WATCH THIS trailer for the movie rubber!
Watching this movie for the first time, there's an obvious connection to post-modernism, the defusion of narratives, the false-hood of the metanarrative, the confusion of conflicting views, the arbitrary nature of the movie and the plot-creation.
However, in re-thinking this movie after reading Lacan, I was considering the phallus as the power structure, and the process by which he abstracts it out of gender, no longer "penis or clitoris" as Lacan would say. In rubber, a tire in the desert mysteriously comes into an animated life, and discovers a telekinetic power to make living things explode. Not combust. Explode. He then essentially attempts to enter into relationship with an individual whom he follows. However, with no ability to talk or act beyond rolling and killing, things turn predictably messy. All of this messiness is performed in front of an on-screen audience, but that is another matter.
For Lacan (via me) the tire is the new phallic symbol. It is the thing which enters into relaionship through direct power symbology. That is, his process of interpellation (Althuisser) or interruption of the self in relationship for another is so complete in power and subjugation that it's totally destructive. It is the symbol-replacer of the phallus. But it is genderless, and with violent manifestations as opposed to sexual manifestations.
Nothing's perfect I suppose.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
TS Eliot Finds Himself
Looking to catch a flick? Well, have I got news for you. At the Wandermere theater here in Spokane you could see The Call (its got Halle Berry), The Croods (Nicholas Cage is a caveman. Type casting?), a little something about Oz or Olympus Has Fallen (Girard Butler as himself).
It’s all a little depressing, I know. But before you decide not to have Spring Break because there’s just nothing to see, consider this:
While none of those films fits very well is a larger aesthetic tradition, they do fit in the minor tradition from which their structure is borrowed. TS Eliot is clear that a work of art is not good simply because it fits in. It will fit in, later, on account of its excellence. If this is the case, does TS Eliot take issue with Adorno? For Adorno avers that cultures essentially recreate themselves, producing the same narratives over and over because they are the kinds of narratives the capitalist system is designed to produce. And if Adorno is right, the canon is itself a capitalist construction. It is not a mark of excellence. It is determinism. Excellent texts will be considered excellent because they fit inside the system that built them.
I do not think Adorno and TS Eliot can be right at the same time. I do think neither would go see the movies at Wandermere. One because the films do not fit into the canon and the other because they do. In the interest of democracy and simplifying our critical canon, I think we should vote. Who is more right? Adorno or Eliot?
Lacan Listens to Music! He Is Happy!
Well, its only a cover, but here is Ryan Adams song “Words.” Watch it, don’t watch it, the point is the chorus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVK8em5cHyw
“Don’t worry up your mind, people are sick and mean sometimes. They’re only words”
Ignoring, for a moment, Ryan Adam’s utterly vacuous writing, I can only imagine Lacan is rejoicing. Because it is only a system of signification, a semiotic world. By it I mean of course myself, and you, and the space between us and everything else. And I think that Lacan should have been a physicist: he has created a perpetual motion machine. The desire to use language creates its own system, which is a participant in (and creator of) signification, and so the whole thing fuels itself. We want symbol, so we use symbol and create symbol. Begin the system anywhere you like. They are only words.
I have, however, a lingering question. I must use signification to communicate the interrogatory symbol, and I beg my readers forgiveness for the irony. No self-contained system can energize itself. If it could, it would be necessary that any isolated part account for itself, and a symbol cannot self-generated and self-reference. That being the case, I wonder what is outside Lacan’s system. That is, what thing outside the system of signification motivates the structure.
Or, is it phallus ex nihilo?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVK8em5cHyw
“Don’t worry up your mind, people are sick and mean sometimes. They’re only words”
Ignoring, for a moment, Ryan Adam’s utterly vacuous writing, I can only imagine Lacan is rejoicing. Because it is only a system of signification, a semiotic world. By it I mean of course myself, and you, and the space between us and everything else. And I think that Lacan should have been a physicist: he has created a perpetual motion machine. The desire to use language creates its own system, which is a participant in (and creator of) signification, and so the whole thing fuels itself. We want symbol, so we use symbol and create symbol. Begin the system anywhere you like. They are only words.
I have, however, a lingering question. I must use signification to communicate the interrogatory symbol, and I beg my readers forgiveness for the irony. No self-contained system can energize itself. If it could, it would be necessary that any isolated part account for itself, and a symbol cannot self-generated and self-reference. That being the case, I wonder what is outside Lacan’s system. That is, what thing outside the system of signification motivates the structure.
Or, is it phallus ex nihilo?
Holy Motors
Here’s the trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWu9WjEcdbk
Now that you’ve watched that and have absolutely no idea what’s going on, Althusser.
The film follows Le Dormeur (The Sleeper) played by Dennis Lavant, who is driven in a white taxi to various “appointments”. At each appointment, Lavant dons a costume and performs a ritual action. Each action is without context; the intentions orienting the actions appear in the context of the scenes themselves. While the film is, apparently, a exploration of film itself, Lavant is an excellent example of interpellation.
Interpellation is hailing into a system. While it would seem that we draw various ideologies into our lives, it is in fact the case that those ideologies have been calling to us. Socially, psychologically, and politically, we are drawn into pre-existing systems that have been calling to us. Le Dormeur’s movements around Paris are a marvelous example of this hailing. The scenes Le Dormeur creates are Absurd (traditionally Absurd, not so much absurd). He is a businessman, a peddling gypsy grandmother, a stop-action stand-in performing a sensual alien dance. And in each scene, bystanders eventually play into the construction as though it were a reality. Dressed as a made gnome dashing about a graveyard, Le Dormeur stumbles upon a fashion shoot. The photographer responds with horror and fascination, asks to photograph Le Dormeur, and has his assistant’s fingers bitten off. Each time, bystanders believe they are organically responding to unfolding events, when they are in reality playing the part that has been built for them. They are actors in a drama designed by Le Dormeur. Interpellated!
Here’s the trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWu9WjEcdbk
Now that you’ve watched that and have absolutely no idea what’s going on, Althusser.
The film follows Le Dormeur (The Sleeper) played by Dennis Lavant, who is driven in a white taxi to various “appointments”. At each appointment, Lavant dons a costume and performs a ritual action. Each action is without context; the intentions orienting the actions appear in the context of the scenes themselves. While the film is, apparently, a exploration of film itself, Lavant is an excellent example of interpellation.
Interpellation is hailing into a system. While it would seem that we draw various ideologies into our lives, it is in fact the case that those ideologies have been calling to us. Socially, psychologically, and politically, we are drawn into pre-existing systems that have been calling to us. Le Dormeur’s movements around Paris are a marvelous example of this hailing. The scenes Le Dormeur creates are Absurd (traditionally Absurd, not so much absurd). He is a businessman, a peddling gypsy grandmother, a stop-action stand-in performing a sensual alien dance. And in each scene, bystanders eventually play into the construction as though it were a reality. Dressed as a made gnome dashing about a graveyard, Le Dormeur stumbles upon a fashion shoot. The photographer responds with horror and fascination, asks to photograph Le Dormeur, and has his assistant’s fingers bitten off. Each time, bystanders believe they are organically responding to unfolding events, when they are in reality playing the part that has been built for them. They are actors in a drama designed by Le Dormeur. Interpellated!
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
What a Trip to the Wood Recycling Tells You About Wordsworth
It’s a simple question: before Wordsworth wrote his parts of Preface and ruined everything, was simple living actually an exploration of transcendence?
It’s a Tuesday morning and Matt and I are digging through the wood recycling in the mud when a white truck spilling old wood shakes up and the passengers get out to unload. It’s rather a fascinating dialogue. A sort of rapid-fire exchange of contractions. Some highlights: ‘el not want that f***r. ‘pen the gate. S***er’ll lie.
Metrically but not metaphysically interesting.
And then after, I go home to a housemate reading Wendell Berry, rhapsodizing about the socio-economic implications of agricultural done well, and the transcendent truths brought to us by rivers. Wordsworth seemed to think that education by the woods happened on accident. Or it happened all the time, and all someone needed to do was jump into dirt to find Nature God. The conversation I overheard at the wood recycling suggests that this is not the case. But then, there is Berry, and the fact that nature interpreted can provide certain instructions.
Let’s ignore, for a moment, that it might be the case those values are layered onto nature and not drawn out of it.
Wordsworth is rather a tricky rhetorician: he suggests that Nature be chosen over urban complication for its ethical instruction. But Nature only works if the urban model of inquiry is brought into it. That being the case, Wordsworth is almost a brilliant chap: in writing Preface, he establishes a structure according to which his point is true. Not true because working at the wood recycling will make you a good poet, but true because a person who has already been in the city, a person who would read Wordsworth, would likely find philosophy in the woods.
It’s a Tuesday morning and Matt and I are digging through the wood recycling in the mud when a white truck spilling old wood shakes up and the passengers get out to unload. It’s rather a fascinating dialogue. A sort of rapid-fire exchange of contractions. Some highlights: ‘el not want that f***r. ‘pen the gate. S***er’ll lie.
Metrically but not metaphysically interesting.
And then after, I go home to a housemate reading Wendell Berry, rhapsodizing about the socio-economic implications of agricultural done well, and the transcendent truths brought to us by rivers. Wordsworth seemed to think that education by the woods happened on accident. Or it happened all the time, and all someone needed to do was jump into dirt to find Nature God. The conversation I overheard at the wood recycling suggests that this is not the case. But then, there is Berry, and the fact that nature interpreted can provide certain instructions.
Let’s ignore, for a moment, that it might be the case those values are layered onto nature and not drawn out of it.
Wordsworth is rather a tricky rhetorician: he suggests that Nature be chosen over urban complication for its ethical instruction. But Nature only works if the urban model of inquiry is brought into it. That being the case, Wordsworth is almost a brilliant chap: in writing Preface, he establishes a structure according to which his point is true. Not true because working at the wood recycling will make you a good poet, but true because a person who has already been in the city, a person who would read Wordsworth, would likely find philosophy in the woods.
Footnote, Belated
Footnote
The film applies to everything. Because it is about philology, the science that takes as its premise cultures and language inform one another. It is mutual construction. There are several disastrous implications, among them the fact that a researcher seeking to uncover the presuppositions of a culture could either study the language or the culture’s history and know everything about the other.
Thus: language is a reflection (or incarnation) of the metaphysical assumptions of its author. It’s a claim that everyone--everyone--who is going to write about aesthetics, is going to have to address. Still, beyond drawing attention to on of the central divisions of literary criticism, Footnote also ticks Maimonides right off.
The academy is about record and dissemination. Eliezer and Uriel are both, by Uriel’s declaration, teachers. No problem so far: the teacher-student relationship is key to Maimonides. They are also writers AKA indiscriminate teachers. It is their mission to make the esoteric known. Big mistake. Key to Maimonides is the idea that the sacred is guarded from the profane by ambiguity. Thus, texts discussing divine knowledge and tradition (such as the Talmud) should deliberately obfuscate their own meaning, thus ensuring that only by divine revelation will a reader understand. It is a pedagogy that ensures God will determine who learns God’s secrets. But Footnote considers scholars. Not only scholars, but teachers, and teachers of the tradition of YHWH.
Bad move, Shkolniks. Bad move.
The film applies to everything. Because it is about philology, the science that takes as its premise cultures and language inform one another. It is mutual construction. There are several disastrous implications, among them the fact that a researcher seeking to uncover the presuppositions of a culture could either study the language or the culture’s history and know everything about the other.
Thus: language is a reflection (or incarnation) of the metaphysical assumptions of its author. It’s a claim that everyone--everyone--who is going to write about aesthetics, is going to have to address. Still, beyond drawing attention to on of the central divisions of literary criticism, Footnote also ticks Maimonides right off.
The academy is about record and dissemination. Eliezer and Uriel are both, by Uriel’s declaration, teachers. No problem so far: the teacher-student relationship is key to Maimonides. They are also writers AKA indiscriminate teachers. It is their mission to make the esoteric known. Big mistake. Key to Maimonides is the idea that the sacred is guarded from the profane by ambiguity. Thus, texts discussing divine knowledge and tradition (such as the Talmud) should deliberately obfuscate their own meaning, thus ensuring that only by divine revelation will a reader understand. It is a pedagogy that ensures God will determine who learns God’s secrets. But Footnote considers scholars. Not only scholars, but teachers, and teachers of the tradition of YHWH.
Bad move, Shkolniks. Bad move.
T.S. Eliot Obituary
Hey, people! If you have some free time, go to this awesome and kind of hilarious obituary of T.S. Eliot in the New York Times! (I was minding my own business, surfing the web, when I saw a link to this article. I was really confused at first because I didn't read the date of the obituary. Be not confused; it is merely an article they transferred to their online database.)
I took two sections in particular to be quite amusing. First, the one on tea:
"In that sojourn he lived in an undergraduate house near the Charles River and entertained students at least once a week at teas. The tea was always brewed and he poured with great delicacy, his long and tabescent fingers clasping the handle of the silver teapot. The quality of his tea, the excellence of the college-provided petit fours and the rippling flow of his conversation drew overflow crowds of students who sat on chairs, on the floor and on windowsills."As well as the one on Shakespeare:
"He had a strong dislike for most teaching of poetry, and he once recalled that he had been turned against Shakespeare in his youth by didactical instructors. "I took a dislike to 'Julius Caesar' which lasted, I am sorry to say, until I saw the film of Marlon Brando and John Gielgud, and a dislike to 'The Merchant of Venice' which persists to this day.'"
All humor aside, I thought this obituary was fascinating. I think it lends even further to our ideas of who Eliot was, and more so, how people saw him at the time of his death. Is he overly idealized? Is he misconstrued? I don't know; probably, at least from Doug's perspective. However, I do think that reading this obituary made Eliot seem more like a person than anything else I've read about him.
Thoughts? Opinions? Favorite part of the obituary? Least favorite?
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