intellectual properties

the seen and the unseen, and things hidden in plain sight

i am doing literary research and working on my MA thesis from now until the end of august.  the things i’ve been posting here are all related/part of the chain of thought, but i realize the connections are inchoate and therefore incoherent. but  in 3 words: language, art, opposition.

outside of the numerous texts i’ve been reading, here are only a few of the long list of things that have recently come through my channels and into my brain, and of course next week it will be a different list.  it’s hard to keep track as the world unfolds.

1. Dirty Wars (WATCH.):  america’s covert wars and how the  journalistic attempts to uncover them fall on deaf ears and a blind public with eyes wide shut:  the seen and the unseen, and things hidden in plain sight: media, ideology and false/fictional democracy

2.the Hannah Arendt film: Eichmann, Heidegger: totalitarianism, ideology, what is thinking?, truth and untruth

3. the NSA vs Finnegan’s Wake: literature, language, surveillance, and intellectual anxiety :  no really.  THIS IS GREAT. READ IT.  just in time for Bloomsday.

4. re: information  hackers and the “epistemic warfare”:  the war on reality (NYT) :   metadata vs information, apophenia (EFF), the NSA, the platonic cave & aletheia: disclosure vs truth or untruth: the making  intelligible: i’ve been considering this NSA thing along the conceptual lines of truth and untruth, things hiding in plain sight (aletheia),  and false consciousness /’why don’t we know what we know’ : information as a shield against new possibilities. this NYT piece ties it up a little too tritely but interesting in broad strokes.

5. democratic political speech (i.e. what do we mean by /”freedom”/  ) and  the jargon of authenticity –> ideology and back to language: words

the jargon likewise supplies men with patterns for being human…

it makes no difference what the voice that resonates in this way says; it is signing a social contract.”

6. #gezi/turkey, the media and tweeted revolutions: the language of the master is silence

7. N says: add the problems of Nietzschean will to truth/will to power vs. technocratic belief in information as savior. yes.  too long.  mostly: the way we come to know things isn’t neutral, and the truth participates in the lie. untruth reveals more than the truth, and transparency cannot be an end unto itself.

.::.

this 2009 Yale lecture on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (video) introduces a large cross-section of what i’ve been studying in Critical Theory and the Arts this past 10 months. transcript.  — ideology, realism, literature, marxism.

tangential: in this lecture the prof makes the comment re: the bourgeois ideology commandeering what gets portrayed as reality:

Who else insists that reality is just one drink below par?

and i didn’t know what he meant by that (i’m behind on such things i guess), so i looked it up and down the internet rabbithole found Discworld, knurd and klatchian coffee:

A strong, nearly magical coffee, brewed in Klatch and drunk only by the initiated in very small cups. Presumably an exaggerated version of Turkish coffee, Klatchian coffee has a strong sobering effect, bringing the drinker “to the other side of sobriety”.

This state of sobriety is referred to as knurd (“drunk” spelled backwards; compare the entry in the Jargon File[3]). Knurdness is described as the opposite of being drunk: not sober, which is merely the absence of drunkenness, but just as far away from sobriety in the opposite direction, resulting in a terrible, existential clarity. According to Sourcery, being knurd strips away all the comforting illusions in which people usually spend their lives, letting them see and think clearly for the first time. This is a very traumatic experience, although it is noted that it sometimes leads to important discoveries.

To counteract the effects of Klatchian coffee, in Klatch it is drunk
with Orakh (a very violent alcoholic beverage made by mixing scorpion venom and cactus sap and fermenting it in the sun for several weeks),…After a few screams,a lie down and a stiff drink, the occasional drinker will try never to be “knurd” again.

Although knurdness is a state usually only obtainable by drinking
Klatchian coffee, Samuel Vimes, one of the Discworld’s most notable characters, is described in Guards! Guards! as being naturally two drinks short of actual sobriety.

+(knurd: the cruel radiance of what is)

.::.

connecting the critical theory i’ve been studying to my life and the rest of the world is exhausting, but i think i’ve reached a point where i can’t think of one without the other so i guess that’s good, although articulating these connections is complicated and difficult.  it’s so much bigger than me.

the cruel radiance of what is

In the immediate world, everything is to be discerned..with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.

- James Rufus Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

recently watched movies: lost cities, lost souls

definitely watch:  Mary and Max is a darkly funny and visually excellent claymation movie with a really great script: Mary Dinkle, a chubby 8-year-old Australian girl, and Max Horovitz, an obese, middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger’s syndrome, are a pair of unlikely pen pals in this quirky clay animation feature from writer-director Adam Elliot. Corresponding for two decades, the friends delve into a variety of topics, including sex, kleptomania, psychiatry, taxidermy and more. Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman provide the voices of Mary and Max. (watch trailer)

“he liked the Noblets because they lived in a delineated and articulated social structure with constant adherent conformity”

“life goals:  1. one true friend 2. collect all the Noblets 3. a lifetime supply of chocolate”

this movie went places i totally wasn’t expecting. i laughed out loud, and i nearly cried. his self-commentary about living with Asperger’s is kind of heartbreaking.  Philip Seymour Hoffman’s voiceover for Max is almost unrecognizable and really quite something.

.::.

artsy and sublime:  Idiots and Angels is a strikingly beautiful animated philosophical tale: Angel is in a battle for his soul when he wakes up one morning with wings on his back and is forced to face his selfish and morally bankrupt ways. Trying to use the wings for evil, he’s swayed by their divine influence.

.::.

special category: Diary of A Lost Girl (1929) with Louise Brooks (full length on youtube) — i went to see this at a movie house in brooklyn and it was accompanied by live music different than the sound on the film. i didn’t know what to expect as i’d never sat through a full length silent film before, but i was totally into it and really struck by the story. one of those movies that would be great to project on a wall during a party, with the striking imagery and subtitles and all.

.::.

important and worth watching:  Detropia is a 2012 documentary about the fall and hopefully rise of Detroit in the last 40 years. maybe not the most entertaining docu i’ve ever seeen but people should know about what happened/is happening in Detroit.

the palace of conception is burning

“We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”

–Otto Neurath, on rejecting isomorphism between language and reality.

.::.

error lies in excessive honesty.

out to sea, we see no land
we have no orientation,
no meaning to attach an anchor.

enter the hot dream and come with us
there is nothing innocuous left -
the inferno that is your paradise -
the shame of still having air to breathe in hell:
infinitesimal freedom.

we are capable of everything, even love, yet always faithlessly -
involiable isolation: remorseless intransigence
a permanent drifting homelessness in
an unwillingness to admit
that calling something “beautiful” undermines it immediately
just as that word,
love,
ceases to mean anything the moment it is uttered,
bombastic.
the play is over.

the end.

there are only beginnings and ends.
nothing ever really happens
except birth and death and rebirth and death:
the interim is hollow,
filled temporarily with distorted images:
a narrative
all pointing to either a beginning or an end.

what then remains of the orderliness of the order?
what refuge has been taken,
what romantic desire burns
to speak in a language that does not exist?

.::.

1. adorno

2.  jim morrison

3. richard foreman

there is nothing innocuous left

There is no way out of entanglement. The only responsible course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe in hell.

–minima moralia #5-6

ignore the rain and listen to the wind

One can very agreeably ignore the rain by walking in it.
In fact it is when one allows a rain to prevent one from walking in it that one is failing to ignore it.
Surely by saying, dear me, I will get soaked through and through if I walk in this rain, for instance, one is in no way ignoring that rain.

–//in the beginning, sometimes i left messages in the street//

.::.

in woodstock last weekend we slept outside in our tent inside a screened-in garden hut rather than in the farmhouse. sleeping in my tent is one of my favorite things. i would almost rather always be sleeping in a tent. in the woods, anyway. perhaps not in new york city. but even then. i wonder.
when we arrived it was rainy and windy, somuch so that earlier a large portion of a giant oak tree had crashed down upon the garage. no damage to the structure, somehow, miraculously. and that night as i lay in the tent inside the hut i could hear the wind roar through the trees, their branches full of just-sprung and firmly attached leaves that whipped like tiny green flags, the wind moving south to north in long deep breaths, like the slow swell of the ocean. at times it was loud enough to wake you, and i would lie there listening to the roar with a soft smile.

“One can tell if one is happy by listening to the wind. This latter reminds the unhappy of the fragility of their house and pursues them in fitful sleep and violent dreams. To the happy, it sings the song of their safety and security: its raging whistle registers the fact that it no longer has any power over them.”

– Adorno, Minima Moralia #29 (do read. do.)

//messages in the woods//

i was in Woodstock again this weekend, this time with a whole lovely crew of human beings. first cold and rainy and nearly freezing, then springtime: a hike with the plus side of lots of rain = lots of gushing waterfalls. then a full summer day and we went to the swimming hole and lie in the sun for hours. three seasons: one weekend. glorious, the one negative being that the almost-full moonrises were late enough that i kept falling asleep before it made it above the tall beautiful trees.

// i left more messages in the woods //

(..more..)

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endearment

happy birthday to my (little) sister, jenelle!

here is an adorable photo of us from 1980:

I start to salivate when I think about the juicy conversations we’ll have when we’re back together again.

the amazing letters of Italo Calvino. (New Yorker)

“What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on earth?”

…

“All the ideas currently in my head are subject to a strange phenomenon: while I work on them and perfect them continuously from the philosophical point of view, they stay rudimentary and barely sketched on the dramatic and artistic side. In my creativity thought has the upper hand over imagination.”

…

“I, on the other hand, am sending you a sample of my new experiments in fiction. (It’s not stuff forN. O. but maybe for R. F. and the like.) It’s a vision of humanity sunk to the lowest level of its downward curve, humanity as an ant-hill, for whom only a latent and confused memory remains of its ancient individuality. It’s also rubbish. If you don’t like it or don’t want to do anything with it, send it back to me.”

…

“What is all this nonsense you’re giving me about pure and impure art? As though we didn’t know each other well enough and had never discussed the subject. As though you didn’t know who Italo-calvino is, what he wants, what he has to say. Forget any remorse: my art has been and always will be social while trying to remain art as far as possible, just as in Ungaretti’s poetry there is always an immanent ethic even when at his most lyrical: “tonda quel tanto che mi dà tormento” (just round enough to torment me). The funny thing is that just about a year ago you were writing me passionate letters on the necessity of a social nature in art and I was replying with even more heated letters on God knows what. We really have to burn this correspondence.”

.::.

+ listen to Liev Schreiber read a Calvino story from Cosmicomics here: radiolab: the distance of the moon

echolalic.2 / the center cannot hold

{3am. today’s notes. more words. incomplete. }

.::.

utter:  1. complete, absolute.  2. to make a sound with one’s voice.

semantic satiation with every single word:
i’m afraid i’ve lost all meaning.
or: the only words uttered are those that mean nothing.

complete, absolute.  which nothing is.

it’s not apathy.
but maybe i’ve lost all affect
an inability to earnestly put any sign on things without feeling like a liar.
but then also a liar in silence.

(if) there is no thought without language
(if) there is no language without meaning
why can’t we know what we know?
can there be nothing inside a thought?

how is it that one can stand looking down a path of destruction
and say “well goddamn, this sure is crazy”
and keep living?
perhaps what we have now is a constant state of shock.
stumbling. speechless.

people search for meaning everywhere.
they go to conferences, universities, tabloids, newspapers, twitter feeds, comment sections, television, movies, music, baseball games, bars, museums, forests, mountains, the ocean, poetry, literature, pornography, sex, drugs, dance, meditation, yoga, church  -

in the falsification of what it means to know
the search is endless and now at a continuously increasing velocity.
perhaps the same velocity at which the world is washing away.

click. click. click. click.

how many words have you read, just today?
just now, even?
and how many of them, really, had meaning?
there is so little meaning to be found
despite that it’s all right there.
quod petit hic est.

the problem with the truth is that you have to have the strength for it.

has it ever been taken seriously how those people in the Allegory of the Cave remain in their seats?

“Nobody believed us when we told them what was happening in Treblinka.”

in the democratic unwillingness to admit inequality, we have grown weak under a guise of strength.
a refutation of authority
that forgets that the word is .(AUTHOR)ity.
the strength of conviction of one’s word.
weakness in that we are no longer authors of our own lives in our own words.
“our” “own” “words”
simplified in a democratic language.
we repeat.
and we repeat what is repeatable.

the terror of actually having to say something that means something will render most of us mute.

.::.

affect:
in the rank natural growth
of the civilizing process,
the weather of our thoughts and feelings has borders, and they are political.

.::.

“the humble are they who go about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts”,
he paraphrased.

and that the protagonist in every novel is a roofless man: a homeless person, a wanderer, untied.

.::.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

–Yeats