May 27, 2022

Emailing Emna Zghal

By Addison Bale

[Author’s note: It’s fitting that Emna Zghal and I held this over email.

Normally we sit in her Bushwick studio surrounded by paintings in progress while sharing a meal, discusings poems, reading, and considering the differences in the translations of poems that Emna had in two or three languages. Up until this point, we have never spoken through writing beyond the occasional text message. Here we talk about the cross-influences of writing and artistic practice, following a short chain of emails into candid territory. Disguised in other topics, Zghal’s paintings are actually the silent centerpoints of our conversation through which all other matters can be considered. We discuss poetry, language, the art world, capitalism; the themes that contour-trace this artist’s life and work. ]

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Addison Bale <sayhey.adi@gmail.com> Feb 13, 2022, 1:42 PM

to Emna

Emna,

Remember sharing poetry over lunches? It was a short-lived arrangement but you still managed to show me such beautiful work, reading segments from The Tree, by John Fowles, and translations of Borges. I have his poem you read to me, "Ars Poetica," saved in my notes and, if I remember correctly, you have that same poem pinned to your studio wall. Can you talk about your relationship to literature in your life and practice as a painter?

*
Addison

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Emna Zghal <[...]@emnazghal.com> Sun, Feb 13, 7:30 PM

to me

Poetry lunches were great! Literature has always been central to my understanding of art. My most cherished memory of my late father is him reciting poems on all occasions, mundane or solemn—at the dinner table, commenting on the news, or at family events. As a child, I didn’t always understand the words, but his delivery made me feel he was articulating the Truth. When I became an artist, these experiences of poetry remained the aesthetic standard that I aspired to. In my undergraduate years in the school of fine arts in Tunis, I was devouring all the artist monographs I could put my hands on but sought guidance as an artist from poets like Adonis.

Arte Poetica—translated as Ars Poetica—by Borges both validates the beauty of infinity and of being lost. Poetry is immortal and poor, he says. The poem is an antidote for our current culture, which has little appreciation for the lost and poor. I named one of my paintings Arte Poetica in 2008. I often circle back to Borges to reconnect with what is important, sincere, and free of hype. I have that poem pinned above my palette table.

The Tree by John Fowles is a book I bought at the New York Botanical Garden, and I read it three times in a row, because I found in it so much validation of my instinctive relationship with nature and creativity. It taught me so much, and still does, on how to articulate these thoughts. Our relationship with nature is mediated by this drive to name and classify everything, which passes for knowledge. Little is left for the personal and subjective experience one can have of a river or a flower, an experience difficult if not impossible to articulate with the clarity of science. I was intrigued when he mentioned that his novels come from nature, and how such a statement was dismissed by scholars who thought that only literary influences and theories of fiction and the rest of that intellectual midden, as Fowles put it, are valid keys into literature. How foolish! He spoke of the small and tidy garden of Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who invented the Latin naming and classifying system of plants and much of nature, as the opposite of a shrine for nature lover and akin to a nuclear explosion whose radiations continue to pollute much of the globe. I find this a terrific and terrifying image to be true.

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Addison Bale <sayhey.adi@gmail.com> Feb 14, 2022, 10:43 AM

to Emna

Can I see your "Arte Poetica"?

I love that anecdote about your father. Such a beautiful legacy to have left that in your childhood.

Borges' take on the Ars poetica is so good for it's attention to fluidity and futility; that poetry returns like dawn and sunset daily, as though begging us to see it; that it opens and closes the day, and maybe, for being an expression of daylight, is what begets our consciousness. So Borges explains without explaining, or rather, his examination of poetry is one that opens it up to be the most common, almost unthinking presence and yet so crucial to be the day itself. Borges allows for that subjectivity that we tend to lose when art and nature enters the classifications of academia or the institution. And this is totally what John Fowles seems to be getting at when he writes about trees and nature! And is, actually, what you are getting at too when you talk about painting.

We've discussed before this overarching sentiment you reach for in art and life that you work within the unclassified and perhaps, unknowable phenomena around us, and that in doing so, there is the potential for much feeling and energy to interact with life through art. It seems that by clinging to the jargon of academia and the frameworks of art history, we relinquish so much of the intimacy between ourselves and art, whatever possibilities lie in that interaction. Your paintings, which are abstract but visually recall natural patterns (zoomed-out as in landscapes or zoomed-in as in shells or plumage) seem to be reaching for this conceptual experience of dwelling in the unknown in the myriad perceptions of pattern and randomness.

Do you see your paintings as images in dialogue with the literature in your life?

Are there ways that you are responding to your literary influences (including your father, including Adonis) somehow visually with paint?

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Emna Zghal <[...]@emnazghal.com> Tue, Feb 22, 10:25 AM

to me

Of course, here is my “Arte Poetica”.

_{"Arte Poetica", 2008, oil on canvas, 32”x 48”}

It’s interesting what you brought up about the calcified frameworks of academia and the understanding of art and art history. Somehow the emotional experience of art seemed to have fallen by the wayside or relegated to an order inferior to concepts and art historical positioning. It’s as if that subjective experience of art (and similarly of nature) cannot be trusted, and therefore cannot be something that contributes to knowledge. I touched on this subject in my artist’s book Plato/Pineapple/Poetry/Painting. I see a parallel between Plato wanting to banish poets from his Ideal City (governed by reason) and contemporary art, which abandoned poetry as the language used to speak about art, in favor of theory (aka reason); and all that derived from that choice. All the talk of “subversiveness” does very little to actually undermine power. Many artists rail against capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy; while little attention is paid to how nominally subversive conceptual art is very convenient for speculation. The making of art is outsourced to unnamed craftspeople or machines, and thus the possibility of failure is minimized and production maximized. The artist is now a brand and a studio CEO. It’s a far cry from being able to distinguish the hand of the master from that of the apprentice in yesteryears. What we lose, or lost, with this scheme is the sidelining of a whole realm of human intelligence. Being able to paint is a genuinely distinct form of human expression that is worth preserving, like dancing or playing musical instruments. Why should philosophizing crush all the rest? To the extent that painting survives, its validity is derived from an ideological content first and visual content second—if at all. Why would artists, critics, and art historians agree to this? I believe the answer lies in how intertwined the 1% is with influential institutions in the art world. Ready-mades are far more convenient for speculation. My ideas are heretical, not only because I was trained to paint and appreciate good paintings, but also thanks to the poetry that provides an anchor for me outside of the visual art world. Poetry emboldens me to operate with a different set of values.

In that sense, and to go back to your question, I don’t see my work as a response to literature. Poetry, and literature in general, schooled me in a certain form of knowledge that is not necessarily averse to reason, but one that fully embraces the full scope of experiences, beyond just what we can rationalize. I remember a quote by Adonis I had on my wall when I was an undergraduate student in Tunis: “Sufism as a method of knowledge.” He refers to the mystical poets of Islam. It struck me then and challenged my views on religion. Yet, seen through that angle, I understood what religion, as a form of human thought, had to offer us. Arguably some of the best music, architecture, or painting came from religious traditions. Poetry is different, the most important Arab poets, like Al Ma’ari and Al Mutanabi, were not religious. I say this because I think that poetry is also a method of knowledge. What I learn from poetry, and literature in general, is that personal experience and feelings anchor me in truth and artistic authority stems from a distinguished personal voice, ideals that the visual arts seem to have abandoned. I quote Ann Temkin, MOMA’s Chief Curator for Painting and Sculpture in my book Plato/Pineapple/Poetry/Painting: “Contemporary artists disavow transcendent goals of truth and beauty.” I think she’s right in her observation, yet I refuse to operate within that paradigm.

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Addison Bale <sayhey.adi@gmail.com> Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 1:03 PM

to Emna

To your point, the tentacles of capital and market-influences operate differently between the fine arts and literature. Speaking for poetry specifically, there is simply much less money involved and therefore much less money at stake in the world of poetry. Compared to the art market, poetry is still an artform relegated mostly to basement bars and living-room readings. Though perceptions of poetry are shifting with this generation, with social media and the work of new poets, it remains less commodified (compared to fine artworks) and therefore its value is always going to be fixed to the standard of a small book. I have often felt that this is actually a good thing for the art of writing, which is largely so exempt from the possibility, however faint, of explosive wealth. Though making money as an artist may be insecure, there is still the specter of prospect and value: paintings are worth x amount of hundreds or thousands. On the contrary, a single poem has no dollar value and its value in a collection is exactly the same on every platform, every mode of download or hard copy—as long as the poem can be read its value is immortal. So as an arbiter of truth, poetry seems to defy (slightly, and not to ignore its own trends and the machine of publishing houses) the erosion of "truth and beauty" through capital...I say this hesitantly though, still thinking as I type.

What is it that we do then? as painters that live by day-jobs, painters that mostly paint in obscurity, hustling for opportunities but likewise wary of the world we tempt to be more deeply involved with?

I consider your work as unique for its unwavering vision and persistence to pursue a practice that explores abstract painting as a reflection of or maybe distillation of the natural world, the imagery of the natural world and the information you take from it—so by painting and continuing to paint against market trends, who are you painting for? Is your practice solitary? Do you paint with a wish against capital? How do we exist as artists and work around that very art market you describe? Is it just a matter of gritting teeth and carrying on?

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Emna Zghal <[...]@emnazghal.com> Sun, Mar 6, 7:45 PM

to me

So many interesting questions there. Let me answer the straightforward ones first. Is my practice solitary? Yes, on some level. Sure. Solitude is crucial for me to achieve any depth. I mix with very few people to shield myself from the uninspiring. To get to your other question, who do I paint for? I am seeking an audience that shares similar values. I believe they are out there. This interview is part of an effort to reach out. I can’t paint on the desert island. What’s the point of self-expression if I’m not communicating with anybody? Looking back at the years when I stopped showing my work, I was blasé. I felt that this purportedly postmodern and diverse artworld had no tolerance for what I wanted to do. I was not ready to toe the line expected from “the native woman” and dish out cheap exoticism and victimhood stories. I felt beat up. I had no support, and still don’t, in my stubborn pursuit of this sort of abstraction. Yet! Yet here I am at it again. I gathered some strength, and I feel like I can take some punches again without being entirely knocked down. I sorted out my immigration status, and I have a day job that allows me to be in the studio. It’s far from ideal, but it’s a workable situation.

Do I paint against capital? No, that makes no sense. I steer clear from preposterous trendy and heroic claims of the sort. I do have a critical view of capitalism and how it functions in the artworld; and most importantly how it seeps through the mentality of art professionals: curators, art teachers, and artists. Books like “Privatising Culture” by Chin-TaoWu, “El Fraude del Arte Contemporáneo” by Avelina Lesper, and “La bêtise s’améliore” by Belinda Cannone are inspiring and empowering writings on this matter. Contemporary art posturing against capitalism is just that, posturing. The validity of a given work of visual art is no longer derived from careful visual examination, rather from statements, biography, and, above all, from market value. It’s lamentable that we, the art professionals, ceded our visual ground to literally stated ideas.

The allure of rebellion and subversiveness is superficial enough as to not threaten any established order. There’s no outrageous art Banksy can do that doesn’t feed the speculation frenzy of his work, or otherwise leads to a concrete social change. It’s important to be lucid about that. When truth is abandoned, the difference between saying and being no longer matters. There’s a classical Arab song that goes like this: Not all who tasted love, know what love is/ not all who drank wine are wine connoisseurs/ not all who sought happiness found it/ and not all who read the book, understand it. Truth matters to me, and so does discernment. I do believe nevertheless that making art and understanding it outside a framework of efficiency, purposefulness, and fame is a step towards lifting the limits put on imagining an alternative value system. That’s the value of being anchored in poetry, because, and as my friend Ammiel Alcalay says, poetry largely escapes capitalism. It’s not purposeful and efficient, it’s imaginative.

To go back to John Fowles and his critique of Linnaeus, it is legitimate to observe that the careful detached taxonomy of nature created all but an illusion of knowledge. Clearly, we’re hitting a wall. Knowing without humility and respect before the examined subject—in this case nature— is leading us on the path of self-destruction. Had we not sidelined emotions in the way we did, perhaps we would have been on a different path.

How do we carry on in these conditions? I didn’t know how to go on for a while. Without ever thinking it could happen, I strayed from the artworld. I got into Argentine tango, and it was like falling into a hole. I applied myself to learn an art form I had no natural abilities in, and at the end, I learned way more than dance steps. Tango taught me anew how to value craft, communication, disciplined practice, and preserving a tradition while being creative.

Now I feel I have a clearer vision of what I want to pursue. How to be a more poignant painter. In my case, the criteria is how to create images as mesmerizing and captivating as nature and its forms: vast landscapes or small shells; while bringing the viewer somewhere unknown and imagined. Being a better painter is more fulfilling an ambition than chasing the next clever idea. It’s not just gritting your teeth and keep on going; it is that of course, but also striving to stand on ever firmer ground intellectually to carry on. The gatekeepers might operate with different values, but you can tempt them to embrace yours. It is a worthwhile pursuit.

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Follow Emna:

Web: www.emnazghal.com

Instagram: @ezghalart

Emna Zghal:

Emna Zghal is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. She was trained in both Tunisia and the United States and has shown her work in both countries and beyond. Reviews of her exhibits appeared on the pages of the New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times, Artform amongst other publications. Noted public collections include Newark Museum, Flint Institute of Art, Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, The Museum for African Art, NY, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY. She has received fellowships, prizes, grants, and residencies from: Creative Capital, The MacDowell Colony, Women’s Studio Workshop, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris) and others.

Addison Bale:

is a writer and artist from NYC. His work is viewable online: https://adi-bale.com

More from “Shedding”:

May 6, 2022

The Mathematical Catastrophe of (Analog <-> Digital) Love

By EMMALEA RUSSO

“Love’s curious arithmetic.”
Michel Serres, The Parasite

“It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.”
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

“You’re even prettier in person.”
Pam & Tommy (2022)

Pam & Tommy (2022)

For an instant, the screen takes up nearly the entire frame. For an instant, the screen takes up nearly the entire frame. For an instant – Oh, fuck. – the screen nearly overflows the frame. For an instant.

READING AND LOVING

Every messenger is ambiguous — noise and signal making and breaking the channel — and the risk of receipt (Rilke’s Every angel is terrible...) is also the risk of all reading. In reading as in loving: zero guarantees. As modes of transmission change, as access to chaotic clumps of information is granted and as we meet with our own images again and again, a mathematical catastrophe ensues. There is so much. Love’s curious arithmetic is always catastrophic, filled with strange messengers and ambiguous geometries. Under digital conditions, the math changes. Alters the structure of relations. A spectrum of numbers and hues get translated to zeros and ones → many becoming 2.

APOCALYPSE

At the end of the world, there are no more secrets. At the end of the world, technology changes. Angels cease their bureaucratic functioning and continue singing glory. At the end of the world, all envelopes open. Apocalypse means uncover, unveil. And revelation: disclosure of information or knowledge to man by a divine or supernatural agency.

ANALOG + DIGITAL

Analog describes a continuous stream ---->

“Love is continuous, it’s a stream, it doesn’t stop,” insists Sarah Lawson in Cassavetes’s Love Streams,

----->

a video’s magnetic tape

- - - -

Digital breaks up analog information into smaller pieces

– 0101010 –

resulting in quicker transmission.

Pam & Tommy, the partly-fictionalized Hulu miniseries based on the unauthorized release of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s infamous honeymoon sex and love tape, is not a show about consent, sex, or fame. It’s a show about the end of the (analog) world and the beginning of another (increasingly digital) one. Analog and digital are not opposites, nor do they exist in separate arenas.

Like the celestial and earthly cities that Saint Augustine outlines in his gigantic 5th century text City of God, analog and digital modes exist alongside one another: translating, transmitting, and overcoding. Augustine tells of the difference between angelic and demonic knowledge, which seems to come down to the question of how a channel holds information – (channel = computer, human, spiritual creature, air…) – writing: “The good angels hold cheap all the knowledge of material and temporal matters, which inflates the demons with pride.” The good angels which are more plentiful than humans in the godly/worshipful city – hold cheap that which they transmit and instead of clinging to it, deliver it straightaway. The demons are demons because of their knowledge, says Augustine. They get inflamed with what they carry. The angels cling to God and the demons cling to information. Eugene Thacker, in “Devil’s Switchboard,” claims that demonology is also the study of “noise’s assault on signal.” And as Michel Serres tells us in The Parasite, signal and noise are structurally hooked-up. When our messaging systems get overfull, we and what we transmit disappear by saturation, too much.

14th cen. Manuscript

ANGELS AND DEMONS

Near the end of “The Dedication” entry in A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes tells us that the visitor in Pasolini’s Teorema is definitely an angel, as he does not speak but rather “inscribes something within each of those who desire him – he performs what the mathematicians call a catastrophe (the disturbance of one system by another): it is true that this mute figure is an angel.” The silence of the angel engraves, leaves a mark. The silence is what happens. An encounter, a puncture, rippled beginnings of texture. Barthes’s “We are our own demons” entry begins with the assertion that the lover is sometimes possessed by a demon of language. The lover is inhabited – an inflamed vessel who babbles hyperspeak. Love and writing are processes of possession and exorcism – stretching bodies to catastrophic limits (the projectile vomit and spinning head in The Exorcist; the catatonia caused by the angel in Teorema). Babble, convulsion, expulsion, inflammation. One system disturbs another. Love> – > l … o ///*& v← )))) e.

Angels reading. Source: The Morgan Library.

Pam and Tommy searching for their sex tape on the internet at the Malibu Library.

DARK GLASSES

Pam and Tommy walk into a library and dial-up to the internet. Slowly, carefully, they type out a web address. Press enter. For an instant, the keyboard overflows the frame. Next, the computer screen. There, the mid-90s transition from analog to digital, video to web, flu to plague, unfolds before their horrified eyes. They see themselves. Their (intimate, sweet, stolen) sex tape is there – somehow – in front of them as the screen gleams their dark glasses. At a thresholded region between analog and digital registers. The breath changes. A stolen piece of data broken into bits and reconstituted as something that moves quicker. The breath changes.

In the “Dark Glasses” entry in A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes writes that weeping (“to weep is part of the normal activity of the amorous body”) swells the eyes and so the lover wears dark glasses “to darken the sight in order not to be seen.” Also: dark glasses are meant to preserve dignity, to dim the too-lit world. The dark glasses impel questions: what’s the matter? What’s going on? What are you hiding? Who/what are you hiding from? The dark glasses reinstitute opacity – shield the lover(s) from themselves. At this moment, Pam and Tommy are no longer two lovers falling frantically in love – they are two people on one side of a screen looking through dark glasses at their own images.

JUSTICE?

One can mistake revenge or punishment for justice. The first episode of the 8-part series opens with Rand, a broke carpenter whom Tommy Lee treats terribly and refuses to pay. (Eileen Jones wrote this interesting piece on the show’s class consciousness). Rand steals Tommy Lee’s safe, hoping to get the 20k he’s owed. When he finds the sex tape amongst the items, he believes himself to be performing a dutiful act of karmic justice by selling it: “The righteous, they get rewarded. The wicked, they get punished,” he says. Rand thinks of himself as an amateur theologian, his tone resembling self-appointed moral arbiters of social media. But justice is more than reward and punishment. It is also about complicating a situation with thorough reading and admitting we cannot know. Like love, it is without guarantees and according to Simone Weil, justice is about reading differently:

“Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.”

OH, FUCK.

That a person is never an easy read. That a text is not what it seems. That justice involves close reading and careful attention to what overflows calculation. Jean Baudrillard and Byung-Chul Han have argued that digital communications proliferate societal obsessions with positivity, pornography, transparency, and painlessness. In The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard writes:

Nothing (not even God) now disappears by coming to an end, by dying. Instead, things disappear through proliferation or contamination, by becoming saturated or transparent, because of extenuation or extermination, or as a result of the epidemic of simulation, as a result of their transfer into the secondary existence of simulation. Rather than a mortal mode of disappearance, then, a fractal mode of dispersal.

In Pam & Tommy, love, intimacy, and secrets buckle under torpedoes of web-based transmission – images of selves sent back to selves ad nauseam – everywhere they/we look, there they/we are. With this hall of mirrors – Oh, fuck. – comes a freaky deletion as the tape’s repetition unspools their togetherness. As the series rolls on, the couple goes from talking about many things to talking about one thing. The viral video won’t go away.

Pam and Tommy search for their sex tape at the library.

The Last Judgment, Michelangelo, 1536-41.

In The Marvelous Clouds, media theorist John Durham Peters writes: “Google revives the ancient dream and nightmare of a ‘book of life’ in which every human deed is recorded for the Day of Judgment and thus stands in a long line of sacral and bureaucratic bookkeeping.” Enter → …///// oh. … // fuck. If love, as Roland Barthes tells us, involves not more understanding but a lingering around the other’s infinite opacity – which is not “the screen around a secret” but another kind of ground – a zone in which exaltation is delivered to the atmosphere as what’s unknown. If love is mystical. If love wears dark glasses. Pam & Tommy shows what happens when a secret gets revealed over and over again in plays of repetitive dispersal. If love means (re)locating textural and textual uncertainty – impenetrable velvet of love’s unknowable transmissions. If love. Then what..////…^^^ now?

Pam and Tommy wait for their sex tape to load at the Malibu Library.

VIRUS

The video was a flu but its internet circulation is a plague, says their lawyer. From analog copying to digital dispersal. Love plagued by plague. The point is not whether we like the show or not, whether we are offended by it or not, whether there is a lesson or not.

If the network holds love. If the network alters the transmission. If the form changes. If what was continuous gets broken up then made continuous again, repeat. If the angel should switch, cease holding knowledge cheap. If the air should morph a particle. If the future should be perfume. If memory is prophecy. If the ecstasy of constant communication should seem unmediated, thresholdless.

LOVE AND VIOLENCE, SIGNAL AND NOISE

Like love, transmission contains within it multiple modes, hues, moods. Not love or violence, consent or unfreedom, but the moods and perfumes that the words and the — can hold as they get altered. Love’s risky spectrum gets echoed in Georges Bataille’s famous statement A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism. Tenderness and brutality, care and cannibalism, analog and digital form complicated and contradictory geometries.

Angels and demons, like reading and misreading, signal and noise, are not opposites but ever-linked. In Transmitting Culture, Regis Debray writes: “A disconcerting reversibility of order into disorder. To synthesize, the devil is not necessarily God’s other; he can be God exercising his power. The noise is in the message itself.”

There is also the terror of too-swift transmission. Messages appearing one after the other in a glitchless zone. There is pain at the threshold and pain of not being able to feel the threshold. There is the demon of noise, a release from smooth communication into a thicker texture. What becomes of love under viral conditions? Baudrillard asks: “Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience?” Destiny – often inconvenient, marks that which has befallen us.

HARM

How to read Pam & Tommy (and whatever…) beyond praise or scold, X or Y? Many people have boycotted and/or scolded the show because the creators didn’t get the explicit consent of Pamela Anderson, arguing that the show repeats the original harm of the stolen tape. (For one of many examples, see: “Exploiting the Exploited: The Problem with Pam & Tommy.”)

Consent: agree, assent, accord, feeling together, giving permission. In her reading of the film Amour Fou in Life-Destroying Diagrams, film theorist Eugenie Brinkema writes:

“Any reading that would fixate on consent as the opposite of unfreedom misses the more radical stance that the opposite of consent is an opposite consent. The opposite of love is neither violence nor hatred, neither cruelty nor indifference, neither force nor violation.”

Likewise, readings of Pam & Tommy that focus on “consent as the opposite of unfreedom” fail to register the status of Pam/Pam as a more complicated person and character. Brinkema continues:

“The secret of love is neither kept to oneself nor shared between several–the secret is that the opposite of love is an opposite love, already contained within its bouquet of values–it extends in every direction at once, even toward the indecency of violation, even toward the realm of what would certainly wreck it from within.”

Are we to base what/how we read on what appears to have caused the least amount of harm? How do we define harm? Indeed, can anything promise to not cause harm? Is there also a harm of willfully rejecting the sight of evil, of offing the negative? Of not reading? Positivity, sedation, unveiling – a harm that masquerades as un-harm, safety, I read it so you didn’t have to. To attempt to abolish all potential harm/pain is also to expunge possibilities for reading love’s thrilling and scary “bouquet of values.”

Every angel is terrible.

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.

& & &

With the ambient violence of the viral comes a fear of contagion – as though reading or spending time with a particular idea, text, person, TV show, or politics might infect. But love and reading must remain open to contagion and unknowing. The logic of purity which separates and severs, where X is marked good/watchable and Y is scorned as bad/unwatchable, is closer to Rand’s misguided and vengeful crusade for justice than Simone Weil’s generous definition of justice as that which demands we read people more complicatedly.

In The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard writes: “All this talk is of the minimizing of Evil, the prevention of violence: nothing but security. This is the condescending and depressive power of good intentions, a power that can dream of nothing except rectitude in the world, that refuses even to consider a bending of Evil, or an intelligence of Evil.” Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee were violated – they had a private tape stolen from their home. Does the show violate again by virtue of the fact that it tells a story that is already in the public domain? Is there a chance that the show – with its fun and sad depictions of these events – chases out some of the evil with evil? Readings of the show that shun it for being misogynist or anti-feminist or re-harming Pamela Anderson not only refuse to read the show beyond the closed circuit of either morally righteous or harmful/violent, but seize the agency that they’re claiming to fight for. Their good intentions are condescending, as they won’t allow Pam/Pam to be anything other than either a victim or an empowered hero. For all its faults, I would argue that the show casts her as a sacred victim/hero...

SACRIFICE

Pam and Tommy’s marriage fails coextensively with the video’s circulation. Pam is the hero of the show because she doesn’t react as Tommy does. Instead, says: give them what they want. Says, stop. Stops. Stops the velocity of transmission. Stops feeding the machine. Surrenders the secrets that are already exposed. Pam halts the velocity of transmission by becoming-sacrifice. To sacrifice – to destroy and to make sacred. In Medium, Messenger, and Transmission, Sybille Kramer describes René Girard’s theory of the sacrifice and violence, noting that Girard talks about the immunizing function of sacrifice as the mediator of a transmission event. The potential for violence is transmitted to the sacrifice – in an absolutely literal sense – and it can then be allayed and overcome in and through the sacrifice. The special status of the sacrificed thus becomes significant; like the neutrality of the messenger, it is caught between competing groups enmeshed in the reciprocal use of force.” The show positions Pam as caught between – between Tommy’s rage and her career – between her lawyer’s advice and her own intuition – on and on – until finally she gives the Internet Entertainment Group the rights to the tape for free. Her sacrifice halts the viral attack, immunizes, stops.

SAVE THE WORLD

Erotic love is often described in geometrical or mathematical terms.

TRIANGLES, THREES:

THE LOVER [hypercharged space in-between, sometimes called EROS] THE BELOVED
SENDER [ANGEL-DEMON..HERMES…THE INTERNET…WHATEVER] RECEIVER

At Plato’s Symposium:

Love is connected to death. The tragedy of love. (Phaedrus)

We are halves walking around searching for wholeness.

Eros = pursuit of the whole that we were before we began and so ½ + ½ = 1. (Aristophanes)

The parents of Eros = Penia (Poverty) and Poros (Resource). Eros mediates between humans or god. Neither human nor god, Eros is a spirit – excess and lack – connected always to death, passion, and sacrifice. (Socrates with the help of Diotima, a wise woman)

A WEIRD NUMBERS GAME:

“Love’s curious arithmetic.” – Michel Serres, The Parasite
Love’s curious arithmetic, digitized.

INTERRUPTION OF THE BALANCE SHEET:

“Eros, however, represents an asymmetrical relationship to the Other. As such, it interrupts the exchange rate. Otherness admits no bookkeeping. It does not appear in the balance of debt and credit.” – Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

At the end of the world, there are no more secrets. Technology changes. All envelopes open. Pam & Tommy’s problem is our problem. An analog then digital tape’s maddening repetition forecloses the error that allows for encounter – the holy shit of love’s arrow – as networked air secretes secrets, as transmission quickens, apocalypse loops.

Love is mathematical catastrophe, mystical. Pam & Tommy reveals the catastrophic encounter with the Other, the shock of encountering a force that might alter the structure of a life:

Would you do me the insane honor of being my wife?

I would love to f*ck you in space.

What are you, the porn police?

I feel violated.

and the disruptive capacities of a new mode of transmission – secrets unveiled and gone viral – injects a catastrophe into the catastrophe, smoothing and stirring love’s deranged geometry. Saving the world means saving the Other – beholding the whole geometric spectrum of love, reading, messaging – what’s illegible, doesn’t add up, what’s crossed out, halts the drudgery of repetitive virality for the sake of silliness and tragedy. I don’t know. It is kind of supernatural.

I know what I do not know.

WORKS CITED

Augustine. City of God. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004.

Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. New York: Verso, 2009.

Brinkema, Eugenie. Life-Destroying Diagrams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.

Debray, Regis. Transmitting Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Agony of Eros. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.

Kramer, Sybille. Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.

Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Plato. The Symposium. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2002.

Emmalea Russo is a writer and artist living at the Jersey shore. Her books are G (Futurepoem, 2018) and Wave Archive (Book*hug, 2019). Recent writing has appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She's pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and edits Asphalte Magazine.

For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo

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