[Manuel Valente Alves, “Just Reality”, 2001]

WEBS by Maria do Carmo Serén

From the window we look at the world passing by, fragmented as an evocation, in a screen window: that is why we look.

The anarchic, Baroque world-in-itself, has for long been unworthy of our attention.

This sequence of events that pass us by in flashes of light, sometimes repeating themselves like pictures in a persistent daydream, has the family look of our times. Ours is not the world of schizophrenic delirium of the 1970s’ desiring machines, a metaphor upon which our politico-social imagination fed itself when the number one enemy of freedom had a name: the capital, an organless, remote, soft body offered to us by Deleuze and Guattari. We can easily spot it; we had already felt it in Modern Times, and in the fight against the perversity of Buster Keaton’s time of motherless machines, when time appeared to us as the time of the world, and not of our body.

Nowadays, we hear, we are fed up with images, tired of those squares and frames of light, which have invaded, according to fine, well-behaved statistics, that which is left of public space in the non-places and in our overly violated private space.

There, we contact with regularities, repetitions, ignoring the urban fluxes of which we are part, while receiving on our bodies the impact of information.

We do that as users, that is to say, former consumers.

Manuel Valente Alves gives us the intermittent speech of daily life, in images that follow one another according to the rhythm of life. Events across which the move-ments of individuals and groups flit by with that apparent lack of organisation we find in the crucible of a drop of water where amoebae and paramecia stir about. Cities of the world, airports, traffic in streets and roads, cutting the surface like the tracks of ephemeral animals, sometimes leading us to a garden or a beach, a discontinuous traffic of bodies and merchandise containers, obeying only,

from our distant vantage point, a fractal and relative, yet persistent geometry.

This geometry is intelligible to us, because we are made so.

As in the discourse of the conscious mind, once the gates of memory are open, the same images repeat themselves, in an outside-looking-in process, where, now and then, references from the author’s personal life can be spotted, like beacons allowing for the identification and recovery of stored memory.

After all, it is through such immaterial images and the symbols they carry that we know the world, being human-made images. These images refer neither to concrete reality nor to what we see as concrete outside us, but to our inner life.

This ecstasy of light, shadow and movement filling every street, every corner, every angle, these institutions we identify as buildings, these prosthesis implanted on Nature and the fate of men, running on roads in air conditioned ambient, are,

more than familiar to us, a sign of belonging. It is so today, it will be more so tomorrow, in this extended present the media offer us to make our own.

Even while indirectly facing the world’s complexity, this theory of evolution, that is our gaze and our body, segregates a handbook of immediate understanding, which is both the globalisation of experience and the memory of these conversations that understanding, it is said, holds with itself. There, taste, justice and truth, the mainstays of our dealings with things and men, unite with the spontaneity that Kant laboriously denied them.

They unite because man can be everything in himself, past and tradition,

hereditariness and lineage, future or horizon, if he wants to. Beyond all reasons, beyond all criticisms, man is – always? – the reason for all his past and future, which converge upon him alone. He carries in himself the whole world, and uses it in his own way.

Such is the gaze of Manuel Valente Alves, in these images that seek the support of subtitles to bear fruit in their apparent alienation. Because life, no matter how self-organised it may be, is always a contingency, ever subject to a larger self-organisation, to determinations and chances whose codes we do not hold yet. Such is the synthesising gaze of one who, being a doctor, tries to know the body’s disposition and needs, in a epoch of biogenetic manipulation, in these times when Biology seems to die, because man no longer tries to discover nature, rather recreates it.

Such is the gaze of an artist, painter and photographer who tries, through the memory of origins or of the archetype on which figuration and/or photography are founded, to go beyond the discourse of possession that has colonised the arts, and on which Modernity rests.

The gaze of a poet who does not interrogate the conflict of contraries, the heritage of the light/ shadow duality that has diabolised the history of culture upon which we still base our discourses of interpretation and domination, multiplying images and representations-in-ourselves, allowing them to interfere with our perceptions of reality in all their unfounded fragility and dispersion so as to insinuate a larger argument.

On taste

The starry sky above me, the universal law in me – who would, today, agree with Kant’s aesthetic view, knowing that this starry sky was no part of some commonsensical daydreaming, but rather Newton’s organised, orderly sky, basically obeying a symmetrical morality that was man’s own fate? We became used, within the discourse of Modernity and Erudition, to see the judgement of taste as something different from feeling, an aesthetic judgement without the mediation of a concept. William James’ notion, according to which every object able to stir up an instinct can also stir up an emotion, refused the idealisation of aesthetic feeling; the criterion of taste, even though it did not shed any light on the object of aesthetic reflection, was a judgement conducive to morality, that fate which, for better or worse, we decidedly see as human.

We are told, today, that William James was right: that this emotion is confluent with the voluntary, rational process unleashing it, and thus, everything fits into emotion; aesthetic emotion is, at the same time, a process of reason – a way of escaping the world’s chaotic dimension and the feeling of disintegration – and a movement of the body.

Since contemporary art denies contemplation and the discourse of political things, creating itself within a holistic model and appearing as a crossing of languages, the author no longer appropriates the world through art, literature and philosophy; this appropriation is now made by the media and guided by sensology, the un-romantic mode of feeling.

Contemporary feeling results from the use, in an obsessive scale, of the information and enjoyment derived from the media; the socialisation spoken of by Lipovetsky founded, and was founded in turn by, the society of the image and indirect feeling. The experience of the world has moved into mediated experiences, bringing about the “already felt” feeling, because emotion means to feel, but a feeling is a reflection upon that act of feeling, starting from the agents that unleash, and are unleashed by, emotion.

In a process Umberto Eco had already foreseen in mass culture, the media have eventually appropriated the scientific, artistic and literary forms, creating simpler, more encompassing models for the circulation of the art of feeling and aesthetic taste, anticipating the mosaic-like culture of revivalism and multiculturalism within a contemporary, synchronic structure. Sensology, that form of apprehending, through the demanding and worn senses, in experimental visualisations, the world and the Other, using the forms of media information, is now exerted upon a civilisation of the thing, where artistic culture is no longer the experience of meeting a creative genius, within a civilisation that, in spite of being still spectacular,

is part of a culture of landscape. This contemporary feeling is characterised by the alienation of the “already felt”, which frees one from responsibility and temporal experience.

Man, here, is no longer a thinking biped, but a thing that feels. After all, in the deconstructive process that creates identities, individuals relate to time in a different way. Where once the past – personal, collective memory – was, we now find other-ness and hybridism: to be in the middle of things, surrounded by interfaces without choosing any in particular, is to live the present in the new, sprawling electronic body.

In the identity of today, one can even observe a disinterest for memory and aesthetic categorisation that will eventually lead to denying the solemn status of that memory which fills museums and archives. The basic notion guiding the decon-struction of the object, of time and space, is the transgression of meanings and authority – something that turns cultural events into festivities, that turns museological institutions into colourful shopping malls, that deals informally with past “geniuses” and their works, that reproduces on toys or note-books Michelangelo’s Pietá or Murillo’s virgins.

A thought of the present, like this series of images by Manuel Valente Alves, where the memory of what is strictly personal is explained by, and identifies itself with, the memory of time and space, neither of them being a hermeneutics, a past or a future, a utopia.

Present, never absent. For these images are happening here, stirring our attention and judgement, determining our arguments, inscribing themselves in our body, in a circle of eternal recurrence that finishes itself in its very organisation, giving them an even greater actuality.

Unexpectedly, it is not a feast of the senses, but a holding back of memories,

a lingering echo of the sound of tranquil beauty, skimming over the senses and the “already felt” like a light summer breeze.

And, meanwhile, we live the enigmatic society. The enigma of this society, our society, lies in the fact that it has become a place of passage, where neo-apathy and the cult of possession can help bring about a complete break-up with subjectivism. The individual turned into a thing, in the confluence of looks from the outside that define and characterise it, have brought new actuality to the problem of appearance and objectification: youth culture, the cares of the body and dress, the “no future and no feeling” adrift on the Net, or the virtual sensology: from the excess of feeling everything to stoicism and the practice of endurance, everything points to a self-emptying, to uniformity, to uniforms, to landscape.

In the enigma we find the juxtaposition of rational and irrational, the coincidence of contraries – the enigma always inhabits the present, where opposites contact.

In the enigmatic thought, affective, intellectual and practical lives unite, into a single mode of awareness: the movement from the same to the same.

That may be read as narcissism, making us try to identify ourselves with these images, that also juxtapose one by one, many by many, between themselves, with the inexorable subtitle reminding us that Aesthetics is an empty concept if it ends up in the close circuit of idea and form, forgetting that other dimensions of man’s action and outlook have signalled the end of the belief in his kindness to (re)cognize himself in the others. The narcissistic way is, we are told, an empty one, as it lacks the ability of experiencing personal emotion – it is the sign of a cold, nihilistic existence, the mould of the family look of contemporary life. But in virtual reality one feels with the senses, the subject and the body are used, and an unbridled, unlimited sensology is unleashed, because the limits of responsibility have no business there. The former critique is still an essentialist one. A critique that values a certain awareness, which shares the nature of divinity and minimises the transitory that is, according to all signs, the law of the world.

Cultures, behaviours, accumulations of traits that make up styles, the aesthetic stirring of the little world in a drop of water. Here we feel the images that, after all, make up the pages of our imagining. We recognize places, gestures and movements. We are supposed to have an anthropological or geographical outlook on them, but we let ourselves be carried away by the oldest deconstruction in the world, the arbitrary cadence of things and the world, the minimal play that weaves the waters of a river.

On justice

Images become different, from an unconscious Gestaltist standpoint, when the slower-moving subtitles (or voice) intersperse them with the culture of spectacle and the culture of writing. Following the latter’s meaning, we turn the images into a background, one with an unexpected, anxious rhythm. The literary text tells us of dead ends tangled up by the devices of Law and Justice. Like the narrator, we are aware that, being the social outcome of the cross-threads of a sociability “already thought” by old ideologies, we know not how to judge. The narration places us in the moment when the whole Modernity dramatically crumbled down, carrying with it the certainties of progress and man’s kindness.

Instead of them, we are left with ghostly questions hope never supports: how much do the devices of power create in us an impossible, dangerous freedom? What limits are there to responsibility, what is the value of self-respect? Justice is no component of man’s culture; it is rather a web of fears and desires, where the body can crush the mind and the mind can crush the body. Where good and evil become confused.

We have learned that social intercourse can only be peaceful if each one remains within the others’ expectations, if each one remains between knowledge and ignorance of the codified limits of sociable attitudes. Kant, as he opened the doors of Modernity, relativism and Erudition, thought that Morals were an epochal product, built from the interests and knowledge of the time and around the species’ impera-tive categorical. It is the law of juste milieu, of common sense, free from natural or divine design, at the time of the “Declaration of the Human and Citizen’s Rights”.

We are physical beings separated from the world and from the others by our skin, dying and judging alone, but ours is a freedom that includes all the others and the whole world, because our mind reaches out to the very confines of our technique.

We increasingly lay that responsibility that is the reverse of freedom on insurance companies, on States, on governments, on institutions of which we are not part, on advertisement and on various electronic interfaces.

How can we judge others when we lose our point of view, our sense of ourselves, together with the identity between what is in and out, when the separation between inside and outside was the rule of that book culture we are now abandoning?

Manuel Valente Alves leaves us on the threshold of such issues: he allows the images to get together simply because he feels them like that, free from rhetoric and value judgements, even though they, between themselves, develop the disci-pline of association and contiguity. He shows us that the great narratives are still there, where they must be dismounted, as incongruous as a culture that is complex because we still ignore the consequences its effects may have on us. He also tells us that life is all that, that sea of concepts and morals, of interdictions and liberties, of voices and silences, a river of inventories and roll-calls where the time of the world flows by us as easily and quickly as all things gratuitous and wasteful.

Because morals, after all, are also historicist and there lies their seat of knowledge, justice, right and the mind itself, that we today expand, through the media, beyond the limits of an archaic body.

On truth

Pragmatism teaches us how to look at philoso-phy without the mediation of mirrors. How to take apart a philosophy that believed that knowledge mirrored on us the surrounding Universe, because science believed that the world was made of very simple things and that the knowledge of those essences give us a key and the pattern of all discourses for interpreting truth. From that came edifying philosophies, which built the foundations for the truth of the world and man, while carrying a notion of man right in the middle of everything.

The pragmatics take the holistic stance, where words take their meanings from other words and not from some hypothetic quality of representativeness, from their transparency regarding reality.

When knowledge is not seen as the simple revelation of a secret, as the enlightenment of an obscurity or even as the exposure of a previously given concept, we find ourselves installed in the concept of “fold”, or crease, which evokes the way the brain, or the Universe, evolves: the unfolding, the developing, the expressing of something tangled, involved, withdrawn in itself.

Neither a secret nor a representation: rather the acute awareness that conceptual instruments are not enough for the spiral movement of things. The “fold” moves towards a very tightly knit association of different things and the notion of a complex and full world, where everything, as in these images, is given, available. Texts, images, data bases, all contribute to a stoical mentality, watching the number of discursive stowaways, living in a present time that comes from the inflation of actuality, but that is also the sign of a Baroque mentality, an anti-nostalgic mode of feeling.

The image always had a disturbing connection with reality. Photography, for in-stance, was seen as a mimetic operation: photographic images were used as evidence, the image becoming thus an even more assured and thorough representation of reality than the eye itself.

It is believed, now, that the primacy of the image over reality has been reversed. The numeric image can be autonomous from reality: in the world of integrated spectacle and virtual reality, both learning and experience value the image, giving a secondary role to the direct relationship with the world and the others. The notion of the loss of reality, which fills up the concerns of computer-image doom prophets, simply suggests a correspondence was found between representations and reality, that kind of authenticity believed lost. The notion of the loss of aura and the disqualification of genius tell us, too, that what was lost was the illusion of a sign of reality; a distant reality, but reality still.

Reality also changes. Computers accelerate our time of response and the world became girdled with electronic webs that tend to create a global road – waves of electricity in electromagnetic fields that can bring down all frontiers and open the way the nomads of information. To see more (globalising sight), to hear more (beyond the media) and to feel more (using, as McLuhan said nearly half a century ago, mankind as our skin): all this lies within the field of art. The truth of art lies not just in theory and style, it lies also in our perceptions. Today, we can physically enter the design of that reality built by our imagination, oblivious to the fact that the will of truth is the will of power.

There is always a coming and going between two situations: the situation of the author and his images, and the situation of his culture and his gaze. As in life, in exhaustion, in ageing or in the laws of thermodynamics, every conception, facing the overwhelming evidence of the senses, must tend towards fallibility.

What is the truth when immense, hidden social phenomena control the look of the world and society? When, according to statistics, men and women fight the unity of genres in their own terms, by increasing or diminishing bodily sensitivity, when the notion of reality draws back and the notion that “things are not, they just tend to be” becomes stronger?

From television-created mass culture, we find ourselves now in a culture that strengthens the connections between biology and technology, and where there is more autonomy regarding messages and automatic consumption. The mass man has become homogenised and depersonalised in a world of “trends and rumours” that replaces reality.

Outside the world of reality, an aspiration to the truth, to a “here and now” truth, susceptible of criticism, can become the driving force of both collective and individual fate, even when critical thought soars strangely above the crumbling of all great convictions. And old Modernity’s stone guest can only accept an offer of vulgarisation, because even the enigma with which we cancel that levelling which takes things from the movement of becoming, from the memory of what has characterised our uncertainty and the sceptical irony of the present, can be made vulgar. In a situation where everything is speeding up, except man, the problem is no longer economic or social; it is rather a psychological one.

In a video-culture as ours, video reveals the cold, pragmatic, nihilistic outlook of contemporary existence. It channels an outside, interiority-denying, passive form of feeling, denying the individual’s activity. As it violates the borders between organic and inorganic – between life and things – video affirms that culture is not, indeed, a mirroring entity: the mirror is human reality itself.

This experience, inside the “already felt” and the mirror-man, the landscape of all images and languages, moves in the opposite direction of subjective. However, it is not moving towards objectivity.

There is, there has always been, an interchange, an osmosis between man and thing. Prosthesis that pointed toward the lengthening of limb and brain, humanising and symbolising. Language and writing. Automata and cybermen.

The expanding of consciousness has, indeed, shrunk the planet. The universe no longer works within the scale of the human body, the measure of a step, the size of the hand’s palm. We have been projected outside humanistic tradition, all barriers separating the individual from his environment have fallen down.

What Manuel Valente Alves’ time of images, text and memory of days is telling us is that the restoration of the connections between art, technology and culture is now an imperative, for the artistic moment is the one when the tension of life becomes excessive. In techno-addictive times, that give us no time for adapting to a new body, the new utensil becomes part of body and mind.

It does so with difficulty, in a way that is ghostly, though part of the psychological mask. To integrate personal life in the time of the world – instead of integrating the time of the world in personal life –, to be able to live the truth and design of one’s time through a reflection and open-ness that belongs to all cultures and goes beyond multiculturalism, can be the way of, affectively, looking at these images.

Or, instead, to feel that both the thing and the work are the world’s strange-ness and metaphysics, what lies beyond man, that connected creature submerged by manifold appeals, that nevertheless keeps doubt and anxiety under his skin.•

[SERÉN, Maria do Carmo, “Webs” in “Just Reality”, DVD, 2002, Centro Português de Fotografia]