A Dead Artist in Motion: Review of Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich

“Today’s events are still confused, but I’ll try drives in a way that infuses his presence with There are extraordinarily accomplished to set them down in orderly fashion so that I an ineffable sense of coldness. Through his moments in 2666 with respect to their formal can perhaps discover in them something that daily entries you witness the development properties. Take the following description of has thus far eluded me, a difficult and possibly of a friendship with a local man known as El a conversation from the first book of 2666 useless task, since there’s no remedy for Quemado. He is a burn victim and gradually as an example of the inventive way in which what’s happened and little point in nurturing acquires a role as Udo’s opponent in gaming. Bolaño fuses the strategies of compression false hopes. But I have to do something to El Quemado’s background is shrouded in and lyricism: pass the time.” This final sentiment appears mystery—are his burns the result of war? to be the singular “The first impulse driving conversation began Roberto Bolaño’s awkwardly, although posthumous novel, Espinoza had been The Third Reich, expecting Pelletier’s published this year call, as if both men by Farrar, Straus found it difficult to say and Giroux. In what sooner or later its unfortunately they would have to underdeveloped say. The first twenty and abandoned minutes were tragic in state, The Third tone, with the word fate Reich often reads used ten times and the like an unwilling word friendship twenty- e x e r c i s e — a four times. Liz Norton’s chronicle of name was spoken fifty s e l f - i m p o s e d times, nine of them in isolation. Given vain. The word Paris the remarkably was said seven times. prolific sequence Madrid, eight. The word of publications love was spoken twice, since Bolaño’s once by each man. The untimely death in word horror was spoken 2003 (posthumous six times and the word publications in happiness once (by English include Amulet, Monsieur Pain, By Night Bolaño refuses to provide an answer. Over Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve in Chile, Antwerp, and the forthcoming Woes of time Charly’s drunken antics escalate until he times. The word category, in the singular and the True Policeman), it is not entirely surprising disappears one night windsurfing. the plural, nine times. The word structuralism that this abandoned novel often refuses to Just as it is the case in his later work, Bolaño’s once (Pelletier). The term American literature develop its primary elements. Yet if you read mystery in The Third Reich is only a mystery three times. The words dinner or eating or retroactively with The Savage Detectives and in appearance. Indeed, Bolaño is reported breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words Bolaño’s masterful 2666 in mind, you can to have said that he would have “preferred eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then see the emergence of many of the motifs that to be a detective rather than a writer.” While the conversation proceeded more smoothly. structure his finest work: e.g., geographic it is transparently clear that his work plays Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and displacement, noir-inspired mystery, offstage with the traditional elements of mystery Espinoza laughed. In fact, they both laughed, violence, and journalistic documentation. (journalistic detachment, violence, infidelity, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was Udo Berger, the protagonist of The Third missing persons), Bolaño only employs such that linked their voices and ears across the Reich, is a German war games champion tropes in order to complicate them. The Third dark fields and the wind and the snow of the vacationing on the beaches of Costa Brava Reich is interesting insofar as Udo Berger Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads with his considerably more outgoing girlfriend backs away from the crisis that his life has and the separate and interminable suburbs Ingeborg. Together they befriend Charly and become. He retreats into the world of strategic surrounding Paris and Madrid.” Hanna, whose late-night excursions accelerate gaming, where historical violence is mediated from light inebriation to irrevocable chaos. through cheap, desensitized stimulation. As Such passages manage to short-circuit the By day, Udo Berger consumes his time as a the characters of his life drift back into their clichéd and nevertheless expand and develop WWII strategist, repeatedly fighting the major proper place Udo insists upon his literal and the minute particular in the same gesture. battles with dice and an oversized board. His emotional displacement. Unfortunately, The The seemingly limitless flexibility of Bolaño’s obsessive gaming is predominantly cryptic— Third Reich was probably abandoned in 1989 narrative voice as well as the heterogeneity of its Bolaño constructs his gaming passages as a because its formal success was predicated parts makes 2666 the immediately compelling stenographer might, which is to say without on the total withdrawal of its protagonist. and necessary book that it is. At his finest, his psychological embellishment or color. By Consequently, the narrative fails to elevate writing is fully in command of the disparate night, Udo parties with Ingeborg, Charly, and and synthesize its fragments into the densely literary traditions he draws on, and his powers Hanna as a loutish vacationer. His late outings textured mosaics that constitute Bolaño’s as an artist seem to transform his precursors— seem only to aggravate his existentialized more elaborate novels. namely, they are transformed into the figurative sense of isolation. That is why Giles Harvey is probably correct architecture which animates and supports the The Third Reich proceeds within three discursive when he writes in “The New Yorker” that landscape of his characters. It is unclear how spaces—in part it is a report of Udo’s The Third Reich should join the shelf marked the hurried frenzy of posthumous publications increasingly anxious nightlife, it is a direct “For Completists Only.” I am less convinced will ultimately affect Bolaño’s legacy, though record of his incessant war gaming, and it is however, in his assessment that you “have they are nevertheless contributing to a more also part diary and confession. It is within to go back to Balzac and Dostoevsky to find complete representation of his (apparently) the impressionistic entries of Udo’s diary that masters of the novel form who showed so immense and ongoing corpus. Bolaño achieves his most interesting literary little interest in the sentence.” Bolaño’s prose device. This mode of transmission supplies a attained rare heights—both in the complexity -Charles Prusikt decisive layer of perspectival concealment— of its formal structure as well as through the Udo’s reflections often fail to identify his own haunting defamiliarization of his lyricism. & Lulu The beauty of our times: this record is the Machine Music where the guitar did not even voice as a device for achieving unreified noise most hated record ever and it has only just need a guitarist (artistic de-subjectification which still contains alienation. But this is not been released. Lou Reed and Metallica took a probably taken from Warhol’s filmmaking: concrete poetry, somehow it sounds even more risk and Lulu is generating some of the most he didn’t need to be behind the camera). But abstract, it is relentless, beautifully out of tune passionate and intelligent writing on the here we get a blunt and confident Lou Reed and it hurts. And then the lyrics: sniff your internet. For sure the cruelty of the reviews happy to have a partner to rock with. And this shit in the wind, coloured dick, pathetic little matches the cruelty of the record. Both seem to is what Lou Reed and Metallica are becoming: dog... these sentences are snubs to any form of be an ethnographic study of our times. One of Rock’n’roll animals in the perverted zoo of taste. Reed lyrics achieve a level of vulgarity so the reviewers said that Lou Reed and Metallica the internet. Yes, Lulu is about sex. It is a 69 brilliant that it will probably beat the number are amongst the of quotes that a most perverse single record can musicians get on the internet. around. Why Yes, James, you are do people a table, where Lou get surprised can rest his fuckin’ when they get feet on. What Lulu the ultimate produces is a radical p e r v e r s e equalisation: a record? So teenage Metallica perverse that cover band are the you cannot take backing group to a it? There is a drunken 100 year famous saying old ranting about in downtown how viciously New York which prostituted a goes: if you are prostitute was who a Lou Reed fan he met when he was you must be 14 while angels in ready to go all furs play violins and the way. Yes, he the neighbourhood is going to take dudes in a basement you to places are making noise that you have while looking at never dreamed amateur German of, even in porn which contains your worst some scatological nightmares. If moments. In fact on you are a Lou this record you get Reed fan you go the whole canon of through shit, interesting music: shit records, drone wrong, shit playing, Henry Chopin- shit covers, style language shit lyrics... deconstructions, He takes you i m p r o v - t h r a s h , psychologically heavy literary cock to the wild rock, contemporary side even if classical you might be Brainbombs, c o m f o r t a b l y geriatric-metal... playing the The headfuck record in your continues with the cosy home with gender politics: a cup of tea. He what could be is going to make more queer than a you reconsider young feminist girl your values of shouting for sexual judgement to liberation in the the core and body of an old male beyond. Once you go through this then you between Lou Reed and Metallica. Lou’s tongue Jew with cut legs and tits? (Whether this body might agree with Lou when he says about is a chainsaw with rusted links (for infection has sperm or not is another question...) Lulu is Lulu: “This thing is the best thing ever done and maximum durability). Metallica gets cut more Lou Reed than Lou Reed and that surely by anybody”. And he insists in an interview in two and will never recover. They say in means that this is the best thing ever done by that he is not being egotistical. I am a Lou interviews that now that they have discovered anybody. Reed fan and I believe him. When Lou does improvisation with Lou they will implement it something he puts himself into it 100% and on their 10th record. Who knows, maybe next -Mattin as we know this is too much for the majority year Metallica will play at the Konfrontatitonen of human beings, from his solo on “I Heard festival? Lou has previously made amazing Her Call My Name” that made him the best noise with the guitar but that has already guitarist ever by bridging feedback noise rock made it into the proper canon of Noise (as an with a Coleman free jazz sensitivity to Metal established genre of music). Now he uses his Interview Between Mattin and Ray Brassier

Ray Brassier: Do you think it could be possible ambivalence, polysemy, etc., (a la Derrida’s a “practice-of-(philosophical) theory”. While I to inject noise into theory (by that I mean to Glas, to take just one notable example of favour a non-teleological alignment of theory use conceptually some of the strategies that philosophy supposedly tending towards or with practice, my problem is with Laruelle’s noise makers utilize rather than to focus on miming modernist experimentation with form) contention that it is the individual human producing sounds, to focus on producing would be precisely how not to introduce noise being that is the real of the “last instance”. If “I” theory)? Or let me put it in another way (and into theory...What we find in such instances am the real of the last instance, then I am the related to the series of conferences that you is a polysemic froth entirely beholden to ultimately determining cause: history, society, organized): what could noise theory be? norms of semantic functioning and yielding a culture, ideology, politics, economics, biology, decipherable philosophical ‘sense’ which turns neurology, can be summarily dismissed (along Mattin: Yes, in a way, that was what initially out to be a philosophical bromide....All this with philosophy) as redundant abstractions drew me to Laruelle’s non-philosophy, but also to say that, in the conceptual element proper with no salient determining force. This easily precipitated my subsequent disenchantment: to theory, experiment at the level of form can degenerates into a kind of transcendental what I thought would be , mask conservatism at the level of content (e.g. individualism, where the individual human

turned out to be baby... Glas), while conservatism at the level of form subject is absolutized (notwithstanding So I am all for introducing noise into theory, may harbour extraordinary Laruelle’s own protests against philosophical rather than generating more theory about radicality at the level of content (e.g. Wilfrid absolutism). It also implies a kind of punitive noise, in a way that ultimately reaffirms the Sellars)... nominalism, were everything but the human redundancy of both....But the element of individual is relegated to the status of causally theory is the conceptual and conceptualization RB: My impression is that one of the most inert metaphysical abstraction. Ultimately, I’m cannot and should not be conflated with useful tools that you get from Laruelle is his afraid this non-philosophical protest against aestheticization: that way, only kitsch lies... use of determination-in-the-last instance. the supposed absolutism and totalitarianism of Precision, saturation, density, frequential Could you please tell me why? philosophical universalism ends up being both extremity: plausible conceptual analogues for theoretically and practically---i.e. politically--- these may be found but I suspect they would lie M: I think the concept can do some useful debilitating. I think venerable questions in the domain of mathematics rather than the work but not in the form in which Laruelle such as “What is real?”, “What is causality?”, kinds of discursive conceptualization usually himself presents it. I’m basically sceptical “What is determination?”, are still unresolved deployed by philosophers....Also, I now believe of the alleged non-philosophical novelty of and urgent topics of philosophical concern, that noise is not to be pitted against “meaning” Laruelle’s concept of determination-in-the- which it would be short-sighted to dismiss (whatever that might be), as i naively thought last-instance: I fear it boils down to a kind of as antiquated metaphysical hangups: they when i believed having any philosophical truck Fichtean materialism of practice (or what Iain point to the need to understand the complex with “meaning” was a symptom of reactionary Grant has called “practicism”) insofar as the stratification of reality and the different sorts of senescence. My current conviction is that a last-instance is identified with the individual causally determining mechanism operative at properly exiguous conception of meaning human being and determination is identified distinct levels. All this to say that I don’t think can eradicate conceptual conservativism with his/her practice—even though Laruelle there is an ultimately determining instance and engender all the desirable subversive has in mind a very specific concept of practice in Laruelle’s sense; which still seems to me to attributes of noise...So to cut a long story short, ---that of theory. Laruelle converts Althusser’s be that of an updated version of free human the sorts of lexical and syntactical trickery that conception of philosophy as “theoretical agency or activity—this is of course the core of habitually engender obscurity, equivocation, practice” into the idea of non-philosophy as Fichteanism. If there an ultimately determining instance, it cannot be identified with the free or conceptual. The currency of “noise” as a an Aesthetics of Noise: “Noise exacerbates activity of the human subject. This is not to say commercial marketing category is ample the rift between knowing and feeling by that activity, whether practical, theoretical or testimony to this fact. But this need not splitting experience, forcing conception some fusion of both, cannot serve as a medium provide a license for complacent or reactionary against sensation. Some recent philosophers for some other determining, material agency, cynicism. Any allegedly “critical” or “subversive” have evinced an interest in subjectless but the latter invariably operates behind the politics must involve disciplined conceptual experiences; I am rather more interested in back of the human subject---which is precisely construction and noise’s metamorphicity experience-less subjects. Another name for what Laruelle denounces and wishes to rectify invites conceptual investment and elaboration this would be “nemocentrism” (a term coined with his concept of man as last instance. I to a degree perhaps unequalled by any other by neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger): the favour a conception of the subject as organon extant “musical” genre---precisely insofar as it objectification of experience would generate or automaton, but one whose heteronomy- threatens the logic of generic classification as self-less subjects that understand themselves --i.e. allocentric determination--- actually such. This is where I believe noise’s subversive to be no-one and no-where. This casts an constitutes a kind of autonomy: the sorts of rule potential lies---at the level of abstract form; interesting new light on the possibility of governed behaviour exemplified by subjects and not in any alleged radicality attributed a “communist” subjectivity.” How might we engaged in deductive activity exemplify a kind to its sonic content (volume, frequency, initiate the process of desubjectification that of “heterautonomy” where the only freedom pitch, etc.). Construed in terms of the is required in order to organize ourselves for available is measured by the potential failure predilections of its practitioners, the politics a collective transformation beyond individual to do what one is rationally obligated to. This of noise runs the gamut of political opinion, needs and desires? is very Kantian of course, but it’s a Kantian from absurdly reactionary obscurantism to rationalism freed from the encroachments of mystical anarchism. At the same time, we morality. shouldn’t be surprised if the politics of noise’s M: Acknowledging that individual subjectivity consumers turn out to the default politics is shaped and conditioned down to its RB: You have written about noise in opposition of all contemporary consumption: that of innermost recesses by impersonal social to capitalism: “What I consider to be interesting a terminally complacent neo-liberalism. If structures would be a good start. Unfortunately, about noise is its dis-organizing potency: the noise harbours any radical political potential, it seems particularly difficult for artists, who incompressibility of a then it needs to be elaborated via a process have been encouraged to invest in their

signal interfering with the redundancy in the of interrogation, which would involve working own individuality, to recognize this. Nothing structure of the receiver. Not transduction but through questions such as: What is experience, is more emblematic of the chokehold of schizduction: noise scrambles the capacity for given that capitalism commodifies sensations, neoliberal ideology than the unquestioned self-organization.” Do you see any possible affects, and concepts? What is abstraction, conviction that individual self-expression political use of the nihilist character of noise given that capitalism renders the intangible remains a natural reservoir of creative for the destruction of capital? determining while dissolving everything we innovation. The cultivation of individuality as held to be concrete? What freedom are we a profitable personal resource is an efficient invoking when we proclaim noise’s “freedom” means of enforcing a reactionary conformism. M: I don’t think it’s credible to attribute from the alleged constrictions of musical Narcissistic or aesthetic self-cultivation can be to noise a directly anti-capitalist political genre? usefully contrasted with the sorts of aberrant valence. The political significance of a This is just to say that the “destruction of individuation generated through psychosocial phenomenon is often ambiguous (I say “often” capitalism” evoked in your question certainly pathologies. (One way of expressing this rather than “always”, because there is nothing won’t be achieved via any form of spontaneous would be in terms of the theoretical contrast ambiguous about the political significance or participatory experience. It would require between socially prescribed subjectivation, of an English Defense League rally, for the development of a political agency informed which is personalizing, de-singularizing, instance). Only rarely can it be unequivocally and instructed by cognitive achievements and sociopathic; and socially proscribed deciphered or straightforwardly translated obtained over the course of a critical subjectivization, which is depersonalizing, into an identifiable political stance. And of collective investigation. A “politics of noise” singularising, and communist.) Alienation course, it’s not only content that is political, commensurate with such an ambitious task is a profoundly unfashionable theoretical it’s also the form of political deciphering: presupposes cognitive discipline, communal trope, but it might be time to rehabilitate it. it’s not just what something is but how it is investigation, and collective organization. It was summarily dismissed in the wake of interpreted that is political. Ultimately, this postmodernist critiques of authenticity. But means that nothing in the realm of cultural alienation arguably has nothing to do with production is inherently pro- or anti-capitalist: “If you tolerate each other, you will tolerate lost authenticity, whether at the individual or popular entertainment is sometimes slyly anything” species level. It is better conceived as expressing subversive; critiques of capitalism have long the contradiction between actually existing been grist for the academic culture industry. RB: Simon Yuill’s contribution, a quote from social pathologies and the absent social ideals This ambiguity is quite evident in the case of Raoul Vaneigem seems to perfectly summarize that they indicate even as they deny them. The noise. The noise subculture has been around the Evacuation of the Great Learning workshop alienated individual can be seen to embody the for a long time now---at least since the early at the Instal festival in Glasgow. During the objective contradiction between social ideal 1980s---and I find it telling that during its workshop, it proved impossible for the group and social pathology. But what is required existence, it’s been possible to ascribe to it to arrive at any consensus about what to do in order to prevent this from lapsing into a just about every conceivable position across or not to do, so the last day it was decided sentimental “outsider” romanticism is the the political spectrum. Thus the politics of that every proposal would be accepted. But as imperative to individuate through conscious noise have variously been described as neo- someone subsequently pointed out, instead depersonalization. What is necessary is nazi, crypto-fascist, neo-conservative, liberal- of collectively achieving something radical, to achieve an objective or cognitively democratic, anarcho-libertarian... To the best we merely reproduced the paltry freedom of enlightened, which is to say, impersonal self- of my knowledge, noise has rarely if ever been expression which capitalist neoliberalism consciousness about one’s own pathology; i.e. aligned with communist or Marxist politics. accords to the individual subject, no matter detached insight into how the pathological There is every interest in doing so. But such how false this ‘freedom’ turns out to be. It nature of one’s own personality indexes the an alignment should not take the form of the seems that capitalism has conditioned our objective discrepancy between what exists somewhat inane equation between dissonance subjectivity to the point where we are no longer and what ought to be realized at the collective and political subversion. Capitalism is no willing to give up anything individually, even level. By achieving an objective perspective more threatened by noise than by any other if this entails a bleak future for everybody. upon her own pathology, the antisocial register of abstraction, whether aesthetic Following what you said at the interview Against individual becomes more social than her well- adjusted, properly integrated peers. This is dilemma.The first response is to reject the good reason to assume this difference, even how individual de-subjectivation becomes argument upon which this conclusion seems if we need concepts to know objects. So he the condition for collective subjectivization: to rest. It can easily be shown to be invalid. leaves open the gap through which we can one relinquishes the pathological markers of access what is outside our minds (“the great one’s psychosocial individuation the better But there’s a sense in which this is not outdoors”). The point is that we don’t need to achieve that depersonalized state in which enough because we still haven’t accounted to escape because we’re not really locked in: subjective agency coincides with collective for the peculiar force correlationism seems to the inside communicates with the outside. capacity. Subjectivizing depersonalization is possess. It’s the vulgarization of an important But because having a mind and being able to the precondition for collectivity. A collective insight. The important insight is that we know things requires some distance from those is constituted by a group of individuals need concepts to know things, and we can’t things---a fundamental hiatus---we can’t ever committing together to a principle, or set of know things without using concepts. But be totally immersed in the great outdoors, or principles. Only by consciously relinquishing one can acknowledge this without accepting lose ourselves in it, unless we want to cancel what is pathological (i.e. conventionally social, the argument that seems to lead to the the very condition that makes us thinking and therefore anti-social) in one’s personality correlationist circle, according to which all beings in the first place. does one become capable of such collective we really know are concepts, not things. The So I would say in response to your question: commitment. From this principle or principles, way to do this is to understand that even if First, that there’s no reason to believe the specific objectives can be derived, together we can’t know things without concepts, we correlationist circle is hermetically sealed in with appropriate criteria for discriminating are connected to the world otherwise than the first place. Second, that some minimal or between those proposals that optimize the through concepts alone. This is because we are epistemic correlation between concepts and realization of the central objective and those not just minds but also bodies with nervous objects is a necessary condition for knowledge, that inhibit it. The determination of the systems connecting us to material reality. Of but that this doesn’t mean that objects are goal ensures the identification of a method course, correlationists will object that what indistinguishable from the concepts through for resolving disagreements. Consensus on is being invoked here is just the concept of a which we know them. Another way of saying matters of principle provides the condition for body or the concept of material reality, and the same thing is to distinguish between a good resolving dissensus over questions of method. that the circle remains closed: thinking only or epistemic correlation, which maintains the Of course, this presupposes a commitment to ever accesses its own correlates. But I think gap between concepts and objects, and a bad a certain conception of dialectical rationality, this objection can be refuted by pointing out or metaphysical correlation, which tries to as well as to rational canons of theoretical and that it rests on a simple non-sequitur: while it close the gap and render them indiscernible. practical investigation. This will be too much is true that you can’t think about something Once this distinction is taken into account, for some: too “dogmatic”, too “authoritarian”. without thinking about it, it doesn’t follow then the conditions of the problem change An apt response to such protests would be to from this that what you’re thinking about quite significantly: it’s a question of using point out that the alternatives to rationality is nothing more than the correlate of your the correlation to understand its outside, and have hardly proven effective. The revolutionary thought. I can’t think about a dog without the of understanding its inside as a function of potential of rationality remains sadly concept “dog”, but this doesn’t entail that the its outside, since there would be no outside underestimated: reason is routinely castigated dog I’m thinking about is the same thing as the without an inside and vice versa. as conservative or defamed as “totalitarian”. concept “dog”. This is the assumption through But the transparently reactionary and which the correlationist presumes to be able -Mattin and Ray Brassier ideological character of this alignment should to close the circle. But once you realize it’s not be perfectly evident by now, and it might be valid, then it becomes possible to insist that worth re-considering once more the critical there’s nothing inherently contradictory in efficacy of pure reason both in theory and in admitting the difference between concepts and practice. things that are not concepts. We’re connected to those things through our body, which is RB: How do we break out from the correlationist another thing, and although we have to rely on circle?First of all, what is the correlationist concepts to know anything, including our own circle? bodies, this doesn’t mean we only know about concepts. In fact, we ought to acknowledge M: Very simply, it seems to follow from the that knowledge has two components: on one following reasoning: whatever you think about hand, it requires concepts, which we generate is thereby rendered relative to your thinking through our minds, but on the other hand, we and so cannot be conceived as existing also receive sensory information from physical independently of your thinking about it. Thus, reality via our nervous systems, since our your claim to be thinking about something bodies are physical things connected to the rest that existed before you began thinking about of physical reality. It is the fact that our mind it is contradicted by your very act of thinking is not a self sufficient system but is intimately about it. If you say the earth existed for connected to a body which connects it to the billions of years prior to your existence now, world that prevents the circle of correlation the correlationist will tell you that what you from closing in on itself. ought to say is that the earth has existed for This is the second possible response to the billions of years for you now, not absolutely correlationist argument mentioned above. or “in itself”. Everything is a “correlate” of your The third is simply to deny or ignore the thinking and trying to think about things that necessity of concepts and pretend we can know are not correlates of your thinking is like trying reality through some other medium. But this to step over your shadow: you can’t do it. The is to exit from the circle at the cost of giving correlate is projected by your thinking just as up on the possibility of rational knowledge your shadow is projected by your body. This altogether. vol. 2 NO 19 September 2012 is the circle: whenever you believe yourself to The better way I think is to acknowledge that be thinking about something outside thought, concepts are necessary for knowledge, but not your act of thinking re-envelops it within sufficient. What I’m propounding here is the thought. classical Kantian view of course----the irony front cover: Jaya Howey RB: Why is this a problem? Because it seems being that it is Kant who is usually charged to imply that we can’t think or know anything with being the founder of correlationism. In as it is in itself, independently of us. In its most fact, I don’t think he is: that dubious accolade printed and distributed by: basic form, correlationism is just another name is better merited by philosophers like Berkeley Marginal Utility for the kind of generalized skeptical relativism or Fichte, who deny that we have any reason typical of “postmodern” ideology. to assume the distinction between concepts M: There are three possible responses to this and objects. But Kant says we have very [email protected] AND Alighiero e Boetti at MOMA In 1973 Alighiero Boetti changed his name to the artwork occasions an act of division in the thread or which text to include); the brutality of Alighiero e Boetti. The addition of an ‘e’ (‘and’ self that complicates what is dominant and the ballpoint pen drawings’ execution crushes in Italian) has the simple effect of division. what is subaltern, what is known and unknown, any romanticization of this kind of work or the What was one becomes two. The integrity of expected and unexpected, the familiar and the autonomy involved. The rift between self and the self (the purported referent of the name) strange, the personal and the impersonal, as other here becomes excruciating, as does the is split into two halves. division between intellectual and He could, however, have manual labor. The work becomes split the self otherwise most interesting at those moments with different effects when it becomes unclear which and consequences. He tendency is dominant: a tendency could have adopted the towards self-inflation or deflation. moniker, Alighiero e In the bronze sculpture, Self-Portrait Boetti. The conjunction (1993), Boetti wears a suit and pours “and” is worlds apart from water from hose onto his head. The “or”. With “and” what bronze head is heated internally is divided is included, which causes the water to evaporate whereas with “or” what as it makes contact, giving the effect is divided is excluded. that his brain is smoking. This The formula Alighiero playful gesture mocks his own belief e Boetti is an inclusive in his fervid genius that nonetheless disjunction. subtends much of the work. The retrospective of Boetti is highly aware that the Boetti’s work, Game Plan, aesthetic situation sets up cetrtain currently on view at expectations, a belief that there will MOMA places this logic be an aesthetic event: the light could into the foreground. indeed turn on for 11 seconds, there The entrance to the could be an illumination, but most exhibition has a blown up likely it will not. The absence of such version of the postcard an event is only registered if one Twins (1968) a work that believes that it could in fact occur. clearly foreshadows the This is no doubt what motivates linguistic intervention much of the tourist industry and into his artistic signature. animates aspiring global trotters: The image on the postcard the belief that the experience of the is a photomontage foreign will produce a richness and depicting two figures a complexity of perspective that will holding hands that look shatter horizons and open the self up nearly identical (both are to sources of meaning that hidden Boetti). In addition to or obscured by daily routine and the this crass repurposing of crushing and overwhelming sense the postcard as a billboard of the normal. Did Boetti believe? style advertisement is Is this what motivated his desire the early work Ping Pong to travel, to establish One Hotel in (1966), consisting of two Kabul? Was he aware that this is light boxes that flank each nothing but a wanton romanticism side of the entryway, flashing intermittently when a right handed person draws with their and that tourism depends on narcissism and ping, then pong. Even at this early stage, left hand: a strategy that Boetti often used. the human’s indefatigable ability to map its the logic is clear; for Boetti, art is a game of The ambition of the work is admirable. expectations onto the foreign? He certainly division played with oneself in which each The work is marred, however, by a tendency plays with this belief, with these expectations. work becomes a new opportunity to multiply toward self-indulgence and mystification as And if one knows? Then what? Should one the self. in the bronze plaques, December 16, 2040 and not travel? In the end, the works continued The exhibition plays this logic out across July 11, 2023. The former date alludes to the interest lies in its uncertainty and unease, Boetti’s divergent output often obscured by his hundred anniversary of the artist’s birth and Boetti’s willingness to indulge, overindulge, tendency toward overproduction (producing, the latter date refers to the day that Boetti and then nonetheless distantiate, mock; his for example, more or less 150 embroidered imagined that he would die. Boetti tends to awareness that art is not merely a game to maps). The exhibition focuses the work around imbue the artist with mystical importance and be played, but a trap. I choose then to read its essential lines of thought, excising the sense at times seems to truly believe that the artist the clasp in the postcard Twins not as an of repetition that threatens to overwhelm the is the revealer of mystical truths. One fears expression of solidarity with his self (with subtle shifts that orient Boetti’s exploration of that the multiplication of his self results only his double), but as sinister pact. One never singularity and multiplicity. There is perhaps in its projection; he finds himself everywhere; knows whether one’s double is a friend or an only one conspicuously absent series of work, the world becomes a vast reflecting pool for enemy. Consistent with the logic of inclusive the airplane series. From this work of editorial his artistic gestures. disjunction, Boetti refuses the forced choice of condensation a dominant idea emerges, Yet, this is not a problem that Boetti seeks to the ‘or’; his self is both friend and enemy. despite the stress, for example, that the avoid. This is nowhere more apparent than exhibition places on his attempt to distance in his desire for anonymity, which he sought -Alexi Kukuljevic himself from his early Arte Povera concerns. through collaboration. This is perhaps most For Boetti, the greatness of art does not lie in evident in the ballpoint pen drawings which resolving contradictions, but in allowing them strike a masterful balance between rigor and to subsist. His work is constantly playing with ease of execution, tedium and beauty, sense the tensions between opposites: space and and non-sense. Whereas in the more well time, singularity and multiplicity, identity known embroidered maps, it is deceptively and difference, order and chaos, presence and clear when the ‘other’ apparently asserts their absence. By allowing contradictions to subsist, autonomy (a choice, for example, of the color of THE END GOES ON (AND ON): BELA TARR’S THE TURIN HORSE In The Turin Horse, Bela Tarr’s latest and reportedly as the world around them mysteriously grinds to a The Turin Horse functions well as a summation of last film, the Hungarian filmmaker follows Samuel halt. The horse refuses to eat. Their well dries up. his body of work. The metaphysical, existential, Beckett’s path of impoverishment and subtraction The nearby village is reportedly wiped out. The ontological precariousness that haunts Tarr’s as far as one can imagine in the cinema. This is wind ceases. The oil in their lamps won’t catch fire. other films becomes the sole subject of The Turin not a matter of simple minimalism. To construct a Nietzsche may have lived on silent and demented Horse, which could be described as an aesthetically form through which to perceive a void, for Tarr as for ten years, but it seems unlikely that anyone in precise and exacting parable of vagueness and for Beckett, requires bold contortions of aesthetic Tarr’s film makes it past day seven. indeterminacy. invention. Having already established himself as the most stubbornly modernist of contemporary Rather than searching for a direct connection For Tarr, given this fundamental precariousness, auteurs, Tarr has ended his career with possibly between the prologue and Tarr’s characters, it is nothing is more dangerous and contagious than his most radical film to date. more fruitful to see it as having an indirect and despair. A spark of despair can turn the world to ambivalent relationship to the rest of the film. ash in Tarr’s universe, and much of his late work A Philosophic Parable As a mysterious and apocalyptic tale of empathy charts the slow, creeping, apocalyptic arc from The Turin Horse begins in darkness as a narrator and despair precipitating a cataclysmic collapse uncertainty to apathy to despair. Walking, of course, provides a slightly bemused recounting of that snuffs out in an instant and yet lingers on features prominently in Tarr’s films. Walking and Nietzsche’s storied final moments of sanity: agonizingly, the Nietzsche story functions as a weather. Long chunks of screen time are given parable mirroring the film’s elusive themes. over to characters laboriously battling brutal In Turin on January 3rd, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps wind, one step at a time. For Tarr, this functions out of the doorway of number six Via Carlo Alberto, The prologue also serves to implicitly suggest Tarr’s both as a realistic depiction of life, and as a simple, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office view of the relationship of cinema to philosophy. visceral metaphor for it. Without faith or purpose, to collect his mail. Not far from him, or indeed very one must trudge on. There is no redemption far removed from him, the driver of a hansom cab to be found in Tarr’s vision, not even the kind is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all Camus finds in the Sisyphus myth. Sisyphus his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon could be happy because he knew his fate and the driver – Giuseppe? Carlo? Ettore? – loses his so he could accept it. We, on the other hand, patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes don’t know what’s in store for us from one step up to the throng and that puts an end to the brutal to the next, never mind beyond that, though scene caused by the driver, by this time foaming all indications suggest things will get worse at the mouth with rage. For the solidly built and and worse . The tedium is always fraught with full-moustached gentleman suddenly jumps up to the likelihood of catastrophe. But we must go the cab and throws his arms around the horse’s on regardless, for as long as we can, because, neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies of course, it is not up to us in the end. motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words (“Mutter, ich Tarr’s vision aligns well with Beckett’s famous bin dumm.”), and lives for another ten years, silent and Characters often philosophize aloud in Tarr’s last words in The Unnamable ( “in the silence you demented, under the care of his mother and sisters. We films. This usually takes the form of semi-coherent don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I will do not know what happened to the horse. rants, a superb example of which can be found in go on.”). However, Tarr counters the misleadingly The Turin Horse. A neighbor bursts in on Ohlsdorfer triumphant tenor the phrase can take on when Following this prologue is the first image of the film, and his daughter one day asking to buy a bottle presented, as it often is, as a kind of epigram for a virtuosic tracking shot lasting several minutes of their palinka. He then sits down and launches Beckett’s worldview: to go on is no feat to be showing a horse pulling on old man on a cart. unprovoked into a bitter, paranoid metaphysical applauded, it is not even necessarily desirable, it As Mihaly Vig’s dirge-like score is introduced, we rant, beautifully written by Tarr’s collaborator, is simply the burdensome fundamental condition watch the horse labor on from a variety of shifting novelist László Krasznahorkai. Speculating on of existence. Both Tarr and Beckett are artists perspectives. Inevitably, we initially assume that the impossibility of the good and the inseparable of purgatory, and their differences have less to this is The Turin Horse and that the film is going forces of acquisition and debasement that rule the do with perspective than medium. Writing, for to speculate on the lingering question of what world, the neighbor rambles for five full minutes, Beckett, mirrors interiority, speaks of wrestling became of the animal after the fateful encounter the only scene of sustained dialogue in the film. with the seemingly useless, unrelenting, with full-moustached philosopher. However, the When he finally finishes his diatribe, Ohlsdorfer confounding experience of consciousness. The Nietzsche incident is never referenced in the film, grunts “That’s nonsense,” and the neighbor shrugs cinema, for Tarr, stages exteriority, observes the and besides the period in which the film is set, and leaves. mysterious, interdependent relationships between there is little to connect it directly to the events of unknowable beings (human or animal) and the prologue. While the horse in the film does refuse Such scenes serve several functions for Tarr. seemingly indifferent world that they inhabit and to move at one point, this occurs outside the stable Through them, he acknowledges the impulse to that dictates the confines of their existence. where the animal sleeps rather than in a public wrestle with philosophical questions; he confirms square. The cold, brutal, wind-ravaged landscape that his film is partaking in this impulse; he Tarr refuses to stage a satisfying apocalyptic finale. of the film certainly isn’t Turin. The characters simultaneously demystifies and poeticizes the In Tarr’s films, even the apocalypse is robbed of its speak Hungarian and drink palinka. While the impulse by having it acted out by drunken, half- grandiosity and finality, is rendered provisional and narrator speculates on the Italian name of the mad characters; and, he demonstrates the limits of uncertain. Every moment is apocalyptic, headed Turin cabbie, he refers to horse’s elderly owner language and rationality in engaging this impulse inevitably toward the end, and yet no end arrives. in the film as Ohlsdorfer. There seems to be little (at least in the cinema). The seventh day is never shown in the film. On the doubt that we are in Hungary, far from number six one hand, there is no need to show it. Rationally, Via Carlo Alberto. It is characteristic of Tarr’s approach that he we know what will happen. The village is gone. highlights the unknown, and unknowable, Everyone has vanished. They have no water. Fire The film’s story, such as it is, focuses on the horse’s experience of the horse in the Turin parable. For won’t burn. At the end of the sixth day, Ohlsdorfer owners more than the animal itself. Ohlsdorfer Tarr, the cinema philosophizes by plunging in the and his daughter sit at their table in darkness, each lives in an isolated hut with his middle-aged opposite direction from philosophy, into that with trying to force down a raw potato. And yet, we daughter. He has one lame arm, and she dresses which philosophy cannot adequately engage. The see them. In the last shot of his career, Tarr gives him (the same clothes everyday) and cooks his end of philosophy for Nietzsche is the starting us light where there is none. This can hardly be meals (a shot of palinka for breakfast, a boiled point for Tarr’s cinema. viewed as an uplifting gesture of hope, as it allow potato for dinner). For entertainment, they take us only to witness inevitable suffering longer than turns sitting in front of their small window gazing Stubbornly Uncertain we would otherwise be able to. Nonetheless, there catatonically out at the baron landscape. The film Ailing bodies, political instability, the volatility is something modestly, even bleakly, affirmative takes place over six (presumably) consecutive of human relationships, the unknowability in this simple final gesture, which attests to Tarr’s days. On the first day, Ohlsdorfer and his daughter of animals, the limits of communication, the refusal to deflect uncomfortable truths with a labor in the howling wind to saddle the horse and deceptive nature of logic, the precariousness spectacle of finality he doesn’t believe in. fasten their cart to it, only to have the animal of sanity, the insatiability of needs and desires, stubbornly refuse to move. Ohlsdorfer beats the the unreliability of pleasure, the confinements -Mike Vass horse until his daughter convinces him that it’s of family/community/location, the haphazard useless. They unsaddle the animal and go back tyranny of the weather: these are the defining inside. The next five days chart a quiet apocalypse features of Tarr’s cinematic universe. In this sense,