Some snippets of clues: Let ‘us’ read together the opening:
Opening notice: ‘I think a lot about invisibility.’ Then, ‘Reality is increasingly digitally
rendered and privacy is becoming more and more difficult to define. I tend to think of it as
a privilege, not a given. Privacy engages the ability to opt into hiding and opt out of being
available to the public’s senses. As a social subject in a synthetically rendered reality, my
participation in the public realm is a default: I am involuntarily open to the signals that
require my attention.’
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Vanishing Points
Well, ‘I’ started with a surveillance, searching for pictures, images, on Google. With
not much luck. And yet, there were possibilities that presented themselves. For instance,
‘I’ found Gmail for a possible writer of this book. What presented itself is the following
message, which I read supposedly addressed to ‘me.’ It had been there in virtual space for
about a year or so. It reads: ‘My Gmail status is set to “invisible”’ and appropriately affirms
my choice by informing me “You are invisible.” These are small but significant assurances
which make my being tethered to my connectable devices bearable.’ But then again, from
Google Contacts, this ‘I’ was told: ‘Visible only to you.’ How charming and unarming! But
now what?
This person, ‘I’ discovered further, has on Google six people in circles. I thought, this
person must be a connoisseur of people. But the names were in Russian! Exhausting a
Google search, ‘I’ searched on LinkedIn, and found ‘someone,’ but the picture was of a
television test pattern. On Twitter, I found a female, perhaps, but with wide sunglasses
covering most of ‘her’ face. Sunglasses that were comparable to the size that Jacqueline
Kennedy was known to wear! After searching through Facebook, however, I found
someone. Her.
In rather different ways, this experience remains comparable to searching for Bigfoot, the
Loch Ness Monster, Bobby Fischer, etc. Fort/Da. Fort/Da. Fort/Da.
•
Last of all: On the impossibility of writing a foreword for Vanishing Points, and yet the
necessity of bringing one forth in words by tripping, stumbling over other words. This
‘I’ has not forgotten that The Author is Dead. So really, Why does this ‘I’ search for the
dead? But this is a serious matter that takes on a more, non-productive playfulness. In
terms of these contraries: Invisible-Visible. Absence-Presence. Death-Life. And yet, more
impotently, all that finds itself in the middle. Muddle. As an exclamation, not a question
point. Affirmation-!-Negation. And yet, again, rather in a third place. One that is the
great exclusion. Yes, the excluded third. As the imagined auteur says: through art and
then philosophy or vice & versa. A question arises, however, about the remains, remnants,
between, the openness of V&V? And! Some more? Well, it has been determined to be non-
positive affirmations.
Jacques Lacan supposedly often asked his patients how far they could count.
Is this all about measurement! Accountability! For example, The Vitruvian Man? The
measurer of all things! Canonized! Human beings as Man likened to Euclidean Geometry
vice versa. With ideal proportions. And yet, ever again, after Euclidean? There comes?
Elliptic, Hyperbolic, etc., geometries. An embarrassment of Grotesqueries.
A flashback: Remember having your hand slapped and told, ‘Don’t touch that!’ Yet ‘we’
could not not touch ‘it.’ To this day. We desire to touch whatever. Think: The objects of our
desires. But really, how does the object touch us, we, who art scattered! If not reassigned. So
then, we eventually in time awaken and have a fad discussion of Object-oriented ontologies.
viii
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Foreword
And ‘we’ see how the object objects to our subjectivity. Reciprocity of sorts? Then, ‘we,’ some
of us, recall the other third of Abject. Abjection. Subject-Object-Abject.
Losing our Renaissance vanishing points, our modernity perspectives, all is up for
grabs. Floating here and there and over there in the vacuum. As the auteur says: All is to be
confronted in the objects that we create. Perhaps it has come, in time, to the revenge of the
crystal. Against carbon. Or simply put: the object! Think of a closing time: Think of Mad-cow
dis-ease.
Moreover, there is our loss of conceptual starting places (topoi), or our points of stasis to
the ex-stasis, being thrown out, yet along side others. Adjacent. Not agents, but adjacencies.
Being-there. Say, Design as Dasein.
We have lost our sense of time, temporality. Or perhaps it might be better put as ‘we’—
who are no longer WE—are experiencing an acceleration of time, in late- or post-modernity.
As much as we have remained framed every workday in terms of Tic-Toc, we are being
thrown in between the other, middle side of
Toc [ ] Tic
Waiting for the return of Tic. Let us embrace of tics. Yes, accelerated, but eventually lost. For
and in moments, unmeasureable moments. What intrudes perhaps is exemplified in what
Freud has called Nachträglichkeit. Too early [Ereignis/Event] Too late. ‘We’ miss a train of
thoughts.
Are ‘you’ AM or PM. Do not get confused with the question in terms of AC and DC!
•
There is so much more that desires to be said. For the moment: Once ever again: Who
wrote this book? Which is a question that has eventually here taken this ‘I’ back to Georges
Bataille. Rereading, reglancing, searching for my notes in his books. Our books. Nobody’s
book. Books … Ah, here are the notes. Bataille thinks it the best of impossible worlds to
never, ever be recognized. He writes in Inner Experience:
If one proceeds right to the end, one must efface oneself, under go solitude, suffer from
it, renounce being recognized: to be as though absent, insane over this, to undergo things
without will and without hope, to be elsewhere. One must bury thought alive (due to
what exists in its depths). I publish it knowing it in advance to be misread, having
to be so.
(155; Bataille’s emphasis)
Some more background with an anecdote: Bataille was in the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel seminar that Alexandre Kojève offered at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, in
Paris between 1933 and 1939. The seminar deals in part with master-slave struggles for
recognition and deals with self-consciousness and in particular the unhappy consciousness.
ix
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