In Response to Heidegger's Plea: Alētheia and the Open Space For
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Maine State Library Digital Maine Academic Research and Dissertations Maine State Library Special Collections 2018 In Response to Heidegger’s Plea: Alētheia and the Open Space for Thinking and Freedom Through Art Louise Carrie Wales Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalmaine.com/academic IN RESPONSE TO HEIDEGGER’S PLEA: ALĒTHEIA AND THE OPEN SPACE FOR THINKING AND FREEDOM THROUGH ART Louise Carrie Wales Submitted to the faculty of The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy July 2018 i Accepted by the faculty of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in partial fulfillment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________________ CHRISTOPHER YATES, PHD. Doctoral Committee ______________________________ SIMONETTA MORO, PHD. ______________________________ DREW DALTON, PHD. 17 July 2018 ii © 2018 Louise Carrie Wales ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii … poetically man dwells on this earth. Friedrich Hölderlin Ô mon corps, fait toujours de moi [une femme] qui s'interroge. Frantz Fanon To Chloë: Thank you for always keeping me humble. I love you more than you can ever know. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - There are many thanks to give. So many, in fact, that I fear a significant and influential someone will be overlooked. That said, I must begin by thanking Dr. Christopher Yates whose patient and detailed guidance have made this entire process enjoyable. I can confidently say that this project would not exist without his tutelage and time. Seriously. Chris has been kind, gentle, thorough (o.m.g. so fabulously thorough) and his turn around time on drafts is proof the man never sleeps. Ever. He also has a gentle humility that make him an invaluable mentor, particularly when ideas are challenging and clarity is not easily won. I am also grateful to my other committee members, Simonetta Moro and Drew Dalton, whose care and support I appreciate immensely. Then, of course, there is the inimitable and ever-supportive Dr. George Smith without whom I would not have joined the IDSVA family in the first place. As all of us here know, George has a contagious love for philosophy, art and his growing Becoming Community. His teaching is motivating and engaging. It’s also downright fun. Who can forget ‘a tergo’ or his impassioned descriptions of Degas’ Keyhole Nudes. The Venus of Urbino is forever etched in my mind as are the colorful descriptions of Titian’s greater impact on trans-historical narratives. To Amy Curtis, Howard Caygill, Paul Armstrong, Ted Coons, David Driskell … thank you for your constant inspiration. To my papa: thank you for instilling your intellectual curiosity in me. Your kindness and love have been very helpful. In addition, I have the best possible study group: Christina Barber, Mike Adams, Wilson Hurst and Taliesin Thomas. I thank each one of you for the laughs, the chats, the occasional venting, the tremendous love and the great getaway to Lopez Island. My students, both at SCAD and UNIS, have been watching as I put together what, to them, seems an endless task. Their collective love and support has kept my humor alive in moments of technological frustration—mostly born in my utter disdain for Microsoft Word. My friends … you definitely know who you are: all who have supported me throughout this adventure, thank you. Most importantly, I am and always will be grateful to my daughter Chloë whose cheerleading and enthusiasm for this project has helped me stay focused. With love, always. v ABSTRACT Louise Carrie Wales IN RESPONSE TO HEIDEGGER’S PLEA: ALĒTHEIA AND THE OPEN SPACE FOR THINKING AND FREEDOM THROUGH ART This dissertation is a response to Martin Heidegger’s call to action asserted at the conclusion of his oft-cited essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he offers the realm of art as the mainspring for our emancipation from the grip of technological enframing. The following chapters investigate artists Martha Rosler, Christian Boltanski, Krzysztof Wodiczko and finally, collaborators Noor Mirza and Brad Butler, whose artworks offer a counterbalance to the erosion of the human capacity for thought as a particular feature of our Being, or Dasein, as proposed by Heidegger. Their shared characteristic lies in truth’s manifestation within artworks as happenings or events rather than a quest for fixed certainty or correspondence. Through their work, the artists catalyze a reckoning, compelling the viewer to question and reflect on his intersubjective ethical responsibility for the other. The common thread connecting them is a powerful shifting of thought — in a distinctly revelatory acting upon the viewer’s awareness. I will argue that, as technological aesthetic narratives are increasingly sophisticated and nuanced, politically conscious artists such as these become better able to harness their potential voices in deeply critical ways allowing the inter-subjective ethos of care to manifest and thrive in dialogic expressions of truth. vi Furthermore, they begin to formulate a way of considering and using technology that not only resists enframing by interrogating the very essence of our relationship with it, but also functions as a way of engaging with the question of Being itself (which encompasses Heidegger’s fundamental project). In the end, this dissertation will demonstrate that Being comes to itself in the site of exchange as his/her awareness of responsibility grows and thought is returned to its poetical dwelling. In these times of narrowed perspectives and technological addiction qua enframing, Heidegger’s call to action and the works responding to it must be brought to the fore and celebrated. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction Chapter One: Heidegger’s articulation of Care in “The Question Concerning Technology” - 27 § 1.1: Introduction 31 § 1.2: Heidegger’s themes and undercurrents 46 § 1.3: Ethical foundations in the “Question Concerning Technology” 68 § 1.4: Thinking versus action and Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism 75 § 1.5: Summary and conclusion Chapter Two: Walter Benjamin and the disruptive reproduction - 77 § 2.1: Introduction 83 § 2.2: Building on Marxist foundations 100 § 2.3: Cult value versus durability: shifting the path to freedom 116 § 2.4: Film qua distraction of the masses as distinct from Marxist leisure 127 § 2.5: The persistence of fascist tendencies: fiat ars, pereat mundus 132 § 2.6: The politicization of art 145 § 2.7: Summary and conclusion Chapter Three: Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home: Ethico-political collaborative art practice - 150 § 3.1: Introduction 157 § 3.2: Contextual conditions shaping Rosler’s ideas and practice 173 § 3.3: Rosler as Artist-Producer and the deciphering of meaning 188 § 3.4: Ethico-Political reading of Rosler’s visual work 202 § 3.5: Rosler’s Garage Sales: class performance and participation 215 § 3.6: Summary and conclusion viii Chapter Four: Fashioning truth from fiction and memory: The essence of truth interpreted through the work of Boltanski + Wodiczko - 220 § 4.1: Introduction 224 § 4.2: The space of truth and memory 240 § 4.3: Christian Boltanski: context, memory and the work of art 273 § 4.4: Krzysztof Wodiczko: truth, temporality and fearless speech 292 § 4.5: Summary and conclusion Chapter Five: Technologized truth: The ambiguity of truth / non-truth in the work of Mirza + Butler - 297 § 5.1: Introduction 306 § 5.2: Post-memory, discourse and intertextuality: the path forward 327 § 5.3: Past-present: Mumbai terror attacks 337 § 5.4: A close reading 370 § 5.5: Summary and conclusion 377 Conclusion - 390 Endnotes - 396 Works Cited - 414 Appendices - Appendix A: A genealogy of ethics on the threshold of Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology.” Appendix B: Benjamin + Heidegger on language as the origin of meaning Appendix C: Genealogy of South Asian history: the ambiguity of truth / non-truth in the work of Mirza + Butler ix INTRODUCTION: “The meditative man is to experience the untrembling heart of unconcealment.” Martin Heidegger - § I.1: A CALL TO ACTION This dissertation concerns the human capacity for thinking—both in its relationship to what Martin Heidegger terms Dasein and, ultimately, in light of our primordial intersubjective ethical disposition. Furthermore, it addresses human access to truth through the realm of art—a truth that is multiple and fluid rather than objectivist and correspondent. It is, more directly, an inter-textual response to Martin Heidegger’s call to action asserted at the conclusion of his oft-cited essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he offers the realm of art as the mainspring for our emancipation from the grip of technological enframing. Inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem, Patmos, Heidegger writes, Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we are questioning. (Krell 340 emphasis mine) Heidegger leaves us with these thoughts after having detailed the ultimate reduction of human beings to standing reserve, or, perhaps more significantly, the reduction of human 1 creativity (in technē) to modes of challenging-forth. In other words, working from the language of Karl Marx, he asserts an essential self-alienation arising from our relationship with technology. Furthermore, he establishes that this relational imprisonment assails Dasein’s ability to exercise its most profound capacity within the unfettered open space of thinking. The greatest peril, in his estimation, lies in a false sense of wellbeing that prompts us to overlook the danger, hence his notice of the ‘absence of emergency’—a condition of Being Santiago Zabala expands upon in his recent volume Why Only Art Can Save Us.