April 20th, 2009 |
Hegel
From the Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics: "Art liberates the real import of appearances from the semblance and deception of this bad and fleeting world, and imparts to phenomenal semblances a higher reality, born of mind."
April 17th, 2009 |
Adorno's Graven Images
From Adorno's Aesthetic TheoryAlong the trajectory of its rationality and through it, humanity becomes aware in art of what rationality has erased from memory and of what its second reflection serves to remind us. The vanishing point of this development—admittedly an aspect only of modern art—is the insight that nature, as something beautiful, cannot be copied. For natural beauty as something that appears is itself image. Its portrayal is a tautology that, by objectifying what appears, eliminates it.
April 13th, 2009 |
Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order at Key WestShe sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
rnThe song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
rnBut it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
rnAnd sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
rnFixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
April 11th, 2009 |
The Assumption
From Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, a stunning discussion of the relationship between the Christian figure of The Assumption to spirit and matter:."...the question naturally arrises for the psychologist: what has become of the characteristic relation of the mother-image to the earth, darkness, the abysmal side of the bodily man with his animal passions and instinctual nature, and to "matter" in general? The declaration of the dogma comes at a time when the achievements of science and technology, combined with a rationalistic and materialistic view of the world, threaten the spiritual and psychic heritage of man with instant annihilation. Humanity is arming itself, in dread and fascinated horror, for a stupendous crime. Circumstances might easily arise when the hydrogen bomb would have to be used and the unthinkably frightful deed became unavoidable in legitimate self-defense. In striking contrast to this turn of events, the Mother of God is now enthroned in heaven; indeed, her Assumption has actually been interpreted as a deliberate counterstroke to the materialist doctrinairism that provoked the chthonic powers in revolt. Just as Christ's appearance in his own day created a real devil and adversary of God out of what was originally a son of God dwelling in heaven, so now, conversely, a heavenly figure has split off from her original chthonic realm and takes up a counter-position to the titanic forces of the earth and the underworld that has been unleashed. In the same way that the Mother of God was divested of all the essential qualities of materiality, matter become completely de-souled, and this at a time when physics is pushing forward to insights which, if they do not exactly "de-materialize" matter, at least endue it with properties of its own and make its relation to the psyche a problem that can no longer be shelved. For just as the tremendous advancement of science led at first to a premature dethronement of mind and to an equally ill-considered deification of matter, so it is this same urge for scientific knowledge that is now attempting to bridge the huge gulf that has opened out between the two Weltanschauungen. The psychologist inclines to see in the dogma of the Assumption a symbol which, in a sense, anticipates this whole development. For him the relationship to the earth and to matter is one of the inalienable qualities of the mother archetype. So that when a figure that is conditioned by this archetype is represented as having been taken up into heaven, the realm of the spirit, this indicates a union of earth and heaven, or of matter and spirit. The approach of natural science will almost certainly be from the other direction: it will see in matter itself the equivalent of spirit, but this "spirit" will appear divested of all, or at any rate most, of its known qualities, just as the earthly matter was stripped of its specific characteristics when it staged its entry into heaven. Nevertheless, the way will gradually be cleared for a union of the two principles. Understood concretely, the Assumption is the absolute opposite of materialism. Taken in this sense, it is a counterstroke that does nothing to diminish the tension between the opposites, but drives it to extremes."
...to be continued...
April 8th, 2009 |
8th Century Lacanian
From the Sufi poet Rabi'a:In love, nothing exists between breast and Breast.
Speech is born out of longing,
True description from the real taste.
The one who tastes, knows;
The one who explains, lies.
How can you describe the true form of Something
In whose presence you are blotted out?
And in whose being you still exist?
And who lives as a sign for your journey?
April 1st, 2009 |
Belly Music
From Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its DoublesMusic has an effect on snakes, not by means of the mental ideas it induces in them, but because snakes are elongated, coil up langorously on the ground, and touch the earth along almost the entire length of their bodies; thus the musical vibrations transmitted to Earth affect these bodies as a very subtle and a very long massage; well, I propose to treat the public like snakes.
March 28th, 2009 |
Financial Katrina
CUNY professor David Harvey discusses the current financial crisis.Until now, I've known Harvey largely through his books (The Postmodern Condition, The Limits of Capital) and his online lectures on Marx's Capital, which are fantastic and can be found here. It's a real treat, then, to be able to hear him talk about something as concrete as what's going on on Wall Street. It's no surprise that his basic point is a Marxist one, that the current crisis is secretly consolidating class power while appearing to do just the opposite. He traces it all back to the excess liquidity generated by capitalism's generation of surplus value, which encourages the creation of artificial markets as means of absorbing that leftover cash. Mortage-backed securities are, of course, the most timely example, but another great example he gives is the pollution rights market, the inanity of which is clear in that it enables people to buy and sell the rights to pollute the Earth. Rather than this surplus being used to actually improve the lives of citizens, it's reinvested in these artificial markets, which exponentially fuel the fire and untimately lead us to where we are now. Even now, though, in the thick of a crisis, he says, this cycle continues to drive circulation. As an example, Harvey mentions Mike Bloomberg, who has pledged to take a chunk of stimulus money and use it to "re-train" Wall Street executives, rather than using it to actually help the people most deeply affected by the crisis.
It is easy to see, then, how this quickly becomes a class phenomenon. One solution, Harvey says, is to somehow take that surplus out of the hands of what is now an incredible consolidation of power (only 5 banks left on Wall Street) and place it back in the hands of the people who made it—the workers. Even if only one bank were nationalized, giving the government the ability to control exactly where this money were going, a tremendous amount of money could be mobilized not towards further consolidating power but towards actually bettering people's lives. Definitely worth a listen.
Old News from meltsintoair.net
