Monday, April 29, 2013

Aphanisis - Rendering the Fading Subject "Thinkable"

Read me later
Noli me Loquitur

Speak not of my beauty,
behind my mask you've never seen

Speak not of my loving heart,
behind it's beats you've never been

Speak not of my truthful mind,
you know not of the darkest lies

Speak not of my emerald eyes
you've never seen their deepest cries...
-Seravane

A life w/o desire is like a body w/o organs.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Cwoud Sourcing Reawity

CHORUS. Virgins, who pour forth the rains, let us move toward Attica, the rich country of Pallas, the home of the brave; let us visit the dear land of Cecrops, where the secret rites are celebrated, where the mysterious sanctuary flies open to the initiate…. What victims are offered there to the deities of heaven! What glorious temples! What statues! What holy prayers to the rulers of Olympus! At every season nothing but sacred festivals, garlanded victims, are to be seen. Then Spring brings round again the joyous feasts of Dionysus, the harmonious contests of the choruses and the serious melodies of the flute.

STREPSIADES. By Zeus! Tell me, Socrates, I pray you, who are these women, whose language is so solemn; can they be demigoddesses?

SOCRATES. Not at all. They are the Clouds of heaven, great goddesses for the lazy; to them we owe all, thoughts, speeches, trickery, roguery, boasting, lies, sagacity.

STREPSIADES. Ah! that was why, as I listened to them, my mind spread out its wings; it burns to babble about trifles, to maintain worthless arguments, to voice its petty reasons, to contradict, to tease some opponent. But are they not going to show themselves? I should like to see them, were it possible.

---

STREPSIADES. Tell me then why, if these really are the Clouds, they so very much resemble mortals. This is not their usual form.
- Aristophanes, "The Clouds"

Friday, April 26, 2013

The Applied Arts of Otherness

Angels can not be seduced at all or quickly.
Pull him into the entryway,
stick your tongue in his mouth and reach
under his robe, til he gets wet; put
his face to the wall, lift his robe
and fuck him. If he stares in anguish
then hold him tightly and let him come two times;
otherwise, by the end, he'll be in shock.
Admonish him so he sways his butt;
let him know he's free to grab your balls.
Tell him he can fall without fear
while he is hanging between earth and heaven -
but don't look him in the face while you are fucking him
and, for heaven's sake, don't crush his wings.
-Bertolt Brecht, "Über die Verführung von Engeln"

Discomfort from the Persistence of the "Other's" Desires

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Modern Prodigals

I love being responsible for my OWN enjoyment/joissance! Woo-hoo! Only... it's not my own???

A joke that Freud tells in Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious illustrates well the point that Lacan is making about how desire differs from both demand (what you ask for) and need (what you cannot do without). The joke goes:

“An impoverished individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance, with many asseverations of his necessitous circumstances. The very same day his benefactor met him again in a restaurant with a plate of salmon mayonnaise in front of him. The benefactor reproached him: “What? You borrow money from me and then order yourself salmon mayonnaise? Is that what you’ve used my money for?” “I don’t understand you”, replied the object of the attack; “if I haven’t any money I can’t eat salmon mayonnaise, and if I have some money I mustn’t eat salmon mayonnaise. Well, then, when am I to eat salmon mayonnaise?” (SE VIII, 49-50).

Commenting on this joke in Seminar V, Lacan says:

“[The joke shows]… the relationship between the signifier and desire, and the fact that desire has profoundly changed its accent, has been subverted, has been made ambiguous, by its passage through the paths of the signifier. Let us be clear what that means. It is always in the name of a certain register that makes the Other intervene beyond the one making the demand, that any satisfaction is accorded, and precisely this profoundly perverts the system of demand and of the response to demand. “Clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick….” I do not need to remind you of the seven or eight or nine works of mercy. It is striking enough in their very expression, that in clothing the naked, one could say that if the demand were something that should be directly sustained in its fullness, why not clothe the naked man or woman at Christian Dior’s?…The same goes for feeding the hungry. Why not let them get drunk?” (Seminar V, 04.12.057., p.6).

To paraphrase Lacan’s point, the joke shows that desire is like a ‘perverted’ form of need by the very process of expressing that need in the form of a demand. The young benefactor obviously needs food, but his hunger can obviously be satisfied by something less than the most expensive and elaborate meals. So we find desire in what ‘pushes beyond’ need in the very expression of a demand.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Le Provencal

pro·vin·cial (pr-vnshl)
adj.
1. Of or relating to a province.
2. Of or characteristic of people from the provinces; not fashionable or sophisticated: "Well-educated professional women ... made me feel uncomfortably provincial" (J.R. Salamanca).
3. Limited in perspective; narrow and self-centered.
n.
1. A native or inhabitant of the provinces.
2. A person who has provincial ideas or habits.
Escape the Provinces! Seek to live a fuller and more sophisticated life, NOW! ;)

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Prisoners of the MSM Cult - All aBOARD!

Chorus:
Will you free me from the logic that I knew?
I'll believe it, even if 'tis not true!

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Testing, One, Two, Three...


How can I believe
This soft rain that I so love -
Radioactive?
- Ted Reynolds

Friday, April 12, 2013

The Last Aristocrat

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Afterwardness

Close your eyes
Try to sleep
Leave bad things behind

No more cry
Try to forget
Restart your mind

Don't be shy
Don't be scare
All the tears will dry

Even love has no reason But it's a lesson for life
Love is not always good it's still has another side

Hurt will tell that your heart is alive
It's just a little thing that your heart can survive

Realize
What you had to face
And what you found

Say good bye
To your faith
That devotes to lie

Don't blame your self
Time will help
Everything will be fine

Even love has no reason But it's a lesson for life
Love is not always good it's still has another side

Hurt will tell that your heart is alive
It's just a little thing that your heart can survive

Closely related for Freud to deferred action was deferred obedience: again, 'a deferred effect...a "deferred obedience" under the influence of repression'. Thus for instance Freud explored the different phases of a man's infantile attitude to his father: 'As long as his father was alive it showed itself in unmitigated rebelliousness and open discord, but immediately after his death it took the form of a neurosis based on abject submission and deferred obedience to him'.

In Totem and Taboo he generalised the principle and 'depicted the social contract also as based on posthumous obedience to the father's authority' - offset at times by its converse, occasional Carnival-like licence such as 'the memorial festival of the totem meal, in which the restrictions of deferred obedience no longer held'

Thus for instance Freud explored the different phases of a man's infantile attitude to his father: 'As long as his father was alive it showed itself in unmitigated rebelliousness and open discord, but immediately after his death it took the form of a neurosis based on abject submission and deferred obedience to him'.
-Jean LaPlanche

Friday, April 5, 2013

The After-Life of Forethought

Not in the strife of action, is the leader made, nor in the face of crisis, but when all is over, when the mind is swift with keen regret, in the long after-thought. The after-thought of one action is the forethought of the next.

It is when alone, in converse with their own thoughts so much that they live their conventionalities, forgetful of the world's, that men form those habits called the heroism of genius, and lead the progress of the race. This, the supreme rise of the individual- not a conflict of the consciousness, an effort to oppose, but bland forgetfulness, a life from self for the world- is the aim of existence.

All this is doubly so of the theoretical. In it the after-thought of long nights beneath the universe, of soul stirrings, of the act of thought itself, is more clearly a part of the next action- its expression. Events influence the first class, the limits of language alone the second.

The poet's insight is in his after-thought. It is of varied heart-beats and converse with nature. ANd the grandest of his ideas come when the last line is written.

Life is an after-thought: how wonderful the world? that is the after-thought of life.
-Robert Frost, "The Robert Frost Reader, Poetry and Prose"

Musical Inter-Lewd


I thought I lived securely as yourselves
No lewdness, narrowing envy, monkey-spite,
Nq madness of ambition, avarice, none:
No larger feast than under plane or pine u
With neighbours laid along the grass, to take
Only such cups as left us friendly-warm,
Affirming each his own philosophy-
Nothing to mar the sober majesties
Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life.
-Tennyson

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Objectiying the Subject

In the clip, through a series of close analyses of plot points and camera angles, Zizek concludes that Vertigo is the realization of a male fantasy, which necessarily involves violence and nightmarish transformations. In the “male libidinal economy,” he says, in the jargon-y psychoanalytic speak of his trade, women must be “mortified” before they are acceptable sexual partners. Slipping out of academic argot, he clarifies: “to paraphrase an old saying, the only good woman is a dead woman.” It’s this kind of blunt and utterly unsentimental way of speaking that raises the hackles of some of Zizek’s critics. But I’m not here to defend him. Watching (and reading) him for me is a game of edge-of-your seat “what outrageous or incomprehensible thing is he going to say next?” and I’ll admit, I enjoy it. So I’ll leave you with a final Zizek-ism. Perhaps it will scare you off for good, or perhaps you’re game for a few more rounds of “perversion” with this encyclopedic critic of the self, the social, and the sexual:

“A subject,” says Zizek, “is a partial something, a face, something we see. Behind it, there is a void, a nothingness. And of course, we spontaneously tend to fill in that nothingness with our fantasies about the wealth of human personality and so on, and so on. To see what is lacking in reality, to see it as that, there you see subjectivity. To confront subjectivity means to confront femininity. Woman is the subject. Masculinity is a fake.”
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek Interprets Hitchcock’s Vertigo in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006)
“After all, the best way to turn someone or something into an object is to kill it…But there are degrees of objectification. The process of mortification begins with how the other is seen, and supposedly known.”
- Teresa Brennan, "Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy"