German

This paper was initially presented as part of a GSA panel on Adaptation. It is a draft and should not be cited. You MAY however cite the revised article published in the proceedings of a Conference on Adaptations held at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, NZ,  in 2011. See downloadable file above.

I deal with the German adaptation for the screen of Willenbrock, a novel by the German author Christoph Hein --also a prominent writer of the former GDR. The paper argues a special case perhaps for post-Wall adaptations (of which Willenbrock constitutes an example). The theoretical framework is offered by Deleuze and Guattari's notion of Collective Enunciation as illustrated in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.

Although artist Daniel Spoerri –once a member of Nouveau Realisme—never directly quoted or cited Walter Benjamin in his numerous texts, his highly philosophical –and witty—approach to the classical and Neo-Avant-garde bears strong affinities with Benjamin’s concept of dialectics at a standstill or “that in which the Then and Now come together into a constellation like a flash of lightning.” In particular, the temporality of Benjamin’s constellation --a flash of historic insight that only could “enter into legibility at a specific time”-- and the ideology critique deriving from “the retrieval of the unfulfilled potential of the past” return in the objectual compositions, the Sentimental Museums, and Eat Art performances of Daniel Spoerri in the Sixties and Seventies. Spoerri’s own Neo-Avant-garde Art constitutes a return to the past of the classical Avant-garde that, as critic Hal Foster writes, is grounded in a “turning of” the Avant-garde.  In other words, the classical Avant-garde re-turns without repetition in Spoerri’s everyday art, which offers itself as the former’s different temporal constellation, its “parallax.”
My paper investigates Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art (his work with food since the early 1960s, including his early trap-paintings) and his Sentimental Museums from a temporal perspective. By focusing on temporality in Spoerri’s work, I illuminate how Benjamin’s own temporalization of the classical Avant-garde anticipated the Neo-Avant-garde’s –Spoerri’s in particular-- historical consciousness and discursive approach toward the Avant-garde as a whole, thus breaking through the Avant-garde’s own and its critics’ purely diachronic accounts.

Some of these thoughts came to inform my book Antidiets of the Avant-Garde. See in particular the chapter on Benjamin and that on Spoerri.

This paper discusses the presence of the Russian Avant-Garde in Benjamin's short text "Borsch", in which the narrator speaks of the experience of eating the red beet soup. The paper unpacks the crystallized presence of other texts by Benjamin on Moscow and the Avant-garde in this short "image of thought" (Denkbild).  For a revised and extended version, see my book Antidiets of the Avant-Garde.

A short analysis of Thomas Meinecke's novel "Tomboy" that revisits and revises the notion of "pop" literature common in the nineties in Germany. I look at how temporality is at work in the novel, not at gender as it may appear from the novel's and my paper's own title. I refer to a very limited range of texts on postmodernism too. This is a draft and should not be quoted without permission.

This abstract was prepared for a paper to be presented at the MLA in 2014 as part of a panel on Global Pirandello, organized by the American Pirandello Society (Prof. Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni).

Pirandello went to Berlin in 1928 with the hope that here, in the capital of both expressionist cinema and the so called “Strassenfilm”, his scenarios would capture the attention of directors such as Joe May, G.W. Pabst, F.W. Murnau, Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang, and also the Viennese Max Reinhardt.  It is ironic then that, the most well known German film based on an original story by Pirandello was directed by Walter Ruttmann, in Italy: Acciaio (1933). My paper offers a genesis of this film in the attempt to illustrate the multiple ironies behind the project. Hence, through an analysis of Acciaio, which I consider with an eye to the Italian socio-political situation informing cinematic production in these years, I ask two questions: On the one hand, to what extent does Ruttmann’s Neue Sachlichkeit unwittingly serve Pirandello’s ideas of an experimental cinema, which seemed more attuned to the world of shadows of expressionism? On the other hand, what elements of Pirandello’s character-based story indeed disturb the ideological content of the film, as the regime wished to read it? In answering these questions, the paper argues that Acciaio exemplifies the complex relations Pirandello entertained with film, especially German film.

Animals have been entwined from their beginning with photography and the cinema, constituting the subject, medium and challenge for the new technologies intent in capturing –halting-- and reproducing motion: the breathing of life or the cinematic. The relation between the transience of life and the mnemic quality of film’s own complex temporalities in particular have been often indexed on screen through the simultaneously material and evanescent presence of vulnerable animals. Among the most powerful images of such animals to date is the donkey Balthazar in Robert Bresson’s eponymous film (1966). While this film has been often interpreted as Christian allegory, the ties between Balthazar’s vagabond chance-like and fragmented life, hence the disjointed story about the donkey, and the ontology of film itself –including the laboring that goes into its making—are what counts for the purposes of this paper. Indeed I wish to trace here an itinerary of animals on screen that, starting with Bresson’s Au hasard, Balthazar and ending with Douglas Gordon’s 2008 Travail with my Donkeys, points to a kind of reflection on the cinema as itself an animal on the verge of extinction: for better or worse, if today labor (the donkey as animal of burden) migrates elsewhere–and here Carlo Mazzacurati’s Il Toro will be invoked in conjunction with Bresson—so does film as medium. Like Gordon’s 2003 Play Dead/Real Time, in which an Indian elephant is asked to carry out the command to lie down and stand up over and over again in front the camera and in a gallery, in memory of the domestication of animals in circuses and zoos, film attempts to get on its feet outside of the cinema, but also of the home, etc. The spaces of cinematic and artistic experience are here questioned and reconfigured through the presence of the animal. Materiality rather than spirituality and pure symbolism can already be seen as constitutive in Bresson’s film, as pointed out by Dana Polan who, thereby, views the film as also questioning theories of emotional montage a la Kuleshev; the elusiveness of mnemic fragments, rather than nostalgia for a lost object, are embodied by the donkeys and other screen animals in Gordon’s gallery films. Through screen animals, in short through the images of displaced animals’ gazes and sounds, the physical spaces where cinematic memory and vision –hence experience-- take place are at once instantiated and lost (e.g. Balthazar); found again and lost again (e.g. Travail with My Donkeys). In this reiterated loss of the spaces of memory and experience, film today–like an animal—reinvents itself as returning readymade image, both alien and familiar. My paper’s argument will follow from the close analyses of a) Bresson’s film and b) Gordon’s Donkeys, which I will intersperse with comments on other parallel art-and fictional films. The theoretical framework is provided by theories of cinema, such as Mary Ann Doane’s and Kaja Silverman, as well as theories on post-humanism, of the likes of Cary Wolfe. The work of Jonathan Burt, and Dudley Andrew --combining film and animals-- will also be considered.

Essay published in Creative Imitations and Appropriations: From Cinematic Adaptations to Re-makes. Select Refereed Proceedings of Research Colloquium, edited by Erica Todd, Clément Da Gama and Hilary Radner.  Dunedin, NZ: Cultures, Histories and Identities in Film Media and Literature Research Network, 2011.

The essay considers the work of New Zealand-based artist Sally Ann McIntyre, in particular her mini-FM radio station for programme-based and site-specific art transmission, i.e., Radio Cegeste. The article focuses on a series of radio projects in which the artist investigates avian acoustics at the crossroads between museology and this medium’s history. Based on several conversations with the artist and a long interview, the essay offers an appraisal of the myriads of ways in which McIntyre approaches issues such as New Zealand's colonial past, nationalism, as well as the environment. At the same time it situates McIntyre's production within the larger context of other contemporary art with birds. The essay argues that operating in the realm of sounds both with an ear to birds, and with critical attention to the technological and institutional history of the medium of radio, McIntyre translates for radio Mark Dion’s call to artists that they resist nostalgia.

An examination of the functions and meanings food takes in the Eat Art and Fluxus movements. This essay was written for the Arts & Foods catalogue of the Art Exhibition accompanying the EXPO 2015 in Milan. The catalogue is edited by renown Italian scholar Germano Celant.

An essay that analyses contemporary German literature --both popular texts and literary ones, including from the former German Democratic Republic-- about traveling to Italy in the contemporary age. How if at all is the Goethian journey to Italy revived? How is it transformed? How do concepts of beauty, history, past and future surface in these texts, and what image of the visited country, do such writings delineate?

German Studies Review, Vol 38: 3 (October 2015), pp. 491-508

This essay identifies key themes in Kleist’s “The Beggarwoman of Locarno,” such as the contrast between meaning and noise, perception and reason, and human and animal. All of these themes are traced back to the dog in the tale, which is shown to play a pivotal role in exposing and expressing the limits of language, anthropomorphism, and reason. In this way, the essay hopes to show the specific ways in which Kleist’s story undermines the human speciesist claims to identity and individuality. To this aim, particular attention is devoted to the roles that sound and temporality play in the text.

"Bear Images: Human Performativity and Animal Touch in Grizzly Man", in Animal Life and the Moving Image, edited by Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon (London: BFI, Dec 2015), CH 14.

In Grizzly Man (2005) Werner Herzog edits and presents footage shot by Timothy Dexter while in the company of grizzly bears. As the film states, Grizzly Man centres on the human story that unfolds in Treadwell’s videos, especially in the context of the fact that he was killed by one of his beloved animals. The bears are of interest to Herzog only insofar as they symbolise an inscrutable and indifferent nature – i.e. those aspects of nature that in Herzog’s view Treadwell misconstrued finally leading to his demise. Against this explicit framing of the bears by Herzog, this essay argues that Grizzly Man opens up a visual space for these animals in which they come to touch not only Treadwell, but also this film’s spectators. Faced with the excessive performances Treadwell enacts for his own cameras, the spectator of Grizzly Man is left wondering about the authenticity or ‘naturalness’ of the human, and is compelled to ask about the gaze humans cast on animals in general, and most specifically on the bears that share the cinematic frame with Treadwell.

Discussing an aspect of the European avant-garde that has often been neglected-its relationship to the embodied experience of food, its sensation, and its consumption-Cecilia Novero exposes the surprisingly key roles that food plays in the theoretical foundations and material aesthetics of a broad stratum of works ranging from the Italian Futurist Cookbook to the magazine Dada, Walter Benjamin's writings on eating and cooking, Daniel Spoerri's Eat Art, and the French New Realists.

Starting from the premise that avant-garde art involves the questioning of bourgeois aesthetics, Novero demonstrates that avant-garde artists, writers, and performers have produced an oppositional aesthetics of indigestible art. Through the rhetoric of incorporation and consumption and the use of material ingredients in their work, she shows, avant-garde artists active in the 1920s and 1930s as well as the neo-avant-garde movements engaged critically with consumer culture, memory, and history.

Attention to food in avant-garde aesthetics, Novero asserts, reveals how these works are rooted in a complex temporality that associates memory and consumption with dynamics of change.

“Noah’s Ark” was the title of a 2014 exhibition held in Dortmund and devoted to animals in contemporary art. The red-thread connecting the multi-media works on view was a critical gaze on the uses and abuses of animals, in the contemporary world of global production, consumption and spectacle. As the title suggests, critical art is invoked here both as a means through which the exploited animal others may be rescued, and as a site where they may find refuge first and then new beginnings, Art is refashioned as Noah’s ark, an archetypical archive. If thus animals on the one hand appear to have entered art as they once did the legendary Ark; on the other art has recently entered the Natural History Museum as itself the Ark and archive where it is possible to excavate and confront the archetypical figures of animals upon which Western human culture at large, and art within it, has built its foundations. Where animals have profusely populated canonical art settings and institutions, from museums to galleries, to art festivals such as Documenta in recent years, thereby receiving much attention (Baker, Broglio, The Guardian); the few art exhibitions and interventions (e.g. films) that have taken place in this other key institutional site of knowledge production, communication and preservation, knowledge devoted especially to other than human life, have gone almost unnoticed. Such lack of academic interest is particularly striking for it is here, I argue, that the archival tendency of contemporary art (Foster) and literature (e.g. Sebald) meets with the aesthetic, philosophical and ethical queries about animals that inform much of today’s cultural production.

My paper is part of a larger project that investigates the mining of European, and especially German-language, literary and artistic archives by those contemporary writers, filmmakers and artists who believe the engagement with the “animal question” as essential for and in the production of ethical and political art. The paper is based on two case studies, e.g. Yoko Tawada’s 2014 “bear” novel Etüden im Schnee and her reading of it at the Naturkundemuseum in Berlin (January 2015), on the one hand; and Daniel Spoerri’s 2012 exhibition at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Wien, on the other. In her novel, Tawada offers the autobiographies of three generations in the family of Polar bear Knut. The Lesung of the novel took place in the presence of the taxidermied bear Star who moved from Berlin Zoo to the museum after his death. In Spoerri’s show, titled Ein inkompetenter Dialog? Spoerri paired up specimen and documents he selected and examined in the massive archives and depots of the imperial museum, with recent and older assemblages made of found and used objects from flea-markets such as hair, skulls and reliquiae, assemblages which he exhumed for this occasion from his own depots and collections.  The paper illustrates how the two case studies initially seem to advocate two distinct and perhaps conflicting ways for humans to conceive of the life and actions of non-human animals. It then argues that in fact at closer look, both positions rely on and advocate a full immersion in the dusty repositories of natural history, where millions of animal bodies lie submerged, anonymous, and in silence, stored away, with no story to tell or show, precisely to rethink and tell the stories of their entanglements in human natural history. By ways of Tawada’s anthropomorphized writing that translates the traces of dispersed genealogies of bears into hard moving human language, and through Spoerri’s recourse to affective collages that mark a new Territorium where human and animal life merge with shared death to engender unexpected yet visible evolutionary variations and variants of human-animal productions, both projects are invested in exploring the material archives of natural history to collect, indeed re-collect and re-write for the future,  imaginative stories of interspecies co-habitation and collaboration, rather than separate and competitive in-habitation. As such, both undertakings participate in the institutive mode of critique that --as Hal Foster suggests-- typifies contemporary archival art, rather than reiterate the institutional critique purported in museum art.

KEYWORDS: Natural History Museums, archival art, animal question, autobiography, writing, collection, memory, Yoko Tawada, Daniel Spoerri, Jacques Derrida, Hal Foster.

Butler's notion of vulnerability helps to isolate those moments in the film that, , function as potential sites of emergence of a collective body politics, within the failed instances of recognition that the film also underscores. My interest in reading this film through the lens of Butler's positions is to take issue with some potent critiques that disparage it as conservative and arrogant with regard to its depiction of multicultural societies, as caught in the vicious cycle of resentment and contempt. I will argue that the film exposes the characters' vulnerability, rather than indifference.

GSAA:  “Kosmopolitische Gedankenwelten im deutschsprachigen Raum”
30th November – 2nd December, 2016 – Canberra
([email protected])
Dr. Gabriele Schmidt und Dr. Katie Sutton, Australian National University, Canberra

PANEL TITLE

“On the Uses and Abuses of Civilization and Cosmopolitanism for Life”
Organised by Cecilia Novero

A year after September 11th, 2001, on September 2002, the US president George W. Bush publicly stated: “We owe it to our children’s children to defend freedom, to free people from the clutches of barbarism.  We owe it to civilization itself, to remain strong and focused and diligent.” Six months later in March 2003, the United States of America invaded Iraq. The terms civilization and barbarism have re-surfaced again and again, in the media, since then. Most recently, after the attacks in Paris, on Charlie Hebdo, in November, and a few days ago, following those that took place in Belgium.
Where the history of the term civilization points to various approaches to it, mostly from within archaeology but also sociology, its current appropriation –especially in the singular— is reductive and “essentialist”. Accordingly, civilization returns as a property “of” the Western world, as the ultimate and sovereign seat of non-negotiable and self-evident universal values, such as freedom and democracy. In the plural, e.g., as civilizations, the term did not contribute to dislodging the West’s self-assured “civilized” state. In contrast, as some recent books’ title asserts, there is the West and there is the Rest, there are freedom and democracy on the one hand, and there is Islam, on the other. Monolithic and static accounts of civilization are advanced, according to which Islam (with its “bloody borders” [Huntington]) contrasts with the absolute “moral values” of Western civilization. Thus, the contrast is fashioned as a necessary clash, as was most notoriously proclaimed by Samuel Huntington, who –post 9/11—has been rediscovered as prescient by some, and widely critiqued by others.

But the debate on civilization is not just academic talk; to the contrary, it is at the heart of politics and ethics, for it informs the crucial question of who will be treated humanely, and who won’t, as Judith Butler explains. If discourse is practice, it is urgent that everyone –and we in the Humanities first of all–step up and engage, publicly, with the question of who does and who does not count as human, in these times of war and injury, of body counts. In these times, that is, when cosmopolitan ethics (the ethos of hospitality, for instance) and sovereign-state law exhibit to what extent their problematic marriage is de facto an intrinsically acute disagreement (suspension of the law within, in the name of the application of the law –the spread of democracy—outside, see Benhabib); it is imperative that the Humanities –we–intervene in such debates rather than dismiss them as “untimely”, or passé. We cannot simply relinquish terms such as civilization to those who in its name wage war and deem certain lives more grievable than others; we also cannot stand by and see notions such as cosmopolitanism be happily flaunted by a global market economy that exchanges these for the new incarnate abstract “virtues of Rationality, Universality and Progress” (Breckenridge, 6) at the expenses of those who stake their lives, in their full vulnerability and injurability, in the thick meanings of these notions (the migrants, refugees, enslaved laborers).
Wishing to contribute to the current debate on the functions and values of the Humanities in the global world, this panel seeks to take a close look at the terms civilization and cosmopolitanism through analyses of key philosophical, literary, and cinematic texts in order to use these texts as springboard for engaging the contemporary uses and abuses of the very same terms in public discourse.

Tim Mehigan and Simon Ryan examine cultural-literary models of engagement with civilization and cosmopolitanism respectively that have had recourse to a deep-time or longue durée approach. They investigate Nietzsche’s cross-disciplinary and genealogical study of values, and Roth’s concept of gnosis within a cosmopolitics of Egypt that has always been, so as to counter the short-termism that, according to Guldi and Armitage (2014) has dominated the Humanities in the past century, marginalizing these disciplines in their ability to imagine the future.

Peter Barton’s paper relies on two literary texts to dissect forms of un/tenable engagement with civilization: one calls for the embodiment of that master discourse through appropriation of its authorial position, an embodiment however that ends up eroding the master by its very means, e.g. the voice. The example here is Thomas Bernhard. The other example Barton contrasts with the former is Heimito von Doderer, who goes the opposite way: that of disengagement.

Cecilia Novero examines Michael Haneke’s film Code Inconnu / Code Unknown (2000) against those interpretations that read it as a conservative reiteration of the inevitable clash of civilizations or the failure of the supranational human mandate of hospitality (Kant, Benhabib, Derrida). In contrast, Novero argues, the film’s contribution to the debate on civilization today is that, in coming to terms with the heterogeneity of human values and the unchoosability of one’s earthly co-habitations (Butler), the film’s long takes instigate a deep focus on the human bodies that, if framed as instruments of violence, also emerge as vulnerable, and finally as always “grievable”.

Cecilia Novero -- Abstract
Email: [email protected]

“Precariousness in the Frames of War: Dynamics of a Sensate Cosmopolitics”

The scholarly analyses of civilization since Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996), have distanced themselves from this position’s essentialism and have rather endorsed a view of dynamic civilizational processes. They have followed the lead, and further elaborated upon, so to speak, of Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process (1939 but belatedly translated in the 1990s). Accordingly, civilizations are examined as “complex and heterogeneous entities that are capable of developing in a variety of directions. ... Civilizations are not closed systems like billiard balls but porous and open to outside influences” (Melleuish 2000:118). In spite of the problems that one can identify in Elias’s studies of customs and mores, of “habitus” in relation to State formation; one of the merits of his work, as Mennell underscores, is that it insists on process and interdependence. Interdependency means, here, that power ratios are a feature of all human relationships, that power is distributed unequally, and that over time the distribution of power changes in structured processes.

Just prior to 9/11 the film Code Unknown: An Incomplete Tale of Different Journeys (2000) was released: a series of successive tableaux depicting the random and generally ‘aggressive’ encounters among strangers, neighbours, family members, lovers etc. displays a network of challenging interdependence amongst the inhabitants of Paris. The film was variously critiqued as conservative reproduction of the idea of the clash of civilizations, static in form and essentialist in its politics, a politics that, allegedly, underwrites the doom and decline of the West, here presented as inescapably imprisoned in a ‘spatial’ present, a horizontal world, where the historical / vertical power relations have turned sour, so to speak, into irreparable relations of “contempt” (Ver-achtung) rather than care and attention, or response-ability (Achtung). The few critics who have observed the film’s engagement with hospitality have for their part emphasized how the film insists on hospitality’s failure and indeed intrinsic impossibility.
Contra these readings, my paper suggests that the film provides us both with the commonsensical reading of the clash of civilizations publicly proclaimed and sustained post 9/11 and with its antidote.  I see the antidote as lying in the film’s aesthetics of “long shots” through which it calls close attention to the (characters’) body as injurable and vulnerable –indeed injured—as well as grieving. This is a body that the film captures as impelled and overwhelmed by grief, a grieving for another’s pain, another distant being in whose violation one sees and feels oneself inextricably involved. The film, I argue, allows the spectator to see the interdependence of all in the precariousness (existential)/precarity (socio-political) of everyone’ s life, as exposed to the other, and as Butler, impels us to ask: “what obligations are to be derived from this dependency, contiguity and unwilled proximity that now defines each population, which exposes each to the fear of destruction? …” (Frames of War) In showing that all habitation is co-habitation, and that co-habitation is always fragile, the film impels us to demand a politics that takes into account and responds to the radical vulnerability of agency.

Phantasmagorias and Awakenings in Borderland Europe
Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment


The film This Very Moment (2003) is modeled on the fairytale “Hansel and Gretel,” of which director Christoph Hochhäusler highlights the most salient power-struggles that he adapts for post-socialist Europe. While in the fairytale issues such as parental love, class, and domesticity are presented as clear-cut oppositions –and even borders-- I argue that in this film about post-1989 Europe the same motifs, especially that of borders, overlap and implode so that none of its protagonists returns home unscathed. This Very Moment takes place near the official border between Germany and Poland. However, I suggest, it presents the border less in the traditional terms of differences in culture or history than as sites of uneven integration into the phantasmagorias of the capitalist West. This is the Europe that expands East with the aim, as it were, of bringing the East home. Hence, This Very Moment is a contemporary tale that, I maintain, deals with three interrelated aspects of life in post-Wall globalizing Europe:  (i) the phantasmagorias of consumer capitalism; (ii) whether the European characters in the film can break the spell of such phantasmagorias; and (iii) if and when the spell is broken, whether the characters are equipped for change, i.e., within their changing political landscape.