| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: SubStance 34.1 (2005) 78-80 Memory, Media, Art Marie-Pascale-Huglo Université de Montréal Johanne Villeneuve Université du Québec à Montréal The trio of memory, media and art raises a question from the start: what can be articulated by such a grouping? One element of a preliminary reply has to do with the materiality implied by arts and media. We are not addressing media in the sense of "new technologies;" although this collection is interested in these, its thrust is "upstream," in the area of writing, for example. The media are less a technique of communication than a singular way of appearing, a device (un appareil, in the words of Jean-Louis Déotte) whose materiality touches not only the senses, but also memory: "Memory is equipped like any other human faculty. Without memory, there is no event" (Déotte, 112). We incorporate (memorize) the specific ways of appearing/instantiation related to current and outdated media. The reciprocity between the arts and media arises from the fact that the plurality of worlds (understood as singular "modes of instantiation") is not purely symbolic, but can be sensed materially. Thus it is a question of thinking aesthetics in terms of differential and differentiated materialities. As Ginette Michaud demonstrates in the case of Jean-Luc Nancy, the difference among the arts equates to a constitutive difference among the five senses. To ponder the reciprocity between the arts and media is to attribute a creative power to the intermedial relations between different sensory systems. It is not surprising that the plurality of the arts and the media is associated with technological mutation; far from being reduced to prostheses, to extensions capable of amplifying our natural senses, technologies transform experience, graft themselves onto it, give body to artifice, and in turn make "sense" and "worlds." Further, aesthetic sensibility is always traversed by forms of incarnation, by tangible propositions, that make possible the elaboration of community. Thus the political and the sensory are linked directly to modalities of representation belonging to an era. This is borne out in Atom Egoyan's film Calendar, from which Tollof Nelson concludes that the inter-media passages that reveal the experience of exile exhume a memory that is both intimate and sensorial, political and sensible. They arise from different strata of memory. Thus distinct temporalities and spaces are involved in the arts and media. Such an aesthetic interrelation is necessarily political. Not only do art and media engage the subject; they constitute him/her at the intersection of specific experiences and a community traversed and knit together by collective memory. For example, modern perspective defines a subject, a nation, a people—in short, an experience of history—as a subjective singularity whose "communality/community" is imposed. Now, what happens to the community when experiences of time and spaces multiply in an accelerated way—a world that is globalized and atomized, a time that is no longer linear, memories that are hypertrophied and discontinuous, a subject that is "migrant," spectral, virtual? By detaching globalization from geopolitical, economic or cultural approaches, we seek to throw into relief the materiality of the intermedial relations that constitute it. On this level, art is not simply a mode of exposition; through its capacity to incorporate and commingle mediatic qualities, it renews our powers of perception and exceeds the limits belonging to each medium by playing with outdated "modes of apparition," embedded in collective memory and not strictly synchronic—hence the aesthetic and political stake contained in the relation "inter." The historical coinciding of the multiplication of media (especially audio-visual) with the massive migrations between Europe and North America in the twentieth century makes a dense historical cluster from which it is possible to analyze the passage from modernity to postmodernity, albeit in the form of exchanges between the two. In the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, mondialisation is no less than a revocation of "globalization" (a term often considered an Americanism), while the plural community composed between the arts and related sensory systems can be considered as an "inter-esse" that is fundamentally "inter-medial," as described by Henk Oosterling. The "interception" (Ginette Michaud) of the work of art and...
|
