Humphrey Jennings's ‘Film Fables’: Democracy and Image in The Silent Village

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-154
Author(s):  
Masashi Hoshino
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
Dramatic Action ◽  
Democratic Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual

This essay explores modernism's aesthetic and political implications through examining the works of Humphrey Jennings. The essay takes as a starting point the tension inherent to the democratic aesthetic of Mass Observation between the individual observers and the editors who write up. This tension can be effectively examined in terms of what Jacques Rancière calls ‘film fables’: the Aristotelian ‘fable’ of dramatic action and cinema's ‘fable’ of egalitarian treatment of ‘passive’ images. The essay argues that the paradox between the two ‘fables’ can be observed in Jennings's works, especially in his essays on Thomas Gray, his ‘report’ poems, and The Silent Village (1943), a dystopian propaganda film set in a Welsh village invaded by Nazis Germany. By looking at these works, the essay illustrates how the utopian longing for ‘pure art’ in modernism is related to the impossible idea of ‘democracy’.

scholarly journals Variaciones de Caracas: el espacio como imagen textual en Celeste Olalquiaga, Yolanda Pantin y Arturo Uslar Pietri

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 43-72
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Selgas
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Representation Of Space ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
Textual Image ◽  
The City ◽  
Selection Of

The purpose of this article is to analyze how a selection of texts by Venezuelan authors Celeste Olalquiaga, Yolanda Pantin and Arturo Uslar Pietri, each produced in different historical stages of Venezuela, represent space as a textual-image. This representation of space as a textual-image portrays both its contemporaneity and a series of effects that stem from memory and the historical configuration of the city, to the suggestion of new ways of seeing and feeling at a given space. To answer this hypothesis, the corpus will be analyzed by articulating theoretical aspects of the visible and the enunciable (Jacques Rancière), and the idea of the generation of images based on the text’s textuality (Luz Horne). Taking these theoretical approaches as a starting point, it will be argued that by remediating Realism the study corpus conveys space as an image that both portrays its contemporaneity, and seeks to condense the affects induced by a determinate space such as the city of Caracas.

The Solidarity of Distance1

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 103-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Wicklund
Keyword(s):  
Physical Contact ◽  
Emotional Distance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Shared Emotions ◽  
Common Goals ◽  
Full Interaction ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Incompetence

Abstract: Solidarity in the classic sense pertains to a cohesion among humans that entails physical contact, shared emotions, and common goals or projects. Characteristic cases are to be found among families, close friends, or co-workers. The present paper, in contrast, treats a phenomenon of the solidarity of distance, a solidarity based in fear of certain others and in incompetence to interact with them. The starting point for this analysis is the person who is motivated to interact with others who are unfamiliar or fear-provoking. Given that the fear and momentary social incompetence do not allow a full interaction to ensue, the individual will move toward solidarity with those others on a symbolic level. In this manner the motivation to approach the others is acted upon while physical and emotional distance is retained.

Freiheit, Gleichheit, Sinnlichkeit–Jacques Rancière, Hegel und die holländische Malerei

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leander Scholz
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Traditional Concept ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
Political Intervention ◽  
The French Revolution

Der Aufsatz geht der These nach, daß die Fundierung der politischen Theorie in einer ästhetischen Theorie bei Jacques Rancière eine Aktualisierung der Losung der Brüderlichkeit aus der Französischen Revolution darstellt. Diese Aktualisierung der Brüderlichkeit als »ästhetische Gemeinschaft« erlaubt es Rancière, an den Klassenbegriff von Marx anzuschließen, ohne die damit verbundene Gemeinschaftserfahrung begrifflich bestimmen und damit an positive Merkmale binden zu müssen. Weil Rancière seine Demokratietheorie vor allem als eine Interventionstheorie angelegt hat, soll die »ästhetische Gemeinschaft« im Unterschied zum Klassenbegriff es ermöglichen, eine prinzipiell unabgeschlossene Reihe von politischen Subjektivierungsprozessen zu denken. Um diese These zu schärfen, wird Rancières Demokratietheorie mit der von Jacques Derrida verglichen, der auf ganz ähnliche Weise das Demokratische der Demokratie in einem Streit gegeben sieht, der jenseits von demokratischen Spielregeln stattfindet, die Losung der Brüderlichkeit jedoch für überaus problematisch hält.<br><br>This article argues that the foundation of political theory in aesthetics by Jacques Rancière can be seen as an actualization of the slogan of fraternalism during the French Revolution. This actualization of fraternalism as »aesthetic community« gives Rancière the possibility to operate with the Marxian concept of classes without positively defining the experience of community. Because Rancière understands democracy as the chance for political intervention, the concept of an »aesthetic community« (as opposed to the traditional concept of classes) allows him to posit an endless process of political subjectification. To sharpen this argument, the article compares Rancière’s understanding of democracy to Jacques Derrida’s, who also focuses on a democratic struggle beyond democratic rules, but is very skeptical about the slogan of fraternalism.

Stasis Anxiety

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Contemporary Writing

Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) theorisations of anxiety, discerns recursive investments in past experiences of hope (invoking Jennifer Wenzel’s work to consider the afterlives of anti-colonial prophecy), assesses the usefulness of Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of the ancient Greek understanding of stasis as civil war, and asks how these works’ elaboration of stasis might be understood in relation to Wendy Brown’s discussion of the eclipsing of the individual subject of political rights by the neoliberal subject whose very life is framed by its potential to be understood as capital.

scholarly journals 1932: entre a imagem e a virtualidade

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (24) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Chirsty Beatriz Najarro Guzmán
Keyword(s):  
El Salvador ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Jacques Rancière

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-784X.2015v15n24p23Entre a realidade e sua representação imagética, intervém a subjetividade de quem capta essa realidade, cujas condições intelectuais, sociais e culturais se articulam para a configuração analógica e dessemelhante do rosto imagético, conforme as considerações de Jacques Rancière sobre a natureza das imagens. Nesse sentido, não só se contesta a existência de um discurso único sobre um evento histórico, mas também a univocidade de tal evento. Levando isso em consideração, o documentário 1932: cicatriz en la memoria (2005), dirigido por Carlos Hernríquez Consalvi, para o Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen (MUPI) de El Salvador, apresenta uma narrativa que compreende o levante popular e etnocídio cultural de 1932, como a semente do Partido Comunista (PC) salvadorenho, ao mesmo tempo em que na entrelinha se tece uma contra-narrativa, cuja linha de pensamento vai no sentido contrário, colocando o indígena como protagonista, contestando o discurso oficial sobre os eventos.

Auras of Detection: Power and Knowledge in Drug Prohibition

2021 ◽  
pp. 009145092110354
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Illicit Drug ◽  
Drug Market ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
People Who Use Drugs ◽  
Drug Supply ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Drug Checking

Drug checking is an evidence-based strategy for overdose prevention that continues to operate (where it operates) in a legal “gray zone” due to the legal classification of some drug checking tools as drug paraphernalia—the purview of law enforcement, not public health. This article takes the emergence of fentanyl in the U.S. drug supply as a starting point for examining two closely related questions about drug checking and drug market expertise. First, how is the epistemic authority of law enforcement over the material realities of the drug market produced? Second, in the context of that authority, what are the socio-political implications of technologically advanced drug checking instruments in the hands of people who use drugs? The expertise that people who use drugs maintain about the nature of illicit drug market and how to navigate the illicit drug supply has long been discounted as untrustworthy, irrational, or otherwise invalid. Yet, increased access to drug checking tools has the potential to afford the knowledge produced by people who use drugs a technological validity it has never before enjoyed. In this article, I engage with theories of knowledge production and ontological standpoint from the field of science, technology, and society studies to examine how law enforcement produces and maintains epistemic authority over the illicit drug market and to explore how drug checking technologies enable new forms of knowledge production. I argue that drug checking be viewed as a form of social resistance against law enforcement’s epistemological authority and as a refuge against the harms produced by drug criminalization.

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