Next Series: Toys and Scale

We're going to do a series on toys and scale (duration undetermined). Here are some of the inquiries and materials we will be addressing:

• Our personal histories with toys and scale.
• How social media such as Tumblr and Flickr legitimize play and scale as art forms (when documented through photograph).

• #sonnyangel #sonnyangelaroundtheworld

  A photo posted by Liina Koivula (@heartexpanding) on Dec 12, 2014 at 6:21pm PST

• Sonny Angel, cuteness, toys sold to and enjoyed by adults.
• Toys as evocative objects (Sherry Turkle).
• On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection by Susan Stewart.
• Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child by J. Allan Mitchell.
• Femme identity and reclaiming girlhood through dolls.
• Toys exposing the "thingness" of things through their non-productive aspects (which also sometimes makes toys scary because they assert agency not usually found in other objects such as tools; they have "a life of their own"; they exceed the purposes we set out for them).
• The father invited by his daughter to a tea party who crushes the miniature teacup in his big man hand: a humiliation!

Amarcord and Temporality: Between Memory and Invention

The temporalities ordinarily governed through normative narrative frames—in which the boundaries between the properly historical, the natural and ahistorical, the public and private are maintained—are flattened in Fellini’s 1973 film Amarcord. Amarcord is a film of discontinuous timescales, a play on how pasts and futures co-exist together in messy and overlapping “modes of duration.” In this way, events that are framed as world historical—the fascist parades for example—and events that are deemed interpersonal—crazy uncle Teo in a tree demanding a woman—are ontologically flattened. In Fellini’s rendition, historical consciousness, the happenings of a provincial Italian town, times of life and seasons swirl together—all as carnavalesque reconstructions of memory catalyzed by the feeling subject, the cinema viewer, who might claim, as many who first saw the film, that “that was my memory.”[1]

Memories here are atemporal, anachronistic, and resist the narrative closure and teleological linearity of historicity and thus, instead of positing history as a sequence of losses or a moral fable calling for the atonement for past (national) sins (this is especially important in light of Amarcord’s setting during WWII Italy), Amarcord seems to speak to a growing global feeling of disillusionment with nationalist projects, a faith in the modernist aspirations to  social perfection, and the inevitability of progress that, according to social histories and novels set in this time had begun to fray in the wake of anti-colonial struggles, Vietnam, the 1968 Paris uprisings, and economic disorder. The past, global structures, consumer culture, Catholicism, and local pastoral practices all work on the town’s present, but not as monumentalized forms that stake out the fulfillment of any particular history. 

“That was my memory.”

Memory in this film is also pre-personal and may express specific “public feelings” in response to the historical present in which it was made: addressing the legacies of fascism, the decay of modernist fantasies, and the decline of rural life in this particular part of the world. But instead of languishing in a state of loss, Fellini’s creation suggests the plentitude of history/memory, the plentitude of time. And thus the uncanny feeling that these could be my memories even though I didn’t live in a provincial Italian town during the 1930s. I could follow the film despite the lack of historical moralizations and national narrative frames. Somehow, the story made sense through my own archive of historical consciousness and affective memories because it freed temporality from the linearity that demands a privileged epistemic position: a national subject, white and middle class, Evangelical Christian, liberal multiculturalist, whatever. Like Italian neorealism in general, Amarcord creates, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, the possibility of a severance of the viewer’s “sensory-motor link,”[2]  giving rise to a new situation: a feeling described by Deleuze scholar Joshua Ramey as “becoming cosmic,” as preindividual stimuli play the body, “lives are cross-cut by other lives and times never directly present to them, and demonstrate the way the lived coherence of time is riven with faulty memory, and how identity is haunted by the various personae we play out along our life lines.”[3]

This plentitude of time is precisely what, according to N+1 critic Nicholas Dames, a recent cavalcade of 1970s “throwback fiction,” share as a major trope, or a common affective register.[4] It was during the 1970s that a feeling of impasse began to take hold as the attainment of Good Life fantasies, especially in the United States, that promised upward mobility, job security, and heteronormative family relations began to fray. This impasse, a condition of precarity, “animated suspension,” and a feeling of the historical present as an “elongated durée,” in which Lauren Berlant identifies with our contemporary neoliberal moment,[5] is identified by Dames as the structure of feeling experienced by the protagonists of the books he reviews. These novels, predating the dawn of the Reagan-Thatcher era, point to a hinge, an opening of historical possibility that is, crucially, felt by the body as a slowing, a depression (not depression as a personal, pathology but as a public feeling). According to Dames, these novels “reinterpret [the 70s] as a kind of security, an ordinariness, created and protected by  the feeling of a social order slowly giving way.”[6] While most of the actors in these novels retreat into private caverns of bathtub and bed, overcome by a grinding recognition that the social configurations they had hedged their bets on were “slowly wearing out,” Dames claims that the “self-confined depressives” of theses novels may be read as REFUSING  compulsory cycles of consumption and production, a REFUSING of the homogenized and relentlessly progressing time of capitalism. But it is in Lauren Groff’s novel Arcadia that Dames suggests may contain the most useful critical approach of the historical novel to the cruel optimism of contemporary neoliberalism. Because neoliberalism continues to rely on notions of inevitability to render its violences natural, historical novels that unabashedly embrace nostalgia as an attachment to a past that could have been, stubbornly refuse the notion that, for example, 70s social experimentation was a blemish on the face of an adolescent generation, destined to fade with time and maturity. Rather, this critical nostalgia attaches to an opportunity not taken, a lingering ache that radical social movements “did not go far enough,” and a “persistent wistfulness, [that] eludes the feeling of inevitability that is, after all, neoliberalism’s best ally.”[7]

But is Groff truly nostalgic for an (alternative) past, or can her book be more usefully seen as haunted by the potentialities of seizing, elaborating, and improvising on glitches, cracks, and pauses at a time of impasse or transition? I remain skeptical that nostalgia can ever be deployed to challenge teleological narratives. It is my hunch that nostalgia, even when critical, is merely replacing one ideal outcome with another. As critical nostalgia remains mired in imagining a past event, an ideal outcome is just as foreclosed, and thus lacking an orientation towards possible futures of living better together in the present. While Dames identifies a possible mode of critique in Groff’s nostalgic stuckness, especially in its resistance to narrative closure, I’d like to suggest another refusal of progressive teleologies. Following the work of the late Jose Estaban Muñoz, I’d like to imagine the act of lingering in the past as attending to its unfinished business, a practice of the present that anticipates or reaches towards futurities that are at once perfectly attainable but can never be realized in any transcendent conclusion.[8]

At first glance, Amarcord may seem mired in the nostalgia of childhood, in pastoral idylls, in the magic spectacles that shaped Fellini as a subject. But the city depicted in the film was not the Rimini of Fellini’s childhood. Fellini took great pains with this movie to show the mythic quality of recovered memories, the theatricality, the carnavalesque renderings of the past as it replays in the mind: the masturbatory caricatures, the exaggerated speed-ups and slow-downs of camera movement, the outrageous stagings of local legends in the lush choreographic language of Busby-Berkeley. Not only did he refuse to film the movie in his hometown and expressed frustration when those from Rimini were convinced he had depicted them on screen, but over the course of filming, demanded to alter the scenes when they looked too realistic, even demanding more plastic in the famous luxury liner shot. “Between memory and invention,” is how film critic Sam Rohdie describes Fellini’s later films, including Amarcord. Between memory and invention is the uncanny, and the future. Meaning is in the present—the irreducible object, now enframed, ceases to be “real.”  The real object is always withdrawing over the horizon, into the future. The momentary glimpse of the real, this uncanny object, is the space of opportunity, a “zone of indetermination” that makes freedom possible, a space to imagine futures “unlike the present.”[9] Meaning is open, it is irreducibly to-come. In the nineteenth century, Percy Shelley saw poets as those doing this work that perhaps filmmakers such as Fellini have carried into the twentieth, as they may be seen to be “the hierophants of an unapprehended imagination, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” Poems and movies have the capability to suspend time and meaning, opening up a space of indeterminacy that also feels uncannily present to us, real, yet unforeclosed.[10]

Perhaps the best we can do is find a shaky home in the tensile weave of memory and invention. After all, aren’t even the most future-oriented utopic imaginings drawn from our archive of memorialized images that make us feel good? Aren’t politics always about desire? The question seems to be one of what, where, and who forms the archive and what stories we may be able to assemble or divine through the materials we find or collect there.

 

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[1] Antonio Monada, Fellini’s Homecoming, DVD, Disc 2, Amarcord, directed by Federico Fellini, (Criterion, 2006). 

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 4.

[3] Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 151; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 171.

[4] Nicholas Dames, “Seventies Throwback Fiction,” N+1 21 (Winter 2015).

[5] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 195.

[6] Dames, “Seventies Throwback Fiction,” 150.

[7] Ibid., 157.

[8] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 3.

[9] Here I am quoting Elizabeth Grosz in her work elaborating on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Elizabeth Grosz, “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom,” in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 148-149.

[10] Percy Shelley quoted in Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 209.

Revolutionary War Themed Wallpaper.

HI!!!!!!!!!! We are going to be blogging again. Slim Volume just finished his Master's in History and I just passed my national massage licensing exam. Our plan was to read Deleuze's Cinema 2, watch all the films, and blog about it. The first one we watched was Fellini's Amarcord because we kind of like Fellini and it was the first one on our list that we found at the University of New Mexico Art and Design Library (we're living in Albuquerque right now). But we decided that reading Cinema 2 was not either of our priorities right now, so we'll just be blogging about what the fuck ever. This week it is Fellini's Amarcord.

The first movie we watched in our supposed Cinema 2 series (an idea all but abandoned at this point) was Amarcord by Fellini. I would consider myself a Fellini fan, not the least because my mother in law considers his work obscene, but I’m not into his, like, famous movies. I’m into Nights of Cabiria and Juliet of the Spirits, even La Strada somewhat - the movies with Giulietta.

Sidenote: I have trouble with the word cinema. While exploring this trouble the other day, I realized it’s because when I think the word cinema, I assume it EXCLUSIVELY encompasses the work of David Lynch and Todd Haynes. Nothing else.

When Slim Volume and I had been together only a couple of months, we went to the Henry Art Museum on the University of Washington campus. I had been there with my Evergreen program, Transcendent Practices, the month prior, when Kaden had mono. I was distracted; we’d just started sharing a room and he got really sick.

Our friend Giselle showed up to dye her hair red and brought some older guy who was wearing an Iron Maiden sweatsuit. Seriously. Sweatpants (not track pants) with Iron Maiden, in the Iron Maiden font, printed down the legs. Just this August, I was trying to write something about it, while drunk and stoned and watching the David Allan Coe parts of Heartworn Highways, with sound, while also listening to Devendra Banhart’s first two records on shuffle, all of this on headphones. I wrote: “DAC’s Rhinestone Cowboy trousers = Giselle’s friend in the Iron Maiden sweatpants when [Slim Volume] had acute healing crisis (mono).” So Slim Volume was home sick, we were 20 years old, he had to call out from Starbucks and they made him call his coworkers on his own to have someone cover his shift even though he couldn’t get out of bed (soon after he was fired because he had been a couple minutes late 3 times). I did mushrooms with my co-workers from McDonald’s and Slim Volume was in bed with a fan on in yellow lamp light and his lips were all fucked up (they really were, like, with eczema) and I envisioned us in a World War I hospital (I’d read All Quiet on the Western Front in high school). (Recently we discussed this and decided that I was Walt Whitman befriending Civil War veterans in a past life. Taking selfies and tit pics with them). One of my co-workers’ boyfriend was installing new windows in our apartment the next day. That was weird.

My class went to the Henry Art Museum. We had only been together for a few days, and I’d missed one of them, taking Slim Volume to the doctor. The art exhibit had a room where you looked out a hole in the roof and you couldn’t believe you were looking at the sky. The art exhibit had a wall where the flickering lights of a television were reflected. The different colors displayed were outrageous. A classmate who had clearly just left home for the first time was astonished to learn that mites lived in his eyelashes and were causing the shifting cloudiness in his vision. An older classmate was noticeably annoyed at having to tell him this. I ate a sandwich that had just mayonnaise and green olives, because that was what I had to make a sandwich with that morning. I remember it being gross.

I wanted to take Slim Volume to see the art exhibit. We went when he was better. The secondary exhibit was Fellini’s sketches.

I felt like I knew about Fellini, although I had never seen any of his films, because something about Patti Smith. I am going to see if I can figure out where I got that notion. I am going to stop writing this and look at some Patti Smith materials right now.

I don’t have the patience to find it. Ctrl+f has spoilt me and I can’t consider reading the entirety of Babel right now; I just read it for a bit and there was so much finger fucking! I don’t remember that. I know exactly where I could look online, but we have used 75% of the data until the 22nd. What did Patti Smith write about Fellini?

I had some notion that I knew about Fellini, because of Patti Smith (I was really obsessed w/Patti Smith in high school). His drawings, at this secondary art exhibit, were of soft, round women and men with comical genitalia. I felt badass enjoying his drawings. I remember them being fun; joyous; delightful. The first time I saw The Big Lebowski, I saw Jackie Treehorn’s drawing as Fellini’s.

Amarcord has the same color palette as The Serpent’s Egg, and takes place around the same time, and I assume was made around the same time. I am imagining that this means they used the same type of film/film coloring (I don’t know shit about this aspect of cinema). The first thing I said about Amarcord was that the color palette reminded me of Revolutionary War themed wallpaper from the American bicentennial. Which makes sense.

Amarcord’s strapping young lad reminds me of Jeff Bridges in The Last Picture Show (speaking of The Big Lebowski): the corpulent, nerdy author/filmmaker (McMurtry or Fellini - though obviously McMurtry is a fucking turd and Fellini is cool) visioning himself as an athletic blonde with 20/20 vision. I will never forgive Larry McMurtry for continuing to give Duane younger and younger women throughout the never-ending book series (the motherfucker even gets viagra for christ sake), while making Sonny into a “creep” who ends up just dying. I’m just saying, that’s what it reminds me of. Like I would portray myself as Dawn Weiner not the cheerleader in American Beauty, you know? (ps. I acknowledge my privilege as cisgendered, average BMI, and white. I’m not a corpulent nerdy man. I totally appreciate the corpulent nerdy men that I know! I just don’t know what it would be like to be them, obviously. Maybe I would portray myself as a strapping young lad on viagra. Or maybe I’d portray myself as Dawn Weiner).

I like that Fellini (in Amarcord) does portray corpulent characters not as comic relief but as people with realistic desires and also as sensible objects of desire.

Sidenote: Slim Volume reminds me that being corpulent in Italy - then and now - doesn’t have the same connotations as being corpulent in present-day USA. But I am watching this film in present-day USA.