Fresh Print of Godard's Pierro le Fou as the Mirror of Cultural Production

Fresh look at Godard's Pierro le Fou amazes at its masterful use of just the notion of intertextuality that must have been gaining in theoretical currency at the time of the New Wave of the French cinema that on the background of apparently low-budget production costs, as far as Hollywood standards go, exhibits high level of cultural investment into a feature film that runs slightly longer than a B-class movie of the day would, given the epic lengths of the major film productions that made the press headlines and roster of critical reviews, which extends the film work not only between the low and high cultural genres, as car chases, social characterizations, and comical moments attest, but also between the 1960s and 2000s as the matters of political, poetical, and social awareness that the film raises before the amused gazes of its viewers have retained their relevance almost to a degree that structural analysis, just coming into theoretical vogue as Godard was making his film, reveals with striking precision when Vietnam war, mediatization of violence, quantified reports of combat casualties and collateral damage make film characters, as well as us by extension of identification, wonder about what would it take to understand the lives the fate of which modern media of representation convey.

From Appropriation of Nature to Accumulation of Culture

As the possibilities for technological progress take increasing amounts of investments to put at the service of capital accumulation not only does it seem that the gap between developed and developing nations reaches qualitative proportions beyond which the horizon of common course of development splinters into space-dependent perspectives but also the role of culture as secondary dimension of process of accumulation reaching increasing proportions of importance becomes implicated in the strategies of intensification that have made visible impact on preceding stage of modernization as a consequence of which it is possible to see the process of modernization of modernity as a two-level reflexivity both of itself and of its environment as the two gain in degree of their interpenetration as different aspects of single process of accumulation where the share of appropriation of nature decreases in favor of appropriation of culture as growing core of activities that constitute the current stage of transformation of modernity as constellation of attractors around which converge dynamic equilibria of global centers of disorganized capitalism, of localized appropriations of modernist legacies, and of collective foci of experience stabilization.

Incorrect Memories of Poems in Another Language

Meandering of thought, behind-the-scenes self-rehearsals, stage management of the improvised jam-sessions of everyday life, memories of words compared and parsed, city landscapes traversed against the sun, soundtracts overheard from subway travellers, routes of repeated recollections, side-notes of the monologue of internal dialogue, technological reproduction of media that put us in tune with our times.

Thinking of Short Sentences

To try to capture the essence of the fleeting moment in one well-built sentence can well serve as reason for concluding the day with some sense of achievement.

Personalization of the Media

Looking at place from somebody else's perspective mediated by digital photography only becomes an act of intimate perception when the whole concatenation of decisions that precede any mass media visual content has been collapsed into singe choice of individual photographer that as contemporary art curator wields within the domain of his or her subjective choices the authority that the growing number of institutions are forced to relate to in terms that render the sphere of personal privacy inviolate, which comes into pointed contradiction with the handling of privacy within the communications media that give so much pride of place to individual expression the primary among which would presently be the internet that in its drive to combine the spaces of data flows, contexts of their materialization, and personalization of its interfaces has apparently exacerbated the contradictions that have laid dormant within the situations that have been defined by less fluid media; the first modern period in this respect must appear hopelessly removed from the vertiginous streams of digitized exchanges that take us on their daily ebb and flow that we in our everyday routines set into reflexive motion.

Subjects on the Move

If subjectivity is a place then cities where modern subjects first came to become mass phenomenon should have something observably different about their spatial structures that sets them apart from other agglomerations of objects, relations, and flows, which would have special significance for displaced subjects who in bringing with them memory of other constellations of spatial relations experience their finding themselves in time and space as discrepancy in the structures that orient what makes up everyday life towards points where self-grasping awareness transits into moments of actualization that for the subject-on-the-move, as opposed to the exile or displaced person, always remain distributed across the trajectory from the point of provisional departure to the destinations that are final until further notice in which case the stable narrative forms in which belonging to any one social formation could take are haunted by the textual relations of articulation, rather than ruling, of the experience as it is given in particular privileged points of fictional vision that in their objectified form resemble the works of architecture as moment of urban existence that connects individual to collective in part random and part pre-determined ways.

Media Mirrors for Late Modern Subjects

Somewhere between how urban environment structures our daily routines and how we tend to tell ourselves our lives as stories the transition of modern experience from logics nested in the contexts of immediate practice to those that become divorced from it lies at our late modern feet the fruits of centuries long coping with the groundlessness of the modern existence as the strong narrative motifs rooted in tradition, society, and economy give way to volatile improvisation that rather than leave space for unreflected selfhood crushes what makes our identities up against the wall of constant change that makes the conditions of our existence always new, which must in no small measure have contributed to the interest with which we read our daily newspapers, listen to our media-streams, and watch our visual dose of entertainment and documentary footage not so much as to fill some inner void but to recombine the structure of our inner workings in tune with the latest state of the art that the ever changing second modernity legislates through its self-appointed representatives, augurs, and potentates.

Invention of the Self

While reading someone else's biography is always reassuring on the grounds of having textual structure of that described lifespan savingly fixed in the verbal material of narration, the moments when the becoming of our life reaches the highly self-aware forms of necessity to make decisions, even if provisional ones, bring quiet anguish to our minds that most probably look for ways to adapt to the structuring structure of everyday life, taken with all its events that encompass those with low probability as well as those that are highly so, more than to get actualized through plying the course that will correspond to the trajectory of development of our selves or so it seems within the elaborate optical illusion called the modern condition.

Photo-Transit

'One thing after another' provides a guiding motto not only to the changes that sculpture has gone through in the second half of the twentieth century but apparently to the everyday life of the modern individuals who are drawn towards the spaces where words, things, and relations mingle in one largely chaotic conglomeration of points of view that relay among them their visitors who possess to varying degrees the perceptual apparatuses that enable the fixation of the random acts of perception in media that range across senses, temporalities, and places, which brings me to the process whereby I am going from one snapshot to another in a grip that borders on thing-like sensuality that accumulates one object after another into a series of visually transmitted recollections of my digital camera.

Prior Notices

Probably thoughts are as random events as all other natural processes that only through loops of self-reflexivity gain in stabilization in what counts as our awareness; for that to gradually attain the degree of self-evidence it must have taken the long development from the pre-modern situation to the present day when little ever is taken for granted except for the expectation that things, ideas, and arrangements arrive at their expiry date sometimes with and sometimes without prior notice, which may distinguish the second modern condition from more usual understanding of modernity when lines of mind's eye vision were so drawn as to allow for a linear perspective to come into existence in certain privileged points the multiplication of which might correspond from the first modern moment to the presently constituting itself global modern situation of perspectival simultaneity that somehow hearkens back to the moment of modernism that may prove itself to be foundational in certain unexpected ways.