Virtual Scholars
An imagined form of scholarship…Archive for June, 2008
Sendai Foray…
Benjamin thought we might take the act of writing ‘theory’ into the streets, but what happens when you find it already there, staring right at you… making you desire it?
I got into Sendai in the late evening. Concrete overwhelmed by senses as I hurried to my hotel. Come the morning, however, I have been able to get a better handle on the place. It seems the city can be traversed relatively easily on foot, which is nice. My mission this morning was to locate the Sendai Mediatheque, where my conference will be tomorrow and the day after.
The building appears to have its main structural elements on the inside, a sort of inside out kind of building, combining fluid curves seen through linear glass cladding. I couldn’t make it up to the higher floors, where there are galleries apparently (and where I will be attending the conference, I hope!). I did make it to the library however, which looked great (it even had a children’s library too). 
There is definitely a high-tech element to the city, but it jostles with a much older feel too – there is a collision between quasi-socialist architecture as you find in Dresden and East Berlin and out and out high-fashion, consumerist styles. Japan does have that habit of accumulating all sorts… it piles up and up.
Sendai train station really makes me think of structures in eastern Germany.
And here again, the sort of cladding you find with buildings in Dresden, yet nestled to the left the Louis Vuitton store – one of many high-end fashion stores in this area.
I say no more!
Precipice…
Having now had a couple of skype-enabled conversations with the elusive originator of the Letters in Red (held up writing again in his home city of Bogota) and with trips to Sendai and then Tokyo planned in the coming days, I sense we are on the precipice of new and potentially ambitious period of work…
As a working title, the new project (the mission, which may, this time, include a trip to Peru), can go by the phrase of Theory-Place-Text. This is really only the very beginning of a dialogue to find out what ‘it’ is we might be heading towards. As a starting point, here are some lines previously written:
‘Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that better fit its influence in active communities than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book – in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment’ – Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
Benjamin’s enigmatic writing has proved to be a vital resource for contemporary criticism (offering for some a kind of methodological compass), yet equally we might ask where is the ‘prompt language’ he gestures towards? Elsewhere in One-Way Street, Benjamin presents – as part of his 13 theses on the writer’s technique – the wonderful line: ‘Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there’. …what if, then, we seek greater courage still by writing everything away from the study? …And, what does it mean (and where does one seek) to write Theory today?
On topics varying from the use of mobile phones and wi-fi technology, the work of Paul Klee and contemporary filmmakers Patrick Keiller and Chris Marker, as well as Asian asethetics and popular culture, Theory-Place-Text ‘might’ present a collection of essays and photo-texts which explore the art of ‘moving theory’ – making Theory not only connect critically with the material world around us, but also to touch us, to be both affirmative and affecting.
Associated papers:
Love Media! Loving exchanges from tanka poetry to mobile phone txting
Lost in Translation, Or Nothing to See But Everything
In the Study of the Letters in Red in Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2005, Vol 4, no. 1, pp 19-27. See also: Rodrigo Velasco’s Letters in Red
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