“All this, therefore, still remains open,
suspended, undecided, questionable even beyond the question, indeed, to make
use of another figure, absolutely aporetic .What is the ethicity of ethics? the morality of morality? what is
responsibility? What is the 'what is?' in this case?, etc. These questions are
always urgent; in a certain way they must remain urgent and unanswered, at any
rate without a general and rule-governed response, without a response other
than that which is linked specifically each time, to the occurrence of a
decision without rules and without will in the course of a new test of the
undecidable. And let it not be said too precipitately that these questions or
these propositions are already inspired by a concern that could by right be
called ethical, moral, responsible, etc. I know that, in saying ('And let it
not be said too precipitately ...'
etc.), one gives ammunition to the officials of anti-deconstruction, but
all in all I prefer that to the constitution of a consensual euphoria or,
worse, a community of complacent deconstruction ists, reassured and reconciled
with the world in ethical certainty, good conscience, satisfaction of service
rendered, and the consciousness of duty accomplished (or, more heroically
still, yet to be accomplished).” Derrida - Passions: “An Oblique Offering”
“Democracy is a permanent risk, a risk that
is well worth running - 'a fine risk' - because it is only when political space
is organized democratically-that is, disorganized as an open, interrupted
community - that one can envisage a politics that does not reduce
transcendence, a community that thinks difference without reducing difference.
Democracy is the politics of ethical difference, political wisdom at the
service of ethical love.[…] However, democracy does not exist.[…] that is to
say, starting from today, and every day, there is a responsibility to invent
democracy.[…] Democracy is an infinite task and an infinite responsibility
directed towards the future (l'avenir); its temporality is that of advent.”
Simon_Critchley: ”The Ethics of Deconstruction”
If in process art the accent is on the
verbs/action in this project I used substantives, sometimes synonyms, antonyms,
or words that function as both, depending on the context. The List is by
necessity incomplete. Most terms are from the book “The Ethics of
Deconstruction“ cited above, which after I read I started re-reading again
from the end to the beginning until one page was fully covered with words.
Beside the images where the process of
writing and erasing the words “The End” was photographed there are also as part
of this project the image of a toy gun where the standard conditions of use for
a free software was superimposed and the image of bullets sold in Bosnia as
souvenirs for the tourists, in this case as key holders.This image is shown
together with the traces left by the bullets on paper. Near this last image,
extracts from dialogues between the director of “We come as friends”
documentary and various individuals from Sudan are also shown.
“The modern era, it is often alleged, has
been dominated by the sense of Sight in a way that set it apart from its pre-modern
predecessors and possibly its postmodern successor. Beginning with the
Renaissance and the scientific revolution, modernity has been normally
considered resolutely ocular centric.
Significantly, in the beginning the eye
cast on the world was singular, rather than the two eyes of normal binocular
vision. Such an eye was, moreover, understood to be static, unblinking, and
fixated, rather than dynamic, moving with what later scientists would call
"saccadic" jumps from one focal point to another. Thus producing a
visual take that was eternalized, reduced to one "point of view," and
disembodied.
The visual world could be appropriated by
an autonomous subject but only as a private unitary consciousness detached from
any active relation with an exterior. The monadic viewpoint of the individual is legitimized by
the camera obscura, but his or her sensory experience is subordinated to an
external and pre-given world of objective truth.
What is striking is the suddenness and
thoroughness with which this paradigm collapses in the early nineteenth century
and gives way to a diverse set of fundamentally different models of human
vision.
The
physical surface of the eye itself became a field of statistical information:
the retina was demarcated in terms of how color changes hue depending on where
it strikes the eye. Also measured were the extent of the area of visibility, of
peripheral vision, the distinction between direct and indirect vision, and the
location of the blind spot.
The issue was not just how does one know
what is real, but that new forms of the real, were being fabricated and a new
truth about the capacities of a human subject was being articulated.
The observer is simultaneously the object
of knowledge and the object of procedures of stimulation and normalization,
which have the essential capacity to produce experience for the subject.
A
more mobile, usable, and productive observer was needed in both discourse and
practice-to be adequate to new uses of the body and to a vast proliferation of
equally mobile and exchangeable signs and images. Modernization entailed a decoding
and deterritorialization of vision.
Paradoxically, the increasing hegemony of film
and photography helped recreate the myths that vision was incorporeal,
veridical, and "realistic." But if cinema and photography seemed to
reincarnate the camera obscura, it was only as a mirage of a transparent set of
relations that modernity had already overthrown.
Still, if one had to Single out the scopic
regime that has finally come into its own in our time, it would be the
"madness of vision" identified with the baroque.
The body returns to dethrone the
disinterested gaze of the disincarnated Cartesian spectator. But unlike the
return of the body celebrated in such twentieth-century philosophies of vision
as Merleau-Ponty's, with its dream of meaning-laden imbrication of the viewer
and the viewed in the flesh of the world, here it generates only allegories of
obscurity and opacity.
In our haste to denaturalize Cartesian
perspectivalism and debunk its claims to represent vision per se, we may be
tempted to forget that the other scopic regimes are themselves no more natural
or closer to a "true" vision.
It may be less dangerous to explore the
implications, both positive and negative, of each.
We may learn to wean ourselves from the
fiction of a "true" vision and revel instead in the possibilities
opened up by the scopic regimes we had already invented and the ones, now so
hard to envision, that are doubtless to come.” - Martin Jay
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