Exams are “coming up” insofar as they happen about three months from now. Which is to say that I won’t be reading much in an academic sense that’s outside of my field, ie the history of photography.

Still, I’m doing my best to read for actual pleasure. Finishing up the Ferrante series soon, then on to Marie NDiaye, and after that I’m not sure. I’m waiting for Nanni Balestrini to come out in paperback. Always open to suggestions.

Taro’s article on film in 1968 in Shinjuku (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, Funeral Parade of Roses) ¹ is really good. Just got to it today. Might not get to do too much other reading “for fun” since exams are coming up.

“Rather than adopt a binary scheme in which amateurism is defined, oppositionally, against professionalism, I understand these as ever-mobile terms in a broader, flexible matrix that admits a range of individual and collective production by all kinds of self-proclaimed textile makers. This book structurally asserts how, in the case of textiles, fine art and amateur practices are mutually coconstitutive, constantly informing each other and viewed radically differently depending on context.”

Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Fray: Art + Textile Politics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017, 5.

Thin sheets of water run down the feature behind the stairs

This facility, a former mill, was converted into an art space in 2006. The factory itself was constructed in the late 1800s, and it’s been renovated in subtle ways, largely through the introduction of gravity-powered water features that re-imagine the building in modernist terms. I arrived in the morning, and enjoyed a walk through the facility. My footsteps were not particularly loud, but they were enough to awaken a police officer who was dozing off at the entrance to the grounds.

We talked here

Why a police officer, though? In fact, there are no musuem workers as such here, but rather a few police scattered throughout the building, a jarring phenomenon to say the very least. I asked one of them if there was a map of the facility, and we ended up having a long conversation about the art center, his work, the disappearing flora of the hillside behind the center, Oaxacan cooking traditions, and so on. P (not his actual initial) said that he’d been working there for about a year and a half; some of his colleagues have been at the center for ten years. He’d like to stay, he says, because it’s very tranquil, and he gets to interact with a lot of different people. P knew practically nothing about art before he came, and now he feels more comfortable with it.

As I reflected on this experience, I thought back to a moment during a march in Los Angeles after the 2016 election in which I saw people high-fiving the police officers that were lining the road. This gesture struck me as somewhat foolish, since the cops were only here to “restore order”—that is to say beat everyone up—if things got out of hand. The situation at San Agustín strikes me as different, though. Even though the presence of police officers (policia auxiliar, to be fair, I guess) in this space put me on my guard, P was thoughtful, gentle, curious to share knowledge, and open to silence. Make All Cops Work in Museums? Or is that giving far too much credit to art? 

Embedded with YouTube’s “privacy mode,” so you’ll only be tracked if you click play. FYI.

Zúñiga, Rodrigo. La extensión fotográfica: ensayo sobre el triunfo de lo fotográfico. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Metales pesados, 2013.

Found on a recent trip to Mexico City.

The book (a collection of five essays written separately) is an attempt to account for photography’s contemporary situation, that is to say its condition as a digital object. Some of Zúñiga’s ideas are worthwhile. For example, he argues cogently that we should not succumb to the discourse of the end of photography. While the strictly indexical model of photography that Barthes took to be stable ontological ground is now nothing more than “aesthetic region,” this is only a segment of the much broader space that the photographic now takes up. (81) The point here, in short, is that “the end of indexical hegemony does not mean the end of photography.” (80) Well and good. I’m also more or less in line with the idea that seems to drive his project as a whole: “we find ourselves obligated to rethink photographic potentiality [la potencia photográfica] itself, now that it seems to determine—in the age of connections and exchanges of images on a global scale—dynamics and processes of subjectification that we could not have even imagined until a few decades ago.” (8) This is an alluring formulation, but here problems creep in. Zúñiga is a philosopher, and so he does not introduce any concrete examples of photography in order to support his position. The result is that the essay (I’m referring to the titular one) comes across as ahistorical, if not simply presentist. In other words, for all that Zúñiga wants to make clear that the digital has not destroyed the validity of the concept of the photographic, he also has not made it clear exactly what is new about digital technology. But without any reference to, say, the 1930s, it seems a bit strange to suggest that photography has never before produced subjects in the way it does now. I don’t think this is convincing, and it’s a frustrating quality of philosophy that it operates in such an abstract way.

At the time that this blog was designed, I think I was using Tumblr more seriously. Perhaps I’ll use this blog as a Tumblr-like space at some point, or use it as a somewhat glorified Twitter. This blog was designed to be a container for longer posts, with the footnoted link system lending an academic sheen to the text. (This was before I started school.) If I really did learn the lesson from my post a minute ago, though, I will happily ignore any demand of “quality” that my own blog seems to expect.

I want to acknowledge the difficulty of graduate school here. In probably most any humanities PhD program, there is no reliable way to grasp your own progress, because the field itself is so expansive, and the skills that you’re meant to “develop” are not easily measured. In short, there’s just not enough time to read everything in your field. There will always be hundreds of essays and books that you haven’t read, and so your knowledge will always remain incomplete. Dealing with this realization is an existential and emotional challenge. In my case, I entered my program with literally no background in my field; I’d never taken an art history class until I started grad school. I felt acutely aware of this “deficiency,” and it seemed to me that I would never be able to find my feet under me, as it were. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, I often thought of leaving my program. I didn’t drop out, so what changed? Certainly not a sudden revelation from on high of newfound “mastery,” let alone an institutional validation (gold star!) that would confer upon me some unassailable position. No, instead I learned to accept that every scholar has deficiencies, not just the ones who started graduate school without any background in their field. Why even think of this negatively, anyway—perhaps this lack is constitutive in some way. In any case, after the trials and tribulations of courses, I’ve come to realize that there’s just no reason to worry about “mastering” a field. That’s a fiction. Getting to that point, though, is probably easier said than done.

“There are tens of thousands of cameras here,” said the officer, who gave his name as Tushan. “The moment you took your first step in this city, we knew.”

From a chilling article on the emerging police surveillance state in Xinjiang ¹. Had a conversation yesterday in which I tried to suggest that photography differs from poetry in that it’s more closely tied to mass culture, but I didn’t even get to this kind of application. I suppose governments might use poetry for propaganda, but there’s no way it’s as easily allied to systems of control and classification. (The classic essay to consult here is Sekula’s “The Body and the Archive.”)

I realize I’ve posted almost nothing at all since I entered grad school, almost more than three and a half years ago. Quite frankly, I was too overloaded with work, too stressed out about what I was actually doing or whether I even belonged in school, too scared to make any sort of comment about anything because I was painfully aware of how little I knew. These days I’m more comfortable with the idea that there’s no such thing as “mastery” of a subject, and that everyone has tremendous gaps in their knowledge.

So, I came in to grad school knowing that I wanted to work on “photography in Japan,” but I wasn’t entirely sure whether I would focus on the former or the latter. A friendly conversation over the summer brought this realization to the surface, even if I probably could have guessed the answer years ago. When, in the course of chatting, I mentioned that I hardly knew anything about Japan before 1860 or so, one of my colleagues who studies premodern literature rolled their eyes at me, almost involuntarily. I didn’t process it at the time, but the next day I realized: I’m a photography scholar, not a scholar of Japan, and photography doesn’t even get invented until the mid-19th century, so I have no reason to be ashamed of knowing nothing about medieval Japanese literature! (As it happens, “Japan” also doesn’t get invented until the 19th century, but that’s a different story.)