Venus After Gaza
At the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art, Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat’s 1999 film installation Rapture plays on opposing screens. One screen depicts mostly young and middle aged men dressed in white, moving animatedly through an old fortress. The other, across them, shows a crowd of veiled women dressed all in black, who stop and pray together and wail in unison in a rocky desert before encountering a wooden boat at the edge of the sea. A vague plaque on the wall vaguely indicates that viewers are meant to understand it as a comment on “gender,” broadly.
“Being an owner of money thereby confirms one’s personhood, and so the foundation upon which to develop one’s unique sensibilities.”
Money then, paradoxically, is a ruthlessly homogenizing unit that affords one individuality; within capitalism, individuation is equally the most extreme denial of personal idiosyncrasy. As Marx writes, “the individual is not objectified in his natural quality, but in a social quality (relation) which is, at the same time, external to him.” “Money, as purely abstract wealth,” he elaborates, “comes under the power of the individual likewise as an abstract person, relating to his individuality as totally alien and extraneous.” As Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch put this doubled quality:
From these Reformation-era roots, the concept (like all other successful viruses) mutated. By the German Late Enlightenment, the Schwarmerei’s madness took on a medical dimension, rendered literally contagious. In the wake of the terrors of the French Revolution of the 1790s, German philosophy adopted a kind of medical authoritative stance with respect to the social and moral ills posed by this form of swarming madness. Rationality, characterised by the position of the detached observer—objective, dispassionate, trustworthily reasonable, largely due to his dislocation from the mobs around him—was often found by contrast to the swarm.
Alex V. Green is __________