Red Friday -- 11.26.10 – Kluge on Marx/Eisenstein/Capital
Contents:
1. About Friday
2. About News from Ideological Antiquity
3. Marx: the quest, the path, the destination
4. Nailing Capital
5. Short Introduction by Marty Kirchner
6. Suggested Reading
7.1 About Platform for Pedagogy
7.2 About Red Channels
8. Useful Links
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1. About Friday
What: Screening
When: Friday -- 11.26.10
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 7:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This Red Friday* we will be presenting the third and final part of a three-part presentation of Alexander Kluge's 9.5 hour 2008 video work, News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital.
The legacy of Marx and Marxist thought remains a point of contention in what remains of a left. And efforts within cinema have also tried to extend the work of or break impasses found in Marx and Marxist thought. To host a screening of Alexander Kluge is to extend this line of research and this thread of conversations.
Recently, Brian (Holmes), in response to the limits of certain readers of Marx, and as a preface to his enthusiastic reading of David Harvey's Enigma of Capital has written:
"What’s sadly absent from such a stripped-down and nostalgic discourse is most of the world, science, advanced technology, finance, education, transport, communications, consumption, aesthetics, party politics, welfare, corporate interest-groups, lobbying, and advertising, not to mention organizational forms, psychology, religion, the study of human motivations, war, law, criminality, deviance, drugs, the neo-imperial state, the infinite varieties of sex and sexuality, nature, cultivation, architecture, linguistic difference, ecological thinking, the role of ritual and art in shaping collective aspirations, the forms and
constraints of individualization, etc etc etc – in short, all the aspects of human existence in society which Marx, at his best, was able to thread into each other and present as elements of a dynamic equilibrium subject to crises in which organized groups could possibly intervene, in order to wrest the measure of value away from its current masters and open up new spaces of existence in which far more subtle and generous forms of human creation and interaction might take place."
Maybe one can say that Kluge's move to revisit Eisenstein's meeting with Joyce and Marx, is a part of an effort to break open such constraints.
This film arrived at our doorstep in a flurry of emails between various parties, all enthusiastic to make a multi-day screening across a series of spaces happen. We would like to thank Platform for Pedagogy, Red Channels, participants from this year's Whitney Independent Study Program who have enthusiastically brought these screenings together & the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building, e-flux, and Ludlow 38 for hosting the previous
screenings.
For those who have missed part 1 and 2, of the film, you are still encouraged to attend this final chapter.
* Black Friday is the name designated for the day after 'Thanksgiving' in the United States. The black represents the hoped for turn to profit by retailers, since people are encouraged to begin shopping for the holidays on this day. Despite efforts to produce a consumer culture in China, it is clear we cannot purchase ourselves out of this crisis, because 'the crisis' is not just an economic problem. It is crisis of imagination, it is a crisis of inequality, it is crisis in education, it is a crisis in various ecologies ... Red designates the refusal of this mono-register (cash / capital) of value.
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2. About News from Ideological Antiquity
Alexander Kluge's News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx–Eisenstein–Capital (2008, 570 minutes) begins with Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's ambitious but unrealized plan to combine Karl Marx's Capital (1867-1894) and James Joyce's Ulysses (1918-1920). For over nine hours, the film expands in concentric circles as Kluge, his guests, interlocutors and monologists make associative links on a range of topics that starts from a filmic discussion of Eisenstein's notes.
Kluge's film is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House (199 minutes); II. All Things are Bewitched People (200 minutes); III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society (183 minutes). At several points in the film we get a sense of what Eisenstein had in mind with his project. At one point, Kluge shows a "pot of soup has become a water kettle, boiling away and whistling: the image recurs at several moments in the exposition (Eisenstein's notes projected in graphics on the
intertitles), in such a way that this plain object is 'abstracted' into the very symbol of energy. It boils impatiently, vehemently it demands to be used, to be harnessed, it is either the whistling signal for work, for work stoppage, for strikes, or else the motor-power of a whole factory, a machine for future production ..." By insistence and repetition this banal object, a commodity, transforms into a larger-than-life symbol, and we start to get a sense of the full range of cognitive and material links this commodity has to the web of life that surrounds it.
--News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital - Alexander Kluge, 2008, (TOTAL 9.5 hours / PART 3: 183 minutes | Digital Projection) There will be a brief intermission after the 2-hour mark.
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3. Marx: the quest, the path, the destination
by Helmut Merker
What is a revolutionary? The writings of Marx and Engels both use the metaphor of revolution as the "locomotive of history". Is, then, the revolutionary a standard bearer of progress, a pace setter, a frontrunner?
None of the above, because in a world ruled by a turbo "devaluation" where only the new has market value, where commodity production spirals out of control, the "train of time" is a deadly trend. Alexander Kluge instead opts for Walter Benjamin's idea of the revolution as mankind "pulling the emergency brake". We must hold up the torch of reason to the problems at hand, and the true revolutionary is therefore the one who can unite future and past, merging two times, two societies, the artist who montages stories and history. And so we come to Alexander Kluge and his art.
Kluge's monumental "News from Ideological Antiquity. Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital" is a 570-minute film available only on DVD which is based on the work of two other montage artists, James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein. These two met in 1929 to discuss filming Marx's "Kapital" which had been written 60 years beforehand. Now, eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither
Hollywood's capitalists nor Moscow's Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way.
Most of the film consists of involved discussions between Alexander Kluge and other Marx-savvy writers and artists. Poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger compares the soul of man with the soul of money, author Dietmar Dath explains the meaning of the hammer and sickle on the Soviet flag and, from the standpoint of the Stoics, leaps (rather than marches at an orderly pace) into industrialisation, the actress Sophie Rois makes an impassioned appeal for Medea, differentiating between additive and subtractive love, filmmaker Werner Schroeter stages a Wagner opera featuring the "rebirth of Tristan in the spirit of battleship Potemkin", philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks about Ovid and the metamorphosis of added value, a man at the piano analyses the score of a strike song while workers and factory owners face off in an opera by Luigi Nono, the poet Dürs Grünbein interprets Bert Brecht's aesthetisation of the Communist manifesto in swinging oceanic hexameter, cultural scientist Rainer Stollmann emphasises the myriad meanings of Marx's writings as science, art, story telling, philosophy, poetry. And social theorist and
philosopher Oskar Negt looks sceptical when asked whether it's possible to find the right images for all this stuff when you're less interested in pedagogical content than the encompassing theory.
Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to watch and listen to these experts as their "thinking
gradually deepens through talking" and to watch Kluge interject, hopping adroitly from one thought to the next, surprising his interlocutors, catching them off balance, sending them off on new trajectories. We never know how much agreement and variance is hidden in Kluge's objections. His a Socratic approach to questioning, curious, open to everything, and so wonderfully subtle that at the end always find yourself wondering whether he had been driving at a particular target all along. Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the most far-flung observations into his system.
He is not filming "Das Kapital" but researching how one might find images to make Marx's book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination. The model for his underlying structure is Joyce's "Ulysses" where the entire history of the world is packed into a day in the life of his hero, Bloom. In Kluge's hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry.
Coincidences, collisions. Back to back with a short film in which director Tom Tykwer stirs things up in a Berlin street, two readers struggle to recite the following sentence, slipping in and out of synch with
increasing desperation: "Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective."
No sooner are we shown "how the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers, the perceptibly existing human psychology" than we have the history of capitalism is explained to us as a giant extension of the fairytale about the devil with the three golden hairs – every thing is a human being being cast under a spell. And the beginning of Mae West's film career runs parallel to the leap into industrialisation – a form of aesthetic slapstick in which not cream pies fly through the air but ideas and concepts.
Unlike Eisenstein, who was driven to desperation by the herculean task of cutting the 29 hours of "October" into a 90-minute film version and turned to drugs into the process which left him temporarily blind, Kluge cooly sticks to his guns and his nine hours. And it's not a minute too long.
(This article was originally published in Tagesspiegel on 8 January 2009.) Helmut Merker is a film critic.
Translation: lp
Alexander Kluge: Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike. Marx –
Eisenstein – Das Kapital.
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4. Nailing Capital
…
Nailing Capital
The title of Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike suggests that Marx and Eisenstein are part of an ideological antiquity. For Kluge the time separating us from them means that we can approach their work in the same way we approach all classical writers: ‘Wir können uns wie in einem Garten mit den fremden Gedanken von Marx und dem seltsamen Projekt von Eisenstein auseinandersetzen, weil sie Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike darstellen. So unbefangen, wie wir mit dem Altertum umgehen, das doch die besten Texte der Menschheit umfasst’ (Kluge 2008: 4). The metaphor of the garden is particularly apt because it echoes another metaphor put forward by the writer Dietmar Dath near the end of the first part of Kluge’s film. Dath describes how Das Kapital can be seen as a book into which a nail has been driven, attaching it to a surface. Once it is set that way, the book can spin around the nail like the needle of a compass. This spinning movement represents the many points of orientation or interpretation that the work allows. This is, in essence, the way we read all books from ideological Antiquity: through time they accumulate diverse and often conflicting readings that mutually exclude but also illuminate each other, the times in which they were formulated and ultimately also ourselves as the latest readers of this text and its history. With Leninism a second nail was driven into Das Kapital, bringing the book to a standstill and forcing one exclusive (and ideologically correct) reading upon it. With the demise of the communist block in 1989 this second nail was forcibly removed, allowing Das Kapital to spin again. Kluge’s film now presents itself as a rhizome of clues to a contemporary reading of the book. But the same can be said of Scarry’s analysis of pain, Arendt’s distinction between kinds of human action, Eisenstein’s unrealised film, activist’s agit- prop and even the present essay: they are all different inroads to Marx’s book. By putting all these maps on top of each other we can connect the dots of this massive rhizome of meaning and see a baroque edifice of new structures emerge, structures of criticism and resistance. As such, they are both clues and appeals to action. This way, Das Kapital becomes a tool-box of ideas for resistance, a set of keys to break open the status quo, give voice to criticism and take action in the world. This, in essence, was Marx’s vision in writing Das Kapital as much as it was Eisenstein’s in wanting to film it. In this sense, Marx is still our contemporary. The world is not a set of goods and should not be bought or sold. The world is who we are, what we make and where we live. The world is us. It is ours to reclaim.
This is the final section of an essay on Eisenstein's version of Das Kapital. The entire essay can be found:
http://www.kluge-alexander.de/uploads/media/KapitalChristopheVanEecke.pdf
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5. Short Introduction by Marty Kirchner
In Capital, Karl Marx goes behind the scenes of everyday life to uncover the forces and contradictions that underly the appearance of reality. Marx's project is to understand how a capitalist mode of production works. To understand all the complexity that exists under capitalism, Marx develops a method that David Harvey describes as his method of descent. According to Harvey, Marx's method in Capital is to descend “beneath the surface appearance of particular events to the ruling abstractions underneath... It entails viewing any particular event set as an
internalization of fundamental underlying guiding forces. The task of enquiry is to identify these underlying forces by critical analysis and detailed inspection of the individual instance.” In Capital, Marx starts with a seemingly ordinary, everyday object, the commodity, and descends beneath its surface to reveal the forces and contradictions of society that get internalized in it. For the next thousand pages, Marx expands from the internal contradictions found in the commodity to describe the entire capitalist mode of production. While Marx pioneered this method of descent to understand capitalism, Freud uses a similar method to develop his theories on the human subconscious.
In the realm of modernist aesthetics, James Joyce also uses the method of descent in his book Ulysses, as he chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Beneath the surface of this seemingly banal, modern day, an epic journey emerges comparable to the heroic adventures of classical antiquity, namely that of Homer's Odysseus. Famously, one of the literary methods that Joyce develops to represent the experience of daily life is stream-of- consciousness, a technique that seems as much inspired by newly emerging theories of the subconscious as aesthetic innovations such as cubism and montage. The horizontal narrative of Bloom's day is interrupted by vertical plunges into the mental space of the characters. In Ulysses, we see depicted in the minds of Bloom and others, chains of associations that show the mental links from, say, “a bowl of soup to the British vessels sunk by England.”
When Eisenstein had the idea to film Capital, he thought that the literary methods found in Joyce's Ulysses would be helpful for his project. According to Fredric Jameson, what Eisenstein had in mind here is
“something like a Marxian version of Freudian free association—the chain of hidden links that leads us from the surface of everyday life and experience to the very sources of production itself. As in Freud, this is a vertical plunge downward into the ontological abyss, what he called 'the navel of the dream'; it interrupts the banal horizontal narrative and stages an associative cluster charged with affect.” Eisenstein's idea was use the structure of Ulysses, a 'day in the life' narrative interrupted by stream-of-consciousness, together with his theories of montage to depict a narrative film version of Capital.
Alexander Kluge's latest film, News From Ideological Antiquity:
Marx-Eisenstein-Capital, begins with Eisenstein's ambitious but unrealized plan to combine Capital and Ulysses. For over nine hours, the film expands in concentric circles as Kluge, his guests, interlocutors and monologists make associative links on a range of topics that starts from a filmic discussion of Eisenstein's notes. Kluge's film is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. At several points in the film we get a sense of what Eisenstein had in mind with his project. In one scene, we see that a “pot of soup has become a water kettle, boiling away and whistling: the image recurs at several moments in the exposition (Eisenstein’s notes projected in graphics on the intertitles), in such a way that this plain object is ‘abstracted’ into the very symbol of energy. It boils impatiently, vehemently it demands to be used, to be harnessed, it is either the whistling signal for work, for work stoppage, for strikes, or else the motor-power of a whole factory, a machine for future production ...” (Frederic Jameson in the New Left Review,
July/August 2009). By insistence and repetition this banal object, a commodity, transforms into a larger-than-life symbol, and we start to get a sense of the full range of cognitive and material links this commodity has to the web of life that surrounds it.
Marty Kirchner, 2010
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6. Suggested Readings
--Notes for a Film of Capital - Sergei Eisenstein, October,
1927-1928/1977, 24 pages (as a .pdf):
http://www.mediafire.com/?h1wdsp3zzend42q
--Reading Eisenstein Reading Capital, Part 1 - Annette Michelson, October, 1977, 12 pages (as a .pdf): http://www.mediafire.com/?z4v45tizfc88xau --Reading Eisenstein Reading Capital, Part 2 - Annette Michelson, October, 1977, 8 pages (as a .pdf): http://www.mediafire.com/?hkr0uieh9g99w0l --Marx and Montage - Fredric Jameson, New Left Review, 2009:
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2793
--Good News: On Kluge’s Ideological Antiquity - Boško Blagojević, Marty Kirchner, Chris Reitz, Stephen Squibb, Idiom, 2010:
http://idiommag.com/2010/11/good-news-on-kluges-ideological-antiquity/
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7.1 About Platform for Pedagogy
The history of public lectures in the United States and New York probably begins in 1826 with the founding of the first Lyceum or "literary club" in Massachusetts. Whether for indoctrination or elucidation, private member societies around New England began to invite lecturers to speak on "politically neutral" and entertaining topics to the interested attendees. In the 1870's, the Lyceum was supplemented by Chautauqua and University Extension movements, which in their ways also devised to educate the adult public. In 1888 the popularity of the public lecture lead to New York state's legislative mandate to apply under-used city spaces as sites for lectures. For over thirty years, under the auspices of Henry M. Leipziger, Superintendent of Lectures for the NYC Board of Education, the city funded over 4,000 annual lectures in more than one hundred locations. Before the cancellation of this "university for the people," attendance reached one and a quarter million per year.
Today, most public lectures in New York are funded and hosted by
non-profit institutions such as museums and universities as part of the supporting programs to exhibition and course offerings. The embedding of the public lecture in the institution's regular programming often results in a narrowing of attendees to those already initiated to the discursive terrain of the topic at hand or familiar with the host institution. The lectures included in Platform Mailer are selected from across disciplines and venues because we hope that our readers will attend a talk on a subject beyond the immediate field of their interest.
Platform for Pedagogy is an initiative to advance a culture of
cross-disciplinary public lecture attendance and to develop the lecture as practice. We deal exclusively with public lectures. The determinate characteristic of the public lecture is form: the geographically bracketed transmission of knowledge by a privileged individual or group of
individuals to an unsolicited public of mixed backgrounds and experiences. Donald M. Scott has written on the birth of the public lecture in
mid-nineteenth century America as a form of supplementary instruction distinct from the sermon, speech or oration — and yet borrowing formally from all three — in that the lecture is mandated and shaped by the public's desire for a certain knowledge. These public lecture attendees sought to expand the trajectory of education typically confined to their formal or professional training by accessing these platforms for pedagogy.
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7.2 About Red Channels
Red Channels is a radical collective. We are open for collaboration and discussion. Since June 2009 we have organized screenings and discussions at Anthology Film Archives, BAMcinematek, Bluestockings, The Brecht Forum, e-flux, Flux Factory, Maysles Cinema, 92Y-Tribeca, 16Beaver, and
UnionDocs. Since September 2009 we have produced 3 short videos, and since April 2010 we have produced 5 publications, both in print and online, of collected and original writings.
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8. Useful Links
http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/
+
http://www.brechtforum.org
http://www.e-flux.com
http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/ney/enindex.htm
http://www.ludlow38.org
http://www.platformed.org
http://www.redchannels.org
http://www.whitney.org/Research/ISP
