Readings: * 'Is the uprising in Iran a feminist revolution?' * Photographs by Chris Killip * 'Green Areas' (extract from Raul Zurita's Purgatorio)
We met at the Cock Tavern and waited for the upstairs room to become available as some ASLEF union members were using it. There was confusion about some of our group sitting talking in a separate part of the pub from everyone else. Once together, things started with a recap of the last meeting, followed by a proposal that we read Raúl Zurita’s ‘Green Areas’ From Purgatory (translated by William Rowe) out loud. There was almost enough poem for each person present to read one page, going round in a circle.
About the poem:
How to find a sense of space that’s not permeated by the Pinochet dictatorship and everything that we know about it, everything Chileans have felt about it?
As a position of the I (?)
There’s some way in which the possession of space, including the possession of language by that regime can start to be felt as uncanny.
Q: Is he a Chilean poet? Kept thinking of Argentina all the time. The gauchos as national symbol while there’s a violent process of enclosure
Difficult to orient oneself in this. Geometry, the measuring out of lands by state forces, but what is it that interests Zurita? Perhaps something stranger?
Yes, something stranger. It’s difficult to speak about this part of the book (Purgatory).
Q: About the black and white of Chris Killip’s photos, and the b/w of the cows in Zurita’s excerpt. What does the b/w of the images do to our reading of the poetry? From the prefatory note to the Killip book being handed around: about a system regarding lives of those depicted in the photos… the book is a ‘fiction about metaphor’.
What’s happening to the cows’ patches? It’s impressed on their skin, their hides. Something about figure merging into background – an inescapable background. There’s a troubling of the idea of standpoint. Figure and ground relation is not to do with complicity, more to do with geometry and abstraction (?)
You get a sense of an aerial view, but there isn’t a place that’s above with a non-Euclidean geometry. It felt like a map.
On the page with the Greek for logos: thinking about what you do when your society is ruled by fascists. A set of three options presented at an event with Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis – generation politicised by the Vietnam War. Some people went above, others below, others sideways. Above = joined the state; below = went underground; sideways = went to Africa and formed an alternative project. The cows also have three directions they can go in.
Committee of Actions of Art did some very dangerous things – went out at midnight and crossed out signs on surface of roads, confusing traffic: marks against the system of efficiency.
In Ireland they would rotate the signs during guerrilla warfare.
Creating jolts. The colonisation of public space is not a requirement. The poem moves like a mathematical proposal. The translator’s note says the poem is trying to represent the real of space. In the enormity of that, some piece of what it would mean to imagine that is offered… we’re not inside a Wordsworthian landscape where the subject would spill out.
That move between the abstracted geometry of the map and the real movement of the cows… relationship to sovereignty and territory. Author looking at the piebald pattern and seeing it as a map. Is who owns what land as arbitrary as the patterning on a cow? Clearly not…
Colours. Blue auras. Ruled green areas. Ruled as in with lines through, and governed.
Auras make you think of standing against the sky and having light surrounding.
Blue comes in right before the epilogue – seems important. Hesitant to say it doesn’t read as defeat – the poem has done what it has to do and then we wake up in Santiago (?) Not sure it’s about making things concrete but about holding onto a glimmer of another space.
In Zurita’s long poem INRI he’s singing about people thrown out of helicopters… it can sound very Christian but the book is always refusing that. Refusal of the framework of salvation, whether that be Christian or a concrete proposal.
Sense of unbounded space. Infinity is a mathematical concept aligned with the divine. Things fall into lines and grids and auras. Non-redemptive.
Cows are the instrument of the frontier.
Highest concentration of capital apart from banks was in cows in the nineteenth century.
Cows produce the landscape. Europeans brought cows into the landscape as a symbol of accumulation.
Conflict with landlords was through the murdering of cows. Cycle of impoverishment. The mad cowboys have done the ruling. People have been thrown off the land to make room for pasture.
Patagonia had the highest rate of extinction of Indigenous people.
It’s still going on: the Mapuche are still fighting.
How do you form a politics out of land that has been emptied?
Terra nullius: signs of Indigenous inhabitation were invisibilised. Ernesto Laclau invented one of the most comforting forms of Marxism. He said the beginning of poetics is the making of space.
Films by Patricio Guzmán include a trio, one with an interview with Zurita and an Indigenous person’s speech intercut. The second of the trio is the best, Nostalgia for the Light.
But isn’t this a redemptive movie? When there’s nothing redemptive in Zurita.
An Indigenous person says there’s no word for police – we don’t need that. The same goes for God.
The poem opens with negatives.
The difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry is the difference between a map and the globe.
Thinking of people being disappeared.
What happens when the bodies you are after come to encompass the whole space?
There are symbols but Zurita refuses ideas of metaphorical mapping.
How does this relate to the text on Iran? There’s not an explicit connection.
Text in Killip book by John Berger. Killip doesn’t take the position of witness, neither does the Zurita poem.
But why doesn’t the Zurita come from an experience of witnessing? Seems like it comes from a restriction in being able to speak freely, and being very much inside the experience, embedded.
Agreed, but there’s no signalling ‘I was there’.
Sense of time in Killip’s work is not making a cut in the way that is familiar from writing about photography. It’s not like a still from a movie. Hard to designate the moment the photos were taken – the year.
Stephen Watts talked in the first meeting about how long Killip took to get people to trust him to take their photo.
In the Iran text, whatever charge the images have is spontaneous. Mimetic desiring.
There’s a list of ingredients about what makes an effective image: a woman with her head uncovered, maybe a fist in the air, a bin or a car… Killip is interested in text on walls.
Killip’s images do not become a pornography of suffering as so many photos of working class life do. There’s a defiance.
Worried about the exhibition of Killip’s images in our current institutions – they are vulnerable to authentocrat centrists.
They’d need not only a good exhibition text but also a site that isn’t frequented by people who would fetishise these images.
Looks at these images and worries Jess Phillips MP would like them.
Aesthetic reaction of the enemy. What does the hypothetical Jess Phillips’ reaction do to the image?
With the passage of time comes the trap of nostalgia.
Viewing different images of women in Iran, people were uncertain how to engage with them. There was trepidation about the different interpretation or usage they could be lent to. The most important thing in the text is the potential of revolutionary desire.
Finds Chris Killip photos difficult. B/w emphasises the cold. Are the people in them happy or unhappy?
In Iran, the iconic photo made you want to be one of those figures. Once you were on the street you started to lose your fear. People in crowds do courageous things that normally they wouldn’t do. She writes of what the still image can do as opposed to the moving image.
The way that uprisings are imaged.
The gestures of refusal are so simple – unveiling. This is why they’re powerful. Contrasts with images of women in YPJ. The writing is so seductive – it makes you believe in the power of the image.
Article is written as a love letter. If you think of the structure of lovers, think of a ‘tryst’ with images.
What is it I want when I look so enthusiastically at images of cop cars getting blown up, etc?
Is porn always bad? It tells you about your curiosity and what you want.
Finding something cool is an entrypoint for young people (example of a student bringing Chris Killip photos into class).
Things will never be the same again in Iran.
It’s a personal piece of writing, not tied to a programme or struggle as usually conceived. Something deeper about desire and mimesis. Had previously been drawn to texts about strategy and the Iran text came as a shock to the system.
In Iran, it’s an uprising against the state and against a particular form of gendered oppression.
So much discourse around photography is a warning against photography.
People at demonstrations. Author wants to celebrate the capacity of things to be photographed.
Strong sense of historical moment which has little to do with identification. Vivid sense of history that is not predictable. Talking about something that happens once in a generation. Not about a Leninist sense of image and slogan that are going to need to be tactical. This grasp of history does not seem available to us here.
It is a revolution because I experienced it as a revolution. It’s about making an argument by convincing the reader.
The revolution can be seen in the daily evolution of images, producing branching points for further images. It’s quite non-linear.
Thinking about up/down/sideways, it gets into blurring distinctions, says this is how the images were working.
Skipping and short circuits: when your body does something as soon as you’ve thought of it.
Zurita’s main unit of composition is the duration of a proposition, or the time of a proposition. This time becomes unfixed. When we read aloud, everyone gave a different amount of time to the gaps that were the same width on the page.
Something still to think about re. Repression. In Zurita movement away, in Iran text movement against… a general categorising thought. Our politics is bound up with things we can or can’t say.
Stances of knowingness.
Resisting the explanatory voice.
Craft, technique and work involved in taking people with you if you don’t have, or don’t want to use, the explanatory voice.
Thinks of (?’s) writing on what you don’t know but what the body does somehow know.
Is this kind of struggle (as in Iran) only available in certain moments? The emergence of an image that is something to be faithful to. What we have is preparation, thinking.
If you’re in a practice against the mainstream discourse you may not be very convincing.
The state is in charge of education but there are many types of education. The state has an enormous amount of pedagogical power.
Through the education system, everyone has a sense of their place in society but the image as written of in the Iran text disrupts that. Missing words: empowerment, confidence.
Momentum had been building: Iran text mentions other, previous years.
End of meeting: debate about whether to read T. J. Clark, ‘For a Left with No Future’. Alternative proposal to read Gail Lewis, ‘Whose movement is it anyway?’
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