We'll Always Have Paris

Everyone has to love Casablanca, right. Humphrey Bogart and his nice dark antihero film noir roles. It is one of my favourite movies of all times. I mean, he gives up his passes for the love of his life, so that she will survive with her lover (the leader of the resistance) . Good story. Emblematic of the US's lack of understanding about Nazi Germany and the Vichy. But that is a story of a different sort. A very psychoanalytic one, and I am sure you (wouldn't it be great if you were plural?) are tired of it.

There is a line in that movie, from where I grab the title of this post. I write because I read an article by Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune/ NY Times, because they are virtually the same, right? In it he details how Paris has become so globalized, so packaged and deaescetizied that it is not longer the city he fell in love with early in his career. That Paris has somehow slipped away, even though he always knew that it would remain for him. That the world of blackberries and cosmetics and neat little packages would somehow eat away from Paris' allure never encountered him, until he went to Cuba.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edcohen.php

Havana without many TVs and Cellphones, and all the amenities that we have grown so accustom of, have somehow allowed Havana to retain its 1950s getaway charm, though at a great price (read embargo). Somehow the aesthetic has remained.

Now I am not an expert on these kinds of things and shall try to to appear as one, but this scenario reminds me of what the German Jewish mystic Walter Benjamin wrote about how art will be used in the age of what he termed "Mechanical Reproduction." He lived in Paris and even wrote "The Arcades Project," a kind of philosophic "Paris Je T'aime." He killed himself and burned all his books because he thought Hilter was after him. Shame. But, in the essay(Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction") he postulates that Nazism/Totalitarianism will attempt to celebrate the aesthetic, to make the aesthetic more aesthetic , beauty is X. Love is X. Monet's works are simply beautiful, beyond reproach, etc, etc. This is how they will attempt to remain in power, to assure their power base. Communists on the other hand (did I mention Benjamin was a Marxist) would attempt to make art more attainable, to make art political in itself. Look at all the soviet worker art. The powerful propaganda and depictions, the kitschy artwork that we all get. Art can contain a political message and the goal of politising the people. He also speaks of aura and the concept of the original work, but again that is another story.

To add another layer, we have Jacques Ranciere, who postulates that art takes on the political message of the age. That for the Ancient Greeks art was utility, the figures on the Grecian Urns, the Temples, etc. Then it moved to Stained Glass for the feudal ages. Glass could depict the message of God above Kings, Kings above men, while communicating Biblical and hierarchical structure. The to capitalism, where the world turned art into art about art. The Romantics and the like wrote poems about poems, the "Ode to the Grecian Urn" by Keats often cited. But what of globalism, of this new phase. What of postmodernism if such a thing exists and we are in it? Well, I might postulate that we are in Cohen's predicament. Art has become completely deaestheticised to the point that the kitschy tourism stops and postcards are the artwork of the age. Where Paris, of old is losing itself to the Paris of the post cards, where in globalism history is not quite as important. You once needed the art to make a new art about the art, but let's move even further, to the point where we forget the art of old, where we move to a history without a history to a beyond history that is not history. Perhaps politics can have no place without a history, but art can. Art among the only ways to usher in and maintain this new ideal.

Even the notion of the postcard implies this disjointness from time and history. The postcard is emblematic because the picture on the front, the purchase of the postcard and its location always arrive too late to the receiver, they never arrive at the right place, thus nothing arrives at the right place. The letter never arrives. What does it say when the aesthetic, the political message of the aesthetic never arrives?

But places like Cuba still exist, and as long as they do, we are reminded of the past. Of a a place where the history lives. But what is a living history, perhaps history as a performance act is what we need, of what we try to abandon as all our models of economic progress attempt to survive by a gradient, by inequality.

Welcome to progress(?).



As a sidenote, I am writing a great deal because I am a)bored, b) sick. Those things mixed together coupled with lots of cold medicine result in a flurry of writing activity, at the expense of other duties, unfortunately, but alls the better.