The Bleeding

André Kertész (1894-1965) - Distortions, c. 1933


'Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment - not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order? I am not suggesting that this is how women are, that this is their ontological status. Instead, my hypothesis is that women's corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage. My claim is not that women have been somehow desolidified but the more limited one which sees that women, insofar as they are human, have the same degree of solidity, occupy the same genus, as men, yet insofar as they are women, they are represented and live themselves as seepage, liquidity. The metaphorics of uncontrollability, the ambivalence between desperate, fatal attraction and strong revulsion, deep-seated fear of absorption, the association of femininity with contagion and disorder, and the undecidability of the limits of the female body (particularly, but not only, with the onset of puberty and in the case of pregnancy), its powers of cynical seduction and allure are all common themes in literary and cultural representations of women. But these may well be a function of the projection outward of their corporealities, the liquidities that men seem to want to cast out of their own representations.'

From Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism by Elizabeth Grosz.

Illuminating Manuscripts

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) - Carnet de notes (Notebooks), 1908-18



"Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals."

Marcel Proust

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."

Elmore Leonard

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

Mark Twain

"True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

Alexander Pope

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to be able to make new things familiar and familiar things new."

Samuel Johnson

"The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes."

André Gide

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."

Jules Renard

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Thomas Mann

"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."

C. S. Lewis

Render Unto Ceasar

Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) - I shop therefore I am, 1990

"I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position."

Mark Twain

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either."

Robert Graves

"I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money."

Pablo Picasso

"There are people who have money and people who are rich."

Coco Chanel

"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."

Woody Allen

"It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money."

Albert Camus

"When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion."

Voltaire

"When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life: now that I'm old I know it is."

Oscar Wilde

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may be said to be living apart."

e. e. cummings

"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."

Dorothy Parker

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition I

Paul Klee (1879-1940): The Miraculous World




The Golden Fish, 1925




Around the Fish, 1926




Cosmic Flora, 1923




Ad Parnassu, 1932




Temple Gardens, 1920




Carnival in the Mountains, 1924

The Week In Review

Films:

Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), 1959 - d. François Truffaut
Antoine et Colette (Antoine and Colette), 1962 - d. François Truffaut
Baisérs voles (Stolen Kisses), 1968 - d. François Truffaut
Domicile conjugal (Bed and Board), 1970 - d. François Truffaut
L'Amour en fuite (Love on the Run), 1979 - d. François Truffaut

Television:

Smallville: Third Season

Books:

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan
Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud

Music:

More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978) - Talking Heads
Music for Films (1978) - Brian Eno
Fear of Music (1979) - Talking Heads
Remain in Light (1980) - Talking Heads
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) - David Byrne and Brian Eno
The Catherine Wheel (1981) - David Byrne
Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks (1983) - Brian Eno
Stop Making Sense (1984) - Talking Heads
True Stories (1986) - Talking Heads
Naked (1988) - Talking Heads
Rei Momo (1989) - David Byrne
The Forest (1991) - David Byrne

Inaubible As A Melody Cut In A Disc Of Flesh

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) - Mandolin and Guitar, 1924



"A painter paints their pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence."

Leopold Stokowski

"Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life."

Ludwig van Beethoven

"You are the music while it lasts."

T. S. Eliot

"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent."

Victor Hugo

"When words leave off, music begins."

Heinrich Heine

"Music is the shorthand of emotion."

Leo Tolstoy

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."

Aldous Huxley

"Music is the poetry of the air."

Jean Paul Richter

"Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me."

Jean Genet

"Too many pieces of music finish long after the end."

Igor Stravinsky

What The Vivian Girls Saw

Henry Darger (1892-1973) - from The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion


"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?"

Leonardo da Vinci

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination."

Emily Dickinson

"I shut my eyes in order to see."

Paul Gauguin

"Imagination is intelligence with an erection."

Victor Hugo

The Pinocchio Syndrome

Data (Brent Spiner) - Star Trek: The New Generation


'There is a certain kind of fiction that I unfailingly experience, in Rilke's terms, as either a cat story or a dog story. This is the category of fiction marked by an unusual choice of protagonist - sometimes literally an animal, but more often some inhuman, semihuman or hybrid figure: robot, alien, swamp creature, ape man, mutant. Or one of those strange, half-formed humans we call a child. In a cat-like story, this figure remains inscrutable, and the point of the tale is to teach us a chastening lesson about that inscrutability.

...

Dog-like stories are completely different. They are sentimental tales, full of pathos, aiming above all to wring tears from the reader or viewer. Their heroes are half-humans who strive desperately, yearn terribly, for the humanity which has been denied them through the circumstances of their creation. Some of the classic figures of this sort include Pinocchio, the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939), Frankenstein's monster, No. 5 in the Short Circuit films and Edward Scissorhands.

Besides Mitsou, nothing brings tears to my eyes faster than the episodes of Star Trek: The New Generation centred on the android Data (played so well by Brent Spiner). One of the central questions driving Star Trek in all its incarnations (all the generations, in both film and TV) is: what does it mean to be fully, truly human? As in so much science fiction, the otherness of the aliens encountered by the members of the Enterprise is not often seriously explored as an issue. These very uncat-like creatures are usually deployed as symbolic mirrors to humanity, as they exemplify some ingenious, evolutionary imbalance of the basic drives, exhibiting too much libido, or placidity, or aggression, or rationality. For a long time, and as an essential ingredient of Star Trek's premise, Spock teased the limits of his comrade's comprehension with his enigmatic, unearthly mind-set - but his inexorable trajectory (whatever his gnomic protestations) was set towards becoming more and more human. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), Kirk even gets to tell Spock that 'We're all human'.

As an android, Data reraises the tricky question involved in dramatically or comically defining the borders of humanity. Like Spock, he is an inscrutable figure: his face conveys little, except when he tries too hard to mimic the facial contortions involved in a human laugh or frown. Incidental details play constantly on Data's inability to understand the most sublime levels of human achievement - art, religion, philosophy - he doggedly works on his painting, his violin playing, and the reading of the pillars of wisdom which Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) solemnly entrusts to him. He obviously also admires the human qualities of playfulness and cleverness, since he sometimes dons the garb of Sherlock Holmes for a spin in the imaginary worlds created by the ship's Holodeck.

The show cleverly incites our desire to read into Data's sleuth-like curiosity the stirring of a more profound sentiment: yearning. And if Data yearns, isn't that the surest sign that he is already, somehow, becoming human? Yet, while certain actions that Data performs seem to indicate the magic alchemy of such a transformation, others pull us suddenly back to ground zero. He is, after all, a machine, one that we occasionally see switched off, and (as he often reminds us himself) he has no emotions of any sort. That is a condition of his being, like his autonomy, which gives him a passionless, twilight aura of existential solitude: as the only one of his kind, Data can have no sense of community or belonging.

Yet the ultimate nature of Data as a sentient being is kept alive as an open question in Star Trek: The New Generation, and many of the best episodes dramatise the ambiguity that compellingly surrounds him. In one story, a coldhearted, hyperrational scientist arrives on the Enterprise with the mission of disassembling Data, so that he can be reproduced and improved (due to a handy trick of intergalactic history, his exact technological make-up remains a mystery). When Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) is able to prove the presence - inexplicable as it is - of attributes in Data that at least resemble conventional emotions, Picard formally rules that henceforth, Data is to be considered neither android nor human, but a hybrid that inaugurates a new evolutionary species.

In another, extremely moving episode, Data takes the question of his reproduction into his own hands. He builds a daughter who, like her father, shows through her inability to adapt to human manners the gulf between these two species. But then she develops powerful surges of emotion that deranges her circuitry. Like man classically transgressive heroines of melodrama, she is far too much trouble for the show to keep alive; but as she dies, she assures Data that, although he cannot honestly express proper parental love, she has enough love for the both of them.

An explicit line of reference in the show compares Data to both Pinocchio and the Tin Man - casting him as that perfectly sentimental figure who lacks a heart or soul, and whose only wish is to obtain them. 'The Tin Man', however, casts a somewhat more sympathetic and accepting light on Data's hybrid nature. The plot concerns Data's relation to two unusual creatures, both of them singular beings fitted uneasily into the cosmic scheme of things. The first is a brilliant but difficult man with supreme powers of empathy and intuition. He is so open to feelings and thoughts that any interaction is a torment to him. The second is the Tin Man - a pile of discarded machinery out in space that has evolved into a sentient being with completely unknowable values and drives. Data, silently, identifies with both of them. When it comes to pass that the destiny of these two beings is to merge into one - thereby extinguishing each other's yearning - Data returns to the Enterprise and reflects that he too, at last, feels some sense of belonging.

The most intensely ambiguous of all the Data stories to date has been 'The Most Toys'. In this episode, Data is kidnapped by a sadistic, selfish collector for his museum of unique objects. Counterpointed to Data's typically cool and methodical exploration of means to escape captivity are the varied reactions of grief from his comrades back on the Enterprise, who believe he is dead. Data has explained to his captor early on that, as an android with a built-in check, he cannot murder; this is later used to taunt him, as others around him under the collector's rule are cruelly exterminated. Finally, Data faces the villain with an especially lethal gun in hand, and is told: 'If only you could feel rage . . . if only you could feel a need for revenge, then you could fire. But you're just an android. You can't feel anything, can you?'

The collector interprets Data's dilemma here - the question of whether to kill or not - as 'just another interesting intellectual puzzle for you, another of life's curiosities'; meanwhile the familiar flickerings in that passive android face seem to bear out the truth of that description. 'I cannot permit this to continue', says Data - ever the rationalist - and raises his gun to fire. At this precise moment, a transporter beam envelops Data and returns him to the Enterprise. The ship's controls indicate an energy discharge has occurred. Data - in an unreadable moment that may indicate canniness - denies that any such thing happened. Finally, he faces his captor, now in turn captured. 'It must give you great pleasure', whines the fallen megalomaniac. Data replies, 'No, sir, it does not. I do not feel pleasure.' And as the camera tracks in for dramatic underlining, he blankly parrots back the words, 'I am only an android'.'

From Dear Data by Adrian Martin.

The Revolting Body

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) - Self-Portrait Masturbating, 1911


'The restrictions on masturbation hardly start in Europe until the eighteenth century. Suddenly, a panic-theme appears: an appalling sickness develops in the Western world. Children masturbate. Via the medium of families, though not at their initiative, a system of control of sexuality, an objectivisation of sexuality allied to corporal persecution, is established over the bodies of children. But sexuality, through thus becoming an object of analysis and concern, surveillance and control, engenders at the same time and intensification of each individual's desire, for, in and over his body.

The body thus became the issue of a conflict between parents and children, the child and the instances of control. The revolt of the sexual body is the reverse effect of this encroachment. What is the response on the side of power? An economic (and perhaps also ideological) exploitation of eroticisation, from sun-tan products to pornographic films. Responding precisely to the revolt of the body, we find a new mode of investment which presents itself no longer in the form of control by repression but that of control by stimulation. 'Get undressed - be slim, good-looking, tanned!' For each move by the adversary, there is an answering one by the other.'

From Body/Power, an interview with Michel Foucault.

'Have adults forgotten how they themselves were incited and aroused by sex impulses as children? Have they forgotten how the frightful passion burned and tortured them while they were still children? I have not forgotten, for I suffered excruciatingly from it.'

Egon Schiele

The Corpse of Everything But Existence Itself

György Eszter (Peter Fitz) - Werckmeister Harmonies (d. Bela Tarr, 2000)


"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

From The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot (1922).

Bill's Bounty

Willem van Aelst (1627-1683) - Still Life with Fruit, c. 1660


"The sun, with all those plants revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

Galileo Galilei

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."

Francis Bacon (Novum Organum)

"I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite."

Bertrand Russell

"And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous that we sweat."

Seneca (Letters to Lucilius)

Turner's Tempest

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) - Shade and Darkness: The Evening of the Deluge, 1843


"Nature is an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere."

Blaise Pascal

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."

Henry David Thoreau

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."

Frank Lloyd Wright

"That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe."

John Berger

"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful."

e. e. cummings

The Week in Review


Films:

Damnation - d. Bela Tarr (2000)
Werckmeister Harmonies - d. Bela Tarr (1987)

Books:

Genet: A Biography by Edmund White
Saint-Genet by Jean-Paul Sartre
A Thief's Journal by Jean Genet

Music:

I Will Not Be Sad In This World (1990) - Djivan Gasparyan
Ask Me No Questions (1994) - Djivan Gasparyan
Apricots from Eden (1996) - Djivan Gasparyan
Black Rock (1998) - Djivan Gasparyan
Armenian Fantasies (2000) - Djivan Gasparyan
Moon Shines At Night (2001) - Djivan Gasparyan

Maid For Murder

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) - Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598


"And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe."

Bible (Exodus 21:23-25)

"If you prick us do we not bleed? . . . If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not want revenge?"

William Shakespeare

"Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged."

Samuel Johnson

"An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."

Mahatma Gandhi

"Revenge is sweet and not fattening."

Alfred Hitchcock

Commedia Dell'Agonia

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) - Gilles, c. 1718-19


"Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness."

Italo Calvino

"Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad."

Victor Hugo

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another."

Anatole France

"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad and indifferent: e.g. music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf."

Baruch Spinoza

"Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits."

Susan Sontag

Baise-Moi, Baby

Anca Daucikova (b. 1950) - Kissing Hour (video), c. 2000


Love's Infiniteness

If yet I have not all thy love,
Dear, I shall never have it all;
I cannot breathe one other sigh, to move,
Nor can intreat one other tear to fall;
And all my treasure, which should purchase thee,
Sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters I have spent;
Yet no more can be due to me,
Than at the bargain made was meant.
If then thy gift of love were partial,
That some to me, some should to others fall,
Dear, I shall never have thee all.

Or if then thou gavest me all,
All was but all, which thou hadst then;
But if in thy heart since there be or shall
New love created be by other men,
Which have their stocks entire, and can in tears,
In sighs, in oaths, and letters, outbid me,
This new love may beget new fears,
For this love was not vow'd by thee.
And yet it was, thy gift being general;
The ground, thy heart, is mine; what ever shall
Grow there, dear, I should have it all.

Yet I would not have all yet.
He that hath all can have no more;
And since my love doth every day admit
New growth, thou shouldst have new rewards in store;
Thou canst not every day give me thy heart,
If thou canst give it, then thou never gavest it;
Love's riddles are, that though thy heart depart,
It stays at home, and thou with losing savest it;
But we will have a way more liberal,
Than changing hearts, to join them; so we shall
Be one, and one another's all.

John Donne (1572-1631)

The Oscar For Best Quote

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)


"Biography lends to death a new terror."

"Wisdom comes with winters."

"One's real life is often the life that one does not lead."

"Only the shallow know themselves."

"I love acting. It so much more real than life."

Oscar Wilde

American Prometheus

Alexander ('Lex') Joseph Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) - Ep. 15, 'Nicodmeus', Smallville: Season One

'It is my good fortune that after the whole millennia of error and confusion I have rediscovered the way that leads to a Yes and a No.

I teach the No to all that makes weak - that exhausts.

I teach the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that justifies the feeling of strength.

So far one has taught neither the one nor the other: virtue has been taught, mortification of the self, pity, even the negation of life. All these are the values of the exhausted.

Prolonged reflection on the physiology of exhaustion forced me to ask to what extent the judgements of the exhausted had penetrated the world of values.

My result was as surprising as possible, even for me who was at home in many a strange world: I found that all of the supreme value judgements - all that have come to dominate mankind, at least that part that has become tame - can be derived from the judgements of the exhausted.

Under the holiest names I pulled up destructive tendencies; one has called God what weakens, teaches weakness, infects with weakness. I found that the "good man" is one of the forms in which decadence affirms itself.

That virtue of which Schopenhauer still taught that it is the supreme, the only virtue, and the basis of all virtues - precisely pity I recognised as more dangerous that any vice. To cross as a matter of principle selection in the species and its purification of refuse - that has so far been called the virtue par excellence.

One should respect fatality - that fatality that says to the weak: perish!

One has called it God - that one resisted fatality, that one corrupted mankind and made it rot. One should not use the name of God in vain.

The race is corrupted - not by its vices but by its ignorance; it is corrupted because it did not recognise exhaustion as exhaustion: mistakes about physiological states are the sources of all ills.

Virtue is our greatest misunderstanding.

Problem: How did the exhausted come to make the laws about values? Put differently: How did those come to power who are the last? How did the instinct of the human animal come to stand on its head?'

From 'European Nihilism' (The Will to Power) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Smarter Than Jesus

'Genius and ideal state in contradiction. Socialists desire to produce a good life for the greatest number. If the enduring homeland of this good life, the perfect state, were really achieved, it would destroy the earth from which a man of great intellect, or any powerful individual grows: I mean great energy. When this state is achieved, mankind would have become too feeble to produce genius any longer. Should we not therefore wish that life retain its violent character, and that wild strengths and energies be called forth over and over again? Now, a warm, sympathetic heart desires precisely the elimination of that wild and violent character, and the warmest heart one can imagine would yearn for it most passionately; though this same passion would have its fire, its warmth, even its existence from that wild and violent character of life. The warmest heart, then, desires the elimination of its rationale and its own destruction; that is, it wants something illogical; it is not intelligent. The highest intelligence and the warmest heart cannot coexist in one person, and a wise man who passes judgement on life also places himself above kindness, considering it only as something to be evaluated along with everything else in the sum of life. The wise man must oppose the extravagant wishes of unintelligible kindness, because he cares about the survival of his type, and the eventual genesis of the highest intellect. At least he will not further the establishment of the "perfect state", if there is room there only for feeble individuals. Christ, on the other hand, whom we like to imagine as having the warmest of hearts, furthered men's stupidity, took the side of the intellectually weak, and kept the greatest intellect from being produced: and this was consistent. We can predict that his opposite, the absolute wise man, will just as necessarily prevent the production of a Christ.'

From 'Signs of Higher and Lower Culture' (Human, All Too Human) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Blake's Bedfellows

Tracey Emin (b. 1963) - My Bed, 1998


The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gown were walking their rounds,
Binding with briars my joys and desires.

William Blake (1757-1827)


Links:

Tracey Emin.co.uk
Jeanette Winterson on Tracey Emin
Stuckism - Tracey Emin
On The Couch With Tracey Emin (Guardian Unlimited)
Tracey Emin (Guardian Unlimited)
Burned Into The Memory (Guardian Unlimited)
Two Go Mad In Margate (Guardian Unlimited)
Tate Online - Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin - Professor of Confessional Arts (EGS)
Tracey Emin - h2g2 (BBC)
Tracey Emin with Barry Barker (University of Brighton)
Tracey Emin at White Cube
Tracey Emin at Lehmann Maupin
Tracey Emin - The Saatchi Gallery


The Week in Review

Film:

The Blood of a Poet - d. Jean Cocteau (1930)
Jean Cocteau: Autobiography of an Unknown - d. Edgardo Cozarinsky (1984)
Orpheus - d. Jean Cocteau (1949)
Testament of Orpheus - d. Jean Cocteau (1959)
Villa Santo Sospir - d. Jean Cocteau (1952)

Television:

Smallville: Series Two

Books:

Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will to Power - Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human - Friedrich Nietzsche

Art:

Screenings: International and International New Media Works - NGV

Music:

Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) - Gustav Mahler
Pierrot Lunaire - Arnold Schoenberg
The Rite of Spring - Igor Stravinsky
Turangalila Symphonie - Olivier Messiaen
The Unanswered Question - Charles Ives

You Still Lookin' At Me?

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). The most recently discovered portrait photograph of Vincent van Gogh, found in the collection of his cousin, Anton Mauve. Research suggests that it was taken when Vincent was working in Goupil's in The Hague, so he would have been between sixteen and twenty years of age.


"The noeme of Photography is simple, banal; no depth: "that has been". I know our critics: What! a whole book (even a short one) to discover something I know at first glance? Yes, but such evidence can be a sibling of madness. The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence - as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence, The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except my intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand "it is not there", on the other "but it has indeed been"): a mad image chafed by reality."

Roland Barthes

"'But I don't want to go among mad people, ' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'"

Lewis Carroll

"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!"

J. G. Ballard

"The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness."

Jean Cocteau

"Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise."

Michel Foucault

Show Me The Music

Wassily Kandinsky (1966-1944) - Composition X, 1939


"Great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener."

"You cannot expect the Form before the Idea, for they will come into being together."

"I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words."

"Whether one calls oneself conservative or revolutionary, whether one composes in a conventional or progressive manner, whether one tries to imitate old styles or is destined to express new ideas - one must be convinced of the infallibility of one's own fantasy and one must believe in one's own inspiration."

"At this time I was able to draw a circle which deviated very little when you checked it with a compass. I could draw really very well, but I think I lost this capacity. But I had the idea that this sense of measurement, of measurements, is one of the capacities of a composer, of an artist. It is probably the basis of correct balance and logic within, if you have a strict feeling of the sizes and their mutual relationship."

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

Rhizome

Simon Patterson (b. 1967) - The Great Bear (detail), 1992

''Rhizome' describes the connections that occur between the most disparate and the most similar of objects, places and people; the strange chains of events that link people: the feeling of 'six degrees of separation', the sense of 'having been here before' and assemblages of bodies. Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the 'rhizome' draws from its etymological meaning, where 'rhizo' means combining form and the biological term 'rhizome' describes a form of a plant that can extend itself through its underground horizontal tuber-like root system and develop new plants. In Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term, the rhizome is a concept that 'maps' a process of networked, relational and transversal thought, and a way of being without 'tracing' the construction of that map as a fixed entity. Ordered lineages of bodies and ideas that trace their originary and individual bases are considered as forms of 'arborescent thought', and this metaphor of a tree-like structure that orders epistemologies and forms historical frames and homogeneous schemata, is invoked by Deleuze and Guattari to describe everything that rhizomatic thought is not.

In addition, Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome as an action of many abstract entities in the world, including music, mathematics, economics, politics, science, art, the ecology and the cosmos. The rhizome conceives how every thing and every body - all aspects of concrete, abstract and virtual entities and activities - can be seen as multiple in their inter-relational movements with other things and bodies. the nature of the rhizome is that of a moving matrix, composed of organic and non-organic parts forming symbiotic and aparallel connections, according to transitory and as yet undetermined routes. Such a reconceptualisation constitutes a revolutionary philosophy for the reassessment of any form of hierarchical thought, history or activity.

In a world that builds structures from economic circuits of difference and desire, Deleuze responds by reconsidering how bodies are constructed. He and Guattari argue that such structures constrain creativity and position things and people into regulatory orders. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari staged the entire book as a series of networked rhizomatic 'plateaus' that operate to counter historical and philosophical positions pitched toward the system of representation that fixes the flow of thought. Instead, through a virtuoso demonstration of the relational energies able to be configured through often disparate forms and systems of knowledge, they offer the reader an open system of thought. Rhizomatic formations can serve to overcome, overturn and transform structures of rigid, fixed or binary thought and judgement - the rhizome is 'anti-genealogy'. A rhizome contributes to the formation of a plateau through its lines of becoming, which form aggregate connections. There are no singular positions on the networked lines of a rhizome, only connected points which form connections between things. A rhizomatic plateau of thought, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, may be reached through the consideration of the potential of multiple and relational bodies and ideas. The rhizome is any network of things brought into contact with one another, functioning as an assemblage machine for new affects, new concepts, new bodies, new thoughts; the rhizomatic network is a mapping of the forces that move and/or immobilise bodies.

Deleuze and Guattari insist bodies and things ceaselessly take on new dimensions through their contact with different and divergent entities over time; in this way the concept of the 'rhizome' marks a divergent way of conceptualising the world that is indicative of Deleuzian philosophy as a whole. Rather than reality being thought of and written as an ordered series of structural wholes, where semiotic connections or taxonomies can be compiled from complete root to tree-like structure, the story of the world and its components, Deleuze and Guattari propose, can be communicated through the rhizomatic operations of things - movements, intensities and polymorphous formations. In opposition to descendent evolutionary models of classification, rhizomes have no hierarchical order to their compounding networks. Instead, Deleuzian rhizomatic thinking functions as an open-ended productive configuration, where random associations and connections propel, sidetrack and abstract relations between components. Any part within a rhizome may be connected to another part, forming a milieu that is decentred, with no distinctive end or entry point.

Deleuze apparatus for describing affective change is the 'rhizome'. Deleuze viewed every operation in the world as the affective exchange of rhizomatically-produced intensities that create bodies: systems, economies, machines and thoughts. Each and every body is propelled and perpetuated by innumerable levels of the affective forces of desire and its resonating materialisations. Variations to any given system can occur because of interventions within cyclical, systematic repetition. As the rhizome may be constituted within an existing body - including existing thoughts one might bring to bear upon another body - the rhizome is necessarily subject to the principles of diversity and difference through repetition, which Deleuze discussed in his books Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition.

Deleuze acknowledges Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return as the constitution of things through repeated elements (existing bodies, modes of thought) that form a 'synthesis' of difference through the repetition of elements. 'Synthesis' is also described by Deleuze and Guattari as an assemblage of variable relations produced by the movement, surfaces, elusions and relations of rhizomes that form the bodies (desiring machines) through composite chains of previously unattached links. As a non-homogeneous sequence, then, the rhizome describes a series that may be composed of causal, chance, and/or random links. Rhizomatic connections between bodies and forces produce an affective energy or entropy. As Deleuze describes in his work on David Hume, the interaction of a socially, politically, or culturally determined force and any given body both produces and uses associations of ideas. The discontinuous chain is he medium for the rhizome's expanding network, just as it is also the contextual circumstance for the chain's production.

Rhizomatic writing, being, and/or becoming is not simply a process that assimilates things, rather it is a milieu of perpetual transformation. the relational milieu that the rhizome creates gives form to evolutionary environments where relations alter the course of how flows and collective desire develop. There is no stabilising function produced by the rhizomatic medium; there is no creation of a whole out of virtual and dispersed parts. Rather, through the rhizome, points form assemblages, multiple journey systems associate into possibly connected or broken topologies; in turn, such assemblages and typologies change, divide, and multiply through disparate and complex encounters and gestures. The rhizome is a powerful way of thinking without recourse to analogy or binary constructions. To think in terms of the rhizome is to reveal the multiple ways that you might approach any thought, activity, or concept - what you always bring with you are the many and various ways of entering into any body, of assembling thought and action through the world.'

Felicity F. Colman

Arborescent Schema

Mike + Doug Starn (b. 1961) - Structure of Thought 15 (from Absorption + Transmission), 2005-7


'The arboreal schema is one of Deleuze's many potent and prominent biological and organic images. His criticism, and his use of the schema, is scattered across his corpus, at various times targeting approaches to philosophy, psychiatry, literature, science, theoretical criticism and even everyday living. The notion of an arborescent or tree-like schema is Deleuze's counterpoint to his model of the rhizome, which he uses to challenge tendencies in thinking and to suggest ways of rehabilitating 'thought' as a creative and dynamic enterprise.

Deleuze's model of the tree-like structure appears to be quite simple. Typically, at its top, is some immutable concept given prominence either by transcendental theorising or unthinking presumption. In Deleuze's work on epistemology and ontology, he identifies Plato's Forms, the models of the subject espoused by René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, as well as the 'Absolute Spirit' of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as examples. All other concepts or particulars are organised vertically under this concept in a tree/trunk/root arrangement. The ordering is strictly hierarchical, from superior to subordinate, or transcendent to particular, such that the individual or particular element is conceived as less important, powerful, productive, creative or interesting than the transcendent.

The subordinate elements, once so arranged, are unable to 'move' horizontally in such a way as to establish creative and productive interrelationships with other concepts, particulars or models. Rather, their position is final, according to an organising principle implied or determined by a superior concept.

Furthermore, the tree is a self-contained totality or closed system that is equal just to the sum of its parts. Relations between elements of the system are interior to and inherent within the model. They are stable or even essential in so far as, first, the superior concept is the all-powerful defining force that dictates the position or meaning of all else in the system and, second, the tendency is to think of the system either as complete in itself or else unconnected to other systems in any meaningful way. The tree is 'fixed to the spot' and static. Any remaining movement is minimal and internal to the system rather than exploratory or connective. Because the creative potential of disorder and inter-connectivity is precluded, the potential inherent in conceptualising and thinking in this manner is very limited.

Deleuze's model calls to mind the porphyrian tree, a device used by the philosopher Porphyry to show how reality and our concepts are ordered and how logical categorisation proceeds. The concept of 'Substance' can be placed at the top of the tree, and dichotomous branching at each level obtained by adding a specific difference such that, at the lowest level, some individual can be identified as a sub-set of 'Substance'.

This version of the arboreal model also highlights something of its complexity and ontological importance for Deleuze. The difference evident between particulars is subsumed by the similarity that defines them in terms of superior concepts in general and the transcendent concept (Substance) in particular. Rather than deriving concepts from individual particulars (or interactions between them), an abstract concept is used to organise individuals and determine their meaning relative just to the organisational hierarchy. Difference has to be added back to each element in order to define it as a particular, rather than having individual elements serve as the starting point for conceptualisation. In contrast, Deleuze holds that lived experience comprises particularity and uniqueness in each moment, experience and individual, the inherent differences of which ought always to be acknowledged. By positing the concept over the particular, thinking of the arboreal kind abstracts from lived experience in its very structure.

For Deleuze, thinking in such a way stifles creativity, leaves superior concepts relatively immune to criticism and tends to close one's mind to the dynamism, particularity and change that is evident in lived experience. Not only is such thinking necessarily abstract, it also serves to protect the status quo and relieve dominant concepts and positions from productive critique.'

Cliff Stagoll

La Rocoquette

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) - The Swing, 1766

"Fragonard's scenes of frivolity and gallantry are considered the embodiment of the Rococo spirit. A pupil of Chardin and later Boucher, he won the Prix de Rome and from 1756 to 1761 was in Italy, where he developed a particular admiration for Tiepolo and the late Baroque style. In this period he specialized in large historical paintings.

Returning to Paris, he soon changed this style, adopting instead the erotic subjects then in vogue and for which he is chiefly known, of which The Swing is the most famous.

This picture became an immediate success, not merely for its technical excellence, but for the scandal behind it. The young nobleman is not only getting an interesting view up the lady's skirt, but she is being pushed into this position by her priest-lover, shown in the rear.

In this same spirit are some other famous pictures, The See-Saw, Blindman's Bluff, The Stolen Kiss, and The Meeting. After his marriage in 1769, he began painting children and family scenes (usually called genre painting) and even returned to religious subjects. He stopped exhibiting publicly in 1770 and all his later works are commissions from private patrons.

To many, this painting embodies the entire spirit of the ancien regime on the eve of the revolution."

(Boston College Website)

"Pleasure is the object, duty and goal of all rational creatures."

Voltaire

"The essence of pleasure is spontaneity."

Germaine Greer

"Take life too seriously, and what is it worth? If the morning wake us to no new joys, if the evening bring us not the hope of new pleasure, is it worthwhile to dress and undress?"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The inward pleasure of imparting pleasure - that is the choicest of all."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"I do not agree that an age of pleasure is no compensation for a moment of pain."

Thomas Jefferson

"All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenues."

Jonathan Swift

"The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain."

Aristotle

"Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments."

Rainer Maria Rilke

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."

Oscar Wilde

"Men seldom give pleasure where they are not pleased themselves."

Samuel Johnson

The Plural Of Apocalypse

Andreas Gursky (b. 1955) - May Day III, 1998

The Hollow Men

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency

And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)