Trinketization thrives

Trinketization thrives on allegorical storytelling, like an old anthropologist telling once again the story of the masquerades seen as a critique of colonial power. Or rather, trinketization would be this allegory if it were enamoured only with the fetish and not something like analogy, symbol, metaphor, synecdoche, hyperbole and irony (hat tip Don Miller).

195 trinketization

DPA

“Four shades of red: To honor Karl Marx’ 195th birthday, artist Ottmar Hörl set 500 of these sculptures up throughout the philosopher’s hometown of Trier, a city in western Germany near the border with Luxembourg. The different shades are reportedly meant to suggest that Marxism can be interpreted in more than one way.

Political artist Ottmar Hörl captured headlines from away from his hometown of Nuremberg in 2009 when he created garden gnomes performing Nazi salutes. And now he’s back to making what he hopes will be another controversial statement.

Each miniature sculpture, which stands less than a meter (3.3 feet) tall, portrays Marx in the exact same pose, but in different shades of red. “I want to inspire pedestrians to think about Karl Marx in a different way,” Hörl explains while his installation is being set up next to Trier’s historic Roman city gate, Porta Nigra, adding that the German philosopher has often been misinterpreted.”

HT Karen, – from:  Philosopher as Farce: Artist Immortalizes Marx as Garden Gnome  Sebastian Hammelehle

Note 33

Trinketization is both a reductive appropriation of everything to commodification, as if that were somehow the fully articulated explanation;

AND

Trinketization is the proliferation of theorizations of that commodity desiccation that atomises a paralyzingly abundant fascination and desire

Trinketization Dream Job

Trinketization with respect to Benjamin’s obsessions with kitsch – mediation between magic and positivism

… with respect to Benjamin’s obsessions with kitsch: Adorno writes to Benjamin trying to wean him from his trinket mania, get him to sort out the Arcades, and get him on a boat to New York. Along the way (I think) he invents the theory of trinketization. Keen to affirm his institutional solidarity with Benjamin, Adorno is careful not to insist on any orthodox version of Marxism, but he also warns against an abdication from Marxist theory:

“The impression which your entire study conveys – and not only to me with my Arcades orthodoxy – is that you have here done violence upon yourself. Your solidarity with the Institute, which pleases no-one more than myself, has led you to pay the kind of tributes to Marxism which are appropriate neither to Marxism nor to yourself. Not appropriate to Marxism because the mediation through the entire social process is missing and because of a superstitious tendency to attribute to mere material enumeration a power of illumination which really belongs to theoretical construction … you have denied yourself your boldest and most fruitful ideas through a kind of pre-censorship in accordance with materialist categories (which by no means correspond to Marxist ones)” (Adorno to Benjamin 10 November 1938, Benjamin/Adorno 1994/1999: 284).

This suggests that Benjamin was merely coquetting with the forms of Marxist theory and not thinking them through – coquetting is Marx’s diminutive word in Capital for where he used the language and style of Hegel, in an analysis that went well beyond Hegel, see the Forward to Marx 1867/1967. On Adorno’s reading – of the draft – Benjamin might be confirmed as ‘the [nice, harmless, cute, ‘bad’] Marxist that you could take home to meet your mother’ (as someone, I forget who, once said). Adorno is teasing and pushing him to be more inventive and rigorous with his connections – all at the same time. And it is connections to which he is attuned, noting:

“a close connection between those places where your essay falls behind its own a priori and its relationship to dialectical materialism … Let me express myself in as simple an Hegelian manner as possible. Unless I am very much mistaken, your dialectic is lacking in one thing: mediation” (Adorno to Benjamin 10 November 1938, Benjamin/Adorno 1994/1999:282).

Mediation then would be the theorization of connections between the ‘mere’ material observations and fascinations of the Arcades, of the baubles that interest the flaneur, of the observations of the analyst, and of the notations of the writer – mediation is the vehicle of analysis. Adorno marks this as a phantasmagorical and mystical error:

“Your ‘anthropological’ materialism ‘harbours a profoundly romantic element … The ‘mediation’ which I miss and find obscured by materialistic-historiographical evocation, is simply the theory which your study has omitted. But the omission of theory affects the empirical material itself” (Adorno to Benjamin 10 November 1938, Benjamin/Adorno 1994/1999:283).

At pains not to offend his friend, but also careful to call for something more, Adorno rephrases the same point again and again:

“To express this another way: the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one wanted to put it rather drastically, one could say your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched. Only theory could break this spell – your own resolute and salutarily speculative theory. It is simply the claim of this theory that I bring against you here” (Adorno to Benjamin 10 November 1938, Benjamin/Adorno 1994/1999:283).

It might be too easy to score credits here on some biographical outcomes chart (a research assessment exercise) as Adorno goes on to write The Dialectic of Enlightenment with Horkheimer, while Benjamin ends up sitting bleary-eyed far too long in the cafés of Marseilles, and finally does not make it over the mountain. But the suitcase he carries is lost and we do not know if these prods in the direction of theory had recast the manuscript. A terrible gap.

Trinkets in Camps

Doc Richard Iveson is a harvester of obscure snippets and curios, none escape his ability to comb through the detritus of philosophy for gems to hold up to the gloaming (apols to Benjamin and Kracauer):

Hi John. I’m in the middle of writing a paper on Catherine Malabou and along
the way I came across an unusual use of the word “trinket” which (if
you don’t already know) I thought you might find interesting -
according to Wolfgang Sofsky (in ‘The Order of Terror’), in the Nazi
concentration camp at Ravensbruck (a women’s camp), the prisoners who
were beyond any possibility of surviving (i.e. the ‘Muselmanner’) were
known as ‘trinkets’. Odd, but provocative, don’t you think?

Trinketization for beginners

Been thinking about trinkets in songs.

Been thinking about trinkets in songs.  I present two stellar
examples, complete with youtube links.

‘In a small far room the bed is set
With trinkets all surrounding
Yet alone it rests, so dry it sets
With souls aside abiding’

Palace Music, ‘We All, Us Three, Will Ride’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkvctVZcO4E

‘I crept into a box of mesmerising trinkets
and I probably shouldn’t think it
and I don’t so now I do’

Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard, ‘And I Don’t (So Now I Do)’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akobg_E0N48

Trinkets: always plural.  Always something that surrounds or
mesmerises, that one must enter…

Thanks Morgan Daniels

Olympiss Trinkisss

including a snowglobe to freeze the heart of Walter Benjamin: thanks Sophie-trinkspotter

Orientally yours

A new blog by Karen Tam updates trinketization, but with Chinese characteristics: http://orientallyyours.tumblr.com/

An example of her interests would be this scenario below by British photographer Grace Lau, but Karen’s own opium dens and faked antiquities are treasures themselves.

Website: www.karentam.ca

Other Blog: Pumpkin Sauce

Photograph booth, and photo, by Grace Lau

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2wjgh5ceh1rrpskqo3_400.png

Trinket of The Week in Iran

From:  http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/iran-offers-u-s-tiny-replica-of-lost-drone/ (thanks Rachel)

January 17, 2012, 4:48 PM

Iran Offers U.S. Tiny Replica of Lost Drone

By ROBERT MACKEY

Scale models of an American drone are now on sale in Iran.

While Iran’s government has so far refused an American request to return the C.I.A. stealth drone it captured last month, on Tuesday, an Iranian company that is manufacturing miniature replicas of the drone in several colors offered to send President Obama a pink one.

According to Iranian state radio, the scale models of the drone are one-eightieth the size of the RQ-170 Sentinel surveillance craft Iran’s military proudly displayed on television last month after it either crashed or was forced down.

Thomas Erdbrink, a Washington Post correspondent in Tehran, reports that a local firm, the Ayeh Art Group, is now making 2,000 toy drones a day. Reza Kioumarsi, an official with the firm, told Mr. Erdbrink that since Mr. Obama said he wanted the drone back, “we will send him one.”

The souvenir aircraft retails for about $4, but, like the commemorative “Justice Coin” that Americans can now buy to celebrate the Navy Seal mission that killed Osama bin Laden, the purchase price includes bonus gifts. According to the Ayeh Art Group Web site, the toy drone comes with a plastic stand bearing the slogan, “We will put America under our feet,” a quotation from the founder of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

An Iranian cartoon mocking President Obama.

An Iranian Web site displaying more images of the toy drones also features an animation mocking Mr. Obama for losing the surveillance aircraft. The cartoon shows a caricature of the American president enjoying a ride on a drone, until it is taken over and forced to land by an Iranian officer holding what looks like an old-fashioned Nintendo game controller. (While the United States claims that the drone malfunctioned and crashed, Iran insists that its military wrested away control of the aircraft and brought it in for a landing.)

Readers interested in securing one of the toy drones can check Mr. Erdbrink’s Twitter feed on Wednesday, when he plans to give away 10 to winners of a quiz.

Kate Murdoch’s home trinkets. Collections and dust. No time like the archive. Get rid of them!

Keeping it together, in two parts (I’ve excerpted the first part and a bit of the second, but lost all the pics which you should see). This is from Artists Talking project blog. These ‘works’ and words seem to touch elegantly on the problems, and pleasures, of trinketization. We just don’t have the time to sort and reflect. I especially like the observations about ‘dust collectors’: from here. via #rosalinddavis

Keeping it Together, by Kate Murdoch

# 1 [20 November 2011]
I spent the summer taking a long hard look at the amount of stuff I have accumulated over the years. To put it into context, I have a lifetime collection of stuff – a lot of stuff! There’s a lot of me

in those collections; my life in boxes – books, objects, photographs, memories of places, people, good times, not so good times – my past, secreted away.
It’s been dotted around various parts of SE London over the past five years or so following a house move, in the attics and garages of sympathetic family and friends. My former home had a large attic and an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ philosophy took over – I squirrelled it all away. I always knew I was going to do something with my collection one day and my long term aim has been (and still is!) to have it all in one space – essentially, keeping it together.
Slowly, the boxes found their way into my studio and the unravelling of a lifetime’s accumulation of possessions began. My focus over this past summer was sorting through them. Deciding what to keep versus what to get rid of became the order of many long hot sunny days. I even managed to visit and donate the book ‘Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You’ to The Museum Of Broken Relationships – now that felt constructive!
I always knew when I moved into my latest studio that time there was limited – however as ongoing talks and negotiations with the landlords came to an abrupt end some three weeks or so ago, we were given less than 48 hours to leave the premises. A community of artists was ripped apart and has had to find ways of coping with an upsetting & unsettling time. It’s been a rollercoaster ride of emotions – in one way or another, we’ve all been hurting.
I’ve taken solace in stacks of Bunty, Judy, Photo Love and other 1960-80s annuals from the book shelves at home. A therapist might say I’m subconsciously seeking out a happy ending … perhaps I am? I have no doubt however about how the recent chaos has forced me to focus on what’s important – what to keep, what not to keep in all senses of the word has raised its head once more and I’m left questioning again what it is that’s important. The boxes are stacked in a self-storage unit, I’m not even sure what’s in some of them or if the stuff has any relevance to my life as it is now. But I do know that it costs money to keep them there.
Keeping It Together is the start of my journey as a studioless artist. Where do I go from here? Where do I and my ‘stuff’, both literally and metaphorically, fit in? Where will I re-establish my practice and where will I feel more at home, both within myself and in relation to others?

Read the rest of it HERE

and if you don’t follow that link, the dust collecters are:

”Dust Collectors’ was started and completed as a symbol of what in real life my art materials are doing – collecting dust in a self-storage unit in deepest Deptford. ‘Dust Collectors’ is also representative of the reaction from those who have never understood the habit of collecting; those who consider anything not being used in a home as superfluous and unnecessary – ‘bloomin’ dust collectors – get rid of them!’

list in r

A Spectre is haunting Europe…

Not all parties atre the same – sorry to have missed this one… [thanks Jo]

Trinketization #Libya

So, with the trajectory of a screaming scud missile, SKY News hones in on the zero-degree-point of trinketization and renders ‘The Fall of Tripoli™’ as a pantomime circus. Pleased as I am with my hats, these guys have rendered the geopolitical as farce better than SZ or KM or BBC et al. How NATO saves (we mean it man).

AK-47

Trinketization (aims):

➤ to note a certain fascination with objects has often meant an aversion to theory.

➤ take up the call of Adorno for an ‘Arcades orthodoxy’ (pace Benjamin) in that the description of objects is mediated, requiring a theoretical contextualization of things.

➤ take up case studies, trinkets, objects, material culture in a way that perhaps starts with commodities, but then adds market, money, production, circulation, division of labour, technology, training, credit, valourization and decline of the rate of profit into the mix as well. (pace Capital).

➤ so, I am thinking of Benjamin, maybe looking at how we maybe take the Arcades as a model, but want to not leave the manuscript up a mountain, incomplete and forever waiting for Adorno to read and critique. Well, at least recognizing its unfinished character. OR Michael Taussig’s work, where his myriad examples in My Cocaine Museum are assembled to order, how each of those curios has to make sense in a history, in syncopation with other examples in the archive of the imaginary institution, and provide a model for eloquence…

➤ start with an object and draw lines of significance around it. Take any object, say, perhaps the AK47, starting from seeing one used by a thug in a village (there is mention in Taussig’s book Law in a Lawless Land), its more widespread use by the rightwing paramilitaries, and the drug traders, and then the history of the FARC, of course the State machinations, the longer history of Colombia, and the International arms industry, the colonial geo-political system, the Soviet connection, the Kalishnikov family, the AK47 as the symbol of global struggle, of political liberation movements, and of course their betrayal, including in cinema, literature, photogenic media war etc… AK-47′s have – no surprise - become fashion items, jewelry, t-shirt icons, guitars etc – see here and here. More…

➤ seek to examine objects or items of congealed interest and place these theoretically and politically in a range of contexts, evoked through writing that attends to style and is inspired by the eloquence of things seen as significant. Objects matter, but not in themselves

➤ evoke and provoke the meaning and market of trinkets in ways that animate and surprise, making connections and associations that link up with a wider analysis of the current of capital as it unfolds in stuff.

➤ get something written. Sooner rather than later. Less planning, Learn to fire.

Politicians, Cops, Judges and Journalists don’t wear jeans: Uniformity v. Levis.

OK, it is ironic since blue jeans are also a uniform, its commercial pap from a megacorp, it is like saying the real thing is coke and meaning the fizzy drink, it is a trinketized and aestheticized cash-in on the atmosphere of dissent in present-day London, and it is an advert that has already been pulled because the company fears a backlash that may accompany the vicious reactionary clampdown and paranoia fueled by lying politicians and complicit media, but it is worth having a tab linking to anything to might point to a world of expression even if it is being erased as we speak… while I neither condone or endorse this, ahem, here it is for as long as its still up on that revolutionary social media we know as YouTube:

BeePicture

Also: http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/do-bee-do-bee-do/

Department of DIY – UfSO

• 
• Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Prof. Expectantby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Crisis Centreby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Dr. John Effraby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Platoby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Bob Edwardsby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Poetryby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Karl Boxerby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Dr. Whyby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Prof. Universeby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Doctoress Beeby UfSOLondon
• 
  Do Your Own Mini-Lecture: Prof. Blondie-Ambitionby UfSOLondon

To do this week (note to self)

Monday 6th – Unkettling Education – teach-in Goldsmiths 10am-9pm: See here.

Tuesday 7th - The Humanities and the Idea of the University’: Tuesday 7 December 2010, 11am-6pm, Saloon (M004), Ground Floor, Mansion Building, Middlesex University, Trent Park campus, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ. (not sure if I can get to this one, but it looks good. Details on Middlesex site)

Tuesday eve from 6pm Centre for Cultural Studies xmas party Royal Albert pub New Cross Rd

Wednesday 8th – day of actions on campuses. Snowball fight with Forces of Reaction planned.

Thursday 9th – National demonstration, Convergence on Parliament, etc. Don’t get kettled, do run in zig zag lines, wear warm clothes.

Friday 10th – 2-4PM Jodi Dean talk – about her book Blog Theory, New Academic Building LG01 Goldsmiths.

followed by from 5pm Benjamin Noys Persistance of the Negative book launch

Plus:

• get colleagues to spend 3k on books at library by May 2011
• raise Kathleen Cleaver money for visit october 2011
• read PhD drafts (currently 2 on desktop)
• reading for Postone study group (100 pages)
• Write adorno names essay linked with middle east musics, sonic jazz.
• camouflage article for Peter – rewrite
• islands T8 presentation – book for Malta conf.
• Strange Musics book Varese-Zappa to Steve Clarke
• Book:Research Diaries, with Daisy
• workers inquiry text (money for assist on edit)
• Trinkets book with Alison – proposal to publisher.
• write up borders talks, culture industry talk brussels, cph talk on bees, Kolkata preservation talk, ATTHQ,
• write up Spivak talk (clandestino) and post video on web.
• write up talk from bombing of poems booklaunch
• working day chapter to write up as commentary on present workload!
• rewrite last chapter of Rumour again on Bill Gates fund or FB guy and Sworkin Film
• write piece for Cultural Studies now – for Jeremy in Sweden (see p19 red Kolkata notebook 2010.1)
• Get a Mac backup hard drive for back ups and one as scratch disk
• Centre for Cultural Studies distinctiveness text, Teaching and Learning strategy doc
• calculate CCS workloads
• CCS publications plan?
• read Hussey and Wacquant on Banliues
• put MTV Hot video of Dis-Orienting Rhythms on Daily Motion or similar

Mumia Abu Jamal

US.: New danger to the life of Mumia Abu-Jamal

22 November 2010. A World to Win News Service. Following is an edited excerpt from an article by C. Clark Kissinger that appeared in the 21 November 2010 issue of Revolution, newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.

The largest courtroom of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals was packed with supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal as a three judge panel heard the latest oral arguments in his case. Outside hundreds more marched and chanted. People from all over the Eastern United States were there, including a whole history class from Hunter College in New York. There were also delegations from France and Germany.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of the best known political prisoners in the world. Forces ranging from people of all walks of life to the European Parliament and Amnesty International have protested his unjust conviction. He has spent 27 years in isolation on death row, after being railroaded in a manifestly bogus trial. In 2001, a federal court refused to grant Mumia a new trial, but overturned his death sentence. Mumia has continued to fight his conviction, and the State of Pennsylvania has attempted in court to get the death penalty reinstated. This hearing was an attempt to reinstate Mumia’s death penalty.

People were justifiably angry with the latest turn of events. This same federal appeals court had already thrown out the death sentence on Mumia in 2008 because the instructions given to the jury were in violation of well-established federal law. But now the U.S. Supreme Court, after an appeal by the state of Pennsylvania, had ordered the federal appeals court to reconsider their previous decision.

Casting a shadow over Mumia’s whole appeal process has been the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (signed into law by Bill Clinton). A big thrust of this law is making it more difficult for prisoners seeking to overturn illegal state court decisions in the federal courts. Under this law, it is not enough for Mumia to show that his death sentence was obtained through a violation of federal law – he has to show that it was obtained through an “unreasonable application of clearly established federal law.” This wording is designed to give state courts “the benefit of the doubt” in pushing through executions.

Mumia was represented at the oral argument by Professor Judith Ritter of Widener University School of Law. Professor Ritter had successfully argued the issue of the jury instructions in the earlier 2008 oral arguments. In a carefully reasoned presentation she asked the court to sustain their previous finding that Mumia’s death sentence be overturned as the new case cited by the Supreme Court did not apply.

While progressive legal observers remain hopeful that the Third Circuit panel will hold their ground and resist calls to reverse their previous decision, were that to happen the State of Pennsylvania can still convene a new jury and hold a new sentencing phase for the original conviction, in which Mumia could again be sentenced to death. Ever since Mumia’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his conviction was rejected, the State of Pennsylvania has been ferociously determined to execute Mumia.

No matter which way the current ruling goes, the losing side will undoubtedly appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court again. Also, there are still other legal issues concerning Mumia’s sentencing that have never been ruled on. This means a considerable road ahead in court, but in a political climate that is much more reactionary than earlier years. A mass movement, reaching far and wide in society and around the world, was a crucial factor in stopping the rulers of this country from executing Mumia Abu-Jamal in the 1980s and ’90s. It is ever more important that people must come together behind the demand to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.

– end item-