Walter Benjamin: On the Weather

"The mere narcotizing effect which cosmic forces have on a shallow and brittle personality is attested in the relation of such a person to one of the highest and most general manifestations of these forces: the weather. Nothing is more characteristic than that precisely this most intimate and mysterious affair, the working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos. Hence for him the deepest connection between weather and boredom. How fine the ironic overcoming of this attitude in the story of the splenetic Englishman who wakes up one morning and shoots himself because it is raining. Or Goethe: how he managed to illuminate the weather in his meteorological studies, so that one is attempted to say he undertook this work solely in order to be able to integrate even the weather into his waking, creative life."

(Walter Benjamin, excerpt from "Boredom, Eternal Return", The Arcades Project)

Marshall McLuhan: The Next Movement?

"After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies [indeed, by means of the fragmentary technology Writing--better yet, it is precisely that: fragmentary technology is writing], the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media ["the greatest compatibility, the greatest coordination, the liveliest possible affinity appears to be imposing itself today between what seems the most alive, live, and différance or delay, the delay in the exploitation or diffusion of the living."--Jacques Derrida, Ecographies of Television]. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be "a good thing" is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex."

(Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media)

Heidegger on Hegel

'Hegel also calls the "speculative dialectic" simply "method." By this he means neither an instrument of representing not merely a special way of philosophy. "Method" is the innermost movement of subjectivity, "the soul of being"--that sounds like fantasy. It is commonly thought that our age has left behind such errors of speculation. Yet we are living right in the midst of this supposed fantasy.'

'When modern physics aims at a formula of the world, then it becomes apparent that being of beings has dissolved itself in the method of total calculability.'

'People take offense at Hegel's statement concerning the completion of philosophy. People regard it as arrogant and characterize it as an error that has long been refuted by history. For after Hegel's time there continued to be philosophy and there still is philosophy. But the statement concerning the completion of philosophy does not mean that philosophy is at an end in the sense of cessation and breaking off. Rather the completion first provides the possibility of diverse transformations down to the simplest forms: brutal inversion and vehement opposition. Marx and Kierkegaard are the greatest of Hegelians. They are this against their will. The completion of philosophy is neither its end nor does it consist in an isolated system out of speculative idealism. The completion is only as the whole course of the history of philosophy, in whose course the beginning remains as essential as the completion: Hegel and the Greeks.'

(Martin Heidegger, Hegel and the Greeks)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)

A great watch after those Adam Curtis documentaries. I will say that the documentarians are a little too self-righteous when looking at the characters of the Enron CEOs and traders, as if there wasn't a culture that created them--or better yet, as if a lack of culture didn't create them. It also tends to place too much blame on the people at the top. The smaller traders are even more frightening to me, its as if they have no connection to material reality. Lurking under the surface of this Documentary is also the logic of intellectual property and information privacy. The logic of the current credit crunch can also be illuminated here. To quote McLuhan from Understanding Media: "Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions--the patterns of mechanistic technologies--are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank--that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early 'mistakes.' We have already reached a point where remedial control, born of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted...."

Take the Adam Curtis triology, this, and add to this a recent feature in Harpers about the Numbers Racket in the U.S. Economy, and you've got a interesting and troubling picture America in the early 21st Century.

Classroom Without Walls

'It's natural today to speak of "audio-visual aids" to teaching, for we still think of the book as norm, of other media as incidental. We also think of the new media (press, radio, TV, [Internet]) as mass media and think of the book as an individualistic form —individualistic because it isolated the reader in silence and helped create the Western "I." Yet it was the first product of mass production.'

'With it everybody could have the same books. It was impossible in medieval times for different students, different institutions, to have copies of the same book. Manuscripts, commentaries, were dictated. Students memorized. Instruction was almost entirely oral, done in groups. Solitary study was reserved for the advanced scholar. The first printed books were "visual aids" to oral instruction.'

'Before the printing press, the young learned by listening, watching, doing. So, until recently, our own rural children learned the language and skills of their elders. Learning took place outside the classroom. Only those aiming at professional careers went to school at all. Today in our cities, most learning occurs outside the classroom. The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly that we're confused, baffled.'

'In this violently upsetting social situation, many teachers naturally view the offerings of the new media as entertainment, rather than education. But this carries no conviction to the student. Find a classic that wasn't first regarded as light entertainment. Nearly all vernacular works were so regarded until the 19th century.'

'Many movies are obviously handled with a degree of insight and maturity at least equal to the level permitted in today's textbooks. Olivier's Henry V and Richard III assemble a wealth of scholarly and artistic skill, which reveals Shakespeare at a very high level, yet in a way easy for the young to enjoy.'

'The movie is to dramatic representation what the book was to the manuscript. It makes available to many and at many times and places what otherwise would be restricted to a few at few times and places. The movie, like the book, is a ditto device. TV shows to 50,000,000 simultaneously. Some feel that the value of experiencing a book is diminished by being extended to many minds. This notion is always implicit in the phrases "mass media," "mass entertainment"—useless phrases obscuring the fact that English itself is a mass medium.'

'Today we're beginning to realize that the new media aren't just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. Historically, the resources of English have been shaped and expressed in constantly new and changing ways. The printing press changed not only the quantity of writing but also the character of language and the relations between author and public. Radio, film, TV pushed written English toward the spontaneous shifts and freedom of the spoken idiom. They aided us in the recovery of intense awareness of facial language and bodily gesture. If these "mass media" should serve only to weaken or corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it won't be because there's anything inherently wrong with them. It will be because we've failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage.'

'These new developments, under quiet analytic survey, point to a basic strategy of culture for the classroom. When the printed book first appeared, it threatened the oral procedures of teaching and created the classroom as we now know it. Instead of making his own text, his own dictionary, his own grammar, the student started out with these tools. He could study not one but several languages. Today these new media threaten, instead merely reinforce, the procedures of this traditional classroom. It's customary to answer this threat with denunciations of the unfortunate character and effect of movies and TV, just as the comic book was feared and scorned and rejected from the classroom. Its good and bad features in form and content, when carefully set beside other kinds of art and narrative, could have become a major asset to the teacher.'

'Where student interest is already focused is the natural point at which to be in the elucidation of other problems and interests. The educational task is not only to provide basic tools of perception but also to develop judgment and discrimination with ordinary social experience.'

'Few students ever acquire skill in analysis of newspapers. Fewer have any ability to discuss a movie intelligently. To be articulate and discriminating about ordinary affairs and information is the mark of an educated man. It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. It's like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches, the other pleases. However, it's always been true that whatever pleases teaches more effectively. '

(Marshall McLuhan, excerpt from "Classroom Without Walls," Explorations in Communication)

Martin Heidegger: The Power of the Word Virus

"For appropriating saying brings to life all present being in therms of their properties [what is most proper]. It allows them into their own, their nature."

"Saying is in need of being voiced in the Word."

"The word first bestows presence, that is being, in which things appear as beings."

(Martin Heidegger)

Alexandre Kojève reading Hegel : The Word Virus is the Source of Humanity

'Desire is human--or, more exactly, "humanizing," "anthropogenetic-- only provided that it is directed toward another Desire and an other Desire.'

'The man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognize his right... to that thing, to make another recognize him as owner of the thing.'

'Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his nonbiological Desire. And Hegel says that the being that is incapable of putting his life in danger in order to attain ends that are not immediately vital--i.e. the being that cannot risk its life in a fight for Recognition, in a fight for pure prestige--is not a truly human being.'

'"The definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called" also means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos) in the strict sense. Animals of the species Homo sapiens would react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign "language" of bees. What would disappear, then, is not only Philosophy or the search for discursive Wisdom, but also that Wisdom itself. For in these post historical animals, there would no longer be any "[discursive] understanding of the World and of self."'

'To remain human, Man must remain a "Subject opposed to the Object," even if "Action negating the given and Error" disappears. This means that, while henceforth speaking in an adequate fashion of everything that is given to him, post-historical Man must continue to detatch "form" from "content," doing so no longer in order actively to transform the latter, but so that he may oppose himself as a pure "form" to himself and to others taken as "content" of any sort.' [Heidegger would say that, to remain human, post-historical Man must become the preserver of the "clearing", the process that allows him to detach "form" from "content", "beings" from "being"--he must become the preserver of the Word Virus.]

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

From Arnold Schoenberg

“Whether one calls oneself conservative or revolutionary, whether one composers in a conventional or progressive manner, whether one tries to imitate old styles or is destined to express new ideas - one must be convinced of the infallibility of one's own fantasy and one must believe in one's own inspiration.” ["Lacan's name for what occurs at the end of the psychoanalytic cure is traversing the fantasy. But since what the fantasy does, for Lacan, is veil from the subject his/her own implication in and responsibility for how s/he experiences the world, to traverse the fantasy is to reavow subjective responsibility."]

“You cannot expect the Form before the Idea, for they will come into being together.” ["The medium is the message" -- McLuhan] ["A formalism which ceases to be external since the form is the innate development of the concrete content itself."--Hegel]

(Arnold Schoenberg)

Jacques Lacan: Identity through the Word Virus

"Language installs the dimension of truth (inconceivable outside of discourse or what is structured as discourse) even as it excludes all guarantee of this truth. In relation to this absence of guarantee, a primary affirmation is engendered that is also the primary truth."

"So runs the signifier's answer [to the subject], above and beyond all significations: 'You think you act when I stir you at the mercy of the bonds through which I knot your desires. Thus do they grow and multiply in objects bringing you back to the fragmentation of you shattered childhood."

"You will grasp why the relationship of the subject to the signifier is the reference that we would place in the foreground of a general rectification of analytic theory, because it is as primary and constituting in the setting up of analytical experience, as it is primary and constituting in the radical function of the unconscious." It has "priority in relation to the signified." And "the signifier alone guarantees the theoretical coherence of the entirety [of the subject] as an entirety."

(Jacques Lacan, Ecrits)

Category Theory and Mathemes

'For a working mathematician, when he/she is concerned at all, “foundations” is simply a general term for the historically variable set of rules and principles of organization of the body of mathematical knowledge, both existing and being created. From this viewpoint, the most influential foundational achievement in the 20th century was an ambitious project of the Bourbaki group, building all mathematics, including logic, around set-theoretical “structures” and making Cantor’s language of sets a common vernacular of algebraists, geometers, probabilists and all other practitioners of our trade. These days, this vernacular, with all its vocabulary and ingrained mental habits, is being slowly replaced by the languages of category theory and homotopy theory and their higher extensions. Respectively, the basic “left-brain” intuition of sets, composed of distinguishable elements, is giving way to a new, more “right brain” basic intuition dealing with space-like and continuous primary images, both deformable and deforming.'

(Yuri Manin, Truth as value and duty: lessons of mathematics)

'After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies the Western world is imploding.'

(Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media)

'...the greatest compatibility, the greatest coordination, the liveliest possible affinity [indeed, let us call it what it is: Continuity] appears to be imposing itself today between what seems the most alive, live, and différance or delay, the delay in the exploitation or diffusion of the living.'

(Jacques Derrida, Echographies of Television)

'...we may forget that a written word IS AN IMAGE and that written words are images in sequence that is to say MOVING PICTURES. So any hieroglyphic sequence gives us an immediate working definition for spoken words. Spoken words are verbal units that refer to this pictorial sequence.'

(William Burroughs, Electronic Revolution)

'...the evolution of the technical synthesis implies the evolution of the spectatorial synthesis.'

'...life (anima – on the side of the mental image) is always already cinema (animation – image-object).'

(Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television)

Žižek on Children of Men

Jacques Derrida and William Burroughs: Word Virus

"Writing is the dissimulation of the natural, primary, and immediate presence of sense to the soul within the logos. Its violence befalls the soul as unconsciousness. Deconstructing this tradition will therefore not consist of reversing it, of making writing innocent. Rather of showing why the violence of writing does not befall an innocent language. There is an originary violence of writing because language is first, in a sense I shall gradually reveal, writing. 'Usurpation' has always already begun. The sense of the right side appears in a mythological effect of return."

(Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology)

"In the beginning was the word and the word was god and has remained one of the mysteries ever since. The word was God and the word was flesh we are told. In the beginning of what exactly was this beginning word? In the beginning of WRITTEN history. It is generally assumed that spoken word came before the written word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. In the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was flesh … human flesh … In the beginning of WRITING. Animals talk and convey information but they do not write. They cannot make information available to future generations or to animals outside the range of their communication system. This is the crucial distinction between men and other animals. WRITING. Korzybski, who developed the concept of General Semantics, the meaning of meaning, has pointed out this human distinction and described man as 'the time binding animal'. He can make information to other men over a length of time through writing. Animals talk. They don't write. Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannot write a text book on DEATH TRAPS IN YOUR WAREHOUSE for the Reader's Digest with tactics for ganging up on digs and ferrets and taking care of wise guys who stuff steel wool up our holes. It is doubtful if the spoken word would have ever evolved beyond the animal stage without the written word. The written word is inferential in HUMAN speech. It would not occur to our wise old rat to assemble the young rats and pass his knowledge along in an aural tradition BECAUSE THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF TIME BINDING COULD NOT OCCUR WITHOUT THE WRITTEN WORD. The written word is of course a symbol for something and in the case of hieroglyphic language writing like Egyptian it may be a symbol for itself, that is a picture of what it represents. This is not true of an alphabet language like English. The word leg has no pictorial resemblance to a leg. It refers to the SPOKEN word leg. So we may forget that a written word IS AN IMAGE and that written words are images in sequence that is to say MOVING PICTURES. So any hieroglyphic sequence gives us an immediate working definition for spoken words. Spoken words are verbal units that refer to this pictorial sequence. And what then is the written word? My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host…(This symbiotic relationship is now breaking down for reasons I will suggest later.)"

(William Burroughs, Electronic Revolution)

Fernando Pessoa: Against Humanism

"I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshiped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea signifying nothing more than an animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rights of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads."

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)

Fetishist Disavowal

'Niels Bohr, who gave the right answer to Einstein's "God doesn't play dice" ("Don't tell God what to do!"), also provided the perfect example of how fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology: at seeing a horse-shoe on his door, a surprised visitor told the physicist that he didn't believe in the superstition that it brought luck, to which Bohr snapped back: "I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it still works if one does not believe in it!" What this paradox renders clear is the way a belief is a reflexive attitude: it is never a case of simply believing - one has to believe in belief itself. Which is why Kierkegaard was right to claim that we do not really believe (in Christ), we just believe in our belief - and Bohr just confronts us with the logical negative of this reflexivity (one can also NOT believe one's beliefs...)'

(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View)

Hermann Hesse on the bourgeosie

"It is between the two [the saint and the profligate], in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself to either lust or asceticism...

"A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security...

"The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility...

"It is clear that this weak and anxious being, in whatever numbers he exists, cannot maintain himself, and that qualities such as this can play no other role in the world than that of a heard of sheep among free roving wolves. Yet we see that, though in times when commanding natures are uppermost the bourgeois goes at once to the wall, he never goes under; indeed at times he appears to rule the world...

"In fact, the vital force of the bourgeoisie resides by no means in the quality of its normal members, but in those of its extremely numerous 'outsiders', who by virtue of the extensiveness and elasticity of its ideals it can embrace. There is always a large number of strong wild natures who share the life of the fold...

"He who is developed far beyond the level of the bourgeois, who knows the bliss of meditation no less than the gloomy joys of self-hatred, he who despises law virtue and common sense, is never the less captive to the bourgeoisie and cannot except it. And so all through the mass of the real bourgeoisie are interposed numerous layers of humanity, many thousands of lives and minds, every one of whom, it is true, would have outgrown it and have obeyed the call to unconditioned life, were they not fastened to it by sentiments of their childhood and infected for the most part with its less intense life; and so they are kept lingering, obedient, and bound by obligation and service. For with the bourgeoisie the opposite of the formula of the great is true: He who is not against me is with me...

"Most intellectuals and artists belong to this type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign themselves or make compromises. Despising the bourgeoisie yet belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live...

"The few who break free seek their reward in the unconditioned and go down in splendor. They wear the thorn crown and their number is small. The others, however, who remain in the fold and from whose talents the bourgeoisie reaps much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an imaginary and yet a sovereign world, humor."

(Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf)

Messiaen on Birds

Marcel Duchamp: "The Creative Act"

"Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

T.S. Eliot, in his essay on "Tradition and Individual Talent", writes: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."

Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History.

I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act - yet, art history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art thorough considerations completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist.

If the artist, as a human being, full of the best intentions toward himself and the whole world, plays no role at all in the judgment of his own work, how can one describe the phenomenon which prompts the spectator to react critically to the work of art? In other words, how does this reaction come about?

This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble.

But before we go further, I want to clarify our understanding of the word 'art' - to be sure, without any attempt at a definition.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Therefore, when I refer to 'art coefficient', it will be understood that I refer not only to great art, but I am trying to describe the subjective mechanism which produces art in the raw state .. .`a l'e`tat brut - bad, good or indifferent.

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane.

The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the work.

In other works, the personal 'art coefficient' is like a arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.

To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this 'art coefficient' is a personal expression of art a` l'e`tat brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict. The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation: through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubtantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists."

(Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act)

Buckminster Fuller

Has America taught its asshole to talk?

'Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.

This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”

“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”

After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.”

After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.'

(William Burroughs, Naked Lunch)

What gets me is when Colbert and Stewart say to their critics, "I'm just a comedian." As if they were born comedians, as if being a comedian isn't a choice they made, as if they couldn't have decided to do something more productive, something more radical. To say "I'm just a comedian" is to say "I'm not going to take responsibility", to admit their lack of actual critical reasoning, and to deny their freedom. The Daily Show and Colbert Report are emblems of American fetishist disavowal.

The Caveman is You

"But the one thing you should not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."

(Ezra Pound)

"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."

(Marshall McLuhan)

"The transition from capitalism to socialism means, according to Marx, 'the ending of pre-history' - the transition from the uncontrolled to the fully conscious development of mankind. To understand society in its final capitalist phase one needs a precise insight into the causality and interrelationships between the growth of the material productive forces and the social relations of production."

(Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology)

"We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science."

(Michelangelo Antonioni)

These ads are a biting and perceptive commentary. They are precise portraits of what is here called "postmodern living": the persistence of the pre-modern in the modern, of the pre-historic within history.