square white world

Am I speaking with Mr. Taylor?

Yes.

Mr. Tony Taylor?

No, his son.

Can I please speak with Mr. Tony Taylor?

No. I’m afraid Mr. Tony Taylor is no longer with us.

Has he got like a divorce?

A what?

A di-v-horse?

No. He passed away.

So who is the main owner of the computers there?

No-one is the main owner of the computers here.

Like who is the main own-ner?

What is this call about please?

You have warning signals sent out…

What kind of operating system do I have…?

No. That’s what you tell me.

I don’t have to tell you anything.

You have warnings being sent out and this is not good for anyone on the…

Are you a scammer? You sound like a scammer…

No, I am not a scammer. I am a human being.

Well, this sounds like a crank call.

This is not a prank call. I am calling because warnings are being sent out from your computer…

What do they say?

Microsoft…

I don’t deal with Microsoft at all.

No? Well then, Apple, Linux…

No, not Apple either.

That’s what I said. Linux then.

Yes.

Right, Linux. [pause] OK. [pause] Good night and god bless you, my dear.

‘Style,’ said Evelyn Waugh, ‘is not just avoiding the cliché. It’s avoiding the place where you can feel the cliché is being avoided.’

- in David Hare, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, Faber and Faber, London, 2005, p. 140

By engagement, I mean not so much an exposition, or a critique, or both, but a path that cuts across these texts, a thought that attempts to find its way through them. Needless to say, this approach might be seen as involving a certain degree of violence. Yet this may well amount to nothing other than the irreducible degree of violence involved in the work of interpretation, which remains the sole form of fidelity toward what is most thought provoking.

- Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004, p. 16

I once with, with Howard Brenton, wrote a play called Pravda, about a mad South African newspaper owner played by Anthony Hopkins as a kind of maquette for his subsequent Hannibal Lecter. Anxious lest our fictional proprietor be confused with a conspicuous real-life Australian, the Board of the nervous National Theatre insisted that we consult a QC. ‘Well,’ said this highly intelligent man, ‘as far as I can see, your play portrays a megalomaniac psychopath who drags his newspapers downmarket, who has no concern for editorial standards, who has no sexual pleasure except in public humiliation and violent dismissal of his staff, and whose only real interest is in the accumulation of a massive, unscrupulous and anti-social fortune for himself. If Rupert Murdoch really wants to step forward and identify himself as the hero of the play, then my advice would be: let him.’

In fact, Murdoch’s response to the play was characteristic. In Pravda, our Lambert le Roux adopts British citizenship specifically in order to be able to own British newspapers. Please not, six months after our opening night Murdoch decided to become an American, protesting that, like Lambert, he went through ‘the normal channels, albeit at unusual speed.’ Murdoch effectively treated our play not as a work of art, but as an inspirational business plan. Is Murdoch the only man on earth who could actually asset-strip a satire?

- David Hare, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, Faber and Faber, London, 2005, pp. 127-8

if metaphysics, as a metaphysics of the ground, and of subjectivity – of subjectivity as constituting the very ground for the objectivity of objectal nature – is no longer possible, if philosophy can no longer turn to subjectivity as the transcendental site revealing the conditions of possibility of experience, and of beings as such and as a whole as a realm of objects, can it not undergo a transformation and reinvent itself, precisely out of this “crisis” of foundation? Can we not think the future of metaphysics, and the possibility of ontology, out of this very event, the event of un-grounding? And so, before proceeding with the rites of burial of philosophy, before declaring its death irreversible, and its new life as science – and, once again, that which, in the current institutional, professional, and cultural landscape, seems to testify to the good health of philosophy, in my mind only confirms the diagnosis I have just formulated – let us at least consider the possibility of a philosophy which, neither metaphysics in the sense of grounding, nor philosophy of science, nonetheless remains in relation to science, at once absolutely different from it and coextensive with it. What sort of relation would that be?

It is a relation born of this “crisis” of foundation. Yet because it is a relation, it does not coincide simply with a collapsing, whether understood as total collapse, or as a collapsing of the one (philosophy) into the other (science). Neither grounding (fondement) nor collapsing (effondrement), it is a relation of what, following Deleuze, we shall call an un-grounding (effondement). This concept is indicative of a twofold gesture, of a double possibility: the possibility of situating philosophy in relation to science anew, first of all; and, in close connection with this first possibility, the possibility of reasserting philosophy as ontology on the basis of a distinction in being between the actual, or the empirical (and the science it enables), and the virtual or transcendental horizon (which philosophy brings out) from which the former unfolds.

…

the transcendental no longer refers back to a transcendental subjectivity, but to the real as such. In effect, the transcendental no longer designates the conditions of possibility of (subjective) experience, nor the conditions of possibility of phenomena themselves. It now designates their real conditions of existence and is concerned with their actual generation and production.

…

The transcendental is therefore a dimension of the real itself.

- Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004, pp. 21-2

there are people who can’t afford to hate.

the damned.

- Jim Sanborn: The Archeological record offers us a frustratingly fragmented view of the past. Though fragmentary, this archeoview is pregnant with secrets yet to be discovered and is thrilling in its potential. Secrecy is power even if it is just a little something kept from view, buried, so to speak, in the matrix of everyday life.

For the past 30 years, my task as an artist has been to release this hidden information at a rate commensurate with its importance, and at the time of my choosing so as to prolong the experience of discovery. As we all know, artwork that gives up its form or content quickly is soon forgotten.

this is an ad for lynching

:

occupy lynching?

while nearby: piracy -

while art means action now

and action means decapitation

- the ritual slaying of Ronald McDonald

this is an ad

for

Rachel Lee’s

article at CTheory

advertising AFFECT

FEELING

EMOTION

intensely &

“ahead of the game”

which could be the following:

is at least what the following wants needs likes follows shares and

adverts to in a culture of “distracted tactility” [Rachel Lee after Michael Taussig, 1991]

“This reminded Tengo of a certain event, something from the distant past that he would recall now and then. Something he could never forget. But he decided not to mention it. It would have been a long story. And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.”

- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011, p. 72

“The concepts of time, space, and possibility.

“Tengo knew that time could become deformed as it moved forward. Time itself was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape. One period of fime might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and short. Occasionally, the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order itself could vanish entirely. Sometimes things that should not be there at all might be added onto time. By adjusting time this way to suit their own purposes, people probably adjusted the meaning of their existences. In other words, by adding such operations to time, they were able – but just barely – to preserve their own sanity. Surely, if a person had to accept the time through which he had just passed uniformly in the given order, his nerves could not bear the strain. Such a life, Tengo felt, would be sheer torture.

“Through the expansion of the brain, people had acquired the concept of temporality, but they simultaneously learned ways in which to change and adjust time. In parallel with their ceaseless consumption of time, people would ceaselessly reproduce time that they had mentally adjusted. This was no ordinary feat. No wonder the brain was said to consume forty percent of the body’s total energy!”

- Ibid., p. 275

my bookmark reads: strike!

TRIPLE DIP – STRIKE

“They’re both policemen now. Not too long ago, my uncle even received official commendation as an outstanding officer – thirty years of continuous service, major contributions to public safety in the district and to improvement of the environment. He was featured in the paper once for saving a stupid dog and her pup that wandered into a rail crossing.”

…

“The ones who did it can always rationalise their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

- Ibid., pp. 292-293

“I am a part of this world, and this world is a part of me.”

- Ibid., p. 855

- from the painting Blue Engineering Object by David Mabb (2001). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]

People’s voices never change, no more than the expressions in their eyes. Amid the generalised physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.

- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, Heinemann, London, 2011, p. 152

A few seconds can be enough to decide a life, or at least to reveal its main direction.

- Ibid., p. 158

- based on a Photograph by Mikhail Kaufman, David Mabb in William Morris Fruit Suit, photograph by Robin Forster (2002). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]

‘It’s the market,’ Pernaut said with a wide, beaming, rancourless smile, going so far as to pat him on the shoulder.

- Ibid., p. 159

- from the painting Fruit by David Mabb (2000). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]

Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter, and easy to leave.

- Ibid., p. 163

- from the painting Morris Blue Willow/Popova Untitled by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]

‘William Morris, according to all we know about him, was someone quite extraordinary.’

…

‘William Morris didn’t lead a very happy life, according to the usual criteria,’ Houellebecq continued. ‘However, all the accounts show him to be joyful, optimistic, and active. At the age of twenty-three he met Jane Burden, who was eighteen and worked as a painter’s model. He married her two years later, and considered going into painting himself before giving up this idea, not feeling gifted enough – he respected painting above all else. He built a house according to his own plans, in Upton, on the banks of the Thames, and decorated it to live there with his wife and their two young daughters. His wife was, according to all those who met her, a great beauty; but she wasn’t faithful. In particular she had a liaison with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. William Morris had a lot of admiration for him as a painter. At the end he came to live with them, and basically supplanted Morris in the conjugal bed. Morris then made the journey to Iceland, learned the language, and started translating the sagas. After a few years he came back, and decided to have it out with them. Rossetti agreed to leave, but something had broken, and never again was there any real carnal intimacy between the couple. He was already involved in several social movements, but he left the Social Democratic Federation, which appeared to him too moderate, to create the Socialist League, which openly defended communist positions, and right until his death he gave all his energy to the communist cause, with countless articles, lectures, and meetings.’

…

‘He wanted to abolish school, thinking that children would learn better in an atmosphere of total freedom; he wanted to abolish prisons, thinking that remorse would be sufficient punishment for the criminal. It’s difficult to read all those absurdities without a mixture of compassion and dismay. And yet, and yet … ‘ Houellebecq hesitated, searching for his words.

- from the carpet design United Colours of Benetton by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]

‘Paradoxically, he had a certain success on the practical level. To put into practice his ideas on the return to artisanal production, very early on he created a firm for decoration and furniture; his employees worked much less than those in the factories of the time, which were nothing other than labour camps, but above all they worked freely and each was responsible for his task from start to finish. The essential principle of William Morris was that design and execution should never be separated, no more than they were in the Middle Ages. According to all the reports, the working conditions were idyllic: well-lit, well-aired workshops on the bank of a river.

- from the montage Transitional Monument by David Mabb (2004). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]

All the profits were redistributed to the workers, except a small percentage which served to finance socialist propaganda. Well, against all expectations, success was immediate, including on the commercial level. After carpentery they became interested in jewellery, leatherwork, then stained-glass windows, cloth and tapestries, always with the same success: the firm Morris & Co. was constantly in profit, throughout its existence. This was achieved by none of the workers’ cooperatives that proliferated in the nineteenth century, be they the Fourierist phalansteries or Cabet’s Icarian community: not one of them managed to organise the efficient production of goods and foodstuffs. With the exception of the firm founded by William Morris you can only cite a succession of failures. Not to mention the communist societies that came later …’

…

- from the painting Head of a Peasant by David Mabb (2002) based on Kazimir Malevich’s Head of a Peasant. Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]

‘What can undoubtedly be said is that the model of society proposed by William Morris certainly would not be utopian in a world where all men were like William Morris.’

- Ibid., pp. 173-175

- from the carpet design Lietuva by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]

I was reading Houellebecq speaking through his character Houellebecq when William Morris came up in a completely different context. Adam Curtis, the film-maker responsible for All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, mentions Morris. But where? Is it in reference to Fourier in his blog article “Dream On” [here], or in the second of the Little Atoms audio interviews conducted with Curtis following the release of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace [here]?

And I am sure William Morris’s name came up a third time, in the same time frame, in connection with Félix Guattari.

I did find this Independent article by Sheila Rowbotham, however, which, along with having her delightful name to recommend it, contains the excellent phrase: “Both men reach out to the edge beyond what Morris called “Nowhere”.” [here]

requiescat in pace Friedrich A. Kittler June 12 1943 – October 18 2011

read Axel Roch’s excellent article here, dated 17 November 2011, the day of

Friedrich Kittler’s funeral

he lies at Dorotheenstadt cemetery

with Heiner Müller, Georg Hegel, Johann Fichte, Herbert Marcuse, Bertolt Brecht.

, specifically like a bullet shot from a gun in Steven Pippin’s Quantum Camera

, the soul is like a bullet shot from a gun into a camera

, the soul in death is a bullet shot from a gun into a camera

, a camera which records the precise instant of its descruction

, the soul is caught by death as the bullet is captured by the camera it destroys

visit Mr. Pippin here

We’ve mainly remembered the sexual theories of Fourier, and it’s true that they’re quite burlesque. It’s difficult to read Fourier with a straight face, with his stories of whirlwinds, fakiresses and fairies of the Rhine Army.

It’s hard to believe he had any disciples, people who took him seriously, who really thought of constructing a new model of society on the basis of his books. It’s incomprehensible if you try to see him as a thinker, because his thought is completely incomprehensible, but fundamentally Fourier isn’t a thinker, he’s a guru, the first of his kind, and, as with all gurus, his success came not from intellectual adherence to a theory but, on the contrary, from general incomprehension, linked with an inexhaustible optimism, especially on the sexual level: people need sexual optimism to an incredible degree. Yet Fourier’s real subject, the one which interests him above all else, isn’t sex, but the organisation of production. The big question he asks is: Why does man work?

What makes him occupy a determined place in the social organisation and agree to stay there and carry out his task? To this question, the liberals replied that it was the lure of profit, pure and simple [...] As for the Marxists, they didn’t reply at all, they weren’t even interested, and, besides, that’s what made communism fail: as soon as you got rid of the financial incentive, people stopped working, they sabotaged their task, absenteeism grew in enormous proportions. Communism never was able to ensure the production and distribution of the most elementary goods. Fourier had lived under the Ancien Régime, and he was conscious that, well before the appearance of capitalism, scientific research and technical progress had taken place, and that people worked hard, sometimes very hard, without being pushed by the lure of profit but by something, in the eyes of modern man, much vaguer; the love of God, in the case of monks, or more simply the honour of the function.

…

We defended the idea that a complex, ramified society, with multiple levels of organisation, like that proposed by Fourier, went hand in hand with a complex, ramified, multiple architecture that left space for individual creativity. We violently attacked Mies van der Rohe – who made empty, multi-purpose structures, the same ones that were going to be a model for the open spaces in businesses – and above all Le Corbusier, who tirelessly built concentration-camp-like spaces divided into identical cells that were suited [...] only for model prisons.

- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, William Heinemann, London, 2011, pp. 143-145

Cf. Adam Curtis on Fourier, here.

going to the theatre is like visiting a good friend who is very ill. I am always afraid of what I will find when I get there.

What new ritual of humiliation will she have been subjected to in the name of making her better?

And usually there he is, good old friend, sitting up in bed, the room too warm, the view non-existent, the decor ugly, a grisly smile on his face as he says hello, hello to us all, and the face itself, now I look, what have they done to it?

Is there a mirror?

I immediately want to rush up and show her.

Was it always a question of make-up – too much make-up – to hide the facts, the cracks?

Was he always dying?