Friday 26 November 2010

Bitter Cold, Grey Park...







...look at the little feet!

Tuesday 23 November 2010

Bird Watching, Wondering

Still on the natural trip. Just watched the first three episodes of the series Birds Britannia - a really excellent historical and cultural overview of the UKs relationship with birds.

It lead me to research Jeremy Mynott and his book Birdscapes. I haven't read it, but am intrigued to after listening to this podcast (on Podularity - wasn't sure who in particular to credit). The crossovers between birds (as cultural symbol) and philosophy seems potentially very interesting. At this point I am wondering how it would be possible to interrogate philosophy, or use philosophical tools towards a meaningful or productive end, to interrogate meaningfully and productively our understanding of the natural world.

Monday 15 November 2010

Dusk




Extracts

I have a habit of underlining bits of text as I read that feel particularly resonant to me in some way. Usually the resonance comes from an argument suddenly opening into another element or avenue (plane) that therefore connects up areas I hadn't before seen the linkage between. I thought I would extract these bits of text and see what they collate into as a collection of such openings.

"...the autonomy of the art object is something which is produced out of the social relations which constitute the institution of art itself." 1

"By defending a form of autonomy which is constituted through the negation of tradition, the irreconcilability of art is coextensive with the irreconcilability of the subject's consciousness of being-in-the-world." 2

"While it is a critical convention ... that people were exhorted to turn from the fascination of the world in order to attain eternal life, the situation is not as simple as this easy distinction between the sacred and the profane. It is the very point of the garden of love to show how the separation of the world, life, and love, into sacred and profane ... is a misprision; that the rift between sensation and understanding (between Eve and Adam) is an illusion..." 3

"The continual production of difference - that is, of uniqueness and particularity - is implicit in the singularity of things." 4

"...connection not renunciation..." 5

"...a continual benediction of emergence conceived as erotica and amoenita..." 6

"...a transformation 'of nature into culture to such an extent that the origin of love ... remains ambiguous' (Cherchi xiv)." 7

"For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole." 8

"...art sanctions the primacy of reality." 9

"Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants." 10

"That artworks as windowless monads "represent" what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it." 11

"...and while this is the nominalist dilemma of all art after the readymade, we can only comprehend the distinctions we make through the frames of mind we do or do not have in common." 12

"The contemporary question of style must be pondered alongside this current "production" of subjectivity, whether emphasis is on regularized forms of self-fashioning or on the singular and less controllable aspects of becoming." 13

"...style may be seen as a key component of media apparatuses that are not just presentational frames but also social machines that integrate human minds and bodies as part of their functioning." 14

"Style is the man when the man himself is a stylus - as in geomancy, when one's body becomes a seismic needle for registering, in ink or sand or some other substance, the signals of the cosmos." 15


1,2 John Roberts, 'After Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique', Historical Materialism 7 (Winter 2000)
3-7 Rod Barnett, 'Serpent of Pleasure: Emergence and Difference in the Medieval Garden of Love', Landscape Journal 28:2-09
8-11 Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans Hullot-Kentor, 1970
12 Michelle Kuo, 'Forms and Functions (Editor's Letter)', Art Forum, September 2010
13, 14 Ina Blom, 'Questions of Style', Art Forum, September 2010
15 Alexander Nagel, 'Questions of Style', Art Forum, September 2010

Thursday 11 November 2010

Green Ideology

Been on a bit of an environmentalist one recently. Just watched this, a film shown on UK Channel 4 about unorthodox views from within the environmentalist movement. It was difficult to watch - one 'green taboo' after another was demolished, advocates arguing for the use of nuclear power and GM food.

Made me think of Žižek's bit in An Examined Life:



The connection between the two is that they both identify ideology as the cause of an obscuration that prevents real insight into the problems that the planet faces and finding prompt ways to act. In the first film it is a residual hippy activist movement that is blind to the science that can treat the problems now. In Žižek, it is conservatism and secular religion lurking beneath our beloved Gaia. They both call for more technology: "We should become more alienated!"