Wonderful Violence

In Echavarria’s work, it is the ‘deliberateness of artifice’ that Taussig finds interesting, because this act of intentionally exposing the ‘fakeness’ of an artwork highlights the process of its making. In seeing that deliberate arrangement, you want to know not why it is there, but why someone has put it there. Taussig suggests that through naming, the work acquires another meaning which transforms it, mutilates it if you will, and punctures your understanding of it.

This is kind of a wonderful thing, the wonderful being something which is mysterious, unknown, and also surprising. “It is this lure of the unknown, this temptation of exploring the hidden labyrinth, that gives to the wonderful its peculiar fascination” (87). Wonder is a question (as in, I wonder what that means?), the same as an artwork. Interestingly, wonder does not necessarily have a positive connotation: “Wonder, from the Old English wundor, might be cognate with the German Wunde or wound. It would thus suggest a breach in the membrane of awareness, a sudden opening in a man's system of established and expected meanings, a blow as if one were struck or stunned” (85). How close to Taussig’s theory of aesthetic violence comes this notion of wonder as a wound.

Taussig concludes that the mixture of art in/of nature (like mixing fact and fiction, history and myth) is the founding violence of authority. It took me a long time to get my head around this. It isn’t that art causes violence: it’s rather that there is an implicit violence within an artwork that pretends to be natural (or real, or true). Art is not natural. Someone has always arranged it in such a way…

It is through wonder that artist’s can activate political consciousness. Violence is everyday, commonplace. If the artist can heighten the activity of violence to be wonderful, then the audience has a chance to see it anew, to question it, to engage with it, to be wounded by it.

Parsons, Howard L. A Philosophy of Wonder. Philosophy and Phenomenological         Research 30.1 (Sep.1969): pp. 84-101 JSTOR. Web. Accessed 2/5/2011.

“Things live by perishing”*

Clifford’s analysis of salvage ethnography involves the idea that objects have an aura—a kind of history and life, a kind of temporality. By enacting another culture’s passing, such an object confirms the West’s “triumphant present” (228): it stands witness to the past while we guard against the tenuous future.

In fact the object itself aids in our guarding against the certainty of our own eventual end. “The illusory permanence of things, to which we happily succumb in shopping, or in fetishizing pieces of art or in wanting expensive jewelry, thus relieves us, for a time, from a consciousness of time that is always also the consciousness of our own mortality” (Schweizer, 26-27). A lasting thing blinds us to the reality that we too will crumble, and this is especially why we enjoy things torn from their context. Without truly knowing an object’s origin and history, we cannot be sure it hasn’t lasted forever.

On the other hand, seeing our own things collapse reveals, if only for a moment, the unhappy fact of our collective and individual futures: death. “We are the age of our objects and experience our own aging at the same time as theirs” (Sylviane Agacinski quoted in Schweizer, 27). It is unnerving to see the holes start to appear in the sweater you just bought, six years ago. Suddenly that gap of time preserved by the object reveals itself, and exposes that nagging question, how much time left?

*(Rainer Maria Rilke quoted in Schweizer, 25)

Schweizer, Harold. “On Waiting.” London: Routledge, 2008. Print.

If the world is imagined, then do I exist?

If we say that the world, vast and all-encompassing, is imaginary, then we seem to limit ourselves from anything outside of our conceptual capabilities. In other words, we lose sight of what we cannot possibly imagine, there is no longer room for wonder. The world becomes known.

Appadurai’s collective homogenization of ‘our’ imagination—instead of mine, yours, or someone else’s (31)—only furthers that quantification of the known world. If we are collectively responsible for creating this world, rather than you or I individually, we could hardly be surprised at the outcome.

Perhaps this is how he comes to the conclusion that production has become a kind of fetish (42). That idea assumes that there is no longer any meaning in the result of production, which is certainly true if we’ve already got all the answers.

But I suspect that Appadurai isn’t talking about actual imaginary worlds. Anderson wrote that nations are imagined communities (and there is a difference between imagined and imaginary)(Tamir, 423). Appadurai writes: “many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds (and not just imagined communities) and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surrounds them” (33). But I would argue that the focus of power/agency that allows individuals to subvert hegemonic systems has to exist outside of the imagined community, from an active or objective position, as a person doing the imagining. This is why using ‘world’ in place of community is dangerous: it engulfs an individual, and conceals a personal sense of power.

Tamir, Yael. “Review: The Enigma of Nationalism.” World Politics Vol. 47, No. 3 (Apr.,   1995): pp. 418-440. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 3 May 2011.