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.

"AUTOPSYCHOGRAPHY" by Fernando Pessoa

The poet is a faker

Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words
Will feel in his writing
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they’re missing.

And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.

Ravel Quartet in F Major, II. Assez vif - Très rythmé

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006)

Werner Herzog on images, TV, and shoes

Derrida: "What Comes Before The Question?"

From Cocteau

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

The Media is the Message 1967 Recording w/Video Mash-Up