Caitlin’s response 3/17 – Biutiful Barcelona

In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, the role of the city of Barcelona is of primary importance in the film, second only perhaps to the protagonist Uxbal, played by Javier Bardem. Arguably, the character and plot cannot be extracted from this specific urban space. Barcelona, one of the most visited European cities, suffers from the very same picturesque image it propagates. While many films (and certainly a number of other artistic mediums) portray Catalonia’s capital from the point of view of the tourists who come to see its architectural glory, famous landmarks and swarming beaches, Biutiful, both technically and thematically, insists on the portrayal of the Barcelona of the marginalized.

The filming techniques throughout the film underline this marginalized side of the city as experienced by its immigrant population. Barcelona is rarely portrayed as a panoramic whole, and in the few shots that are positioned from an elevated view allowing this panorama, the city is shown at nighttime or under cloud cover, obscuring views of the Mediterranean and draping the architecture in a drab and depressing ambience. Additionally, the panoramic shots concentrate more often on buildings under construction than on fully finished architectural triumphs. Our vision of the skyline is consistently cluttered with cranes and never allows us liberating views of the expansive space that we would expect from a Mediterranean cityscape. The few picturesque images of the city are captured at the beginning of a shot that pans to a reality which disrupts our initial reaction to the image. The view of the Sagrada Familia and the Torre Agbar (under a clouded sky) are slowly relegated to the view out of the hospital window as Uxbar receives his cancer treatment. When we finally are able to see the horizon of the Mediterranean, a similar pan is used to reveal the corpses of the Chinese workers as they float ashore in the foreground of the infamous Barceloneta and its gleaming architecture. Thus the celebrated cityscape is used as a backdrop to harsh human realities that are more often hidden behind its gleaming façade.

Although it uses a different filmic strategy, the effect of the police chase through the Ramblas can be seen as a similar effort to disrupt the idealized image of the city held by a privileged, largely tourist population. The areal view of the Plaça de Catalunya is quickly shattered into fragmented pieces when the police begin to chase the illegal street vendors around the boundaries of the plaça. The shots are interrupted by frequent cuts between perspectives from inside the moving police cars, shots from the plaça following the chase circulating around it, and moving shots with handheld cameras following the persecuted men. These frequent moving, disrupted and disrupting shots make their way into Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s infamous street which has turned into one of its greatest tourist attractions. Yet again, the initial view of the majestic, tree-lined pedestrian fairway is cut apart into running shots, obscured views, and frequent cuts as the camera follows characters down narrow off-streets in their effort to escape.

In addition to these disrupted panoramas, the majority of the shots are filmed in closed, dark, cramped spaces that better represent Barcelona as known to the film’s protagonists than the propagated postcard images of its open tourist spaces. The basement that houses the Chinese immigrants, the low-ceilinged, seemingly temporary housing of the African street vendors and their families, and even the more spacious but decaying apartment of the protagonist and his family are the most frequent settings of the movie. The frequent use of these external contexts construct boundaries between the “outside” world of the rich tourist city and the inside, or perhaps “underside”, that, while frequently contained in these tight spaces, occasionally spills out. The shots and filming techniques used to construct the visual narrative of Biutiful can thus be seen as an effort to problematize a dominant view of Barcelona and to fully represent the city’s marginalized spaces and inhabitants.

Charlie’s critique of Morton: phenomenology and the ephemeral self

Hey folks, what follows is an explanation of one aspect of Morton’s argumentative style that I took issue with. Given the space constraints (two pages is a tough goal), I focused on my critique and not on how I think Morton’s work can be very useful. There’s some good stuff in his writing and hyperobjects brings up good questions that I’m excited to talk through in class. I just offer that caveat because I fear this response will read as being dismissive of him.

Thanks!

Charlie

In Timoty Morton’s book, Hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology after the end of the world, and in his essay, Queer Ecology, he argues for an understanding of nature, ecology, and the place of ‘the human’ in the world that Morton claims is a significant departure from previous theorizing. In Hyperobjects, Morton writes that his work necessitates a style of thinking “in which the normal certainties are inverted, or even dissolved. No longer are my intimate impressions “personal”…they are footprints of hyperobjects” (p. 5). Through this statement, he argues that the human subject is not a disembodied consciousness standing apart from the world but is created through its relationships and that hyperobjects leave their imprint on the human subject. He also challenges what he understands correlationalism to be: “the refrigerator itself, let alone the light inside it, only exists when I am there to open the door” (p. 13). He argues that hyperobjects exist whether or not we perceive them and that they exceed the human capacity to perceive them as phenomena. We are no longer “embedded” in a world, rather we are encompassed by these hyperobjects that surpass any human world.

Morton establishes the novelty of his claims through these sweeping criticisms of phenomenology. While one sympathetic review (http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/hyperobjects) claims that Morton is “sampling” from philosophy, not “doing philosophy,” I want to push back against his sampling. Morton mischaracterizes phenomenology, apparently to exaggerate the novelty of his own claims. I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to respond to some of Morton’s statements. Merleau-Ponty followed Heiddeger’s project of trying to understand Being, the human experience of life. He is best known for drawing attention to the body, but his work also clearly articulated how the human self is a transient phenomenon that is continuously made and remade.

Morton’s critiques of phenomenology wrongly assume that the “I,” the subject for phenomenology, is a contained “for-itself.” In continental philosophy, the “for-itself” refers to a pure constituting consciousness such as the one Descartes is caricatured as producing. The for-itself is a disembodied consciousness, a mind, that exists apart from the world and can behold objects. The “in-itself” then refers to the object itself, a discrete entity bounded by space and time. This contrast assumes that the subject and the object are two discrete things that do not overlap, and this appears to be how Morton is characterizing the subject for phenomenology.

However, if we turn to Merleau-Ponty, we see that he argues that the subject and object alike arise out of perceptual experience. For example, he writes, “If there is for me a cube with six equal faces and if I can indeed meet up with the object, this is not because I constitute it from within, but rather because through perceptual experience I plunge into the thickness of the world” (PhP p. 211). The cube becomes a cube for him in the act of perception, in meeting up with it in the world. Phenomenology actually makes no claim about the object ‘in-itself,’ phenomenology is instead concerned with how it becomes an object for a subject, how it comes to mean something in their world. Further, the “I” also comes to be in this encounter. Again, from Merleau-Ponty:

“Myself as the one contemplating the blue of the sky is not an acosmic subject standing before it, I do not possess it in thought, I do not lay out in front of it an idea of blue that would give me its secret. Rather, I abandon myself to it, I plunge into this mystery, and it “thinks itself in me.” I am this sky that gather together, composes itself, and begins to exist for itself, my consciousness is saturated by this unlimited blue” (PhP p. 222).

He then ends the paragraph by saying that “I” am “a hollow, or a fold that was made and than can be unmade” (p. 223).

Let’s make sense of these two dense quotations. First, Merleau-Ponty claims that both subject and object are abstractions, the product of perceptual experience. One comes to have a sense of self and other through the experience of being-in-the-world, through living life. Whereas correlationism as Morton would have it presupposes constituted subjects perceiving objects through the data of sensory experience, Merleau-Ponty’s claim is that this is not the character of life itself, but they are instead products of our efforts to make sense of the world, to derive meaning from our perceptual experience.

As I walk across campus, there are many things of which I am not aware of, that do not really exist for me. I can imagine that the grass on Bascom is made up of many different plant and animal species, but the lawn generally exists for me only as a lawn, as a sitting place or as a lying in the sun place. However, as I cross Charter Street on my way to class, I am acutely aware of the pedestrians, cyclists, cars, and buses that make their way through the intersection in a seemingly chaotic manner. Cars for me become fast cars, careless cars, considerate cars that stop for me. They have meaning for me because, in order for me to make my way across the intersection, I have to navigate their various trajectories and anticipate their actions. Many more objects come to exist meaningfully for me in that intersection than in the ecosystem that is Bascom hill.

This is a metaphysical claim, not an empirical claim. It does not say anything about the objects “in-themselves.” It makes no claim about what species of turf grass live on Bascom nor does it make an empirical claim about who or what is on Charter St at a given moment. Rather, it is a claim about how they come to have significance for me, how I come to see them, take note of them, and how they contribute to producing a sense of who I am in the world. This is not a representational claim, as Morton would have it, but it is a world making claim. It addresses the questions, how do I experience life, what do I see as significant, how does this impact how I experience myself and others, and what kind of judgements do I make? Throughout this entire process, “I” am unfolding, “I” am produced by the process. The “I” is never static, it is a verb. While Merleau-Ponty articulates this more clearly than Heidegger, and he draws more attention to the embodiment at work in the process, it is very much in the Heideggerean tradition that Morton claims to be criticizing.

The correlationalism charges that Morton levels therefore miss their mark. The phenomenological tradition does not draw on an understanding of our experience of the world as a correlation mediated by sense data. We don’t take pictures of the world and then represent them in our head to understand the world. In its most simple sense, Morton’s picture perhaps aligns with Kant’s understanding of how a consciousness represents its world, but to then level that same critique at the phenomenological tradition through Heiddeger is mistaken.

The idea of hyperobjects may indeed be valuable. Morton takes on the important question of how to understand and experience a process that happens on many scales. How can something be local and global at the same time? A process like global warming poses significant challenges for an approach that is prejudiced by that scalar hierarchy. Hyperobjects also raise the important question of how to confront a process that is both human created and far beyond control? The anthropocene is very much about the anthropos but we may be limited in our capacity to do much about it. However, by “sampling” philosophy in a way that mischaracterizes previous efforts, Morton undercuts his own and overplays the novelty of what object oriented ontologies can offer.

Last in the story of Chevron in Lago Agrio http://chevrontoxico.com/news-and-multimedia/2015/0313-the-hague-rules-against-chevron-in-ecuador-case” title=””>

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Charles’ reflection on De La Cadena

De la Cadena response
Marisol de la Cadena’s article, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics,” offers a brilliant extension of the work on “multinaturalism” offered by Vivieros de Castro and Latour, putting their work into conversation with Isabelle Stengers to explore the implications of a multinatural politics. Rather than framing indigenous politics in terms of multiculturalism or belief, De la Cadena instead argues that they should be understood as speaking from a different world than their mestizo counterparts. While the multiple worlds can be in conversation with one another, they should not be thought of as either equivalent or reducible to a single nature, a unified physical world. Using Andean political struggles over resource extraction as her empirical base, De La Cadena demonstrates how self-identified indigenous activists have successfully enrolled “earth-beings” such as mountains or rivers as political actors in their struggles.

One of the contributions of Indigenous Cosmopolitics is that it begins to reframe indigeneity. Postcolonial critiques often point out that indigeneity, as a signifier or as a category of being, comes to have meaning in terms of its contrast to the dominant culture. This tends to lock indigenous identity into a static past, resisting the acculturation of colonialists. If Westerners are secular, indigenous are spiritual, Westerners are aligned with culture while indigenous people come to be seen as closer to nature. This flattens indigenous identity, denies it dynamism, and locks it into an oppositional relationship with its colonial others.

Instead, De la Cadena makes use of contributions by Marilyn Strathern and Eduardo Vivieros de Castro to demonstrate how Andean indigenous activists can both enter politics on their own terms and engage in political struggles across worlds that do not neatly match up. First, she introduces Strathern’s idea of “partial connection.” Partial connection “refers to a relationship composing an aggregate that is “neither singular nor plural, neither one nor many, a circuit of connections rather than joint parts” (2004:54). Partial connections create no single entity; the entity that results is more than one, yet less than two” (p. 347). Second, she makes use of Vivieros de Castro’s idea of “equivocation.” Different actors in a struggle may use some of the same key words, but they do not necessarily refer to the same thing. For a Western environmentalist, a mountain may refer to a physical thing composed of rocks and plants, which forms the beginning of a watershed. For Mariano and Nazario Turpo, the Peruvian ritual specialist with whom De La Cadena worked, the mountain was alive, a being in its own right. While they may have worked with environmental groups to protect the mountain, using the language of western environmentalists, they were still, in important ways, referring to different mountains.

Using these concepts, I think one of De la Cadena’s important contributions is to point out how syncretism, usually associated with religion, also applies to politics. It allows for an understanding of indigenous politics as strategic, dynamic, and capable of speaking with Western worldviews while not being subsumed by them. It allows her to push past understandings of indigeneity that insist on static, ‘traditional,’ values or cultural interpretations that may respect their beliefs but still undermine their veracity.

These two concepts may be helpful in my own research into rites of passage ceremonies. I work with an organization, The School of Lost Borders, whose members work to reinterpret and reintroduce ‘traditional’ ceremonies such as the vision fast to contemporary American and European culture. The work is often one of translation. Lakota and Cheyenne practices and knowledge are put into conversation with Jungian psychology and the American wilderness tradition. Participants in their programs learn to engage the land and nonhuman others as intentional beings in their own right who may participate in the psychological lives of humans in meaningful ways. In some ways, it is an attempt to adopt what is often thought of as an “indigenous” worldview, a way of inhabiting a world full of “earth-beings.” Participants sometimes struggle with self-conscious doubts about the process, wondering if they are simply projecting internal processes onto an inanimate external world. Critics have charged that these ceremonies are an act of cultural appropriation, an act of further colonization.

While it’s important to consider these concerns, I wonder if the work of organizations like The School of Lost Borders may be better understood as working to negotiate equivocations and to foster partial connections. Just as De La Cadena seeks to “slow down reasoning,” these experiments in inhabiting the world in an animist fashion may be thought of as efforts to nurture partial connections between worlds, to inhabit a different world. De la Cadena wrote that she and Nazario could never inhabit the same world, but that they could ally with each other and fight for causes there are important to both of them. I worry that this assertion is limiting. She is dismissive of “new agers” interested in shamanism, but I think this forecloses on the possibility of learning to appreciate and inhabit multiple worlds. Experiences like the vision fast ceremony may offer poignant felt experiences of earth beings that facilitate the translation of equivocations. Stathern’s partial connections demonstrate that the gulf between worlds is not insurmountable. Connections may be nourished while also allowing that the subsumption of one world into another is neither possible nor desirable.

-Charles Carlin