Paul Klee: Angelus Novus (1920)
I. Kate Loves Marlon
Katherine Waugh describes the impersonal form of writing that she loves best as fugitive in character and I don't have any problem with that, though how it differs from what Deleuze and Guattari term minor literature and/or nomadic philosophy is not quite clear; they too speak of outlaws and those who have the courage to flee.
Indeed, Waugh even privileges the same authors as Deleuze and Guattari - Nietzsche, Kafka, Artaud ... all the usual suspects. She may have been a subjectless teenage reader, but there's nothing unique about her taste in writers. Or movie stars ...
If saying you like Marlon Brando isn't exactly going out on a limb, describing Sidney Lumet's film Fugitive Kind (1960) as extraordinary - in a positive sense - is admittedly a bold move. Waugh is clearly smitten with the character played by Brando - Valentine Xavier - dressed in his snakeskin jacket. She speaks of his "singular beauty and sexual allure", before quickly adding that what really appeals is the fact that Valentine is "seeking to escape the oppressive subjectification he feels trapped within".
How do we know that this guitar-playing drifter is "seeking to escape the oppressive subjectification he feels trapped within"? Because he tells the older woman he's taken a shine to (played by Anna Magnani) the tragic tale of an apodal bluebird that is destined to forever stay on the wing. Should the poor creature ever attempt to land, it will immediately perish.
That's how Valentine wishes to be understood; as a man who doesn't belong anywhere and must always keep moving. And I guess that's how Waugh also wants to be understood; footloose and footless. Part bluebird - and part angel of history, as Waugh flits from Brando to Benjamin and the latter's obsessive love of a painting by Paul Klee ...
II. Kate Loves Walter
German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, was, as Waugh reminds us, literally a fugitive. Or, perhaps more accurately speaking, as a Jew in German-occupied Europe, Benjamin was a political refugee. Either way, he died on the run from the Nazis.
Waugh wonders what Benjamin might think of contemporary culture, were he to view it through the eyes of his Angel. Would what he saw make him panic, or fall into picnoleptic hysteria? I don't know. And, to be honest, I had to google the last term too.
Waugh writes of eyes that cannot see the past, but remain "hypnotized and bedazzled by the virtual luminosities of a history-less present, and possibly, in such a state, not seeing the present (however one defines it) either". And it's a nice idea, nicely expressed, even though it's not her idea; it belongs rather to that philosopher of speed, Paul Virilio.
Not that this really matters ... It's only that later in the essay, Waugh expresses such a love of original writing that ... But I digress (as Waugh herself digresses, though she terms it a divagation). Let's get back to Benjamin ...
What is it that Waugh loves about him? Did he too wear a snakeskin jacket and possess the singular beauty and sexual allure of Marlon Brando as Valentine Xavier? I think it would be pushing it a bit to describe him in such terms. However, he did seek to escape the oppressive subjectification he felt trapped within. Waugh tells us that Benjamin was (amongst other things):
Self-effacing ☑
A lover of pseudonyms ☑
Indeed, Waugh even privileges the same authors as Deleuze and Guattari - Nietzsche, Kafka, Artaud ... all the usual suspects. She may have been a subjectless teenage reader, but there's nothing unique about her taste in writers. Or movie stars ...
If saying you like Marlon Brando isn't exactly going out on a limb, describing Sidney Lumet's film Fugitive Kind (1960) as extraordinary - in a positive sense - is admittedly a bold move. Waugh is clearly smitten with the character played by Brando - Valentine Xavier - dressed in his snakeskin jacket. She speaks of his "singular beauty and sexual allure", before quickly adding that what really appeals is the fact that Valentine is "seeking to escape the oppressive subjectification he feels trapped within".
How do we know that this guitar-playing drifter is "seeking to escape the oppressive subjectification he feels trapped within"? Because he tells the older woman he's taken a shine to (played by Anna Magnani) the tragic tale of an apodal bluebird that is destined to forever stay on the wing. Should the poor creature ever attempt to land, it will immediately perish.
That's how Valentine wishes to be understood; as a man who doesn't belong anywhere and must always keep moving. And I guess that's how Waugh also wants to be understood; footloose and footless. Part bluebird - and part angel of history, as Waugh flits from Brando to Benjamin and the latter's obsessive love of a painting by Paul Klee ...
II. Kate Loves Walter
German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, was, as Waugh reminds us, literally a fugitive. Or, perhaps more accurately speaking, as a Jew in German-occupied Europe, Benjamin was a political refugee. Either way, he died on the run from the Nazis.
Waugh wonders what Benjamin might think of contemporary culture, were he to view it through the eyes of his Angel. Would what he saw make him panic, or fall into picnoleptic hysteria? I don't know. And, to be honest, I had to google the last term too.
Waugh writes of eyes that cannot see the past, but remain "hypnotized and bedazzled by the virtual luminosities of a history-less present, and possibly, in such a state, not seeing the present (however one defines it) either". And it's a nice idea, nicely expressed, even though it's not her idea; it belongs rather to that philosopher of speed, Paul Virilio.
Not that this really matters ... It's only that later in the essay, Waugh expresses such a love of original writing that ... But I digress (as Waugh herself digresses, though she terms it a divagation). Let's get back to Benjamin ...
What is it that Waugh loves about him? Did he too wear a snakeskin jacket and possess the singular beauty and sexual allure of Marlon Brando as Valentine Xavier? I think it would be pushing it a bit to describe him in such terms. However, he did seek to escape the oppressive subjectification he felt trapped within. Waugh tells us that Benjamin was (amongst other things):
Self-effacing ☑
A lover of pseudonyms ☑
Able to stage his own disappearance in the text ☑
Buried in an anonymous grave ☑
Buried in an anonymous grave ☑
In other words, he ticks all the right boxes for Waugh, who loves a writer who gives nothing away about himself and is able to become-imperceptible, which is the ultimate goal of all becomings. And o' how she longs for such writers to come from out of the future as it were, now that Kafka, Joyce, and all the B-boys, are long dead and buried beneath the weight of (non-fugitive) scholarship and critique.
III. Closing Remarks
Essentially, what Waugh is calling for is a new theoretically-informed criticism which is extreme, absurd, bewildering and, above all, thrilling. She approvingly quotes the music critic Simon Reynolds: "Far from being born of a cold-blooded drive to dissect and demystify, the attraction of critical theory (especially the French kind) was that it set your brain on fire."
I don't agree with that. Au contraire, I think that French critical theory builds upon the Nietzschean teaching that only those who know how to put ideas on ice have earned the right to enter into the heat of debate. Thus, I don't think Waugh would much care for the posts here on Torpedo the Ark where enthusiasm (and what she terms passion) is very much curbed.
Indeed, I suspect she'd think me a narcissistic stylist who trades in bland inanities dressed up as "profundities in 'clever' sentences". And she is quick to remind her readers - with all the snobbery of those who (often secretly) defend genre distinctions and high culture - of Sylvère Lotringer's remark: theory is not synonymous with blogging.
That might be true, but blogging is not synonymous with "the horrors of much online, spontaneous, 'opinionizing' and 'self-expression'" either. Indeed, I would suggest that one can (sometimes) find conceptual intelligence in all kinds of writing, including blogging - and she can put that in her snow globe and shake it!
Essentially, what Waugh is calling for is a new theoretically-informed criticism which is extreme, absurd, bewildering and, above all, thrilling. She approvingly quotes the music critic Simon Reynolds: "Far from being born of a cold-blooded drive to dissect and demystify, the attraction of critical theory (especially the French kind) was that it set your brain on fire."
I don't agree with that. Au contraire, I think that French critical theory builds upon the Nietzschean teaching that only those who know how to put ideas on ice have earned the right to enter into the heat of debate. Thus, I don't think Waugh would much care for the posts here on Torpedo the Ark where enthusiasm (and what she terms passion) is very much curbed.
Indeed, I suspect she'd think me a narcissistic stylist who trades in bland inanities dressed up as "profundities in 'clever' sentences". And she is quick to remind her readers - with all the snobbery of those who (often secretly) defend genre distinctions and high culture - of Sylvère Lotringer's remark: theory is not synonymous with blogging.
That might be true, but blogging is not synonymous with "the horrors of much online, spontaneous, 'opinionizing' and 'self-expression'" either. Indeed, I would suggest that one can (sometimes) find conceptual intelligence in all kinds of writing, including blogging - and she can put that in her snow globe and shake it!
See: Katherine Waugh, 'The Fugitive Kind', essay in Fugitive Papers, Issue 2, (Summer 2012), pp. 12-15.
Note: Katherine Waugh is a curator, writer, and filmmaker based in Ireland.
