Notes on Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)
"...even the fiercest of nineteenth century conflagrations, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, ended after less than a year's duration with the defeated nation being able to pay over an unprecedented sum as an indemnity without any disturbance of the currencies concerned."
Franco-Prussian war: what's the meaning of defeat, and the function of national defense, when a war can be ended with nothing more than a transfer of funds from one bank account to another?
Interesting to think through Kant's perpetual peace argument -- also needs to be routed back through Hobbesian state theory etc:
"Haute finance, an institution sui generis, peculiar to the last third of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century, functioned as the main link between the political and the economic organization of the world in this period. It supplied the instruments for an international peace system, which was worked with the help of the Powers, but which the Powers themselves could neither have established nor maintained. While the Concert of Europe acted only at intervals, haute finance functioned as a permanent agency of the most elastic kind. Independent of single governments, even of the most powerful, it was in touch with all; independent of the central banks, even of the Bank of England, it was closely connected with them. There was intimate contact between finance and diplomacy; neither would consider any long-range plan, whether peaceful or warlike, without making sure of the other's good will. Yet the secret of the successful maintenance of general peace lay undoubtedly in the position, organization, and techniques of international finance."
"Trade had become linked with peace. In the past the organization of trade had been military and warlike; it was an adjunct of the pirate, the rover, the armed caravan, the hunter and trapper, the sword-bearing merchant, the armed burgesses of the towns, the adventurers and explorers, the planters and conquistadores, the manhunters and slave traders, the colonial armies of the chartered companies. Now all this was forgotten. Trade was now dependent upon an international monetary system which could not function in a general war. It demanded peace, and the Great Powers were striving to maintain it. But the balance-of-power system, as we have seen, could not by itself ensure peace. This was done by international finance, the very existence of which embodied the principle of the new dependence of trade upon peace"
"It must be clear by this time that the peace organization rested upon economic organization. Yet the two were of very different consistency. Only in the widest sense of the term was it possible to speak of a political peace organization of the world, for the Concert of Europe was essentially not a system of peace but merely of independent sovereignties protected by the mechanism of war. The contrary is true of the economic organization of the world. Unless we defer to the uncritical practice of restricting the term "organization" to centrally directed bodies acting through functionaries of their own, we must concede that nothing could be more definite than the universally accepted principles upon which this organization rested and nothing more concrete than its factual elements. Budgets and armaments, foreign trade and raw material supplies, national independence and sovereignty were now the functions of currency and credit. By the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, world commodity prices were the central reality in the lives of millions of Continental peasants; the repercussions of the London money market were daily noted by businessmen all over the world; and governments discussed plans for the future in light of the situation on the world capital markets. Only a madman would have doubted that the international economic system was the axis of the material existence of the race. Because this system needed peace in order to function, the balance of power was made to serve it. Take this economic system away and the peace interest would disappear from politics. Apart from it, there was neither sufficient cause for such an interest, nor a possibility of safeguarding it, in so far as it existed. The success of the Concert of Europe sprang from the needs of the new international organization of economy, and would inevitably end with its dissolution."
"First among the statesmen of the time, Woodrow Wilson appears to have realized the interdependence of peace and trade, not only as a guarantee of trade, but also of peace. No wonder that the League persistently strove to reconstruct the international currency and credit organization as the only possible safeguard of peace among sovereign states, and that the world relied as never before on haute finance. J. P. Morgan had replaced N. M. Rothschild as the demiurge of a rejuvenated nineteenth century."
Monday, August 31, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
#22
Henri Michaux, from "La lettre du dissinateur" 1944
"Quand je regard le papier blanc, écrit-il, je vois courir au loin un homme épouvanté. De quoi épouvanté? Je ne sais, et aussi le rite ridiculte d'hommes qui tournent en rond.
Puis viennent d'autres hommes (toujours à l'éxtrême bout du papier) en quantities innombrables, une foule non pour un tableau mais pour une époque. Ces hommes sont maigres et grands.
La santé ne m'a pas prodigué des excès. Je n'en prodigue pas aux autres. Voilà ce qu'on pourrait dire.
Mais pour ce qui est de la multitude, elle est prodiguée. Seul un viellard au faîte d'une longue vie en vit passer autant.
Ah! Si je pouvais les réunir en un seul tableau! Il y aurait des gens haletants à le regarder tant il grouillerait de vie.
On s'arrêterait et l'on dirait émerveillé: voilà, cette fois nous avons vu une vraie foule passer!
Mais ils passent et je puis les arrêter ni les tenu groupés. Les jambes de l'un effacent l'ombre du précédent. Pourtant chacun, je le vois, a comme un dépôt.
Enfin, de rage de ne pouvoir le retenir, je me jette furieux sur le papier et le massacre de ratures, jusqu'à ce qu'il sorte une horrible figure désolée qui en cent toiles et en dix ans a fini par me faire reconnâitre pour peintre.
Mais je ne suis pas dupe. Dans les pleurs et la rage, je rejette loin de moi cette maudite usurpatrice, et l'art qui se dérobe m'emplit de son souvenir décevant et amer."
"Quand je regard le papier blanc, écrit-il, je vois courir au loin un homme épouvanté. De quoi épouvanté? Je ne sais, et aussi le rite ridiculte d'hommes qui tournent en rond.
Puis viennent d'autres hommes (toujours à l'éxtrême bout du papier) en quantities innombrables, une foule non pour un tableau mais pour une époque. Ces hommes sont maigres et grands.
La santé ne m'a pas prodigué des excès. Je n'en prodigue pas aux autres. Voilà ce qu'on pourrait dire.
Mais pour ce qui est de la multitude, elle est prodiguée. Seul un viellard au faîte d'une longue vie en vit passer autant.
Ah! Si je pouvais les réunir en un seul tableau! Il y aurait des gens haletants à le regarder tant il grouillerait de vie.
On s'arrêterait et l'on dirait émerveillé: voilà, cette fois nous avons vu une vraie foule passer!
Mais ils passent et je puis les arrêter ni les tenu groupés. Les jambes de l'un effacent l'ombre du précédent. Pourtant chacun, je le vois, a comme un dépôt.
Enfin, de rage de ne pouvoir le retenir, je me jette furieux sur le papier et le massacre de ratures, jusqu'à ce qu'il sorte une horrible figure désolée qui en cent toiles et en dix ans a fini par me faire reconnâitre pour peintre.
Mais je ne suis pas dupe. Dans les pleurs et la rage, je rejette loin de moi cette maudite usurpatrice, et l'art qui se dérobe m'emplit de son souvenir décevant et amer."
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
#21
George Valois' fascism -- the postwar state sounds like a compromise between this and the international order imposed by American capital.
"It will produce:
A state that does not belong to one class but to all, and that is national;
A unified state with a leader;
A state in which the leader represents the action of authority, and the assemblies the organization of liberty;
A state of the industrial age that will raise up countless new riches out of the soil;
A state in which nationalism and socialism will finally be united. The parliamentary state and an exhausted, out-of-date elite, miscreations of 1789, attempt to oppose the creation of a modern state.
It is against this that we continue the movement of 1789 with the dual cry 'Down with parliament! Long live the Nation!'" (106-7)
"It will produce:
A state that does not belong to one class but to all, and that is national;
A unified state with a leader;
A state in which the leader represents the action of authority, and the assemblies the organization of liberty;
A state of the industrial age that will raise up countless new riches out of the soil;
A state in which nationalism and socialism will finally be united. The parliamentary state and an exhausted, out-of-date elite, miscreations of 1789, attempt to oppose the creation of a modern state.
It is against this that we continue the movement of 1789 with the dual cry 'Down with parliament! Long live the Nation!'" (106-7)
#20
Louis Marin, from To Destroy Painting
Caravaggio fails at telling a story (cf. Giulio Mancini quote)
"When it comes to the highest position in the hierarchy of genres of paintings--historical paintings--Caravaggio is a failure. And his failure is explained in terms of the kind of space that is peculiar to him, his special use of light and shadow, his particular mode of painting." (150)
Poussin says that Caravaggio came into the world to destroy painting
Caravaggio fails at telling a story (cf. Giulio Mancini quote)
"When it comes to the highest position in the hierarchy of genres of paintings--historical paintings--Caravaggio is a failure. And his failure is explained in terms of the kind of space that is peculiar to him, his special use of light and shadow, his particular mode of painting." (150)
Poussin says that Caravaggio came into the world to destroy painting
#19
Clement Greenberg on Paul Klee
"Klee inhabits, really, the closed, cautious world of the modern aesthete, which admits experience only piecemeal. No grand style here, no panormas, but many small and precious objects. Let him be put next to Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, and we in America shall have a more correct idea of the place of his art and a truer estimation of its intense but circumscribed power. Also, let the mysticism if not the supernal vision be excluded, and let him be put next to e. e. cummings so that we can take the exact measure of his humor and understand how it unlocks the serious supernal vision. It is no accident that these three American poets are Klee's close contemporaries. They attempt to keep at arm's length what is more or less the same industrial world, and they struggle with a similar provincialism.
[...]
The ambient in which Klee spent most of his life was up-to-date as well as provincial, a region of a [sic] middle-sized cities where spic-and-span modernity sat side by side with the complacently old-fashioned, where the Gothic seeped and eddied around modernistic architecture, Bauhaus posters and electric lights, with a countryside lying close by in which peasant costumes and arts and crafts still could be seen from the windows of the streamlined electrified trains. It was another closed world, closed as only a German 'region' could be, yet not remote
One was forced in upon himself there and induced to cultivated his personal peculiarities. Klee is like somebody out of an E. T. A. Hoffmann story about the small-town Germany of the 18th century: confortable, musical, modest, and fantastic--all these in his work if not his person. He had a Wunderkammer in which he accumulates influences, hints, notions from all over, but first he assimilates them to his domestic interior. Whereas the primitive and exotic that are present in so much of modern art are there for the sake, in part, of their startling effect, in Klee they are made homely and familiar, less strange, less direct and abrupt. Klee is surprising but he is not startling or audacious; his art is eccentric, perhaps, but it is domesticated, and his humor and whimsicality, once we decipher his plastic language, is reassuring rather than unsettling. We are reassured as to the persisting sensuous stability of a very German world in which concepts, more often than not, fail to fit actuality. Klee's real audacity was his modesty, which accepted and accomplished the task of making an easel picture out of almost nothing."
"Klee's color does not have the range or register of his line. It is washed on in tints: light, tender, thin--un-modern. It seldom inheres within definite contours, nor does it become opaque o solid (modern) until the artist's last phase. It does not describe or define any more than his line does; it becomes intense or fades like light itself. Yet such color, in Klee's hands, did succeed in achieving a kind of depth. Not a depth in which represented objects are probable, but a matter of suffusions and breaths of color that create a faraway, ambiguous glow. Against this backdrop, lines peregrinate like melodies against chords. The surface palpitates, signs appear and disappear, yet we cannot tell whether this takes place in fictive depth or on the real surface."
"Putting the gist of his art into narrative and decorative complications rather than architecture, and using color as tint rather than body, Klee takes a relation to the School of Paris somewhat like that of Sienese painting to Florentine in the early Renaissance. He is less realistic than Paris, less physical, that is, but at the same time more literary. Space is flatter and more impervious in Matisse and Picasso. Their pictures move about in actual physical space, occurring with other events and other objects in that space; whereas Klee's inhabit a remoter region which, being nuanced if not constructed like the space of traditional painting, is more emphatically discontinuous with that in which the observer stands. In this sense Klee is less revolutionary than the School of Paris.
Which may be one of the reasons why his influence has been more immediately fruitful than that of any other master who arose in European painting between 1900 and 1925. Of all the artists who put themselves under Picasso's tutelage, hardly one realized himself in anywhere near as short a time as did those who followed Klee (think only of Dubuffet, Brauner, Tobey, Graves). The explanation of this goes, however, beyond the fact of Klee's more traditional use of space--which is so, after all, only by contrast with Picasso's and amounts really to a different emphasis, not a different conception. The style Picasso formed for himself in Cubism is designed to accomodate what I would call a lordly talent. Artists who take this style as a point of departure find it difficult to disembarrass themselves of the personality that goes with this talent. It requires a native largeness and power that are rare. Even Picasso himself has since the late twenties been unable to supply consistently the power his own intentions and their means demand. Klee is an artist of smaller scope whose personality frees rather tahn oppresses or challenges those influenced by him. If the artist's temperament is a modest one, contact with Klee encourages him to release it in sincerity rather than inflate it in imitation. Seeing how much Klee made of relatively little, the aspirant is moved to confess how little he himself has and to make the most of that little.
Picasso asks you to construct more than invent, to build large, substantial edifices--not like Klee, to send up demountable tracery and momentary mists. Picasso asks you to be more aware of your surroundings. This does not mean that Picasso is more 'intellectual' or even more deliberate than Klee; in fact, he works faster and less meditatively. The difference is that he sees the picture as a wall, while Klee sees it as a page; and when painting a wall you have a more conscious sense of the surroundings and of their relation to the picture. Architecture imposes itself then, and with that the monumental and the public."
"As I intimated at the beginning of this article, Klee is not subversive. He is well content to live in a society and culture that he has robbed of all earnestness; in fact, he likes them all the better for that. They become safer, more gemütlich. Far from being a protest against the world as it is, his art is an attempt to make himself more comfortable in it; first he rejects it, then, when it has been rendered harmless by negation, he takes it fondly back. For notice that Klee's irony is never bitter."
"Klee inhabits, really, the closed, cautious world of the modern aesthete, which admits experience only piecemeal. No grand style here, no panormas, but many small and precious objects. Let him be put next to Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, and we in America shall have a more correct idea of the place of his art and a truer estimation of its intense but circumscribed power. Also, let the mysticism if not the supernal vision be excluded, and let him be put next to e. e. cummings so that we can take the exact measure of his humor and understand how it unlocks the serious supernal vision. It is no accident that these three American poets are Klee's close contemporaries. They attempt to keep at arm's length what is more or less the same industrial world, and they struggle with a similar provincialism.
[...]
The ambient in which Klee spent most of his life was up-to-date as well as provincial, a region of a [sic] middle-sized cities where spic-and-span modernity sat side by side with the complacently old-fashioned, where the Gothic seeped and eddied around modernistic architecture, Bauhaus posters and electric lights, with a countryside lying close by in which peasant costumes and arts and crafts still could be seen from the windows of the streamlined electrified trains. It was another closed world, closed as only a German 'region' could be, yet not remote
One was forced in upon himself there and induced to cultivated his personal peculiarities. Klee is like somebody out of an E. T. A. Hoffmann story about the small-town Germany of the 18th century: confortable, musical, modest, and fantastic--all these in his work if not his person. He had a Wunderkammer in which he accumulates influences, hints, notions from all over, but first he assimilates them to his domestic interior. Whereas the primitive and exotic that are present in so much of modern art are there for the sake, in part, of their startling effect, in Klee they are made homely and familiar, less strange, less direct and abrupt. Klee is surprising but he is not startling or audacious; his art is eccentric, perhaps, but it is domesticated, and his humor and whimsicality, once we decipher his plastic language, is reassuring rather than unsettling. We are reassured as to the persisting sensuous stability of a very German world in which concepts, more often than not, fail to fit actuality. Klee's real audacity was his modesty, which accepted and accomplished the task of making an easel picture out of almost nothing."
"Klee's color does not have the range or register of his line. It is washed on in tints: light, tender, thin--un-modern. It seldom inheres within definite contours, nor does it become opaque o solid (modern) until the artist's last phase. It does not describe or define any more than his line does; it becomes intense or fades like light itself. Yet such color, in Klee's hands, did succeed in achieving a kind of depth. Not a depth in which represented objects are probable, but a matter of suffusions and breaths of color that create a faraway, ambiguous glow. Against this backdrop, lines peregrinate like melodies against chords. The surface palpitates, signs appear and disappear, yet we cannot tell whether this takes place in fictive depth or on the real surface."
"Putting the gist of his art into narrative and decorative complications rather than architecture, and using color as tint rather than body, Klee takes a relation to the School of Paris somewhat like that of Sienese painting to Florentine in the early Renaissance. He is less realistic than Paris, less physical, that is, but at the same time more literary. Space is flatter and more impervious in Matisse and Picasso. Their pictures move about in actual physical space, occurring with other events and other objects in that space; whereas Klee's inhabit a remoter region which, being nuanced if not constructed like the space of traditional painting, is more emphatically discontinuous with that in which the observer stands. In this sense Klee is less revolutionary than the School of Paris.
Which may be one of the reasons why his influence has been more immediately fruitful than that of any other master who arose in European painting between 1900 and 1925. Of all the artists who put themselves under Picasso's tutelage, hardly one realized himself in anywhere near as short a time as did those who followed Klee (think only of Dubuffet, Brauner, Tobey, Graves). The explanation of this goes, however, beyond the fact of Klee's more traditional use of space--which is so, after all, only by contrast with Picasso's and amounts really to a different emphasis, not a different conception. The style Picasso formed for himself in Cubism is designed to accomodate what I would call a lordly talent. Artists who take this style as a point of departure find it difficult to disembarrass themselves of the personality that goes with this talent. It requires a native largeness and power that are rare. Even Picasso himself has since the late twenties been unable to supply consistently the power his own intentions and their means demand. Klee is an artist of smaller scope whose personality frees rather tahn oppresses or challenges those influenced by him. If the artist's temperament is a modest one, contact with Klee encourages him to release it in sincerity rather than inflate it in imitation. Seeing how much Klee made of relatively little, the aspirant is moved to confess how little he himself has and to make the most of that little.
Picasso asks you to construct more than invent, to build large, substantial edifices--not like Klee, to send up demountable tracery and momentary mists. Picasso asks you to be more aware of your surroundings. This does not mean that Picasso is more 'intellectual' or even more deliberate than Klee; in fact, he works faster and less meditatively. The difference is that he sees the picture as a wall, while Klee sees it as a page; and when painting a wall you have a more conscious sense of the surroundings and of their relation to the picture. Architecture imposes itself then, and with that the monumental and the public."
"As I intimated at the beginning of this article, Klee is not subversive. He is well content to live in a society and culture that he has robbed of all earnestness; in fact, he likes them all the better for that. They become safer, more gemütlich. Far from being a protest against the world as it is, his art is an attempt to make himself more comfortable in it; first he rejects it, then, when it has been rendered harmless by negation, he takes it fondly back. For notice that Klee's irony is never bitter."
Thursday, August 6, 2009
#18
Heidegger, from "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1951):
"Mortals dwell in that they save the earth--taking the word in the old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation.
Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest.
Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.
Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own nature--their being capable of death as death--into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death. To initiate mortals into the nature of death in no way means to make death, as empty Nothing, the goal. Nor does it mean to darken dwelling by blindly staring toward the end."
For Heidegger, dwelling is not a matter of clearing a space for accumulation -- of making room for things to be acquired, i.e. wrenched from the grip of the earth and established as objects of human value (rather than objects for themselves) -- but rather of being-with, of inviting into the limited sphere of the human something Other, of establishing regular contact with something that must be lived with, rather than taken over or cast out. Absent this propensity to stay with things, humans would be unable to live within the specific "fourfold" limits of terrestrial existence: earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Any other arrangement would necessitate a rearrangement of the limits of human experience, and thus a departure from the humanity of humankind.
"To spare and preserve means: to take under our care, to look after the fourfold in its presencing. What we take under our care must be kept safe. But if dwelling preserves the fourfold, where does it keep the fourfold's nature? How do mortals make their dwelling such a preserving? Mortals would never be capable of it if dwelling were merely a staying on earth under the sky, before the divinities, among mortals. Rather, dwelling itself is always a staying with things. Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things.
[...]
Dwelling preserves the fourfold by bringing the presencing of the fourfold into things. But things themselves secure the fourfold only when they themselves as things are let be in their presencing. How is this done? In this way, that mortals nurse and nurture the things that grow, and specially construct things that do not grow. Cultivating and construction are building in the narrower sense. Dwelling, insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things, is, as this keeping, a building."
Traces of the world-picture argument: "Our thinking has of course long been accustomed to understate the nature of the thing. The consequence, in the course of Western thought, has been that the thing is represented as an unknown X to which perceptible properties are attached. From this point of view, everything that already belongs to the gathering nature of this thing does, of course, appear as something that is afterward read into it. Yet the bridge would never be a mere bridge if it were not a thing."
Every thing as a thing gathers the fourfold "in such a way that it allows a site for it. But only something that is itself a location can make space for a site. The location is not already there before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a location, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge. The bridge is a thing; it gathers the fourfold, but in such a way that it allows a site for the fourfold."
Space and location:
"Only things that are locations in this manner [see above] allow for spaces. What the word for space, Raum, Rum, designates is said by its ancient meaning. Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing." Heidegger's (Hellenic) definition of the boundary here stands in stark contrast with that of Enlightenment political philosophy (or, for that matter, Roman legal discourse), and its distinction between the space of the law (space of accumulation) and the extra-legal space of violence and war. For Heidegger, the Greek peras does not separate the known from the unknown, nor the secure from the contestable; it is the boundary at which a reciprocal relationship between the present and the undisclosed is negotiated. "That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their being from locations and not from 'space.'"
With or against Sartre's Imaginaire?
"We do not represent distant things merely in our mind--as the textbooks have it--so that only mental representations of distant things run through our minds and heads as substitutes for the things. If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in Heidelberg, this thinking toward that location is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the nature of our thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that location. From this spot right here, we are there at the bridge--we are by no means at some representational content in our consciousness. From right here we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing."
Natural permeability of man--really crucial passage: "Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man. To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations. And only because mortals pervade, persist through, spaces by their very nature are they able to go through spaces. But in going through spaces we do not give up our standing in them. Rather, we always go through spaces in such a way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things. When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I go through it."
(Heidegger contra Schmitt?)
"The Greek for 'to bring forth or to produce' is tikto. The word techne, technique, belongs to the verb's root tec. To the Greeks techne means neither art nor handicraft but rather: to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way. The Greeks conceive of techne, producing, in terms of letting appear. Techne thus conceived has been concealed in the tectonics of architecture since ancient times. Of late it still remains concealed, and more resolutely, in the technology of power machinery. But the nature of the erecting of buildings cannot be understood adequately in terms either of architecture or of engineering construction, not in terms of a mere combination of the two. The erecting of buildings would not be suitably defined even if we were to think of it in the sense of the original Greek techne as solely a letting-appear, which brings something made, as something present, among the things that are already present."
Really wonderful statement of what the analysis of artworks might be said to do: "Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build. Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been how it was able to build."--To search for the signs of dwelling, and the manner of this dwelling, is one way to approach the question of how the formalist tools of art history might be put to a philosophical/cultural analysis of the history of ways of humanity's being in the world (in the "fourfold," as Heidegger insists on naming it).
"Mortals dwell in that they save the earth--taking the word in the old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation.
Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest.
Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.
Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own nature--their being capable of death as death--into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death. To initiate mortals into the nature of death in no way means to make death, as empty Nothing, the goal. Nor does it mean to darken dwelling by blindly staring toward the end."
For Heidegger, dwelling is not a matter of clearing a space for accumulation -- of making room for things to be acquired, i.e. wrenched from the grip of the earth and established as objects of human value (rather than objects for themselves) -- but rather of being-with, of inviting into the limited sphere of the human something Other, of establishing regular contact with something that must be lived with, rather than taken over or cast out. Absent this propensity to stay with things, humans would be unable to live within the specific "fourfold" limits of terrestrial existence: earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Any other arrangement would necessitate a rearrangement of the limits of human experience, and thus a departure from the humanity of humankind.
"To spare and preserve means: to take under our care, to look after the fourfold in its presencing. What we take under our care must be kept safe. But if dwelling preserves the fourfold, where does it keep the fourfold's nature? How do mortals make their dwelling such a preserving? Mortals would never be capable of it if dwelling were merely a staying on earth under the sky, before the divinities, among mortals. Rather, dwelling itself is always a staying with things. Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things.
[...]
Dwelling preserves the fourfold by bringing the presencing of the fourfold into things. But things themselves secure the fourfold only when they themselves as things are let be in their presencing. How is this done? In this way, that mortals nurse and nurture the things that grow, and specially construct things that do not grow. Cultivating and construction are building in the narrower sense. Dwelling, insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things, is, as this keeping, a building."
Traces of the world-picture argument: "Our thinking has of course long been accustomed to understate the nature of the thing. The consequence, in the course of Western thought, has been that the thing is represented as an unknown X to which perceptible properties are attached. From this point of view, everything that already belongs to the gathering nature of this thing does, of course, appear as something that is afterward read into it. Yet the bridge would never be a mere bridge if it were not a thing."
Every thing as a thing gathers the fourfold "in such a way that it allows a site for it. But only something that is itself a location can make space for a site. The location is not already there before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a location, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge. The bridge is a thing; it gathers the fourfold, but in such a way that it allows a site for the fourfold."
Space and location:
"Only things that are locations in this manner [see above] allow for spaces. What the word for space, Raum, Rum, designates is said by its ancient meaning. Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing." Heidegger's (Hellenic) definition of the boundary here stands in stark contrast with that of Enlightenment political philosophy (or, for that matter, Roman legal discourse), and its distinction between the space of the law (space of accumulation) and the extra-legal space of violence and war. For Heidegger, the Greek peras does not separate the known from the unknown, nor the secure from the contestable; it is the boundary at which a reciprocal relationship between the present and the undisclosed is negotiated. "That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their being from locations and not from 'space.'"
With or against Sartre's Imaginaire?
"We do not represent distant things merely in our mind--as the textbooks have it--so that only mental representations of distant things run through our minds and heads as substitutes for the things. If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in Heidelberg, this thinking toward that location is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the nature of our thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that location. From this spot right here, we are there at the bridge--we are by no means at some representational content in our consciousness. From right here we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing."
Natural permeability of man--really crucial passage: "Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man. To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations. And only because mortals pervade, persist through, spaces by their very nature are they able to go through spaces. But in going through spaces we do not give up our standing in them. Rather, we always go through spaces in such a way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things. When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I go through it."
(Heidegger contra Schmitt?)
"The Greek for 'to bring forth or to produce' is tikto. The word techne, technique, belongs to the verb's root tec. To the Greeks techne means neither art nor handicraft but rather: to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way. The Greeks conceive of techne, producing, in terms of letting appear. Techne thus conceived has been concealed in the tectonics of architecture since ancient times. Of late it still remains concealed, and more resolutely, in the technology of power machinery. But the nature of the erecting of buildings cannot be understood adequately in terms either of architecture or of engineering construction, not in terms of a mere combination of the two. The erecting of buildings would not be suitably defined even if we were to think of it in the sense of the original Greek techne as solely a letting-appear, which brings something made, as something present, among the things that are already present."
Really wonderful statement of what the analysis of artworks might be said to do: "Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build. Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been how it was able to build."--To search for the signs of dwelling, and the manner of this dwelling, is one way to approach the question of how the formalist tools of art history might be put to a philosophical/cultural analysis of the history of ways of humanity's being in the world (in the "fourfold," as Heidegger insists on naming it).
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
#17
Notes on Mulholland Drive
There are a couple ways to take the "asocial" argument, the way I was thinking about it. First, like I was saying, the world of the film (its social world) seems to me to be particularly cloistered, self-enclosed, and hermetically-sealed. You can't get there from here - from the world of everyday sociability; the rules that govern Mulholland Drive, and which govern the relationships of characters with one another, aren't the same as govern your interaction with me or with anyone else in the world outside the movie theater. I don't mean this in the way you might think, though. It's not that Mulholland Drive isn't explicable in terms of our world, and the subjectivity of its characters in terms of our subjectivity. Maybe its better to say that Lynch makes a few important interventions in the formal conditions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. If subjectivity presumes a subject and an object, a self and an other, it seems important to say that only half of the equation is represented in Mulholland Drive. Self without an other, or an other without a self: this paradox is alive and well in the world of David Lynch. Rita and Betty belong as characters to a scene of fantasy that surpasses them both, and which neither can claim to possess as "hers." Same with the cowboy, the director, the studio bosses. What's missing is subjective interiority - the ability to think, reason, to act of one's own volition. What motivates the characters is external to them; but it is also the same force that acts upon all (the code for which is the man behind the wall). Is it death that moves them? It seems irrelevant whether or not we call the characters living or dead, since in a world of illusion, of fiction, one is always only playing dead, playing living. Lynch's world is wholly that of fiction; but in his world, fiction aggregates to itself unprecedented powers of violence and seduction; spoken language is its weakest weapon, body language, gesture, facial expression, its strongest.
Mulholland Drive is a paradoxical world: not only does it not "make sense" as a narrative, but its nonsense isn't even hidden, it's put in plain view - the blue box, for example, or the man behind the wall. In other words, the film isn't nonsensical because Lynch has simply left out or removed the relevant bits of information or plot (this is how Deleuze explains the shift from a cinema of movement to a cinema of time); rather, the film is visibly, openly nonsensical. Its paradoxes have congealed, or condensed, taking the form of objects fully inscribed within the world traversed by its characters. What's important here isn't, though, the "made-up" character of this world; because Mulholland Drive is emphatically not science fiction or fantasy. It's not nonsense for its own sake, in other words. My hunch is this: that Mulholland Drive takes place fully at the site of the Other, and in a manner that refuses to avow its relationship with the spectatorial Self. The Other without a Self, or an object without a subject: we can't make sense of these characters because their otherness is too much Other - as if an otherness totally Other had been given a framework, taken human form, becoming dispersed among a cast of characters (casting being one of the film's dominant themes) who can neither maintain their distance from one another nor merge finally back into their original state of inseparability (the fantasy of the wholly Other is the fantasy of the self-enclosed body, of the body that requires nothing Other for its satisfaction). I guess this is a bit convoluted, but what I mean is that the narcissism of the characters and their world is of a sort goes unchecked, dialectically, by anything that resists or negates it. Laura Harring's character is irresistible to Naomi Watts. A more conventional spin on the Betty character would put her into contact with Rita as a necessary counter-force: the jaded actress whose benevolent scorn forces Betty to harden herself in the tough world of Hollywood wheeling and dealing. Instead, Rita and Betty belong together to a scene of fantasy that requires nothing outside of itself to fulfill itself. Rita has the blue key, and Betty the blue box; who wouldn't predict a girl-girl sex scene somewhere near the end of the key-in-box plot-line?
Come to think of it, it's interesting that the second "half" of the film, post-key-in-box, is about Naomi Watts' individuation (the waking of dead Diane Selwyn) outside the world of Hollywood insiders (i.e. as a hapless striver): but of course, the film immediately assaults and kills her; individuation is death, but more than that, individuation is incompatible with the world of the film, and so the moment of Diane's full coming-into-being as an individual, when she has Camilla killed, is the moment that circumscribes both the beginning and the end of the film. The catch-22, then, is that to become an individual, Peggy has to enter the world of cinema, sacrificing her interiority to be swept up in the lifeless duration of a cinematic fiction; but to repossess her interiority, she has to take her own life. Either way, individuation is death in the world of cinema: to die in order to live onscreen, and to be killed so that the film can end. Fiction is deadly for Lynch - and this deadliness is the film's paradox: the absolutely-Other is death incarnate. I wonder if it isn't true that the most beautiful scenes in American cinema are always images of death, while the most beautiful scenes in European cinema are of love.
The film is antisocial in another way - and it's in this respect that the world Lynch imagines is of historical interest. It's not merely Otherness for Otherness' sake, or cinema for cinema's sake: there's a reason Mulholland Drive frightens us, compels us, and, ultimately, strikes us more familiar and less paradoxical than it otherwise should. The paradox of Mulholland Drive is the same paradox that structures, or has structured, the organization of power in America for much of the 20th century. The self-enclosedness of the film seems to me to take its cue from the self-enclosedness of executive and administrative power generally - power that has aggregated to itself both the means of production and the means of violence, but which has, up until very recently, kept itself more or less out-of-view, if not hidden entirely. Guy Debord territory, in other words. It's no coincidence that Mulholland Drive was released on the eve of Bush-Cheney executive unilateralism. The dream of executive power is to operate in a world where nothing resists the executive command - and where nothing resists, and where no principle of difference or individuation stands in the way of corporate efficiency, there's no need for language, communication, mediation. What's remarkable is that this cohort of power-holders, unlike the other totalitarian regents of 20th-century societies, hasn't any use for the cult of the leader, nor for the cult of personality. Instead, one worships at the cult of efficiency, of corporate unity - and, strangely enough, of a strange sort of social modesty: it's not necessary that anyone see evidence of one's power; in fact, it's essential that the exercise of force remain invisible, and that the accumulation of wealth be primarily if not fully out-of-view. But this is a paradox: power can't be exercised in a vacuum, nor wealth accumulated immaterially; power and wealth are always relational qualities. It's just not possible - and so society itself (culture) becomes the site at which executive wealth and violence are laundered, taking the form of characters, narratives (fictions), and speech. Mulholland Drive takes on the parameters of the executive world, reveling in the unimportance of fiction qua fiction, and also in the incredible violence and seductiveness of the power that works in and through fiction. Personally, I'm very happy that Lynch shows the paradox of executive authority for what it is: unmediated force, the absolutely-Other, death. To involve oneself in the world of executives is to accept a living death; to extricate oneself from this world, to negate it, is to be negated in turn. Where executive power holds sway, it dictates the terms of individuation; to be an individual means, very simply, to become an administrator: a false, impossible form of individuality, but an alluring one just the same.
Since the rise of the Hollywood system, cinema has held out to viewers the possibility of experiencing what it would be like to be an individual in a world otherwise (in reality) atomized through and through. Because capital organizes the world in such a way as to deny most people the possibility of possessive individuality - the ability to own property, but also to "own" one's experience in the form of unique, but communicable, memories - cinema makes accessible the thrill of individuality, though in a way that makes being an individual seem like more trouble than it's worth. The hero is assaulted by threats of a magnitude no audience member would ever wish on him- or herself (the sovereignty of the individual ego is justified in terms of threat); by the time our 90 minutes of individuality has elapsed, it no longer seems like such a bad idea to be a mere employee. Interesting, then, given the historical circumstances (the beginning of Bush totalitarianism, but, more importantly, the sudden coming-into-view of executive authority after decades of its remaining obscure), that individuality in Mulholland Drive is no longer commensurate with the spectator's wish for to be an individual (if only for a short time). For Lynch, the only individuality on offer in cinema is of a completely untenable sort: the living death of being-without-otherness. To a certain extent, the stakes of executive individuality are made clear: one can live one's narcissistic fantasy, but only by severing ties with the world of the living. Here, to enter the world of the film is to be possessed by an otherness that outlaws the self. Only in the land of the dead is power exercised immediately and without reserve; word and gesture serve to abolish all distance and difference. On the one hand, Mulholland Drive is a paean to the seductiveness of the executive fantasy, hence its creepily fascistic beauty. On the other hand, though, Lynch insists upon the fatal impossibility of this fantasy: No hay banda. Todo es illusion. The singer is held captive by a voice not her own; her body collapses. Individuality of this sort is untenable - death is its agent, it speaks in our name. Thankfully Mulholland Drive is a funeral for these living dead, even if a ravishing one.
There are a couple ways to take the "asocial" argument, the way I was thinking about it. First, like I was saying, the world of the film (its social world) seems to me to be particularly cloistered, self-enclosed, and hermetically-sealed. You can't get there from here - from the world of everyday sociability; the rules that govern Mulholland Drive, and which govern the relationships of characters with one another, aren't the same as govern your interaction with me or with anyone else in the world outside the movie theater. I don't mean this in the way you might think, though. It's not that Mulholland Drive isn't explicable in terms of our world, and the subjectivity of its characters in terms of our subjectivity. Maybe its better to say that Lynch makes a few important interventions in the formal conditions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. If subjectivity presumes a subject and an object, a self and an other, it seems important to say that only half of the equation is represented in Mulholland Drive. Self without an other, or an other without a self: this paradox is alive and well in the world of David Lynch. Rita and Betty belong as characters to a scene of fantasy that surpasses them both, and which neither can claim to possess as "hers." Same with the cowboy, the director, the studio bosses. What's missing is subjective interiority - the ability to think, reason, to act of one's own volition. What motivates the characters is external to them; but it is also the same force that acts upon all (the code for which is the man behind the wall). Is it death that moves them? It seems irrelevant whether or not we call the characters living or dead, since in a world of illusion, of fiction, one is always only playing dead, playing living. Lynch's world is wholly that of fiction; but in his world, fiction aggregates to itself unprecedented powers of violence and seduction; spoken language is its weakest weapon, body language, gesture, facial expression, its strongest.
Mulholland Drive is a paradoxical world: not only does it not "make sense" as a narrative, but its nonsense isn't even hidden, it's put in plain view - the blue box, for example, or the man behind the wall. In other words, the film isn't nonsensical because Lynch has simply left out or removed the relevant bits of information or plot (this is how Deleuze explains the shift from a cinema of movement to a cinema of time); rather, the film is visibly, openly nonsensical. Its paradoxes have congealed, or condensed, taking the form of objects fully inscribed within the world traversed by its characters. What's important here isn't, though, the "made-up" character of this world; because Mulholland Drive is emphatically not science fiction or fantasy. It's not nonsense for its own sake, in other words. My hunch is this: that Mulholland Drive takes place fully at the site of the Other, and in a manner that refuses to avow its relationship with the spectatorial Self. The Other without a Self, or an object without a subject: we can't make sense of these characters because their otherness is too much Other - as if an otherness totally Other had been given a framework, taken human form, becoming dispersed among a cast of characters (casting being one of the film's dominant themes) who can neither maintain their distance from one another nor merge finally back into their original state of inseparability (the fantasy of the wholly Other is the fantasy of the self-enclosed body, of the body that requires nothing Other for its satisfaction). I guess this is a bit convoluted, but what I mean is that the narcissism of the characters and their world is of a sort goes unchecked, dialectically, by anything that resists or negates it. Laura Harring's character is irresistible to Naomi Watts. A more conventional spin on the Betty character would put her into contact with Rita as a necessary counter-force: the jaded actress whose benevolent scorn forces Betty to harden herself in the tough world of Hollywood wheeling and dealing. Instead, Rita and Betty belong together to a scene of fantasy that requires nothing outside of itself to fulfill itself. Rita has the blue key, and Betty the blue box; who wouldn't predict a girl-girl sex scene somewhere near the end of the key-in-box plot-line?
Come to think of it, it's interesting that the second "half" of the film, post-key-in-box, is about Naomi Watts' individuation (the waking of dead Diane Selwyn) outside the world of Hollywood insiders (i.e. as a hapless striver): but of course, the film immediately assaults and kills her; individuation is death, but more than that, individuation is incompatible with the world of the film, and so the moment of Diane's full coming-into-being as an individual, when she has Camilla killed, is the moment that circumscribes both the beginning and the end of the film. The catch-22, then, is that to become an individual, Peggy has to enter the world of cinema, sacrificing her interiority to be swept up in the lifeless duration of a cinematic fiction; but to repossess her interiority, she has to take her own life. Either way, individuation is death in the world of cinema: to die in order to live onscreen, and to be killed so that the film can end. Fiction is deadly for Lynch - and this deadliness is the film's paradox: the absolutely-Other is death incarnate. I wonder if it isn't true that the most beautiful scenes in American cinema are always images of death, while the most beautiful scenes in European cinema are of love.
The film is antisocial in another way - and it's in this respect that the world Lynch imagines is of historical interest. It's not merely Otherness for Otherness' sake, or cinema for cinema's sake: there's a reason Mulholland Drive frightens us, compels us, and, ultimately, strikes us more familiar and less paradoxical than it otherwise should. The paradox of Mulholland Drive is the same paradox that structures, or has structured, the organization of power in America for much of the 20th century. The self-enclosedness of the film seems to me to take its cue from the self-enclosedness of executive and administrative power generally - power that has aggregated to itself both the means of production and the means of violence, but which has, up until very recently, kept itself more or less out-of-view, if not hidden entirely. Guy Debord territory, in other words. It's no coincidence that Mulholland Drive was released on the eve of Bush-Cheney executive unilateralism. The dream of executive power is to operate in a world where nothing resists the executive command - and where nothing resists, and where no principle of difference or individuation stands in the way of corporate efficiency, there's no need for language, communication, mediation. What's remarkable is that this cohort of power-holders, unlike the other totalitarian regents of 20th-century societies, hasn't any use for the cult of the leader, nor for the cult of personality. Instead, one worships at the cult of efficiency, of corporate unity - and, strangely enough, of a strange sort of social modesty: it's not necessary that anyone see evidence of one's power; in fact, it's essential that the exercise of force remain invisible, and that the accumulation of wealth be primarily if not fully out-of-view. But this is a paradox: power can't be exercised in a vacuum, nor wealth accumulated immaterially; power and wealth are always relational qualities. It's just not possible - and so society itself (culture) becomes the site at which executive wealth and violence are laundered, taking the form of characters, narratives (fictions), and speech. Mulholland Drive takes on the parameters of the executive world, reveling in the unimportance of fiction qua fiction, and also in the incredible violence and seductiveness of the power that works in and through fiction. Personally, I'm very happy that Lynch shows the paradox of executive authority for what it is: unmediated force, the absolutely-Other, death. To involve oneself in the world of executives is to accept a living death; to extricate oneself from this world, to negate it, is to be negated in turn. Where executive power holds sway, it dictates the terms of individuation; to be an individual means, very simply, to become an administrator: a false, impossible form of individuality, but an alluring one just the same.
Since the rise of the Hollywood system, cinema has held out to viewers the possibility of experiencing what it would be like to be an individual in a world otherwise (in reality) atomized through and through. Because capital organizes the world in such a way as to deny most people the possibility of possessive individuality - the ability to own property, but also to "own" one's experience in the form of unique, but communicable, memories - cinema makes accessible the thrill of individuality, though in a way that makes being an individual seem like more trouble than it's worth. The hero is assaulted by threats of a magnitude no audience member would ever wish on him- or herself (the sovereignty of the individual ego is justified in terms of threat); by the time our 90 minutes of individuality has elapsed, it no longer seems like such a bad idea to be a mere employee. Interesting, then, given the historical circumstances (the beginning of Bush totalitarianism, but, more importantly, the sudden coming-into-view of executive authority after decades of its remaining obscure), that individuality in Mulholland Drive is no longer commensurate with the spectator's wish for to be an individual (if only for a short time). For Lynch, the only individuality on offer in cinema is of a completely untenable sort: the living death of being-without-otherness. To a certain extent, the stakes of executive individuality are made clear: one can live one's narcissistic fantasy, but only by severing ties with the world of the living. Here, to enter the world of the film is to be possessed by an otherness that outlaws the self. Only in the land of the dead is power exercised immediately and without reserve; word and gesture serve to abolish all distance and difference. On the one hand, Mulholland Drive is a paean to the seductiveness of the executive fantasy, hence its creepily fascistic beauty. On the other hand, though, Lynch insists upon the fatal impossibility of this fantasy: No hay banda. Todo es illusion. The singer is held captive by a voice not her own; her body collapses. Individuality of this sort is untenable - death is its agent, it speaks in our name. Thankfully Mulholland Drive is a funeral for these living dead, even if a ravishing one.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
#16
Édouard Berth (pseudonym Jean Darville), quoted in Sternhell:
"War is not always that 'work of death' that a vain people of effeminate weaklings imagines. Behind every powerful industrial and commercial development there is an act of force, an act of war."
Sternhell/Berth: "Only violence can save the human race from 'becoming universally bougeois,' 'from the platitude of an eternal peace.'"
problem of perpetual peace
"War is not always that 'work of death' that a vain people of effeminate weaklings imagines. Behind every powerful industrial and commercial development there is an act of force, an act of war."
Sternhell/Berth: "Only violence can save the human race from 'becoming universally bougeois,' 'from the platitude of an eternal peace.'"
problem of perpetual peace
Sunday, August 2, 2009
#15
Bataille, from 1950 letter to René Char:
"The difficulty of subordinating action to its end stems from the fact that the only admissible action is the most efficacious. Hence, the initial advantage of immoderately giving oneself over to it, of lying and of unrestrained conduct. If all men permitted themselves to act only to the extent that necessity dictates to their total being, falsehood and brutality would be superfluous. It is the overflowing propensity to action and the ensuing rivalries, which increase the efficacy of liars and of the blind. Moreover, given the circumstances, we can do nothing to extricate ourselves--to remedy the evil of excessive action, one has to, or would have, to act! We do nothing more than verbally and vainly condemn those who betray and blind their own kind. Everything, in all this vanity, takes a turn for the worse. No one can condemn action except through silence,--or though poetry, which opens, as it were, its window onto silence. To denounce, to protest, is also to act, and at the same time, it is to shy away from the exigencies of action!"
On the unbearable and the divine:
"One speaks about the 'unbearable' universe that I portray in my books, as though I were displaying my open wounds the way the wretched do. It is true that, on the surface, I like to deny, or at least to neglect and discount, the multiple resources which help us to endure. I scorn them less perhaps than it would appear, but I most certainly hasten to give back my own small portion of life to that which divinely slips away before us, and which slips away from the will to reduce the world to the efficacy of reason. I have nothing against reason and rational order, for in the numerous cases where it is clearly opportune, like everyone else, I am in favor of them both. Nevertheless, I do not know whether anything in this world has ever appeared adorable which did not exceed the functions of utility, did not wreak havoc upon and benumb as it charmed, and, in short, was not at the extreme limit of endurance. I, who know myself to be clearly limited to atheism, am perhaps wrong for never having demanded less from this world than the Christians did from God. Did not the idea of God itself, while having as its logical outcome a reasonable account of the world, also have the means to chill (the blood)? Was it not itself 'unbearable'? All the more unbearable then is that which is, of which we know nothing (except in detached bits), about which nothing can give an explanation, and whose fullest expression is to be found only in man's powerlessness and death."
Henri Michaux, Tête Bleu, 1948
"The difficulty of subordinating action to its end stems from the fact that the only admissible action is the most efficacious. Hence, the initial advantage of immoderately giving oneself over to it, of lying and of unrestrained conduct. If all men permitted themselves to act only to the extent that necessity dictates to their total being, falsehood and brutality would be superfluous. It is the overflowing propensity to action and the ensuing rivalries, which increase the efficacy of liars and of the blind. Moreover, given the circumstances, we can do nothing to extricate ourselves--to remedy the evil of excessive action, one has to, or would have, to act! We do nothing more than verbally and vainly condemn those who betray and blind their own kind. Everything, in all this vanity, takes a turn for the worse. No one can condemn action except through silence,--or though poetry, which opens, as it were, its window onto silence. To denounce, to protest, is also to act, and at the same time, it is to shy away from the exigencies of action!"
On the unbearable and the divine:
"One speaks about the 'unbearable' universe that I portray in my books, as though I were displaying my open wounds the way the wretched do. It is true that, on the surface, I like to deny, or at least to neglect and discount, the multiple resources which help us to endure. I scorn them less perhaps than it would appear, but I most certainly hasten to give back my own small portion of life to that which divinely slips away before us, and which slips away from the will to reduce the world to the efficacy of reason. I have nothing against reason and rational order, for in the numerous cases where it is clearly opportune, like everyone else, I am in favor of them both. Nevertheless, I do not know whether anything in this world has ever appeared adorable which did not exceed the functions of utility, did not wreak havoc upon and benumb as it charmed, and, in short, was not at the extreme limit of endurance. I, who know myself to be clearly limited to atheism, am perhaps wrong for never having demanded less from this world than the Christians did from God. Did not the idea of God itself, while having as its logical outcome a reasonable account of the world, also have the means to chill (the blood)? Was it not itself 'unbearable'? All the more unbearable then is that which is, of which we know nothing (except in detached bits), about which nothing can give an explanation, and whose fullest expression is to be found only in man's powerlessness and death."
Henri Michaux, Tête Bleu, 1948
Saturday, August 1, 2009
#14
La nouvelle Citroën,
extrait de Mythologies
de Roland Barthes.
Je crois que l’automobile est aujourd’hui l’équivalent assez exact des grandes cathédrales gothiques : je veux dire une grande création d’époque, conçue passionnément par des artistes inconnus, consommée dans son image, sinon dans son usage, par un peuple entier qui s’approprie en elle un objet parfaitement magique.
La nouvelle Citroën tombe manifestement du ciel dans la mesure où elle se présente d’abord comme un objet superlatif. Il ne faut pas oublier que l’objet est le meilleur messager de la surnature: il y a facilement dans l’objet, à la fois une perfection et une absence d’origine, une clôture et une brillance, une transformation de la vie en matière (la matière est bien plus magique que la vie), et pour tout dire un silence qui appartient à l’ordre du merveilleux. La «Déesse» a tous les caractères (du moins le public commence-t-il par les lui prêter unanimement) d’un de ces objets descendus d’un autre univers, qui ont alimenté la néomanie du XVIIIe siècle et celle de notre science-fiction: la Déesse est d’abord un nouveau Nautilus.
C’est pourquoi on s’intéresse moins en elle à la substance qu’à ses joints. On sait que le lisse est toujours un attribut de la perfection parce que son contraire trahit une opération technique et tout humaine d’ajustement: la tunique du Christ était sans couture, comme les aéronefs de la science-fiction sont d’un métal sans relais. La DS 19 ne prétend pas au pur nappé, quoique sa forme générale soit très enveloppée; pourtant ce sont les emboîtements de ses plans qui intéressent le plus le public: on tâte furieusement la jonction des vitres, on passe la main dans les larges rigoles de caoutchouc qui relient la fenêtre arrière à ses entours de nickel. Il y a dans la DS l’amorce d’une nouvelle phénoménologie de l’ajustement, comme si l’on passait d’un monde d’éléments soudés à un monde d’éléments juxtaposés et qui tiennent par la seule vertu de leur forme merveilleuse, ce qui, bien entendu, est chargé d’introduire à l’idée d’une nature plus facile.
Quant à la matière elle-même, il est sûr qu’elle soutient un goût de la légèreté, au sens magique. Il y a retour à un certain aérodynamisme, nouveau pourtant dans la mesure où il est moins massif, moins tranchant, plus étale que celui des premiers temps de cette mode. La vitesse s’exprime ici dans des signes moins agressifs, moins sportifs, comme si elle passait d’une forme héroïque à une forme classique. Cette spiritualisation se lit dans l’importance, le soin et la matière des surfaces vitrées. La Déesse est visiblement exaltation de la vitre, et la tôle n’y est qu’une base. Ici, les vitres ne sont pas fenêtres, ouvertures percées dans la coque obscure, elles sont grands pans d’air et de vide, ayant le bombage étalé et la brillance des bulles de savon, la minceur dure d’une substance plus entomologique que minérale (l’insigne Citroën, l’insigne fléché, est devenu d’ailleurs insigne ailé, comme si l’on passait maintenant d’un ordre de la propulsion à un ordre du mouvement, d’un ordre du moteur à un ordre de l’organisme).
Il s’agit donc d’un art humanisé, et il se peut que la Déesse marque un changement dans la mythologie automobile. Jusqu’à présent, la voiture superlative tenait plutôt du bestiaire de la puissance; elle devient ici à la fois plus spirituelle et plus objective, et malgré certaines complaisances néomaniaques (comme le volant vide), la voici plus ménagère, mieux accordée à cette sublimation de l’ustensilité que l’on retrouve dans nos arts ménagers contemporains: le tableau de bord ressemble davantage à l’établi d’une cuisine moderne qu’à la centrale d’une usine: les minces volets de tôle mate, ondulée, les petits leviers à boule blanche, les voyants très simples, la discrétion même de la nickelerie, tout cela signifie une sorte de contrôle exercé sur le mouvement, conçu désormais comme confort plus que comme performance. On passe visiblement d’une alchimie de la vitesse à une gourmandise de la conduite.
Il semble que le public ait admirablement deviné la nouveauté des thèmes qu’on lui propose: d’abord sensible au néologisme (toute une campagne de presse le tenait en alerte depuis des années), il s’efforce très vite de réintégrer une conduite d’adaptation et d’ustensilité (« Faut s’y habituer »). Dans les halls d’exposition, la voiture témoin est visitée avec une application intense, amoureuse: c’est la grande phase tactile de la découverte, le moment où le merveilleux visuel va subir l’assaut raisonnant du toucher (car le toucher est le plus démystificateur de tous les sens, au contraire de la vue, qui est le plus magique): les tôles, les joints sont touchés, les rembourrages palpés, les sièges essayés, les portes caressées, les coussins pelotés; devant le volant, on mime la conduite avec tout le corps. L’objet est ici totalement prostitué, approprié: partie du ciel de Metropolis, la Déesse est en un quart d’heure médiatisée, accomplissant dans cet exorcisme, le mouvement même de la promotion petite-bourgeoise.
Roland Barthes, 1957, dans « Mythologies », extrait des Œuvres complètes I, Editions du Seuil
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)