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When Adar enters
Mar. 14th, 2004 01:33 pmOn Saturday I went to see the art in the strip of galleries huddled under the S-bahn at Janowitzbrucke. The first few weren't very exciting -- there was a splashy mural, a hut installation with a trompe l'oeuil forest filled with throat-clearing sounds, a few big photos of nondescript apartment blocks, and some nice digitally-manipulated pregnant women by Vibeke Tandberg.
But then I entered a new space belonging to BuroFriedrich, a darkened cave filled with three video projections by Yael Bartana. On the biggest of the three screens an extraordinary carnival was unfolding. On the streets of what was clearly an Israeli city people were rushing by in the most bizarre costumes, like white rabbits in Alice in Wonderland. A masked king with a staff waved from the back of a hatchback. Six young bridesmaids waited to cross the street. A little boy with long forecurls and a striped hat gave the camera a feral sneer. A hassidic man in white socks covered his face with his hat on seeing the camera. These were normal street scenes, yet nobody was normal.
The video was edited to emphasize the strangeness of what we saw: verite-style shots slipped from time to time into slow motion, actors seemed to be mixed in with the passersby, and the sound of real sirens and traffic was mixed with strange abstract musique concrete. The resulting atmosphere -- ludic, otherworldly, chaotic, strange and rather disturbing (what planet am I on?) -- was like seeing a town filled entirely with Matthew Barneys and Cindy Shermans, caught on handycam by a passing anthropologist. It seemed like some sort of orthodox Jewish version of Halloween, Mardi Gras or the Venice Carnival.
Studying the handout, I learned that Yael Bartana is an Israeli artist (born 1970) who divides her time between New York and Amsterdam. This piece, When Adar Enters , was shot in March 2003 in orthodox districts of Jerusalem and Bnei-Brak during Purim, an annual celebration of an ancient victory over the Persians during the month of Adar (March). Bartana filmed people dressed up as brides and kings in reference to a passage in the Old Testament.
An orthodox website explains Purim thus: 'When one enters the month of Adar, joy is increased' (Ta'anit 29a). We learn that the festival of Purim , occurring in the middle of the month, is so delightful that it reverberates throughout the weeks before and after. Purim is a celebration of the human potential for transformation... we cloak ourselves in brilliant disguises and masquerade...'
Bartana's statement is not so breathlessly celebratory, nor so universalist. 'I am focusing on Israel in order to ask: what is this place where I grew up? How long will this troubled nation continue to perpetuate this pattern of ignorance?' she says. 'By manipulating form, sound and movement, I create work that triggers personal resonance. Personal, intimate reactions have the potential to provoke honest responses and perhaps replace the predictable, controlled reactions encouraged by the state... State organised memorials, ceremonies and military events define tradition and shape national identity. They are powerful and therefore dangerous phenomena that perpetuate patterns of loyalty and ignorance. I am interested in the dynamics of the state that prescribes a belief system, and the individual who embraces it.'
If the official line casts Purim in blandly universal terms as 'a celebration of the human potential for transformation', Bartana draws our attention back to the festival's particular, partisan, odd, atavistic and aggressive elements. Neither tourist nor participant, she is unable to ignore the divisiveness in the festival's victorious mood: what makes the celebrants so happy, after all, is a Jewish victory thousands of years ago, and some implication about the 'chosenness' of the Jewish people, their particularity and difference.
With her use of odd, disturbing music, slow motion, the sense of randomness, the reluctance of the participants to be filmed, Bartana has given Purim the somewhat sinister, extraterrestrial, fascinating allure of the Ku Klux Klan or a Papuan tribe. What's fascinating in this video is that these people are not part of la pensee unique. They have held back, deliberately, from all worldliness, from denim, convergence, liberalism, monoculture. Fascination is a mixture of attraction and repulsion, and Bartana has tapped brilliantly into our ambivalence about true difference -- the central anxiety, I think, of our time.
We live in a monoculture which likes to pretend it's neutral -- that it has no flavour, no local accent, no ideology, no eccentricities or neuroses. Our monoculture calls itself pretentiously bland things like 'the international community'. It uses a fake liberalism to destroy the differences that resist it and threaten to make visible its biases. Because our monoculture is evangelical -- its need for cheap labour and raw materials and perpetual economic growth forces it to keep expanding -- it needs to propose its values as universal. It does this by presenting its own values as natural, uncontroversial, inevitable. When it's not challenged, it erases difference with seemingly benign weapons like trade, development, freedom, democracy and rights. When it's challenged, it uses threats and military force to crush resistance and wipe out difference and the particularities that resist it.
In the face of this 'orthodoxy' with its pretensions to neutrality and universality, the pretension of the Orthodox Jews ('God's chosen people' -- quelle pretension!) is actually refreshing. Orthodox Jews look so interesting on the street because they are, like the best actors, pretentious in a rather magnificently unapologetic way. They are not ashamed of proclaiming their utter difference. Practising a fearless, often dangerous, self-ostranenie, a deliberate Verfremdungseffekt, defamiliarisation and distanciation, Orthodox Jews seem to bring to the street the provocations of the avant garde, that state of mind where the tepid feelgood generalisations of faux-tolerant, covertly evangelical liberalism are left behind.
We're not all the same deep down, damn it! Where the liberal orthodoxy is a joyless and conformist hedonism, the Orthodox are austere and abstemious. Where the liberal orthodoxy is secular materialism, the Orthodox are religious and metaphysical. Where the orthodoxy is expansion and evangelism and pluricide, the Orthodox keep themselves to themselves and focus on staying weirdly different.
The other day, watching in a documentary Canton chefs skinning a dog to be eaten, I caught myself thinking 'They won't be able to do that any more when China becomes part of the world community.' And then I was appalled by my own thought, with its implication that different ways of doing things are unacceptable, that convergence towards western mores is inevitable, and that China, with all its differences, is not already part of 'the world community'. I wouldn't eat a dog, but who am I to say it's wrong and must be on the way out? Then again, isn't my moral relativism also an ideology? Why then do I embrace an ideology that doesn't allow me to think what I think (that eating dogs is wrong)?
I'm conflicted. It's good when the state or big corporations abandon their claims to universality, embrace their 'situatedness', and admit that they believe in something particular. HOWEVER I don't want them to use their new-found visibility the same way they used their invisibility -- to force their own particularities down other people's throats. Difference enriches. HOWEVER, knowing humans and their tendency to bully and attack each other, difference also endangers. Harmony is nice. HOWEVER, harmony should not require too much hiding and especially not erasure of all black notes, minor keys and discords. I like to see people in my city who look like they think differently from me. HOWEVER, I don't like it when I find they're illiberal, and especially not when their difference from me causes them to blow me up with a bomb. People emphasizing their difference can make us tolerant. HOWEVER, people emphasizing their difference can also foster resentment and hatred. Someone who goes out of his way to say he's different may be asking for it. HOWEVER, I may have forced him into that role when my prejudice made him a pariah. Pretension and vanity about your specialness and your difference is a good thing. You're special! HOWEVER, pretension and vanity about your specialness and your difference is a bad thing. What makes you think you're so special? Everybody's special! So you're not special.
I was rather shocked last week when Robert Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, called the new Volvo concept car (designed by and for women) 'sexist'. What he didn't like about this feminine car was the fact that it made all other cars -- the cars in his own range -- look masculine. He (and BMW's spokesman, who also derided the vulva-Volvo) knew that if one accepted that Volvo had really produced a revolutionary new car for women, it made all other cars look like cars for men. It blew their cover of gender neutrality. It suddenly made visible the ideology built into seemingly-neutral technology. Look, General Motors is not so 'general' after all! It makes 'cars for men (that women can also drive)'. Why doesn't it change its name to Particular Motors! Particular Motors comes from a particular town, Detroit! Particular Motors speaks with a particular accent! Particular Motors is a man!
If we accept all that (let's call it 'situatedness', with philosopher David Simpson), we can't help finding a word like 'sexist' ridiculous. Sexist is a word from a world where nothing has a gender because everything is secretly male, male by default. Where the gulf between 'equality of opportunity' and 'inequality of result' (which is its logical consequence) has become so wide that the way we speak about things (the neutrality we hope to find) and the way we find them to be in reality (the messy particularity we do find) has become farcical.
In a world where everything has a gender, is sexed rather than ideally, notionally sexless, the word 'sexist' is tautological. It may be wrong to make rigid and deterministic links between gender and behaviour, but it's also wrong to leave gender out of account. It's perverse to call someone foregrounding gender a 'sexist' while gender is still an important differentiator -- a signifying difference -- in all societes, a distinction already clear to young children. The 'sexist' women at Volvo made a car addressing the particularities of women rather than pretending to be 'universal'. Interestingly enough, Volvo later backed away from their daring particularity. In a cunning spin which eased the anxiety of particularity by stressing convergence, Camilla Palmertz, the Volvo project manager, declared: 'Men and women really want the same things in cars. But women want more.' How disappointing! It seems that the hubris of universal claims is, in marketing, just impossible to avoid. Nobody ever says 'This product is for you... but not for you.' Nobody ever wants to limit the market like that. And so we get bland, secretly specific yet pretentiously universalist products, products which try to be all things to all... ahem... consumers. And their corollary: politicians which try to be all things to all... ahem... voters.
A debate between London mayor Ken Livingstone and French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin about the french decision to ban the islamic hijab in schools made me think again about 'pretentious universalism'. It struck me as a debate between a pretentiously universalist liberalism (Livingstone) and a modestly situated illiberalism (Raffarin). Raffarin says that the french state is secular, and wants to outlaw all provocative and divisive religious affiliations in schools. Livingstone says that religion is an important part of cultural identity, and that the display of religious customs enhances tolerance and acceptance of other cultures.
They both use the rights of women to bolster their opposing positions. Raffarin says that the hijab reflects the lowly status of women in Islam, which the egalitarian french state would not tolerate. Livingstone says that by preventing women from wearing what they choose, the french state is limiting the women's freedom of choice. For Livingstone, freedom of choice is apparently a fairly unproblematical neutral area. But what if clothes wear us as much as we wear them? What if a western shopping centre contains not clothes for women but ideology about women in the form of clothes? What if, in other words, there's nothing neutral about 'freedom of choice', and, instead of freedom, there's only a choice of allegiances? My people, or yours. My racial-cultural clan (with a history ranging from glory to gory) or yours? This, in all its thisness, or that in all its thatness?
Raffarin wants Islamic women to take off the hijab. In exchange, he is prepared to disrobe the french state, remove its cloak of 'pretentious universalism'. Like a man taking off his clothes, power is both more modest and more terrifying when it stands naked.
Raffarin's position is a strong one to the extent that it acknowledges that the state is not neutral on religion: the state is secular in an intolerant way, suggesting that secularism is itself a sort of religion. This is an important step away from the pretension of universalism, which always tries to portray itself as neutral and global. Raffarin says 'Here, in a french school, we are french, and secular. If you come here, be as french and as secular as we are'. He knows that power abhors a vacuum. The choice for Islamic women is not between 'what France wants us to wear and what we want to wear', but between 'what France wants us to wear and what Islam wants us to wear.' Between two powerful particularities, in other words, with no neutral ground. And just as there is no neutral ground where a woman can be a women free of cultural constructions of her freedom or obligation, so there is no neutral place in french society where the foreigner can be 'other' in a simple and harmless way. In a country notably intolerant of difference, the only alternative to integration is mortal danger. I don't want to believe this view -- I very much want a society of co-existent differences, of pluralism -- but history teaches me that I cannot dismiss it. I cannot get complacent.
'Better red than dead,' some people used to say, while others replied 'better dead than red'. In that bi-polar world, ideologies at least had a colour. After the collapse of communism we lived for a decade or so in a bubble world whose transparent limits seemed like infinity to us and whose filmy flow of colours seemed like no-colour. In our hubris we believed that ideology itself was over, and that our way of thinking about life was neutral. Our 'new world order', our 'international community', had no accent, and no colour. It was nothing, and it was everywhere. Like money, it had no odour. But the bubble burst. It became apparent on 9/11 that someone, somewhere saw our system as having a distinct colour, and would rather be dead than agree to become whatever colour we were. Today's Al Quaeda statement claiming responsibility for the Madrid train bombings says 'You love life and we love death.' There it is. Some would rather be dead than the colour we are. Whatever that is. Some like what we've made of life so little that they'd rather die than live the way we do. Their plan for integration is to kill themselves and also us. Perhaps this is what spring feels like in Israel.
But then I entered a new space belonging to BuroFriedrich, a darkened cave filled with three video projections by Yael Bartana. On the biggest of the three screens an extraordinary carnival was unfolding. On the streets of what was clearly an Israeli city people were rushing by in the most bizarre costumes, like white rabbits in Alice in Wonderland. A masked king with a staff waved from the back of a hatchback. Six young bridesmaids waited to cross the street. A little boy with long forecurls and a striped hat gave the camera a feral sneer. A hassidic man in white socks covered his face with his hat on seeing the camera. These were normal street scenes, yet nobody was normal.
The video was edited to emphasize the strangeness of what we saw: verite-style shots slipped from time to time into slow motion, actors seemed to be mixed in with the passersby, and the sound of real sirens and traffic was mixed with strange abstract musique concrete. The resulting atmosphere -- ludic, otherworldly, chaotic, strange and rather disturbing (what planet am I on?) -- was like seeing a town filled entirely with Matthew Barneys and Cindy Shermans, caught on handycam by a passing anthropologist. It seemed like some sort of orthodox Jewish version of Halloween, Mardi Gras or the Venice Carnival.
Studying the handout, I learned that Yael Bartana is an Israeli artist (born 1970) who divides her time between New York and Amsterdam. This piece, When Adar Enters , was shot in March 2003 in orthodox districts of Jerusalem and Bnei-Brak during Purim, an annual celebration of an ancient victory over the Persians during the month of Adar (March). Bartana filmed people dressed up as brides and kings in reference to a passage in the Old Testament.
An orthodox website explains Purim thus: 'When one enters the month of Adar, joy is increased' (Ta'anit 29a). We learn that the festival of Purim , occurring in the middle of the month, is so delightful that it reverberates throughout the weeks before and after. Purim is a celebration of the human potential for transformation... we cloak ourselves in brilliant disguises and masquerade...'
Bartana's statement is not so breathlessly celebratory, nor so universalist. 'I am focusing on Israel in order to ask: what is this place where I grew up? How long will this troubled nation continue to perpetuate this pattern of ignorance?' she says. 'By manipulating form, sound and movement, I create work that triggers personal resonance. Personal, intimate reactions have the potential to provoke honest responses and perhaps replace the predictable, controlled reactions encouraged by the state... State organised memorials, ceremonies and military events define tradition and shape national identity. They are powerful and therefore dangerous phenomena that perpetuate patterns of loyalty and ignorance. I am interested in the dynamics of the state that prescribes a belief system, and the individual who embraces it.'
If the official line casts Purim in blandly universal terms as 'a celebration of the human potential for transformation', Bartana draws our attention back to the festival's particular, partisan, odd, atavistic and aggressive elements. Neither tourist nor participant, she is unable to ignore the divisiveness in the festival's victorious mood: what makes the celebrants so happy, after all, is a Jewish victory thousands of years ago, and some implication about the 'chosenness' of the Jewish people, their particularity and difference.
With her use of odd, disturbing music, slow motion, the sense of randomness, the reluctance of the participants to be filmed, Bartana has given Purim the somewhat sinister, extraterrestrial, fascinating allure of the Ku Klux Klan or a Papuan tribe. What's fascinating in this video is that these people are not part of la pensee unique. They have held back, deliberately, from all worldliness, from denim, convergence, liberalism, monoculture. Fascination is a mixture of attraction and repulsion, and Bartana has tapped brilliantly into our ambivalence about true difference -- the central anxiety, I think, of our time.
We live in a monoculture which likes to pretend it's neutral -- that it has no flavour, no local accent, no ideology, no eccentricities or neuroses. Our monoculture calls itself pretentiously bland things like 'the international community'. It uses a fake liberalism to destroy the differences that resist it and threaten to make visible its biases. Because our monoculture is evangelical -- its need for cheap labour and raw materials and perpetual economic growth forces it to keep expanding -- it needs to propose its values as universal. It does this by presenting its own values as natural, uncontroversial, inevitable. When it's not challenged, it erases difference with seemingly benign weapons like trade, development, freedom, democracy and rights. When it's challenged, it uses threats and military force to crush resistance and wipe out difference and the particularities that resist it.
In the face of this 'orthodoxy' with its pretensions to neutrality and universality, the pretension of the Orthodox Jews ('God's chosen people' -- quelle pretension!) is actually refreshing. Orthodox Jews look so interesting on the street because they are, like the best actors, pretentious in a rather magnificently unapologetic way. They are not ashamed of proclaiming their utter difference. Practising a fearless, often dangerous, self-ostranenie, a deliberate Verfremdungseffekt, defamiliarisation and distanciation, Orthodox Jews seem to bring to the street the provocations of the avant garde, that state of mind where the tepid feelgood generalisations of faux-tolerant, covertly evangelical liberalism are left behind.
We're not all the same deep down, damn it! Where the liberal orthodoxy is a joyless and conformist hedonism, the Orthodox are austere and abstemious. Where the liberal orthodoxy is secular materialism, the Orthodox are religious and metaphysical. Where the orthodoxy is expansion and evangelism and pluricide, the Orthodox keep themselves to themselves and focus on staying weirdly different.
The other day, watching in a documentary Canton chefs skinning a dog to be eaten, I caught myself thinking 'They won't be able to do that any more when China becomes part of the world community.' And then I was appalled by my own thought, with its implication that different ways of doing things are unacceptable, that convergence towards western mores is inevitable, and that China, with all its differences, is not already part of 'the world community'. I wouldn't eat a dog, but who am I to say it's wrong and must be on the way out? Then again, isn't my moral relativism also an ideology? Why then do I embrace an ideology that doesn't allow me to think what I think (that eating dogs is wrong)?
I'm conflicted. It's good when the state or big corporations abandon their claims to universality, embrace their 'situatedness', and admit that they believe in something particular. HOWEVER I don't want them to use their new-found visibility the same way they used their invisibility -- to force their own particularities down other people's throats. Difference enriches. HOWEVER, knowing humans and their tendency to bully and attack each other, difference also endangers. Harmony is nice. HOWEVER, harmony should not require too much hiding and especially not erasure of all black notes, minor keys and discords. I like to see people in my city who look like they think differently from me. HOWEVER, I don't like it when I find they're illiberal, and especially not when their difference from me causes them to blow me up with a bomb. People emphasizing their difference can make us tolerant. HOWEVER, people emphasizing their difference can also foster resentment and hatred. Someone who goes out of his way to say he's different may be asking for it. HOWEVER, I may have forced him into that role when my prejudice made him a pariah. Pretension and vanity about your specialness and your difference is a good thing. You're special! HOWEVER, pretension and vanity about your specialness and your difference is a bad thing. What makes you think you're so special? Everybody's special! So you're not special.
I was rather shocked last week when Robert Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, called the new Volvo concept car (designed by and for women) 'sexist'. What he didn't like about this feminine car was the fact that it made all other cars -- the cars in his own range -- look masculine. He (and BMW's spokesman, who also derided the vulva-Volvo) knew that if one accepted that Volvo had really produced a revolutionary new car for women, it made all other cars look like cars for men. It blew their cover of gender neutrality. It suddenly made visible the ideology built into seemingly-neutral technology. Look, General Motors is not so 'general' after all! It makes 'cars for men (that women can also drive)'. Why doesn't it change its name to Particular Motors! Particular Motors comes from a particular town, Detroit! Particular Motors speaks with a particular accent! Particular Motors is a man!
If we accept all that (let's call it 'situatedness', with philosopher David Simpson), we can't help finding a word like 'sexist' ridiculous. Sexist is a word from a world where nothing has a gender because everything is secretly male, male by default. Where the gulf between 'equality of opportunity' and 'inequality of result' (which is its logical consequence) has become so wide that the way we speak about things (the neutrality we hope to find) and the way we find them to be in reality (the messy particularity we do find) has become farcical.
In a world where everything has a gender, is sexed rather than ideally, notionally sexless, the word 'sexist' is tautological. It may be wrong to make rigid and deterministic links between gender and behaviour, but it's also wrong to leave gender out of account. It's perverse to call someone foregrounding gender a 'sexist' while gender is still an important differentiator -- a signifying difference -- in all societes, a distinction already clear to young children. The 'sexist' women at Volvo made a car addressing the particularities of women rather than pretending to be 'universal'. Interestingly enough, Volvo later backed away from their daring particularity. In a cunning spin which eased the anxiety of particularity by stressing convergence, Camilla Palmertz, the Volvo project manager, declared: 'Men and women really want the same things in cars. But women want more.' How disappointing! It seems that the hubris of universal claims is, in marketing, just impossible to avoid. Nobody ever says 'This product is for you... but not for you.' Nobody ever wants to limit the market like that. And so we get bland, secretly specific yet pretentiously universalist products, products which try to be all things to all... ahem... consumers. And their corollary: politicians which try to be all things to all... ahem... voters.
A debate between London mayor Ken Livingstone and French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin about the french decision to ban the islamic hijab in schools made me think again about 'pretentious universalism'. It struck me as a debate between a pretentiously universalist liberalism (Livingstone) and a modestly situated illiberalism (Raffarin). Raffarin says that the french state is secular, and wants to outlaw all provocative and divisive religious affiliations in schools. Livingstone says that religion is an important part of cultural identity, and that the display of religious customs enhances tolerance and acceptance of other cultures.
They both use the rights of women to bolster their opposing positions. Raffarin says that the hijab reflects the lowly status of women in Islam, which the egalitarian french state would not tolerate. Livingstone says that by preventing women from wearing what they choose, the french state is limiting the women's freedom of choice. For Livingstone, freedom of choice is apparently a fairly unproblematical neutral area. But what if clothes wear us as much as we wear them? What if a western shopping centre contains not clothes for women but ideology about women in the form of clothes? What if, in other words, there's nothing neutral about 'freedom of choice', and, instead of freedom, there's only a choice of allegiances? My people, or yours. My racial-cultural clan (with a history ranging from glory to gory) or yours? This, in all its thisness, or that in all its thatness?
Raffarin wants Islamic women to take off the hijab. In exchange, he is prepared to disrobe the french state, remove its cloak of 'pretentious universalism'. Like a man taking off his clothes, power is both more modest and more terrifying when it stands naked.
Raffarin's position is a strong one to the extent that it acknowledges that the state is not neutral on religion: the state is secular in an intolerant way, suggesting that secularism is itself a sort of religion. This is an important step away from the pretension of universalism, which always tries to portray itself as neutral and global. Raffarin says 'Here, in a french school, we are french, and secular. If you come here, be as french and as secular as we are'. He knows that power abhors a vacuum. The choice for Islamic women is not between 'what France wants us to wear and what we want to wear', but between 'what France wants us to wear and what Islam wants us to wear.' Between two powerful particularities, in other words, with no neutral ground. And just as there is no neutral ground where a woman can be a women free of cultural constructions of her freedom or obligation, so there is no neutral place in french society where the foreigner can be 'other' in a simple and harmless way. In a country notably intolerant of difference, the only alternative to integration is mortal danger. I don't want to believe this view -- I very much want a society of co-existent differences, of pluralism -- but history teaches me that I cannot dismiss it. I cannot get complacent.
'Better red than dead,' some people used to say, while others replied 'better dead than red'. In that bi-polar world, ideologies at least had a colour. After the collapse of communism we lived for a decade or so in a bubble world whose transparent limits seemed like infinity to us and whose filmy flow of colours seemed like no-colour. In our hubris we believed that ideology itself was over, and that our way of thinking about life was neutral. Our 'new world order', our 'international community', had no accent, and no colour. It was nothing, and it was everywhere. Like money, it had no odour. But the bubble burst. It became apparent on 9/11 that someone, somewhere saw our system as having a distinct colour, and would rather be dead than agree to become whatever colour we were. Today's Al Quaeda statement claiming responsibility for the Madrid train bombings says 'You love life and we love death.' There it is. Some would rather be dead than the colour we are. Whatever that is. Some like what we've made of life so little that they'd rather die than live the way we do. Their plan for integration is to kill themselves and also us. Perhaps this is what spring feels like in Israel.