Category Archives: theory

The Arcades Project arrived in the mail today

Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1927 – 1940) arrived in the mail today. See my entry at Jahsonic as well as my previous blog entry.

The first thing to catch my eye was this Coetzee review on the back cover:

“[The Arcades Project] suggests a new way of writing about a civilization using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above. And [Benjamin’s] call elsewhere for a history centered on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime…”What does The Arcades Project have to offer? The briefest of lists would include: a treasure hoard of curious information about Paris, a multitude of thought-provoking questions, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind’s trawl through thousands of books, succinct observations, polished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of subjects…and glimpses of Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as a compiler of a ‘magic encyclopedia’…[A] magnificent opus.”
–J. M. Coetzee, The Guardian

More appraisals from Harvard University Press

Carnography

Carnography (from latin “carnis” meaning “meat” and Greek grafi “writing”) is a neologism for writing, films, images, or other material that contains gratuitous amounts of bloodshed, violence and/or weaponry. It is named by analogy to pornography (although it is often mistaken for a portmanteau of “carnage” and “pornography”, this is not strictly the case), and is sometimes referred to as “violence porn”.

The mere depiction of violent acts, or of their results, does not necessarily qualify a film as carnography, just as the mere depiction of sex acts does not necessarily qualify a film as pornography. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnography [Nov 2006]

Slavoj Žižek and the chicken joke

Slavoj Žižek and the chicken joke from The Parallax View (2005):

“For decades, a classic joke has been circulating among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a grain of seed but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back, trembling and very scared—there is a chicken outside the door, and he is afraid it will eat him.“My dear fellow,” says his doctor,“you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?””

What is hauntology?

Spending time on Padraig’s Subject-barred brought the concept of hauntology to my attention via this piece titled The Gramophone’s Technological Uncanny which furthers Mark K-Punk’s investigation of sonic hauntology. In its origins hauntology is Jacques Derrida‘s neologism which is, in French, a pun on ontology and refers to, in the words of the Halflives website: “the paradoxical state of the specter, which is neither being nor non-being.”

Besides by K-Punk (here in a piece on Kubrick), hauntology is also used by Simon Reynolds here and by Woebot here.

No doubt the term goes back 1848 when Marx and Engels stated “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.” Haunting is about ghosts, and one of the first people to use the word haunting in a musical context was David Toop’s Haunted Weather : Music, Silence, and Memory (2004).

About four weeks ago, The Existence Machine also wondered just what is hauntology.

K-Punk thinks this is a good summary of the concept.

Someone wrote an Wikipedia entry on hauntology in October of 2006 but it was deleted by consensus. It finally passed Wikipedia stringent notability criteria in August 2007.

See hauntology at artandpop.

Lasse Braun, the sexual revolution came from the cold

Yesterday evening on Arte TV (along with the BBC, one of the best television stations in Europe) there were two documentaries about the sexual revolution in Europe. The first documentary was on Lasse Braun and it was followed by a documentary on the sexual revolution as it happened in Denmark, what I have called the ‘Danish experiment’ before. I fell asleep during this second part, so some notes about the Braun feature:

Worth remembering about Lasse Braun (born 1936) is that he spent some time in Breda, The Netherlands, which was his most fruitful time; that he was/is somewhat of an intellectual/guru type of person (equalling pornography to anarchism (a practice which started in 18th century Europe)) and that he is a sexually dominant who works with women who were/are in love with him.

Sensations (1976) – Lasse Braun

There was an interesting interview with Tuppy Owens (Britain’s leading “pro-sex” (a radical group within the post-feminist camp) writer and activist, comparable to the likes of Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright etc in America). Tuppy Owens appeared in the 1976 film Sensations, Braun’s first feature film and a good illustration of the shift of pre-1970s pornographic film (usually filmed on 8mm and 16mm formats and distributed in brothels and peep show booths) to porn chic films (filmed on professional stock and shown in ‘mainstream’ theatres.)

The end of the documentary saw Lasse Braun in Susan Block’s TV show, a very sad affair indeed.

In search of monomaniacs

Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art (2005) – Marina Van Zuylen
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

First sentence: “The early twentieth-century physician, philosopher, and psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859-1947) could be renamed the great poet of obsessive disorders…” (more)

Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idée fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina van Zuylen revives the term monomania to explore the therapeutic attributes of obsession. She introduces us to artists and collectors, voyeurs and scholars, hypochondriacs and melancholics, whose lives are run by debilitating compulsions that may become powerful weapons against the tyranny of everyday life.

In van Zuylen’s view, there is a productive tension between disabling fixations and their curative powers; she argues that the idée fixe has acted as a corrective for the multiple disorders of modernity. The authors she studies—Charles Baudelaire, Sophie Calle, Elias Canetti, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann among them—embody or set in motion different manifestations of this monomaniacal imperative. Their protagonists or alter egos live more intensely, more meaningfully, because of the compulsive pressures they set up for themselves. Monomania shows that transforming life into art, or at least into the artful, drives out the anxiety of the void and puts in its place something so orderly and meaningful that it can take on the aura of a religion. — from the publisher

Monomania word sample from Jahsonic.com:

The She Devils remains Pierre Louys’ most intense, claustrophobic work; a study of sexual obsession and monomania unsurpassed in its depictions of carnal excess, unbridled lust and limitless perversity. –Kathleen Murphy on Pierre Louÿs (1870 – 1925)

It’s this very monomania that gives [Sade’s] works their coldly granitic fascination, page after page of mechanized sexual debasement hewn out like so many identical slabs of stone, and it’s also why he can disturb the most open-minded reader. — Bruce Reid on Quills (2000) – Philip Kaufman

Poe’s tales, of course, fall into several classes; [the] third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. –Lovecraft via Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927)

From Art and Popular Culture:

In psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, mania) is a type of paranoia in which the patient has only one idea or type of ideas. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea or ideas. The originally French term was prominent in the 19th century and has come into disuse.

In colloquial terms, the term monomania is often attached to subcultures that to the general public appear esoteric. However, the differences between monomania and passion can be very subtle and difficult to recognize.

The term was first attested in the English language in 1823, probably on model of earlier French monomanie. [2]

See also: everyday life – escapism – addiction – obsession – creativity

There is now only one fantastic object: man

Quoting from Todorov’s book on the fantastic, page 173, Todorov seems to hold that Sartre has a similar view on fantastic literature to his own:

“According to Sartre, Blanchot and Kafka no longer try to depict extraordinary beings; for them,

there is now only one fantastic object: man. Not the man of religions and spiritualisms, only half committed to the world of the body, but man-as-given, man-as-nature, man-as-society, the man who takes of his hat when a hearse passes, who kneels in churches, who marches behind a flag.

The quote by Sartre is taken from his article on Blanchot’s récit Aminadab, published in Situations.

There’s no English equivalent of the French récit, which names a literary genre which tells of a single event. A few dense notes on what this word comes to mean for Blanchot in The Book to Come and elsewhere. —http://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/2006/06/what_is_the_rel.html

[Nov 2006]

Tolkien

Although I recently stated that I only want to do appreciative criticism, I want to investigate why I don’t like Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. I do like the fantastique and fantastic literature as defined by Todorov.

On a sidenote I’ve noticed that people who like Tolkien also like Harry Potter for which I have very little enthusiasm. Again, why?

Googling for Todorov (who is the leading authority on the fantastique) in combination with Tolkien brings up this:

Key critics such as Rosemary Jackson, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Tzvetan Todorov all see Tolkien as beyond their parameters. Jackson’s work is largely concerned with fantasy elements within realist literature, while Todorov and Brooke-Rose see Tolkien as a creator of secondary worlds, no longer a fantasy writer, but a creator of the marvellous, placing him outside their studies. –Sara Upstone via http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OON/is_4_23/ai_99848429

The keyword is marvelous, which according to Todorov does not belong in the fantastic/que category.

And googling for Tolkien and irrealism brings the Cafe Irreal:

[J].R.R. Tolkien, who not only had to create a whole new world from scratch, but one which he could only visit in his imagination. And yet Tolkien (and the various other genre fantasy and science-fiction writers) are not irreal writers. For, having imagined a new world, a Tolkien proceeds to make it so real and concrete for us (by giving it laws, mythologies and governments) that we could visit it, if it existed, like we would visit an exotic island — surprised by the customs of the people and the creatures that inhabit its jungles, but feeling very much as if we were in the category of the real. Like the realist writer, he tries to concretize the unreal. –G.S. Evans in IRREALISM AND THE DREAM-STATE via http://home.sprynet.com/~awhit/tirr_dre.htm [Nov 2006]

The key phrase in this little investigation is “Having imagined a new world, Tolkien proceeds to make it so real and concrete for us, … making it very much as if we were in the category of the real. Like the realist writer, he tries to concretize the unreal.” By doing so he takes out all the ambiguity, ambivalence, unresolvedness, unreliability and uncertainty that makes the fantastique what I find so attractive in it.

In the words of Jan Beardsly commenting on Todorov:

Todorov distinguishes the fantastic from two other modes, the uncanny and the marvelous. While these modes have some of the ambiguity of the fantastic, they ultimately offer a resolution governed by natural laws (the uncanny) or the supernatural (the marvelous). –Jan Bardsley via http://www.unc.edu/~bardsley/ghosts/todorov.html

A final quote on uncertainty by Todorov:

“The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty….The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (p. 25).

What is irrealism?

See https://artandpopularculture.com/Irrealism.

There can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz

It has often been said that the unique nature of the Holocaust “challenges our imagination with a nearly impossible task” (Lawrence Langer). “There can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz,” Maurice Blanchot asserted. And Adorno: “After Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation.” I believe that these words — these transformed fictional narratives — exist, and that they already existed before Auschwitz. Artaud hallucinating his own death or Bataille his own dismemberment, Simone Weil embracing the abjection of assembly line work or Céline carried away by an insane racist rage — these writers were not acting on their own either. By making the unimaginable their very subject, these artists provided us with that fraction of truth which scholars of the Holocaust are vainly seeking. — Sylvère Lotringer, The Art of Evil in FAT Magazine, Vol. 1 No. 1, 1994, 1995 via http://www.thing.net/~fat/vol1no1/sylvere.htm

Sylvère Lotringer is professor of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University and general editor of Semiotext(e). He frequently lectures on art.