Everything, All the Time, Everywhere (incl. Tendonitis)
Stuart Jeffries is the author of Grand Hotel Abyss, a book about the Frankfurt School that I started reading, yet never finished, in part because I had parceled out reading into bits so far apart that I was unable to remember things. I need to go back to it and start from the beginning.
I'm pretty certain that I had found and bought the book when Verso had one of their book sales: every ebook was just $1. I clicked myself through the site and bought a boat load of books (even as, I know, I know, it's not clear how a selection of ebooks can be a boat load).
Regardless, I don't remember how I heard of Jeffries' new book, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere. But there was -- at the time of this writing: still is -- another sale at Verso (40% off all books, e or physical ones), and I bought the new book. I started reading it a few days ago, and it delivers on its promise big time:
Postmodernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. But beneath its glitzy surface, postmodernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism.
The brilliance of the book is provided in part by Jeffries pulling together a large number of seemingly unrelated things, events, and people to detail how they're all part of the world we are forced to inhabit now. As a reader, you never quite know what will be coming next: how, for example, the Sex Pistols and Margaret Thatcher have more in common than you might imagine.
There also is plenty of photography discussed in the book, with larger sections on Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle. I found the Sherman part weak and disagreed with most of its read. But the read was still engaging for me to be interested in it (even as I think Jeffries misreads one of Sherman's photographs, mistaking a small hand mirror for the end of a cable release).
The part about Sophie Calle is a lot better, and it forced me to re-think my ideas around the relationship between art and privacy:
At its most political, Calle’s art subverts male power and intrudes into others’ privacy. It consists of a series of subversive games that challenge not only what art is, what counts as a portrait, how we present and hide ourselves from others, but also power structures, and not just male ones. Indeed, privacy itself might be thought of as akin to property – a commodity amassed and defended most assiduously by the powerful, whose loss provokes the biggest outcry from those who have most invested in the existing late-capitalist order. From this perspective, which I suspect is the perspective of Calle, Proudhon was right to say property is theft, but he should have added: privacy is theft, too.
There's a straight line from Jeffries' observation of privacy as "a commodity amassed and defended most assiduously by the powerful" to wealthy and well-off people being mostly invisible in photographs by fine-art photographers, with underprivileged and poor people making up the bulk of subjects in photographs.
The end of the chapter is brilliant:
In 2007, Calle was dumped by email. Circumloquacious, pseudo- literary and self-serving, it ended: ‘Take care of yourself.’ And so she took care of herself. In ‘Prenez soin de vous’ (‘Take care of yourself’, 2007), she invited 107 women to analyse the email from their professional perspectives. A psychiatrist, a lexicographer, a crossword-setter, a psychologist, a lawyer and a Talmudic scholar were among the women who helped build what one critic called a towering babel of feminine scorn – though a very funny one – which showed Pierre Baudry how revenge was done: not through demanding the publication of naked pictures of the person who purportedly wronged you, but through merciless textual deconstruction.
Viewed thus, Sophie Calle is an organic intellectual, a revolutionary fighting not at the barricades but through art that challenges bourgeois norms and values that seem to be common sense. In stalking her male prey, she was attacking the very basis of the bourgeois French revolutionary heritage, showing that what seemed to be natural was really socially constructed and oppressive. If Pierre D. and Henri B. did not see matters that way when she intruded upon their privacy, that was because they were part of the problem. She was asserting something that the French tradition scarcely paid heed of: not the rights of man, but the right of woman to subvert the rights of man.
If you want to get someone something nice for the holidays, get them whatever you think is best. But make sure to get yourself this book and read it. It's very much worth your time.
The past couple of weeks, I had been going on longer daily walks. I don't really like walking for the sake of walking (it's dreadfully boring), but I ended up bringing my camera to make some pictures. Here are a couple of them.
Alas, I hadn't anticipated that my stylish and seemingly comfortable footwear would not be ideal for extended and repeated walking. A few days ago, I ended up with tendonitis in my left foot, which forced me to a) stay at home for a while and b) order better footwear for future walking.
I probably should mention that my Patreon is growing and growing. It's all exclusive "content" (terrible word): articles about photobooks (there are 35 of them so far) plus photobook videos (where I show books and talk about them as I go through them). It's possible that there will be other material as well -- I'm very much open to suggestions from patrons. Check it out!
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg