the blotches of the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; but thinking makes it so; JLB DJ LW
It is not one thing, but all the things which
legend attributes to Judas Iscariot that are false
(de Quincey,1857).
Like a certain German before
him, de Quincey speculated that Judas had
delivered up Christ in order to force Him to
declare His divinity and set in motion a vast
uprising against Rome's yoke; Runeberg
suggests a vindication of a metaphysical nature.
Cleverly, he begins by emphasizing how
superfluous Judas' action was. He observes (as
Robertson had) that in order to identify a
teacher who preached every day in the
synagogue and worked miracles in the plain
sight of thousands of people, there was no need
of betrayal by one of the teacher's own apostles.
That is precisely, however, what occurred. To
assume an error in the Scriptures is intolerable,
but it is no less intolerable to assume that a
random act intruded into the most precious
event in the history of the world. Ergo, Judas'
betrayal was not a random act, but
predetermined, with its own mysterious place
in the economy of redemption. Runeberg
continues: The Word, when it was made Flesh,
passed from omnipresence into space, from
eternity into history, from unlimited joy and
happiness into mutability and death; to repay
that sacrifice, it was needful that a man (in
representation of all mankind) make a sacrifice
of equal worth. Judas Iscariot was that man.
Alone among the apostles, Judas sensed Jesus'
secret divinity and His terrible purpose. The
Word had stooped to become mortal; Judas, a
disciple of the Word, would stoop to become an
informer (the most heinous crime that infamy
will bear) and to dwell amid inextinguishable
flames. As below, so above; the forms of earth
correspond to the forms of heaven; the blotches
of the skin are a map of the incorruptible
constellations; Judas is somehow a reflection of
Jesus. From that conclusion derive the thirty
pieces of silver and the kiss; from that
conclusion derives the voluntary death, so as
even more emphatically to merit reprobation.
There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial. Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet's words: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad.
If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone. Certainly the reading of this description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics.
And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters.
I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water [even] if I were to pour out a gallon over it.
Borges' The End (Artifices)
Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein
Wittgensteins A Lecture on Ethics
tristan garcia - form and object
A thing is nothing other than the difference between that
which is in this thing and that in which this thing is. Unless one
guarantees this double sense, there are no thinkable things. Every
reductionist who claims to deduce that which this or that thing is
from that which composes this or that thing only succeeds in dissolving
the very thing that they claim to account for. We attempt
to accomplish the exact opposite of this: to guarantee things as
invaluable differences embedded in the distribution channels of
being of the world. To complete our task, we set out to discover
the meaning which circulates among things, between that which
composes them and that which they compose, inside or outside us,
with or without us.
This meaning that we call for, and that thought seeks, is not
salvation. It is not the possibility of holding onto the essential,
necessary, or genuine self after the end of life, or in our damaged
social existence.
Some ways of thinking seek salvation. Here we seek to redeem
nothing: not the soul, not personhood, not the body, not thought,
not a community, not the proletariat. A thing among things, this
treatise attempts to save neither me nor you; between things there
is no salvation whatsoever.
The meaning we seek is not reducible to a mere signification,
a language game, a body of practices, or a normative system.
Whoever calls for a semiotic meaning of things or a return to the
description of their signification, to the ways in which we name or
make use of things, or to our linguistic, social, or cultural practices
will be disappointed. The promise of thought is not kept. I seek a
meaning of things outside us, and I have returned to what takes
place between us.
Salvation is the hope of situating oneself outside things (escaping
annihilation, death, oblivion, inauthenticity, alienation, reification).
Signification is the disappointment of never managing
to abstract things from the relations that we maintain with them.
Salvation situates us outside of things, while signification precludes
things from being situated outside of us.
I do not wish for the salvation of my soul, my body, human
beings, my ideas, or my individuality. I do not ask for the (linguistic,
cultural, historic) signification of things – our way of referring
ourselves to them, of constructing their significance, of using them,
of exchanging them, of making them significant among us, for us,
and by us. No, I simply search for a meaning of things, whether
this is the meaning of me, of you, or of a piece of black slate.
In truth, this meaning – neither completely existential nor
completely semiotic – is simply the possibility of passing from one
thing to the other. It is the possibility and necessity of never being
reduced to a thing that would be nothing else, that would be in
nothing else, and that would not exist in and by itself – whether
one calls that matter, nature, history, society, God, or an individual.
As if one could reduce the black slate to being nothing
but a material thing or a natural thing or a social thing. As if one
could then consider matter, nature, or society as things outside
appearances, absolute, remaining in themselves. This ghost of
‘compactness’, which will be the adversary of our whole adventure
of thought, will only disappear on one condition: for each thing to
make sense, it must have two senses. Nature or history as things
contain many things (first sense), but they are contained by things
other than themselves (second sense).
This is Vegas. Amatory elements: nil. JGB our lady of gaming
A History of Nothing. Narrative elements: a week of hunting the overpasses, the exploration of countless apartments. With stove and sleeping-bag, they camped like explorers on the sittingroom floors. ‘They’re exhibits, Karen - this conception will be immaculate.’ Later they raced around the city, examining a dozen architectures. Talbert pushed her against walls and parapets, draped her along balustrades. In the rear seat the textbooks of erotica formed an encyclopedia of postures - blueprints for her own imminent marriage with a seventh-floor balcony unit of the Hilton Hotel.
Amatory elements: nil. The act of love became a vector in an applied geometry. She could barely touch his shoulders without galvanizing him into a spasm of activity. Some scanning device in his brain had lost a bolt. Later, in the dashboard locker she found a set of maps of the Pripet Marshes, a contour photogram of an armpit, and a hundred publicity stills of the screen actress.
A Diagram of Bones.
All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.
Ballard: the Atrocity Exhibition shrine of our lady of wambierzyce poland 2 x game: this is vegas our lady of fátima portugal
You could bump into Allah, into the Prince of the Rebel Angels, and into all the dead stars of the universe. Before the fault, nothing had happened // Krasznahorkai & Stiegler
War & War
… this, said Korin, was what struck him as he walked those hundred furiously-thinking paces on the evening of his birthday: that is to say that he understood the infinite significance of his faith and was given a new insight into what the ancients had long known, that it was faith in its existence that had both created and maintained the world; the corollary of which was that it was the loss of his own faith that was now erasing it, the result of which realisation being, he said, that he experienced a sudden, utterly numbing, quite awful feeling of abundance, because from that time on he knew that whatever had once existed, existed still and that, quite unexpectedly, he had stumbled on an ontological place of such gravity that he could see - oh but how, he sighed, how to begin - that Zeus, for instance, to take an arbitrary example, was still "there," now, in the present, just as all the other old gods of Olympus were "there," as was Yahweh and The Lord God of Hosts, and there alongside them, the ghost of every nook and cranny, and that this meant they had nothing and yet everything to fear, for nothing ever disappeared without trace, for the absent had a structure as real as the structure of whatever existed, and so, in other words, you could bump into Allah, into the Prince of the Rebel Angels, and into all the dead stars of the universe, which would of course include the barren unpopulated earth with its godless laws of being as well as the terrifying reality of hell and pandemonium which was the domain of the demons, and that was reality, said Korin: thousands upon thousands of worlds, each one different, majestic or fearsome; thousands upon thousands in their ranks, he continued, his voice rising, in a single absent relationship, that was how it all appeared to him then, he explained, and it was then, when he had got so far, continually reliving the infinite capacity of the process of becoming, that the trouble with his head first started…
Technics and Time, 1
Thus the deviation, if there is one, is not in relation to nature but in relation to the divine. Again this means that the real issue here concerns the relation of mortals to immortality, that this anthropogony is in the first instance a thanatology. Anthropogony only acquires meaning in theogony, the conflict between the Olympians and the Titans, which continues, in an underhanded way, with the struggle between Zeus and Prometheus. It is in this sense that humans participate in the divine, on the basis of the double fault, particularly that of the theft of fire, erecting altars to the gods qua those who are immortal. It is a religion entirely made up of trepidations at the condition of technicity (its power, implying equally the powerlessness of mortals). Before the fault, nothing had happened.
...
Through sacrifice mortals are put in their place: between the beasts and the gods, this in-between (between appearing and disappearing) resulting from a deviation. It is not a matter of recalling a state of nature, nor of claiming what "human nature" ought to have been; there was no fall, but a fault, no hap or mishap, but mortality.
...
Man invents, discovers, finds (eurisko), imagines (mêkhanê), and realises what he imagines: protheses, expedients. A pro-thesis is what is placed in front, that is, what is outside, outside what it is placed in front of. However, if what is outside constitutes the very being of what it lies outside of, the this being is outside itself. The being of humankind is to be outside itself. In order to make up for the fault of Epimetheus, Prometheus gives humans the present of putting themselves outside themselves.
Humankind, we might say, puts into effect what it imagines because it is endowed with reason, with logos - that is, also with language. Or, should we rather say that it is because it realises what it imagines - as we said a moment ago, because it lies outside itself - that humanity is endowed with reason, that is, with language? Is it tekhnê that arises from logos, or the reverse? Or rather, is it not that logos and tekhnê are modalities of the same being-outside-oneself?
...
Discovery, insight, invention, imagination are all, according to the narrative of the myth, characteristic of a de-fault. Animals are already marked by a de-fault (in relation to being as it is and as it endures through change, and in relation to the gods): they perish. One must understand "de-fault" here in relation to what is, that is, a flaw in being. And yet, whereas animals are positively endowed with qualities, is it tekhnê that forms the lot of humans, and tekhnê is prosthetic; that is, it is entirely artifice. The qualities of animals make up a sort of nature, in any case a positive gift to the gods: a predestination. The gift made to humanity is not positive: it is there to compensate. Humanity is without qualities, without predestination: it must invent, realise, produce qualities, and nothing indicates that, once produced, these qualities will bring about humanity, that they will become its qualities; for they may rather become those of technics.
...
Prometheus robs Hephaestus and Athena. By pursuing Athena, Hephaestus becomes the father of the Athenians. Here arms, tools, and instruments of war play a large role: Athena rose from the head of Zeus clad in arms, delivered by the patron god of handicraft with an axe. Athena is in turn pursued by Hephaestus when she orders arms from him: in this manner the craftsman's sperm is spilt on the earth, constituting the myth of Athenian autochthony… Origin, war, politics: with each it is a matter of instruments. From these gods who handle instruments is stolen "the creative genius of the arts" (which translates ten entekhnen sophian: it is, again, a matter of sophia and tekhnê).
Laszlo Krasznahorkai; War & WarBernard Stiegler; Technics and Time, 1
they smiled at each other's pagan faces - the barbaric smiles of Bacchus; Ballard and Schulz
With a gesture he led Sanders down the nave to the open porch. He pointed up to the dome-shaped lattice of crystal beams that reached from the rim of the forest like the buttresses of an immense cupola of diamond and glass. Embedded at various points were the almost motionless forms of birds with outstretched wings, golden orioles and scarlet macaws, shedding brilliant pools of light. The bands of colour moved through the forest, the reflections of the melting plumage enveloping them in endless concentric patterns. The overlapping arching in the air like the votive windows of a city of cathedrals. Everywhere around them Sanders would see the countless smaller birds, butterflies and insects, joining their cruciform haloes to the coronation of the forest.
Father Balthus took Sanders's arm. "In this forest we see the final celebration of the Eucharist of Christ's body. Here everything is transfigured and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of space and time."
Then he realised why Thorensen had brought the jewels to the young woman, and why she had seized on them so eagerly. By some optical or electromagnetic freak, the intense focus of light from the surfaces reversed the process of crystallisation. Perhaps it was this gift of time which accounted for the eternal appeal of precious gems, as well as of all baroque painting and architecture. Their intricate crests and cartouches, occupying more than their own volume of space, so seemed to contain a greater ambient time, providing that unmistakeable premonition of immortality sensed within St. Peter's or the palace at Nymphenburg. By contrast, the architecture of the twentieth century, characteristically one of rectangular unornamented façades, of simple Euclidean space and time, was that of the New World, confident of its firm footing in the future and indifferent to those pangs of mortality which haunted the mind of old Europe. Dr. Sanders knelt down and filled his pockets with the stones, cramming them into his shirts and cuffs. He sat back against the front of the depository, the semi-circle of smooth pavement like a miniature patio, at whose edges the crystal undergrowth glittered with the intensity of a spectral garden. Pressed to his cold skin, the hard faces of the jewels seemed to warm him, and within a few seconds he fell into an exhausted sleep.
J.G. Ballard; The Crystal World; 1966
From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the the brightness of the day. The passerby, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey. Upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat - as if the sun had forced his worshippers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other's pagan faces - the barbaric smiles of Bacchus.
Market square was empty and white hot, swept by hot winds like a biblical desert. The thorny acacias, growing in this emptiness, looked with their bright leaves like the trees on old tapestries. Although there was no breath of wind, they rustled their filial in a theatrical gesture, as if wanting to display the elegance of the silver lining of their leaves that resembled the fox-fur lining of a nobleman's coat. The old houses, worn smooth by the winds of innumerable days, played tricks with the reflections of the atmosphere, with echoes and memories of colours scattered in the depth of the cloudless sky. It seemed as if whole generations of summer days, like patient stonemasons cleaning the mildewed plaster from old facades, had removed the deceptive varnish revealing more and more clearly the true face of the houses, the features that fate had given them and life had shaped for them from the inside. Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep; the balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.A bunch of ragamuffins, sheltering in a corner of the square from the flaming broom of the heat, beleaguered a piece of wall, throwing buttons and coins at it over and over again, as if wishing to read in the horoscope of those metal discs the real secret written in the hieroglyphs of cracks and scratched lines.
Bruno Schulz; Street of Crocodiles; 1934
Father Balthus took Sanders's arm. "In this forest we see the final celebration of the Eucharist of Christ's body. Here everything is transfigured and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of space and time."
Then he realised why Thorensen had brought the jewels to the young woman, and why she had seized on them so eagerly. By some optical or electromagnetic freak, the intense focus of light from the surfaces reversed the process of crystallisation. Perhaps it was this gift of time which accounted for the eternal appeal of precious gems, as well as of all baroque painting and architecture. Their intricate crests and cartouches, occupying more than their own volume of space, so seemed to contain a greater ambient time, providing that unmistakeable premonition of immortality sensed within St. Peter's or the palace at Nymphenburg. By contrast, the architecture of the twentieth century, characteristically one of rectangular unornamented façades, of simple Euclidean space and time, was that of the New World, confident of its firm footing in the future and indifferent to those pangs of mortality which haunted the mind of old Europe. Dr. Sanders knelt down and filled his pockets with the stones, cramming them into his shirts and cuffs. He sat back against the front of the depository, the semi-circle of smooth pavement like a miniature patio, at whose edges the crystal undergrowth glittered with the intensity of a spectral garden. Pressed to his cold skin, the hard faces of the jewels seemed to warm him, and within a few seconds he fell into an exhausted sleep.
J.G. Ballard; The Crystal World; 1966
From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the the brightness of the day. The passerby, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey. Upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat - as if the sun had forced his worshippers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other's pagan faces - the barbaric smiles of Bacchus.
Market square was empty and white hot, swept by hot winds like a biblical desert. The thorny acacias, growing in this emptiness, looked with their bright leaves like the trees on old tapestries. Although there was no breath of wind, they rustled their filial in a theatrical gesture, as if wanting to display the elegance of the silver lining of their leaves that resembled the fox-fur lining of a nobleman's coat. The old houses, worn smooth by the winds of innumerable days, played tricks with the reflections of the atmosphere, with echoes and memories of colours scattered in the depth of the cloudless sky. It seemed as if whole generations of summer days, like patient stonemasons cleaning the mildewed plaster from old facades, had removed the deceptive varnish revealing more and more clearly the true face of the houses, the features that fate had given them and life had shaped for them from the inside. Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep; the balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.A bunch of ragamuffins, sheltering in a corner of the square from the flaming broom of the heat, beleaguered a piece of wall, throwing buttons and coins at it over and over again, as if wishing to read in the horoscope of those metal discs the real secret written in the hieroglyphs of cracks and scratched lines.
Bruno Schulz; Street of Crocodiles; 1934
louden lots bit by bit; On falling into filth with Percy Grainger and Daniil Kharms
Grainger was a vegetarian who was not particularly fond of vegetables, and lived variously on nuts, boiled rice, wheatcakes, cakes, bread and jam, ice cream and oranges. Grainger was a sado-masochist, with a particular enthusiasm for flagellation, who extensively documented and photographed everything he and his wife did. His walls and ceilings were covered in mirrors so that after sessions of self-flagellation he could take pictures of himself from all angles, documenting each image with details such as date, time, location, whip used, and camera settings. He gave most of his earnings from 1934–1935 to the University of Melbourne for the creation and maintenance of a museum dedicated to himself. Along with his manuscript scores and musical instruments, he donated the photos, 73 whips, and blood-soaked shirts. Although the museum opened in 1935, it was not available to researchers until later. He was a cheerful believer in the racial superiority of blond-haired and blue-eyed northern Europeans. This led to attempts, in his letters and musical manuscripts, to use only what he called "blue-eyed English" (akin to Anglish and the 'Pure English' of Dorset poet William Barnes) which expunged all foreign (i.e., non-Germanic) influences. In Grainger's writings, a composer was a "tone-smith" who "dished up" his compositions and a piano was a "keyed-hammer-string". He hated Italian terms in music scores; "poco a poco crescendo molto" became "louden lots bit by bit". This bias was not consistently applied though: he was friends with and an admirer of Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, and also gave regular donations to African-American causes. Grainger eagerly collected folk music tunes, forms, and instruments from around the world, from Ireland to Bali, and incorporated them into his own works. Furthermore, alongside his love for Scandinavia was a deep distaste for German academic music theory; he almost always shunned such standard (and ubiquitous) musical structures as sonata form, calling them "German" impositions. He was ready to extend his admiration for the wild, free life of the ancient Vikings to other groups around the world, which in his view shared their way of life, such as the ancient Greece of the Homeric epics. Other departures from the common norms of the time included never ironing his shirts and wearing the same clothes for days. He once said "concert audiences can't tell the difference". While in America, he was twice arrested for vagrancy due to his dress. In his later years, when he scavenged in rubbish bins in the middle of the night for parts to make musical instruments, he dressed in his best clothes for the task. Grainger was a stout believer in natural forces and felt that the summer months were meant to be hot and the winter months were meant to be cold. Thus in winter he slept naked with his bedroom windows open, while spending the stifling summer evenings adorned in heavy wool.
\
"On falling into filth, there is only one thing for a man to do: just fall, without looking round. The important thing is just to do this with style and energy." - D.K.
Daniil Kharms is the best known pen name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev, one of the finest of the Russian avant-garde absurdists. Born in St. Petersburg in 1904 and arrested in 1941 for 'defeatism', he died of starvation in a prison hospital along with so many others. His father, Ivan Iuvachev, was a member of The People’s Will, an organisation that advocated for universal suffrage, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and permanent political representation. He too was arrested.
Kharms once declared that only two things in life are of great worth: humour and saintliness, but against the prevailing Socialist Realist aesthetic, Kharms' saintliness was understandably considered 'antisocial'. Between his birth and death he wrote hundreds of poems and stories, using more than 30 pseudonyms.
The adult prose (Kharms also wrote children's fiction) takes the form of short aphoristic stories, frequently referred to as "incidents". The term comes from the consensus translation of "Sluchai", the name Kharms gave to a cycle of works written between 1933 and 1937 and is often used to refer to a broader class of his writings than the body of the cycle. The incidents range from short to extremely short. An example of the later:
An old man was scratching his head with both hands. In places where he couldn't reach with both hands, he scratched himself with one, but very, very fast. And while he was doing it he blinked rapidly.
Like the French playwright Alfred Jarry, Kharms cultivated a bohemian eccentricity, treating his life as one more artistic medium to be formed, elaborated, and put in the window. Against the backdrop of anti-aristocratic Soviet sentiment and although he was not noble by birth, Kharms cultivated old money charm and petty affectations with what might be called the energetic spirit of 'defeatism'. While those accused of being former noblemen were being deported, or worse, Kharms carried silver goblets in his briefcase and wasted few opportunities to display his 'family heirlooms'. With friends, in workers bars, and anywhere else cups were required, he would make a point of refusing to drink from anything else.
He would wear a false moustache to the opera and declare that to go to the theatre without one was indecent. In the moustache's style and a great many other mannerisms Kharms confessed that he was aping his brother, a Privatdozent at the University of Petersburg, who, Kharms forgot to add, he had also invented.
'What kind of machine?'
'No kind. Just a machine in general.'
'And where does it come from?'
'I put it together myself,' Kharms said proudly.
'What does it do?'
'It does nothing.'
'What do you mean nothing?'
'Simply nothing.'
'What is it for?'
'I just wanted to have a machine at home.' "
and the following from a wonderful short story called The Old Woman, A Tale
Now I feel sleepy but I am not going to sleep. I get hold of a piece of paper and a pen and I am going to write. I feel within me a terrible power. I thought it all over as long ago as yesterday. It will be the story about a miracle worker who is living in our time and who doesn't work any miracles. He knows that he is a miracle worker and that he can perform any miracle, but he doesn't do so. He is thrown out of his flat and he knows that he only has to wave a finger and the flat will remain his, but he doesn't do this; he submissively moves out of the flat and lives out of town in a shed. He is capable of turning this shed into a fine brick house, but he doesn't do this; he carries on living in the shed and eventually dies, without having done a single miracle in the whole of his life.
Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you.
Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.
H.P.; + Métal Hurlant - french sci-fi mag; + Germaine Krull - Série Métal 1927; + Aelita - constructivist sci-fi flick 1924; + Chris Marker - Sans Soleil 1983 + La Jetée 1962.
An even better introduction to Aelita and all things sci-fi can be found here, at ssforward
-The moon, which already, by then, will have begun to rot. -The moon is old, Ofwfq agreed; Fourier & Calvino
Fourier is so prodigal in his invention and his crazy descriptions that Lerminier justifiably compares him to Swedenborg… Fourier, too, was at home in all skies and all planets. After all, he calculated mathematically the transmigration of the soul, and went on to prove that the human soul must assume 810 different forms until it completes the circuit of the planets and returns to earth, and that, in the course of these existences, 720 years must be happy, 45 years favourable, and 45 years unfavourable or unhappy. And has he not described what will happen to the soul after the demise of our planet, and prophesied, in fact, that certain privileged souls will retire to the sun? He reckons further that our souls will come to inhabit all other planets and worlds, after spending 80,000 years on planet Earth. He calculates, in addition, that this termination of the human race will occur only after it has enjoyed the benefits of the boreal light for 70,000 years. He proves that by the influence, not of the boreal light, to be sure, but of the gravitational force of labor,… the climate of Senegal will become as moderate as summers in France are now. He describes how, once the sea has turned to lemonade, men will transport fish from the great ocean to the inland seas, the Caspian, the Aral, and Black Seas, given that the boreal light reacts less potently with these salty seas; and so, in this way, saltwater fish will accustom themselves gradually to the lemonade, until finall they can be restored to the ocean. Fourier also says that, in its eighth ascending period, humanity will acquire the capacity to live like fish in the water and to fly like birds in the air, and that, by then, humans will have reached a height of seven feet and a life span of at least 144 years. Everyone, at that point, will be able to transform himself into an amphibian; for the individual will have the power of opening or closing at will the valve that connects the two chambers of the heart, so as to bring the blood directly to the heart without having it pass through the lungs… Nature will evolve in such fashion, he maintains, that a time will come when oranges blossom in Siberia and the most dangerous animals have been replaced by their opposites. Anti-lions, anti-whales will be at man's service then, and the calm will drive his ships. In this way, according to Fourier, the lion will serve as the best of horses and the shark will be as useful in fishing as the dog is in hunting. New stars will emerge to take place of the moon, which already, by then, will have begun to rot. -Sigmund Engländer on Fourier, 1864; in The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin
The moon is old, Qfwfq agreed, pitted with holes, worn out. Rolling naked through the skies, it erodes and loses its flesh like a bone that’s been gnawed. This is not the first time that such a thing has happened. I remember moons that were even older and more battered than this one; I’ve seen loads of these moons, seen them being born and running across the sky and dying out, one punctured by hail from shooting stars, another exploding from all its craters, and yet another oozing drops of topaz-colored sweat that evaporated immediately, then being covered by greenish clouds and reduced to a dried-up, spongy shell.
What happens on the earth when a moon dies is not easy to describe; I’ll try to do it by referring to the last instance I can remember. Following a lengthy period of evolution, the earth had more or less reached the point where we are now; in other words, it had entered the phase when cars wear out more quickly than the soles of shoes. Beings that were barely human manufactured and bought and sold things, and cities covered the continents with luminous colour. These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more awash with new products, new toothbrushes, a New York with its own Manhattan that stretched out dense with skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush.
In this world where every object was thrown away at the slightest sign of breakage or ageing, at the first dent or stain, and replaced with a new and perfect substitute, there was just one false note, one shadow: the moon. It wandered through the sky naked, corroded, and grey, more and more alien to the world down here, a hangover from a way of being that was now outdated.
Ancient expressions like “full moon,” “half-moon,” “last-quarter-moon” continued to be used but were really only figures of speech: how could we call “full” a shape that was all cracks and holes and that always seemed on the point of crashing down on our heads in a shower of rubble? Not to mention when it was a waning moon! It was reduced to a kind of nibbled cheese rind, and it always disappeared before we expected it to. At each new moon, we wondered whether it would ever appear again (were we hoping that it would simply disappear?), and when it did reappear, looking more and more like a comb that had lost its teeth, we averted our eyes with a shudder.
dearest mother, send me immediately a hundred thousand bon bons; criminals, Kantsaywhere, eugenics, & indentification
carissima mamma, mandami subito centomila bon bons se no faccio la cattiva
Eugenie
dearest mother, send me immediately a hundred thousand bon bons if I do not the bad.
Eugenie
From Writing of a criminal by hypnotic suggestion; Cesare Lombroso.
The above is a google translation and although I know it's not 'correct' I quite prefer it. The bad sums up perfectly the diffuse and unclear boundaries between right and wrong in childhood. The inevitable question to 'don't do that' is 'why?' and often you hear parents saying, 'because it's bad' or simply 'because I said so'. Eugenie is a great little imp. In her desire for bon bons - and with the sense that out of the myriad things that you might feel like doing, some of them are 'bad' and some 'good' and some just go unnoticed (the 'ugly' comes later in this spaghetti western) - she's equating everything that does not lead to bon bons with what she will not do. Bad - no bon bons - won't do it.
But this is what Nietzsche means when he talks about the 'actual right to make promises' which children don't have because, you can be sure, once those bon bons are in Eugenie's belly and she is oh-so-satisfied and thankyou very much carissima mamma, all bets are off. But we are expected to extend to children the rights (if not the responsibilities) of the adult because they are in potentia - potential full humans. Laws relating to the rights of children are mostly a 19th and 20th century phenomenon and they sprang into being around the same time that laws was being developed to mediate the rights of those considered degenerate, insane, innately criminal, and delinquent.
Cesare Lombroso was most famous for his book L'uomo delinquente (1878) and was the founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso's general theory suggested that criminals are distinguished from noncriminals by multiple physical anomalies. This is where the Ugly comes in. I suggest heading to Sander Gilman's 1995 book, Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference, where he details the correlation of the unhealthy and the ugly in this crucial 19th century. Back to Lombroso, who postulated that criminals represented a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of man. This earlier type is characterised by physical features reminiscent of apes, lower primates that are to some extent preserved in modern "savages" (his term). The behaviour of these biological "throwbacks" will inevitably be contrary to the rules and expectations of modern civilised society. Lombroso suggested that the discretion of the doctor as to whether a criminal was born (reo nato) or simply a 'criminaloid' (occasional criminals by 'passion') should be used to decide on a legislated course of action in order to propagate the right plants and weed out the others.
Social darwinism is the name that was eventually given to these tendencies, but whilst Darwin was worried about 'breeding' - and more specifically about the effects of marriage between cousins because he was married to his - it was Francis Galton, another cousin who Darwin was not married to, who really pushed the agenda. He is famous for his composite photographs (more, hither), an article called Africa for the Chinese (intriguing given the heavy investment of Chinese companies in African resources in recent times - read it, hither) but he also wrote a terrible but very intriguing novel called Kantsaywhere, which is Brave New World written by a statistician, i.e. dry, clinical, lacklustre, and slightly gormless. The narrator is actually a fictional professor of vital statistics at Kantsaywhere, which might explain some of its charmlessness, though the more juicy bits were edited out by his niece, Milly who “destroyed all the story, all poor Miss Augusta, the Nonnyson anecdotes, and in fact everything not to the point”. You can read extracts from the rest of it @ UCL Library Services, hither.
Eugenie
dearest mother, send me immediately a hundred thousand bon bons if I do not the bad.
Eugenie
From Writing of a criminal by hypnotic suggestion; Cesare Lombroso.
The above is a google translation and although I know it's not 'correct' I quite prefer it. The bad sums up perfectly the diffuse and unclear boundaries between right and wrong in childhood. The inevitable question to 'don't do that' is 'why?' and often you hear parents saying, 'because it's bad' or simply 'because I said so'. Eugenie is a great little imp. In her desire for bon bons - and with the sense that out of the myriad things that you might feel like doing, some of them are 'bad' and some 'good' and some just go unnoticed (the 'ugly' comes later in this spaghetti western) - she's equating everything that does not lead to bon bons with what she will not do. Bad - no bon bons - won't do it.
But this is what Nietzsche means when he talks about the 'actual right to make promises' which children don't have because, you can be sure, once those bon bons are in Eugenie's belly and she is oh-so-satisfied and thankyou very much carissima mamma, all bets are off. But we are expected to extend to children the rights (if not the responsibilities) of the adult because they are in potentia - potential full humans. Laws relating to the rights of children are mostly a 19th and 20th century phenomenon and they sprang into being around the same time that laws was being developed to mediate the rights of those considered degenerate, insane, innately criminal, and delinquent.
Cesare Lombroso was most famous for his book L'uomo delinquente (1878) and was the founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso's general theory suggested that criminals are distinguished from noncriminals by multiple physical anomalies. This is where the Ugly comes in. I suggest heading to Sander Gilman's 1995 book, Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference, where he details the correlation of the unhealthy and the ugly in this crucial 19th century. Back to Lombroso, who postulated that criminals represented a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of man. This earlier type is characterised by physical features reminiscent of apes, lower primates that are to some extent preserved in modern "savages" (his term). The behaviour of these biological "throwbacks" will inevitably be contrary to the rules and expectations of modern civilised society. Lombroso suggested that the discretion of the doctor as to whether a criminal was born (reo nato) or simply a 'criminaloid' (occasional criminals by 'passion') should be used to decide on a legislated course of action in order to propagate the right plants and weed out the others.
nota bene the pencil additions of defensive conscience, however commendable in itself.
Social darwinism is the name that was eventually given to these tendencies, but whilst Darwin was worried about 'breeding' - and more specifically about the effects of marriage between cousins because he was married to his - it was Francis Galton, another cousin who Darwin was not married to, who really pushed the agenda. He is famous for his composite photographs (more, hither), an article called Africa for the Chinese (intriguing given the heavy investment of Chinese companies in African resources in recent times - read it, hither) but he also wrote a terrible but very intriguing novel called Kantsaywhere, which is Brave New World written by a statistician, i.e. dry, clinical, lacklustre, and slightly gormless. The narrator is actually a fictional professor of vital statistics at Kantsaywhere, which might explain some of its charmlessness, though the more juicy bits were edited out by his niece, Milly who “destroyed all the story, all poor Miss Augusta, the Nonnyson anecdotes, and in fact everything not to the point”. You can read extracts from the rest of it @ UCL Library Services, hither.
Moholy-Nagy's Painting, Photography, Film shows the possibilities of wireless imaging; 1925
extremities buzzing slightly; book - drugs 2.0; music - fatima al qadiri
Illegal drugs, including LSD in the 1960s, heroin in the 1980s and Ecstasy in the 1980s and 1990s,
have long had a uniquely perturbing influence on the public realm, with the dangers and pleasures
inherent in their consumption splitting users and law makers into opposing camps. Mephedrone,
though, was completely legal. The new drug was, according to toxicologists, ‘two chemical tweaks
away from Ecstasy’. Those tweaks were deliberate, and were made to evade drug laws. Mephedrone
upended all prior hierarchies and caused huge confusion among many users who considered, wrongly,
that since it was legal, it was harmless.
Widely available and hugely popular, mephedrone was the first mass-market ‘downloadable’ drug,
in the sense that it was, uniquely for the mass market, originally only available online. It was like a
narcotic viral video, a digital diversion to be shared with the click of a mouse. In every sense, it was
a radically new game-changer. Mephedrone was the fulcrum, the tipping point that took a clandestine
internet drug scene and dropped it, gurning and wide-eyed, right into the high streets of the UK – and
then into the wider world. The swift and protocol-busting ban on the new drug in the UK did nothing
to eliminate it here or in the EU or the US; it simply handed the market to grateful gangsters who
added the drug to their repertoire, and prompted greater innovation in the chemical underground.
Fatima Al Qadiri; Desert Strike
Born in Senegal, Fatima Al Qadiri grew up in a futuristic yet already vintage Kuwait colonized by skyscrapers with lights ablaze round the clock, Japanese manga imagery and shoot ‘em up video games. This was the substrate, against the backdrop of the Gulf War, on which she has developed an advanced mixture of music borrowed and reinterpreted from different cultural contexts and her own unique imaginary. Babak Radboy, artist and creative director of Bidoun Magazine, as well as a long-time friend, met with her to talk about her influences and the way she manages to keep creative control over her original output.
Babak Radboy: Kuwait is so American.
Fatima Al Qadiri: Kuwait is definitely the most American country in the Arab world. Consider the obesity rate alone: after America we’re the number-two fattest country in the world, per capita. There are so many words in the language to describe fat children! Like, six, at least. It’s a real problem in Kuwait: a whole generation of obese children. Kuwait’s rate of consumption is similar to the U.S. but even more absurd.
BR: Kuwait is a crazy mix: a super-affluent country, yet basically a welfare state, though with a super neo-liberal consumer economy.
FQ: We consume vast amounts of everything. Instagram businesses are a big thing in Kuwait.
Read interview @ moussemag.it, hither/
Born in Senegal, Fatima Al Qadiri grew up in a futuristic yet already vintage Kuwait colonized by skyscrapers with lights ablaze round the clock, Japanese manga imagery and shoot ‘em up video games. This was the substrate, against the backdrop of the Gulf War, on which she has developed an advanced mixture of music borrowed and reinterpreted from different cultural contexts and her own unique imaginary. Babak Radboy, artist and creative director of Bidoun Magazine, as well as a long-time friend, met with her to talk about her influences and the way she manages to keep creative control over her original output.
Babak Radboy: Kuwait is so American.
Fatima Al Qadiri: Kuwait is definitely the most American country in the Arab world. Consider the obesity rate alone: after America we’re the number-two fattest country in the world, per capita. There are so many words in the language to describe fat children! Like, six, at least. It’s a real problem in Kuwait: a whole generation of obese children. Kuwait’s rate of consumption is similar to the U.S. but even more absurd.
BR: Kuwait is a crazy mix: a super-affluent country, yet basically a welfare state, though with a super neo-liberal consumer economy.
FQ: We consume vast amounts of everything. Instagram businesses are a big thing in Kuwait.
Read interview @ moussemag.it, hither/
2.0 x-box + research drugs e.g. (shamelessly edited from a much longer blow by metaphorical blow account found online)
10.45: MXE taken.
10.56: Extremities buzzing slightly. Can’t feel my toes.
11.01: Edges are beginning to seem more defined. I have a slight feeling of disassociation with my body. Slightly harder to write.
11.05: Start playing a game. My friend (N) comes onto xbox Live and we discuss playing co-operatively on something else later.
11.15: I switch to the suggested game and begin to play. I feel much more like I am IN the game.
11.29: I’m still here. N comes online and we attempt to set up a party. I find it difficult to speak, but tell him why. He is very unimpressed.
11.44: N leaves in disgust. I continue to spin around in circles and fire at random things.
11.48: Things ripple lazily around me, but apparently “I laugh at the thought of suppressing it with my iron will” (or so I said according to E).
12.15: Still here, but difficult to write.
13.51: The mouse is becoming very hard to move.
16.00: I have a shave, and look in the mirror to see my face looking much more goat-like than I remembered. No, more as if I have a connection with goats and their natural characteristics.
16.10: Leave for the station.
Read the rest of A Lazy Morning: An Experience with Methoxetamine (ID 95067) and other such human chronicles at Erowid Experience Vaults, hither.
als ich kann
In the judgement of posterity - and no doubt also in that of contemporaries - the most refined representative of Ghent painting in the later 15th century was not Joos van Wassenhove, alias Justus van Gent, but his friend Hugo van der Goes, who, as we know, financed his journey to Italy. We have far more biographical information on Hugo van der Goes than of Justus van Gent; and the difference is more than quantitative. Goes is the earliest Northern European painter whose mental state is a matter of written record. This is because he had the misfortune to die insane.
He had retired to a monastery, the Roode Clooster near Brussels, and a memoir written long afterwards by a fellow monk describes some of the symptoms of his illness. After spending several years there as a novice, he fell ill on his way home from a visit to Cologne and died not long afterwards, in the year 1482. The affinity between genius and madness is an issue to which modern students of artistic psychology attach great importance, so it is not surprising that an artist who lends himself to discussion of the phenomenon seems more approachable and even begins to look like a modern personality.
He had retired to a monastery, the Roode Clooster near Brussels, and a memoir written long afterwards by a fellow monk describes some of the symptoms of his illness. After spending several years there as a novice, he fell ill on his way home from a visit to Cologne and died not long afterwards, in the year 1482. The affinity between genius and madness is an issue to which modern students of artistic psychology attach great importance, so it is not surprising that an artist who lends himself to discussion of the phenomenon seems more approachable and even begins to look like a modern personality.
I should stress that the evolution that I shall try to outline does not agree with the chronology, or rather chronologies, given in the Goes literature. Not that I have any desire to presnet my own chronology as the one true way to salvation; this is rather more a case of Jan van Eyck's motto, 'As best I can' (als ich kann).
Otto Pächt
Why is this such an absolute masterpiece? Aside from the obvious Eyckian character of the left panel of this diptyque, van der Goes' Satan belies a humanity and a depth comparable to Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost. And for the late 15th century, when representations were considered excessively evidential and so potentially dangerous, this is no mean feat.
William Blake writing about John Milton said that he was nothing other than "a true poet & of the Devils party without knowing it." Cecil B. DeMille was the most famous producer of early (20s-40s) Biblical Sword-and-Sandal films, who was a devout protestant and called the bible "the source of all drama - and the lexicon of human behaviour, good and bad." One critic pointed out, however, that "Mr DeMille's real interest is in the wicket Romans... with the enthusiasm of an artist... he paints the manifold nature of their sins, their cruelties, their decadent luxuries."
loving contorsions
HTRK - Love is Distraction
Shigeko Kubota, Vagina Painting, 1965, performed at the Perpetual Fluxus Festival in New York
,+1512,+tempera+and+gold+leaf+on+parchment.++The+Hague,+Koninklijke+Bibliotheek.jpg)
Temperance in Séjour de deuil pour le trepas de Messire Philippes de Commines (hs. 76 E 13, fol. 8r), 1512, tempera and gold leaf on parchment. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek
Yasumasa Morimura, Daughter of Art History- Theatre B, 1990.
signaux alpha
Signaux alpha; part of a little book I printed a few years ago as part of my final work at ENSAD, Paris.
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