Insufficient Competitor x 2

 October 24th & October 25th, 2012

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Against the overwhelming power of technologies that reproduce that which is real, conveying it onto mobile mirrors, mere letters that at best allure the self prove to be an insufficient competitor. Thus, literature “hands its enchanted mirror over to the machines” — at the clear cost of the fragmentation of “the narcissism of one’s own conception of the body.”

- Iris Dressler (quoting Friedrich Kittler) on the triumph of film’s popularity over literature

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She argues that since film “reproduces that which is real,” it sublimates our visual imagination and forces us to see what it wants us to see — and this opposed to the un-caged abandon with which we envisage when we read literature.

Similarly, non-narrative, non-linear multiple exposures overlap in odd places and play temporal tricks on the viewer (and on the photographer's memory!). Add to that an unfamiliar clerk's arbitrary choice of frame selection and my heavy thinker's heart grows wings the size of warehouses. I constantly want to relocate myself in an unknown territory, want always to enter a Borges story half-way through as the character that shows up only in the footnotes, want (as Whitman said?) to be turned around with my eyes closed once in the forest.

In short, to be lost.

Exerting so much control alongside relinquishing so much control is the new seduction.
Not being sure becomes less exciting than being sure I could not possibly know.

And this taking place atop (within?) a portrait of the self!