ISSUE #12: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND HISTORICAL 12 REPRESENTATION nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668 EDITORIAL BOARD Bridget Alsdorf Ruth Leys James Welling Jennifer Ashton Walter Benn Michaels Todd Cronan Charles Palermo Lisa Chinn, editorial assistant Rachael DeLue Robert Pippin Michael Fried Adolph Reed, Jr. Oren Izenberg Victoria H.F. Scott Brian Kane Kenneth Warren FOR AUTHORS ARTICLES: SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Please direct all Letters to the Editors, Comments on Articles and Posts, Questions about Submissions to [email protected]. 1 Potential contributors should send submissions electronically via nonsite.submishmash.com/Submit. 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ISSN 2164-1668. 2 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #12: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION (SUMMER 2014) ISSUE #12: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION SUMMER 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS ISSUE DESCRIPTION Issue #12: Contemporary Politics and Historical Representation . 8 ARTICLES Didier Bay’s Photographic Sociology of Post-1968 Paris . 12 By Lily Woodruff (Michigan State University) Seeking the Authentic: Polish Culture and the Nature of Postcolonial Theory . 36 By Stanley Bill (University of Cambridge) Forget Postcolonialism, There’s a Class War Ahead . 52 By Jan Sowa (Jagiellonian University) East European Art Peripheries Facing Post-Colonial Theory . 62 By Piotr Piotrowski (Adam Mickiewicz University) FEATURES The Theater of Inequality . 80 By Thomas Jessen Adams (University of Sydney) POETRY Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz and Ewa Lipska translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak . 96 By Tadeusz Różewicz, Ewa Lipska and Joanna Trzeciak RESPONSES Questions for Adams . 104 By Charles Palermo (College of William & Mary) 4 On Modeling Re: The Force of a Frame . 110 By Marina Pinsky Response to Marina Pinsky . 114 By Walter Benn Michaels (UIC) REVIEWS The Meaning of Pain . 120 By Todd Cronan (Emory University) 5 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #12: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION (SUMMER 2014) ISSUE DESCRIPTION ISSUE DESCRIPTION 6 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #12: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION (SUMMER 2014) ISSUE DESCRIPTION ISSUE #12: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION In nonsite’s 12th issue, a collection of views on the meaning and uses of postcolonial theory in and around modern Poland, plus photography and ’sixties Paris and a feature essay on Thomas Piketty’s celebrated Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 8 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #12: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION (SUMMER 2014) ARTICLES ARTICLES 10 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #12: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION (SUMMER 2014) ARTICLES DIDIER BAY’S PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIOLOGY OF POST-1968 PARIS LILY WOODRUFF We must always first contemplate something else—the water, or Diana, or the woods—in order to be filled with an image of ourselves. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition In the wake of May 1968, Didier Bay began documenting the daily life of return-to-order Paris such as it was visible through a telephoto lens that he positioned in the window of his Latin Quarter apartment. Nine years later, he published the 263-page volume, Mon quartier vu de ma fenêtre, or My Quarter Viewed from My Window, 1 [Fig. 1] which presents sequences of small black-and-white photographs of local residents in their homes and in the street accompanied by type-written explanatory narratives. At a time when sociologists were restructuring the landscape and politics of post-World War II France, Bay considered himself a “sociological” artist. 2 Yet, unlike sociology engineered for technocracy, Bay’s sociology did not quantify in order to categorize. Instead, the distant and multiply fragmenting views of his neighbors expressed a profound suspicion that it is impossible to fix social knowledge due to the insularity of the private individuals who compose a society. If Bay’s project invited doubt about sociology however, it transformed such doubt into a critique of order that was particular to the years following 1968. As much as Mon quartier is a study of his civilian neighbors, it is also an examination of the state power that resided down the block in the Republican Guard barracks on the Place Monge, and across the street in the apartment where an undercover police officer supposedly lived with his family. Through sequential repetition Bay continually fragments conventional, unified images of both civilians and state power. In this way, Bay resists casting the subjects of his serial photographs, the neighbors and state power alike, as “types” that could then be interpellated by the law—a law that constructs the fixed identities that define it and upon which it depends. 12 LILY WOODRUFF - DIDIER BAY’S PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIOLOGY OF POST-1968 PARIS Didier Bay, My Quarter Viewed from My Window As Bay claimed, his interest in surveilling others originated in a highly personal loss, that of his mother to suicide when the artist was twenty. Upon her death Bay experienced frustration at reviewing photographs from her life that fail to provide any explanation for her death. In the idiosyncratically typed English and French texts that introduce Mon quartier, Bay recounts, “I discover that the only souvenirs left of her are rather inaccurate and purely ‘motherly.’ Of the woman, the individual she was I knew nothing. Although it is more likely the individual than the mother that committed suicide” 3 [sic]. These old family photographs revealed to Bay the double impossibility at the heart of the artistic project he subsequently undertook: the inadequacy of identity categories, such as “mother,” to communicate information about those they would describe, and the limitations of the photographic medium in conveying information more dynamic than what is immediately visible in the static image itself. Mon quartier seeks to discover in the private lives of others what Bay never knew of his own mother, but in doing so, it presents sequential photographs that multiply views of his subjects and replace sociologically produced identity with a continuously evolving process of identification. 13 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #12: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION (SUMMER 2014) ARTICLES Categorical distinctions are not, however, absent in Bay’s book. Indeed, Bay’s observations are typically classed and gendered. The first page of photographs presents images of two types of women that Bay shows to be of a kind.[Figs. 2 and 3] Both have emerged from their windows to manipulate cleaning tools providing a moment for Bay to snap a few nearly illegible photographs on whose snippets of information he elaborates: These two women of different ages have the same “femine” occupation in the morning. The older one is dressed. It is an habit, a discipline taken a long time ago; since with age coming she can’t bear any more things or people that look neglected. Since sha has no beauty anymore, at least she tries to be neat , and live among neat things , cleanliness . The youngest uses the “middle-class” priviledge of the dressing-gown, as a distinctiv sign of not being obliged to go out to work, then wear street clothes [sic]. 4 While Mon quartier includes studies of men and children as well, the photographs’ residential site positions them to capture subjects that would resemble Bay’s mother.