The subject of this essay began 25 years ago with a somewhat naïve curiosity about the centrality of the operations of language in the art practices of certain artists emerging from a traumatic history of colonialism. To be sure, by the late 1970s, the play between image and word in artworks had become common practice following its reintroduction by Pop art and Conceptualism. But for the culturally dislocated subject there seemed to be rather more at stake politically than gaming with language for its own sake, or as a strategy for challenging assumptions governing the institutions of art as such. The issue seemed to be one of agency: for the individual or collective to construct subjectivity it must acquire the language and power to act within the socio-political and historical relations that constitute its life-world. However, the histories of colonialism demonstrate that cultural dispossession sets in motion a catastrophic mutilation of communal identities and social structures. Where ancestral belonging to place, language, culture and history is violently interrupted the self is deprived of a ground from which to narrate itself in the world and imagine new possibilities of existence. Thus, to dispossess a people is in extremis to reduce them to what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’ or the ‘inhuman’, to alienate them from both the past and the future.
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Notes and References
Durham J., 1988, ‘A Certain Lack of Coherence’, Jimmie Durham: Matoaka Ale Attakulakula Guledisgo Nhini [Matoaka and the Little Carpenter in London], Matt’s Gallery, London
Lecercle J.-J., 1985, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass, Open Court, La Salle, IL, p. 6
Ibid. pp. 27, 39
Ibid. p. 7
Baker H. A., 1986, ‘Caliban's Triple Play’, in “Race”, Writing, and Difference, H. L. Gates Jr. (Ed.), Chicago University Press, Chicago, p. 393
Colebrook C., 2004, Irony, Routledge, London, p. 136
Caruth C., 1996, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 62
Perhaps one recent media exception is the images of the collapsing World Trade Center, especially the shocking sight of people falling from the burning towers, transmitted ‘raw’ prior to any authoritative ‘explanation’
See Durham J., 1993, ‘Savage Attacks on White Women, As Usual’ in A Certain Lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics, Kala Press, London, p. 124; and ‘Cowboys and…’, ibid., p. 184
LaCapra D., 1998, History and Memory After Auschwitz, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, p. 100
For further critique of these points, see Kearney R., 2002, On Stories, Routledge, London, pp. 47–69; and Kearney R., 2003, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, Routledge, London, pp. 179–190
Gilroy P., 1993, The Black Atlantic, Verso, London, pp. 46–58
Given that technologies are relative to their time, the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets was equally deadly in its technological, rational intent and effect
Agamben G., 2002, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, D. Heller-Roazen (Trans.), Zone Books, New York, pp. 87–135
This reading was unfortunately enhanced by a temporary floor installation by the artist Alan McCollum, which consisted of casts of dinosaur bones
Bataille G., 1992, quoted in D. Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, B. Wing (Trans.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 67–68
Badiou A., 2005, Handbook of Inaesthetics, A. Toscano (Trans.), Stanford University Press, Stanford, p. 29
Durham J., 1974, ‘American Indian Culture: Traditionalism and Spiritualism in a Revolutionary Struggle’, in Durham, A Certain Lack of Coherence, op. cit., p. 11
Formed in 1969, American Indian Movement marked the first proactive collective movement towards reconfiguring indigenous subjectivity and agency
Durham J., 1974, ‘American Indian Culture: Traditionalism and Spiritualism in a Revolutionary Struggle’, op. cit., p. 12
Senn F., 1984, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 202
Joyce J., 1916 [1996], A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Penguin Popular Classics, London, p. 215
Deane S., 1992, ‘Introduction’ to James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939, Penguin, London, pp. vii–xlix
Ibid., p. xix
Joyce J., Finnegans Wake, ibid., p. 583
Durham J., 1983, Columbus Day: Poems, Stories and Drawings About American Indian Life and Death in the 1970s, West End Press, Minneapolis
Durham J., 2004, Jimmie Durham, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Edizione Charta, Milan, pp. 123–125
Fanon F., 1985 [1961], The Wretched of the Earth, C. Farrington (Trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 193
Ricoeur P., 1999, ‘Memory and Forgetting’, in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, R. Kearney and M. Dooley (Eds.), Routledge, London, p. 9
Caruth C., 1996, op. cit., p. 58
Ibid., pp. 14–17
Ibid., p. 62
Ibid., pp. 17–24
Ibid., p. 8
Ibid., p. 22
Lame Deer J. (Fire) and R. Erdoes, 1972, Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, Washington Square Press, New York, p. 226
LaCapra D., 1998, op. cit., p. 139
Deloria Jr. V., 1969, ‘Indian Humour’, in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, Macmillan, New York, pp. 146–167
This is true of not only the Native America but also Africa and the African diaspora which also have a trickster tradition; to cite a few examples: the writers Amos Tutuola, Patrick Chamoiseau, Wilson Harris, the artist David Hammons, and from a more recent generation, Yinka Shonibare
Vizenor G., 2000, ‘Trickster Hermeneutics: Curiosa and Punctuated Equilibrium’, in Reverberations: Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency in Trans/cultural Practices, J. Fisher (Ed.), Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions, Maastrict, p. 145
Erdoes R., and A. Ortiz, 1984, American Indian Myths and Legends, Pantheon Books, New York, pp. 381–382
Kerényi K., 1975, Mythology and Humanism: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerényi, A. Gelley (Trans.), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, p. 9. The term Hermetic, of course, derives from Hermes, the subject of a lecture Kerényi delivered in 1942 in Switzerland after having fled Nazi-occupied Hungary, later to be published as Hermes, Guide of Souls
Kerényi K., 1996 [1944], Hermes, Guide of Souls, M. Stein (Trans.), Spring, Woodstock, pp. 140–145
Durham J., 1991 [1988], ‘The Search for Virginity’, in The Myth of Primitivism, S. Hiller (Ed.), Routledge, London; republished in A Certain Lack of Coherence, op. cit., pp. 154–157
Deleuze G., 1990, The Logic of Sense, M. Lester with C. Stivale (Trans.), Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 5–7
Ibid., pp. 8–10
Colebrook C., op. cit., p. 133
Lecercle J.-J., 1985, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass, Open Court, La Salle, IL, p. 112
Benjamin W., 1986, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Reflections, E. Jephcott (Trans.), Schocken Books, New York, p. 236
Freud S., 1976 [1905], Freud 6. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’, J. Strachey (Trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 298
Freud S., 1988 [1927], ‘Humour’, in Freud 14. Art and Literature, J. Strachey (Trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp. 427–433
We may note here that from Andrew Jackson on, the policy of the United States towards American Indians hardened into a punitive paternalism, which treated them as wards of the state. In psychoanalytic terms, the native ego is crushed by a harsh super-ego, which as Durham’s 1974 essay suggests, then becomes internalised by the people. Hence one task of the survivors of cultural dispossession would be to somehow diminish the negative affects of this super-ego imposed by the language of repression
Freud, 1988, p. 432
Ibid., p. 429
Critchley S., 2002, On Humour, Routledge, London, pp. 98–105
Lecercle J.-J., op. cit., p. 189
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Fisher, J. (2009). A Distant Laughter: The Poetics of Dislocation. In: Van den Braembussche, A., Kimmerle, H., Note, N. (eds) Intercultural Aesthetics. Einstein Meets Margritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5780-9_11
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