Catherine M. Lord

Introduction: Essays in migratory aesthetics: cultural practices between migration and art-making

Introduction: Essays in Migratory Aesthetics Cultural Practices Between Migration and Art-making | 11 How can we better understand migration in terms of aesthetic practice or, for that matter, aesthetics as a category of the migratory? This volume of interdisciplinary essays offers a diversity of topics from the fields of literature, film, photography, art history, environmental studies, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, gender studies, cultural theory and analysis, all generated and focused around the knotted terms of “migration,” “migratory” and “aesthetics.” In times of heady globalisation, there is a need to critique conflations and confusions between critical terms and scholarly practices. People forcibly exiled or relocating themselves and their cultures bring aesthetic traditions into host cultures which, in turn, can both reject and appropriate these traditions. The conjoining of “migratory” and “aesthetics” is not intended to suggest a free-floating aesthetics that somehow transcends national borders. Aesthetic practices, like migrants themselves, are clearly subject to multiple cultural, political and economic constraints. And yet aesthetic practices often gain their force precisely through their contestation of constraint and the assertion of a certain freedom of movement. Aesthetic freedom is linked to human agency, to the power to create the (multi-) cultural habitats in which we live. But what role does aesthetics play in a world in which goods, labour and capital are seemingly becoming ever more moveable and movement itself becomes a sign not only of individual agency but also of powerlessness, where there is no choice but to move? How does aesthetic production reflect and contest the unequal power relations that underpin the myriad movements occasioned by globalisation? Between the politics of migration and aesthetic production there is always a complex transaction of cultural signs and identities. This collection of essays reflects these two-way movements between cultural identity and subjects-in-aesthetic-process – not all of who are themselves migrants. “Migratory aesthetics” suggests the various Introduction: Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural Practices Between Migration and Art-making

Only connect: ecology between 'late' Latour and Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams

In recent articles and lectures, Latour’s ecological thinking has given a central role to the Gaia theory, in which he develops his own model, often shortened to ‘Gaia’. This recent work on ecology is dependent on An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Here, the concept of ‘networks’ from earlier work moves into a richer domain of multi-disciplines; these ‘diplomatically’ bring many different networks to the conference table. ‘Gaia’ as Latour continues its ‘composition’ invites investigation from many ‘modes of inquiry’. Gaia as a conceptual model is caught between affirming certain anthropomorphizing significations while requiring to be released from any singular, metaphorical grip. As an appropriate interlocutor to tease open the problematic of Gaia’s networks, I bring to the table Werner Herzog’s poetic and ecological documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Anthropologically and artistically, the film explores the Chauvet Cave of the Ardeche Gorge, with its cave paintings dating back 35,000 years. While He...

Her green materials: Mourning, 'Melancholia' and not-so-vital materialisms

Lars von Triers Melancholia (2011) is paints a mise-en-scene which draws the spectator into a feminine sensibility which illuminates how, paradoixcally, human life is not central to the planet, nor is human existence anything other than precarious, passing and therefore beautiful: James Lovelock meets Deleuze meets Kants third critique meets metaphaphyiiscal poetry meets Charlotte Gainsbourgh and Kirsten Dunst.

At the Margins of the World: The Nature of Limits in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line

Abstract Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) is an anti-war film which can be read as an Orphic narrative meditating on the relationship between humans and “nature.” Many scholarly readings of the film have been attracted by analyzes that explore the influences of Cavell and Heidegger on Malick (Critchley, Furstenau and MacCavoy, Sinnerbrink). Kaja Silverman’s recent opus, Flesh of My Flesh (2009), contains a chapter titled “All Things Shining.” She elegantly examines how Malick’s film explores the theme of “finitude.” She argues that, ontologically speaking, human existence gains a more intense “glow” when humans are made aware of their mortality. The present becomes paramount. But like Orpheus, the present seeks to make amends with the past. Taking Silverman’s analysis one step further involves exploring finitude through the film’s many animal, arboreal and geological images. Nature can be read as a “margin” that more fully enhances the film’s exploration of connection and finitude. To this end, the opening chapter of Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy (1986) is invaluable. Entitled “Tympan,” Derrida’s introductory essay introduces a wealth of ecological metaphors. These stimulate an interaction between Silverman’s model of finitude, Derrida’s surprising ecologies at the margin and Malick’s quest for what shines in all beings.

In the cooler

April had become a crueller month. Mabel Arden’s bottle of water was close to her pencil and paper. Her greying, blonde hair branched over her hemp cardigan. She removed the wires from the X-pod that fed into her ears. Then she followed her instincts and analysed the scene around her. She sniffed the air for its kaleidoscope of synthetic deodorants and unwashed bodies. She listened. In the Kings Cross café, Harry’s Hideout, she registered the counterpoints of Chinese, Indian, Arabic, Spanish, African, and Dutch. There was a British family in front of her. They were smoothing down the greased hair of their children. The three-year old girl had lifted a bottle of water into the air and was trying to pour the contents over her head. The mother grabbed the bottle and secured back the top. “Do that again” hissed the mother “and no more bedtime stories for you.” Under the pressure of this threat, the child exploded. She was then walloped and hauled outside. Mabel scribbled down this moment of zeitgeist on a brown paper bag. She placed this in one of her own novels, which she kept as a file. It was a professional heirloom, which she always left in Harry’s safe. She turned the book over on a piece of protective plastic. Gel and an old scarf wiped off the irritation of sweetener that cemented the café table. On her novel’s back cover was a younger picture of Mabel, specifying the Crime Writer of the Year award. She covered this over with a copy of the LCD menu.