Negative Capability: Documentary and Political Withdrawal

<p>This thesis thinks with, alongside, and against several theories of political withdrawal that have emerged during the past three decades as they have been taken up by artists working with documentary video. Political withdrawal here refers to a set of tactics that position themselves in opposition to existing models of belonging, civic engagement, and contestation. The context in which this study takes place is one in which qualifying for citizenship in the liberal western state increasingly requires one remain transparent, docile, and willing to acquiesce to whatever demands for information the state may make. In response to these conditions, the theories and artworks examined in this thesis all propose arguments in favour of anonymity, opacity, and indeterminacy. Situating itself, sometimes uncomfortably, within the archives of feminist, queer, and anarchist thought, this thesis engages with selected video works by Martha Rosler, Bernadette Corporation, Hito Steyerl, and Zach Blas in order to understand the ways in which withdrawal may constitute a generative framework for enabling meaningful social change. These video works are here described as documentary, but not in the conventional sense that they are objective or transparent attempts to capture or record actual fact. Rather the term is understood as a historically pedagogical genre — notably deployed in the service of both oppressive regimes and oppositional movements — that provides a means through which to engage with, and creatively reimagine, political languages. The artists in this study take a critical approach to troubling times. Suspending the truth claims historically associated with documentary, they offer a range of ways to think through how complaint might be articulated and commitment sustained.</p>

Negative Capability: Documentary and Political Withdrawal

<p>This thesis thinks with, alongside, and against several theories of political withdrawal that have emerged during the past three decades as they have been taken up by artists working with documentary video. Political withdrawal here refers to a set of tactics that position themselves in opposition to existing models of belonging, civic engagement, and contestation. The context in which this study takes place is one in which qualifying for citizenship in the liberal western state increasingly requires one remain transparent, docile, and willing to acquiesce to whatever demands for information the state may make. In response to these conditions, the theories and artworks examined in this thesis all propose arguments in favour of anonymity, opacity, and indeterminacy. Situating itself, sometimes uncomfortably, within the archives of feminist, queer, and anarchist thought, this thesis engages with selected video works by Martha Rosler, Bernadette Corporation, Hito Steyerl, and Zach Blas in order to understand the ways in which withdrawal may constitute a generative framework for enabling meaningful social change. These video works are here described as documentary, but not in the conventional sense that they are objective or transparent attempts to capture or record actual fact. Rather the term is understood as a historically pedagogical genre — notably deployed in the service of both oppressive regimes and oppositional movements — that provides a means through which to engage with, and creatively reimagine, political languages. The artists in this study take a critical approach to troubling times. Suspending the truth claims historically associated with documentary, they offer a range of ways to think through how complaint might be articulated and commitment sustained.</p>

Sex, Freedom, and Marianne Faithfull’s Voice in the Afterlight of the 1960s

At the outset of her career, Marianne Faithfull’s voice was a folky soprano, a sonic emblem of 1960s youthfulness. By the end of the decade, in the wake of scandal and drug use, it had transformed. This chapter examines these vocal changes in the context of changing rock culture’s gendered constructions of freedom. It looks at Faithfull’s performances—and public reactions to them—at three particular moments in her career: her early recordings of songs like “As Tears Go By,” which construe her as an ingenue; her late-1960s performances of “Sister Morphine,” which reveal how rock’s politics of authenticity proved exclusionary to women; and recent albums like Horses and High Heels (2011) and Negative Capability (2018). The chapter shows how her vocal performances of trauma become a means of asserting musical authenticity, both subverting and reinforcing the ideas of rock authenticity that shaped her early career.

Jenseits des Sichtbaren Rilkes Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

In Rilke’s novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, the Parisian scene is conceived as a stage; the main character has been considered as the author’s alter ego or Doppelgänger, who is going to face the most alienating and fearful aspects of the modern metropole. Rilke’s project involves a new use of sight and perception in which the boundary between the inner and outer world is continuously crossed so that Malte – and the reader at the same time – starts to doubt the traditional categories of acknowledgement. Despite all negative aspects of this split scene of modernity, characterised by forgetfulness and alienation, Malte is very likely to eventually die, completely forgotten by his ghostly family – this loss of individuality and possession is also able to enhance a kind of negative capability, representing the condition to make a new start, e.g. a lyrical program expressing the paradox of Life, where life seems to be no longer possible. The formal fragmentation of Rilke’s novel and its lack of traditional unity reflect the split scene of the subject, thus foreshadowing the clash between sign and meaning, between angel and puppet, which will be put on stage in the crucial passage of the Fourth Elegy, where the I is depicted as a spectator in front of the curtain of his own heart.

The principles of feminist dramaturgical thinking in dance and performance

This text is offering an overview of principles of feminist dramaturgical thinking, that have been identified and used in research on feminist dramaturgy through theoretical and practical work on the performance Still to Come, a Feminist Pornscape. Some of the principles are: the principle of bell hooks, the principle of relationality, the principle of significant otherness, the principle of negative capability, the principle of critters, and they can be related to a variety of aspects of politics and ethics in artistic practice. The text is an ending chapter of The Feminist Pornscapes, on Feminist Dramaturgical Thinking in Dance and Performance Practice book and is intentionally only sketching the current reach of the proposed principles with the wish to welcome the reader into a conversation, to pave the way for more thorough elaborations that are still to come.

BETWEEN CHAOS AND COSMOS: TONY WEIR IN THE CAMBRIDGE LAW JOURNAL

This article surveys Tony Weir's case notes and book reviews for the Cambridge Law Journal between 1963 and 2002 in order to illuminate Tony's unique genius as a legal academic and thinker. Reading Tony's case notes and book reviews reveals that he cannot be characterised as either a “lumper” (someone who seeks to reduce the law down to a few elemental ideas and concepts) or as a “splitter” (someone who resists such a reduction). Instead, Tony's genius lay in his possessing the Keatsian quality of “negative capability”. This quality allowed Tony to be both a lumper and a splitter at the same time, refusing to identify himself definitively with either way of thinking about the law.

Developing Presencing Leadership Acumen through Five Negative Capability Informed Practices

In the face of myriad local and global challenges that humanity is currently facing, it is becoming clear that the future of leadership depends increasingly on a leader’s capacity to make effective discernments and interventions that confront these deeper complex issues at their very root source. To advance progress towards this aim, this article makes the case for cultivating presencing leadership which involves connecting with, and leading from, the hidden source of optimal and sustainable forms of action.

Su Shi’s “Transforming into Bamboos” and John Keats’ “Negative Capability”: A Comparative Study

The seemingly identical artistic terms put forward respectively by the Chinese poet Su Shi and English poet John Keats, “Transforming into Bamboos” and “Negative Capability” contain significant differences due to their distinct cultural context and the poets’ personal experience. Firstly, their subjective mentalities are different. Rather than the total repression of human faculties and the Taoist world-weary attitude, Su Shi advocates an initiative subject, a fully charged mind with a deep humanistic concern; while for Keats, a state of passiveness and receptiveness overwhelms the exercise of intelligence and reason. Secondly, their ways of approaching “Truth” are different. Su Shi values both talent and hard practice, together with a dialectical attitude towards language and media while Keats emphasizes a dispossessed ego, an imaginative soul，a chameleon quality, and a full trust on language and symbols. Thirdly, the claimed “Truth” they are pursuing are different. For Su Shi, the goal of “Transforming into Bamboos” is to catch Li(理) , a Confucian variant or derivation of Tao while what Keats looks for through “Negative Capability” is an aesthetic utopia where he finds justice for his art and himself under an age of industrialization.