Draft 3 (July 24–
Befitting critical theory, Jameson’s subtitle for The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015) needs to be moved to The Benjamin Files (2021), which this essay will repeatedly invoke for language commensurate with HOWBEIT’s achievement. “Historicity,” Jameson writes in the latter book, “is a peculiarly complex conceptual problem, but unlike its equivalent in photography, it is not blocked by the reification of the past in an image” (233). The problem is access to the past as Event, which is not to be confused with access to Appearance in the present, and care is needed to tell the difference between the personal and collective history recorded by HOWBEIT and the present tense of the spectators’ viewing experience of perception. The photograph that for Jameson reifies a moment in time from the past might be said of the moving image of documentary film, yet this essay claims that the inveterate temporality of HOWBEIT abolishes the last vestiges of time points for critical theory still pointing at time and isolating individual objects, whether artwork or artist. Critical theory’s tasks should redirect to its missed opportunity in the 1930s: the convergence of theory and practice in the public sphere. Stop interpreting and start changing the world, for HOWBEIT shows how the work of art can theorize itself. As far as Mars from the Nietzschean eternal present of virtual worlds, the vital grasp at Appearance promised by the perception of time all but calls on art to begin history. (Adorno, Negative Dialectics: “All for fear that history might begin”). But history cannot begin without access to the past as Event. Is this a contradiction? Art and politics allegorized as Orpheus and Eurydice offers, in silhouette, a dialectical image for which the artwork, triumphantly appropriating the history of forms for the present, must not look back, must not submit to periodization, in its wager with Death to return to the living world and its impossible Real with Fanny Söderböck’s “revolutionary time.”
By her own account, the artist conceived of HOWBEIT as a date-stamped work of photography and video whose raw digital footage merges personal and collective spheres, documenting the artist’s own life as that life passes through manifold international cultural and social spaces alongside intimate exposures from everyday life with friends, family, and self. [Cite K-21 Dusseldorf and iMalat-Hane]. The conscious motivation for the present essay is to identify the magnitude of HOWBEIT’s discovery, one that exceeds without diminishing the artist’s expressed intention to create a fragmentary montage that can be entered at any sequence and viewed for as little as a moment and for as long as the spectator’s attention lasts. Drawing on a passing remark from Guattari’s posthumous notebook, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, and Carol Lesjak’s restatement by Žižek of Hegel’s most enduring insight, the following claim can be made for Banu Cennetoğlu’s 127-hour video installation: Between Žižek’s claim that the most important ontological problem for Hegel is emergent Appearance and Guattari’s insight that instead of “contemplation of the impossible real,” psychic life in a repressed and guilt-stricken society is condemned to sleepwalking the “unconscious contruction of an artificial real,” HOWBEIT opens a wide, fathomless interiority that gives at least those viewers that strive to practice the photographer’s patience with the waste of hours that make a day access to contemplating Guattari’s “impossible real” and seeing Appearance emerge from peripheries in flashes of color, shape, and sound. Time is given the chance to be perceived in this work, which is no small gift to aesthetics, but a bounty of potentiality for what Jameson has called “the historicity of forms.”
Vivienne Jabri’s 2025 Worlds in Conflict positions in her discursive collage critical theory (Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas), poststructuralism (Deleuze and Guattari), and political theory (Fanon, Zizek, Hardt and Negri). Although Badiou and Rancière are each cited only once, they loom as well over Jabri’s four “analytical categories” (4) for theorizing war: violence, people, words, and things. Writing at the intersections among these four categories, Jabri skirts both ideology and theoretical fiction in her sketch of a possible political imaginary for the postcolonial subject, or subaltern subjectivity, to “claim the right to politics.” Jabri’s “installation,” as she calls it, generously samples contemporary art, including Mohammed Sami’s 2022 Jellyfish; Baptist Coelho’s 2022 Agar is dharti tay koyi Jannat hai, o ay hi hai, ay hi hai, ay hi hai; Joseph Beuy’s 1983-1985 The End of the Twentieth Century; and Shaun Gladwell’s 2016 AR15 Field Strip. Introducing Cennetoğlu’s installation, then, invites dialogue between the political and aesthetic, or, more concretely, postcolonial theorization of a world at war and a documentary modality transposing personal and collective temporalities. Jabri’s four analytical categories help identify moments in HOWBEIT where individual works receive theoretical attention if by theory is understood combinations, or transpositions, of ideology and fiction (narrative). The four works are Catalog 2009, a digital print; the Documenta 14 site-specific work, Being Safe Is Scary; Gurbet’s Diary 27.07.1995-08.10.1997, a (potentially) interactive sculpture; and The List, which, respecting the artist’s oft-cited disclaimers that it is/was not art, this essay will call a memorial. A digital version may presently circulate on Instagram, so the present tense is warranted though problematic since purpose of The List was to occupy public space. In 2018, vandals in Liverpool attacked the memorial, and the project halted.
While the impossibility of a narrator capturing time confined to a single day in Michel Butor’s 1960 Degrés is remotely related to the spaces you’re about to enter, it’s Butor’s experiment with second-person point of view that will guide you to an exhibition space in 1915 Petrograd, after which you will meet Esfir’ Shub at the cutting table for The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, then ride with Rancière on Medvedkin’s cinema train until changing stations at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, entering on the top floor Gorky’s “kingdom of shadows” as if for the first time. Forego any previous encounter with the moving image, even Meklas and Warhol’s 1964 Empire. Banu Cennetoğlu’s 127-hour video installation, 1 January 1970 – 21 March 2018 . HOWBEIT . Guilty feet have got no rhythm . Keçiboynuzu . AS IS . MurMur . I measure every grief I meet . Taq u Raq . A piercing comfort it affords . Stitch . Made in Fall . Yes. But. We had a golden heart. One day soon I’m gonna tell the moon about the crying game (HOWBEIT), salvivically refuses to capture, contain, control, or captivate viewers’ experience of time, sound, and sight. Open your eyes, for they have been sealed shut for a century despite a Homeric catalog of experiments in materialist film.
You come from the countryside, and your name is Kazimierz Malewicz or Kazymyr Malevych. The West will sand your name smooth to Malevich. Unlike the fields and open sky, the borders separating Poland, Ukraine, and Russia are unstable. In Petrograd, on the threshold of the space where you will position your Black Square, your power of vision struggles to rest on the sacred corner. You are no stranger to the peasant’s love for the land or faith in a god that priest, cossack, and czar have disfigured beyond recognition. Only the roughly-wrought ikon binds the weathered eye and mind of the peasant to the will to survive. The flagrant fact of the sacred corner is that it needs neither spire nor dome, only a space where two walls meet in a bare room to form a corner that belongs to everyone. Extreme sensitivity to outer and inner light leads you to seize—appropriate—the peasant’s sacred corner, and you inaugurate the installation’s body-and-image space, the four walls of the room mirrored by the geometry of your Black Square.
“The origins of East European installation lie in painting. Here the viewer falls into the painting, makes the passage to the other side of the glass, enters into the painting. The Western installation is oriented toward the object, toward the appearance of different objects after the action. The Eastern installation is oriented toward space, toward the atmosphere of a particular situation.” (Kabakov 1995).
Three years from now, in 1918, Wladyslaw Strzeminsky will enter your field of vision and influence, elaborating decades later a theory of seeing that will wait for more than a century after the last Futurist exhibition for its English version: “[T]he image of the world that we see through our real visual consciousness is . . . a changeable image, dependent on historical development, on social systems arising in its course and, ultimately, on the class struggle shaping history” (2025, p. 31). If, as Lyotard once protested, “no one has seen the proletariat,” then it follows that no one can see history. But the experience of time and changing subjectivities’ perception of forms, emerging from refinements of lenses, digitalized images, and immediate dissemination and circulation, develops an audio-visual field of endless waste and repetition where no edge or plane is stable or permanent and where objects dissolve rather than materialize.
History may be rushing from the future, but only time is available to the eye’s craving for appearance. Carol Lesjak: “’The fundamental lesson of Hegel,’ Zizek writes in The Parallax View, is that the key ontological problem is not that of reality, but that of appearance: not ‘are we condemned to the interminable play of appearances,’ but ‘How could—in the middle of flat, stupid reality that is just there—something like appearance emerge?’” (247). The sudden, unexpected manifestation of appearance in fleeting, mutating forms is the discovery of Cennetoğlu’s HOWBEIT. The photographer’s discovery is the determination to document the vast expanse of “flat, stupid reality that is just there.” Appearance abrupts into view only if the eye drifts, floats, and flounders among attenuations of mundane, routine detail that aspire to deplete attention.
Sergei Yutkevich writes about meeting you in Summer, 1927, in an editing room, 1st Goskino Factory, Zhitnaya ulitsa. It’s late at night, and he doesn’t know what to do with the strips of film he’s been given to edit. He finds you in the next room, working late. “She’s friendly, sociable. She’s always ready to help” (1). Everyone calls you Edi. But Yutkevich writes that you did not fully appreciate the importance of your “breakthrough” for the future of cinema by making the first full-length film composed entirely from archived images (6). Keith Sanborn calls you “one of the founders of the genre of films made from other films” (xi) Yutkovich titled his memoir: “Sorceress of the Editing Table,” and Alla Gadassik calls her essay: “A Skillful Isis: Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker” (A Companion to Documentary Film History, Wiley & Sons, 2021). Jay Leyda’s term for your work is “compilation film.”
If Ruth Berlau photographed theater, you make film from reels of footage and photographs. “During these two months, I watched sixty thousand meters of film. For the film I selected five thousand two hundred meters. Fifteen hundred meters went into the film . . . The film (Fall of the Romanov Dynasty) consists of seven reels and with intertitles is one thousand seven hundred meters long” (110-111). Sanborn uses the difference between metaphor and metonymy to distinguish your work from Vertov’s, yet he uses metaphor to figure your difference: “she uses a slow burn, which ignites only after a long period of kindling, not an immediate conflagration, born of quick sparks” (496). He also writes that your films give “extraordinary attention to detail” and that your “sense of montage is subversive in its indirect quality” (497). Vertov’s cuts, for Sanborn, want to be absorbed by the viewer’s consciousness without the viewer’s active participation in processing them. He cites your criticism of Vertov: “this kind of montage helps the conception of the scene very little and leads the spectator to fall in love with the device itself” (501). Much of Barrett Watten’s The Constructivist Moment (2003) is premised on this formalistic innovation, the so-called ‘baring of the device.’ Against Vertov’s “utopian drive towards simultaneity, the eternal present of metaphor, the instantaneity of the single frame,” Sanborn affirms your “repeated insistence on a first name, a last name, and the date of a shot,” whose “catalogic impulses are indexical of a worldview driven by the pole of metonymy, of linearity, of historicity” (501).
“I learned how to properly assess the construction and composition of a shot. I cultivated a memory for shots, for the content and motion within the frame, for the rhythm of pacing of things as a whole. I interiorized when it was necessary and appropriate to change from a wide shot to a medium shot, from a medium shot to a close up and back again” (Shub 498). But Sanborn also writes that you are “remembered in Russia by film historians of considerable standing only as one of Eisenstein’s lovers, or someone who used too much text” (504). Eisenstein’s April 14, 1932 drawing of you on p. 505 separates head and torso from your lower body by stretching an arch of flesh from the middle of which a lightbulb distends. The lightbulb’s significance should be seen in the light of Lenin’s 1921 calculation: “Communism= Soviet power + electrification.” (Notes on Electrification). The twenty of so marks for the rays of light emitted by the lightbulb are repeated in what looks like ten marks in an arc around your sex. Your collaborator and lover wrote on the drawing: “Esfir’ Shub having stepped on the throat of her own song.” (Your feet are on your neck). The text signals caricature rather than homage, although Bergan’s biography notes that it was at your “cutting table that the mysteries of montage were revealed to Eisenstein” (89).Still, the marks for the rays of light repeated around what looks like a cursive W to draw the center of your being engender a theory of the labial eye. Alonzo and Bitrán associate an “erotic impulse” with Zaha Hadid’s interiorities in her version of one of Malevich’s arkhitektons compared to the “pure exteriority” of the original.
Can Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One be read in Eisenstein’s inscription, “Esfir’ Shub stepping on the throat of her own song”? “Not knowing what she wants, ready for anything, even asking for more, so long as he will ‘take’ her as his ‘object’ when he seeks his own pleasure. Thus she will not say that she herself wants; moreover, she does not know, or no longer knowns, what she wants” (p. 25). Narrative her own desire, Irigaray fictionalizes theory – fictive as in fictive music – and a figure emerges that by 2026 transmits more than the experience of the sex, genitalia, which the theorist forms as biologican difference. The labial eye emerges from this difference: “Women’s desire would not expected to speak the same language as man’s; woman’s desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks” (25). HOWBEIT’s refusal of totality extends touch, the materiality of touching, to visualization; the camera roams among details and settles for indefinite durations of movement, shape, volume, color. “She finds pleasure almost anywhere . . . the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined – in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness” (p. 28). This is the light that Eisenstein marked around his cursive W on the sketched body of the better artisan. The labial eye is one way to see and think with the camerawork of Banu Cennetoğlu. The upper-floor placement of the installation conveyed the Walker’s immense respect for the work and its artist. The words that began to materialize in your notebook trace just as one draws a line by following the line on a page placed below the superimposed page that fingers use pen to push from page to line, edge, contour. Sensation of floating, visually, sonically, Kristeva’s soma, according to Söderbäck (cite).
But those marks: “A mark is the face of a fact. A letter is naked matter breaking from form from meaning. An anagram defies linear logic. Any letter of the alphabet may contain its particular unravelling spirit. A mark is a dynamic cut. Dynamic cutting is a highly stylized form of editing. Sequences get magpied together from optical surprises, invisible but omnipresent verbal flashes, flashes of facts. A documentary work is an attempt to recapture someone something somewhere looking back. Looking back, Orpheus was the first known documentarist: Orpheus, or Lot’s wife” (Howe 49-50). Rancière writes that Le Tombeau d’Alexandre “fictionalizes the history of Russia” since “[t]he real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” (38). The fiction of Marker’s Le Tombeau belongs to the speculative philosopher’s Aesthetic Regime of Art (Vico, Cervantes, etc., p. 81). Marker’s Tombeau is an aesthetic object. For Rancière, as for Lyotard, neither art nor philosophy can see either history or time. Rancière’s totalizing view of Marker’s documentary overlooks the fragment, the additional element, the unassimilable detail that inspires association with Malevich’s Black Square, Shub’s labial eye, and HOWBEIT’s discovery of Söderbäck’s Kristevan revolutionary time.
Draft 2 (July 23-24)
“the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound to the idea of redemption”
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” II
Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, encountered at Istanbul’s Sakip Sabanci in the days following AMPS’ July 6-8, 2026 conference, incites Ilya Kabakov’s installation for the 49th Venice Biennale, “Not everyone will be taken into the future” (Tupitsyn, p. 5). Kabakov’s admonition aptly applies to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Ono appropriates Duchamp’s logos and cut glass that reduces woman to object and function as The Bride Stipped Bare’s word play dies a slow death at the hands of recruits Ono summons to perform her “claim to the right to politics” (Jabri 2025), which for feminism since the second wave is to claim the right to one’s body. Other than Christina Kiaer’s 2005 Imagine No Possessions, a more radical message for subalterns of any and plural genders and nationalities can hardly be conceived. The gall of Cut Piece gives leave to say to the Museum of Modern Art, both the institution and its looming Western category, “Hail-fellow-well-met”! (Killian, p. 59), backflush and purge. The century-plus rockets’ red, white and blue glare of early modernism is allegorized in a single phallocentric object: R. Mutt’s urinal. Two years earlier, in the East, rose the Black Square, conceived not only to absorb the Russian folk icon but to absorb and appropriate the spires of capital behind all those appearances of appearances bearing down from America, as Rilke once warned.
German critical theory ages as well as French wine. In her 1996 Body- and Image-Space, Sigrid Weigel pairs Julia Kristeva with Walter Benjamin (“Towards a female dialectic of enlightenment” (pp. 63-79). Feminist aporias that remain relevant a generation later include the work of demolishing doll-like images of the feminine in the face of Internet proliferations of object and function meme imagery, organizing liberation struggles without subordinating theory to practice, rejecting the “‘male order’” hook, line and sinker while braving punishing flows of patriarchal signifying practices, overcoming internalizing “dominant symbolic and imaginary structures” and negotiating what is perhaps the site of greatest conflict, the desire for subject position without abandoning its critique (p. 63). The gender question, like the class question, cannot even be raised without patriarchal language doing its disabling work and rendering crippling limitations to emancipatory concepts and their representation. Weigel links Kristeva to Benjamin, first, to “refute” the artificial separation between critical theory and poststructuralism (a division that serves hegemonic interests, one might add, though how could Weigel have foreseen the present generation’s splitscreen between Washington’s military expansionism and state university systems in the United States serving as aircraft carriers of idea programming from coast to coast fostering, among other things, the illusion that with the Frankfurt School’s wartime relocation to New York City the enlightenment horizon of the French Revolution died with Walter Benjamin, denied safe passage just as any subaltern today risking death on America’s and Europe’s borders) and second, to activate Benjamin’s “thinking in images” for a future philosophy of “‘the feminine/the female’” (p. 64).
The absence of Body- and Image-Space from Fanny Söderbäck’s 2019 Revolutionary Time as well as from the 2012 version of the theorist’s title chapter in Signs, signals yet another aporia. when Weigel’s chapter on Kristeva and Benjamin cover much the same ground. “Revolt without critical thinking paves the way for totalitarianism” (Söderbäck, p. 311) might, and must, be amended to read: Revolt without Critical Theory paves the way for totalitarianism. Despite the blind spot this absence exposes (and absences are always less important than pleading the case to close the gap and persuade theory wielding so wonderful a title as Revolutionary Time that Kristeva and Benjamin need be read together. Alongside her early commitment to the semiotic fluidity of poetic language, Kristeva challenges “popular feminist reception of myths” by seeing the drive to sameness in metaphor: “A metaphorical application which actualizes and reinterprets mythical figures tends to remain within the structure of the imaginary in which, through operations on the level of identification, differences are not discerned or are erased. It is a different matter if we reflect upon the structuring of our perception and experience through the patterns of the imaginary, and read mythical constellations as primal scenes of our history that are preserved in memory (Weigel, p. 75). Anticipating Kristeva, “[j]ust such a thinking-in-images that goes beyond metaphor” can be read in Benjamin’s recognition of the usefulness of magic and myth in his theory of language, especially when “he discovers ‘correspondences between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology’” (Weigel, p. 75).
Vivienne Jabri’s defense of the Frankfurt School’s contemporary relevance is first signaled in the essay, “War, Aesthetics, and the Political” (2024) and subsequently elaborated in Worlds in Conflict (2025). In the essay, Benjamin and Adorno help Jabri retrieve the memory of Europe’s pre-war struggle against fascism while distinguishing between Adorno’s conflicted insistence on the autonomy of the work of art and Benjamin’s commitment to politicizing art (pp. 55, 64-67). In Worlds in Conflict, this commitment is significantly broadened to draw a hard line between “complicit technoscientific discourse of awe and wonder, and aesthetic interventions, from the visual arts to literature, that enact a Brechtian interruption” (p. 171). In other words, Jabri’s spatial-temporal shift to the present, “from the events of September 11 to the invasion of Ukraine to the ongoing crisis in the Middle East” (p. 181), brings Benjamin to the threshold of Weigel’s Aktualität: “revitalized or modified validity for the present moment” (p. 3). Although Worlds in Conflict’s nearly twenty pages of references do not cite Weigel, the presence in Jabri’s book of Revolution in Poetic Language and Strangers to Ourselves in addition to two sets of interviews, among several dozen citations to Kristeva, speaks to the wisdom of Weigel’s association of Critical Theory with French feminism a generation earlier.
Like turns on a country road, the winding Kristevan path that shuts off Weigel from Söderbäck and even Weigel’s contemporary, Vivienne Jabri at King’s College’s Department of War Studies, illustrates how the transmission of knowledge and practice, in theory as well as the arts, must never be assumed. The Frankfurt School returned to Europe after the war. Despite significant exceptions, a generation of North American professors and professor-poets programmed postmodern deconstructive doxa everywhere in the 1980s and 90s. Dissertation factories perpetuate themselves, like creative writing programs (Jameson, pp. 279-92), and social media is a flash in the pan. It takes long nights of sleepless vigilance after even longer work days to track the present-past as the future roars towards competing versions of catastrophe. The alarm does not understate Jabri’s urgency combined with scholarly, nuanced overtures to international law and juridical responsibility. Her summary statements turn to the 1948 principles of human rights that emerged from the United Nations after the defeat of fascism and Washington’s Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki incineration of civilian populations. Jabri’s 2024 essay cites the 2003 nighttime bombing of Baghdad as a case study of an empire’s demonstration to the world of its right to bomb other nations with impunity (p. 53), but the tradition begins in 1945. “The concept is controversial,” writes Jabri of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “yet when the lens is turned toward the declaration and its performativity, we appreciate that the concept of the universal is irreplaceable in not only capturing sheer diversity of what it means to be human but also, drawing on Adorno, the excess that is the place where politics is possible, where individuals and peoples alike can make their claims in contesting exclusionist renderings of the universal” (p. 177).
During 2026-2027, Kanal | Centre Pompidou in Brussels and the Massachussets Art Museum in Boston will exhibit Banu Cennetoğlu’s installation, Right?, which engages the humanitarian, not epistemological, crisis of disassociation between word and deed separating the military prerogatives of the Great Powers from the language of the United Nation’s thirty articles and their legal definitions of international human rights. In view of the jarring resemblance between nineteenth-century and twenty-first century geopolitics, Boris Groys’ terse remark lays bare the issue: “when one reads newspapers or watches TV today one gets the feeling that an invisible hand has erased the whole of twentieth-century culture, with its universalist utopian aspirations, and put us back into a world in which national-cultural identities dominate.” (e-flux, “Towards a New Universalism”). Jabri’s and Cennetoğlu’s double-edged affirmation of the principles and fraught recognition of their referential fragility, the difficulty of their legal enforceability, represents a perfect meeting point between postcolonial theorist and Istanbul artist. The supreme, or symptomatic, irony of their meeting is that it arrives by way of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis after an encounter by this writer, over seven long afternoon visits, with a 127-hour video installation or Benjaminian/Kristevan concept-image: 1 January 1970 – 21 March 2018 · H O W B E I T · Guilty feet have got no rhythm · Keçiboynuzu · AS IS · MurMur · I measure every grief I meet · Taq u Raq · A piercing Comfort it affords · Stitch · Made in Fall · Yes. But. We had a golden heart. · One day soon I’m gonna tell the moon about the crying game, 2018 (HOWBEIT). Jameson’s word for such an ambitious project is “maximalism” (2015), which for a poet with a United States passport conjures Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems (1983), but the arc or ark of HOWBEIT’s triumph is its indivisible blending of the personal with the political and its refusal, or inability, or indifference to the difference between art and life.
However, for North American poetics, on this question of dissolving social and psychic partitions separating the human being from the artist, Nightboat’s “foundational” New Narrative anthology, Writers Who Love Too Much (2017), and more specifically, the same publisher’s Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (2019), offer parallel aesthetics of life-as-art or art-as-life. HOWBEIT appears in 2018, so the constellation of these dates may suggest more harmony of the spheres rather than any direct or indirect line of influence although Kevin Killian, one of the editors of Writers Who Love Too Much, was a well-known reviewer of contemporary art (Art Forum obituary) so it is not impossible that Killian’s writing was known to the Turkish artist who lived in New York City at the turn of the century. Most specifically, as Benjamin writes in his theses on the philosophy of history, the “historical materialist” recognizes, ultimately, that “weak messianic power, a power on which the past has its claim” (p. 390). In the fifth thesis, Benjamin writes: “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’” Sophie Coppola’s 2025 film,Fairyland, is an important movie about Steve Abbott, and the film may offer the gift of a healing image of a vanished San Francisco gay bohemia, but to return to historical materialism and Benjamin’s thesis: “Articulating the past . . . means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (p. 391). That danger is best expressed in the famous passage from thesis VI: “The only historical capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.” (391). It’s impossible to prove, but devoted readers of Walter Benjamin’s life and philosophy cannot avoid the thought that the fate of Asja Lacis in Stalin’s USSR names the enemy here, and it is not fascism. Thus the four corners, or quadrant, emerges: Jabri’s four analytical categories, violence, people, words, and things, offer themselves as guideposts to HOWBEIT’s interminable, obsessive, formless expanse of time from which float to the surface more signs and images and fragments of form than language could ever hope to capture let alone represent; at the same time HOWBEIT’s anti-aesthetic opens its arms to receive the most destitute of orphans in the history of postwar American poetry: Steve Abbott’s sequence of seven sonnets, Conversation with Aliens, buried on pages 56-57 of A Book of Correspondences for Jack Spicer (ACTS 6, 1987).
The Additional Element of the Architecture for the Book (not Essay)
1. The fate of Arctic Summer – how could a book found on the shelves of Borders in Cleveland, a mass paperback, disappear? Privately printed? How many copies? These are “known unknowns” (essential NOT to separate Rumsfeld from “Rome really male” insight in the “Arctic Summer” poem).Curse of gifts in an internal colony (postcolonial theory). The gift of the inscribed copy of the RD to one of the two (check the 2007 memoir for any mention of a gift to the author during or after the interview, or gift-giving, generosity, influence). Hermeneutics. The curse of the gift or withholding of the gift will be there. Gifts are recognitions. “You are important.” B: “Nobody ever told him he was important.” So the gift (“You are important” from one of the few great poets of the 20th century, is immediately stolen – deadlocked – by a jealous glare recorded in “Conversations with Aliens”). Jealousy in Proust’s first volume. Pathology. Philosophy: What are the origins of jealousy? (Envy in the Middle Ages). Political economy of Envy. Psychoanalysis of Envy. Dialectic possible built on premise of Lack. Envy’s disguises. Masks. Berlant writes about this. Performativity. It is also one source for Formalism in Art. (Memory: stray emphatic remark, critical, of the “Technique” title for the second volume of the New Coast anthology. Psychoanalysis: overdetermined emphasis. In the criticism, or protest, affirmation). “That’s not what the work is doing when that is all the work is doing.” Technique performs the will to write when something else is missing. Fear of the unconscious. The Formalism comes from somewhere other than RD or Spicer. Lines of influence are a waste of time.
2. The gift of the Ur-Faust is an object. The object is bewitched. Magic spell. The essay for the greater book that HOWBEIT incites (art/life) must approach indigenous materials so as not to break the spell. WB’s historical materialism gives permission to work with magic. Provocation: RD’s Ur-Faust is the last book (cf. Shelley’s The Last Man). Provocations are forceful fictions. They probe the individual/collective imaginary. Alternately suspend and lower the boom on RD’s exploitation of the situation. “I am a great poet.” (“I have the right to pick favorites”). For a communal poetics, the myth of the great poet must be demystified. The author of Arctic Summer was bad on this, wrong. Origin of Little Caesar. Symptomatic impatience with Dale and Denise at the open house, humming to himself and tapping his foot. Dale was a friend of Etel’s. Power broker? Who would assign himself the role of power broker in an internal colony? The second object, then, that is bewitched is Recent Events. Can only guess how it has been appropriated to explain the author’s absence. Did anyone read the last chapter of Arctic Summer? The novelist’s insight into his own limitations, his inability to separate himself from the so-called “community” impaired his aspiration to Great Art.The tell-tale heart: “fake book” in Lullaby Alibi. But also, the question, “in severe question” (check quote), the Book itself. Does Lullaby Alibi pronounce the death of the book? Displacement: Make the Ur-Faust the last book, not the true last book. Arctic Summer author is Pekka Kervinian and engineered Blue Lion’s 2005 Proletariaria. The question of its author’s return to San Francisco was being discussed – are there letters? emails? records? – NC likely communicated the 97 phone call, “once you are reintegrated into the community,” an unacceptable condition. Why? The easy answer is Pride. The less artful art/life answer is that by 98 Cleveland was just as good if not better than San Francisco. Large studio, light in the windows, Realsprache outside. Bus travels around the city. Works and Days written before going online. Who knows what might have happened if the lure to join the Buffalo Poetics List had not come by way of a phone call from someone you met at Grim’s. Define “local poet.” For the power brokers, they are servants. Class analysis: only a class-conscious proletarian would survive walking away, and you almost did not survive the first year.
3. Class analysis, which is impossible without feminism (Fraser’s MAJOR), begins with servitude. The vulnerability of writers and artists from working-class households makes them especially vulnerable to exploitation by the powerful and by those seeking power, which is a petit-bourgeois prerogative. Not just a birthright, but training, drilled into children from professional households. (Family itself as threat to communal forms. Under the regime of Capital, birth parents cripple, if not kill, their children. Medea?). “She’s ambitious” (the author of Arctic Summer about your friend and ally in San Francisco). Arctic Summer’s “hoot” and later, online play (Transcendental Friend?): “Lesbians until graduation.” Blasphemy: not everyone in the queer community was actually gay, heterosexual relations were conducted under political cover of gay and lesbian identity. (Private letter). The ambition explains the betrayal over the Wade Park prophet, but Little Caesar was also ambitious. “Conversations with Aliens”: “The tremendous died with World War II,” / you say.” Who is talking from the other side of the question? Art/Life dialectic says the voice, the subjectivity forming the poem – read again last night, HOWBEIT in verse, utterly honest – for WB’s historical materialist: the poem inscribes a proletarian voice. It is a class that is speaking as much as it is an individual speaking. SA either channeled Jozsef (when was the Bakti translation available?) or was reading him. Malevich: internalization. Not a line of influence. The Lily in Attila’s voice. “Small things sweep me away.” Counter: no documentary evidence from FOP in 99 after posting 7X7. Remember “delusions of grandeur” and guessed who was writing it. Jealous of Agora/Soup choice. The phrase returns in the memoir. MP effect: the writer no longer in touch with his psyche. Public persona. Might explain capitulation to technology. These must be inferences absent Nettime exposure of hacking practices, but no one wants to reveal the reach and capabilities of their counter-surveillance tools.
4. Deniability is a powerful political tool, and nothing about the second generation of the San Francisco Renaissance is NOT political because of the amount of money and symbolic capital invested. Russian Don Quixote (saw it in Cleveland): “Tonight he gave up his own name.” Nobody does this. The petit-bourgeois would accept almost any other fate, or commit any crime (Dostoevsky), to avoid the loss of one’s name, the signature attached to their books. The translation issue in Moscow Diary is profound: A Russian intellectual is talking about authorial self-consciousness and WB hears him saying that Shakespeare wrote before the invention of printing. WB no clue about high standards of Russian education from the nineteenth century. Learned this in Tomsk. Can data prove this? Among world nations not cripped by postcolonial exploitation, North America has the lowest educational standards. Relevance? Why identity politics takes root in U.S. The only intelligence that survives are among those who do not pass through higher education, or sleepwalk through it. Brutal propaganda system. Who else taught undergraduates general education for twenty years? Bev? Shift from internal colony to national politics. Shift from Coppola milieu to Hillbilly Elegy. Read the two memoirs side by side. The problem is the form of the memoir, a maelstrom that wraps the writer into illusions of self-importance. HOWBEIT is not a memoir. The camera is not a pen or keyboard. Counter: in a surveillance society, how much do audiences see of the private person if the private person has been colonized by performativity, which is the demand of late Capital surveillance systems. (SWP militant ventriloquizing Boss culture, which is always Patriarchal: “What are you doing when you are at home? You must be doing something wrong if you are not at work and we (the Invisible Employer) can’t see you.”) Early in the work, the Invisible Employer allegorized the Unconscious; technology seeks to usurp the individual’s unconscious and direct/supervise their behavior, choreograph their thought. Biometrics, keystrokes, cameras, hacked screens: The only defense against this level of exploitation is – what is the Russian word? – collective living – Russians were said to hate it, but the famous musical is nostalgic. Even though they hated each other, they cared for each other. A social system where nobody was isolated or alone. U.S. technological capabilities are applied to isolate and program. The optimal consumer and tool of Capital is an isolated individual. Connect to late Capital’s determination to abolish time so that an immobilized society lives in an eternal present. Your experience of surveillance, the ultimate threshold of deniability – nobody believes – worse, where APA/Soviet behavioral psychology is applied – “it is just your imagination. Your behavior needs to be corrected.”
July 22 Note: Paragraph 4, which ends by comparing Kristeva’s emphasis on cultural revolt to Saint-Simon, is displaced or amended by Erilar Frischmann’s counter sent by email on the evening of July 21. Whether accidental collaboration or channeled intervention, Frischmann’s paragraphs (6-24) were written independently of the first four paragraphs; in other words, these are parallel texts that would address the same subject without either writer aware of the other’s writing. What is the difference between theory and fiction? The first three paragraphs (the fourth veers towards other matters) set out to situate the subject in relation to the museum, but the remaining paragraphs (except for the response) address the subject imaginatively rather than discursively. For anyone making art or who would aspire to write about the transformative power of art’s impact on how we see each other individually and socially, what is the nature of our address?
“This art project reflects the notion that the actual museum situation in which we now view the works is also the institutional setting in which the history of art can be accessed and pressured to mean what the authorities who manage culture for us want it to mean.” – Mieke Bal, “Memories of the Museum,” Acts of Memory, p. 173.
Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, encountered at Istanbul’s Sakip Sabanci in the days following AMPS’ July 6-8, 2026 conference, incites Ilya Kabakov’s installation for the 49th Venice Biennale, “Not everyone will be taken into the future” (Tupitsyn, p. 5). Kabakov’s admonition aptly applies to Marcel Duchamp’sThe Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.* Ono attacks Duchamp’s logos and cut glass that reduces woman to object and function as The Bride Stipped Bare‘s word play dies a slow death at the hands of recruits Ono summons to perform her “claim to the right to politics” (Jabri 2025), which for feminism is to claim the right to one’s body. Other than Christina Kiaer’s 2005 Imagine No Possessions, a more radical message for subalterns of any and plural genders and nationalities can hardly be conceived. The gall of Cut Piece gives leave to say to the Museum of Modern Art, both the institution and its looming Western category, “Hail-fellow-well-met”! (Killian, p. 59), backflush and purge. The century-plus rockets’ red, white and blue glare of early modernism is allegorized in a single phallocentric object: R Mutt’s urinal. Two years earlier, in the East, rose the Black Square, conceived not only to absorb the Russian folk icon but to absorb and appropriate the spires of capital behind all those appearances of appearances bearing down from America, as Rilke once warned.**
German critical theory ages as well as French wine. In her 1996 Body- and Image-Space, Sigrid Weigel pairs Julia Kristeva with Walter Benjamin (“Towards a female dialectic of enlightenment” (pp. 63-79). Feminist aporias that remain relevant a generation later include the work of demolishing doll-like images of the feminine in the face of Internet proliferations of object and function signs and memes, organizing liberation struggles without subordinating theory to practice, rejecting the “‘male order’” hook, line and sinker while braving punishing flows of patriarchal signifying practices, overcoming internalizing “dominant symbolic and imaginary structures” and negotiating what is perhaps the site of greatest conflict, the desire for subject position without abandoning its critique (p. 63). The gender question, like the class question, cannot even be raised without patriarchal language doing its disabling work and rendering crippling limitations to emancipatory concepts and their representation. Weigel links Kristeva to Benjamin, first, to “refute” the artificial separation between critical theory and poststructuralism (a division that serves ruling class interests, one might add, though how could Weigel have foreseen the present generation’s splitscreen between Washington’s military expansionism and USA state university systems serving as aircraft carriers of culture programming from coast to coast, paying European academics handsome guest-worker salaries to perpetuate the illusion that with the Frankfurt School’s wartime relocation to New York City the enlightenment horizon of the French Revolution died with Walter Benjamin, denied safe passage just as any subaltern today risking death on America’s and Europe’s borders) and second, to activate Benjamin’s “thinking in images” for a future philosophy of “‘the feminine/the female’” (p. 64).
The absence of Body- and Image-Space from Fanny Söderbäck’s 2019 Revolutionary Time as well as from the 2012 version of her title chapter in Signs, signals yet another aporia. when Weigel’s chapter on Kristeva and Benjamin cover much the same ground. “Revolt without critical thinking paves the way for totalitarianism” (Söderbäck, p. 311) might, and must, be amended to read: Revolt without critical theory paves the way for totalitarianism. The specter of dissertation advisors partitioning critical theory from French feminism is hardly a wild surmise from a peak in Darien, yet despite the blind spot this absence exposes (and absences are always less important than seizing the opportunity to close the gap and persuade theory wielding so wonderful a title as Revolutionary Time that Kristeva and Benjamin need be read together. Alongside her early commitment to the semiotic fluidity of poetic language, Kristeva challenges “popular feminist reception of myths” by seeing the drive to sameness in metaphor: “A metaphorical application which actualizes and reinterprets mythical figures tends to remain within the structure of the imaginary in which, through operations on the level of identification, differences are not discerned or are erased. It is a different matter if we reflect upon the structuring of our perception and experience through the patterns of the imaginary, and read mythical constellations as primal scenes of our history that are preserved in memory (Weigel, p. 75). Anticipating Kristeva, “[j]ust such a thinking-in-images that goes beyond metaphor” can be read in Benjamin’s recognition of the usefulness of magic and myth in his theory of language, especially when “he discovers ‘correspondences between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology’” (Weigel, p. 75).
Without Weigel’s Benjamin, these two citations to Söderbäck’s Kristeva sound more cultural revolutionary than historical materialist: “Revolt is a ‘dialectical process’ without end, ‘a state of permament questioning, of transformation, change, an endless probing of appearances’” (Revolt, She Said, p. 120). That we are ‘still to come’ means, precisely, that our culture must be permeated by ‘permanent revolution’” (Revolt, She Said, p. 12). The specific (“microscopic”) context for the first reference carries an explicit disavowal of “political ‘revolts’”, citing like bookmarks 1793 in France and 1917 in Russia. Söderbäck passes twice over Kristeva’s concept of permanent revolution, pausing on the first to add, “as Kristeva herself puts it” (p. 100). One wonders whether university life in Europe and America has reached such a collective forgetfulness that, in the interest of historical accuracy, the changed name of the revolutionary who advanced the theory in the same work of history Benjamin enthusiastically recommended to Gretel Adorno, the same revolutionary whose passage through Istanbul inspired one architect from the Global South, during the AMPS Isik conference, to search for the place, the site, the address where he lived and worked as long as possible, must be passed over for fear of retribution. That tag on a wall on a campus in Greece that Banu Cennetoğlu raised over Kassel’s Fridericianum for Documenta 14 about ten years ago, BEINGSAFEISSCARY, may enjoy a strange afterlife long after the site-specific event. Or, rather than rewriting history, are misattributions a generative example of Jameson’s “extreme reading”? Söderbäck’s Revolutionary Time even begins to sound less safe than Kristeva without Benjamin, another disillusioned 68er shorn of the Nazi refugee’s influence, a feminist psychoanalyst who substitutes critical thinking for critical theory and who believes in a revolution of intimacy much like Saint-Simon preached a revolution in consciousness.
Western theory, even if it goes by the name of post-theory as a recent collection of essays from Turkey attests, should think about turning toward the East, and follow art. The supreme, or symptomatic, irony of this appeal is that it arrives by way of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis after an encounter, seven long afternoon visits to be precise, with a video installation by Istanbul artist Banu Cennetoğlu whose 127-hour concept-image has not been shown in Turkey: 1 January 1970 – 21 March 2018 · H O W B E I T · Guilty feet have got no rhythm · Keçiboynuzu · AS IS · MurMur · I measure every grief I meet · Taq u Raq · A piercing Comfort it affords · Stitch · Made in Fall · Yes. But. We had a golden heart. · One day soon I’m gonna tell the moon about the crying game, 2018.
Posted with (skeptical) permission of the author of a recent manuscript, Jokker.
Re: Sometimes it is beneficial to get stuck by a healing burn; addition to the Jokker
Erilar Frischmann
6:31 AM (4 hours ago)
I sent you a piece of fiction….
Sent from my iPad
On Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 9:20 PM Erilar Frischmann erilar.frisch@ wrote:
I noticed a stack of free newspapers by the entrance and picked one up. A charitable organization with a long acronym for a name was presenting local news and a platform for discussion. On the second page was a text titled “23-25” and signed by someone with the initials Zh.L.:
Ask yourself and an AI one simple question: “Why do people go to the Art museums?” and compare the answers. Not for the public or publication on social media or mass media. For Yourself. Please/
Banu Cennetoğlu, a visual artist based in Istanbul, put together HOWBEIT (2018), a video installation and archive comprising over 127+ hours of raw personal photographs and videos she took on her cell phones, cameras, and hard drives over more than a decade. “Howbeit” means “nevertheless,” “however,” or “be that as it may,” the last is very close to “so mote it be.” Is HOWBEIT dismantling woven into our daily lives’ embodied spells from the Regius Manuscript, 1390, by its simplicity, sincerity, and novelty?
127+ hours of content. We saw the installation at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis between February and May 2025. The artist called it “intro-spective.” In a dark hall, several rows of black beach chairs form semi-circles in front of a big screen, which, like a pool, an ocean, or a portal, holds the attention of the person leaning against the black fabric in the transparent darkness. Technically, black is the absence of light, and in art it represents the complete absorption of all other colors. Should I cite Henri Matisse here? When watching the installation, the spectator or observer becomes an absorber of the light poured from the screen, with the opportunity to transform the received light and colors into something else, be it a creative project, compassionate action, or to file them as memory with an inspiring or irritating charge.
The photographs and videos are a mixture of professionally taken shots, family pictures/videos, and other randomly or purposefully recorded objects, city life scenes, bridges, faces, mountains, corners, landscapes, imperfections, or purities of the world noticed and recorded by the photographer from different angles. There is only one order or organizing principle there – time – from 2006 till 2018. What strikes is that in the modern world, everyone with a smartphone has their own archive (howbeit), which could be turned into an installation with rows of chairs or one chair and a screen. Question: Will my or your photo collections have the same impact? And if not, WHY?
In the double-split experiment, quantum particles behave like water drops in the cloud of probabilities until they interact with a “measuring device,” and the cloud collapses into a concrete reality that can be called someone’s experience, be it a physical sensation/emotion, a book, an article, or an action. If the “measuring device” is the spectator’s attention or focus during the show, then we have an interesting phenomenon when the observer watches another observer’s (photographer’s) focus that forms the cloud of possibilities for the spectator. May it be the very core reason why people keep coming to look at the masterpieces of art in the numerous museums all over the world? To correct or recalibrate their focus?
During the past centuries, philosophy was the science that, in one way or another, governed the social life of the masses, remaining unreachable to them because of widespread illiteracy. Since the Renaissance, major philosophical movements have gradually laid the groundwork for modern governance and human rights. However, the people were introduced to these concepts through someone’s interpretations, such as declarations, lectures, slogans, sermons, tirades, criticism, ideologies, or propaganda. And then, a major shift occurred: the original ideas, books, and videotaped lectures from leading scientists, artists, musicians, and writers became accessible to the public. Through the Internet Archives or other sources, everyone, even in the most remote places, has access to the unabridged texts or images to study and understand them without the lens of another interpreter-observer. Everyone can allow themselves to notice tendencies, recognize trends, draw conclusions, and act intuitively or consciously without being forced or manipulated by an intermediary party.
I am where I am and what I am now, and from here I can look back, see or notice where my focus was, check if I like it or not, and shift my focus towards something I am eager to create that inspires me and brings more relevance to my life. The creator of the HOWBEIT almost screams into the void: it is as it is, and I keep working to make a difference!
The List. The List is “an artwork that documents the names of thousands of refugees and migrants who have died trying to enter Europe.” Nobody knows how many died in a desperate attempt to cross the deep waters of the Mediterranean Sea on inflated, overloaded boats. And each spectator in the darkness of the room or during the coming night can shift their focus and make a conscious effort, starting with the first step to co-create the world where each human life matters, where we do not label each other as Israeli, Palestinian, Kurdish, Russian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Republican, Democrat, Orthodox, Christian, Pro- or Anti-, the world where we start putting price tags on each missile or bomb we shoot or drop at each other, when the resources spent on only one missile could fundamentally change the lives of the whole village somewhere in Middle East or Africa, and then well-fed and confident people from that village may stop hating unknown enemies from the other side. Poverty makes us vulnerable, uncertainty brings anxiety, and embodied obedience and dependency do not allow us to shift the focus.
Traditionally, philosophers work by breaking down complex or abstract concepts using logic, analysis, dialectics, debate, historical texts, other philosophers’ texts or ideas, and hypothetical experiments. In general, they make an effort to explain to us the meaning or meaninglessness of our individual and/or collective existence, and an ordinary electrician or clerk can’t participate in any debates because they would not last the first round: after Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Leibniz, there may come contemporary Peter Singer, Amia Srinivasan, or Dan Dennett, and “the electrician” would not get a chance to participate in the discussion about our shared life on the planet because they have not mastered the last publication of Alain Badiou or Martha Nussbaum: checkmate! But clerks, electricians, and nurses can go to the museums and look at art and installations. Of course, there is a layer of philosophy of art, but the majority of the spectators in the museums are pure; we do not need an explanation, we can see, and we can understand.
In Ancient Greece, they distinguished between theoretical knowledge and the knowledge of personal experience. While English, along with many other languages, uses a single word “knowledge” to cover both, Greek uses “episteme” as scientific knowledge and “gnosis” as experimental, individual knowledge. While practicing “episteme,” debates, theory formulation, systematic or logical analysis, experiments, and other methods are applied to develop science and produce technology, methods, or products. Gnosis doesn’t require any of those; it is based on self-exploration and self-intellectual studies which can be shared, but not influenced or dimmed. Or can they be dimmed and replaced by the multiple explanations, interpretations, and declarations presented by a group of peer individuals who, with the best intentions as trusted, try to tailor our perceptions and affect our actions through moral principles, commandments, ideologization, manifestations, manipulations, and, at the end of the cycle, mobilization with full compliance from our confused “selves”. Individual knowledge, gnosis, was found and labeled as a dangerous freedom because, without supervision and influence, it may fall into default human values: unconditional love, compassion, service, peaceful coexistence, curiosity, and well-being for everyone. If so, the need for multi-million dollar institutions of bureaucrats and influencers disappears, leaving communities with more resources for development and growth. Imposed poverty is the ancient instrument to force individuals to block their access to the gnosis; only knowledge – tailored, selected, adapted, censored, crafted to seed fear of the approaching unknown (Dr. R. Nicholas Carleton, Fear of the unknown: one fear to rule them all?, Free article on https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ 27067453/), is spread and permitted.
When watching your own story in the darkness of the room late at night or early in the morning, scrolling through the photographs and videos you had taken over the years or decades, you can see where your focus was; you may notice it shifting; you can reveal the patterns, find depths or moments of clarity. It is your diary, written not with the focus and intention, with a pen in your hand and blank paper in front of you, but unconsciously by clicking the camera shutter, leaving a digital image in virtual space. Cloud? Remember, the cloud of possibilities before collapsing into reality? Banu Cennetoğlu may show the way to trace back to oneself, restore something inside, and remember to trust one’s gnosis without expecting approval, validation, or praise. Can it be done while sitting in the dark observing rapidly changing frames on a huge canvas or screen? May it be called a screen of your mind?
Throughout the past few centuries, a very clear model or structure has been created: philosophers take responsibility to explain to us “life” and its meaning; theosophists keep a vigilant watch to ensure that we do not, under any circumstances, take the trouble to read the thick volumes of the “sacred” texts or scriptures and decide for ourselves what they are about and how to apply them to our lives, and guides with critics spell out the meanings of paintings and books – heaven forbid we give free rein to our imagination and creativity, concluding, as an example, that Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” can be viewed as a visualization of “black hole” through which spiritual energy or life force is drained from humanity. The Square itself (as many squares in major cities: Tahrir, Tiananmen, Independence, Taksim, etc.) may symbolize catastrophe or energy of rapture (public executions in city squares or plazas as entertainment for its citizens), the collapse of eras, wars, and/or revolutions. These massive historical upheavals are gigantic generators of “gavvakh” – mass fear and pain in the real world. Daniil Andreev in his magnum opus “The Rose of the World” describes “gavvakh” as a subtle material emanation released by living beings during intense physical and emotional suffering. As individuals, we can conclude collectively or privately that the black square, as the black color shaped in a box, is a step into the transcendent – a path to the light through absolute emptiness, ending Andreev’s realm of anti-god, feeding on earthly suffering. The individual choice made in the darkness of the room, observing the uninterpreted images from the “cloud,” may become a catalyst for billions of micro individual choices against blind obedience and unnecessary compliance.
It takes three and a half weeks to watch the full 128 hours of the installation, spending thirty-five hours a week (the Walker opening hours) in front of the screen. According to Girija Kaimal, an associate professor in the Creative Arts Therapies Department at Drexel University and president-elect of the American Art Therapy Association, exposing the brain to art, whether creating it or immersing oneself in a gallery, reduces stress hormones, triggers dopamine release, and builds functional connectivity between brain networks, actively supporting emotional and cognitive resilience. Kirsten Weir, in “What happens in the brain when we experience art”, Monitor on Psychology (digital edition) Vol. 56, No. 6, page 54, claims that viewing and evaluating art stimulates the DMN, which is normally associated with self-reflection and introspection. Remember, Banu Cennetoğlu called it “intro-spective.”
Are we, as humanity, standing on the threshold of something entirely new – a time when individual sovereignty, grounded in undeniable inner knowing, becomes the sole and indisputable source of decision-making, independent of the throngs of interpreters, translators, explainers, officials, appointees, and self-proclaimed authorities? Humanities or liberal arts often use historical or comparative analysis; today we observe a collective shift towards empathy, sustainability, and global interconnectedness, which have not been shared experiences on the planet in known history. Let me quote a paragraph from a research article “A Care-Based Approach to Transformative Change: Ethically-Informed Practices, Relational Response-Ability & Emotional Awareness” by Angela Moriggi, Karina Soini, Alex Franklin, and Dirk Roep. Angela Moiggi works for the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University, Netherlands, and the Bioeconomy and Environment Unit, Natural Resources Institute Finland – Luke, Helsinki, Finland:
“Future studies could critically examine the ways in which care talk and care practice can be a vehicle of transformation. Integral to doing so is the need to bring more in-depth empirical accounts of practices of caring for both human and more-than-human, at the place-based level, but also by critically assessing how universities and research institutes can be loci of transformative caring research practice. Moreover, attention should be given to the role of the institutions and the collective in scaling up relational responsibility and endorsing both the burdens and joy of care work. The risk, indeed, when discussing the inner dimension of change, is to place considerable attention on the role of the individual, ignoring in so doing structural issues of justice and conditions of inequality. Finally, the framework presented can also be applied to further explore ways in which care offers a rupture with existing discourses, favoring alternative narratives celebrating a relational view of life on Earth.”
May I suggest that current major societal indicators include the steady rise in holistic wellness practices, widespread advocacy for environmental stewardship, and a growing rejection of divisive socio-economic structures in favor of community-driven, collaborative models, such as BAM Institute of Civic Biodesign?
Retro-spective has already turned into Intro-spective. Sharing unprecedented values and mutual principles, we have the perspective needed to shape tomorrow based on the realities of today, rather than the constraints and disagreements of yesterday. Past, when observed in silent darkness, helps to dive inside, into the black box or square, and find grounds for individual transformation with the collective and through the collective.
“Throughout the video, political matters sit alongside mundane moments and ecstatic encounters. In this way, Cennetoğlu rejects borders and hierarchy, prompting viewers to reflect on their own negotiations of complex realities.”
On Jul 22, 2026, at 4:34 AM, Kevin Magee@ wrote:
I saw it last night when I first read it, but I was too tired to process the perception that you channeled my impasse about writing about HOWBEIT. It is not a free choice of wanting to write about a work one way or other. The work does not open to traditional aesthetics. It only opens to the personal and tests the boundaries of sincerity in word and image. The writing, or Erilar’s writing, the subject position, embodies sweetness that generates the representation of an experience of perception. I have been looking at the last pages of Susan Howe’s Chris Marker monograph, where she writes that all film images are ghosts. Maybe, but that is Cennetoğlu achievement, discovery, insight. The installation is embodied. The image and the life are not alienated from one another. BC has answered NC’s “body divide up / why.” The answer may be linguistically and culturally factored. My poetry only achieved this level of – what is the word? – worthlessness? powerlessness? The minute I started typing it up the act not art of writing emptied into formality. Spicer: “Nobody’s stranger than the stranger coming to dinner. He can imitate anything or anybody.” It is not style. It is internalization. What does it mean to say that we love poetry? At the Walker those seven long afternoons I felt that I was viewing the process of someone who felt the same way about photography. BC’s first major catalog book got remaindered and the copies were going to be destroyed, so she turned the books into another project. But I cannot appropriate Howe’s Marker for Magee’s Cennetoğlu (I write this as the visualist Elek Mueller) for AMPS. So much of writing is recuperation and permission. Your writing has that aura. What is so terrible a thought for me is that I thought that I heard you saying the other dark night that this place of first permission you associated with esteem for my writing, not so much the text itself, but my disregard for its afterlife or relevance to its time. I couldn’t see the value of my writing until seeing HOWBEIT. Were you saying that I never responded, even rejected, your suggestions to collaborate? It is too late in my life to keep punishing myself for this will to isolation which must date from my childhood. The work will speak for itself, just as this moment of Saint-Simon that you have written in words anyone coming to art for the first time could understand. You are layering or patching in an inclusiveness – the diary! – that preserves or protects like a guardian spirit Kristeva and Cennetoğlu both.
*“She [Claire Démar] goes on to describe the custom of these times: […] ‘Contracted in the presence of the crowd, the marriage drags along, across an orgy of wines and dances toward the nuptial bed, which has become the bed of debauchery and prostitution, inviting the delirious imagination of the guests to follow . . . all the details . . . of the lubricious drama enacted in the name of the Wedding Day! If the practice which thus converts a young bride . . . into the object of impudent glances . . . , and which prostitutes her to unrestrained desires, . . . does not appear to you a horrible exploitation, . . . then I do not know what to say’ (Ma Loi d’avenir, pp. 29-30).[The Arcades Project: P: “Anthropological Materialism,” p. 811].
**”Utopia lies in negativity” Adorno, “Notes for the Lectures,” 11 Nov. 58, Aesthetics, p. 263.
***In 1924, he [Malevich] produced a famous photomontage (the only one he is known to have made) in which he usurped the image of the most emblematic skyscrapers of the New York skyline of the first decades of the twentieth century – 14 Wall Street, Trinity Building, Equitable Building, Bankers Trust Tower, and Trinity Church – replacing them with his Suprematist arkhitekton A11. . . . To Malevich, [A11] still needed to be positioned, in Manhattan, in order to absorb the city from within, appropriating it. Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Pauline Bitrán. The Additional Element in Architecture, pp. 337-338
Divigation #1: American empiricism does not distinguish between formal and dialectical logic; rather, it incorporates both in undeveloped form. Pragmatism is the philosophy of an undifferentiated weld of formal and dialectical logic. Rationalism, not logic, results from the uniquely American inability to raise thought to the dialectic. The chicken knows that grain is useful, necessary, and delicious. The chicken uses its beak to draw a logical conclusion. Aristotle’s syllogism works the same way. Aristotle articulates those ABC mental conclusions that anyone can observe among farm animals. American philosophy forgot to observe the chickens in the barnyard. Operating under the influence, no, dead drunk on empirical data, American thought breaks the chain of the syllogism – sorites – and arrives at conclusions with no connection to any previous logical chain. This problem, which is worse than irrationality since it is emotion disguised as reason, is especially clear in the sphere of politics. The syllogism enables comprehending external events. Dewey: “We do not know anything about the world except what is provided by experience.” This is correct if one does not understand experience as direct testimony from the five senses. To say that the basis for everything is experience is to say too much or nothing at all. Experience is the active interrelationship between subject and object. To analyze experience outside this category dematerializes experience into a formless, meaningless unity where subject and object vanish into the mystical formula of experience. Why in American textbooks is there only condemnation of historical materialism? “The state is created for society and not society for the state” represents a circular model of rationalistic-nationalistic thinking. The Bourgeois demands that the state trouble him as little as possible. The Anarchist demands that the state trouble him not all. Bourgeois and Anarchist are interchangeable, two sides of the same coin, like Fascist and Stalinist. Fascism is the redoubt of the ruined petit-bourgeois. Stalinism extracts technology from humanity, usurping the revolutionary power of subalterns.
Divigation #2: The relation of Thetis to Achilles. The Iliad makes explicit, emphatic use of her as mother – a kourotrophos – and protector, i.e., this aspect of Thetis, her maternal, protective power – also her role in the theogonic myth of succession. Thetis initially appears as a figure of destitution, helplessness, and grief. Female deities notable in Greek and Indic mythologies to the prototype of an Indo-European goddess, Ausos. Asia is either the literal end of life or destiny, the index of whether one’s actions are appropriate to one’s nature. “Thetis and her mythology are put to radically different use in the Iliad. Through her the Iliad offers not the immortality of the Aethipis but a conception of heroic stature as inseparable from human limitation and of heroic experience as metaphor for the condition of mortality.” Thetis’ overwhelming potential as Isthmian 8 reveals (Pindar). It lies at the heart of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Thetis: “an inconsolable mother, unable to save her only child.”
16-18 July
According to the editors, likely late 1920s, maybe earlier. Ballenger’s first-year composition textbook, The Curious Writer, used the same simple dictionary diagram. Insight into Adorno’s critique. “Benjamin’s thinking-in-images (Bilddenken) . . . is not readily translatable into the categories of philosophical discourse” (Weigel, p. 8). Buck-Morss called the method “dialectics of seeing” in 1989, but Benjamin does not work with chains of syllogisms; thus false or non-productive oppositions can be expected like “Love/whore” (Jameson’s 2022 The Benjamin Files exposes the biographical details, but this sentence could only be written within a patriarchal frame: “This [prostitution] is an existential dimension of nineteenth- and twentieth-century male life, which, along with the terror of syphillis (and tuberculosis,) is too frequently passed over in silence in literary and cultural study before the postmodern” (p. 105). (Passed over in silence is twenty-first century human trafficking, yet another adumbration for The List). Viewed in passing after 2024 West Bend camping trip: Billboard outside Lower Brule Reservation about abductions of Native Women.
The sudden spatial-temporal shift just as suddenly brings The Arcades Project to the threshold of Weigel’s Aktualität: “revitalized or modified validity for the present moment” (p. 3). Paging for hours searching for the Démar after-image, you find: “This, presumably, an allusion to Enfantin. At the beginning of the text, a sort of lament for the proletariat; the pamphlet also refers to this class in closing: “Emancipateur pacifique! He travels the world over, everywhere working for the liberation of the proletarian and of WOMAN” (p. 582). Paris, 1830. The conjunction is nearly as old as the French Revolution. Instead, Jameson ends his paragraph remarking Benjamin’s prostration before the Frankfurt School and its journal as a “commodity-physiognomy” analogous to prostitution. Repeated notations (fifteen according the pdf search bar) to Claire Démar in the Saint-Simon and Anthropological Materials sections. Did Lacis lead Benjamin to Démar? Lacis would have known Armand’s Rabonitsa, already in print for ten years when they meet in Capri. The life presses through the method. Buck-Morss: “Benjamin began the Passagen-Werk in 1927″ (p. 5); “‘origin’ in quotation marks (Benjamin: ‘that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing’): “the moment is arguably the summer of 1924 . . . antiquity of the Mediterranean world where they met” (pp. 9-11). “Had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I would have gone up like a powder keg” (Jameson, p. 106, citing One-Way Street, index p. 262: “writing: Benjamin never wrote a book,” p. 9 (Jameson: “this aesthetic or dialectic of the interruption” . . . “Benjamin never wrote a traditional book (and never could or wanted to”). One-Way Street is dedicated to Lacis. “His marriage to Dora Pollak had for some time been in difficulty” (Buck-Morss, p. 8).
Démar, Lacis, Armand, Weigel, Buck-Morss bear down on Jameson’s fatuous analogy; he should have remembered the letter refusing the small number of francs returned to some Paris publication, insulted. It is not a question of intellectual integrity. Benjamin loved the book he knew he would not live to see published. Impossible abstractions and useless (non-contradictory) categories are an early problem for the “dialectical” diagram. Armand’s superior dialectical oppositions were (thesis): Free Love; (antithesis): Bourgeois Marriage. Her premise: Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Go to Weigel’s Chapter 5 : “Towards a female dialectic of enlightenment: Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin” (Body- and Image-Space, 1996). Özüm Hatipoğlu did not recognize Weigel, or your pronounciation of Weigel, even though you used the V and not the W. She studied with Geoff Waite and Susan Buck-Morss at Cornell. Hatipoğlu took the same seminar as you at Iowa: Freud, Marx, Nietzsche. She agreed to review your Guattari/Žižek thesis for HOWBEIT.
18 July 3:00-6:30am
*The Politics of Aesthetics, Continuum 2004. With regard to what we call art, it is in fact possible to distinguish, within the Western tradition, three major regimes of identification. There is first of all what I propose to call an ethical regime of images. In this regime, ‘art’ is not identified as such but is subsumed under the question of images. As a specific type of entity, images are the object of a twofold question: the question of their origin (and consequently their truth content) and the question of their end or purpose, the uses they are put to and the effects they result in. (20).
