Framing Question
In what ways do Povinelli and Agamben approach their critiques? Can we think of Agamben as a critique from within? Is it a deconstruction of Western discourses on the human/animal dichotomy? Can Povinelli’s be seen as a type of comparative politics as a means to critique or deconstruct, through opposition, ontological assumptions of the political economy of value, practice and identity? As a critique from the outside or from the side? How do both show the incongruities between the binaries that they position and how does each writer deal with these spaces?
Can we think of dreaming as similar to Levi-Strauss’ construction of the bricoleur? Or in what ways does it offer a critique of such a conception? Can we see Povinelli’s text as complicating Levi-Strauss’s conception of mythical thought as bricolage?
Passage for close reading:
“Belyuen Aborigines play with the terms of economic, cultural, and historical arguments, but they are also cognizant of the multiple ways in which resistance is rearticulated into dominant relations of power. History, then, neither dictates cultural forms or is subsumed by them, but rather emerges in processes of social action and association” (Povinelli, 14).
What does Povinelli see as sites of potentiality? Povinelli’s seems very explicit on the importance of counter-hegemonic discourse in its resistance of the selective appropriation and ahistorically framed identity of the Belyuen Aborigines by the West. What is the importance of the “process of social action and association,” in her argument?
Film Question
How does the film imagine the community or space of the gleaner? Does their consumption serve to demystify the commodity? If they are consuming non-commodities to begin with, if we apply Marx’s text, then how can we think of their consumption as outside of capitalist modes of exchange?
Can we put pressure on this romanticization and in what ways does Varda address this in her project, the film is wrought with the idyllic representations of the gleaner through the Impressionist paintings?
What is the importance or significance of the medium of video in Varda’s project? How is time is articulated in the film (the clock without hands, the the aging of Varda’s hands, the decay of the potatoes)? What is time’s relation to decay?
What is the importance or significance of the medium of video in Varda’s project? How is time is articulated in the film (the clock without hands, the the aging of Varda’s hands, the decay of the potatoes)? What is time’s relation to decay?
[Suggested close reading of the scene in which Varda drops the armful of wheat in exchange for the videocamera.]
Jesse, Emmett, & Monica
While reading "The Science of the Concrete," it seemed to us that Levi-Strauss's distinction between bricolage and the engineer depends on a recourse to material reality. For instance, he argues that mythical thought is closer to sensible intuition of reality than scientific thought. However, Levi-Strauss then goes on to argue that engineers work on the level of "concepts," which "aim to be wholly transparent with respect to reality." This is intimately related to the attempts of the engineer to "make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization while the bricoleur by inclination or necessity always remains in them." In what ways is the construction of material reality related to distinctions between nature/culture, human/animal? How does materiality support or undermine claims to be "outside" or "inside" the system? Povinelli argues that "Rather than investigating two alternative ideologies of work that can be resolved by reference to a material reality, this study shows that material reality emerges from ways of knowing it and ways of understanding labor in it." With this in mind, how does the stone slab in "2001" function to draw the boundaries between human and animal? In Varda's film: how does the "labor" of the gleaners relate to the material objects with which they interact? The scene where Varda exchanges wheat for a camera: is Varda drawing a parallel between being "outside" the capitalist system in the case of the gleaners and her own participation in the production of the film, for instance in the shot of the dance of the camera's lens?
ReplyDeleteA quickie: How does Povinelli's project to investigate 'association' relate to Uexkull's conception of a non-hierarchical ecosystem/taxonomy?
-AA, CM, TV