Teaching My New Book

I’ve been revising my book manuscript over the last few weeks and a colleague offhandedly suggested that I might come and talk about it in his class. I took this as the kind of gesture that one makes to a colleague, but not a genuine invitation. 

That said, it did get me thinking about how I might talk to a classroom of undergraduates about my current work.

First, I would show the class a photograph and ask them to describe the objects, relationships, and situations that appear in the photo. I would urge them to think about the temporal relationships in the photograph. Which things were older, can we discern an order — a stratigraphy — to the things, and do certain things seem out of time as much as out of place?

Then, I would ask them to think about the photograph as a photograph. I would ask them to describe the photograph itself rather than what it shows. In particular I ask them to contextualize the photograph in as many ways as they can.

This allows me to talk about the photograph’s relationship to the viewer and its abrupt ability to become contemporary. The photograph is somehow both in the present as an object that can be viewed and from some other time. In other words, it’s possible to de- and re- contextualize a photograph because it’s portable. I’ll show them the photo on a sheet of paper and on my iPad. I’ll show it next to another photo of something different and then next to the price of oil.

This lets me introduce folks like Benjamin and talk about how the democratization of art through photography robs it of its special historical and sacred value and replaces this with its capacity to be deployed in new, political ways. This is because photographs are fragments that can be arranged in new ways almost instantly. I can then loop back to the objects within the photograph and point out that there are fragments everywhere and introduce Benjamin’s Arcades.

At this point, the going gets a bit tougher. I introduce them, on the one hand, to how we can re-arrange fragments to create narratives and how photographs are useful for this because they’re portable and have a kind of timelessness. I explain that Benjamin was worried about this because he saw new narrative arising in Europe among fascists that sought to recontextualize the fragmented reality in hostile, militant, and repressive ways. For Benjamin, then, recognizing the fragmented character of these narratives allowed viewers to subvert them and prevent fascists — but also capitalists — from naturalizing the order of things.

For Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, fragmentation isn’t just way to subvert narratives, it makes them obsolete. For Han, fragments of time embodied in photographs, objects, things, or whatever, “whizz around” decoupled from narratives. 

Of course, we experience this. We recognize that our efforts to arrange our lives and our reality along trajectories often collapse when subjected to any critical attention. We recognize that the alternation between booms and busts is also the alternation between busts and booms. The fragmented world instills us with moments of “cruel optimism” that shatters only too quickly when the promise of whatever narrative we seek to impose collapses. Our experience lack structure, rhythms, or order. Photographs embody this reality just as the things in the photograph reveal the loose arrangement of emergent times, durations, and temporalities.

For Han, this means that narratives have failed, but we can dwell on the fragments in ways that allow for meaning, for duration, and for existence that are not dependent upon cruel optimism, progress, or reactionary politics. We just have to slow down and do it.