Can a
discourse be critiqued or modified from without that discourse?
A brief analysis of the economics of life and thought.
Discourse, like language,
functions as a system of exchange. Every time we speak, we enter by virtue of
our words into a chain of signifiers - just as currency enters into circulation.
The Savings Account
Guy Debord. His Situationist musings were conceived
as strategies to fight commercialization, reification, and re-appropriation of
art works after observing that even subversive art becomes normalized when
successful, landing in an art museum. The Situationist solution is taking art out of circulation: to
construct art that is ephemeral, i.e. situations,
which can never be assimilated into exchange. If an act or work does not enter into exchange, it leaves no trace on that
system of exchange, can it then affect that system of exchange?
Priming the Pump
Brice Parain. Nana’s
first words to him are “Do you mind if I look?” Parain responds to the question
of what he is doing “Reading,” – Nana and Parain are opposed as the “looker”
and the “reader.” As the conversation continues, we learn that speaking and
thought are one thing. Through a parable (Nana saw the movie, but didn’t read
the book), thought is identified with death and yet speaking is a rebirth, a
redemption while at the same time the death of silence. Errors and lies are
more or less the same thing – not finding the right word. Love is a contingent truth
and is something we mature into by making mistakes. Eventually we must find “the
word that says what it must say and does what it must do” words become
identified with action again – but only after critical distance is created “you
cannot speak well until you see life with detachment.” Parain cites German
philosophy as teaching us that we must come to truth (the right word, the right
love, the right action) dialectically – i.e. through error.
The Bottom Line
Nana’s inability to find
the right words is her fear of making a mistake in life and love, her
unwillingness or hesitancy to enter into circulation, into discourse. The dialectic presented here is
that we act, we observer our behavior with detachment (the only way to observe), and then we find new
words/acts that represent modified behaviors. As our new words become new acts
they can be seen once again with detachment before we once again modify them.
But we must be willing to kill off our silent selves, we must be willing to
make a mistake, and we must be willing to reenter the fray, reenter circulation
before we must be willing to look once again upon our new behaviors with
detachment for future modifications. In the same way we love, we love again, we
love better. “We pass from silence to thought, that’s the movement of life.”
It seems to me then that
the Situationist solution does not accept this dialectic movement and this
explains Debord’s fear of the artwork’s commodification. It is a desire like
Nana’s to remain above the fray by not investing herself. “Why must we speak…
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could remain silent?” Debord is afraid that his
artwork will be coopted, in other words, that he’ll choose the wrong word. Of
course, he’s right. It will. He will. But I think the point is, and he would
agree: they’re all wrong words. But perhaps he’s forgetting the bit of truth in
the error/lie. The question is, what do you do faced with this reality – speak
anyway, knowing you’ll have to speak again, or remain silent? We must stand
outside of discourse to establish critical distance, but then we must re-enter
circulation to affect it. Eventually, Nana does choose to act, to love, to be
her own agent and to enter the fray, and she suffers the death of her silent
self.
In many ways I feel that
many of Godard’s films forget this, his own lesson, and that by using Brechtian distanciation and didactic non-identification among other techniques,
he attempts to avoid assimilation, avoid affirming the dominant ideology, i.e.
avoid making a mistake, avoid picking a story. But that’s a
thought to be elaborated in another venue.
Loose Change
·
Nana says in
her conversation with Parain that words lose meaning if we over use them
indicating a fear of a kind of linguistic inflation.
·
When Parain
says that “to speak well one must renounce life for a while” he then says “that’s
the price” suggesting that we pay with our lives.
·
Is this rhetorical
analysis of the economics of discourse and exchange speaking through the
ideology of capitalism and therefore subject to criticism from without on these
grounds?
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