Category Archives: theory

Note to self: check connection between Paul Virilio’s concept of pure war and the military-industrial complex to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Tip of the hat to Kris Melis.

For now: some Google connections of which the strongest is the one by Nick Spencer:

Despite multiple claims that the era of postmodernity represents a radical shift in the epistemology and ontology of western societies, many commentators stress the continuities between postmodernism and earlier historical periods. Such a project either takes the form of discerning postmodernism avant la lettre – say in the literary texts of Cervantes, Sterne, or Joyce, or the philosophies of the pre-Socratics – or of assessing traces and residues from the political, cultural, and philosophical past which remain within contemporary western culture. In this latter respect, the legacy of romanticism has been particularly strong. Even those elements which are apparently unique to postmodernism – the technologization of experience and the decentering of subjectivity, to name but two – are partly derivative of romanticist notions such as the mystification of electricity and scientific devices, and the awareness of unconscious forces which can overwhelm and fragment the subject. –Nick Spencer, Clausewitz and Pynchon: Post-Romantic War in Gravity’s Rainbow, via here.

Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-Thon

Today marks the beginning of the Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-Thon, hosted by Harry Tuttle at Unspoken Cinema.

“Contemplative Cinema” is defined as “the kind that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and star system.” Though the Blog-a-Thon runs throughout January, the entries are already gathering nicely, and even better, IMHO, many of the voices are entirely new to me.

Bonus for French speakers: A concurrent discussion, “Cinéma Contemplatif?,” is rolling along in Le Forum des Cahiers du Cinéma. –via Greencine

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them

Grotto in the Bomarzo gardens, Italy

At this moment someone in Uzbekistan or in Zimbabwe is writing a book which reveals more about life on earth than one year of television or a ton of newspapers …The Scream by Munch or a story by Kafka predict more than a thousand futurologists, a chapter by Proust reveals more than a hundred analytical sessions, a page of Kawabata tells more about eroticism than 10 Kinsey reports. Poetry, fiction, imagination, it’s always about – as Marianne Moore has stated inimitably – imaginary gardens with real toads in them, and try catching those. — The Abduction of Europe (1993) – Cees Nooteboom

Take pleasure in change and transitoriness

Le Voyageur (1972) – Schizo
cover of the 7″ vinyl

“Le Voyageur“/Torcol (1972) is a seven inch single by Heldon. It features Nietzsche lyrics recited by Deleuze on music by Richard Pinhas:

“He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth – and not even as a traveller towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.” –from The Wanderer, in the first volume of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human

The track is available on:

Radio Nova presents: Underground Moderne (2001) – Various [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

More here.

Toilet philosophy

Human waste has been of interest to a number of philosophers and I call them — and I do not mean this in a derogatory way — toilet philosophers.

Among them are Georges Bataille, who André Breton called “excremental philosopher” and Peter Sloterdijk, famous for his remarks on the role of the arse in his book Critique of Cynical Reason.

Then there was Slavoj Žižek in a review of a book of Timothy Garton Arsh who connected toilets to Buñuel to Lévi-Strauss to Hegel to Erica Jong.

Underground canon

Underground U.S.A. (2002) – Xavier Mendik, Steven Jay Schneider
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Whether defined by the carnivalesque excesses of Troma studios (The Toxic Avenger), the arthouse erotica of Radley Metzger and Doris Wishman, or the narrative experimentations of Abel Ferrara, Melvin Van Peebles, Jack Smith, or Harmony Korine, underground cinema has achieved an important position within American film culture. Often defined as “cult” and “exploitation” or “alternative” and “independent,” the American underground retains separate strategies of production and exhibition from the cinematic mainstream, while its sexual and cinematic representations differ from the traditionally conservative structures of the Hollywood system. Underground U.S.A. offers a fascinating overview of this area of maverick moviemaking by considering the links between the experimental and exploitative traditions of the American underground.

I would recommend readers to pay particular attention to those articles [in Underground U.SA. by Steven Jay Schneider] that take issue with the representation of sexuality and graphic nudity in the underground canon such as [Elena] Gorfinkel’s work on taste and aesthetic distinction, Sargeant’s research on voyeurism and sadistic transgression and Michael J. Bowen’s work on the violent eroticism of what he terms the ‘roughie’. The work on the sexploitation film is interesting in terms of a discussion of taste formations and cultural distinctions, but more importantly (in terms of the aim of this book), the sexploitation film is interesting due to the fact that such films provide a ‘shadow history to cultural and social events’ of particular historical periods. —Rebecca Feasey, Scope

And a Richard Armstrong review at Flickhead.

Things exist by mistake

Slavoj Žižek (1949 – ): I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where – you know, the idea there is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. And i like this idea spontaneously very much. The fact that its not just nothing, things are out there, – it means something went terribly wrong. that, – what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe. That things exist by mistake. And im even ready to go to the end, and to claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake and go to the end, and we have a name for this, its called love. Isn’t love precisely this kind of cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted that with this notion of “I love the world, universal love”…I dont like the world, i dont know how..- Basically I’m somewhere inbetween, I hate the world or I’m indifferent towards it. But the whole of reality its just it, its stupid, it is out there, I dont care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act, love is not;”I love you… all”. Love means i pick something out, and its again this structure of imbalance, even if this something is a small detail, a fragile individual, person, I say, “I love you more than anything else. In this quite formal sence, love is evil. — Youtube clip, transcription source

The Abduction of Europe (1993) – Cees Nooteboom

Abduction of Europa (1908) – Félix Vallotton

I’m currently reading Cees Nooteboom‘s 1993 essay bundle De Ontvoering van Europa (Eng: The Abduction of Europe), dedicated to the question of a European identity.

I read Nooteboom’s Rituelen while in my twenties and I had largely forgotten about him. It strikes me now how he is probably one of the foremost intellectual writers of Europe and also a true European in the sense that he divides his time between Amsterdam, Berlin, and the Spanish islands. Petri Liukkonen says that he “has been frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature”.

Here is my translation of an excerpt on France’s fear of American cultural imperialism (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Dallas and Dynasty):

… if we give Europe’s indigenous cable television moguls a chance, we will soon enough prove that we are capable of producing television series equally bad as those in America, and that the French secret weapon of MacBaudrillard and MacDerrida is wreaking just as much havoc at American universities as harmless McDonald’s in Europe.

See also: Rituals at the Existence Machine and All Soul’s Day at This Space.

P. S. : It’s interesting to note that the concept of abduction as it relates to the mythological figure of Europa is interchangeable with the terms rape and seduction. The Wikipedia article states that “the [latter] two being near-equivalent in Greek myth.” I had encountered this before when reading about Don Juan who is depicted as either a seducer, rapist or murderer, depending on who’s doing the analysis. The American Production code (the forerunner of the MPAA, the current American film rating system) said of the depiction of seduction and rape (intimately locating them in one entry): “They should never be more than suggested, and only when essential for the plot, and even then never shown by explicit method.”

Admittedly I may be influenced too much by 1990s feminist discourse in locating these similarities, but here is one more pointer: History of Rape, Abduction, and Seduction in European Art and Literature

What is realism in literature?

Parents: realism – literature

Truth (1870) – Jules Joseph Lefebvre

By definition, fiction is “untruth.” Since untruth is contrary to truth, and because truth is a virtue, does that not make untruth found in fiction a vice? –anonymous catholic quote

In literature realism refers to verisimilitude of narrative (whether or not a story is believable) or to verisimilitude of characterization (whether or not the characters are believable). Verisimilitude was introduced in literature when – in the latter half of the second millenium – the novel replaced the romance as primary literary genre.

The novel or the modern novel introduced realism in fiction, at a time when much fiction was marked by fantasy (romances such Amadís de Gaula, Le Morte d’Arthur). The devices used to introduce realism were the epistolary technique (Pamela), true adventure (Crusoe) and psychological development of the characters (Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black). Literary realism as a full-fledged literary movement (first called realism and then naturalism) came into being in Europe in the 19th century. In France the movement’s main exponents were Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola, in Scandinavia there was August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen and in Russia Chekhov. The novelist George Eliot introduced realism into English fiction; as she declared in Adam Bede (1859), her purpose was to give a “faithful representation of commonplace things.” Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were the pioneers of realism in the United States.

Renunciation of a vocation

Having read about Rimbaud’s life (and how he had stopped writing altogether) in Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, I re-read The Aesthetics of Silence by Susan Sontag. It’s incredible how Sontag – who was only 34 at the time this essay was published – reaches an impeccable style and an enormous lucidity. An excerpt:

The scene changes to an empty room.

Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school-teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. —…

The essay is published in the bundel Styles of Radical Will, which also features the seminal The Pornographic Imagination (1967).

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad