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March 12 2012
good advice and lots of it
February 11 2012
and then perhaps I should start writing about what I am doing, begin a conceptual staging of my web project, let me know if you would like to read about it here. Until I hear from you, dear visitor, some gleanings, scratchings, fork&plate
‘Style,’ said Evelyn Waugh, ‘is not just avoiding the cliché. It’s avoiding the place where you can feel the cliché is being avoided.’
- in David Hare, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, Faber and Faber, London, 2005, p. 140
By engagement, I mean not so much an exposition, or a critique, or both, but a path that cuts across these texts, a thought that attempts to find its way through them. Needless to say, this approach might be seen as involving a certain degree of violence. Yet this may well amount to nothing other than the irreducible degree of violence involved in the work of interpretation, which remains the sole form of fidelity toward what is most thought provoking.
- Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004, p. 16
I once with, with Howard Brenton, wrote a play called Pravda, about a mad South African newspaper owner played by Anthony Hopkins as a kind of maquette for his subsequent Hannibal Lecter. Anxious lest our fictional proprietor be confused with a conspicuous real-life Australian, the Board of the nervous National Theatre insisted that we consult a QC. ‘Well,’ said this highly intelligent man, ‘as far as I can see, your play portrays a megalomaniac psychopath who drags his newspapers downmarket, who has no concern for editorial standards, who has no sexual pleasure except in public humiliation and violent dismissal of his staff, and whose only real interest is in the accumulation of a massive, unscrupulous and anti-social fortune for himself. If Rupert Murdoch really wants to step forward and identify himself as the hero of the play, then my advice would be: let him.’
In fact, Murdoch’s response to the play was characteristic. In Pravda, our Lambert le Roux adopts British citizenship specifically in order to be able to own British newspapers. Please not, six months after our opening night Murdoch decided to become an American, protesting that, like Lambert, he went through ‘the normal channels, albeit at unusual speed.’ Murdoch effectively treated our play not as a work of art, but as an inspirational business plan. Is Murdoch the only man on earth who could actually asset-strip a satire?
- David Hare, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, Faber and Faber, London, 2005, pp. 127-8
if metaphysics, as a metaphysics of the ground, and of subjectivity – of subjectivity as constituting the very ground for the objectivity of objectal nature – is no longer possible, if philosophy can no longer turn to subjectivity as the transcendental site revealing the conditions of possibility of experience, and of beings as such and as a whole as a realm of objects, can it not undergo a transformation and reinvent itself, precisely out of this “crisis” of foundation? Can we not think the future of metaphysics, and the possibility of ontology, out of this very event, the event of un-grounding? And so, before proceeding with the rites of burial of philosophy, before declaring its death irreversible, and its new life as science – and, once again, that which, in the current institutional, professional, and cultural landscape, seems to testify to the good health of philosophy, in my mind only confirms the diagnosis I have just formulated – let us at least consider the possibility of a philosophy which, neither metaphysics in the sense of grounding, nor philosophy of science, nonetheless remains in relation to science, at once absolutely different from it and coextensive with it. What sort of relation would that be?
It is a relation born of this “crisis” of foundation. Yet because it is a relation, it does not coincide simply with a collapsing, whether understood as total collapse, or as a collapsing of the one (philosophy) into the other (science). Neither grounding (fondement) nor collapsing (effondrement), it is a relation of what, following Deleuze, we shall call an un-grounding (effondement). This concept is indicative of a twofold gesture, of a double possibility: the possibility of situating philosophy in relation to science anew, first of all; and, in close connection with this first possibility, the possibility of reasserting philosophy as ontology on the basis of a distinction in being between the actual, or the empirical (and the science it enables), and the virtual or transcendental horizon (which philosophy brings out) from which the former unfolds.
…
the transcendental no longer refers back to a transcendental subjectivity, but to the real as such. In effect, the transcendental no longer designates the conditions of possibility of (subjective) experience, nor the conditions of possibility of phenomena themselves. It now designates their real conditions of existence and is concerned with their actual generation and production.
…
The transcendental is therefore a dimension of the real itself.
- Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004, pp. 21-2
February 04 2012
the shame of it, the shame of there being a grey area
American scientists from Princeton University have found out how much money do I need a man for happiness.
It turned out to achieve full satisfaction from life, you need to earn 75,000 dollars a year, which amounts to 6,250 dollars a month, or about 190 thousand rubles. In this case, the excess of the threshold income is no longer adds happiness, and more positive experiences of wealthy people relate purely to their personal characteristics.
- from here
“The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture”
by Andrew Keen, Doubleday / Currency, 2007
January 26 2012
lynching, piracy, decapitation, abject media = subjection … and excerpts from Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
while nearby: piracy -
while art means action now
and action means decapitation
- the ritual slaying of Ronald McDonald
which could be the following:
is at least what the following wants needs likes follows shares and
adverts to in a culture of “distracted tactility” [Rachel Lee after Michael Taussig, 1991]
“This reminded Tengo of a certain event, something from the distant past that he would recall now and then. Something he could never forget. But he decided not to mention it. It would have been a long story. And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.”
- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011, p. 72
“The concepts of time, space, and possibility.
“Tengo knew that time could become deformed as it moved forward. Time itself was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape. One period of fime might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and short. Occasionally, the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order itself could vanish entirely. Sometimes things that should not be there at all might be added onto time. By adjusting time this way to suit their own purposes, people probably adjusted the meaning of their existences. In other words, by adding such operations to time, they were able – but just barely – to preserve their own sanity. Surely, if a person had to accept the time through which he had just passed uniformly in the given order, his nerves could not bear the strain. Such a life, Tengo felt, would be sheer torture.
“Through the expansion of the brain, people had acquired the concept of temporality, but they simultaneously learned ways in which to change and adjust time. In parallel with their ceaseless consumption of time, people would ceaselessly reproduce time that they had mentally adjusted. This was no ordinary feat. No wonder the brain was said to consume forty percent of the body’s total energy!”
- Ibid., p. 275
my bookmark reads: strike!
TRIPLE DIP – STRIKE
“They’re both policemen now. Not too long ago, my uncle even received official commendation as an outstanding officer – thirty years of continuous service, major contributions to public safety in the district and to improvement of the environment. He was featured in the paper once for saving a stupid dog and her pup that wandered into a rail crossing.”
…
“The ones who did it can always rationalise their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
- Ibid., pp. 292-293
“I am a part of this world, and this world is a part of me.”
- Ibid., p. 855
January 22 2012
a season of birthdays, peppered with incident, highlights in my salt barrel include: organs and records, a hand, an absence of art, after maths, scoping out company offices, dinners of froth, jelly & Christ’s decomposition . find Alice
January 17 2012
January 15 2012
January 05 2012
Crutchless Massages or impotence in the face of the architectural anathema that is Q Theatre
“Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note – and don’t play one note unless you’ve got a reason to play it.”
- John Cope (aka Mark Hollis)
December 23 2011
December 13 2011
November 16 2011
from a letter to Emerson
I always wanted to make a brand of chilli chutney and call it Chattanooga Chilli Chutney.
Cherr!
Because in my research I found that the world’s first patented mechanical vibrator was the Chattanooga.
It ran off steam, coal-powered, I think.
It was enormous and as noisy as a railway steam-engine.
The chutney would have boasted a graphic depicting said device in all its industrial era splendour and gloriously inventive impracticality.
It seems the steam-powered part was sheer invention, now that with my interest refreshed, I return to the subject.
It was electromechanical, stood about two metres tall and required two men to operate it.
It was considered a medical treatment to bring “hysterical” women to involuntary orgasm, so relieving them of the symptoms of their hysteria, or womb disease.
No, even this is not true.
It appears that opinion is divided over which of the two early models bore the name Chattanooga, either the steam-powered, coal-fired, or the electromechanical:
The Chattanooga is a particularly famous model; it stood nearly 2m tall and required a couple of men to operate it. Being steam-powered, the engine of the machine was located in a small room and two men shoveled coal into the furnace and monitored the steam temperature, pressure, and thrust required to drive the Chattanooga. The engine room was separated from the doctor’s room by a wall which had a hole in it. A mechanical arm extended from the engine through the wall and into the consulting room where the doctor controlled it and used the vibrating arm to administer the appropriate genital massage to the grateful patient.
- from here
George Taylor, who must be one of my predecessors, I will claim him as one, was the inventor.
See the attached images for the two models.
The table version is merely the ‘interface’ and not the engine itself.
The standard version is the electromechanical.
Housefires were not uncommon where the latter was deployed, since the gentle art of insulation had not yet been brought to any common level of acceptance, so that the wires powering the device were left dangerously bare.
- fig. 1, the electromechanical
- fig. 2, the interface to the steam-powered, coal-fired
November 09 2011
November 02 2011
October 23 2011
faux pas
Good evening.
I’m coming to you this
evening from
Tauranga, and
there is a
sea
of black here.
October 22 2011
October 16 2011
Pig Blood Organ
- Matthew Herbert’s Organ by Matlock
October 12 2011
portrait of the interior of a car… of a city meant for cars and dogs… veering towards pink in the end
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