# Sådan Set Er Byen by Anne Haaning and benandsebastian

Sådan Set Er Byen is a new work by benandsebastian (see their manifesto for boiteaoutils) and Anne Haaning. It is a short and beautiful film inspired by the poem Det (It) written in 1969 by the Danish poet Inger Christensen.

Sådan Set Er Byen

a film by Anne Haaning and benandsebastian

assistants: Christine Bjerke, Marie Erstad, Rasmus Myrup Mortensen

soundtrack: ‘Junkspace’ by Isambard Khroustaliov

Narrator: Jan la Cour

‘sådan set er byen’ is inspired by and constructed around the poem:
‘Det’ by Inger Christensen
copyright © 1996 Inger Christensen, v. forlaget Gyldendal
translation copyright © 2005, 2006 by Susanna Nied

# Poema des los dones by Jorge Luis Borges

Poema des los dones (Poem about Gifts) is a poem written by Jorge Luis Borges after he was nominated Director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. That is that time that he strongly lost his sight and this poem expresses the beauty of the irony of his inability to fully appreciate his function. He is in fact condemned to be the blind warden of the Library.

Original Spanish version follows the English one:

POEM ABOUT GIFTS

Let none think that I by tear or reproach make light
Of this manifesting the mastery
Of God, who with excelling irony
Gives me at once both books and night.

In this city of books he made these eyes
The sightless rulers who can only read,
In libraries of dreams, the pointless
Paragraphs each new dawn offers

To awakened care. In vain the day
Squanders on them its infinite books,
As difficult as the difficult scripts
That perished in Alexandria.

An old Greek story tells how some king died
Of hunger and thirst, though proffered springs and fruits;
My bearing lost, I trudge from side to side
Of this lofty, long blind library.

The walls present, but uselessly,
Encyclopedia, atlas, Orient
And the West, all centuries, dynasties,
Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies.

Slow in my darkness, I explore
The hollow gloom with my hesitant stick,
I, that used to figure Paradise
In such a library’s guise.

Something that surely cannot be called
Mere chance must rule these things;
Some other man has met this doom
On other days of many books and the dark.

As I walk through the slow galleries
I grow to feel with a kind of holy dread
That I am that other, I am the dead,
And the steps I make are also his.

Which of us two is writing now these lines
About a plural I and a single gloom?
What does it matter what word is my name
If the curse is indivisibly the same?

Groussac or Borges, I gaze at this beloved
World that grows more shapeless, and its light
Dies down into a pale, uncertain ash
Resembling sleep and the oblivion of night.

Original Spanish version:

POEMA DES LOS DONES

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

De esta ciudad de libros hizo dueños
a unos ojos sin luz, que sólo pueden
leer en las bibliotecas de los sueños
los insensatos párrafos que ceden

las albas a su afán. En vano el día
les prodiga sus libros infinitos,
arduos como los arduos manuscritos
que perecieron en Alejandría.

De hambre y de sed (narra una historia griega)
muere un rey entre fuentes y jardines;
yo fatigo sin rumbo los confines
de esta alta y honda biblioteca ciega.

Enciclopedias, atlas, el Oriente
y el Occidente, siglos, dinastías,
símbolos, cosmos y cosmogonías
brindan los muros, pero inútilmente.

Lento en mi sombra, la penumbra hueca
exploro con el báculo indeciso,
yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso
bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

Algo, que ciertamente no se nombra
con la palabra azar, rige estas cosas;
otro ya recibió en otras borrosas
tardes los muchos libros y la sombra.

Al errar por las lentas galerías
suelo sentir con vago horror sagrado
que soy el otro, el muerto, que habrá dado
los mismos pasos en los mismos días.

¿Cuál de los dos escribe este poema
de un yo plural y de una sola sombra?
¿Qué importa la palabra que me nombra
si es indiviso y uno el anatema?

Groussac o Borges, miro este querido
mundo que se deforma y que se apaga
en una pálida ceniza vaga
que se parece al sueño y al olvido.

# Against Architecture. The writing of Georges Bataille by Denis Hollier

In 1974, Denis Hollier (the current chairman of NYU's French Department), published a n absolutely brilliant book entitled La Prise de la Concorde that will be later (1990) be translated in English with the title Against Architecture. The writings of Georges Bataille.
This book takes as premises the very limited amount of writings that Georges Bataille published about architecture and makes out of them a beautiful treatise on architecture and society.

I meant to write an article about this book a long time ago and I never made the time for it, so now I would rather publish an anthology of excerpts of this book than nothing at all.

Two quotes about death and architecture stroke me when I read them as I was very interested by the association of two notions at the time I read the book:

“For Bataille the world of the Aztecs will remain the model of a society that does not repress the sacrifice that forms it. Ephemeral, at the height of glory and at the peak of its powers, this society neglected to put in place the institutional structures that would have secured its future, but. When the time came, offered itself as heedlessly as it sacrificed its victims to extinction and death when Cortez’s army landed in Mexico. It presents the only image of a society based upon death and faithful to this basis to such an extent that is somehow defenseless and died out. The pyramids is left behind were not used to cover up death of the sacrificial victim. “Their knowledge of architecture,” writes Bataille in the chapter of La Part maudite (The Accursed Share) devoted to them, “served them in the construction of pyramids on top of which they immolated human beings.” Architecture is returned to the destructive interaction that its initial function was to interrupt.”

“Imperialism, philosophy, mathematics, architecture, etc., compose the system of petrification that waves of humanity, the crowd unleashed, will end up carrying off in its revolutionary uprising. “Upholding death’s work,” said Hegel, “requires the greatest strength of all.” But the relation between conceptualization and death is not the same for Hegel as it is for Bataille. In the work of the mind, which introduces divisions into the concrete, separating and abstracting, Hegel sees the mechanics of death at work. Discursive knowledge is thus the bearer of this “absolute power” of destruction that cancels the sensuous concrete. It is not until later that science’s abstract concepts, which initially liquefied the “sensuous being-there,” become in turn a unified a whole of thought, “fixed and solidied,” and are set rigidly into a system of abstract determinations. For Bataille, on the contrary, this petrification is the very essence of conceptualization (and here it is not yet necessary to make a distinction among the various sciences, mathematics, and others on the one hand, nor between science and philosophy): it is initially formalist. Conceptualization is being preserved in it, as Hegel put it, conceptualization eludes death by keeping ahead of it, propelled by whatever in its terror over presentiments of the unknown takes refuge in the forms of sameness. Death fluidifies, it liquefies; mathematics paralyze. Architecture has not even a hint of motion. Its main purpose, as the article “Informe” said, is to provide what exists with a “formal coat, a mathematical overcoat”: a form that veils the incompletion that death, in its nakedness, introduces into life. Concerning this point a paradoxical anthropomorphism of mathematics is outlined. In “Le Cheval Academique” Bataille connects the harmonious proportions of human form (form being that which covers up nakedness) with “fright at formless and undefined things.”

“Classical, academic painting, under the control of architecture, is limited to masking a skeleton. Painting conceals it, but the skeleton is its truth. In many primitive societies the skeleton marks the moment of the second death – a death that is completed, clean, and properly immutable: that which survives putrefaction and decomposition. The skeleton, as architectural, is the perfect example of an articulated whole.”

Later in the book, within a chapter entitled The Labyrinth and the Pyramid, Hollier basing his vision of architecture on Bataille's writings establishes that:

“The labyrinth, therefore, is not an object, not a referent. It does not have a transcendence that would permit one to explore it. Wanting to explore the labyrinth only confirms this further: there is no getting around it. But neither the category of subjectivity nor the category of objectivity can exist in this space, which, having made them unsound, nevertheless has no replacement to offer. Distance like proximity, separation like adhesion remain undecidable there. In this sense one is never either inside or outside the labyrinth – a space (perhaps that is already too much to say) that would be constituted by none other than this very anxiety, which is however, incurably undecidable: am I inside or outside?”

Other excerpts:

“Architecture exists only to control and shape the entire social arena. It is constituted by this impulse propelling it to erect itself as the center and to organize all activities around itself.”

“The revolutionary movement liberates the future from the prisons of known. Bataille speaks rarely of political action, but frequently of revolutionary agitation. The revolution destroys the authorities and imaginary dictatorships that work only because they tap the support of some faith. Including the authority of science.
“Man is seen as a bureaucratic-looking prison.” Architecture functions as the fantasy that man identifies with to escape his desire (to escape it is to control it). Man is confined: conformed within himself. Nothing of him escapes the group’s encoding synthesis, whole enclosure he himself guarantees. Because he, in fact, believes in his prison.”

# Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant

Edouard Glissant is a magnificent poet-philosopher who develops the most beautiful French writing I've ever read. He is one of those authors that makes your reading slowing down (which in my case is miraculous) and moves you in your humanity.
As talented as Betsy Wing, his English translator, is, the beauty of language do not (and probably cannot) transfer from French to English but the substance remains...

Here are three excerpts of Poetics of Relation, one of his main books:

Imaginaire

Penser la pensée revient le plus souvent à se retirer dans un lieu sans dimension où l’idée seule de la pensée s’obstine. Mais la pensée s’espace réellement au monde. Elle informe l’imaginaire des peuples, leurs poétiques diversifiées qu’à son tour elle transforme, c’est-à-dire, dans lesquels se réalise son risque.

La culture est la précaution de ceux qui prétendent à penser la pensée mais se tiennent a l’écart de son chaotique parcours. Les cultures en évolution infèrent la Relation, le dépassement qui fonde leur unité-diversité.

La pensée dessine l’imaginaire du passé : un savoir en devenir. On ne saurait l’arrêter pour l’estimer, ni l’isoler pour l’émettre. Elle est partage dont nul ne peut se départir ni, s’arrêtant, se prévaloir.

Imaginary

Thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoples, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realized.

Culture is the precaution of those who claim to think thought but who steer clear of its chaotic journey. Evolving cultures infer Relation, the overstepping that grounds their unity-diversity.

Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge becoming. One cannot stop it to assess it nor isolate it to transmit it. It is sharing one can never not retain, nor ever, in standing still, boast about.

Répétitions

Ce flux de convergences, qui se publie sous la forme du lieu commun. Celui-ci n’est plus généralité reçue, convenance ni fadeur – il n’est plus évidence trompeuse, abusant le sens-commun -, mais acharnement et ressassement de ces rencontres. Tout alentour, l’idée se relaie. Quand vous éveillez un constat, une certitude, un espoir, ils s’efforcent déjà quelque part, ailleurs, sous une autre espèce.

Aussi bien la répétition est elle, ici et là, un mode avoué de la connaissance. Reprendre sans répit ce que depuis toujours vous avez dit. Consentir a l’élan infinitésimal, à l’ajout, inaperçu peut-être, qui dans votre savoir s’obstinent.

Le difficile est que l’entassement de ces lieux communs n’échoue pas en un bougonnement sans nerf – l’art y pourvoie ! Le probable : que vous alliez à fond de toutes confluences, pour démarquer vos inspirations.

Repetitions

This flood of convergences, publishing itself in the guise of the commonplace. No longer is the latter an accepted generality, suitable and dull – no longer is it deceptively obvious exploiting common sense – it is, rather, all that is relentlessly and endlessly reiterated by these encounters. On every side the idea is being relayed. When you awaken an observation, a certainty, a hope, they are already struggling somewhere, elsewhere, in another form.

Repetition, moreover, in an acknowledged form of consciousness both here and elsewhere. Relentlessly resuming something you have already said. Consenting to an infinitesimal momentum, an addition perhaps unnoticed that stubbornly persists in your knowledge.

The difficulty: to keep this growing pile of common places from ending up as dispirited grumbling – may art provide! The probability: that you come to the bottom of all confluences to mark more strongly your inspirations.

Généralisations

Reconnaitre, imaginer, la Relation.
Entreprise encore, et combien déguisée, de généralisation universalisante ?
Fuite, en avant des problèmes ?
Nul imaginaire n’aide réellement à prévenir la misère, à s’opposer aux oppressions, à soutenir ceux qui « supportent » dans leur corps ou dans leur esprit. Mais l’imaginaire modifie les mentalités, si lentement qu’il en aille.

De quelque endroit ou l’on se trouve, et quelle que soit la force d’errance, on entend monter le désir de « donner avec », de surprendre l’ordre dans le chaos ou au moins d’en deviner l’improbable motivation : de développer cette théorie qui échapperait aux généralisations.

La poétique ? Précisément cette double portée, d’une théorie qui tache à conclure, d’une présence qui ne conclut (ne présume) de rien. Non point l’une sans l’autre. C’est par là que l’instant et la durée nous confortent.
Toute poétique est un palliatif d’éternité.

Edouard Glissant. Poétique de la Relation. Paris : Gallimard 1990

Generalization

Recognizing, imagining, Relation.
Yet another undertaking, thoroughly disguised, of universalizing generalization?
Escape, the problems at our heels?
No imagination helps avert destitution in reality, none can oppose oppressions or sustain those who “withstand” in body or spirit. But imagination changes mentalities, however slowly it may go about this.

No matter where one is, no matter how strong the force of errantry, one can hear the mounting desire to “give-on-and-with”, to discover order in chaos or at least to guess its unlikely motivation: to develop this theory that would escape generalizations.

Poetics? Precisely this double thrust, being a theory that tries to conclude, a presence that concludes (presumes) nothing. Never one without the other. That is how the instant and duration comfort us.
Every poetics is a palliative for eternity.

Edouard Glissant. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1997

# The Emergence of Social Space. Rimbaud and the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross

Plus que jamais nous bambochons
Quand viennent sur nos fourmilières
Crouler les jaunes cabochons
Dans des aubes particulières

Thiers et Picard sont des Eros
Des enleveurs d’héliotropes,
Au pétrole ils font des Corots
Voici hannetonner leurs tropes…

More than ever we carouse
As onto our ant-hills come
Tumbling the yellow heads
On those extraordinary dawns:

Thiers and Picard are Cupids
And ravishers of heliotropes too;
They paint Corots with petrol
Here their tropes buzz about…

Rimbaud. Chant de guerre 1871 (translation Paul Schmidt)

I heard that the interesting French publisher La Fabrique is going to publish very soon the French version of Kristin Ross' The Emergence of Social Space. Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988), and I therefore decided to post an excerpt of it.
This essay associates Arthur Rimbaud's poetry and Paris Commune in 1871 (see former post) and propose a very accurate dissection of the poet's work in order to perceive the strong political involvement of it. Ross is also emphasizing the notion of swarm used by Rimbaud to describe the Communards and that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt are re-interpreting in their book called Multitude (see former post).
The book is published with Verso and I really recommend to explore their books (Zizek, Jameson, Badiou, Ranciere etc.). Great great publisher!

Here is the excerpt I chose:

The breakdown of spatial hierarchy in the Commune, one aspect of which was the establishment of places of political deliberation and decision making that were no longer secret but open and accessible, brought about a breakdown in a temporal division as well. The publicity of political life, the immediate publication of all the Commune’s decisions, and proclamations, largely in the form of affiches, resulted in a “spontaneous” temporality whereby citizens were no longer informed of their history after the fact but were actually occupying the moment of its realization. If the city and its streets were in fact reappropriated by the Communards, this undoubtedly entailed a Communard reinvention of urban rhythms: white nights and “revolutionary days” that are not simply certain days marked off on a calendar, but are rather the introduction to and immersion in a new temporal movement. […]
The workers who occupied the Hotel de Ville or who tore down the Vendome Column were not “at home” in the center of Paris; they were occupying enemy territory, the circumscribed proper place of the dominant social order. Such an occupation, however brief, provides an example of what the Situationnist have called a détournement – using the elements or terrain of the dominant social order to one’s own ends, for a transformed purpose; integration actual or past productions into a superior construction of milieu. Détournement has no other place but the place of the other; it plays on imposed terrain and its tactics are determined by the absence of a “proper place”. Thus, the détournement of churches: using them to hold the meetings of women’s clubs or other worker organizations. Détournement is no mere Surrealist or arbitrary juxtaposition of conflicting codes; its aim, at once serious and ludic, is to strip false meaning or value from the original.

Kristin Ross. The Emergence of Social Space. Rimbaud and the Paris Commune.Verso 2008