Seminar 10: Steven Connor on Haze

Friday, December 8, 2006
5:30pm for 6pm
Metcalfe Auditorium State Library of NSW
Macquarie Street, Sydney
Admission $12 Booking essential on (02) 9273 1770

The Department of English at Macquarie University and The Writing and and Society Group at the University of Western Sydney in association with the State Library of NSW present:

Steven Connor on Haze

Speaker: Steven Connor (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Convenor: Paul Sheehan (Macquarie University)

Steven Connor, of the University of London, is one of the foremost contemporary cultural and literary critics currently working.He has recently developed a series of projects considering how things which we take for granted affect our understanding of the world, by examining how these things: skin, the air, the humble house fly, have been represented in art.

This talk is drawn from his current project which examines early twentieth-century culture through various traditions of the air. Considering how modernist artists engage with the weather, Steven Connor argues for a kind of meteorological imagination, which he sees as manifested in two different ways: as ‘Romantic haze’, in the form of glamour, or diffused radiance, lending objects and people a singular aura; and as a more corrupt and decomposing ‘nether’ air (mist, fog, smog).

Modernist haze, he suggests, is connoted not through clear-cut separations such as these categories imply, but, more exactly, through interference, an accidental mixing of registers and channels. Haze is thus rendered as a form of visual noise, creating interference patterns. Connor then plots the multiform reactions to these modernist atmospherics, from Pound and Lewis’s desire to ‘blast’ England for her gaseous dullness, to Woolf’s delineation of the ‘luminous halo’ enveloping consciousness, to Conrad’s interest in X-rays, given startling shape when Kurtz is depicted as an unsteady exhalation of vapour. From another direction, and slightly earlier, Monet and Whistler utilise haze as an optical paradox, capable simultaneously of suspending time and marking duration. The effects of haze can also be seen in the more commonplace consumption of tobacco, in which organic matter is turned into smoke, the corporeal into the cerebral.

As the residue of the past, haze denotes compromised vision and threatens to dissolve all distinctions, to thwart every attempt at achieving clarity and focus. The dim and indiscernible pose a problem for modernist artists, and become at once an objective, a vocation and a provocation. Through these enquiries, Connor shows how haze occupies modernist thought and perception, its appeal lying in its very elusiveness, in the desire to represent the indistinct and somehow fix the unfixable. The haze of modernism, he suggests, brings the sky down to earth, dissolving the relations between the two, creating interference patterns between high and low.

Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College University of London and is the Academic Director of the London Consortium. For further details on his numerous publications see: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ english/skc/