Yearning

As I was watching the new Del Toro film on dvd, Hell Boy II: The Golden Army, it was impossible not to think of a riff on Heidegger's writings wherein the status of the human (and presumably the constitution of the perception of not only our being/ontology but those forces which escape us and yet somehow still seem to participate in our formation) was to proceed from gods (in terms of, e.g., ancient Greece/Rome), then in medeval times to creatures, then to modernist abstractions of fields of force. Somehow that tripartite series I attribute to Hubert Dreyfus. In searching for that movement, I came across the Dreyfus website, an article on Heidegger and Foucault, which I think addresses at least the latter part of the declension (I use 'declension' purposely but as a more ambiguous term than simply deterioration or degradation - though perhaps there is that - but also in this sense of the dictionary: a bending, sloping, or moving downward: land with a gentle declension toward the sea, keeping in mind Foucault's declining nature of the human face as it is washed away at the edge of the ocean in The Order of things):

The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger's focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects.

And yet. our tech seems intent on reviving all manner of creatures. And for that matter, for the subject, and consciousness, to become another species of matter, the great death drive of the human, if we can be some Freudian about it for a sec.m meeting up with the great 'yearning' of matter to become conscious.

Dead Writing (discontinued) --move to 'creatures'

at least for now. I was going to discuss the NY Review of Books article by Zadie Smith and some of the work around hauntology and the new world of objecthood and it's (and materialism generally) co-terminus fabrication of both in 'selfhood' (and vice versa). But I've lost the urge. Besides the dead (and the undead, and the never-dead) are always there, waiting., both ahead and behind us. So no fear there of being surpassed/sublimed/sublated or any other aspect of -rosa becoming sub- or super-. Check out some of the (European) blogs on 'speculative materialism.' Funny how place is not erased even on the net.

Dead Reading

Three different items have recently oriented me to the title above. 'Nekros' mean 'dead body' in the original Greek. While not an oxymoron, the term 'dead body,' from the point of view of a die-hard materialist would have to seem somewhat problematic, perhaps needing to find a necessity to disavow life as any special category . Or for that matter, 'dead' as a special category, both being (for that hard-dead materialist) simply positions on a continuum of some sort of movement/non-movement. And while there can be forms of life, can there be forms of death? One would suppose that our straw materialist would reply that is a barrier (not even a barrier really, which after all assumes that there is something, a threshold, abyssal/abyssmal or not, on another 'side': there would only be here, within an imminent monad I suppose.

But nevertheless, necrological concerns abound, popular forms of death-in-living, such as vampires, and zombies, as the chiasmatic form life-in-death. In fact we would not be too remiss to say that these two forms (that is, death-in-life and life-in-death) set up the polar co-ordinates between which most of thought and culture moves. (One might also say in concordance with this that the mostly-hidden CONVERGENCE and folding of those two forms into the apocalyptic, forms another massif under modernist western archepelagos: various fundamentalisms and/or the technologial singularity seem to escape from all sides of the valley of consciousness and genealogy. leaving us to wax nostalgically about when we were alive, or, in the case of our objects and gadgets, when we were not-alive.

I just finished Lucius Shepard's The Golden, a fabulous tale of intrigue within the vampire world ... and if you've read any Shepard you know that the writing itself is often fabulous and with a tinge of the hysterical which only a vampire novel can provoke in its depictions of the realms of the dead. But of course hysteria is somewhat appropriate, since the term itself denotes an ecstatic wandering of desire outside of itself, a dislocation.

The other two items are a changing of the status of the object (material) in some art discourses and a recent literary review by zadie smith in the New York Review of Books on the changing (or not) nature of narrative ...but next time.

Ink on the Edge, Skinned a Life

For the eyedrum show Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies, Fehta Murghana had a piece from her estate on the problematics of hoaxing, This is a portion of a piece left out, on tattooing and psychogeography.
RC

This photo is from material left out of Bladerunner, the Ridley Scott movie. Here we see the replicant Roy Batty. Of most interest are the tattoos on the upper left side side of his chest, looking like circular formations, quixotic, indecipherable really, designs which we can guess to relate to his short lived career as a spaceship pilot. Given the rest of the movies thematics of remembrance, false memory, questions of identity, it would be natural to relate the marks to identity somehow. Knowing that the replicants were basically short lived prisoners, conducting the work of a space faring civilization in conditions where 'normal' humans could not or did not choose to work may help.

Perhaps they were attachment points for neural control devices. But for our purposes they function exactly the same as traditional tattoos: boundaries markers, points de capiton sewing up memory and place, bringing them to a visible head.

In the essay acccompanying the book Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, V. 2, Alexie Plutser-Sarno makes the point that the criminal's tattoos speak for him/her, that when the criminals meet for the first time, or they interact with authorities, it is the tattoos which communicate: "The tattoos are like a mass media complex purveying propaganda opposed to the authorities"; from the thief's point of view words "only obscure the meaning of the abolutely reliable information that his tattoos communicate." The tattoos form an ideal world, and an ideal 'I' and a stable state of identity that precedes and bests the human's interior view of himself. Batty's markings, like the crop markings in the fields of England further eschew representation strategies for geometrization, a final unlocking of a unstable state of mudane existence onto some otherworlds/interdimensional state of reality and a re-loading into geometry, an anonymous (oddly enough, odd since it is backed by the currency of the person standing there yet made evanescent in her reality of presence) fateless mode delinked from death and loss, turned to figure. And perhaps the closest a replicant can get to knowledge of self, which is, if we are to believe the western traditions of The Book, also the way through and into the divine, the skin marking the only real boundary.

Round in Circles

It is most often (inevitably one would say) that there are levels of accountability in society and levels of un-accountability. Since these apparently economic concepts arise through concepts and constructions of 'credit' or credulousness or investment in certain plans of reality (yes, not inappropriate to call all this 'theological' as Agamben and others have noted), any alternative accounts of reality seem 'bankrupt' -- and in a most literal sense. What previously were thought of as 'signs from the heavens' are always thought of, sociologically, as symptoms of cultural and social pressures, tensions and dislocations. The 'economy' as we have come to love and hate it, is always fenced round with baton wielding angels, ministerial enforcers of P.O.V. for the great Treasury To Come. Pursuit of any unacounted-for (and un-wanted) signs will surely lead to a sort of moral bankruptcy.

Is it any wonder then that the resurgence of the 'paranomal' (other than its perennial ebb and flow) seems tied to the free-floating economy of the web, where credit, either in its citational form or its monetized form, seems to be undergoing a phase shift into some other sort of creature (recent national and global events would attest to this also)?

I recently curated and wrote a catalog entry for a show called 'Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies'. You can find the result of that over at FORT!da? books or just off of the Public Domain site. Of course it could also be the case that I have 'symptomatized' something here also. In the distancing of this theorizing about it, it is all be inevitable.

It will be interesting to see the reactions of folks to the show itself which opens in a couple of weeks at eyedrum art and music gallery.

Unfortunately, one thing which I planned but did not have time to work into the show was tattooing and psychogeography and the 'talking object' and diagram as is now being discussed in certain art theory circles.

here was the original call for the show:

Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies

If nothing else, perhaps it can be said that modernity is about diagrams,
schematics, blueprints, Rorschalk cards, flow charts, maps, floorplans and
all the other graphic devices designed to simplify and link the real,
material world with the abstract world of thought and feeling. The same
thing might be said of the visual arts in general.

The infamous crop circles started mysteriously appearing in the fields of
England in the mid-Seventies. Over the past thirty plus years, they have
become the source of much speculation, wonderment, hoaxing: were they made
by artists? By aliens? By intelligent plasmas? Unknown terrestrial forces?
Covert military operations? As with everything, your answers depended on
your proclivities and stations in life. At the very least, they were
beautiful and 'artistic' and SEEMED to be some form of cosmograms, in the
same league with mandalas, Mayan city constructions, Egyptian
mega-constructions, archaic native American pictographs and other nativistic
schematics which seemed to link an astronomical world above with the
terrestrial world below . and to imbue those diagrams with a purported
spiritual power.

All these types of 'ground-based' diagrams also have in common implicit
psychological connections with the land even to the point of creating those
connections ex nihilio. The term 'psychogeography' was coined some years
ago to account for the feeling that the 'beach under the pavement' somehow makes
itself felt in ideas, feelings, and 'spirits'.

The visual arts show at eyedrum art and music gallery will explore these
connections and forms: What are these forms? Do they have effects and
affects or is 'aesthetic' sufficient? Can they be created anew? Does
technology facilitate these 'cosmic figures' and give them new voice or
does it kill them off in paving them over and leave us with a dead schematic ...
which nevertheless still tries to speak?

Time (and Catastrophe)

In order to keep this thing rolling, I'm going to re-post something from another abortive blog attempt. Everyone knows that if a blog is hot/for the next five minutes no one cares (as if anyone cared anyway). But the rationale for THIS particular post is a book I'm reading for another book poroject called APOCALYPSE THEN: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World by Arthur Williamson, on the idea of the foundational aspects of 'apocalypse' --- true, not exactly the same as catastrophe but I don't have time to for explication of text at the moment.
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Catastrophe

"Nature is constantly straining against its chains: probing for weak points, cracks, faults, even a speck of rust. The forces at its command are of course colossal as a hurricane and as invisible as a baccilli. At either end of the scale, natural energies are capable of opening breaches that
can quickly unravel the cultural order."
Mike Davis / Dead Cities

Catastrophe works like fingerprinting techniques at a crime scene. ‘Dusting for prints’ reveals that ‘absence’ is never absolute and that both the innocent and the guilty hover around every scene of misery and disaster, occasionally one being mistaken for the other. But in the end, they are all human prints and the grief is always contained and analyzed (‘triaged’ as they say, in the early accounting that medical emergencies require), and packed away as trauma requires. Or worked out as ‘just keeping going’ requires. The military draws a cordon around the diseased area and, eventually, rebuilding commences…

But natural catastrophes (if one were sufficiently scientific and objective, every catastrophe would be seen as ‘natural’) don’t really leave fingerprints. In fact, they are more like the dusting substance itself, revealing, as Mike Davis’s quote above alludes to, latent breaches and cracks in the social order, the cracks that underlie every human endeavor but which remain muted or covered over and which all human order is devoted to maintaining.

Our cities are monuments to this octopus like quest by humans to search out every exposable facet of natural potentiality and put it to work in the service of a human motivation. (Usually these days that exploration is in the service of capital acquisition; it has becomes hard to extricate that aspect of late modern life from any other aspect of life, some are ready to tell us there is no difference anymore—and, really, never was a difference).

But while the human agenda is always to quell the urgency of the natural (one suspects that the military is merely the outgrowth of this extremely long term human trend: ‘repelling the intruder’ covers much ground). ‘Global survival’ is merely shorthand for technical competence and engineering .. that is, more, but better, levees, earthquake predicative apparatuses, mid-ocean tsumnami sensors, satellite surveillance.

The Great Missoula Flood

On TV last night there was a special about an area in Washington state called the Scablands. The topography of the area is so strange that it took a few years before scientists think they discovered what caused these weird rock formations that covered an area hundreds of miles in length. Apparently 20, 000 years ago a gigantic glacier some 23 miles wide and 500 ft or more high formed in one of the valleys during a period of extreme glaciation. They theorize that the huge wall of ice stopped up the river going through the valley and caused a lake to form bigger than two of the Great Lakes. At great pressure, the case at the bottom of this immense frozen block, the water does not freeze at its normal 32 degrees Fahrenheit but manages to stay liquid till it is 31 or 30 degrees. There it slowly begins its regime of crackdom, slowly but surely bringing down the huge mass, its very size inculcating its demise. Nevertheless, the cracks don’t signal a permanent new regime since the old conditions are still present and the mass slowly begines to form and rise again.

Catastrophe of the south

I’ve written before about the apocalyptic mindset of the southerner. I recently came across a southern artist who had concentrated his large canvases on southern disasters and it made me realize the special relationship that the south has to catastrophe, all the way from it’s founding as a center of slave activity, to floods and hurricanes, to the fighting and subsequent defeat in the civil war, to economic collapse of king cotton and so on. No wonder the peculiar mind set of the old south, the feeling of being put-upon by outsiders, and the isolation that came before that, the inferiority complex and the aggression that often accompanies that state of mind.

The final end of catastrophe is often disappearance, perhaps not even all at once that ways of life succumb and transmute or just are destroyed. In fact, it would be unusual for catastrophe to have THAT much power. More often it’s simply the power to command abandonment, a small tricking away of power.

The Relation of the Extreme(s) to the (always coming) Disaster

The radical ends (primordial and eschatological) are always far before and far after. The current cultural fascination of the extreme in all areas is perhaps in its own way a recognition of those radical possibilities, but in an immanentized version of the old transcendental, the always present possibility of being un-homed and even the courting of the uncanny through the extreme, the possibility of strtetching the human to the limit of sensation, cognition, possibility even to the point of death, the only really firm extreme that anyone will experience. (Even then it’s problematic whether it could be called an experiencing of a limit.)

It seems appropriate to start a blog to try to get Public Domain, Inc.'s new publication series some visibility., so here goes.

You can go here to find out about upcoming releases, and material relating to the contents of the publications themselves and various other miscellanea.

To see the first three releases (more planned and info on those later) you can go to
http://www.pd.org and scroll down to the bottom of the page (and visit some of the other features at the site if you wish).

From the inaugural release page:

Strictly speaking, Freud's observation in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, of the child's tossing of objects (shouting, Freud thought, 'FORT!' or gone in German) and subsequent reeling back in ('da', or there), becomes problematized at the beginning of the twenty first century. One does not need Freud to know that objects (and subjects) thrown out may or may not find their way back -- and if they do come back it is often in the guise of a haunting (if it makes you feel better, you may call it an 'effect'). This playful sending out and receiving back, or not, or in a burnished form, marks a new, apparently gravity-free stage of history, where even the fundaments may return eventually, even continually, perhaps heralding (as a purported non-appearance) some form of the Eternal Return, much feared/beloved by Nietzsche. But if so, all appears in that tight nexus that Benjamin examined in the aura, a simultaneous mixture of the very distant within the very near, a glamour which refuses to go away and perhaps bewitches to a greater extent than ever before but hidden, exerting subterranean pulls within the flows of our machines.

But what is 'writing' if not the pulsations of these powerful flows and folds of temporality and spatiality, writing forming the liminality and false intimacy of a Mobius strip, forever stitching along the border of inside and outside, nearest and furthest, object and subject, and all the other metaphysical dyads that have whirled through the human mind probably from the beginning of the time when there began to be such a thing as the human mind.

There, in that problematic -- fascinating, fabulous, dead yet undying --stroke between, there is where this new/old venture resides, the skototropic surplus mass that can never be fully moved past the stroke . . . and yet never fully assimilated.

There, write there.

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stay tuned, more to come.