Re: <documenta X><blast> aesthetics-ethics
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Fri, 18 Jul 1997 14:59:16 +0200
Jordan
It is for me very important that you brought in Foucault's ideas, and I try
to contextualize them so that we can discuss this specific space of the
image that for both writers is illusionary and full of traps. The virtual
spacethat we may cherish we should also criticize, or rather, must look at
it from different angles, one of them is the angle of its potential and
actual dangers. Dreams and ideals may, as Foucault shows, blind from
realizing the horror. The boat, in his story, begins with dreamers and ends
in death - this is Foucault's clear position. No surprise here, because
for Foucault, like for other intellectuals writing after the second world
war, after Stalin, and so on, human capacity to blind horros by ideals and
dreams knows no limits.
I must overreact to Foucault's image of the boat because this particular
otherplace touches upon something personal. It touches one of my
childhood's "over there", one of my childhood haunting noplace, more real
then reality and yet a noplace spreading between trauma and phantasy I
share with my unknown others. For many years my mother told me how the
nazis before leaving a certain camp few days before the end of the second
world war, put all the ill people in one big shack, closed it and burnt it,
to leave nobody for the Russians who were taking over very soon. In this
shack found her death also one of her sisters who didn't want to leave her
sister-in-law that was too sick to walk. My mother is now 81, and starting
last year something in her mind wouldn't let her carry this mental image
anymore, so she now says: "You know, when the Russian approached, the Nazis
put all the sick people on a boat and sent them to the sea. That's how my
sister died". She is now idealizing... By the way, I checked in history
books, and the nazis indeed did both kind of actions, depending on which
camp. So now my mother ecxhchange one horror she can't carry anymore for an
horror of others.
Foucault was not a dreamer, his main purpose was critical, and you are
right to bring it over here, because every technology brings and folds
inside it new possibilities for barbarism, if to borrow Benjamine's
formula. We must face the potentiality of very sophisticated barbrism in
the cynberspace, and try to imagine what the angel of history will be
looking back at in the past of his future.
So my question remains open: Is cyperspace also a Foucultian boat? Can we
compose another kind of boat? do we? and if so, in what ways is it
different?
My ideas concerning distance-in-proximity, im-purity, with-ness,
co/in-habit(u)ating etc., and the way I am thinking of "Suspension" and
"Blast" have to do with all this, with matrixials potentials for
co-respons-ability. As an artist, it is not the political aspect which
interests me directly , but rather, the borderspace betwen aesthetics and
ethics.
Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger