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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 10 2012
there you see I would go so far as to say that the web project I am engaged with reads with love, reads you, read …
“There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging in to an electric circuit…This second way of reading’s quite different from the first, because it relates a book directly to what’s Outside. A book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery… This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything. . . is reading with love.”
- Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, quoted here
ideas of novelty & privacy – which I cite because they speak to my web project which I have not really spoken of here about which feel free to contact me, yours affectionately
“First you have to know how to admire; you have to rediscover the problems he poses, his particular machinery. It is through admiration that you will come to genuine critique… You have to work your way back to those problems which an author of genius has posed, all the way back to that which he does not say in what he says, in order to extract something that still belongs to him, though you also turn it against him. You have to be inspired, visited by the geniuses you denounce… In every modernity and every novelty, you find conformity and creativity; an insipid conformity, but also “a little new music”; something in conformity with the time, but also something untimely —separating the one from the other is the task of those who know how to love, the real destroyers and creators of our day. Good destruction requires love… You have to be able to love the insignificant, to love what goes beyond persons and individuals; you have to open yourself to encounters and find a language in the singularities that exceed individuals, a language in the individuations that exceed persons” (DI, 139-140).
- Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, quoted here
“We are uncovering a world of pre-individual, impersonal singularities. They are not reducible to individuals or persons, nor to a sea without difference. These singularities are mobile, they break in, thieving and stealing away, alternating back and forth, like anarchy crowned, inhabiting a nomad space. There is a big difference between partitioning a fixed space among sedentary individuals according to boundaries or enclosures, and distributing singularities in an open space without enclosures or properties. The poet Ferlinghetti talks about the fourth person singular: it is that to which we try to give voice… Philosophers often have a difficult time with the history of philosophy; it’s horrible, it’s not easy to put behind you. Perhaps a good way of dealing with the problem is to substitute a kind of staging for it. Staging means that the written text is going to be illuminated by other values, non-textual values (at least in the ordinary sense): it is indeed possible to substitute for the history of philosophy a theatre of philosophy… Precisely, by virtue of those criteria of staging or collage, it seems admissible to extract from a philosophy considered conservative as a whole those singularities which are not really conservative: that is what I did for Bergsonism and its image of life, its image of liberty or mental illness.” (DI, 142-144).
- Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, quoted here
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 27 2012
January 26 2012
designed to exude information slowly
there are people who can’t afford to hate.
the damned.
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 17 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 30 2011
Once Upon A Time – Life: the entry so narrow; the exit so wide as to be everywhere around… the ‘utopias’ of ‘never again,’ Houellebecq on Houellebecq on William Morris: a fairy tale (illustrated by some of the Morris-like works of David Mabb painted by Rajendra Sharma)
- from the painting Blue Engineering Object by David Mabb (2001). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
People’s voices never change, no more than the expressions in their eyes. Amid the generalised physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.
- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, Heinemann, London, 2011, p. 152
A few seconds can be enough to decide a life, or at least to reveal its main direction.
- Ibid., p. 158
- based on a Photograph by Mikhail Kaufman, David Mabb in William Morris Fruit Suit, photograph by Robin Forster (2002). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘It’s the market,’ Pernaut said with a wide, beaming, rancourless smile, going so far as to pat him on the shoulder.
- Ibid., p. 159
- from the painting Fruit by David Mabb (2000). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter, and easy to leave.
- Ibid., p. 163
- from the painting Morris Blue Willow/Popova Untitled by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘William Morris, according to all we know about him, was someone quite extraordinary.’
…
‘William Morris didn’t lead a very happy life, according to the usual criteria,’ Houellebecq continued. ‘However, all the accounts show him to be joyful, optimistic, and active. At the age of twenty-three he met Jane Burden, who was eighteen and worked as a painter’s model. He married her two years later, and considered going into painting himself before giving up this idea, not feeling gifted enough – he respected painting above all else. He built a house according to his own plans, in Upton, on the banks of the Thames, and decorated it to live there with his wife and their two young daughters. His wife was, according to all those who met her, a great beauty; but she wasn’t faithful. In particular she had a liaison with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. William Morris had a lot of admiration for him as a painter. At the end he came to live with them, and basically supplanted Morris in the conjugal bed. Morris then made the journey to Iceland, learned the language, and started translating the sagas. After a few years he came back, and decided to have it out with them. Rossetti agreed to leave, but something had broken, and never again was there any real carnal intimacy between the couple. He was already involved in several social movements, but he left the Social Democratic Federation, which appeared to him too moderate, to create the Socialist League, which openly defended communist positions, and right until his death he gave all his energy to the communist cause, with countless articles, lectures, and meetings.’
…
‘He wanted to abolish school, thinking that children would learn better in an atmosphere of total freedom; he wanted to abolish prisons, thinking that remorse would be sufficient punishment for the criminal. It’s difficult to read all those absurdities without a mixture of compassion and dismay. And yet, and yet … ‘ Houellebecq hesitated, searching for his words.
- from the carpet design United Colours of Benetton by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘Paradoxically, he had a certain success on the practical level. To put into practice his ideas on the return to artisanal production, very early on he created a firm for decoration and furniture; his employees worked much less than those in the factories of the time, which were nothing other than labour camps, but above all they worked freely and each was responsible for his task from start to finish. The essential principle of William Morris was that design and execution should never be separated, no more than they were in the Middle Ages. According to all the reports, the working conditions were idyllic: well-lit, well-aired workshops on the bank of a river.
- from the montage Transitional Monument by David Mabb (2004). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
All the profits were redistributed to the workers, except a small percentage which served to finance socialist propaganda. Well, against all expectations, success was immediate, including on the commercial level. After carpentery they became interested in jewellery, leatherwork, then stained-glass windows, cloth and tapestries, always with the same success: the firm Morris & Co. was constantly in profit, throughout its existence. This was achieved by none of the workers’ cooperatives that proliferated in the nineteenth century, be they the Fourierist phalansteries or Cabet’s Icarian community: not one of them managed to organise the efficient production of goods and foodstuffs. With the exception of the firm founded by William Morris you can only cite a succession of failures. Not to mention the communist societies that came later …’
…
- from the painting Head of a Peasant by David Mabb (2002) based on Kazimir Malevich’s Head of a Peasant. Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘What can undoubtedly be said is that the model of society proposed by William Morris certainly would not be utopian in a world where all men were like William Morris.’
- Ibid., pp. 173-175
- from the carpet design Lietuva by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
I was reading Houellebecq speaking through his character Houellebecq when William Morris came up in a completely different context. Adam Curtis, the film-maker responsible for All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, mentions Morris. But where? Is it in reference to Fourier in his blog article “Dream On” [here], or in the second of the Little Atoms audio interviews conducted with Curtis following the release of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace [here]?
And I am sure William Morris’s name came up a third time, in the same time frame, in connection with Félix Guattari.
I did find this Independent article by Sheila Rowbotham, however, which, along with having her delightful name to recommend it, contains the excellent phrase: “Both men reach out to the edge beyond what Morris called “Nowhere”.” [here]
November 13 2011
Jed’s father recalls Fourier between bouts of self-pity over the artificial anus, excerpted from Michel Houellebecq, with pictures by Henry Darger
We’ve mainly remembered the sexual theories of Fourier, and it’s true that they’re quite burlesque. It’s difficult to read Fourier with a straight face, with his stories of whirlwinds, fakiresses and fairies of the Rhine Army.
It’s hard to believe he had any disciples, people who took him seriously, who really thought of constructing a new model of society on the basis of his books. It’s incomprehensible if you try to see him as a thinker, because his thought is completely incomprehensible, but fundamentally Fourier isn’t a thinker, he’s a guru, the first of his kind, and, as with all gurus, his success came not from intellectual adherence to a theory but, on the contrary, from general incomprehension, linked with an inexhaustible optimism, especially on the sexual level: people need sexual optimism to an incredible degree. Yet Fourier’s real subject, the one which interests him above all else, isn’t sex, but the organisation of production. The big question he asks is: Why does man work?
What makes him occupy a determined place in the social organisation and agree to stay there and carry out his task? To this question, the liberals replied that it was the lure of profit, pure and simple [...] As for the Marxists, they didn’t reply at all, they weren’t even interested, and, besides, that’s what made communism fail: as soon as you got rid of the financial incentive, people stopped working, they sabotaged their task, absenteeism grew in enormous proportions. Communism never was able to ensure the production and distribution of the most elementary goods. Fourier had lived under the Ancien Régime, and he was conscious that, well before the appearance of capitalism, scientific research and technical progress had taken place, and that people worked hard, sometimes very hard, without being pushed by the lure of profit but by something, in the eyes of modern man, much vaguer; the love of God, in the case of monks, or more simply the honour of the function.
…
We defended the idea that a complex, ramified society, with multiple levels of organisation, like that proposed by Fourier, went hand in hand with a complex, ramified, multiple architecture that left space for individual creativity. We violently attacked Mies van der Rohe – who made empty, multi-purpose structures, the same ones that were going to be a model for the open spaces in businesses – and above all Le Corbusier, who tirelessly built concentration-camp-like spaces divided into identical cells that were suited [...] only for model prisons.
- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, William Heinemann, London, 2011, pp. 143-145
Cf. Adam Curtis on Fourier, here.
November 02 2011
freedom & laziness
For example, I hesitate between staying home and working or going out to a nightclub: these are not two separable ‘objects,’ but two orientations, each of which carries a sum of possible or even hallucinatory perceptions (not only of drinking, but the noise and smoke of the bar; not only of working, but the hum of the word processor and the surrounding silence …). And if we return to motives in order to study them for a second time, they have not stayed the same. Like the weight on a scale, they have gone up or down. The scale has changed according to the amplitude of the pendulum. The voluntary act is free because the free act is what expresses the entire soul at a given moment of its duration. That act is what expresses the self. Does Adam sin freely? In other words, at that instant his soul has taken an amplitude that is found to be easily filled by the aroma and taste of the apple, and by Eve’s solicitations. Another amplitude – one having retained God’s defense – is possible. The whole question turns on ‘laziness.’
- Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, trans. Tom Conley, Continuum, London, 2006, pp. 79-80
I am surprised I am not surprised
C’est incroyable. Le G20 – le sommet rassemblant les gouvernements les plus puissants du monde – se réunit demain pour discuter de la crise économique mondiale, et qui sponsorisent l’événement? Les banques et les entreprises!
October 16 2011
Pig Blood Organ
- Matthew Herbert’s Organ by Matlock
September 13 2011
what has happened is that the economy is being used as a weapon against democracy – what does ‘economy’ mean? mesh, grid, world wide web, social network
What some would call the death of the political is only the birth of a new world and new politics: the success of the 1970s reaction and the appearance of a “No Future” tendency linked to the creation of an Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) that neatly slices up the planet. With the IWC, individuals are all the more subjected since they cannot localise power. The world market is presented as an efficient instrument for putting poverty into a “grid” and “enmeshing” marginalisation. Despite the global grid overlaying the social universe, the revolution and hence hope are not things of the past.
- François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman, Columbia University Press, New York, 2010, p. 299
As Foucault had sketched it out, power is everywhere and first of all in us. We must “make do with it.”
- Ibid., pp. 299-300
June 22 2011
more! ,,, release non-commercially ”’
- SCOTT WALKER – WORLD PREMIERE OF NEW SCOTT WALKER SCORE TONIGHT; EXCERPT POSTED ONLINE
In advance of tonight’s world premiere of a new Scott Walker score, an excerpt has been posted online.
Appearing as part of a larger piece for Duet For One (a reimagination of Jean Cocteau’s famed monologue Duet For One Voice), the excerpt can now be heard at the foot of the page.
Full information for the run of performances at the Linbury Studio Theatre in London can be found below.
There are currently no plans for this score to be released commercially.
May 26 2011
92A … Next Steps: created 03:31 3.4.2009 released 00:00 28.4.2011
- courtesy wikileaks (note: GNZ = Government of New Zealand) #09WELLINGTON88
May 24 2011
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