#because those very modes of existence are politicized

[thatneoncrisis]

truly one of the most agonizing parts of wanting to work in the general creative space whether it be as a writer or artist or some other field is like knowing for a fact i have to hack myself up as a person into little pieces and watch as they muse of the texture and flavor and ask if thats notes of rosemary or sage and i just go "its my fucking leg man"

[lecinemabraque]

Divine Intervention: Elia Suleiman’s Symbolic Approach to a Distinctively Political Narrative

I moved to Palestine in 2018 having never been there before. I had never been to the middle-east before. I had very little familiarity with Islam. I did as much research as I could before moving there, but was given very little lead-time. So despite my best efforts, I arrived very much tainted with ignorance and unchallenged prejudices. I learned a tiny bit of Arabic (the wrong dialect) and familiarized myself with the basics of the conflict with Israel. Then, in the middle of the night, I arrived at the Tel-Aviv airport, slipped into an Arab taxi, crossed the threshold into the West Bank having never seen Israel by day, and into a tiny dormitory in the village of Abu Dis, just on the other side of the massive Apartheid wall on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

I learned, very quickly, that Abu Dis is about a mile or two from Ma’ale Adumim, an Israeli settlement. It’s the largest settlement in the West Bank. It is surrounded with walls and armed guards. The inhabitants fall into two groups: extremists who believe all the land in the West Bank is their god-given right, and ignorant bourgeoise who don’t even really realize they are in the West Bank, but simply a suburb of Jerusalem. This second group often cause more problems than the first one.

A few months before my arrival in Abu Dis, a settler from Ma’ale Adumim accidentally made a wrong turn, left the security of his settlement behind, and wound up in the village of Al Azarea. This is an area of the West Bank where neither the Palestinian Authority has a presence, nor the Israeli military. It’s the Wild West. Or Wild West Bank. The settler was noticed relatively quickly, and chased by the locals. Realizing his mistake, he fled through unknown roads, finally ending up in front of the dormitory I would eventually move to. The Palestinian locals surrounded his car with flaming dumpsters, broke his windows and attempted to extract and execute the man. I don’t know how long the incident lasted, but eventually the Israeli military stormed into the area, tear gassed everyone and brought the settler back to safety.

This was a terrifying story to learn of only two or three days into my commitment to making Abu Dis my new home. I’m a Germanic American foreigner. One of only two that I knew about in town. What’s to protect me from being mistaken as a settler? Am I a colonizer here to scrape away the dregs of the culture and land these people have been struggling to protect for 70 years? Not too long after, I was told I was safe because I didn’t dress like a settler. You can tell from the outfit. Settlers have the long curls on their head, the tassels at their hips, beards, black hats and vests. I was clearly just a foreigner, which isn’t the same thing.

In Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002) we begin with a scene eerily familiar to the one that occurred outside my eventual home in Abu Dis, but with a single major variation. The locals are chasing the settler, easily identifiable by his striking attire, though his clothing is not the clothing of religious orthodoxy; it is distinctively agnostic. He is dressed as Santa Claus.

This film elevates Santa Claus, the innocuous symbol of Christmastime for all religions, to that of a colonial settler. A figure so hated that a wrong turn in the West Bank could prove fatal. A figure which immediately conjures the erasure of their culture, the murder of their children, and the expulsion of their friends and family from their homeland for nearly a century. It is interesting to approach this creative decision from the perspective of an American, because the closest cultural connection I have is the common refrain by religious dogmatics in America when confronted with non-religious symbols throughout the month of December. “Happy Holidays” draws the ire of many of my neighbors here. You’ll not be hard pressed to find yard signs that say “Merry Christmas Spoken Here”.

Isn’t Santa Claus the ultimate “Happy Holidays?” He, by his very nature, takes the Christ out of Christmas, as the popular refrain goes. He can sell you a Coca-Cola for the holidays regardless of your personal beliefs. Christmas is a time for presents. He shifts the entire narrative of the holiday towards the act of giving (or possibly receiving) rather than the birth of Christ.

How does this relate to Palestine and Israeli settlers? For those of us who were raised Christian, it’s hard to separate the birth of Christ with the town of Bethlehem. Bethlehem is located in the West Bank, on the other side of the Israeli separation wall. The people of Bethlehem live under military occupation. Bethlehem is also home to Dheisheh refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank. It is filled with families of those who were displaced by the Israelis when they took over Palestine in 1948. Removing the Christ from Christmas is also removing Palestine from Christmas. It is the erasure of its historical and cultural significance. It is cultural colonialism. Just as the settlers steal the land from the Palestinians, and claim that it was always theirs… so too does capitalism extricate the political, social, and historical realities from that land and the holiday associated with it. A Santa Claus costume is indeed the garb of a settler. He is colonizing the mind of the world, utilizing the resources he finds most useful and erasing the narratives he finds politically inconvenient.

From this uncomfortable equation, we get our opening images of the film. Something familiar: a group of children chasing Santa Claus. But they are not after his presents. They are after him (as the knife jutting out of his chest reveals.) Moreover, they are after the narrative he has co-opted. He needs to be extinguished so they can make an attempt at reclaiming their history, their culture, and their land. All this… and we haven’t even reached the opening credits yet.

It is with this that Suleiman indicates to the audience the mode within which he is working. He tells a single narrative, but one that feels like a series of disparate vignettes à la Roy Andersson. He is telling us that the apparent incongruity is not as it seems. He is also showing us that in Palestine, everything is political. Every Palestinian’s existence has been so thoroughly politicized that simple absurd images cannot help but become pregnant with subversive meaning. If you choose to remain blind to the politics, you can. You may even find much to enjoy in the comically deadpan mise-en-scène of the film. However, Suleiman offers an indictment of these audience members as well.

A young French tourist approaches an Israeli policeman looking for directions. The policeman doesn’t know the way, and so he enlists the help of his Palestinian prisoner from the back of the van. Bound and with a blindfold over his eyes, the Palestinian offers three clear ways for her to get to Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. There are two ways to read the scene. Both reveal the political anger brewing just below the droll surface of the gag. The first is simply that the Palestinian knows this land so well that he can give you directions while blindfolded. While the Israeli cop has no idea where to go. He is a foreigner here too. He may have political and military authority, but he is not truly of this land, while his prisoner is.

The second interpretation is the indictment of the apolitical audience member. We can visit Israel as tourists (or visit this film as a sort of cinematic tourist) gaze at the wonderful architecture, eat the food, enjoy the beaches and the lovely weather, all while turning a blind eye to the near century of racist exploitation, disenfranchisement, and genocide occurring right in front of us. It'd be all too obvious if we’d bother to simply engage beyond our own immediate pleasure and convenience.

Both of these interpretations are effective. Both are true. But the tourist is the one who allows this to continue indefinitely. She witnesses injustice and chooses comfort. The Israeli is blind to the irony of his evil. He thinks this is his land. The foreigner has the benefit of an objective vantage point, and remains aloof. So who is the real villain here?

Suleiman has combined the aesthetics of Jacques Tati with a uniquely Palestinian political fervor and sense of subversion. The film needs to be read as the synthesis of both of these elements.

[moretalk]

“Now, at this farthest point, the question is: how can we possibly envisage the emergence of such qualitatively different needs and goals as organic, biological needs and goals and not as superimposed values? How can we envisage the emergence of these needs and satisfactions within and against the established society – that is to say, prior to liberation? That was the dialectic with which I started, that in a very definite sense we have to be free from in order to create a free society.....

...The sensitivity and the awareness of the new transcending, antagonistic values – they are there. And they are there, they are here, precisely among the still non-integrated social groups and among those who, by virtue of their privileged position, can pierce the ideological and material veil of mass communication and indoctrination – namely, the intelligentsia....  Can we say that the intelligentsia is the agent of historical change? Can we say that the intelligentsia today is a revolutionary class? The answer I would give is: No, we cannot say that. But we can say, and I think we must say, that the intelligentsia has a decisive preparatory function, not more; and I suggest that this is plenty. By itself it is not and cannot be a revolutionary class, but it can become the catalyst, and it has a preparatory function – certainly not for the first time, that is in fact the way all revolution starts but more, perhaps, today than ever before. Because – and for this too we have a very material and very concrete basis – it is from this group that the holders of decisive positions in the productive process will be recruited, in the future even more than hitherto. I refer to what we may call the increasingly scientific character of the material process of production, by virtue of which the role of the intelligentsia changes. It is the group from which the decisive holders of decisive positions will be recruited: scientists, researchers, technicians, engineers, even psychologists – because psychology will continue to be a socially necessary instrument, either of servitude or of liberation.

This class, this Intelligentsia has been called the new working class. I believe this term is at best premature. They are – and this we should not forget – today the pet beneficiaries of the established system. But they are also at the very source of the glaring contradictions between the liberating capacity of science and its repressive and enslaving use. To activate the repressed and manipulated contradiction, to make it operate as a catalyst of change, that is one of the main tasks of the opposition today. It remains and must remain a political task.

Education is our job, but education in a new sense. Being theory as well as practice, political practice, education today is more than discussion, more than teaching and learning and writing. Unless and until it goes beyond the classroom, until and unless it goes beyond the college, the school, the university, it will remain powerless. Education today must involve the mind and the body, reason and imagination, the intellectual and the instinctual needs, because our entire existence has become the subject/object of politics, of social engineering. I emphasize, it is not a question of making the schools and universities, of making the educational system political. The educational system is political already. I need only remind you of the incredible degree to which (I am speaking of the US) universities are involved in huge research grants (the nature of which you know in many cases) by the government and the various quasi-governmental agencies.

The educational system is political, so it is not we who want to politicize the educational system. What we want is a counter-policy against the established policy. And in this sense we must meet this society on its own ground of total mobilization. We must confront indoctrination in servitude with indoctrination in freedom. We must each of us generate in ourselves, and try to generate in others, the instinctual need for a life without fear, without brutality, and without stupidity. And we must see that we can generate the instinctual and intellectual revulsion against the values of an affluence which spreads aggressiveness and suppression throughout the world.

Before I conclude I would like to say my bit about the Hippies. It seems to me a serious phenomenon. If we are talking of the emergence of an instinctual revulsion against the values of the affluent society, I think here is a place where we should look for it. It seems to me that the Hippies, like any non-conformist movement on the left, are split. That there are two parts, or parties, or tendencies. Much of it is mere masquerade and clownery on the private level, and therefore indeed, as Gerassi suggested, completely harmless, very nice and charming in many cases, but that is all there is to it. But that is not the whole story. There is in the Hippies, and especially in such tendencies in the Hippies as the Diggers and the Provos, an inherent political element – perhaps even more so in the US than here. It is the appearance indeed of new instinctual needs and values. This experience is there. There is a new sensibility against efficient and insane reasonableness. There is the refusal to play the rules of a rigid game, a game which one knows is rigid from the beginning, and the revolt against the compulsive cleanliness of puritan morality and the aggression bred by this puritan morality as we see it today in Vietnam among other things.

At least this part of the Hippies, in which sexual, moral and political rebellion are somehow united, is indeed a nonaggressive form of life: a demonstration of an aggressive non-aggressiveness which achieves, at least potentially, the demonstration of qualitatively different values, a trans-valuation of values.

All education today is therapy: therapy in the sense of liberating man by all available means from a society in which, sooner or later, he is going to be transformed into a brute, even if he doesn’t notice it any more. Education in this sense is therapy, and all therapy today is political theory and practice. What kind of political practice? That depends entirely on the situation. It is hardly imaginable that we should discuss this here in detail. I will only remind you of the various possibilities of demonstrations, of finding out flexible modes of demonstration which can cope with the use of institutionalized violence, of boycott, many other things – anything goes which is such that it indeed has a reasonable chance of strengthening the forces of the opposition....

...Our role as intellectuals is a limited role. On no account should we succumb to any illusions. But even worse than this is to succumb to the wide-spread defeatism which we witness. The preparatory role today is an indispensable role. I believe I am not being too optimistic – I have not in general the reputation of being too optimistic – when I say that we can already see the signs, not only that They are getting frightened and worried but that there are far more concrete, far more tangible manifestations of the essential weakness of the system. Therefore, let us continue with whatever we can – no illusions, but even more, no defeatism.”

- Herbert Marcuse, Liberation from the Affluent Society

[phaedrus227a]

An Early Thought on Photography and Death...

(Watchman -- Jasper Johns, 1964).

Preface:

The following was written roughly two years ago in a strange yet momentous period of my life... 

...where I was intensely embroiled with doubts concerning my religious belief (which has now metamorphosed into a weakling pseudo-absurdism), an unhealthy admiration of Roland Barthes’s prosaic style (the original draft had a lot more semi-colons), and a giant and inchoate attempt at designing an entire thesis -- very little screams more “undergraduate” than this -- on the militant politicization of art via the presupposition that art is a priori a function of didacticism. The lattermost emerged from a fight I had with a friend on a Sunday morning at Memorial Glade, who I believed hazarded my love for him by being so anti-intellectual that I felt it was only my duty to save our friendship by launching an entire treatise on why he was so (so) wrong. Needless to say, I was a pesky and vindictive little snatch that had just finished his core curriculum for critical theory, and at that time was all too ready to flex a lexicon for which I clearly lacked serious nuance and knowledge.

All neurotic attempts to excuse the following aside, I think it is worth recording here simply because the spontaneous conclusions reached therein illustrate the kind of machinations from which I developed most of the thoughts and opinions I seriously entertain in the present. Movement, the fetishism of mortality -- tropes that enmesh in my current expressions. And to some extent, when I look back at my style and my intensity and my temperament, I’m slightly wistful -- wistful that I was so blindly confident in expressing my opinion, and even in writing a succession of sentences that marched on with that distinct and reckless passion of a new initiate. I’m immobile in comparison, now. But I still am a university student, so I suppose it’s silly for me to be wistful, some may say...but thought now presupposes a lack that only grows larger when I attempt to articulate it...Antonio’s first line in The Merchant of Venice, the conditions of the Faustian deal, Lacan’s psychoanalysis...

Anyways, here it is. 

“On Photography”

The photograph is to me an expression of a fundamental fear of death. For what does it mean to take a photograph? It is first to understand that there is a thing, and then that its relation to the photographer is one of aura (cf. Walter Benjamin), and lastly that there is an exigency to possess that thing in some capacity. The subject of the photograph is typically that of a moment intuited to be precious, like a marmalade sunset, or the birthday of a dear friend. Otherwise, it is a portrait of a being or of a mood – nevertheless the photograph is by definition an attempt to capture the transient. Yet the capacity is that of virtual simulation, it is ritualistic; it has an eternity in its modality; it’s aura, moreover, affects its physicality inasmuch as it does its spirituality. For if I went into one’s attic and marked or cut a photograph of one’s deceased aunt, would not I be committing – and one feels this on their body and on their soul – a grossly mortifying transgression?

There is therefore a kind of religious credence involved in the attitude toward the photograph, an animism, or at the very least the existence of associations that are at once deeply personal and transcendent to what we immediately are. We understand that the thing, in its encounter with us, like that of the burning bush, has such a significance that we cannot hazard its memory to our forgetful minds, so we render it – before with a shock of light and gear, now with a silent shutter – to what we subconsciously believe promises permanence. Experience as opposed to eternity. Can one say that the numinous with which we place faith in the notion of a thing, and the notion that it has such a meaning such that we are quickened to capture it, identifies with that of the fear of God?

Maybe so, but more immediately this set of attitudes belie a specific philosophy of existence. “There exists something”…what if, and here I am trying to signify the truth of this thesis reductio ad absurdum, one did not fear death? Meaning, that death is not a state but something that happens; consequently, life is not existent but existing and will soon be not death but being not. What if one saw life thus as a movement? As a phenomenon rather than a state? It throws off pretensions to permanence, for one, and reveals the dishonesty with which one sees something as a thing. Would there really be an exigency to capture anything if that thing will never be what it was in its moment of perception, that one has caught it in one of its infinite shifting modes, and that even the photograph itself will be subject to the relentless weather of time? 

But what of aura? What becomes of the cult of eternity? Does the removal of the fear of death effectively deny the validity of religion? No, nor does it imply necessarily that life, a firelight that extinguishes faster than its burning, is devoid of meaning. No – there is not the removal of aura but perhaps a different one, one that celebrates time rather than a rebellion against it. When one lets go of the fear of one’s death, when one accepts life to be like that of a certain wave in congeries of waves, there results a gentle cult of mortality. Things become and remain and vanish beautifully precisely because they once are but will never be again. I am suggesting here that the reality of life and all of its contingencies is its beauty; I am cautioning those who obsess over eternity with images of despair – a boy who loses his sand structure to the ebbing tide, a man who loses a friend, and the graying moribund who mutter tired verses of hope. Let us welcome an aesthetics of death…as for the idea of life beyond, let us first be content with the life that is, and will soon be very well as never have been.