BACK OF MY HAND #1

Side program [conferences + conversation + screening] #1

21 May 2022

Carpintarias de São Lázaro, Lisbon

Hand Made Films – Philippe-Alain Michaud

Behind One’s Back: On Visible and Invisible Hands – Sami Khatib

Moderate by Jorge Leandro Rosa

Philipe-Alain Michaud – Hand Made Films

This conference will return to the series of hand films created by Richard Serra at the beginning of the 1970s in which he seeks to reconstruct, "with bare hands" if one can say so, the experience of the film independently of the system of recording and projection. Thus, Hand Films resonate, beyond the references that link them to the history of cinema (in particular to Robert Bresson), practices of sculpture, dance and drawing.

Philippe-Alain Michaud is Curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou in charge of the collection of films, He is the author of Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Zone Books, 2002 and Macula 2012), Le peuple des images (Desclée de Brouwer, 2004), Sur le film (Macula, 2016), Âmes primitives. Figures de film, de peluche et de papier (Macula, 2019) and has written extensively on the relations between film and visual arts. He as curated a number of exhibitions among which : Comme le rêve le dessin (Musée du Louvre/Centre Pompidou, 2004), Le mouvement des images (Centre Pompidou, 2006), Nuits électriques (Musée, de la photographie, Moscou and Laboral (Gijon, Spain) 2007, Tapis volants (Villa Medici, Rome and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse) 2010, Images sans fin, Brancusi photographie, film (Centre Pompidou, 2012), Beat Generation (Centre Pompidou, 2016), L’œil extatique – Serguei Eisenstein à la croisée des arts (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2019) and as associate curator : Scarabocchi, Villa Medici, Rome et Ecole nationale des beaux arts, Paris), 2022.

Behind One’s Back: On Visible and Invisible Hands – Sami Khatib

Relying on Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, this talk explores the dialectics of “intellectual and manual labor,” focusing on a zone of indifference where virtuosity and exploitation, mastery and servitude, playfulness and heteronomy lose their exclusiveness. In “Capital” (1867/72), Marx demonstrated how labor creates value and capital while being exploited as labor power. The intentional results of this exploitation, revenues and profits, while entertaining a self-valorizing relation, however, initiate an uncanny, almost automatic process, which ultimately operates beyond the realm of capitalist intentionality. Marx speaks of an unconscious historical process “beyond the backs” of capitalist “character masks,” which indirectly determines the vicissitudes of capital accumulation. This process has cut itself loose from specific skills of the workers while enthroning capitalist machinery as its real “virtuoso,” which, in turn, treats workers as its replaceable limbs. In the 1930s, while recounting an orientalist tale about a virtuous juggler, Benjamin also refers to an unconscious process “behind the back.” In the latter case, however, play and virtuosity are not relegated to an alienated machinery but refer to an economy of the body and its limbs. Undermining the capitalist separation of intellectual and manual labor, in the magical interplay of the juggler’s soma and psyche the “the will abdicates its power once and for all in favor of the organs – the hand, for instance” (Benjamin). Such a hand does not act as the liberal “invisible hand” of the market but as the agent of an unconscious economy of liberating interplay, where labor and instrumentality are suspended.

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Sami Khatib is an interim professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) and a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). His publications include a co-editorship of the volume Critique: The Stakes of Form (Zürich, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2020) and authorship of the book “Teleologie ohne Endzweck: Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des Messianischen” [“Teleology without End.” Walter Benjamin’s Dislocation of the Messianic], (Marburg: Tectum, 2013). His ongoing research project on the “Aesthetics of Real Abstraction" examines the aesthetic scope and political relevance of Marx’s discovery of the commodity form.