[-empyre-] introducing week 3

[Monika Weiss]

Lamentation has been banned from public spaces in various cultures, especially the engendered, female lamentation performed by organized groups of women against war, against the absurdity of violence. Lament has been considered dangerous, the dangerous voice. Why? Because of its symbolic power; not the real power (what is real in this case?) and not ‘real’ danger but the symbolic one. Saskia Sassen writes about the idea of a city as a weak regime: it cannot overcome the power but it can contest it. I feel the same can be said of our cultural production, and its citizenry or its obligation — as Ana writes, poetry may be more scary at times then the bombings. I grew up in a country where, sometime ago, certain music was forbidden (by the Nazis). If you played a Chopin nocturne on a piano you would be killed. Not because it had any specific words in it (it did not) but because the melodies connoted layers of resistance condensed into small pieces of music. I have been working with lamentation and with the notion of lament in my films, in my sound compositions, performances and drawings, for that very reason: lament has an overlapping connection to resistance; I am still digging deeper and deeper into the fact that lament is considered the oldest form of both music and poetry (Margaret Alexiou), and as such is antiphonal (by the way, thank you Johannes for your beautiful responses to some of my entries, which were, in turn, responding to yours, in a truly antiphonal way).
p.s.
On the subject of ‘wrong mourning’— such as in Russia as Murat writes, when I was preparing the exhibition in Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, they told me the museum was a very contested institution, because about 40% of people who leave now in Chile are still pro Pinochet they said. So, not only “who is worth of mourning” but also, who is mourning whom? I am not sure what we have learned. We established the idea of human rights very recently in history (declaration), but who is respecting them?


On Nov 22, 2014, at 6:00 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> "(There have been so many artworks, paeans, dirges, warnings, all this for thousands of years, and what have we learned? To spread the havoc via social media? To be more effective in our slaughter?)
> 
> Again, what is to be done?"
> 
> Alan, don't forget. Many of those dirges were to the perpetrators of violent acts, The Iliad being the classical example. Awareness, a raising of consciousness, must be a weapon against manipulative, transactional symbolic/political acts, for example, being aware that "job creators" was a symbolic phrase concocted (created!) by a wordsmith(s) at a rightist think tank to disguise the bottom line nature of capitalist enterprise, self interest at all costs. All we can do is weave and re-weave those contra spaces of clarity hoping it will have some effect, maybe, in time. By the way, my sense is that the worse a politician (a perpetrator of violent action, physical or spiritual) gets the better he/she becomes at manipulating symbolic nefarious action. That is true for the right (at this moment in the States) or the left. After all, Stalin was called a leftist. To this day, don't a great number of people mourn him in Russia?
> 
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