First Entry (Hanjo Berressem)

During the discussion of Sandy’s talk, one question concerned the distinction between melodramatic tragedy and real injustice. In the light of this distinction, one might ask whether realism – a genre with its own artistic strategies and formulas – is better suited for cultural criticism. Is realism, both in the moving image and other genres more precise and accurate in its portrayal of actual cultural situations than tragedy? What can the role of tragedy be in the field of social activism? The overall idea, of course, is to avoid choosing between two options, but rather to look at their specific cultural agencies and currencies in specific circumstances, contexts, and cultural fields.

If, as in the final scene of Haynes’ Far From Heaven, the melodramatic tragedy can be distilled into an itself silent, but musically orchestrated dialogue composed of a series of affect-images, with Raymond’s hands and gazes in an affective conversation with Kathy’s gazes and facial expressions, can such a continuous modulation of the social’s impossibilities respond to, rather than just resonate with the social circumstances that it expresses on a non-representational, expressive level? What is its surplus-value beyond transforming the movie’s narrative into an intensive affective duration? If this affective composition somehow compresses and contains the complexity of a social field and the impossibility to solve its injustices, can this ending herald the beginning of a movement of social justice, or will it forever remain nothing more than the expression of its tragedies?

My first impression is that such intensive durations contain the potentiality of bringing about new feminist work if one considers them not as affective responses that are separated from the field of cognition proper, but rather as what American Pragmatism calls ‘perceptual’ (Peirce) or ‘intuitive’ (Whitehead) judgements, which are unconscious and uncontrollable forms of judgement that are famously considered to shade into conscious, controllable, but also less complicated processes of cognitive abduction. In this light, I would propose to consider these intensive durations as unconscious, uncontrollable analyses of very specific social and political fields, and as such also as unconscious, uncontrollable critiques of those fields.