Lundi Matin piece: <https://lundi.am/Pour>. We began by reading this: ‘The shrink, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, let's call him what we want, insofar as he doesn't just give medication, and he listens to us, has recently entered our lives in a more collective way. Until now, you had to have been marked by something in life, have symptoms that you never talked about, bad half-shameful childhood stories – for this experience to be imposed, for you to be forced to 'go. We had that space somewhere in his private life. It was the space of the care of private life and memory and of a certain form of individual cursing – except for the intellectuals who thought they were learning interesting and enriching things about their castration or filiation problem. I simplify. For some time, since the pandemic but even before, for a few years the lines have become blurred and we have been less successful, we have no longer succeeded too much in making the difference between personal pain and collective pain; between psychic pain and political destruction. Each and everyone slowly started going crazy, crazy. We have witnessed an evolution of society and murderous capitalism, we have become more or less voluntary seismographs of an evil whose consciousness has crossed the layers of the psyche to go very, very deep within us. inside. Consciousness failed to prevent penetration into the deeper layers. With the destruction of society and the explosion of death drives during the period of great unbinding of the pandemic (social unbinding/digital overcommunication), psychic life took on another place. She found herself overexposed at the same time as social life closed. It would be necessary to be able to define this place: it manifests itself rather negatively, by definitive acts, decompensations, depressive and anxious symptoms, but also, just afterwards, just next to it, by a kind of affirmation which passes through the passivity of the disease only by the psychic action on the world, that is to say by affects, conflicts, dreams, irrepressible expressions, passions and accelerations, an awareness of oneself, of life and of sudden death intensified, of friendship and love like we've never been closer. As if we had never been so emotionally and collectively close to things, never so fragile and sensitive.’
Yes, that seems helpful to me. Usefulness of thinking about unbinding. There’s the sense of the end of the ‘defend Russia’ perspective as one point of political confusion, but also the background of unbinding from political meanings in relation to the experience of mass death during the Pandemic.
Re: The Luskacova photos of Spitalfields differ from the images discussed in the Berger. Implicit injunction: Don’t make these images homogeneous with your experience of time, your time. Otherwise they might be compatible with liberalism – ideas of pity, preconceived ideas of class. Where does the injunction come from? From the subjects of the photos themselves; sometimes from their eyes, sometimes not. This has to do with emotion that hasn’t yet been processed into regularised meanings.
The images were taken in a flea market that was outside the normal terms of control and administration.
Is it about the photographer imposing this view? What is the best language for the relation between photographer and subject? Is it one that involves the agency of the subjects? Perhaps that language is also meaningless. In some of the images you can see a positive interest on the part of the photographer - for instance when some of the subjects think they are being photographed and ‘posing’ but the focus is on others.
Relative to the Killip photographs – the images are more interested in composition and those compositions include some kind of message that can be deciphered. Less so in the Luskacova, where what we see is the people in themselves.
Berger: ‘the people trusted her, more than that they allowed her to become intimate’.
In the Spitalfields images – possible to feel some nostalgia for a life I didn’t live. But is the relationship Berger describes between the photographed and the dead also relevant for the Spitalfields images? Is this to do with peasant life?
People living in the streets in these images will have been closer to death or more intimate with death than others.
Berger suggests the images fail when people have an interest in seeing themselves as they are – it is their lack of concern with the photographer that allows the images to succeed.
[Attempting to step back and introduce more general considerations:] thinking about the meaning of ‘forgotten political experience’ – Audre Lorde as discussed by Gail Lewis and ‘world-sense’. Is there something in how the people Luskacova photographs in Pilgrims that could remind us of pieces of our history that we have forgotten. What about the ‘loosening of the oneness of the self’, not in favour of a specific collectivity, but some much larger thing. The photographers take time ‘not to be thought of outsiders’ – a dwelling together. The question of the forces that make it difficult for us to speak to one another, raised on the Reports blog – to speak with one another with various measures of openness. We are testing out with one another what and how much we can say about the different areas of the left.
If you are dwelling with the dead as Berger suggests that one might, it is harder to hold on to an idea of one’s total difference or uniqueness. The connection here again to the Gail Lewis piece.
If contra Berger’s peasant society, we have been through a mass death event and live in a society that refuses or disallows commemoration, perhaps we should avoid noting similarity or continuity.
What would it mean for us to be in some relation to the dead? To avoid remembering as a scanning backwards towards a static past defined in relation to a static now? How to be in any relation to the many dead?
I see two approaches to commemoration - a simple and a complex approach. The images Berger writes about are complex. Simple approach: the Vietnam war memorial in the USA. A simple shape and then names are added to the structure. A similar project for trees that had died due to climate change. The dead trees are left to rot in public parks. Something is made visible in simple terms. Does this approach help? Hard to think dialectically about this.
There’s something about listing names that doesn’t reach to individual experiences of death. There’s something about not knowing people’s names and still wanting and needing to have a kind of relation to what’s happening. I think of the NGO-maintained list of the names of the people who have died due to Fortress Europe border policies. Many people in this list were never unidentified. A commonality in the absence of being able to form a relation – I question the need for names and details of individuals. What can be done with states of anonymity, or with people who are not known, not identifiable?
The relationship between numbers and names – during the pandemic, you got the numbers every day. What was this about? If it’s remembering, it’s a hyperrational and secularised form. Naming *as* counting.
Liberalism tends to get hung up on raw material data relating to an atrocity, rather than meaning.
I think for instance of the clearance of people by brute force from Scotland and parts of Ireland during the eighteenth century. I don’t share the scepticism about numbers. I think we need to know how many families were shipped overnight to Newfoundland or Australia. I think we do need to know this.
I recently saw the Steve McQueen film about Grenfell at the Serpentine. McQueen grew up in the area; before the building was covered in its current cladding, he filmed it, homing in from the affluent districts in the north. The sound drops away as the camera reaches the tower. Names aren’t included in the video but they are on the wall in the next room. This piece and his work about Grenada seem extremely strong as approaches to this issue of the closeness of death and how to be in real contact with it.
Relation to the exemplary individual death - Alan Kurdi on the Turkish coast. That kind of liberal piety. But also the relation of this to the mass movement and its martyrology – US 2021, Iran 2022, Tunisia, Egypt etc.
I want to defend naming – a way of making proximity to the dead. Naming is a fundamental linguistic process. Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s also done in the NYT. Do we want a secular way of relating to the dead?
There’s a question of responsibility here
Death is the programme of austerity – does this create a sense in which it is unjustifiable to be alive, in some way? Obviously that is a sensitive thought – needs to be discussed carefully. Lisa and Danny’s conversation on Sean’s Our Death.
How can we name no one when we’ve made so many people no one? We can’t name no one, said Celan. Why always the focus on covid when so many people are dying at sea etc. It makes me angry.
There’s always the ‘say her name’ BLM chant/slogan.
I find the naming more meaningful when it is etched on the faces of the living and not onto dead material.
Who do we preserve things for? Do the subjects of the photographs care? I don’t know…
What about the Weiss quote? ‘Later, after we achieved political understanding, our hatred grew more intense, we began purposefully fighting those who tried to hold us down, annihilate us. We were guided by a cold, homicidal repulsion. Very seldom did we find this sensation articulated in art, in literature’ – is there a way of thinking about the relationship to Luskacova?
Worth thinking about the materiality of film - the light entering the lens, leaving a mark on the film. Different with digital photography, also with memory. You lose the physicality of the imprint. It’s harder to erase film. Abundance wipes out meaning. Is there a sense in which the images are ‘homicidal’ in Weiss’s sense – in relation to the working class? And perhaps in relation to their subjects, also – poverty is also a form of annihilation.
[there is a difficult passage of the conversation here: some participants respond with pain to the idea of the word ‘homicidal’ being in any way relevant to Luskacova’s images]
Where might they be shown? The idea of them being shown at the Tate aggravates me.
Two photographers working on Ridley Road – trying to collaborate with people and give them power *or* preemptively memorialising people who are in fact still alive? The photographer can make choices; these are political.
Photography needs to be a part of a political struggle – to enter into political struggle.
I feel the same, but it might be the case that what some photographs do – we haven’t found the forms of struggle that are needed. To read off the ‘political potential’ of photographs might miss what they are calling on us to feel, think and do.
The video of George Floyd’s murder had political power and helped to sustain momentum.
But these were also videos of murder - as images in this genre always are. The photographs are in a complex way helping people to survive. Feeling, thinking and doing are important verbs – what about being? The Pasolini essay on the being of the faces of his subjects. The Gospel of St Matthew: the almost transcendental relationship to the face. Also the history of the Italian subjects – the beings – who Pasolini was filming.
This is helpful in that it brings back the question from the beginning, of relation to one’s own political thinking. It’s about not just changing your thinking but also changing who you are.
The question of co-optation – what does it mean if the images are shown at the Tate. But don’t we want those people to visit the Tate to change also? (The exhibition was free.)
I still don’t think it’s useful to talk about Luskacova’s images in terms of their political potential – they record something as yet unarticulated in politics, unavailable to politics.
[Some disagreement about this.]
Maybe worth thinking about when they were taken – in the late 70s, before mass gentrification. Politics perhaps has more vocabulary + forms now for what Luskacova was doing.
The images represent a not-yet space, like in the Gail Lewis text: art can do this.
A big portion of the present situation is not intelligible.
The relationship between the need for patience to get at Weiss’ ‘babble’ and the urgency of the situation. A contradiction that can’t be wished away.
There’s a lot of unspeakable feeling that is entwined with but not the same as the social – the question of unbinding.
Capitalism brainwashes us into thinking trauma etc. are individual issues when they’re not. Portraiture is not bourgeois because the individual is not individual.
‘It, the language, remains, not lost, yes, in spite of everything, but it had to pass through its own answerlessness, its own muting … it had passed through this happening. Passed through and had come to light again (Celan); Aichinger: ‘I have only one language and it’s not mine. Language is something that does not belong’.
Proposals for next time:
Pasolini’s poem ‘Victory’, on the dead and the problems of politics and of being.
Text by Lis Rhodes of the London filmmakers’ co-op on history.
