<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><br><br><div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Thank you Johannes Birringer for your question about Danby. I too was fascinated by Soo Yon Lee's [Finding the Invisible], and grateful to say more about Danby in response to your question.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt">Â </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">There is so much to say about the Danby painting
and our current global crisis that it is hard to know where to begin. Briefly, I
believe the painting speaks very directly to issues about the art of communication raised by our current global
predicament, especially as it focuses our attention on the conjuncture of the
promise at the end of slavery and revolutions in communication technology upon which
our contemporary world rests. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Â </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Coincidentally, Rustom Bharucha, author of <i>Terror and Performance</i>, wrote after my
earlier post to ask if the current global crisis allows us to
rethink the basic infrastructures of communication. I thought I’d share aspects of my research as it overlaps with the
epistemic reorientations made possible by the current conjuncture. My comments
reflect efforts to escape the circular causality of race through an elaboration
of a specifically postcolonial aesthetic theory. Danby’s painting, Seamus
Heaney’s <i>The Cure at Troy</i> and
Kentridge’s less good idea, have each helped to make headway on how we reframe
the question concerning communication in our times.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Â </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Danby’s
painting brings into view a specific model of postcolonial aesthetic theory. It
extends understanding of the lingering potential of the constellations of
images of faltering hope that bears upon our understanding of a “digital
baroqueâ€. Beyond its anti-slavery sentiments, an anecdote about the circulation
of the painting may help to place it in a new constellation of communication. In 1835 the painting was purchased by one John Watkins Brett, art speculator who came close
to having his art collection sold to decorate the rotunda of the White House
(that requires an emoji, but I cannot decide which). With a decline of his
attempts to create a market in art through speculating on the nascent public
sphere in the Europe and the USA, the Brett brothers, over tea I might add,
drew inspiration from the Danby painting. Like the bolt of lightning connecting
heaven and earth in Danby’s painting, Brett developed the idea of connecting
the continents by way of submarine telegraphic communication. Combined with the
revolution in scientific communication, involving John Herschel (who settled in
the Cape in 1834 to map the southern skies and where he coined the term photography
after finding a way to fix images), Babbage, Peacock and Whewell at Cambridge
University, and the laying of telegraphic cable, the stage was set for a brave,
and some might say, tragic new world. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Â </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">I
am less and less convinced that a history of communication determined by the rise
of the public sphere is sustainable under current conditions. We need a new
account of communication, perhaps one that sees its onset in how the “hopeâ€
that accompanied the end of slavery, colonialism and apartheid invariably ended
in disappointment. Danby’s painting provides a space of convergence for
thinking such a new history: the abolition of slavery, the expansion of
technological resources, the work of art in an industrial age, changes in the circulation
of commodities and the accompanying technical reproducibility of artwork, the
distribution of art through exhibition and distribution of offprints, and stitching
of the image of the slave into a canvas from which it had been excised. Not to
mention a bolt of electricity.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Â </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Ultimately,
<i>The Opening of the Sixth Seal</i> recalls
how the end of slavery, and the end of apartheid, founded, as Heaney would have
it, on the “hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge,†faltered. The
racial remains of slavery appear to be distributed across the spiral of biopolitics and industrial capitalism, while its uncertain energies were folded
into mechanisms of communication and control. In short, race became a matter of a circular causality in the age of cybernetics. How then does the work of art
both invite us to think ahead and live in the shadow of disappointment of
communication thus conceived?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Â </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">So,
when we read Heaney’s <i>Cure at Troy</i> or
catch a glimpse of the instruments of communication in Kentridge’s theatrical
productions, perhaps we are being invited to join in the anticipation of the
unshackled slave, arms outstretched to the heavens, being restored to the canvas of modernity as a figure of entropy stitched into a communication
network. This is perhaps why Norbert Wiener, many years later, on the eve of
the founding of apartheid, would call cybernetics a system of communication and
control.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Â </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">All
of this to say that perhaps the Covid-19 pandemic calls for a new constellation
in the history of communication that may well proceed from the setbacks, and the search for a deferred hope, for which the aesthetic educates postcolonial sensibilities. Apologies for the longish
post <span style="font-family:Wingdings">L</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">Â </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">Â </span></p><div><div dir="ltr" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px">Premesh Lalu (Prof.)<br></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px">DST/NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities</div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px">Centre for Humanities Research<br>Faculty of Arts<br>University of the Western Cape</div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px"><br>Private Bag X 17<br>Bellville<br>7535<br>Cape Town<br>(021) 959 3162<br>0716767806<br><br></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px"><a href="http://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/" target="_blank">http://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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