Horner's Corner

Adolph Fassbender The Sentinels, 1937

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

Moonlit Landscape

(watercolor; with moon cut out and inserted on a separate piece of paper)

via Crashingly Beautiful.

In Valences of the Dialectic Fred Jameson comments on the dialectical character of Mondrian’s art. It made me think of this.(CH)

“A Mondrian does not consist of blue rectangles and red rectangles and yellow rectangles and white rectangles. It is conceived – as is abundantly clear from the unfinished canvases – in terms of lines – lines that can move with the force of a thunderclap or the delicacy of a cat.

“Mondrian wanted the infinite, and shape is finite. A straight line is infinitely extendable, and the open-ended space between two parallel straight lines is infinitely extendable. A Mondrian abstract is the most compact imaginable pictorial harmony, the most self-sufficient of painted surfaces (besides being as intimate as a Dutch interior). At the same time it stretches far beyond its borders so that it seems a fragment of a larger cosmos or so that, getting a kind of feedback from the space which it rules beyond its boundaries, it acquires a second, illusory, scale by which the distances between points on the canvas seem measurable in miles.

” ‘The positive and the negative are the causes of all action … The positive and the negative break up oneness, they are the cause of all unhappiness. The union of the positive and the negative is happiness.’ The palpable oneness of the solitary flower or tower, being subject to time and change, had to give way to the subliminal oneness of a vivid equilibrium.”

- From David Sylvester, “About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948-1997″

Immanuel Kant

Check out this FIVE MINUTE guide to Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, illustrated with comics.

(Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgement”: Drastically Abridged Awesome Version – lacunae.)

Douglas Wolk

xkcd: Height.

WH Auden

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn.

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

by W.H. Auden – Feb, 21, 1907- Sept 29, 1973

1. The Imaginary: the gaze, the fantasy, the mirror, ideal-ego and ego-ideal.

2. The Symbolic: signifiers, codes, language, law

3. The Real: the unsymbolisable, the gap in representation.

As Zizek argues, its best to take the three orders, not as one Lacanian system, but as part of a developing work -with the Real becoming the focus of interest in the later seminars.

See here for a real life illustration involving Zizek and me!

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

But in my spirit will I dwell,

And dream my dream, and hold it true;

For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu,

I cannot think the thing farewell.

CXXIII from In Memoriam – Tennyson

[Originally published in Le Monde, 13 February 2010. Translated by Alberto Toscano]

Alain Badiou

The Courage of the Present

For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary.

To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.

In the debate concerning the rationality of the French Revolution during the Third Republic, Clemenceau produced a famous formula: ‘The French Revolution forms a bloc’. This formula is noteworthy because it declares the integral legibility of the process, whatever the tragic vicissitudes of its unfolding may have been. Today, it is clear that it is with reference to communism that the ambient discourse transforms the previous sequence into an opaque pathology. I take it upon myself therefore to say that the communist sequence, including all of its nuances, in power as well as in opposition, which lay claim to the same idea, also forms a bloc.

So what can the principle and the name of a genuine orientation be today? I propose that we call it, faithfully to the history of the politics of emancipation, the communist hypothesis. Let us note in passing that our critics want to scrap the word ‘communism’ under the pretext that an experience with state communism, which lasted seventy years, failed tragically. What a joke! When it’s a question of overthrowing the domination of the rich and the inheritance of power, which have lasted millennia, their objections rest on seventy years of stumbling steps, violence and impasses! Truth be told, the communist idea has only traversed an infinitesimal portion of the time of its verification, of its effectuation. What is this hypothesis? It can be summed up in three axioms.

First, the idea of equality. The prevalent pessimistic idea, which once again dominates our time, is that human nature is destined to inequality; that it’s of course a shame that this is so, but that once we’ve shed a few tears about this, it is crucial to grasp this and accept it. To this view, the communist idea responds not exactly with the proposal of equality as a programme – let us realize the deep-seated equality immanent to human nature – but by declaring that the egalitarian principle allows us to distinguish, in every collective action, that which is in keeping with the communist hypothesis, and therefore possesses a real value, from that which contradicts it, and thus throws us back to an animal vision of humanity.

Then we have the conviction that the existence of a separate coercive state is not necessary. This is the thesis, shared by anarchists and communists, of the withering-away of the state. There have existed societies without the state, and it is rational to postulate that there may be others in the future. But above all, it is possible to organize popular political action without subordinating it to the idea of power, representation within the state, elections, etc. The liberating constraint of organized action can be exercised outside the state. There are many examples of this, including recent ones: the unexpected power of the movement of December 1995 delayed by several years anti-popular measures on pensions. The militant action of undocumented workers did not stop a host of despicable laws, but it has made it possible for these workers to be recognized as a part of our collective and political life.

A final axiom: the organization of work does not imply its division, the specialization of tasks, and in particular the oppressive differentiation between intellectual and manual labour. It is necessary and possible to aim for the essential polymorphousness of human labour. This is the material basis of the disappearance of classes and social hierarchies. These three principles do not constitute a programme; they are maxims of orientation, which anyone can use as a yardstick to evaluate what he or she says and does, personally or collectively, in its relation to the communist hypothesis.

The communist hypothesis has known two great stages, and I propose that we’re entering into a third phase of its existence. The communist hypothesis established itself on a vast scale between the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune (1871). The dominant themes then were those of the workers’ movement and insurrection. Then there was a long interval, lasting almost forty years (from 1871 to 1905), which corresponds to the apex of European imperialism and the systematic plunder of numerous regions of the planet. The sequence that goes from 1905 to 1976 (Cultural Revolution in China) is the second sequence of the effectuation of the communist hypothesis. Its dominant theme is the theme of the party, accompanied by its main (and unquestionable) slogan: discipline is the only weapon of those who have nothing. From 1976 to today, there is a second period of reactive stabilization, a period in which we still live, during which we have witnessed the collapse of the single-party socialist dictatorships created in the second sequence.

I am convinced that a third historical sequence of the communist hypothesis will inevitably open up, different from the two previous ones, but paradoxically closer to the first than the second. This sequence will share with the sequence that prevailed in the nineteenth century that fact that what is at stake in it is the very existence of the communist hypothesis, which today is almost universally denied. It is possible to define what, along with others, I am attempting as preliminary efforts aimed at the reestablishment of the communist hypothesis and the deployment of its third epoch.

What we need, in these early days of the third sequence of existence of the communist hypothesis, is a provisional morality for a disoriented time. It’s a matter of minimally maintaining a consistent subjective figure, without being able to rely on the communist hypothesis, which has yet to be re-established on a grand scale. It is necessary to find a real point to hold, whatever the cost, an ‘impossible’ point that cannot be inscribed in the law of the situation. We must hold a real point of this type and organize its consequences.

The living proof that our societies are obviously in-human is today the foreign undocumented worker: he is the sign, immanent to our situation, that there is only one world. To treat the foreign proletarian as though he came from another world, that is indeed the specific task of the ‘home office’ (ministère de l’identité nationale), which has its own police force (the ‘border police’). To affirm, against this apparatus of the state, that any undocumented worker belongs to the same world as us, and to draw the practical, egalitarian and militant consequences of this – that is an example of a type of provisional morality, a local orientation in keeping with the communist hypothesis, amid the global disorientation which only its reestablishment will be able to counter.

The principal virtue that we need is courage. This is not always the case: in other circumstances, other virtues may have priority. For instance, during the revolutionary war in China, Mao promoted patience as the cardinal virtue. But today, it is undeniably courage. Courage is the virtue that manifests itself, without regard for the laws of the world, by the endurance of the impossible. It’s a question of holding the impossible point without needing to account for the whole of the situation: courage, to the extent that it’s a matter of treating the point as such, is a local virtue. It partakes of a morality of the place, and its horizon is the slow reestablishment of the communist hypothesis.

GREEN = Palestinian Land; WHITE = Israeli land

If someone took your land like this, wouldn’t you fight?

Anyone interested in how the dispossession of the Palestinians got started might find Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine useful. About 700,000 Palestinians were driven by out or fled in 1948.

Never give way to melancholy. Nothing encroaches more. I fight against it vigorously. One great remedy is, to take short views of life. Are you happy now ? Are you likely to remain so till tomorrow or next month, or next year ? Then why destroy present happiness by a distant misery which may never come at all, or you may never live to see ? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and many of them shadows of your own making.

Sydney Smith

Gerhard Richter

b. Feb. 9, 1932

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

All natural blessings are either mental or physical, and there is no other category of blessing. Now it is abundantly clear to everyone that athletes have never even dreamed of mental blessings. To begin with, they are so deficient in reasoning powers that they do not even know whether they have a brain. Always gorging themselves on flesh and blood, they keep their brains soaked in so much filth that they are unable to think accurately and are as mindless as dumb animals.

Perhaps it will be claimed that athletes achieve some of the physical blessings. Will they claim the most important blessing of all: health? You will find no one in a more treacherous physical condition… Their sleep is also immoderate. When normal people have ended their work and are hungry, athletes are just getting up from their naps. In fact, their lives are like those of pigs, except that pigs do not overexert or force feed themselves…

I think that it has become abundantly clear that the practice of athletics has no utility in the real business of life. You would further learn that there is nothing worth mention in such practice if I tell you the myth some talented man put into words. It goes like this: if Zeus decided that all the animals should live in harmony and partnership, and the herald invited to Olympia not only men but also animals to compete in the stadium, I think that no man would be crowned. In the dolichos the horse will be the best, the stadion will belong to the hare, and the gazelle will be first in the diaulos. Wretched men, nimble experts, none of you would be counted in the footraces. Nor would any of you descendants of Herakles be stronger than the elephant or the lion. I think that the bull would be crowned in the pyx and the donkey would, if he decided to enter, win the kicking crown…

This myth shows quite nicely that athletic strength does not reside in human training. And yet, if athletes cannot be better than animals in strength, what other blessing do they share in?

Perhaps someone will say that they have a blessing in the pleasure of their bodies. But how can they derive any pleasure from their bodies if during their athletic years they are in constant pain and suffering, not only because of their exercises but also because of their forced feedings? And when they reach the age of retirement, their bodies are essentially if not completely crippled.

Are athletes perhaps to be worshipped like kings because they have large incomes? Yet they are all in debt, not only during the time they are competing but also after retirement.

–Galen,(129-210 AD) Exhortation for Medicine 9-14; A 215.

via Justin Erik Halldór Smith.

The non paternalist elite hobnobbing at the ICA

It’s worth reminding ourselves of the peculiar logic that neoliberalism has successfully imposed. Treating people as if they were intelligent is, we have been led to believe, “elitist”, whereas treating them as if they are stupid is “democratic”. It should go without saying that the assault on cultural elitism has gone alongside the aggressive restoration of a material elite.

Parkes touches here on the right way to think about paternalism – not (just) as something prescriptive, but in terms of the gift and the surprise. The best gifts are those we wouldn’t have choosen for ourselves – not because we would have overlooked or rejected them, but because we simply wouldn’t have thought of them. Neoliberal “choice” traps you in yourself, allowing you to select amongst minimally different versions of what you have already chosen; paternalism wagers on a different “you”, a you that does not yet exist. (All of which resonates with J J Charlesworth’s illuminating piece on the management of the ICA in Mute, with its attack on the assumption that “what the audience wants is merely what the institution should do.”)

Neoliberalism may have been sustained by a myth of entrepreneurialism, a myth that the folk economics of programmes like The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den have played their part in propagating, but the kind of “entrepreneurs” that dominate our culture – whether they be Bill Gates, Simon Cowell or Duncan Bannatyne – have not invented new products or forms, they have just invented new ways of making money. Good for them, no doubt, but hardly something that the rest of us should be grateful for. (The genius of Cowell was to have plugged a very old cultural form into new machineries of interpassivity.) And for all the bluster about entrepreneurialism, it is remarkable how risk-averse late capitalism’s culture is – there has never been a culture more homogenous and standardized, more repetitive and fear-driven.

Read more via k-punk.