Peter C. Marzio. “Art, Technology and Satire: the Legacy of Rube Goldberg”. Great Britain: Pergamon Press, 1972, Vol. 5, pp. 315-324.
As Director of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Peter C. Marzio is today lauded for his extremely successful museum directorship and ability to fundraise. In addition to these successes he has been particularly committed to building a museum that reflects both the diverse ethnicity and population of the local community. He has set a major 10-year Latin American art initiative project in place, following the success of the Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, co-curated by Mari Carmen RamÃrez and Hector Olea. 1. Merzio came from blue-collar beginnings and initially trained as a technical draughtsman before his PHD graduation. He has authored five books and numerous articles.
Introducing this article on Rube Goldberg, Marzio’s abstract outlines his intentions to investigate four broad areas of research. The first is the acceptance of the machine and technology as viable subjects for fine arts since 1910, the second being that much of the art of technology was satirical and in sympathy with the cartoons of Rube Goldberg, the third was to connect the Goldberg inventions with a style of satire described by Freud, and the final area is how Goldberg’s cartoons point out some of the basic characteristics of modern technology that most observers fail to see .2
Picking up on the second and third point, the second paragraph of Marzio’s article relates the connectedness between Goldberg, Duchamp and Dadaism, He concludes a brief discussion by expounding that Duchamps “refusal to distinguish between art and anything else in the world”, became one of the main aspects of Dadaism “and that more importantly, it opened the door of modern aesthetics for technology and laughter” 3
In a rare recording of one of his interviews, Duchamp said that “Dada was important in producing humour in very serious work”. I perceive this statement as saying something different to Marzio's understanding, something more along that lines that humour was deliberately employed to highlight the seriousness of the concept. Duchamp went on to say that
“Humour is important to me because it justifies the fact that you are living”, and when discussing the concept of the readymade Duchamp carefully explained that his intention was irony, not laughter.
He said,
“here is a ready made as a sort of irony, it ‘s a thing called art – I didn’t even make it. I chose something that was neither interesting nor not interesting, that I did not like or did not dislike, with a total absence of good or bad taste, a complete anesthesia.
Art means to make, to hand make-
Ready made is a form of denying the possibility of defining art.”4
The difference is that satire holds up human vices and follies for scorn, whereas irony gains its humour from the discordance between what is said or done and what is generally understood or expected. Situational irony, which is what I think Duchamp is explaining, is when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect, such as presenting a readymade in an art gallery as a work of art within a situational context of historical expectations that art is either hand-painted or hand -sculpted.
Goldberg, however, does appear to be exposing some kind of aberrant anthropomorphic behaviour that shows us something questionable about human folly, or perhaps he is deliberately depicting follies to express his particular concerns about the rapid mechanisation of human activity .
It was Goldberg himself who said “ while large groups of inventors were toying with great forces of the universe I looked around me in anguish.”5
{and just because this paper reminded me of a special childhood character…}
“Next to Uncle Scrooge, Gyro Gearloose is probably the most ingenious invention of Barks but then; Gyro is an inventor in the stories himself. Gyro hardly ever invented anything that we could use in today's world. Usually it was a question of coming up with extremely skilled solutions for people who had specific problems. From time to time the inventions turned out to have a life of their own and the amiable Gyro ended up in lots of trouble.”
http://www.cbarks.dk/THEINVENTIONS.htm
1 REGINA SILVEIRA
em HOUSTON, EUA
http://www.britocimino.com.br/convite/exp-reg/indexbr.htm
2 Marzio, Peter.C. Art, Technology and Satire: The Legacy of Rube Goldberg, Leonardo, Vol. 5, Pergamon Press 1972. P.315
3 Ibid., pp. 315
4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv_Poj5qXQ4&NR=1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SXyMAkZu1M&feature=related
5 Marzio, Peter C. “Art, Technology and Satire: the Legacy of Rube Goldberg”. Great Britain: Pergamon Press, 1972, Vol. 5, pp. 321
>
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Artrite 3 k.way 2008
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. London: Penguin, 2007.
"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know...." (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race). (1.) Taleb, ‘Fooled By Randomness’)
The Black Swan describes how we are mostly unprepared and ignorant about the timing and impact of major occurrences in our personal, local and global lives. I remember in a Sociology 101 lecture hearing the French Revolution described as having seemed ‘to suddenly burst forth out of a clear, blue sky’. I also remember the day of the September 11 being described by a newsman with exactly the same words, and the surprise reported of Americans who could not understand why they or America should be so hated.
Perhaps these occurrences help to explain why we are drawn to conspiracy theories. Because part of their appeal is that they provide secret and exhaustive reasons for the surface of history providing all the intrigues and machinations behind events, behind history. Then maybe if you get the codes right you know the secrets and you know who was pulling what parts of the string. Even though it’s hard to find out and even though it’s incredibly elaborate there is a cause and effect that’s traceable. Having an inkling of insider knowing about what Taleb refers to as the significant, large events perhaps imbues us with a sense of control, a sense that maybe we can do something about it, to be an actor rather than a couch potato observer.
Reading Edward Said writing about his own transformation from being a teacher at Columbia University to being “reclaimed by the Arab world generally and by Palestine in particular. This was a direct result of the war…and of severely damaged political, cultural…military and geographical situation…” supports this theory. He continues his story with a knowing of the history, the betrayals, the nations and political and economic orders that destroyed his home and their peace. (Said. P.1-2)
Michel Chossudovsky too has been thorough in his research of exactly how the “Movement of the global economy is ‘regulated’ by a ‘world-wide process of debt collection’ which constricts the institutions of the national state and contributes to destroying employment and economic activity….entire countries have been destabilized as a consequence of the collapse of national currencies, often resulting in the outbreak of social strife, ethnic conflicts and civil war.” (Chossudovsky P.15)
His book is about economic restructuring imposed by international creditors on developing countries and his information is sourced directly from the IMF, the World Bank, financial journals and bank archives.
This heavy information makes Taleb’s discussions, questions and the following Glossary, appear a little glib, a little, I don’t know…light and unfeeling maybe.
I do agree with his investigation of knowledge and how there’s maybe not enough emphasis on the bigger picture. We could do more to develop a culture where asking questions and admitting we don’t know is accepted without any major dissing.
We could accept randomness and unpredictability and chaos has a greater part to play in our lives and the world than order, static knowledge and hierarchies. However his approach and the manner in which he offers his analysis and what I suspect is his unremarkable agenda in this tumultuous and suffering world just leaves me cold.
Said. W. Edward. The Politics of Dispossession, New York, Vintage Books, 1999
Chossudovsky, Michel. The Globalisation of Poverty. London, Zed Books.1998. P.15.
1. 310 GLOSSARY
Tale_1400063515_2p_all_r1.qxp 1/25/07 2:08 PM Page 310
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know...." (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race). (1.) Taleb, ‘Fooled By Randomness’)
The Black Swan describes how we are mostly unprepared and ignorant about the timing and impact of major occurrences in our personal, local and global lives. I remember in a Sociology 101 lecture hearing the French Revolution described as having seemed ‘to suddenly burst forth out of a clear, blue sky’. I also remember the day of the September 11 being described by a newsman with exactly the same words, and the surprise reported of Americans who could not understand why they or America should be so hated.
Perhaps these occurrences help to explain why we are drawn to conspiracy theories. Because part of their appeal is that they provide secret and exhaustive reasons for the surface of history providing all the intrigues and machinations behind events, behind history. Then maybe if you get the codes right you know the secrets and you know who was pulling what parts of the string. Even though it’s hard to find out and even though it’s incredibly elaborate there is a cause and effect that’s traceable. Having an inkling of insider knowing about what Taleb refers to as the significant, large events perhaps imbues us with a sense of control, a sense that maybe we can do something about it, to be an actor rather than a couch potato observer.
Reading Edward Said writing about his own transformation from being a teacher at Columbia University to being “reclaimed by the Arab world generally and by Palestine in particular. This was a direct result of the war…and of severely damaged political, cultural…military and geographical situation…” supports this theory. He continues his story with a knowing of the history, the betrayals, the nations and political and economic orders that destroyed his home and their peace. (Said. P.1-2)
Michel Chossudovsky too has been thorough in his research of exactly how the “Movement of the global economy is ‘regulated’ by a ‘world-wide process of debt collection’ which constricts the institutions of the national state and contributes to destroying employment and economic activity….entire countries have been destabilized as a consequence of the collapse of national currencies, often resulting in the outbreak of social strife, ethnic conflicts and civil war.” (Chossudovsky P.15)
His book is about economic restructuring imposed by international creditors on developing countries and his information is sourced directly from the IMF, the World Bank, financial journals and bank archives.
This heavy information makes Taleb’s discussions, questions and the following Glossary, appear a little glib, a little, I don’t know…light and unfeeling maybe.
I do agree with his investigation of knowledge and how there’s maybe not enough emphasis on the bigger picture. We could do more to develop a culture where asking questions and admitting we don’t know is accepted without any major dissing.
We could accept randomness and unpredictability and chaos has a greater part to play in our lives and the world than order, static knowledge and hierarchies. However his approach and the manner in which he offers his analysis and what I suspect is his unremarkable agenda in this tumultuous and suffering world just leaves me cold.
Said. W. Edward. The Politics of Dispossession, New York, Vintage Books, 1999
Chossudovsky, Michel. The Globalisation of Poverty. London, Zed Books.1998. P.15.
1. 310 GLOSSARY
Tale_1400063515_2p_all_r1.qxp 1/25/07 2:08 PM Page 310
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
Artrite 4 k.way 2008
Manuel de Landa. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997, pp 57-70.
Manuel de Landa is a writer and philosopher. His work is broad-based and includes science, economics, and the theories of Gilles Deleuze, nonlinear dynamics and social organization. In an interview with Konrad Becker and Miss M. at Virtual Futures, he said “So as a philosopher, I am interested in all kinds of phenomena of self-organization, from the wind patterns that have regulated human life for a long time, like the monsoon or trade winds which are self-organized winds, to the self-organizing patterns inside our bodies, to the self-organizing processes in the economy, to the self-organizing process that created the Internet”. 1
Sand stone and Granite is chapter in his book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, within which he investigates common physical processes behind the formation of meshworks and hierarchies using the natural transformational geological process whereby mountain boulders are carried to the sea by rivers and sorted, relocated and sedimented in homogenous groupings, as a way of raising philosophical questions.
He describes how firstly there is the sorting process and then there is the sticking the different sorted groups together process consolidating the stones in their new spatial relationships described as an “architectonic” structure.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the two processes of cementing and consolidating as the two operations constituting an engineering diagram.2 ( de Landa P.60) that suggests that the same abstract process of stratification can be found in the human world as well.
Finding different possibilities for human societies to interrelate and interconnect is also a concern of Jared Diamond, who has studied the histories of societies that have ‘collapsed’ and investigated the complex and multitudinal facets and interconnections that have contributed to each collapse. He then made an in-depth contemporary study of problems to do with populations and environmental and resource crisis, along with examples of more successful societal models.
Whilst both de Landa and Diamond communicate a sense of profound urgency in their discourse, de Landa optimistically assumes that humanity may one day agree on a shared beneficial set of values. He writes that “The combinatorial possibilities-the number of possible hybrids of meshworks and hierarchies-are immense…and experimental and empirical attitude would seem to be called for…in our search for viable hybrids we must look for inspiration in as many domains as
possible 3.
This seeking for inspiration and multiple combinatorial possibilities both authors proritise highlight the immanent problems the world is struggling with. Diamond’s hope is that ” By relating output variables to input variables, I aim to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses 4.
He adds, “ My remaining cause for hope is another consequence of the globalized modern world’s interconnectedness. Past societies lacked archeologists and television. …Thus we have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples and past peoples.” 5
1 An interview with Manuel de Landa with Konrad Becker and Miss M. at Virtual Futures, Warwick 96 http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/intdelanda.htm
2 de Landa, Manuel. “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History”. New York: Zone Books, 1997. P.60
3 Ibid. P.69-70.
4 Diamond, Jared. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, New York: Penguin Books, 2006. P.18
5 Ibid. P.525
Manuel de Landa is a writer and philosopher. His work is broad-based and includes science, economics, and the theories of Gilles Deleuze, nonlinear dynamics and social organization. In an interview with Konrad Becker and Miss M. at Virtual Futures, he said “So as a philosopher, I am interested in all kinds of phenomena of self-organization, from the wind patterns that have regulated human life for a long time, like the monsoon or trade winds which are self-organized winds, to the self-organizing patterns inside our bodies, to the self-organizing processes in the economy, to the self-organizing process that created the Internet”. 1
Sand stone and Granite is chapter in his book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, within which he investigates common physical processes behind the formation of meshworks and hierarchies using the natural transformational geological process whereby mountain boulders are carried to the sea by rivers and sorted, relocated and sedimented in homogenous groupings, as a way of raising philosophical questions.
He describes how firstly there is the sorting process and then there is the sticking the different sorted groups together process consolidating the stones in their new spatial relationships described as an “architectonic” structure.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the two processes of cementing and consolidating as the two operations constituting an engineering diagram.2 ( de Landa P.60) that suggests that the same abstract process of stratification can be found in the human world as well.
Finding different possibilities for human societies to interrelate and interconnect is also a concern of Jared Diamond, who has studied the histories of societies that have ‘collapsed’ and investigated the complex and multitudinal facets and interconnections that have contributed to each collapse. He then made an in-depth contemporary study of problems to do with populations and environmental and resource crisis, along with examples of more successful societal models.
Whilst both de Landa and Diamond communicate a sense of profound urgency in their discourse, de Landa optimistically assumes that humanity may one day agree on a shared beneficial set of values. He writes that “The combinatorial possibilities-the number of possible hybrids of meshworks and hierarchies-are immense…and experimental and empirical attitude would seem to be called for…in our search for viable hybrids we must look for inspiration in as many domains as
possible 3.
This seeking for inspiration and multiple combinatorial possibilities both authors proritise highlight the immanent problems the world is struggling with. Diamond’s hope is that ” By relating output variables to input variables, I aim to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses 4.
He adds, “ My remaining cause for hope is another consequence of the globalized modern world’s interconnectedness. Past societies lacked archeologists and television. …Thus we have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples and past peoples.” 5
1 An interview with Manuel de Landa with Konrad Becker and Miss M. at Virtual Futures, Warwick 96 http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/intdelanda.htm
2 de Landa, Manuel. “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History”. New York: Zone Books, 1997. P.60
3 Ibid. P.69-70.
4 Diamond, Jared. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, New York: Penguin Books, 2006. P.18
5 Ibid. P.525
Artrite 5 k.way 2008
Katherine S. Willis, “Sensing Place – Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Urban Space”, in Lars Frers & Lars Meier (eds), Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City, Hampshire & Virginia: Ashgate, 2007, pp155-
168.
The question that Willis purports to explore is how our perceptions of space are transformed in this “increasingly mobile society with ubiquitous access to communication technologies.” She writes, “In order to understand the consequences of this transformation it is important to first investigate our experience of space.” 1
Willis’s writing stumbles along under par to her stated intentions, and the more unsupported statements I read the less energy I had to try and find some depth or excitement throughout her enquiry. I was under whelmed by statements such as “we identify with space having visual appearance and physical form”2 and “places are the settings in which people interact, and as such space, frames human action and also importantly behaviour.”3
I found myself increasingly irritated by closed assumptive beliefs around both identity, “to understand something of the content and structure of images is an essential prerequisite for understanding identity” 4 and resource access- “Mobile and wireless technologies have been proliferating and have…become common means of enabling communication.” 5
The closest Willis came to any exhilarating analysis is hinted at on the final page in her summary where she writes “…our essential spatial perspective on the world is called into question with mobile and wireless technologies, a form of ubiquitous computing where the focus is not on the technology itself, but rather on what it is enabling.” 6 (my emphasis).
I decided to use myself as a guinea pig and investigate how my perceptions of place might be transformed by employing said technology in a place I closely identified with.
Katharine Willis is thirty-five years old; she is a Libran, born in the zodiac year of the Rat. She is an architect by training and has, for the last five years, been exploring ways in which we interact with our environment by way of installations, observation and photographic documentation. She looks kind of vulnerable and sad. How do I know? This information came directly into the place of my home, to the space of my laptop from her blog 7 address through my Sierra wireless portal.
So OK, I found that rather than transforming my perceptions this little exercise only mildly entertained. However, her blog postings of 1) the cocaine inspired artwork and 2) images from Google maps, led me to a greater depth and interest in the question. In addition, with a very brief reference to de Certeau on page 168 of her article, Willis opened the understanding of space to be considered as a ”field of interaction, composed of intersections of mobile elements…actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.”8 Following this lead a rather more interesting discourse on space, place and the enabling of wireless technology to transform perception came alive.
“In The Practice of Everyday Life, where Certeau makes another crucial distinction between "place" (lieu) and "space" (espace) [115-30]. The difference between these terms is to a large extent a matter of propriety: "The law of the 'proper' rules in the place; the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it defines." Because each element in a place rests in the position in which it belongs, place "implies an indication of stability" [117]. Space, on the other hand exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. . . . Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. . . . In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a "proper." [117] Space, then, cannot be "proper" because it is a product of action and movement. "In short," writes Certeau, "space is a practiced place"9
A story. This morning my partner Andrew showed me images he captured on his mobile phone of a baby orca that had been stranded up a small estuary of the Waitemata It had been rescued and transported across the harbour bridge on the back of a truck and released at Takapuna beach where it ‘happily’ swam out to sea. If Andrew was techno-savvy he could have transmitted the images directly to my e-mail, and as I was online at the time, we could have watched the release together, but not in the same physical space. How fantastic is that.
However at the time I was excitedly exploring the new Google map service, (likewise accessed through computer technology connected to an active Sierra wireless portal device), so that when he arrived home with his orca images I was able to show him not only the traditional street map of New York, but by clicking on a ‘yellow man’ icon and shifting it to a street address, I could take him on a spherical and linear 360degree virtual image tour of the physical places I had visited, and more, by moving the curser around I could virtually lie down in the street and contemplate the New York skyscape whilst remaining static in my kitchen in Beachaven.
Now our perception of space has been transformed, because as de Certeau opened an understanding of place being stable, and space being the effect produced by the operations that orient it by using wireless image capturing device that can also that could transfer (the ‘effect’) images through space to a place of viewing, interconnected the place (of the orca, the truck, the sea, the laptop computer, our home) to space (which is a product of the action and movement), he furthered this investigation by considering the example of cartography.
He explained that old maps used to be more like a history book or log, recording experiences pictorially. Later maps
“became more autonomous." They gradually diminished the signs of their own creation, reducing them to the "figurations" of ships or monsters: "these figurations, like fragments of stories, mark on the map the historical operations from which it resulted. Thus, the sailing ship painted on the sea indicates the maritime expedition that made it possible to represent the coastlines." But, according to Certeau, "the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonizes space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it." The result is the map in its "current geographical form...” 10
When Google Maps is activated a page opens with an image of the traditional map. It is flat, an image of grid-like lines depicting land mass outlines, geographical areas and streets, a map de Certeau described as “bereft (through a gradual process of forgetting) of the visible evidence of its own construction”11 . Once the icon is activated, the map becomes layered, the traditional grid remains as a foundational visual locating device. This image is then superimposed with virtual photographic images that show the experiences of a journey through stable place whilst mingling with active space. 12
1. Katherine S. Willis, “Sensing Place – Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Urban Space”, in Lars Frers & Lars Meier (eds), Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City, Hampshire & Virginia: Ashgate, 2007 P.155
2. Ibid. P.158
3. Ibid, P159
4. Ibid.P 157
5. Ibid.P.15
6. Ibid.P.168
7. ‘http://www.blogger.com/profile/07387808532281665502’.
8.Katherine S. Willis, “Sensing Place – Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Urban Space”, in Lars Frers & Lars Meier (eds), Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City, Hampshire & Virginia: Ashgate, 2007 P.1161
9.Reynold, Bryan. Fitzpatrick, Joseph. Eds. The Transversality of Mechel de Certeau: Foucault's Panoptic Discourse and the Cartographic Impulse. Diacritics 29.3 (1999) 63-80
http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/journals/diacritics/v029/29.3reynolds.html
10.Ibid.P. 68
11.Ibid. P.69
12.http://maps.google.com/
168.
The question that Willis purports to explore is how our perceptions of space are transformed in this “increasingly mobile society with ubiquitous access to communication technologies.” She writes, “In order to understand the consequences of this transformation it is important to first investigate our experience of space.” 1
Willis’s writing stumbles along under par to her stated intentions, and the more unsupported statements I read the less energy I had to try and find some depth or excitement throughout her enquiry. I was under whelmed by statements such as “we identify with space having visual appearance and physical form”2 and “places are the settings in which people interact, and as such space, frames human action and also importantly behaviour.”3
I found myself increasingly irritated by closed assumptive beliefs around both identity, “to understand something of the content and structure of images is an essential prerequisite for understanding identity” 4 and resource access- “Mobile and wireless technologies have been proliferating and have…become common means of enabling communication.” 5
The closest Willis came to any exhilarating analysis is hinted at on the final page in her summary where she writes “…our essential spatial perspective on the world is called into question with mobile and wireless technologies, a form of ubiquitous computing where the focus is not on the technology itself, but rather on what it is enabling.” 6 (my emphasis).
I decided to use myself as a guinea pig and investigate how my perceptions of place might be transformed by employing said technology in a place I closely identified with.
Katharine Willis is thirty-five years old; she is a Libran, born in the zodiac year of the Rat. She is an architect by training and has, for the last five years, been exploring ways in which we interact with our environment by way of installations, observation and photographic documentation. She looks kind of vulnerable and sad. How do I know? This information came directly into the place of my home, to the space of my laptop from her blog 7 address through my Sierra wireless portal.
So OK, I found that rather than transforming my perceptions this little exercise only mildly entertained. However, her blog postings of 1) the cocaine inspired artwork and 2) images from Google maps, led me to a greater depth and interest in the question. In addition, with a very brief reference to de Certeau on page 168 of her article, Willis opened the understanding of space to be considered as a ”field of interaction, composed of intersections of mobile elements…actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.”8 Following this lead a rather more interesting discourse on space, place and the enabling of wireless technology to transform perception came alive.
“In The Practice of Everyday Life, where Certeau makes another crucial distinction between "place" (lieu) and "space" (espace) [115-30]. The difference between these terms is to a large extent a matter of propriety: "The law of the 'proper' rules in the place; the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it defines." Because each element in a place rests in the position in which it belongs, place "implies an indication of stability" [117]. Space, on the other hand exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. . . . Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. . . . In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a "proper." [117] Space, then, cannot be "proper" because it is a product of action and movement. "In short," writes Certeau, "space is a practiced place"9
A story. This morning my partner Andrew showed me images he captured on his mobile phone of a baby orca that had been stranded up a small estuary of the Waitemata It had been rescued and transported across the harbour bridge on the back of a truck and released at Takapuna beach where it ‘happily’ swam out to sea. If Andrew was techno-savvy he could have transmitted the images directly to my e-mail, and as I was online at the time, we could have watched the release together, but not in the same physical space. How fantastic is that.
However at the time I was excitedly exploring the new Google map service, (likewise accessed through computer technology connected to an active Sierra wireless portal device), so that when he arrived home with his orca images I was able to show him not only the traditional street map of New York, but by clicking on a ‘yellow man’ icon and shifting it to a street address, I could take him on a spherical and linear 360degree virtual image tour of the physical places I had visited, and more, by moving the curser around I could virtually lie down in the street and contemplate the New York skyscape whilst remaining static in my kitchen in Beachaven.
Now our perception of space has been transformed, because as de Certeau opened an understanding of place being stable, and space being the effect produced by the operations that orient it by using wireless image capturing device that can also that could transfer (the ‘effect’) images through space to a place of viewing, interconnected the place (of the orca, the truck, the sea, the laptop computer, our home) to space (which is a product of the action and movement), he furthered this investigation by considering the example of cartography.
He explained that old maps used to be more like a history book or log, recording experiences pictorially. Later maps
“became more autonomous." They gradually diminished the signs of their own creation, reducing them to the "figurations" of ships or monsters: "these figurations, like fragments of stories, mark on the map the historical operations from which it resulted. Thus, the sailing ship painted on the sea indicates the maritime expedition that made it possible to represent the coastlines." But, according to Certeau, "the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonizes space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it." The result is the map in its "current geographical form...” 10
When Google Maps is activated a page opens with an image of the traditional map. It is flat, an image of grid-like lines depicting land mass outlines, geographical areas and streets, a map de Certeau described as “bereft (through a gradual process of forgetting) of the visible evidence of its own construction”11 . Once the icon is activated, the map becomes layered, the traditional grid remains as a foundational visual locating device. This image is then superimposed with virtual photographic images that show the experiences of a journey through stable place whilst mingling with active space. 12
1. Katherine S. Willis, “Sensing Place – Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Urban Space”, in Lars Frers & Lars Meier (eds), Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City, Hampshire & Virginia: Ashgate, 2007 P.155
2. Ibid. P.158
3. Ibid, P159
4. Ibid.P 157
5. Ibid.P.15
6. Ibid.P.168
7. ‘http://www.blogger.com/profile/07387808532281665502’.
8.Katherine S. Willis, “Sensing Place – Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Urban Space”, in Lars Frers & Lars Meier (eds), Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City, Hampshire & Virginia: Ashgate, 2007 P.1161
9.Reynold, Bryan. Fitzpatrick, Joseph. Eds. The Transversality of Mechel de Certeau: Foucault's Panoptic Discourse and the Cartographic Impulse. Diacritics 29.3 (1999) 63-80
http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/journals/diacritics/v029/29.3reynolds.html
10.Ibid.P. 68
11.Ibid. P.69
12.http://maps.google.com/
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Artrite 6 k.way 2008
Radhika Mohanram, “The Postcolonial Critic: Third-World (con)texts/First-world Contexts” in Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995, pp172-194.
Radhika Mohanram is a teaching academic whose research interests are gender, postcolonial theory and the position of the diasporic. (1)This essay addresses issues of justice in relation to contemporary politics of difference, focusing in particular on the critique of differences pertaining to post-colonial intellectuals who speak from the university in the place of their physical indigeneity and those who speak in a diasporic place from first world universities.
The 1990 Post Colonial Critic Interview between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and three Indian women professors of English at Jawaharlal University provides Mohanram the question,“Is there discontinuous development in the production and practice of postcolonial theory “ between the two entities. The three Indian professors assert their difference, emphasising “distance and proximity” and “indigenous theory” whilst Spivak emphasised a similarity in their structural position. (2)
Mohanram begins her examination of postcolonial theory with a solid critic of Western productions of third-world theory revealing problematic firstly of Frederic Jameson’s expose of his Western binary thinking that positions the East as one-dimensional and Benita Parry’s approach that insists on a single authority of the ‘native ‘ voice. These analysis and beliefs exemplify the very processes that formulate constructions of self and other by the European West and underpin colonisation.
Dismissing nation-naming whilst emphasing one’s own (American) nation, criticising the third-world intellectuals returning a “collective attention to “us” whilst returning the focus to the writers own American intellectual peers. Naming, constructing the ‘third world’ as the ‘third world’,is that which Edward Said calls Orientalism, the Orient being constructed in opposition to a constructed European West that is represented as being as being enlightened , rational and civilised. (3)
In her book Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Smith writes that “The globilisation of knowledge and Western culture constantly reaffirms the West’s view of itself as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of ‘civilised’ knowledge.’” (4)
Taking cognisance of the persistent presence of this Western force it becomes clear that those who are speaking from the lived site of colonialism, the indigenous place, will continue to voice difference as long as they experience that “what we teach and write has political and other actual consequences for us”. (5)
I came across an interesting art response to this question when researching the South African artist and writer Kendall Geers, who lives and works mostly in the ‘West”. When asked to name that he thought of as important emerging artists, Sean O’Toole said, “ As South Africa is a country gripped by political factionalism and lingering racial divisions, it is apt that collectives impressed the most this past year. Amongst these, … AVANT CAR GUARD (ACG). Not only has this trio of young white males danced on the grave of revered/reviled landscape painter J.H. Pierneef, they also symbolically buried Kendell Geers.
‘We have issue with him authoring the South African experience remotely,’ stated ACG’s Michael MacGarry. ‘He isn’t relevant here anymore.’ (6) (my emphasis).
1. Mohanram, Radhika. "The Postcolonial Critic: Third-World (con)texts/First-world Contexts” in Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995, P.173.
2. Ibid. P.173
3. Said, Edward W. Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books Edition. 1979
4. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London : Zed Books Ltd.1999.P.63
5. Mohanram, Radhika. “The Postcolonial Critic: Third-World (con)texts/First-world Contexts” in Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995 P.175
6. frieze magazine. Issue 112 January-February 2008
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/emerging_artists2/
Radhika Mohanram is a teaching academic whose research interests are gender, postcolonial theory and the position of the diasporic. (1)This essay addresses issues of justice in relation to contemporary politics of difference, focusing in particular on the critique of differences pertaining to post-colonial intellectuals who speak from the university in the place of their physical indigeneity and those who speak in a diasporic place from first world universities.
The 1990 Post Colonial Critic Interview between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and three Indian women professors of English at Jawaharlal University provides Mohanram the question,“Is there discontinuous development in the production and practice of postcolonial theory “ between the two entities. The three Indian professors assert their difference, emphasising “distance and proximity” and “indigenous theory” whilst Spivak emphasised a similarity in their structural position. (2)
Mohanram begins her examination of postcolonial theory with a solid critic of Western productions of third-world theory revealing problematic firstly of Frederic Jameson’s expose of his Western binary thinking that positions the East as one-dimensional and Benita Parry’s approach that insists on a single authority of the ‘native ‘ voice. These analysis and beliefs exemplify the very processes that formulate constructions of self and other by the European West and underpin colonisation.
Dismissing nation-naming whilst emphasing one’s own (American) nation, criticising the third-world intellectuals returning a “collective attention to “us” whilst returning the focus to the writers own American intellectual peers. Naming, constructing the ‘third world’ as the ‘third world’,is that which Edward Said calls Orientalism, the Orient being constructed in opposition to a constructed European West that is represented as being as being enlightened , rational and civilised. (3)
In her book Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Smith writes that “The globilisation of knowledge and Western culture constantly reaffirms the West’s view of itself as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of ‘civilised’ knowledge.’” (4)
Taking cognisance of the persistent presence of this Western force it becomes clear that those who are speaking from the lived site of colonialism, the indigenous place, will continue to voice difference as long as they experience that “what we teach and write has political and other actual consequences for us”. (5)
I came across an interesting art response to this question when researching the South African artist and writer Kendall Geers, who lives and works mostly in the ‘West”. When asked to name that he thought of as important emerging artists, Sean O’Toole said, “ As South Africa is a country gripped by political factionalism and lingering racial divisions, it is apt that collectives impressed the most this past year. Amongst these, … AVANT CAR GUARD (ACG). Not only has this trio of young white males danced on the grave of revered/reviled landscape painter J.H. Pierneef, they also symbolically buried Kendell Geers.
‘We have issue with him authoring the South African experience remotely,’ stated ACG’s Michael MacGarry. ‘He isn’t relevant here anymore.’ (6) (my emphasis).
1. Mohanram, Radhika. "The Postcolonial Critic: Third-World (con)texts/First-world Contexts” in Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995, P.173.
2. Ibid. P.173
3. Said, Edward W. Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books Edition. 1979
4. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London : Zed Books Ltd.1999.P.63
5. Mohanram, Radhika. “The Postcolonial Critic: Third-World (con)texts/First-world Contexts” in Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995 P.175
6. frieze magazine. Issue 112 January-February 2008
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/emerging_artists2/
Artrite 7 k.way 2008
Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10, 1929, pp. 36-44.
“I wonder if anyone realizes, until they try it, the freedom of being without tempestuous petticoats? Whatever arguments may be urged against a boy’s dress for a woman anywhere within range of civilization, those arguments do not hold good in wilds such as we went through…A real boys dress is, in my view, far preferable in every way to a compromise such as so-called ‘reformed costume’…”
Constance Barnicoat, who in 1903, along with three other women, climbed the 7180-foot high Copeland Pass and tramped through virgin bush to Hokitika, twenty-three years before Joan Riviere authored this paper, wrote the quote above. Barnicoat, who had already attained an undergraduate arts degree, went on to study languages, climb mountains and explore countries where tourists were rare. During the later stage of her life she worked tirelessly against the Germans during the First World War whilst based in Switzerland.(1)
According to Stephen Heath, Joan Riviere was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. “From 1916 to 1920 she was in analysis with Ernest Jones and by 1919 had patients of her own. The relationship with Jones was intense and fraught, a result certainly of strong transference and counter-transference and possibly too of an actual love affair. She writes to Jones in 1918 of 'the long tragedy of my relationship with you'; he describes her as a patient as 'the worst failure I ever had'.”(2)
Her paper investigates how “women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.”(3)
Her case study is a woman succeeding in her different roles as wife and as a professional who has times of anxiety with public speaking whereby she ‘”obsessively seeks reassurance” both on her performance and sexual attractiveness, from men described as “father figures” .(4)
Within a structured and narrow Freudian analysis, Riviere expounds on the cause and effect of this behaviour, basing her analysis on the oral-sucking stage of development whereby the nipple, milk is deemed analogous with receiving the penis and semen from the father. Hence subconscious horrors of castration, father giving mother the penis, sadistic fury against both parents and the resultant need to have supremacy over them were visited upon her. No wonder the poor girl needed reassurance after her public speaking events.
Heaths essay on Riviere and the time in history when her paper was written helps to explain the context within which she was working, professionally and emotionally, and my perception of her failure to distance herself from one particular analysis. I am suspicious that the case study is more a transference of her situation onto that of her patient.
I still question the seemingly obvious, why did she not analyse the problem of her patient’s anxiety in relation to having to succeed in male terms within the male gaze with which women have been constructed?
In 1929 the world that successful women masqueraded themselves in is aptly described by John Berger as follows:
“Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space.” Is this the masquerade that Riviere writes of?
Berger continues, “But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room, or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father,” or while she is speaking publicly, “…she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.
From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” (5)
If Riviere and her patient were to undergo therapy in the present post-modern environment, Berger’s description of the impact of the male gaze would certainly seem an important consideration in seeking the cause of her anxiety.
When I compare the recorded lives and work of the three women, Constance Barnicoat, Joan Riviere and her woman patient, they become connected. Each woman would have been treated within the construction of alterity, otherness to women in their time. That the complexity of pluralism, individual relationships and circumstance, and societies within society, meant that each experienced their alterity differently is relevant individually, but irrelevant to their contribution to women’s history and the ongoing investigation into a liberation from the male gaze.
1. McCallum, Janet. 'Barnicoat, Constance Alice 1872-1922' Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007. http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb/
2.Stephen Heath JOAN RIVIERE AND THE MASQUERADE P .47
http://www.ncf.edu/hassold/WomenArtists/heath_riviere_and_masquerade.htm
3. Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10, 1929, pp. 36-44.
4. Ibid.P.36
5. John Berger reading from his 1972 book “Ways of Seeing”
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1335486.htm
“I wonder if anyone realizes, until they try it, the freedom of being without tempestuous petticoats? Whatever arguments may be urged against a boy’s dress for a woman anywhere within range of civilization, those arguments do not hold good in wilds such as we went through…A real boys dress is, in my view, far preferable in every way to a compromise such as so-called ‘reformed costume’…”
Constance Barnicoat, who in 1903, along with three other women, climbed the 7180-foot high Copeland Pass and tramped through virgin bush to Hokitika, twenty-three years before Joan Riviere authored this paper, wrote the quote above. Barnicoat, who had already attained an undergraduate arts degree, went on to study languages, climb mountains and explore countries where tourists were rare. During the later stage of her life she worked tirelessly against the Germans during the First World War whilst based in Switzerland.(1)
According to Stephen Heath, Joan Riviere was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. “From 1916 to 1920 she was in analysis with Ernest Jones and by 1919 had patients of her own. The relationship with Jones was intense and fraught, a result certainly of strong transference and counter-transference and possibly too of an actual love affair. She writes to Jones in 1918 of 'the long tragedy of my relationship with you'; he describes her as a patient as 'the worst failure I ever had'.”(2)
Her paper investigates how “women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.”(3)
Her case study is a woman succeeding in her different roles as wife and as a professional who has times of anxiety with public speaking whereby she ‘”obsessively seeks reassurance” both on her performance and sexual attractiveness, from men described as “father figures” .(4)
Within a structured and narrow Freudian analysis, Riviere expounds on the cause and effect of this behaviour, basing her analysis on the oral-sucking stage of development whereby the nipple, milk is deemed analogous with receiving the penis and semen from the father. Hence subconscious horrors of castration, father giving mother the penis, sadistic fury against both parents and the resultant need to have supremacy over them were visited upon her. No wonder the poor girl needed reassurance after her public speaking events.
Heaths essay on Riviere and the time in history when her paper was written helps to explain the context within which she was working, professionally and emotionally, and my perception of her failure to distance herself from one particular analysis. I am suspicious that the case study is more a transference of her situation onto that of her patient.
I still question the seemingly obvious, why did she not analyse the problem of her patient’s anxiety in relation to having to succeed in male terms within the male gaze with which women have been constructed?
In 1929 the world that successful women masqueraded themselves in is aptly described by John Berger as follows:
“Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space.” Is this the masquerade that Riviere writes of?
Berger continues, “But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room, or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father,” or while she is speaking publicly, “…she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.
From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” (5)
If Riviere and her patient were to undergo therapy in the present post-modern environment, Berger’s description of the impact of the male gaze would certainly seem an important consideration in seeking the cause of her anxiety.
When I compare the recorded lives and work of the three women, Constance Barnicoat, Joan Riviere and her woman patient, they become connected. Each woman would have been treated within the construction of alterity, otherness to women in their time. That the complexity of pluralism, individual relationships and circumstance, and societies within society, meant that each experienced their alterity differently is relevant individually, but irrelevant to their contribution to women’s history and the ongoing investigation into a liberation from the male gaze.
1. McCallum, Janet. 'Barnicoat, Constance Alice 1872-1922' Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007. http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb/
2.Stephen Heath JOAN RIVIERE AND THE MASQUERADE P .47
http://www.ncf.edu/hassold/WomenArtists/heath_riviere_and_masquerade.htm
3. Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10, 1929, pp. 36-44.
4. Ibid.P.36
5. John Berger reading from his 1972 book “Ways of Seeing”
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1335486.htm
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Artrite 8 k.way 2008
“Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language.”
De Certeau, Michel. “The Practice of Everyday Life”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. P15-18
De Certeau investigates the ways in which people navigate their way through every day at an unconscious level. In this chapter he studies the “subtle, stubborn, resistant activity of groups”[1] to enforced assimilation and the ways that resistance is articulated.
He described two levels of discourse, one being the acknowledgement of actual power relationships where by use of force and mendacity, the powerful retain a place of unjust victory and those whom they oppress are always “fucked over”[2].
The other level is the everyday enunciation of that power relationship through lucid discourse amongst the people and the way that articulation serves to undermine, disrupt and subvert the dominant order.
I couldn’t help but connect these instances of oppression and uplifting stories of resistance locally. The enunciation of historical injustices to Maori in the 1970’s was responded to by other everyday New Zealanders as they would to some alien monster bursting out of a green sleepy hollow. The nations’ smug confidence in previous claims to world-class race relations was under attack. As a consequence, “the powerful” response was denial, further mendacious distortions and increased defensive power strategies.
One of the truths that emerged concerned the Ngati Whatua hapu who attempted to reclaim their land, stolen from them by the Crown, by physical occupation in the 1970’s.
Ngati Whatua, like the Pernambuco peasants describing their situation in 1974, recognized the everyday injustice of an order that seemed immutable, but this did not make it any more acceptable. “The fact was not accepted as a law”.[3]
In 1978 the Crown responded with force, arresting 222 people occupying Takaparawhau and charging them with trespass.
Just as de Certeau discovered that “the Indians often used the (enforced Spanish) laws, practices and representations that were imposed on them by force…to ends other than those of their conquerors: they subverted them from within…” [4],
The Bastion Point Defense Committee was set up and employed tactics to subvert the court in the same way.
It was decided that all who were charged would defend themselves thus employing the full use of the imposed Westminster judiciary system. The defendants called on Crown witnesses from the highest echelons of the State along with innumerable experts and other witnesses and prepared lengthy interrogations of them.
One defendant insisted on speaking in te reo, the court provided her with a translator and in the manner of the trickster and she and the translator embarked on long, rambling and humorous conversations, some lasting up to an hour after each question was put to her. Of course the Judge and court officials did not understand a word that they said and although they interjected with barely controlled frustration, each interjection only encouraged an even longer, more circuitous response.
This play, this brave stubbornness, this refusal to fully comply exemplifies to me someone making do with what she had. By applying her knowledge, that of which Lyotard says ”also includes notions of ‘know-how’, ‘knowing how to live’ “[5], she found a way of foiling the Crown’s game in what de Certeau describes as “the certain art of placing one’s blows” whilst perhaps enjoying “a pleasure in getting around the rules of a constraining space.”[6]
These tactics resulted in the first forty cases taking months to finalise and huge costs to the Crown. Eventually they decided to drop the remaining 180 charges.[7]
[1] De Certeau, Michel. “The Practice of Everyday Life”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. P.18
[2] Ibid. P.16
[3] Ibid.P.16
[4] Ibid. P32.
[5] Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.1988. P.19
[6]. De Certeau, Michel. “The Practice of Everyday Life”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 P.18.
[7] Takaparawhau, The People’s Story-1998 Bastion Point 20 year Commemoration Book, Sharon Hawke, Ed. (unpublished), 1998. Pp.24/63.
De Certeau, Michel. “The Practice of Everyday Life”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. P15-18
De Certeau investigates the ways in which people navigate their way through every day at an unconscious level. In this chapter he studies the “subtle, stubborn, resistant activity of groups”[1] to enforced assimilation and the ways that resistance is articulated.
He described two levels of discourse, one being the acknowledgement of actual power relationships where by use of force and mendacity, the powerful retain a place of unjust victory and those whom they oppress are always “fucked over”[2].
The other level is the everyday enunciation of that power relationship through lucid discourse amongst the people and the way that articulation serves to undermine, disrupt and subvert the dominant order.
I couldn’t help but connect these instances of oppression and uplifting stories of resistance locally. The enunciation of historical injustices to Maori in the 1970’s was responded to by other everyday New Zealanders as they would to some alien monster bursting out of a green sleepy hollow. The nations’ smug confidence in previous claims to world-class race relations was under attack. As a consequence, “the powerful” response was denial, further mendacious distortions and increased defensive power strategies.
One of the truths that emerged concerned the Ngati Whatua hapu who attempted to reclaim their land, stolen from them by the Crown, by physical occupation in the 1970’s.
Ngati Whatua, like the Pernambuco peasants describing their situation in 1974, recognized the everyday injustice of an order that seemed immutable, but this did not make it any more acceptable. “The fact was not accepted as a law”.[3]
In 1978 the Crown responded with force, arresting 222 people occupying Takaparawhau and charging them with trespass.
Just as de Certeau discovered that “the Indians often used the (enforced Spanish) laws, practices and representations that were imposed on them by force…to ends other than those of their conquerors: they subverted them from within…” [4],
The Bastion Point Defense Committee was set up and employed tactics to subvert the court in the same way.
It was decided that all who were charged would defend themselves thus employing the full use of the imposed Westminster judiciary system. The defendants called on Crown witnesses from the highest echelons of the State along with innumerable experts and other witnesses and prepared lengthy interrogations of them.
One defendant insisted on speaking in te reo, the court provided her with a translator and in the manner of the trickster and she and the translator embarked on long, rambling and humorous conversations, some lasting up to an hour after each question was put to her. Of course the Judge and court officials did not understand a word that they said and although they interjected with barely controlled frustration, each interjection only encouraged an even longer, more circuitous response.
This play, this brave stubbornness, this refusal to fully comply exemplifies to me someone making do with what she had. By applying her knowledge, that of which Lyotard says ”also includes notions of ‘know-how’, ‘knowing how to live’ “[5], she found a way of foiling the Crown’s game in what de Certeau describes as “the certain art of placing one’s blows” whilst perhaps enjoying “a pleasure in getting around the rules of a constraining space.”[6]
These tactics resulted in the first forty cases taking months to finalise and huge costs to the Crown. Eventually they decided to drop the remaining 180 charges.[7]
[1] De Certeau, Michel. “The Practice of Everyday Life”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. P.18
[2] Ibid. P.16
[3] Ibid.P.16
[4] Ibid. P32.
[5] Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.1988. P.19
[6]. De Certeau, Michel. “The Practice of Everyday Life”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 P.18.
[7] Takaparawhau, The People’s Story-1998 Bastion Point 20 year Commemoration Book, Sharon Hawke, Ed. (unpublished), 1998. Pp.24/63.
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