Sunday, June 29, 2014

faire une pipe


A while ago I received a message from the Chair of our department with the title “your webpage.” (See infra for the full text.)

What’s wrong with my webpage <zouhairghazzal.com>?

Loyola had at the time accepted that my webpage be directly linked to the departmental webpage, that is, my name links me directly to my personal page which carries my own domain-name, hence contrary to what the Chair’s email falsely claims, this is not “your LUC webpage”: I’ve designed it myself over 10 years ago, and it does not sit on the Loyola servers in Chicago. In fact, it is hosted by the Yahoo Small Business unit.

When I did the initial design once I moved to Rome for a year in 2001–02, the year the Manhattan Twin Towers went down, Loyola did at the time host my webpage, and I used to update it regularly, that is, until 2006–07 when updating became a real annoyance: every once and a while the page was “locked” under an administrator’s name, and it had to be “unlocked” simply to add a photo or a text. When I thought that enough is enough (I disliked also that the “address” was too long, ugly, and could not be easily memorized), I created the above domain-name and moved everything to the new website.

The point here is that Loyola has nothing whatsoever to do with this personal webpage of mine. So why was the Chair frustrated? Because “someone” from the “Loyola community” got “offended” that on my Flickr portfolio <http://www.flickr.com/photos/zghazzal/> there is (female) nudity. Actually, to be specific, the message below did not specify what the “problem” really was with the “four images” “in the vicinity” of the link below—nudity (male or female) or otherwise. One has to go to the link to see what the “problem” might be: nudity, indecency, sexual intercourse, penetration (or lack thereof), blow-jobs, and so on. The fact that the “problem” is unnamed but only alluded to is a fundamental aspect of the accusation by this or those anonymous person or persons from the so-called “Loyola community.” Forget about freedom of speech, the first amendment, and academic freedom, you only feel within a “community” once you’re accused of a felony or crime. We’ve known for some time that institutions of higher learning in the United States are Foucauldian in their essence, with a high degree of scrutinization, and with a lot of empty homogeneous time and resources at their disposal. Thus the dumb hypocritical bureaucracy must be running mad in its paper work, servers, viruses and malware, and paranoia, fearing that it would lose its grip on its “audience,” “community,” and “Jesuit education.”

Notice here that my Flickr account is unrelated to Loyola, and that on my webpage there is a link to Flickr only under “photography”; to repeat, both webpages are not hosted by Loyola, but by Yahoo.

“The ones who have generated complaints,” as the text below says, did not generate their complaints to me personally—say, be email—but to the Chair. Not only such decent people prefer to remain unnamed and anonymous, but their complaints only point to an image, which we’ll have to assume “contains” something “indecent” into it, to the point that it must be permanently “deleted,” as the text urges me to do, so that the unnamed “problem” would not reach the ears of the higher officials at Loyola.

The image to which the link below refers to is composed of frames within frames, which are framed with a single “final” frame—that of my camera’s viewfinder. There is the frame of a cheap reproduction of a painting by the Belgian René Magritte. The painting is quite well known and world famous, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” This is not a pipe, to which Michel Foucault had devoted a small penetrating book on the ambiguities of language. The painting is indeed a meditation on language: “this is not a pipe” is technically correct because what we see is a painting that represents a pipe, hence as a representation of a pipe “is” not a pipe—per se. The being-of-a-pipe should be taken strongly as one of existence-of-a-thing, its being what it is. But then we know damn well that this is a pipe in the sense that the representation of the pipe still makes it a pipe, that we can all acknowledge it as such without problem. Notice, however, how in the title, “this is not a pipe,” the “not” negates the “is,” as if in an act of defiance to the very existence of the object—and to being and time in general. Moreover, it is the very juxtaposition of the representation-as-image with language which, in the final instance, negates the existence of the represented object, leaving it to an object-of-representation that marks the sublime beauty of this unique work of art of the twentieth century.

Magritte seems to have been under the influence of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) whose view of language operated under the separation of the signifier from the signified. If the signifier is the “sign”—the linguistic word—which designates a “content,” the signified object, then the relation between signifier and signified remains problematic. For example, if I say “tree”—acting as signifier—the signified in this instance is nothing else but the “image” of a “tree” that I have in mind at the moment—not the “real tree.” I can, of course, designate a “real tree” out there to show to my hearer what a “tree” “is.” But the way we generally (unconsciously) use language is through abstract associations and representations. Every word “makes sense” not by designating a concrete object, but by “defining” it through other words and designated objects. Which renders any “tight association” between signifier and signified a bit problematic, to say the least.

This is precisely what, for example, American abstractionism of the first few decades of the twentieth century has perfectly seized. Artists like Marc Rothco and Jackson Pollock have seized the moment of the “separation” of signified and signifier to declare the non-necessity of figurative art, an art that paints something that is out there, and hence transforms it into a mere object of representation. Abstractionist paintings do not “represent” anything in particular anymore. The representation, if any, must be thought of abstractly or conceptually.

That’s—briefly—regarding the first “frame” in my photograph. The second “frame” consists of a still from a film running on a TV-monitor, presumably from a DVD machine, and what we see—at face value—is a woman giving a blow-job to a man. We only see the face of the woman but not that of the man, whose only erect penis is within the frame. What’s interesting here is that the wo(man) is gazing at the man’s invisible gaze, which, being excluded from the frame we can only imagine—the spectator filling the gap.

The film clip is from a short by Argentinian director Gaspar Noé who became well known with Irréversible. It is its “juxtaposition” with Magritte’s painting that gives it resonance. The frames within frames. Magritte’s painting is only a cheap reproduction of the original, covered in glass with a black frame. Nöé’s film clip by contrast is framed within a monitor, and the two frames have been framed through a camera’s viewfinder and presented as such to the spectator.

Does the title-caption give any clues? The French “faire un pipe,” to do a pipe, simply means in common jargon “blow-job” (léchouille). I leave it to your imagination to decide.



Zouhair:

It has been brought to my attention that some of the images connected to your LUC webpage are objectionable to some in the university community.  Would it be possible for you to remove them?

The relevant images are on page 5-6 of the Flickr page.  There may be others, but those are the ones that have generated complaints to me.  The four images in the vicinity of the link below are most relevant.


If the photos are not removed and complaints are made to higher officials in the university, your page may be removed from the university site.

Thanks.

Tim

Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Professor and Chair of History, Loyola University Chicago
Associate Editor, Journal of Urban History

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