GAI SAVOIR
Me, Myself, I?
Over the last three decades my research has followed a number of paths of enquiry, some of them concerning quite specific historical archives (e.g. The Paris Commune and Parisian urban formation in the c19 and c20, the Parisian Judicial Archives, the Archives of the Institut de France) and some of them driven by conceptual and theoretical issues of different orders of abstraction (e.g. the object of art history, the subject as a breathless or a waiting subject, queer studies and the narcissus myth.) However I see its main characteristic as being the interweaving of these approaches so that a concept can be refigured or critically deployed within different fields of cultural materials or a historical thematic can become a theoretical question of disciplinary formation. In the last few years I have shifted to the more conceptual end of the spectrum as a means of reconstituting an archive of specific knowledges and aesthetic problematics.
Thus my Ingres then, and now (2000) combines modes of archival investigation into the languages of late c18 and early c19 aesthetics and art education with speculative reflections on the contemporary subject as a theoretically and sexually specific viewer in such a way as both to elaborate and undermine the possible nature of historical narrative within a framework of contemporary cultural theory. While in an article ‘Freud’s Rome, Benjamin’s Paris, Whose London?’ (in The Metropolis and its Image, ed. Dana Arnold 2000) I set Lacanian theories of the beginnings of language, Ealing Comedy and the experience of riding the 253 bus route in London side by side to think through the psycho-geography of theoretical models as well as materials and artefacts in specific figurings of a city’s history. This in turn is being extended in some current work on Paris, concerning its adequacy as a paradigmatic concept of the urban in contemporary figurings of the city – oh that I could escape Paris, as “Molly Nesbit”: http://www.e-flux.com/projects/utopia/about.html has so wonderfully done, having set out the magnificent structure of her Atget’s Seven Albums (il miglior fabbro) and then totally moved on.
While I work with film and cinema, classical and popular music, canonical art and mass imagery, literature and pornography, I do not see myself as being in ‘French studies’ or ‘film studies’ or ‘queer studies’, nor, for that matter ‘art history’. In a recent article on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut I address the theme of the anthology in which it appeared, Art and Thought, (Blackwell, 2002) to explore Julia Kristeva’s writings on Giotto and early Renaissance art and the ways in which this film throws light on their more complex appropriation by other modes of art historical and cultural studies.
It is this kind of work that is addressed to a broad constituency that might as well include the study of French philosophy as a semiological or psychoanalytic art history or a post-Lefebvrian cultural geography and so on – struggling against a disciplinary space leads to some odd contortions. The above mentioned discussion of Paris today (due for publication this year in Sites, and somehow summarising years of thinking with Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross) looks at the adequacy of this City as a model for urban studies that is both a critique of the Benjamin industries and an attempt to see how one might configure the local as a relatively autonomous vector of the forces of globalisation. Looking at both rap and contemporary gay writing in Paris I set out to specify a new articulation of the frenchness of Paris that is not dependent on a nostalgic anti-globalisation such as that of the peasant movement, but that is both in dialogue with international movements of cultural formation and highly individual, attuned to the unfolding of a cyber-urbanism. At the same time it is in working critically with this trace of what one might call the ‘national’ that leads me to reinforce the tendency of my research to run counter to country or subject based disciplinary formation.
Currently I am working on a number of fairly long term research projects of which two are as follows. One is under the general heading of ‘Hyperventilation – gay poetics’, which entails a comparative study in the rhetorical articulation of dejected masculinity and the masculine subject ‘beside itself’ in work ranging from mid seventeenth century baroque painting (martyrdom, the fault lines of religious diegesis, perversions of the classical) to certain aspects of Baudelaire’s poetry (enslavement) and finally recent gay sm pornography. The focus of some of this work is a baroque painter who is above all not-Caravaggio, but Mattia Preti.
The point of this work is to detach the findings of queer theory in the last decade from its grounding in an academic sexual politics and to re-implicate it in a history of apparently alien rhetorics and to translate it into a more effectively radical critique of disciplinary formation. Early essays from this work are ‘Collecting Men or my Next Duchess’ (in Other Objects of Desire, Collectors and Collecting Queerly, eds. Camille and Rifkin, 2000) and ‘Sexual Anaphora’ (in Umbr(a), a Journal of the Unconscious no 2, 2002).
The other, which is distantly but crucially related, represents an extension of my previous interests in music (Street Noises, ‘Carmenology’ [in New Formations,1987]) into a series of critical essays concerning writing on music in cultural studies through an analysis of Kracauer’s Orpheus in Paris and a critique of Adorno in his relation with Wagner’s Ring. The theme of hyperventilation also enters here as a means of apprehending the relation between the duration of the score on the one hand and the duration of the subject as enunciated through listening on the other. This sets a critical musicology in a space after Adorno, a more deconstructive mode of understanding the listening subject, and it is also in part drawn towards the interest in contemporary techno and rap cultures in the Paris piece above. It also comes out of other themes in my previous work concerning German ness, Jewish ness and French culture.(e.g. ‘Parvenu or Palimpsest, some tracings of the Jew in modern France’, in The Jew in the Text, eds T Garb and L Nochlin, 1995 – Tamar managed to get me to write a Jewish piece, though if, as Henri Meshonnic suggests, there is no Jewish thought, I may have written more than one!!)
For a brief commentary on my work over 30 years, see PUBLICATIONS. Alternatively, go to:
