Bobby Foster and Albert Hazlett, the Bard of the Shankill.

Eamon Maguire at the Peace Line.

]]> http://imagingbelfast.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/conway-mill/feed/ 0 johncraigfreeman Eamon_Maguire http://imagingbelfast.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/the-real-signals/ http://imagingbelfast.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/the-real-signals/#comments Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:04:24 +0000 glue http://imagingbelfast.wordpress.com/?p=153 ]]>

Decision

Michael Moore in his film Fahrenheit 9/11 used footage showing George Bush at Booker Elementary School, in a reading lesson involving the story The Pet Goat, which is what he was doing when he was told of the attacks on the Twin Towers.  Moore uses the fact that Bush delayed acting on this news, but continued on with the lesson for some minutes, as a criticism.  In fact, it is one of those instances when the Real, like the Delphic oracle, shows a reality (the Real neither conceals nor reveals, but indicates).  The fact is that Bush already knew what to do, what his decision will have been, so there was no need to deliberate:  he learned his judgment (we all learned it) in childhood, from within a habitus of the frontier myth (the operating wisdom of American tradition).

Where do we learn the standards of judgment, by which we measure what is right and wrong?  The ethos internalized in childhood is a major site of value construction, laying the foundations of judgment so deep that they may never be excavated.  Is that true?  What are the sources of judgment by which the people of Belfast know what to do, how to act, what is right and wrong, true and false, in the present historical circumstances?

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A note on method.  Everything at this point is preliminary, prelusive.  Theory:  an introduction of some of the theoretical positions potentially relevant, with the potential to frame the event (Belfast) as instruction, fable, wisdom (Barthes, Luhmann, Derrida, Lyotard for example).  Imaging:  a documentation and mapping of a zone, geocultural configurations carrying memory, history.  Natives know their way around these demarcations.  The lines of intensity do not align neatly with the layout of the city.  Nothing has been touched, so to speak; everything remains suspended.  A context is forming.  There is an accumulation from which something unforeseen may emerge (perhaps).  Such is constellation, recalling Walter Benjamin’s historiography.  An “image” emerges when past and present conjoin at the moment of their recognizability.  In these terms there is as of yet no image here.

The term “differend” names the device Lyotard proposes for sublime prudence, that is, for the practice of judgment in time.  That prudence is even possible in contemporary circumstances is due entirely to the negative presentation of a sublime aesthetics.  [Belfast] names a feeling, that becomes the basis for further work addressed, deliberately, to the future (without knowledge or understanding).  What is the destiny of this name?  You decide, in your manner.  [Belfast] may not be represented, but it may be witnessed.  The differend is a device for giving testimony of a feeling.  It is a judgment that persuades by creation of mood (Stimmung), and this is the new dimension that must now be given a place at the negotiating table.  The term “device” is a reminder that we are inventing a practice that involves formal and rhetorical procedures. The device functions as a bridge or “passage apparatus” (Lyotard, 1988: 64).  “Darstellung

is, in general, an adjoining, a conjoining, a setting side by side, a comparison, between an established or an unknown rule and an intuition (or whatever takes the  place of intuiton).”  The device promises a minimum of at least one phrase, structured by nothing more than the paratactic “and, and” that in modernist syntax replaced classical subordination (65).

We know that these procedures are to be derived from the experimental and avant-garde arts.  The focus for now is on what these arts are expected to provide –- a means of linking together anything and everything that is incommensurable, mutually repellant or indifferent, disjunctive.  Rhetorically the task is described as bringing into relationship disparate phrase regimes or language games, different genres of discourse.  Kant’s optimism about a bridge of aesthetic judgment is the philosophical justification of the differend.  The question for deliberative rhetoric is not Belfast yesterday, or  Belfast today, but Belfast tomorrow, the future of “Belfast” (and the like) as a phrase regime at work in the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of an Internet public sphere.

Reality is not a matter of the absolute eyewitness, but a matter of the future. The logician, for whom “nothing is accidental” requires that possible sense be preinscribed in the object;  otherwise, this object, which is what it is (the theory of simples), could be affected after the fact (nachtraglich) by some new sense, as if by chance. . . . What is absolutely required, on the contrary, is the contingency of the future.  By this, not only the contingency of “events” should be understood but also  the contingency of sense. . . .The differend seeks to do for electracy what “definition,” as the primary procedure of concept formation, did for literacy.

Deliberation in sublime conditions, then, is a concatenation of phrases and even of genres (150).  “Belfast” (or any event) is a work in progress, whose future is open and never secure.  “The deliberative is more ‘fragile’ than the narrative,” Lyotard argues.  “It lets the abysses be perceived that separate genres of discourse from each other…that threaten ‘the social bond.’” (150).  If we decline to accept the challenge of sublime deliberation, however, we leave the public sphere in control of the economic genre that is hegemonic today.  “More wealth, more security, more adventure, etc., there’s our answer to the canonical phrase of political ethics:  What ought we to be?  This ethical question is not asked, however, in the economic genre.  In it, you don’t gain (you don’t grab onto the stakes) because you listened to the obligation and welcomed it, but because  you’ve gained some time and are able to gain even more [money being defined as stored time].  Thus, the economic genre of capital in no way requires the deliberative political concatenation, which  admits the heterogeneity of genres of discourse” (178).

First Make A Distinction

My approach to Imaging Belfast supplements Craig’s goal to record natives speaking for themselves.  I am not interested in or capable of speaking “for” Belfast or “to” Belfast, but “with” Belfast on behalf of outsiders who only learn about Belfast through media.  An Image of Belfast is produced in this orientation as a category of thought, specifically of electrate thought, the way concepts are constructed within the frame of literate category that assumes that entities are defined by essences.  Electracy in turn has its own metaphysics (its own way of constructing and interacting with “reality”).

My understanding of electrate metaphysics, within which Imaging Belfast functions as category, is formed by poststructuralist theories of various camps.  In this instance I am extrapolating from the insight into communications systems of Niklas Luhmann.  The insight Luhmann develops is intrinsic to modernist thought in general, aware of the impossibility of attaining an overview of the whole of the world or society.  German Idealism worked through the paradox of self-positing, the act of reflexivity, of self-consciousness, that in practice creates self-alienation, forcing a passage through an opaque exterior in order to reconnect with one’s own identity.  Hegel temporalized this passage, and Marx adapted the circle of alienation and return to his dialectic. But for Luhmann and most thinkers today, there is no return to wholeness or recovery of plenitude (no utopia).

Luhmann understands society through communications, in which “event” is never raw or immediate, but is encountered already coded, constructed and framed within as many points of view as there are codes for which a particular happening may be relevant.  The code articulates a (collective) decision, a distinction, a severance, choosing a value that is not within factical or empirical conditions:  it is outside rational discourse.  The same action may be coded “patriotic” or “war crime.”  A given social system develops or unfolds historically, following its own tendency, without (and here is the modernity of the theory) any telos, essence, or purpose by which this pattern (the pattern replaces substance) may be measured and judged.  Or rather, one code may judge another code, but the accumulated perspectives never add up to a whole, but only to an ecology.

In this context of communicative system, “Bobby Sands” is what Lyotard called a “differend” — a node of attraction around which descriptions and narratives gather, whose meaning and significance is open perpetually to revision.  Imaging Belfast attempts to map the moving action of distinction unconcealing itself in the region “Belfast.”  What is this configuration, and how may we apply it as a particular blind spot (since every position is occulted to itself) to illuminate other configurations?  The purpose is to triangulate to our own positions, wherever they are, whomever we might be (but the answer to that question is perpetually deferred), to notice the movement and drift, the tendency that is underway carrying us along with it.

(This post indebted to William Rasch, “The Self-Positing Society,” introduction to Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction, Stanford, 2002).

On a street corner in Shankill Road in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a man strolls past a mural depicting an Ulster Volunteer Force fighter holding a gun, Sept. 26, 2005. Dylan Martinez. From: Belfast: Read the walls for signs of peace. (click on image for full article)

I want to avoid the indignities of speaking for the people of West Belfast. My hope has always been that Imaging Place might be able overcome this artifact of colonial documentary practices by allowing the people to speak for themselves. As you will recall, my first forays into the zone were met with suspicion and no one would talk to me until I met Danny Burke.

As I said, I am navigating and testing the Imaging Belfast project and posting the screen capture movies in the order that I shot the work on location. I spent the first few days simply and carefully observing the space. In time, and in upcoming post, the people on both sides of the Peace Line will speak directly about the meaning of specific murals and provide further context.

Gable Mural at Conway Street and Northland Street in the Shankill Neighborhood of West Belfast. R Rand. From: Urban Artifacts and Social Practices in a Contested City. (click on image for full article)

Having said that, there are a few things that are considered common knowledge. Gable mural painting is practiced by Catholics and Protestants alike. The murals can serve four different purposes. They can be memorial, commemorating and honoring the people who have died. They can be militant, an expression of aggression. They can be territorial, most of the people of Belfast will admit that it is still necessary to be keenly aware of what part of town you are in. Or they can be defiant. The most poignant example of this is the view of the Bogside murals from the old city wall in Derry or Londonderry, depending on who you ask.

Bogside Mural from old city wall, Derry.

Many of the murals of Northern Ireland are disappearing as community groups and the government work to remove or replace the more militant images. See Belfast’s murals: Off the wall?.

Map of Belfast Murals