Words of Light

Cadava, Eduardo

doi:10.2307/j.ctv39x7bt

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The reproduction was painted by Christopher du Preez, who was the acting director of the Red Location Museum and a South End Museum board member. 41 A. Cook, 'The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History' , Criticism, 46,3,2004,494. As a counter-point and as a limit to such an argument, although the actors are just that, actors, and not ex-residents of South End, their play in the scene asks us to consider 'historical actors as human beings rather than as incidental by-products of material conditions, the bearers of some abstract historical spirit, or as passive vehicles for the self-articulation of discourse' , while simultaneously, 'and to some extent conversely' , as Cook argues, 'they also force participants and audiences to consider the material, environmental, and cultural constraints under which all lives are lived' .…”

Section: Mapping 'Community'mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Another Image of 'Community' at the South End Museum

Smith

2021

Kronos.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper considers some of the curatorial devices used in exhibitions at the South End Museum in Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth). The South End Museum, which opened on 3 March 2001, is modelled in several respects on the District Six Museum in Cape Town: it, too, is an urban-based, self-defined 'community museum' constituted around the histories of the apartheid Group Areas Act and the implementation of forced removals. Like many post-1994 museums in South Africa, the South End Museum relies on photographs for their displays, whilst also making use of maps, a mural and reenactment. The paper considers the ways in which these different displays touch, recall, reflect and activate one another. Keeping in mind that the notion of 'community' in South Africa bears the burden of being raced by its apartheid and colonial pasts, and abiding by the spectrality that is constitutive of the image, the paper grapples with the haunted space of 'community museums' in the Eastern Cape. While the South End Museum deploys some of the same curatorial devices as the District Six Museum, and deals with related histories of forced removal, South End, it is argued, brings the relation between race, indigeneity and 'ruin' within 'community museums' into fleeting focus.

show abstract

Section: Mapping 'Community'mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But here it is the painting that points to this. What this reproduction stages is the reproducibility of the photograph, 'reproducibility as a mode' 46 and how this, as Cadava writes, 'deconstructs [the] value of authenticity' . 47 This allows for a reading of this mural beyond its representation of cultural values.…”

Section: Mapping 'Community'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Another Image of 'Community' at the South End Museum

Smith

2021

Kronos.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…55 This image of philosophical thought resonates with Cadava's observation that in Benjamin's thought 'there can be no philosophy without photography'. 56 But where Benjamin produces a 'photography of history', John Ó Maoilearca explains that Laruelle's non-standard aesthetics 'materializes […] thought through a photography of philosophy'. 57 It is through the adoption of the axiomatic method and a description of the immanent vision that manifests itself according to these axioms that Laruelle effectuates the suspension of philosophical/photographic realism, and this is arguably where the 'barbarity' of his thought resides: in order to find a non-specular paradigm for thinking he looks to a form of reasoning that, as Ray Brassier remarks, '"continental" philosophy has consistently belittled and demeaned as un-thinking'.…”

Section: Laruelle: Radicalizing the Photographic Apparatusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing in-photo: Non-photography as Positive Barbarism

Lammin

2018

Parallax

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Technology was already an analysis and reconstruction of perception, already an artificial perception […] Let us extend this experience in the form of an experiment within a matrix that imitates the photographic apparatus and what it hides or houses within its entrails, an experimental dispositive of the transformation of the most intellectual of perceptions that must abandon its machinery and determinism. François Laruelle 2 Benjamin's claim that modern technologies reveal the poverty of the conventional notion of experience, and thus initiate a new kind barbarism, appears at first sight to be a negative judgement of the effects of modern life. However, he uses the term 'barbarism' to indicate a new, positive, concept, proposing that the 'poverty of experience' does something productive for the barbarian: It forces him to start from scratch; to make a new start; […] Among the great creative spirits, there have always been the ones who begin by clearing a tabula rasa. They need a drawing table; they were constructors. 3 Benjamin cites philosophers (Descartes), scientists (Albert Einstein), avant-garde artists (the Cubists, Paul Klee) and science-fiction writers (Paul Scheerbart) as taking such 'barbaric' approaches to their respective creative practices, indicating that poverty of experience can yield constructive results across diverse regions of knowledge production. This article seeks to add another name to this list-that of François Laruelle-and to explore the ways in which Laruelle's contemporary experiments in 'non-philosophical' or 'non-standard' thinking similarly constitute a levelling of the grounds of thought which radicalizes experience, and resonate with Benjamin's own ideas about experience and technology. Laruelle characterizes his theoretical stance as a 'heresy' in relation to standard philosophy, and it perhaps seems 'barbaric' to some; 4 indeed, Jacques Derrida suggests that Laruelle's unorthodox method holds what appears as a kind of 'terror' over philosophy. 5 However, the ultimate aim of Laruelle's heresy is to introduce a radical democracy into thinking, setting philosophical concepts into a broader paradigm by supposing the equality of all genres of thought. Here, I will argue that non-philosophy can thus be understood as an example of the positive barbarism that Benjamin calls for.

show abstract

“…Cadava claims that this rapport derives from their shared heliotropism: "Both take their life from light". 3 The "heliotropic" aspect of both philosophy and photography refers to their continual turning (tropism) towards the sun, whether as divine light, the light of reason or the sensible object. 4 In the factory, the dark chamber is where light sensitivity or light receptivity is enabled.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Light sensitive material: an introduction

Henning¹,

Mikuriya²

2021

photographies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Picture an enormous flat-bed machine, mounted on rollers and the length of several buildings, dwelling in a narrow pitch-black cavern into which no light can enter. 1 On this machine lies a long strip of paper or film and here it is coated with photosensitive emulsion and dried. Conceive of it as a giant creature, incubated in this cavern. It is a temperamental and hyper-sensitive being, affected not only by light but by temperature, humidity, air velocity, dust, contaminants in the air and in liquid. It is receptive and responsive to human touch and to certain metals. No people are allowed in its cave; it is watched over only by infrared cameras, and other sensors. Picture further, in a different room, lit by electric lights, a man who monitors this creature in its cave, via the images that illuminate several computer screens. Somewhere else in this building there is a group of people who receive and analyse various samples and scans which are extracted and produced by the machines in the darkened chamber.We are in the factory of Harman Technology, in Mobberley, a village in North-West England. This is one of the factories that belonged to Ilford Limited, the manufacturer which dominated British photographic production in the first half of the twentieth century alongside Kodak Limited (the British branch of the American giant Eastman Kodak). Harman Technology continues to produce Ilford photographic film and darkroom materials here. The factory visit was made as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Fellowship, which also funded archival research on Ilford Ltd, and supported the two-day conference

show abstract

Words of Light

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Another Image of 'Community' at the South End Museum

Another Image of 'Community' at the South End Museum

Seeing in-photo: Non-photography as Positive Barbarism

Light sensitive material: an introduction

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About