Craig Dworkin: No Medium (2013)

(photo source)

“In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object.

Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston’s erased copy of Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston’s marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage’s 4’33”, Dworkin links Cage’s composition to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, Ken Friedman’s Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a “guide to further listening” that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of “silent” music.

Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
ISBN 0262018705, 9780262018708
219 pages

Interview with the author (Critical Margins)
Author’s lecture at Penn Poetry & Poetics (video, 19 min)

Reviews: Johanna Drucker (Los Angeles Review of Books), Michael Leong (Hyperallergic).
Commentary: Richard Marshall (3:AM Magazine).

Publisher

EPUB

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926 (1996)

“Walter Benjamin emerged from the head-on collision of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet determined “to be considered as the principal critic of German literature.” But the scene, as he found it, was dominated by “talented fakes,” so—to use his words—“only a terrorist campaign would I suffice” to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign, culminating with “One Way Street,” one of the most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword.

Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany’s most influential journals.

The volume includes a number of his most important works, including “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin,” “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” “The Task of the Translator,” and “One Way Street.” He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems of aesthetics.

Benjamin’s sentences provoke us to return to them again and again, luring us as though with the promise of some final revelation that is always being postponed. He is by turns fierce and tender, melancholy and ebullient; he is at once classically rooted, even archaic, in his explorations of the human psyche and the world of things, and strikingly progressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the collective (its architectures, fashions, signboards). Throughout, he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis of possible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor. Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet), Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising and challenging of critical writers.”

Some parts first appeared in Gesammelte Schriften, Band I, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1972
Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings
Publisher Belknap Press, 1996
ISBN 0674945859, 9780674945852
528 pages
via Scribd.com

Review (J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books)
Review (Eli Friedlander, boundary 2)

Publisher

PDF (no OCR)

transversal, 06/13: A Communality That Cannot Speak: Europe in Translation (2013) [EN, DE, FR, ES, PL, SR, HU]

“What is at the core of the European crisis today? The trouble with the Euro, as the ruling elites want us to believe? Wrong! The crisis is not about the common currency, but about the current commonality. Europe not only lacks a common language to collectively respond to the crisis, or a common public space to mobilize joint democratic action against its disastrous social consequences. It fails, above all, to address the very commonality of today’s capitalist crisis that now returns to Europe after having long been displaced to other parts of the world, outsourced to those “others” who were not, and still are not, supposed to enter a truly shared sphere of commonality. Hence, when today, caught in crisis, the European modes of speaking and decision-making fall apart into a cacophony of national languages and a chaos of parallel political realities, they simultaneously keep silencing the very commonality of the question of commonality.

It has been claimed that translation can offer a solution to the enigma of linguistic and political commonalities. But what kind of translation? Certainly not the one that simply serves the communication between allegedly homolingual communities and thus reproduces the already existing regimes and imaginaries. So how can we think of another kind of translation, one that addresses a non-aggregate community of foreigners, migrants of all sorts, but also all those who are becoming increasingly foreign to their own “native” languages, cultures, societies and political institutions: a translation that evokes a new mode of sociality still in search of its political actualization?”

With contributions by Boris Buden, Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, Myriam Suchet, Loredana Polezzi, Peter Waterhouse, Arat, Rubia Salgado, 1. März – Transnationaler Migrant_innenstreik, Nicole Doerr.

Publisher eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna/Linz
Copyleft
ISSN 1811-1696

HTML (updated on 2020-4-18)