Mapping the Politics of Vision: searching for a transformative gaze

Through this commentary, my intention is to create a coherent rationale to account for my film practice, which is based on, and is the result of, research. This reflective process will draw out the aesthetic and political approaches that I have forged over the last ten years, so as to reveal their singularity. To do so, I revisit and contextualize four of my film works, which were produced between 2014 and 2018: Apicula Enigma (2014), Desire is Not Much, But Nonetheless (2015), May 13th,1968 (2011) and Cinétracts (2012 – 2018). Their subjects are, respectively, the non-human gaze, the gendered gaze, and the dominant gaze. I demonstrate how these works are an attempt to deconstruct the inherent complicity between the gaze and political ideology and, as such, I outline the profile of an artistic practice that understands filmmaking as being a transformative and seditious act. To reveal this, I elaborate on the position of the author and on the distance between the observer and the observed, which is understood as being a critical space. This leads this commentary to examine how these four films are intended to form a social critique in which the question of gender is at its core. Feminism, gender fluidity, and the anti-colonial and post-human perspectives will be brought forward in order to expose the underlying political outreach of these four works. This commentary also investigates the relationship between the materiality of film and its illusion – the meaning of the tension produced. The production of film, as well as its reception and exhibition, form a critical space on which this commentary will focus in order to expose the particularity of the processes that were involved in the making of these films. I will analyse how the politics of vision is the uniting thread of my practice, the goal of which is to deconstruct the cultural frame that informs the gaze in the search for an unalienated and transformative one. My aim, in this commentary, is to reveal the potential of my work, and to understand my position as a woman and my role as an artist, so as to affirm the emancipatory value of my practice and to take it forward

‘Vat am I doink here?’ : L’Amérike de Jerome Rothenberg

Dans Poland/1931 (1974), l’ethnopoète Jerome Rothenberg met en scène un voyage autobiographique fantasmé. À contre-courant de la ruée vers l’or et l’art américains, le mouvement imaginaire et mémoriel s’effectue d’ouest en est, de la métropole californienne au shtetl de ses ancêtres. Pourtant, la structure du recueil reproduit le parcours initial des pionniers. Empreinte de vide – « O Poland » (Rothenberg 2007, 3) – et de satire – « America disaster/America disaster » (148) –, cette œuvre s’inscrit paradoxalement dans une dynamique américaine en réinventant le nouveau monde, en rêvant la terre promise et l’origine perdue. L\u27 ouvrage se présente comme une investigation à la fois historique et poétique laissant une place considérable à l’imagination. Cet article analyse l’inscription et le déracinement du moi dans Poland/1931, articulés à l’aide d’expérimentations formelles. La dénégation de l’autobiographie, rare instant où la voix de l’auteur transparaît, est énoncée à travers la vie et l’œuvre de l’autre, ce qui nous amènera à interroger l’identité fuyante du poète outsider. Hérité de Whitman, Stein, Rimbaud et Kafka, le « je » indécidable de Jerome Rothenberg traduit une visée anthologique panaméricaine et universelle

The Physicality of Writing in Paul Auster's White Spaces and Winter Journal

White Spaces is a hybrid piece of poetic prose marking Paul Auster’s literary rebirth. This matrix text, which served as an immediate response to Auster’s “epiphanic moment of clarity” during a dance rehearsal in New York, is an early experimentation with the physicality of writing. Words are steps. Verbs are motions. Facing the choreographer’s incapacity to put into words the December 1978 dance rehearsal, he began — step by step, word by word — to give in to silence, linguistic randomness and wandering. Auster suddenly realized that literary creation springs from physical commands rather than intellectual ones. Thirty years later, in Winter Journal, Paul Auster took up his exploration of the impersonal and tested the second-person narrative voice of his aging self. In both White Spaces and Winter Journal, the repetition of the binary rhythm of steps, breath, heartbeat, and the emphasis on doublings and symmetry widen the scope of Auster’s organic use of language. Speaking and writing require losing oneself to an interior music, as if the words were alive, freely animated and dictated to the writer by his own body. Speech, which parallels the world seen, is propelled by its own flow. Sensory limitations and the inadequacy of language, which had led Auster to a poetic dead-end, are in turn deplored and celebrated. As suggested in Winter Journal, language registers negativity as indirectly as the body integrates trauma. Shifting from pleasure to pain, the body exhibits the wounds of the past. Repeatedly, these cyclical works focus on feeling, falling and failing. Hence the aim of this paper is to highlight Auster’s metaphysical quest and aesthetic obsessions, which put the body’s functions and failures at the core of the writing process

Trading Volumes in Dynamically Efficient Markets

The classic Lucas asset pricing model with complete markets stresses aggregate risk and, hence, fails to investigate the impact of agents heterogeneity on the dynamics of the equilibrium quantities and measures of trading volume. In this paper, we investigate under what conditions non-informational heterogeneity, i.e. differences in preferences and endowments, leads to non trivial trading volume in equilibrium. Our main result comes in form of a non-informational no trade theorem which provides necessary and sufficient conditions for zero trading volume in a dynamically efficient, continuous time Lucas market model with multiple goods and securities.General Equilibrium, Trading Volume; heterogenous agents; multiple goods; incomplete markets; no-trade theorem.

Growth Options in General Equilibrium: Some Asset Pricing Implications

We develop a general equilibrium model of a production economy which has a risky production technology as well as a growth option to expand the scale of the productive sector of the economy. We show that when confronted with growth options, the representative consumer may sharply alter consumption rates to improve the likelihood of investment. This reduction in consumption is accompanied by an erosion of the option value of waiting to invest, leading to investment near the zero NPV threshold. It also has important consequences for the evolution of risk aversion, asset prices and equilibrium interest rates which we characterize in this paper. One interesting prediction of the model is that we get time varying risk aversion and equity returns by virtue of the presence of growth option. We also find that the moneyness of the growth option is the key factor which determines the extent to which the book to market ratios will influence the conditional moments of equity returns.Time varying MRS; Growth Options; General Equilibrium