The Trajectories of Pomoism
ale...@my-deja.com
Question: just what is the trajectories for postmodern theories (if
there are any ;)? Is it still about the defragmentation of the meta-
narrative, the decentring of margin:centre binarism, or have we simply
become complacent to what Lyotard defined as "false" postmodernism in
his book (Postmodern Condition)? A sort of panoramic, privileged
intellectual position?
Joyce
PS. Please don't throw Molotov's cocktails at me - just raising some
points of concern ;)
Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/
G*rd*n
| Question: just what is the trajectories for postmodern theories (if
| there are any ;)? Is it still about the defragmentation of the meta-
| narrative, the decentring of margin:centre binarism, or have we simply
| become complacent to what Lyotard defined as "false" postmodernism in
| his book (Postmodern Condition)? A sort of panoramic, privileged
| intellectual position?
A philosophical movement always ends in being totally
vulgarized. Hadn't this occurred by the time we were seeing
Microsoft ads featuring pouty twenty-somethings running glitzy
dot-coms back before the Fall?
--
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 12/21/0 <-adv't
Fong
<ale...@my-deja.com> wrote in message news:95ksmh$m82$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> Dear inclusive all:
>
> Question: just what is the trajectories for postmodern theories (if
> there are any ;)? Is it still about the defragmentation of the meta-
> narrative, the decentring of margin:centre binarism, or have we simply
> become complacent to what Lyotard defined as "false" postmodernism in
> his book (Postmodern Condition)? A sort of panoramic, privileged
> intellectual position?
>
> Joyce
Postmodern theories is indeed a panoramic, privileged intellectual position,
and I don't think I agree with Lyotard that this is false in any sense. The
postmodern theory unravels, ruptures, disseminates, deconstructs; but what
we have here is a parasite. It latches on and refuses to give while toying
and actively destroying its host. Perhaps destroying is too powerful a word;
but it derails, it asphyxiates, and it creates a creepy sense of
light-headedness. A heightened sense of consciousness? Maybe. A panoramic,
privileged informed position? If done right, probably.
Postmodern theories, by themselves, are impotent. Take this quote from
Nietzsche for example:
"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies,
anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been
poetically and rhetorically tempered by, transferred and embellished, and
which, after long usage, seem to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are
illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that
have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which
have lost their embossings, and are now considered as metal and no longer as
coins" Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Normal Sense'.
Truth is dead. That is the heart of this passage. Nietzsche declares the
death of Truth; truth takes its place, and truth is now Truth. In violence,
the offspring thus usurps the throne and the father, brutally murdered.
So what?
The postmodern notes the act of violence, it illuminates the recesses in
which certain details are hidden, it shakes the linearity of succession, but
the postmodern does not take from the son the liberties that the son had
taken from the father. The postmodern requires the son to remain on the
throne, and in a state of perversion draws from the son while at the same
time condemning(?) its benefactor. Who then benefits from this state of
affairs? Why, the cohorts of course. The courtiers, the plebians, the
aristocracy, the bourgeoise; in short, the oppressee, the frustrated, the
gloryhounds... ad nauseam.
So, what then is the trajectory of the postmodern? What is the goal of the
postmodern? It innocently proclaims to search for Truth (but it has been,
for so long, narrated and metaconceptually defined by truth that its
interrogation, its questioning, recommits the crime). And the postmodern is
aware of the futility of his task. The postmodern invents his own
vocabulary, the "necessary but inaccurate" conceptions - but even these, to
a certain extent, rely upon truth again. Truth (capital T) refuses
articulation.
Are we complacent? Depends on who you ask. In my opinion, yes, especially
with the number of people that so readily define themselves as postmodern
viz. that postmodern-type woman who deconstructs a snowman as symbolic of
gender inequity. (I can see her point, but dammit, it's a snowman!) The
postmodern opens the floodgates hoping for a light watering of its garden,
but careful, for a light sprinkling might turn into a deluge. Caveat.
Cautious postmodernist,
Fong
ale...@my-deja.com
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n) wrote:
> ale...@my-deja.com:
> | Question: just what is the trajectories for postmodern theories (if
> | there are any ;)? Is it still about the defragmentation of the meta-
> | narrative, the decentring of margin:centre binarism, or have we
simply
> | become complacent to what Lyotard defined as "false" postmodernism
in
> | his book (Postmodern Condition)? A sort of panoramic, privileged
> | intellectual position?
>
> A philosophical movement always ends in being totally
> vulgarized. Hadn't this occurred by the time we were seeing
> Microsoft ads featuring pouty twenty-somethings running glitzy
> dot-coms back before the Fall?
>
> --
blurs the distinction between so-called high and mass culture either
through pastiche or juxtaposition!), as to the defeatism which seems to
be occuring.
Microsoft ad??
James Whitehead
same - forever?
--
James Whitehead
James Whitehead
>ale...@my-deja.com:
>| Question: just what is the trajectories for postmodern theories (if
>| there are any ;)? Is it still about the defragmentation of the meta-
>| narrative, the decentring of margin:centre binarism, or have we simply
>| become complacent to what Lyotard defined as "false" postmodernism in
>| his book (Postmodern Condition)? A sort of panoramic, privileged
>| intellectual position?
>
>A philosophical movement always ends in being totally
>vulgarized. Hadn't this occurred by the time we were seeing
>Microsoft ads featuring pouty twenty-somethings running glitzy
>dot-coms back before the Fall?
>
philosophy - do the "philosophers" of po-mo qualify (as philosophers) -
aren't they in the main from other disciplines - and/or "French"
--
James Whitehead
James Whitehead
that Latin is being taught in primary schools!)
--
James Whitehead
James Whitehead
<fon...@mcmaster.ca> writes
>
><ale...@my-deja.com> wrote in message news:95ksmh$m82$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
>> Dear inclusive all:
>>
>> Question: just what is the trajectories for postmodern theories (if
>> there are any ;)? Is it still about the defragmentation of the meta-
>> narrative, the decentring of margin:centre binarism, or have we simply
>> become complacent to what Lyotard defined as "false" postmodernism in
>> his book (Postmodern Condition)? A sort of panoramic, privileged
>> intellectual position?
>>
>> Joyce
>
>Postmodern theories is indeed a panoramic, privileged intellectual position,
>and I don't think I agree with Lyotard
>
significantly> pronounced leotard?
>that this is false in any sense. The
>postmodern theory unravels, ruptures, disseminates, deconstructs; but what
>we have here is a parasite. It latches on and refuses to give while toying
>and actively destroying its host. Perhaps destroying is too powerful a word;
>but it derails, it asphyxiates, and it creates a creepy sense of
>light-headedness. A heightened sense of consciousness? Maybe. A panoramic,
>privileged informed position? If done right, probably.
>
>Postmodern theories, by themselves, are impotent. Take this quote from
>Nietzsche for example:
>
>"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies,
>anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been
>poetically and rhetorically tempered by, transferred and embellished, and
>which, after long usage, seem to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are
>illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that
>have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which
>have lost their embossings, and are now considered as metal and no longer as
>coins" Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Normal Sense'.
Blake said something similar i think. Truth is also an instrument of
repression - only the gentry can lie.
>
>Truth is dead. That is the heart of this passage. Nietzsche declares the
>death of Truth; truth takes its place, and truth is now Truth. In violence,
>the offspring thus usurps the throne and the father, brutally murdered.
>
>So what?
>
>The postmodern notes the act of violence, it illuminates the recesses in
>which certain details are hidden, it shakes the linearity of succession, but
>the postmodern does not take from the son the liberties that the son had
>taken from the father. The postmodern requires the son to remain on the
>throne, and in a state of perversion draws from the son while at the same
>time condemning(?) its benefactor. Who then benefits from this state of
>affairs? Why, the cohorts of course. The courtiers, the plebians, the
>aristocracy, the bourgeoise; in short, the oppressee, the frustrated, the
>gloryhounds... ad nauseam.
This doesn't sound like Nietzche - but we must move towards pseudonymity
>
>So, what then is the trajectory of the postmodern? What is the goal of the
>postmodern? It innocently proclaims to search for Truth (but it has been,
>for so long, narrated and metaconceptually defined by truth that its
>interrogation, its questioning, recommits the crime). And the postmodern is
>aware of the futility of his task. The postmodern invents his own
>vocabulary, the "necessary but inaccurate" conceptions - but even these, to
>a certain extent, rely upon truth again. Truth (capital T) refuses
>articulation.
Po-mos' reality only exists in modern eyes- its the dissected out optic
nerve of modernity...
>
>Are we complacent? Depends on who you ask. In my opinion, yes, especially
>with the number of people that so readily define themselves as postmodern
>viz. that postmodern-type woman who deconstructs a snowman as symbolic of
>gender inequity. (I can see her point, but dammit, it's a snowman!)
No its not! We have Snow Dogs- you dam - ask the great patriarch in the
sky to send to hell...
> The
>postmodern opens the floodgates hoping for a light watering of its garden,
>but careful, for a light sprinkling might turn into a deluge. Caveat.
Not so - the po-mo is the realist cancer patient. (and at such point you
will notice wealth, race and gender become nothing)
>
>Cautious postmodernist,
>Fong
>
>
--
James Whitehead
G*rd*n
James Whitehead <jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk>:
| Well "movement" isn't an attribute of po-mo - i thought - and as for
| philosophy - do the "philosophers" of po-mo qualify (as philosophers) -
| aren't they in the main from other disciplines - and/or "French"
It's a sort of simulacrum of a philosophical movement.
I should have said "banalized" instead of "vulgarized" to
save you all the trouble of rushing to defend the pops.
Ned Ludd
news:_yrf6.78701$V22.16...@news4.rdc1.on.home.com...
>...
> Postmodern theories, by themselves, are impotent. Take this
> quote from Nietzsche for example:
>
> "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies,
> anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which
> have been poetically and rhetorically tempered by, transferred
> and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to be fixed,
> canonical and binding. Truths are illusions which we have
> forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become
> worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which
> have lost their embossings, and are now considered as metal
> and no longer as coins"
> Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Normal Sense'.
>
> Truth is dead. That is the heart of this passage. Nietzsche
> declares the death of Truth; truth takes its place, and truth
> is now Truth. In violence, the offspring thus usurps the throne
> and the father, brutally murdered.
>
And long overdue. Fixed truth is an oxymoron. Or as pomo's
favorite whipping boy said, "Time is truth's inability to
coincide with itself."
Ned
u...@nadaredhotant.com
> In article <_yrf6.78701$V22.16...@news4.rdc1.on.home.com>, Fong
> <fon...@mcmaster.ca> writes
[snip]
>> The
>> postmodern opens the floodgates hoping for a light watering of its garden,
>> but careful, for a light sprinkling might turn into a deluge. Caveat.
>
> Not so - the po-mo is the realist cancer patient. (and at such point you
> will notice wealth, race and gender become nothing)
My goodness, James, what a happy, shiny world you must live in. We all die
(and then wealth, race and gender mean nothing) - but how we die, with what
pain or lack of it we die, and of course when we die still has quite a bit
to do with wealth (or rather class) race and gender, let alone how the
cancer was contracted in the first place (Fags - or cigarettes for the USA,
chemical works, nuclear plant - or living near one, uranium miner, etc.
etc.)
We are entered in the postcode lottery, like it or not. You might want to
reconsider your metaphor.
Regards
Giles
Curtiss Leung
cannot be rejuvenated by its likeness, only understood; for it is only at
dusk that the owl of Minerva takes wing and flies.
Or something like that.
--
Curtiss, ashamed that he doesn't know this off the top of his head.
marcel duchamp
The most difficult art history course I ever took in college concerned
Walt Disney. I kid you not. The professor is/was the foremost
authority on the matter, and for this she is/was esteemed. Now, I'll
give her her five minutes of my life to say her piece, but to actively
threaten my GPA over the artistic merits of Phantasia?! We aren't
overcompensating for the seeming lack-of-weight in the topic, are we?
James Whitehead
>| ...
>
>James Whitehead <jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk>:
>| Well "movement" isn't an attribute of po-mo - i thought - and as for
>| philosophy - do the "philosophers" of po-mo qualify (as philosophers) -
>| aren't they in the main from other disciplines - and/or "French"
>
>It's a sort of simulacrum of a philosophical movement.
>
>I should have said "banalized" instead of "vulgarized" to
>save you all the trouble of rushing to defend the pops.
>
Mac - knowing the risk of BSE and the certainty of heart burn. I know
there are some who view po-mo as being positive, (Joyce?) but i'm not
part of such a group. If we look at po-mo "art" - it lacks aesthetic
considerations, as does architecture. At best its silly, at worst plain
ugly or disgusting.
--
James Whitehead
James Whitehead
writes
>James Whitehead wrote:
>
>> In article <_yrf6.78701$V22.16...@news4.rdc1.on.home.com>, Fong
>> <fon...@mcmaster.ca> writes
>
>[snip]
>
>>> The
>>> postmodern opens the floodgates hoping for a light watering of its garden,
>>> but careful, for a light sprinkling might turn into a deluge. Caveat.
>>
>> Not so - the po-mo is the realist cancer patient. (and at such point you
>> will notice wealth, race and gender become nothing)
>
>My goodness, James, what a happy, shiny world you must live in.
Its not shiny - but whatever it is i've decided to be happy, it feels
better...
>We all die
>(and then wealth, race and gender mean nothing) - but how we die, with what
>pain or lack of it we die, and of course when we die still has quite a bit
>to do with wealth (or rather class) race and gender, let alone how the
>cancer was contracted in the first place (Fags - or cigarettes for the USA,
>chemical works, nuclear plant - or living near one, uranium miner, etc.
>etc.)
Your talking about life - and the will to live - not death and the
realization that its certain. The idea of transcending death is a
modernist one, technologized religion. What i'm saying is one of the
considerations which comes with po-mo is the very pointlessness of life.
How we die might also be to do with how we value our own egos "rage rage
against the dying of the light" or do we go like lambs to the slaughter?
the quality of life is difficult to measure - we are now talking about
life though- not death.
>
>We are entered in the postcode lottery, like it or not. You might want to
>reconsider your metaphor.
The metaphor works for me though perhaps not for you, it holds the
notion of hopelessness - which is another feature of post-modernity.
regards
--
James Whitehead
James Whitehead
<na...@place.com> writes
on topic. I would say the mistake is to see value in this tacky stuff,
this would be to modernize it.
--
James Whitehead
pinkspot
jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk wrote on 2/6/01 10:20 AM:
> the quality of life is difficult to measure - we are now talking about
> life though- not death.
oh James......
how very post-modern delusion
miko
u...@nadaredhotant.com
[snip]
>>> Its not shiny - but whatever it is i've decided to be happy, it feels
>>> better...
>>
>> "One can react passively to nihilism, accepting it as a diagnosis of
>> modernity, knowing the world to be absurd, but also knowing that nothing one
>> can do will change matters: don't worry, be happy. Such an experience of
>> spiritual recession and decline... is, as Raoul Vaneigem rightly points out,
>> 'merely an overture to conformism'" Simon Critchley, Very Little...Almost
>> Nothing.
>>
>> Sorry - it was irresistible.
>
> I'm allowed to worry. But fail to see how this is spiritual recession...
> could you say why?
For Critchley? I'm not sure. Maybe because it is a passive acceptance, a
failure to respond to the problem (which is not to say that one could find
an answer).
[snip]
>> I was talking about dying, as were you - the realist cancer patient. The
>> will to live has nothing to do with it. Anyway, out of curiosity, can one
>> realise death? One can realise that one is going to die, that one is dying,
>> but can one grasp death, one's own death?
> Of course- no one else can - and no ones standing next to you with some
> score card- "you didn't quite make it - better try again" :-)
Really? Clearly no-one else can, but I don't see any 'of course'. What does
death look like? Can one imagine not being, without being to imagine it? If
one is a witness to one's own demise, then one still is. Isn't any attempt
to grasp one's own death just a prosopopeia?
[snip]
>> Transcending death? Where did you get that from? All I was pointing out was
>> that dying (regardless of whether one recognises the fact or not) is not
>> separate from race, class and gender, quite the reverse. If you mean that
>> race, class and gender mean nothing to the dying person, then I misread and
>> yes, maybe that is so, although Oscar keeps rattling through my head - 'I am
>> dying as I have lived, beyond my means'. Or, differently, Beckett's
>> Unameable, a voice unable to be silent, unable not to speak as some sort (or
>> sorts) of 'I'.
>
> The dying - well they come in all shapes and sizes, but they move
> towards a unity. The quotes above are critiques of life - not death.
A unity? Can 'not-being' be a unity (honest question)? And yes, I know the
bits I mentioned aren't about death, they are about dying.
>>> What i'm saying is one of the
>>> considerations which comes with po-mo is the very pointlessness of life.
>>
>> Quite a perennial concern, I would have thought. Forgive a couple of
>> favourite quotes.
>>
>> "He who dares to kill himself has learnt the secret of the deception. Beyond
>> that there is no freedom; that's all, and beyond it is nothing. He who dares
>> to kill himself is a god. Now everyone can make it so that there shall be no
>> God and there shall be nothing. But no one has done so yet." Dostoevsky, The
>> Devils
>>
>> "Live and invent. I have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live.
>> No matter." Beckett, Malone Dies.
>
> *Real* suicide would be to become a Marxist or a Republican - for no
> reason whatsoever. What the above are about is immortality.
Oh no they aren't. They are about 'the very pointlessness of life'. No
mentions or intimations of immortality, in fact the reverse. I merely
mentioned them as a part of pointing out that 'life as pointless' goes back
quite some way.
Anyway, why would a choice made for no reason be 'real' suicide? What is
being killed? Such a choice sounds rather like Sartre's 'freedom'.
[snip]
>> It was dying that was being talked about, not life or death
> dying is/as the loss of life? - well it might be - then the loss of race
> the loss of gender....
Dying as what leads up to the loss of life, not the loss of life itself,
that is death, obviously.
[snip]
>>> The metaphor works for me though perhaps not for you, it holds the
>>> notion of hopelessness - which is another feature of post-modernity.
>> I grasped what the metaphor was about, I was just pointing out that dying is
>> hardly separate from the holy trinity of race, class, gender.
> its the loss of these...?
Dying is the losing of life, not its loss. Or could one say dying is living
towards death? Perhaps not. The trinity, I would guess, stick around until
death, whether or not they are particularly important to the person dying.
>> But even
>> putting that aside, I'm still not sure it works - if hopelessness and
>> pointlessness arise from the recognition of the finitude of life in the
>> metaphor, and postmodernism equals dying, then where is postmodernism's
>> death? It can't be the end of the modernist project, because the casting
>> aside of the delusions of vigorous youth is what the dying person does on
>> the realisation that death awaits. The metaphor demands an end for
>> Postmodernism - a death that postmodernism is leading to.
>
> Its a loss of modernity,
That's what I guessed, which is why the metaphor doesn't work - otherwise
the cancer patient would have to be looking back on her death, a tricky
thing to pull off, particularly if she is realist.
> another metaphor could be loss of virginity.
That would work better. I rather like pomo as a post coital modernity - the
petite Mort of the grand narratives perhaps - or is it the apres-shag
tristesse of the loss of innocence, having traded in one's virginal glow for
a few moments of disappointing flesh rubbing. But then what counts as
pre-act heavy petting?
> The hopelessness of po-mo has nothing directly to do with death - or
> sex, but these are metaphors.
Never!
> The hopelessness and pointlessness in the
> *ideology* (HA!) of po-mo is that even given biological life - the
> passing on of the project - nothing is there to be passed on.
For the rest of the biological world, the passing on of life *is* what is
passed on. This is one reason I don't like nature much. Nature doesn't do
intimations of mortality either, which is another reason.
> Within the
> modern programme the goal may be out of personal reach, but not out of
> the grasp of humanity - or to whatever forms evolve from humanity. The
> hopelessness and pointlessness is a condition of *after* whether what it
> was after was a success or a failure. The only way out of po-mo is
> amnesia.
Or, of course, death.
>> 'Hopelessness' is another hardy perennial (sorry, I've got gardening on my
>> mind). Another bouquet of quotes.
>>
>> 'There is infinite hope, but not for us' Kafka
>>
>> "Gaber, Gaber, he said, life is a thing of beauty, Gaber, and a joy forever.
>> He brought his face nearer mine. A joy forever, he said, a thing of beauty,
>> Moran, and a joy forever. He smiled. I closed my eyes. Smiles are all very
>> nice in their own way, very heartening, but at a reasonable distance. I
>> said, Do you think he meant human life?" Beckett, Molloy.
>>
>> "We'd end up by needing God, we have lost all sense of decency admittedly,
>> but there are still certain depths we prefer not to sink to." Beckett, The
>> Unameable.
> what happens when you close the book... ? (open another)
You mean there is a life out there? A thing of beauty? Nah.
Hopelessness, like pointlessness, also has quite a history, you might
notice, of which these are but the most recent.
Regards
Giles
"C'est la Mort qui console, helas! et qui fait vivre;
C'est le but de la vie, et c'est le seul espoir"
James Whitehead
writes
>James Whitehead wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>>>> Its not shiny - but whatever it is i've decided to be happy, it feels
>>>> better...
>>>
>>> "One can react passively to nihilism, accepting it as a diagnosis of
>>> modernity, knowing the world to be absurd, but also knowing that nothing one
>>> can do will change matters: don't worry, be happy. Such an experience of
>>> spiritual recession and decline... is, as Raoul Vaneigem rightly points out,
>>> 'merely an overture to conformism'" Simon Critchley, Very Little...Almost
>>> Nothing.
>>>
>>> Sorry - it was irresistible.
>>
>> I'm allowed to worry. But fail to see how this is spiritual recession...
>> could you say why?
>
>For Critchley? I'm not sure. Maybe because it is a passive acceptance, a
>failure to respond to the problem (which is not to say that one could find
>an answer).
But not responding is also possible - from a spiritual point that is...
>
>[snip]
>
>>> I was talking about dying, as were you - the realist cancer patient. The
>>> will to live has nothing to do with it. Anyway, out of curiosity, can one
>>> realise death? One can realise that one is going to die, that one is dying,
>>> but can one grasp death, one's own death?
>
>> Of course- no one else can - and no ones standing next to you with some
>> score card- "you didn't quite make it - better try again" :-)
>
>Really? Clearly no-one else can, but I don't see any 'of course'. What does
>death look like? Can one imagine not being, without being to imagine it? If
>one is a witness to one's own demise, then one still is. Isn't any attempt
>to grasp one's own death just a prosopopeia?
It might be - you have assumed death is the end of everything - or at
least the end of self... but i see no reason why it should be - or even
if it is then its not possible to remember this - to revisit it.
>
>[snip]
>
>>> Transcending death? Where did you get that from? All I was pointing out was
>>> that dying (regardless of whether one recognises the fact or not) is not
>>> separate from race, class and gender, quite the reverse. If you mean that
>>> race, class and gender mean nothing to the dying person, then I misread and
>>> yes, maybe that is so, although Oscar keeps rattling through my head - 'I am
>>> dying as I have lived, beyond my means'. Or, differently, Beckett's
>>> Unameable, a voice unable to be silent, unable not to speak as some sort (or
>>> sorts) of 'I'.
>>
>> The dying - well they come in all shapes and sizes, but they move
>> towards a unity. The quotes above are critiques of life - not death.
>
>A unity? Can 'not-being' be a unity (honest question)? And yes, I know the
>bits I mentioned aren't about death, they are about dying.
the singularity... however it appears that to most the equality is the
lack of any value gained in the process - even christ found nothing in
the process.
>
>>>> What i'm saying is one of the
>>>> considerations which comes with po-mo is the very pointlessness of life.
>>>
>>> Quite a perennial concern, I would have thought. Forgive a couple of
>>> favourite quotes.
>>>
>>> "He who dares to kill himself has learnt the secret of the deception. Beyond
>>> that there is no freedom; that's all, and beyond it is nothing. He who dares
>>> to kill himself is a god. Now everyone can make it so that there shall be no
>>> God and there shall be nothing. But no one has done so yet." Dostoevsky, The
>>> Devils
>>>
>>> "Live and invent. I have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live.
>>> No matter." Beckett, Malone Dies.
>>
>> *Real* suicide would be to become a Marxist or a Republican - for no
>> reason whatsoever. What the above are about is immortality.
>
>Oh no they aren't. They are about 'the very pointlessness of life'. No
>mentions or intimations of immortality, in fact the reverse. I merely
>mentioned them as a part of pointing out that 'life as pointless' goes back
>quite some way.
And i added that suicides do not see life as pointless. Or it as an act
implies other, implies a wish to beat life. Cows in the field find
little in life other than grass bit they rarely kill themselves.
>
>Anyway, why would a choice made for no reason be 'real' suicide? What is
>being killed? Such a choice sounds rather like Sartre's 'freedom'.
there's no choice at all - its a destruction of self, i thought this was
a theme in Marxism? Freedom - is Sartre's freedom a freedom from
responsibility of being? If suicide is destruction of body or is it
destruction of ideas...
>
>[snip]
>>> It was dying that was being talked about, not life or death
>
>> dying is/as the loss of life? - well it might be - then the loss of race
>> the loss of gender....
>
>Dying as what leads up to the loss of life, not the loss of life itself,
>that is death, obviously.
Yes a loss - you begin to lose things - age brings loss of hair,
appetite, teeth, gender, memory .... how well you die doesn't seem
dependent on life at all, a slave might regard it as a blessing.
>
>[snip]
>
>>>> The metaphor works for me though perhaps not for you, it holds the
>>>> notion of hopelessness - which is another feature of post-modernity.
>
>>> I grasped what the metaphor was about, I was just pointing out that dying is
>>> hardly separate from the holy trinity of race, class, gender.
>
>> its the loss of these...?
>
>Dying is the losing of life, not its loss. Or could one say dying is living
>towards death? Perhaps not. The trinity, I would guess, stick around until
>death, whether or not they are particularly important to the person dying.
That's it they are unimportant.
>
>>> But even
>>> putting that aside, I'm still not sure it works - if hopelessness and
>>> pointlessness arise from the recognition of the finitude of life in the
>>> metaphor, and postmodernism equals dying, then where is postmodernism's
>>> death? It can't be the end of the modernist project, because the casting
>>> aside of the delusions of vigorous youth is what the dying person does on
>>> the realisation that death awaits. The metaphor demands an end for
>>> Postmodernism - a death that postmodernism is leading to.
>>
>> Its a loss of modernity,
>
>That's what I guessed, which is why the metaphor doesn't work - otherwise
>the cancer patient would have to be looking back on her death, a tricky
>thing to pull off, particularly if she is realist.
They in a sense are dead already - they live in another world. The
condemned may up to the last minute be waiting for the governors call,
they still have some value in life's events, but the dead see no value -
not in your trinity at least.
>
>> another metaphor could be loss of virginity.
>
>That would work better. I rather like pomo as a post coital modernity - the
>petite Mort of the grand narratives perhaps -
yes - death again - its not so different?
> or is it the apres-shag
>tristesse of the loss of innocence, having traded in one's virginal glow for
>a few moments of disappointing flesh rubbing. But then what counts as
>pre-act heavy petting?
The renaissance!
>
>> The hopelessness of po-mo has nothing directly to do with death - or
>> sex, but these are metaphors.
>
>Never!
But that's not to say that po-mo is nothing to do with sex or death.
The hopelessness is nothing to do with these...
>
>> The hopelessness and pointlessness in the
>> *ideology* (HA!) of po-mo is that even given biological life - the
>> passing on of the project - nothing is there to be passed on.
>
>For the rest of the biological world, the passing on of life *is* what is
>passed on. This is one reason I don't like nature much. Nature doesn't do
>intimations of mortality either, which is another reason.
>
>> Within the
>> modern programme the goal may be out of personal reach, but not out of
>> the grasp of humanity - or to whatever forms evolve from humanity. The
>> hopelessness and pointlessness is a condition of *after* whether what it
>> was after was a success or a failure. The only way out of po-mo is
>> amnesia.
>
>Or, of course, death.
No that's always been around. Amnesia would mean someone could write the
wastelands again - which would be ironic. Death wont kill an ideology?
Or if it does it would appear to kill all of them?
>
>>> 'Hopelessness' is another hardy perennial (sorry, I've got gardening on my
>>> mind). Another bouquet of quotes.
>>>
>>> 'There is infinite hope, but not for us' Kafka
>>>
>>> "Gaber, Gaber, he said, life is a thing of beauty, Gaber, and a joy forever.
>>> He brought his face nearer mine. A joy forever, he said, a thing of beauty,
>>> Moran, and a joy forever. He smiled. I closed my eyes. Smiles are all very
>>> nice in their own way, very heartening, but at a reasonable distance. I
>>> said, Do you think he meant human life?" Beckett, Molloy.
>>>
>>> "We'd end up by needing God, we have lost all sense of decency admittedly,
>>> but there are still certain depths we prefer not to sink to." Beckett, The
>>> Unameable.
>
>> what happens when you close the book... ? (open another)
>
>You mean there is a life out there? A thing of beauty? Nah.
No - i don't mean that at all, the mistake was reading the book - it
structures life into beginnings and ends.
>
>Hopelessness, like pointlessness, also has quite a history, you might
>notice, of which these are but the most recent.
Of course, but po-mo is different, nothing can escape from a black hole
- that's not like death but more like po-mo.
>
>Regards
>
>Giles
>
>"C'est la Mort qui console, helas! et qui fait vivre;
>C'est le but de la vie, et c'est le seul espoir"
>
--
James Whitehead
u...@nadaredhotant.com
[snip]
>>>> "One can react passively to nihilism, accepting it as a diagnosis of
>>>> modernity, knowing the world to be absurd, but also knowing that nothing
>>>> one
>>>> can do will change matters: don't worry, be happy. Such an experience of
>>>> spiritual recession and decline... is, as Raoul Vaneigem rightly points
>>>> out,
>>>> 'merely an overture to conformism'" Simon Critchley, Very Little...Almost
>>>> Nothing.
>>>>
>>>> Sorry - it was irresistible.
>>>
>>> I'm allowed to worry. But fail to see how this is spiritual recession...
>>> could you say why?
>>
>> For Critchley? I'm not sure. Maybe because it is a passive acceptance, a
>> failure to respond to the problem (which is not to say that one could find
>> an answer).
>
> But not responding is also possible - from a spiritual point that is...
Indeed, but that is not a failure to respond - it is not acquiescence. It is
also not taking nihilism seriously, but that is nearly another matter.
[snip]
>>> The dying - well they come in all shapes and sizes, but they move
>>> towards a unity. The quotes above are critiques of life - not death.
>>
>> A unity? Can 'not-being' be a unity (honest question)? And yes, I know the
>> bits I mentioned aren't about death, they are about dying.
>
> the singularity... however it appears that to most the equality is the
> lack of any value gained in the process - even christ found nothing in
> the process.
Singularity and equality are properties of things (being), not of non-being.
Death is not dialectical. As death cannot be grasped, then one cannot even
say that death is equal. We all die, but is it the same? No-one can say.
[snip]
>>> *Real* suicide would be to become a Marxist or a Republican - for no
>>> reason whatsoever. What the above are about is immortality.
>>
>> Oh no they aren't. They are about 'the very pointlessness of life'. No
>> mentions or intimations of immortality, in fact the reverse. I merely
>> mentioned them as a part of pointing out that 'life as pointless' goes back
>> quite some way.
>
> And i added that suicides do not see life as pointless. Or it as an act
> implies other, implies a wish to beat life.
You didn't add that; but by and large I would agree with this, or nearly.
Rather the point of suicide is that life is pointless, but the self isn't.
One asserts the self by destroying it.
But, in the Dostoevsky, it is a desire to be rid of the deception that is
life, in favour of nothing. It is still not about immortality. And the
Beckett certainly isn't about suicide. I added a quote (and then cut it)
which said - to paraphrase - 'I could die tomorrow, with a little effort,
but best to let it happen, I shall be tepid'.
> Cows in the field find
> little in life other than grass bit they rarely kill themselves.
See my previous comments on Nature.
>> Anyway, why would a choice made for no reason be 'real' suicide? What is
>> being killed? Such a choice sounds rather like Sartre's 'freedom'.
> there's no choice at all - its a destruction of self,
No, like suicide, it's an assertion of self, self over everything or self in
the face of nothing, thus not destruction and definitely a choice.
> i thought this was
> a theme in Marxism?
What? Marx is against suicide? I don't think it even crops up. Off the top
of my head, I can't think of any Marxism that is so ludicrously moralistic
(I exclude the Stalinist SU) as to follow the Christian condemnation of
suicide.
> Freedom - is Sartre's freedom a freedom from
> responsibility of being? If suicide is destruction of body or is it
> destruction of ideas...
Sartre's freedom is the decision in the face of absurdity - the decision for
no reason, which is the responsibility of being. In a place with no point
and no hope, then making a decision on the basis of one's self and *nothing*
else, (not the same as self interest), is freedom. Personally, I think this
is crap, but it is a counterpoint to your claim that this is suicide.
>>>> It was dying that was being talked about, not life or death
>>
>>> dying is/as the loss of life? - well it might be - then the loss of race
>>> the loss of gender....
>>
>> Dying as what leads up to the loss of life, not the loss of life itself,
>> that is death, obviously.
>
> Yes a loss - you begin to lose things - age brings loss of hair,
> appetite, teeth, gender, memory
Losing, not lost. You confuse failing with nothing.
> .... how well you die doesn't seem
> dependent on life at all, a slave might regard it as a blessing.
Spot the self contradiction. Why would a slave regard it as a blessing?
But this is not worthy of you, I feel. Anyone might regard death as
something to be desired. But you seem to think that merely being better off
or in a better situation might make someone more predisposed to cling to
life. Surely not, as you have just told us that such things as wealth, class
etc, mean nothing when faced with death. Make your mind up.
>>>>> The metaphor works for me though perhaps not for you, it holds the
>>>>> notion of hopelessness - which is another feature of post-modernity.
>>
>>>> I grasped what the metaphor was about, I was just pointing out that dying
>>>> is
>>>> hardly separate from the holy trinity of race, class, gender.
>>
>>> its the loss of these...?
>>
>> Dying is the losing of life, not its loss. Or could one say dying is living
>> towards death? Perhaps not. The trinity, I would guess, stick around until
>> death, whether or not they are particularly important to the person dying.
> That's it they are unimportant.
Nope. Consider how they might impact on the small things, like your
treatment, how much morphine you get - or whether you might get enough to
die; or, loosely, what kind of support care you might get. This has a lot to
do with your dying, let alone Montaigne's sense of learning how to die.
>>>> But even
>>>> putting that aside, I'm still not sure it works - if hopelessness and
>>>> pointlessness arise from the recognition of the finitude of life in the
>>>> metaphor, and postmodernism equals dying, then where is postmodernism's
>>>> death? It can't be the end of the modernist project, because the casting
>>>> aside of the delusions of vigorous youth is what the dying person does on
>>>> the realisation that death awaits. The metaphor demands an end for
>>>> Postmodernism - a death that postmodernism is leading to.
>>>
>>> Its a loss of modernity,
>>
>> That's what I guessed, which is why the metaphor doesn't work - otherwise
>> the cancer patient would have to be looking back on her death, a tricky
>> thing to pull off, particularly if she is realist.
>
> They in a sense are dead already - they live in another world.
Two things. First, you and I clearly have very different experiences of
dying. Second, as far as I can tell, both personally and theoretically, the
problem with dying is precisely that one is not already dead.
> The
> condemned may up to the last minute be waiting for the governors call,
> they still have some value in life's events,
No. I'm sorry but here and above you talk bollocks. You see life and death
as direct opposites, with no place for dying. Both theoretically and
personally, I think you are simply wrong. I'm not going to ask any personal
questions, but do you really think that dying - whether one wishes to die or
not - can possibly be equivalent to 'I'm already dead' (as in 'They are in a
sense dead already')? If you do, then you are hugely wrong.
> not in your trinity at least.
The dead see no value, sure - but, I have to keep saying this, you and I
were talking about dying, not death.
>>> another metaphor could be loss of virginity.
>>
>> That would work better. I rather like pomo as a post coital modernity - the
>> petite Mort of the grand narratives perhaps -
>
> yes - death again - its not so different?
A post-jouissance blackout -v- Pomo as Death? The metaphor still doesn't
work.
>> or is it the apres-shag
>> tristesse of the loss of innocence, having traded in one's virginal glow for
>> a few moments of disappointing flesh rubbing. But then what counts as
>> pre-act heavy petting?
>
> The renaissance!
I'm only going to say this once, ever, and I mean really ever.
James, sometimes you are a love bundle.
>>> The hopelessness of po-mo has nothing directly to do with death - or
>>> sex, but these are metaphors.
>>
>> Never!
>
> But that's not to say that po-mo is nothing to do with sex or death.
> The hopelessness is nothing to do with these...
I was presuming that this was the case. But isn't it odd how one's metaphors
can get out of control?
>>> The hopelessness and pointlessness in the
>>> *ideology* (HA!) of po-mo is that even given biological life - the
>>> passing on of the project - nothing is there to be passed on.
>>
>> For the rest of the biological world, the passing on of life *is* what is
>> passed on. This is one reason I don't like nature much. Nature doesn't do
>> intimations of mortality either, which is another reason.
>>
>>> Within the
>>> modern programme the goal may be out of personal reach, but not out of
>>> the grasp of humanity - or to whatever forms evolve from humanity. The
>>> hopelessness and pointlessness is a condition of *after* whether what it
>>> was after was a success or a failure. The only way out of po-mo is
>>> amnesia.
>>
>> Or, of course, death.
>
> No that's always been around. Amnesia would mean someone could write the
> wastelands again - which would be ironic. Death wont kill an ideology?
> Or if it does it would appear to kill all of them?
You said there was only one way out. You were wrong. Death is a way out.
(And has been a way out for millenia. Calling Moggin...). You wanted a
metaphor of the recognition that one would die as a version of pomo. So the
result is dying as pomo, death as a way out - not as a solution, of course.
But then, as Adorno points out, utopia in modernity always has the features
of death.
[snip]
>>> what happens when you close the book... ? (open another)
>>
>> You mean there is a life out there? A thing of beauty? Nah.
>
> No - i don't mean that at all, the mistake was reading the book - it
> structures life into beginnings and ends.
Then you are reading the wrong books. No, really, you are. Try some
modernism.
>> Hopelessness, like pointlessness, also has quite a history, you might
>> notice, of which these are but the most recent.
>
> Of course, but po-mo is different, nothing can escape from a black hole
> - that's not like death but more like po-mo.
A black hole where nothing happens, ever? I think you might have found your
metaphor, but I am no physicist. But then, in a black hole there is no time
and thus no death.
Warmly
ale...@my-deja.com
hierarchical differentiation of "good" art and "bad" art. But speaking
of art (in the western context atleast), I don't think one can talk
about it today without reference to cultural policies and fundins as
dictated by the governments. If one argues that one of the function of
art is about ethics (imaginary one, arbitrary and whatnot), and of the
representing the society and its members, would postmodern art be about
the (re)production of postmodern subjects???
Lutin
After 'modernism' and 'high modernism' and 'marxism' there may be,
perhaps, a return to a more human life ---
a life more nearly in accord with our inner nature (dao ?).
I wonder if this return might be what Pol Pot was seeking --
although his means (like all totalitarians, idealists, and statists)
was inhuman, horrible, frightful.
--
Lutin
"Les denonciateurs denoncent.
Les cambrioleurs cambriolent.
Les assasins assassinent.
Les amoureux s'aiment."
Belle & Sebastian
-A Bout de Souffle
"James Whitehead" <jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:gPzvlWAl...@jliat.demon.co.uk...
> In article <B6A603EA.1B4A6%u...@NADAredhotant.com>, u...@NADAredhotant.com
> writes
>
> [..]
> >>>
> >>> My goodness, James, what a happy, shiny world you must live in.
> >>
> >> Its not shiny - but whatever it is i've decided to be happy, it feels
> >> better...
> >
> >"One can react passively to nihilism, accepting it as a diagnosis of
> >modernity, knowing the world to be absurd, but also knowing that nothing
one
> >can do will change matters: don't worry, be happy. Such an experience of
> >spiritual recession and decline... is, as Raoul Vaneigem rightly points
out,
> >'merely an overture to conformism'" Simon Critchley, Very Little...Almost
> >Nothing.
> >
> >Sorry - it was irresistible.
>
> I'm allowed to worry. But fail to see how this is spiritual recession...
> could you say why?
>
> >
> >>> We all die
> >>> (and then wealth, race and gender mean nothing) - but how we die, with
what
> >>> pain or lack of it we die, and of course when we die still has quite a
bit
> >>> to do with wealth (or rather class) race and gender, let alone how the
> >>> cancer was contracted in the first place (Fags - or cigarettes for the
USA,
> >>> chemical works, nuclear plant - or living near one, uranium miner,
etc.
> >>> etc.)
> >>
> >> Your talking about life - and the will to live - not death and the
> >> realization that its certain.
> >
> >'That to Philosophie is to Learne How to Die' Montaigne.
>
> He was not the first to say such - but philosophy is more to do with
> filling the time we are alive... I am therefore i think.
> >
> >I was talking about dying, as were you - the realist cancer patient. The
> >will to live has nothing to do with it. Anyway, out of curiosity, can one
> >realise death? One can realise that one is going to die, that one is
dying,
> >but can one grasp death, one's own death?
> Of course- no one else can - and no ones standing next to you with some
> score card- "you didn't quite make it - better try again" :-)
> >
> >> The idea of transcending death is a
> >> modernist one, technologized religion.
> >
> >Transcending death? Where did you get that from? All I was pointing out
was
> >that dying (regardless of whether one recognises the fact or not) is not
> >separate from race, class and gender, quite the reverse. If you mean that
> >race, class and gender mean nothing to the dying person, then I misread
and
> >yes, maybe that is so, although Oscar keeps rattling through my head - 'I
am
> >dying as I have lived, beyond my means'. Or, differently, Beckett's
> >Unameable, a voice unable to be silent, unable not to speak as some sort
(or
> >sorts) of 'I'.
>
> The dying - well they come in all shapes and sizes, but they move
> towards a unity. The quotes above are critiques of life - not death.
> >
> >>What i'm saying is one of the
> >> considerations which comes with po-mo is the very pointlessness of
life.
> >
> >Quite a perennial concern, I would have thought. Forgive a couple of
> >favourite quotes.
> >
> >"He who dares to kill himself has learnt the secret of the deception.
Beyond
> >that there is no freedom; that's all, and beyond it is nothing. He who
dares
> >to kill himself is a god. Now everyone can make it so that there shall be
no
> >God and there shall be nothing. But no one has done so yet." Dostoevsky,
The
> >Devils
> >
> >"Live and invent. I have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is
live.
> >No matter." Beckett, Malone Dies.
>
> *Real* suicide would be to become a Marxist or a Republican - for no
> reason whatsoever. What the above are about is immortality.
>
> >
> >
> >> How we die might also be to do with how we value our own egos "rage
rage
> >> against the dying of the light" or do we go like lambs to the
slaughter?
> >>
> >> the quality of life is difficult to measure - we are now talking about
> >> life though- not death.
> >
> >It was dying that was being talked about, not life or death
> dying is/as the loss of life? - well it might be - then the loss of race
> the loss of gender....
> >
> >>> We are entered in the postcode lottery, like it or not. You might want
to
> >>> reconsider your metaphor.
> >>
> >> The metaphor works for me though perhaps not for you, it holds the
> >> notion of hopelessness - which is another feature of post-modernity.
> >
> >I grasped what the metaphor was about, I was just pointing out that dying
is
> >hardly separate from the holy trinity of race, class, gender.
> its the loss of these...?
> > But even
> >putting that aside, I'm still not sure it works - if hopelessness and
> >pointlessness arise from the recognition of the finitude of life in the
> >metaphor, and postmodernism equals dying, then where is postmodernism's
> >death? It can't be the end of the modernist project, because the casting
> >aside of the delusions of vigorous youth is what the dying person does on
> >the realisation that death awaits. The metaphor demands an end for
> >Postmodernism - a death that postmodernism is leading to.
>
> Its a loss of modernity, another metaphor could be loss of virginity.
> The hopelessness of po-mo has nothing directly to do with death - or
> sex, but these are metaphors. The hopelessness and pointlessness in the
> *ideology* (HA!) of po-mo is that even given biological life - the
> passing on of the project - nothing is there to be passed on. Within the
> modern programme the goal may be out of personal reach, but not out of
> the grasp of humanity - or to whatever forms evolve from humanity. The
> hopelessness and pointlessness is a condition of *after* whether what it
> was after was a success or a failure. The only way out of po-mo is
> amnesia.
> >
> >'Hopelessness' is another hardy perennial (sorry, I've got gardening on
my
> >mind). Another bouquet of quotes.
>
> >
> >'There is infinite hope, but not for us' Kafka
> >
> >"Gaber, Gaber, he said, life is a thing of beauty, Gaber, and a joy
forever.
> >He brought his face nearer mine. A joy forever, he said, a thing of
beauty,
> >Moran, and a joy forever. He smiled. I closed my eyes. Smiles are all
very
> >nice in their own way, very heartening, but at a reasonable distance. I
> >said, Do you think he meant human life?" Beckett, Molloy.
> >
> >"We'd end up by needing God, we have lost all sense of decency
admittedly,
> >but there are still certain depths we prefer not to sink to." Beckett,
The
> >Unameable.
> >
> >Regards
> >
> >Giles
> >
> >
> what happens when you close the book... ? (open another)
> --
> James Whitehead
James Whitehead
[..]
>> >I should have said "banalized" instead of "vulgarized" to
>> >save you all the trouble of rushing to defend the pops.
>> >
>> You mistake me - the vulgar is just that, I still eat the occasional
>Big
>> Mac - knowing the risk of BSE and the certainty of heart burn. I know
>> there are some who view po-mo as being positive, (Joyce?) but i'm not
>> part of such a group. If we look at po-mo "art" - it lacks aesthetic
>> considerations, as does architecture. At best its silly, at worst
>plain
>> ugly or disgusting.
>>
>[grizzling] Aesthetic is a matter of taste, and taste is a matter of
>hierarchical differentiation of "good" art and "bad" art. But speaking
>of art (in the western context atleast), I don't think one can talk
>about it today without reference to cultural policies and fundins as
>dictated by the governments. If one argues that one of the function of
>art is about ethics (imaginary one, arbitrary and whatnot), and of the
>representing the society and its members, would postmodern art be about
>the (re)production of postmodern subjects???
I agree with your analysis about *art* today - its a product of a
cultural elite - and just that, a self referential one. Its nothing to
do with aesthetics or ethics. *Art* today is different as its *made* by
critics. Aesthetics *now* are matters of taste, but it never used to be
- it was part of the "good". There once was a method for deciding what
was art, part of modernity.
--
James Whitehead
James Whitehead
writes
[..]
>>
>> But not responding is also possible - from a spiritual point that is...
>
>Indeed, but that is not a failure to respond - it is not acquiescence. It is
>also not taking nihilism seriously, but that is nearly another matter.
I think one can fail and be spiritual.
>
>[snip]
>
>>>> The dying - well they come in all shapes and sizes, but they move
>>>> towards a unity. The quotes above are critiques of life - not death.
>>>
>>> A unity? Can 'not-being' be a unity (honest question)? And yes, I know the
>>> bits I mentioned aren't about death, they are about dying.
>>
>> the singularity... however it appears that to most the equality is the
>> lack of any value gained in the process - even christ found nothing in
>> the process.
>
>Singularity and equality are properties of things (being), not of non-being.
>Death is not dialectical. As death cannot be grasped, then one cannot even
>say that death is equal. We all die, but is it the same? No-one can say.
Two separate tracks here are the emotional one - where comes my seeming
contradictions and the material ideas - the singularity in physics its
maintained is not in this world. Science would see death as graspable -
but not the singularity. On the other hand -"we all die" - well i'm not
so sure.
>
>[snip]
>
>>>> *Real* suicide would be to become a Marxist or a Republican - for no
>>>> reason whatsoever. What the above are about is immortality.
>>>
>>> Oh no they aren't. They are about 'the very pointlessness of life'. No
>>> mentions or intimations of immortality, in fact the reverse. I merely
>>> mentioned them as a part of pointing out that 'life as pointless' goes back
>>> quite some way.
>>
>> And i added that suicides do not see life as pointless. Or it as an act
>> implies other, implies a wish to beat life.
>
>You didn't add that; but by and large I would agree with this, or nearly.
>Rather the point of suicide is that life is pointless, but the self isn't.
>One asserts the self by destroying it.
I'm careless at times with words - however i did add "Or it as an act
implies..."
>
>But, in the Dostoevsky, it is a desire to be rid of the deception that is
>life, in favour of nothing. It is still not about immortality. And the
>Beckett certainly isn't about suicide. I added a quote (and then cut it)
>which said - to paraphrase - 'I could die tomorrow, with a little effort,
>but best to let it happen, I shall be tepid'.
To get out of the process of becoming - i take it as a wish for
immortality. Can you guarantee death as giving nothing?
>
>> Cows in the field find
>> little in life other than grass bit they rarely kill themselves.
>
>See my previous comments on Nature.
>
>>> Anyway, why would a choice made for no reason be 'real' suicide? What is
>>> being killed? Such a choice sounds rather like Sartre's 'freedom'.
>
>> there's no choice at all - its a destruction of self,
>
>No, like suicide, it's an assertion of self, self over everything or self in
>the face of nothing, thus not destruction and definitely a choice.
>
>> i thought this was
>> a theme in Marxism?
>
>What? Marx is against suicide? I don't think it even crops up. Off the top
>of my head, I can't think of any Marxism that is so ludicrously moralistic
>(I exclude the Stalinist SU) as to follow the Christian condemnation of
>suicide.
Individuals simply don't matter in politics. Marxist theory ...
"The German revolutionists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels met in Paris
in 1844. Together they developed the philosophy of dialectical
materialism, based on the dialectical logic of Hegel, but they made
matter, rather than mind, the ultimate reality."
>
>> Freedom - is Sartre's freedom a freedom from
>> responsibility of being? If suicide is destruction of body or is it
>> destruction of ideas...
>
>Sartre's freedom is the decision in the face of absurdity - the decision for
>no reason, which is the responsibility of being. In a place with no point
>and no hope, then making a decision on the basis of one's self and *nothing*
>else, (not the same as self interest), is freedom. Personally, I think this
>is crap, but it is a counterpoint to your claim that this is suicide.
In "roads to freedom" the hero effectively kills himself - the old
Sartre - physically - whilst the new Sartre becomes a Marxist - another
death of self?
>
>>>>> It was dying that was being talked about, not life or death
>>>
>>>> dying is/as the loss of life? - well it might be - then the loss of race
>>>> the loss of gender....
>>>
>>> Dying as what leads up to the loss of life, not the loss of life itself,
>>> that is death, obviously.
>>
>> Yes a loss - you begin to lose things - age brings loss of hair,
>> appetite, teeth, gender, memory
>
>Losing, not lost. You confuse failing with nothing.
then your confusing (or wishing) death with nothing.
>
>> .... how well you die doesn't seem
>> dependent on life at all, a slave might regard it as a blessing.
>
>Spot the self contradiction. Why would a slave regard it as a blessing?
Such is the inability of logic and semantics to catch the human
condition. Though thinking about it - there's sense, the slave and slave
owner become one - the parable of Lazarus.
>
>But this is not worthy of you, I feel. Anyone might regard death as
>something to be desired. But you seem to think that merely being better off
>or in a better situation might make someone more predisposed to cling to
>life. Surely not, as you have just told us that such things as wealth, class
>etc, mean nothing when faced with death. Make your mind up.
Look at it this way - if a Bank goes bust - those in debt and those in
credit will become financially equivalent - though they might not feel
the same about being made so. There is some logic in here perhaps.
Though i regret having to make my mind up, its like putting it in a
cage.
>
>>>>>> The metaphor works for me though perhaps not for you, it holds the
>>>>>> notion of hopelessness - which is another feature of post-modernity.
>>>
>>>>> I grasped what the metaphor was about, I was just pointing out that dying
>>>>> is
>>>>> hardly separate from the holy trinity of race, class, gender.
>>>
>>>> its the loss of these...?
>>>
>>> Dying is the losing of life, not its loss. Or could one say dying is living
>>> towards death? Perhaps not. The trinity, I would guess, stick around until
>>> death, whether or not they are particularly important to the person dying.
>
>> That's it they are unimportant.
>
>Nope. Consider how they might impact on the small things, like your
>treatment, how much morphine you get - or whether you might get enough to
>die; or, loosely, what kind of support care you might get. This has a lot to
>do with your dying, let alone Montaigne's sense of learning how to die.
These are nothing, no consolation at all. At best lies - we had this
debate. The ordinary conventions no longer apply. Of course you want to
make the dying comfortable - but you would rather make them alive and
uncomfortable - here is my sense of a reversal or denial of values - or
denial of your trinity.
>
>>>>> But even
>>>>> putting that aside, I'm still not sure it works - if hopelessness and
>>>>> pointlessness arise from the recognition of the finitude of life in the
>>>>> metaphor, and postmodernism equals dying, then where is postmodernism's
>>>>> death? It can't be the end of the modernist project, because the casting
>>>>> aside of the delusions of vigorous youth is what the dying person does on
>>>>> the realisation that death awaits. The metaphor demands an end for
>>>>> Postmodernism - a death that postmodernism is leading to.
>>>>
>>>> Its a loss of modernity,
>>>
>>> That's what I guessed, which is why the metaphor doesn't work - otherwise
>>> the cancer patient would have to be looking back on her death, a tricky
>>> thing to pull off, particularly if she is realist.
>>
>> They in a sense are dead already - they live in another world.
>
>Two things. First, you and I clearly have very different experiences of
>dying. Second, as far as I can tell, both personally and theoretically, the
>problem with dying is precisely that one is not already dead.
Precise problems - eh! Death like birth is messy. It blurs out into
life, alters values - lots of things. Death - dying is not a problem or
a theory, how post-modern then it seems, but this is the other way
around.
>
>> The
>> condemned may up to the last minute be waiting for the governors call,
>> they still have some value in life's events,
>
>No. I'm sorry but here and above you talk bollocks. You see life and death
>as direct opposites, with no place for dying.
Not at all your the one applying binary opposites - maybe life is some
mathematical equation in which your trinity sails, but my experiences of
death show/tell me that value systems and logic seem of little use.
>Both theoretically and
>personally, I think you are simply wrong. I'm not going to ask any personal
>questions, but do you really think that dying - whether one wishes to die or
>not - can possibly be equivalent to 'I'm already dead' (as in 'They are in a
>sense dead already')? If you do, then you are hugely wrong.
ok i'm wrong? and yes i do.
>
>> not in your trinity at least.
>
>The dead see no value, sure - but, I have to keep saying this, you and I
>were talking about dying, not death.
im talking about life, death, your trinity, dying - if you want to talk
about dying as some biological thing, watching the screen of brain waves
slowly flatten, is that dying, is the flat line death? Is that what you
mean by dying? Some definite state on the graph. A change in the
trajectory (on topic!) which we colour on the spreadsheet and say =
'look dying has begun, and look there - he is dead.'
>
>>>> another metaphor could be loss of virginity.
>>>
>>> That would work better. I rather like pomo as a post coital modernity - the
>>> petite Mort of the grand narratives perhaps -
>>
>> yes - death again - its not so different?
>
>A post-jouissance blackout -v- Pomo as Death? The metaphor still doesn't
>work.
Maybe then its a parable.
>
>>> or is it the apres-shag
>>> tristesse of the loss of innocence, having traded in one's virginal glow for
>>> a few moments of disappointing flesh rubbing. But then what counts as
>>> pre-act heavy petting?
>>
>> The renaissance!
>
>I'm only going to say this once, ever, and I mean really ever.
>James, sometimes you are a love bundle.
is this good?
>
>>>> The hopelessness of po-mo has nothing directly to do with death - or
>>>> sex, but these are metaphors.
>>>
>>> Never!
>>
>> But that's not to say that po-mo is nothing to do with sex or death.
>> The hopelessness is nothing to do with these...
>
>I was presuming that this was the case. But isn't it odd how one's metaphors
>can get out of control?
I have never been happy with my english.
>
>>>> The hopelessness and pointlessness in the
>>>> *ideology* (HA!) of po-mo is that even given biological life - the
>>>> passing on of the project - nothing is there to be passed on.
>>>
>>> For the rest of the biological world, the passing on of life *is* what is
>>> passed on. This is one reason I don't like nature much. Nature doesn't do
>>> intimations of mortality either, which is another reason.
>>>
>>>> Within the
>>>> modern programme the goal may be out of personal reach, but not out of
>>>> the grasp of humanity - or to whatever forms evolve from humanity. The
>>>> hopelessness and pointlessness is a condition of *after* whether what it
>>>> was after was a success or a failure. The only way out of po-mo is
>>>> amnesia.
>>>
>>> Or, of course, death.
>>
>> No that's always been around. Amnesia would mean someone could write the
>> wastelands again - which would be ironic. Death wont kill an ideology?
>> Or if it does it would appear to kill all of them?
>
>You said there was only one way out. You were wrong. Death is a way out.
>(And has been a way out for millenia. Calling Moggin...).
Giles! are you attempting Necromancy?
The one way out was a thought about po-mo - not dying. You might be able
to die more than once but to lose your virginity more than once requires
you to forget.
> You wanted a
>metaphor of the recognition that one would die as a version of pomo. So the
>result is dying as pomo, death as a way out - not as a solution, of course.
>But then, as Adorno points out, utopia in modernity always has the features
>of death.
(James imagining Adorno showing him round Manhattan)
>
>[snip]
>
>>>> what happens when you close the book... ? (open another)
>>>
>>> You mean there is a life out there? A thing of beauty? Nah.
>>
>> No - i don't mean that at all, the mistake was reading the book - it
>> structures life into beginnings and ends.
>
>Then you are reading the wrong books. No, really, you are. Try some
>modernism.
Books imply narrative and an author outside, they project such images
onto life, ok they are arbitrary, but they don't suit me. One of
Modernism's big problems was the edge.
>
>>> Hopelessness, like pointlessness, also has quite a history, you might
>>> notice, of which these are but the most recent.
>>
>> Of course, but po-mo is different, nothing can escape from a black hole
>> - that's not like death but more like po-mo.
>
>A black hole where nothing happens, ever? I think you might have found your
>metaphor, but I am no physicist. But then, in a black hole there is no time
>and thus no death.
I think you cant even say inside there is no time, what we are gets
stuck to the event horizon. - forever modern.
>
>Warmly
>
>Giles
>
> "C'est la Mort qui console, helas! et qui fait vivre;
>C'est le but de la vie, et c'est le seul espoir"
>
>
getting out the garlic -
--
James Whitehead
u...@nadaredhotant.com
>>> But not responding is also possible - from a spiritual point that is...
>>
>> Indeed, but that is not a failure to respond - it is not acquiescence. It is
>> also not taking nihilism seriously, but that is nearly another matter.
>
> I think one can fail and be spiritual.
I would have thought it was probably a necessity.
>>>>> The dying - well they come in all shapes and sizes, but they move
>>>>> towards a unity. The quotes above are critiques of life - not death.
>>>>
>>>> A unity? Can 'not-being' be a unity (honest question)? And yes, I know the
>>>> bits I mentioned aren't about death, they are about dying.
>>>
>>> the singularity... however it appears that to most the equality is the
>>> lack of any value gained in the process - even christ found nothing in
>>> the process.
>>
>> Singularity and equality are properties of things (being), not of non-being.
>> Death is not dialectical. As death cannot be grasped, then one cannot even
>> say that death is equal. We all die, but is it the same? No-one can say.
>
> Two separate tracks here are the emotional one - where comes my seeming
> contradictions and the material ideas - the singularity in physics its
> maintained is not in this world. Science would see death as graspable -
> but not the singularity.
I agree that science would see death - as a brute facticity - as graspable,
but that is partly the problem, surely. For the cancer patient, or
ourselves, death is not graspable because it is a brute facticity. It is not
his, her, yours or my death.
> On the other hand -"we all die" - well i'm not
> so sure.
Traces of hope on your part?
[snip]
>> But, in the Dostoevsky, it is a desire to be rid of the deception that is
>> life, in favour of nothing. It is still not about immortality. And the
>> Beckett certainly isn't about suicide. I added a quote (and then cut it)
>> which said - to paraphrase - 'I could die tomorrow, with a little effort,
>> but best to let it happen, I shall be tepid'.
>
> To get out of the process of becoming - i take it as a wish for
> immortality. Can you guarantee death as giving nothing?
Traces of hope on my part? Anyhow, I thought the process of becoming was
over in postmodernism?
[snip]
>> What? Marx is against suicide? I don't think it even crops up. Off the top
>> of my head, I can't think of any Marxism that is so ludicrously moralistic
>> (I exclude the Stalinist SU) as to follow the Christian condemnation of
>> suicide.
>
> Individuals simply don't matter in politics. Marxist theory ...
I still can't think of any Marxist condemnation of suicide. I could well be
wrong, but none come to mind.
> "The German revolutionists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels met in Paris
> in 1844. Together they developed the philosophy of dialectical
> materialism, based on the dialectical logic of Hegel, but they made
> matter, rather than mind, the ultimate reality."
?
[snip]
>> Sartre's freedom is the decision in the face of absurdity - the decision for
>> no reason, which is the responsibility of being. In a place with no point
>> and no hope, then making a decision on the basis of one's self and *nothing*
>> else, (not the same as self interest), is freedom. Personally, I think this
>> is crap, but it is a counterpoint to your claim that this is suicide.
>
> In "roads to freedom" the hero effectively kills himself - the old
> Sartre - physically - whilst the new Sartre becomes a Marxist - another
> death of self?
Only if you take self as being embodied in the content of the ideas. If the
self is rather in the act of decision, then it is the life of self, not its
death. After all, as you pointed out at the beginning, the ideas are
pointless.
[snip]
>>> Yes a loss - you begin to lose things - age brings loss of hair,
>>> appetite, teeth, gender, memory
>>
>> Losing, not lost. You confuse failing with nothing.
>
> then your confusing (or wishing) death with nothing.
Yes, I am. As you pointed out, we have lost our virginity, (although I
suspect we have done so repeatedly). To do otherwise than see death as
nothing is to have recourse to faith or an overcoming of some sort. "We have
lost all sense of decency admittedly, but there are still certain depths we
prefer not to sink to."
>>> .... how well you die doesn't seem
>>> dependent on life at all, a slave might regard it as a blessing.
>>
>> Spot the self contradiction. Why would a slave regard it as a blessing?
>
> Such is the inability of logic and semantics to catch the human
> condition. Though thinking about it - there's sense, the slave and slave
> owner become one - the parable of Lazarus.
Not quite what I meant. In one line you say that how well one dies doesn't
seem dependent on life AND that a slave might regard it as a blessing. If it
isn't dependent on life, then why is the slave's condition significant?
>> But this is not worthy of you, I feel. Anyone might regard death as
>> something to be desired. But you seem to think that merely being better off
>> or in a better situation might make someone more predisposed to cling to
>> life. Surely not, as you have just told us that such things as wealth, class
>> etc, mean nothing when faced with death. Make your mind up.
>
> Look at it this way - if a Bank goes bust - those in debt and those in
> credit will become financially equivalent - though they might not feel
> the same about being made so. There is some logic in here perhaps.
> Though i regret having to make my mind up, its like putting it in a
> cage.
I get the point - some will have a greater attachment to what is being lost
(whatever that might be), others might feel such an end to be a benefit,
even if the end situation is the same for both. That still seems to me to go
against the assertion that 'how well you die doesn't seem dependent on life
at all'. Sorry for asking your mind to stop wandering. 'Oh give me a home,
where the buffalo roam...'
[snip]
>>>> Dying is the losing of life, not its loss. Or could one say dying is living
>>>> towards death? Perhaps not. The trinity, I would guess, stick around until
>>>> death, whether or not they are particularly important to the person dying.
>>
>>> That's it they are unimportant.
>>
>> Nope. Consider how they might impact on the small things, like your
>> treatment, how much morphine you get - or whether you might get enough to
>> die; or, loosely, what kind of support care you might get. This has a lot to
>> do with your dying, let alone Montaigne's sense of learning how to die.
>
> These are nothing, no consolation at all.
I didn't mean that they were consolations, on the contrary, they might be
aids to die (the helpfully large dose of morphine). They make no difference
to the brute fact of death, but they certainly have a lot to do with dying,
even with being able to accept death on your terms. It can be hard to be 'as
if already dead' when your body is stubbornly insisting that you aren't by
continual pain.
> At best lies - we had this
> debate. The ordinary conventions no longer apply. Of course you want to
> make the dying comfortable - but you would rather make them alive and
> uncomfortable
Blimey. Where did you get that from what I wrote?
> - here is my sense of a reversal or denial of values - or
> denial of your trinity.
But there are all sorts of conventions about dying (and about death) and
they certainly apply - like it or not - to the cancer patient, even if they
are no longer applicable for the patient. The world, bluntly, won't leave
you alone. Then there are other problems, like our inability to sit silently
in a room, even when dying, even when the world hasn't any point, but then I
am back to Beckett.
[snip]
>>>> That's what I guessed, which is why the metaphor doesn't work - otherwise
>>>> the cancer patient would have to be looking back on her death, a tricky
>>>> thing to pull off, particularly if she is realist.
>>>
>>> They in a sense are dead already - they live in another world.
>>
>> Two things. First, you and I clearly have very different experiences of
>> dying. Second, as far as I can tell, both personally and theoretically, the
>> problem with dying is precisely that one is not already dead.
>
> Precise problems - eh! Death like birth is messy. It blurs out into
> life, alters values - lots of things. Death - dying is not a problem or
> a theory, how post-modern then it seems, but this is the other way
> around.
I mostly agree with this and, standing corrected, withdraw the words 'the'
and 'precisely'. But dying is a problem - or a whole galimaufrey of problems
rolled into one. I'll try to be clearer below.
>>> The
>>> condemned may up to the last minute be waiting for the governors call,
>>> they still have some value in life's events,
>>
>> No. I'm sorry but here and above you talk bollocks. You see life and death
>> as direct opposites, with no place for dying.
>
> Not at all your the one applying binary opposites - maybe life is some
> mathematical equation in which your trinity sails, but my experiences of
> death show/tell me that value systems and logic seem of little use.
Fair enough, and I apologise. But I am not applying binaries; rather I'm
struggling with one, perhaps. If you consider what I have tried to say about
the ungraspability of death, then you might find that I also see value
systems and logic to be of little use. Let me try to set out what strikes me
as our difference here.
From the realist cancer patient on, the divide you apparently draw is
between life (as an engagement or concern with the world?) and an acceptance
of death (as in 'in a sense they are dead already. They live in another
world'). This strikes me as a consolation - that the dying can have already
escaped life (or given what else you say, this life) before death. (As an
aside, there might be another world, there might not, but to trust that
there is, let alone encounter it before death, is faith).
I'm suggesting something else: That death, as anything other than a brute
facticity, is ungraspable; That dying involves both a recognition of the
fact of death and an inability to make that fact meaningful, at least
without recourse to some kind of faith or some kind of overcoming - which is
what 'they are dead already' means to me. As you metaphorically suggested at
the beginning of this exchange, death renders the world hopeless and
pointless, not for the dead, but for the dying. If death cannot be
meaningful, without recourse to faith or perhaps fantasies of immortality -
as in 'my works will live on...'- then neither can life. Dying without
illusion, as you asked of your cancer patient, involves the recognition that
life consists in dying, right from the get go.
>> Both theoretically and
>> personally, I think you are simply wrong. I'm not going to ask any personal
>> questions, but do you really think that dying - whether one wishes to die or
>> not - can possibly be equivalent to 'I'm already dead' (as in 'They are in a
>> sense dead already')? If you do, then you are hugely wrong.
>
> ok i'm wrong? and yes i do.
Then this is where we, and our experiences, disagree profoundly.
>>> not in your trinity at least.
>>
>> The dead see no value, sure - but, I have to keep saying this, you and I
>> were talking about dying, not death.
>
> im talking about life, death, your trinity, dying - if you want to talk
> about dying as some biological thing, watching the screen of brain waves
> slowly flatten, is that dying, is the flat line death? Is that what you
> mean by dying? Some definite state on the graph. A change in the
> trajectory (on topic!) which we colour on the spreadsheet and say =
> 'look dying has begun, and look there - he is dead.'
I've more or less already said this, although I'm not happy with it, but
dying would be the recognition of finitude, and, perhaps, also the
recognition of death's ungraspability. Anything else is merely a transition,
not death and therefore not dying. But death as a brute fact, a flat line on
some monitor, yes, I'd go along with that. We might or might not find that
things are otherwise, afterwards. In the meantime, neither the world, nor
being still alive will leave us alone. In fact, being us won't leave us
alone.
[snip]
>> I'm only going to say this once, ever, and I mean really ever.
>> James, sometimes you are a love bundle.
>
> is this good?
Depends on your point of view, but it was meant as approbation. I thought
you might prefer it to 'sometimes I could kiss you'. Although I have shaved.
[snip]
>>> But that's not to say that po-mo is nothing to do with sex or death.
>>> The hopelessness is nothing to do with these...
>>
>> I was presuming that this was the case. But isn't it odd how one's metaphors
>> can get out of control?
>
> I have never been happy with my english.
Nor I mine, but metaphors are sly creatures; shapeshifters and escape
artists, even for the best keepers.
[snip]
>>> No that's always been around. Amnesia would mean someone could write the
>>> wastelands again - which would be ironic. Death wont kill an ideology?
>>> Or if it does it would appear to kill all of them?
>>
>> You said there was only one way out. You were wrong. Death is a way out.
>> (And has been a way out for millenia. Calling Moggin...).
>
> Giles! are you attempting Necromancy?
I hope not . But should any shades appear before us, uttering terrible words
of truth, I might have done it accidentally.
> The one way out was a thought about po-mo - not dying. You might be able
> to die more than once
Now you are frightening me.
> but to lose your virginity more than once requires
> you to forget.
One might have many deaths but only one virginity? You are a cruel
visionary. Although now that I think about it...
>> You wanted a
>> metaphor of the recognition that one would die as a version of pomo. So the
>> result is dying as pomo, death as a way out - not as a solution, of course.
>> But then, as Adorno points out, utopia in modernity always has the features
>> of death.
>
> (James imagining Adorno showing him round Manhattan)
A good guide, I would have thought, if not a very enthusiastic one, and you
wouldn't get the cheap meal at the kickback restaurant.
[snip]
>>> No - i don't mean that at all, the mistake was reading the book - it
>>> structures life into beginnings and ends.
>>
>> Then you are reading the wrong books. No, really, you are. Try some
>> modernism.
>
> Books imply narrative and an author outside, they project such images
> onto life, ok they are arbitrary, but they don't suit me. One of
> Modernism's big problems was the edge.
It is with the edge that some books wrestle/play/fight/collude. The
implication of narrative and author might be there, but it is an expectation
often denied, confused, frustrated or emptied of sense. In doing that,
perhaps modernism projected life onto books?
[snip]
>>> Of course, but po-mo is different, nothing can escape from a black hole
>>> - that's not like death but more like po-mo.
>>
>> A black hole where nothing happens, ever? I think you might have found your
>> metaphor, but I am no physicist. But then, in a black hole there is no time
>> and thus no death.
>
> I think you cant even say inside there is no time, what we are gets
> stuck to the event horizon. - forever modern.
Only to the outside observer, surely, and where are they?
>> "C'est la Mort qui console, helas! et qui fait vivre;
>> C'est le but de la vie, et c'est le seul espoir"
>>
>>
> getting out the garlic -
or better still, the cheap, untaxed wine.
Regards
Giles
G*rd*n
| [grizzling] Aesthetic is a matter of taste, and taste is a matter of
| hierarchical differentiation of "good" art and "bad" art. But speaking
| of art (in the western context atleast), I don't think one can talk
| about it today without reference to cultural policies and fundins as
| dictated by the governments. If one argues that one of the function of
| art is about ethics (imaginary one, arbitrary and whatnot), and of the
| representing the society and its members, would postmodern art be about
| the (re)production of postmodern subjects???
But why would you argue that art is about ethics? One of
the nostrums of the 20th century is that you can have good
art with bad ethics -- the Nazi flag, for example. But this
is because art is seen as a hanger-on of far greater facts
like the facts of politics and economics. Modernistic art
is then the decor of national capitalism, and postmodern
art of multi-national capitalism. It's not telling anyone
anything, it's being told.
James Whitehead
>| ...
>
>ale...@my-deja.com:
>| [grizzling] Aesthetic is a matter of taste, and taste is a matter of
>| hierarchical differentiation of "good" art and "bad" art. But speaking
>| of art (in the western context atleast), I don't think one can talk
>| about it today without reference to cultural policies and fundins as
>| dictated by the governments. If one argues that one of the function of
>| art is about ethics (imaginary one, arbitrary and whatnot), and of the
>| representing the society and its members, would postmodern art be about
>| the (re)production of postmodern subjects???
>
>But why would you argue that art is about ethics? One of
>the nostrums of the 20th century is that you can have good
>art with bad ethics -- the Nazi flag, for example.
Hold on G. the Nazi's appropriated the Swastika, its was not a result of
their ethic, though in its Jain and Saxon fylfot origins does have
ethical connotations.
> But this
>is because art is seen as a hanger-on of far greater facts
>like the facts of politics and economics. Modernistic art
>is then the decor of national capitalism, and postmodern
>art of multi-national capitalism. It's not telling anyone
>anything, it's being told.
Difficult to separate the two at times. Modern art i think was more
adopted by capitalism, its origins being separate. (As technology adopts
Science.) I'm still trying to work out post-modern art?
--
James Whitehead
James Whitehead
writes
[...]
>
>I agree that science would see death - as a brute facticity - as graspable,
>but that is partly the problem, surely. For the cancer patient, or
>ourselves, death is not graspable because it is a brute facticity. It is not
>his, her, yours or my death.
I'm not understanding here - my death will be mine - and mine alone.
>
>> On the other hand -"we all die" - well i'm not
>> so sure.
>
>Traces of hope on your part?
No no even NO! I *think* that it will *not* be an end... that's the
problem.
(it makes things more complicated - certainly Nietzche's eternal return
has implications ... more that just going to sleep, as does any concept
of heaven or void... )
>
>[snip]
>
>>> But, in the Dostoevsky, it is a desire to be rid of the deception that is
>>> life, in favour of nothing. It is still not about immortality. And the
>>> Beckett certainly isn't about suicide. I added a quote (and then cut it)
>>> which said - to paraphrase - 'I could die tomorrow, with a little effort,
>>> but best to let it happen, I shall be tepid'.
>>
>> To get out of the process of becoming - i take it as a wish for
>> immortality. Can you guarantee death as giving nothing?
>
>Traces of hope on my part? Anyhow, I thought the process of becoming was
>over in postmodernism?
Don't know the answer to this one - who do we ask? - i thought process
was very po-mo?
>
>[snip]
>
>>> What? Marx is against suicide? I don't think it even crops up. Off the top
>>> of my head, I can't think of any Marxism that is so ludicrously moralistic
>>> (I exclude the Stalinist SU) as to follow the Christian condemnation of
>>> suicide.
>>
>> Individuals simply don't matter in politics. Marxist theory ...
>
>I still can't think of any Marxist condemnation of suicide. I could well be
>wrong, but none come to mind.
Not a quote but a consequence of the theory - its a waste of material.
Its selfish - which certainly is counter to Marxism?
>
>[snip]
>>> Sartre's freedom is the decision in the face of absurdity - the decision for
>>> no reason, which is the responsibility of being. In a place with no point
>>> and no hope, then making a decision on the basis of one's self and *nothing*
>>> else, (not the same as self interest), is freedom. Personally, I think this
>>> is crap, but it is a counterpoint to your claim that this is suicide.
>>
>> In "roads to freedom" the hero effectively kills himself - the old
>> Sartre - physically - whilst the new Sartre becomes a Marxist - another
>> death of self?
>
>Only if you take self as being embodied in the content of the ideas. If the
>self is rather in the act of decision, then it is the life of self, not its
>death. After all, as you pointed out at the beginning, the ideas are
>pointless.
But in both cases the act of decision is the last act of self. How is
the Marxist able to change his/her mind?
>
>[snip]
>
>>>> Yes a loss - you begin to lose things - age brings loss of hair,
>>>> appetite, teeth, gender, memory
>>>
>>> Losing, not lost. You confuse failing with nothing.
>>
>> then your confusing (or wishing) death with nothing.
>
>Yes, I am. As you pointed out, we have lost our virginity, (although I
>suspect we have done so repeatedly).
You need to expand on this bracketed section please?
> To do otherwise than see death as
>nothing is to have recourse to faith or an overcoming of some sort. "We have
>lost all sense of decency admittedly, but there are still certain depths we
>prefer not to sink to."
Well Nietzche's faith was more like dread, which i think became
happiness? I'm trying to culture a feeling of amusement about it.
(thought of the Hollywood version where he gets the girl in the end)
Still waters (do not run deep) go stagnant. (paraphrase of Blake)
The trinity you referred to doesn't necessarily help (in dying well) -
you said it might - better treatment- i offered a counter example. If we
now focus on the point of death itself then life doesn't seem to be of
much help. That's the impression i was trying to make, a significant
feeling of difference about dying.
>
>[snip]
>>>>> Dying is the losing of life, not its loss. Or could one say dying is living
>>>>> towards death? Perhaps not. The trinity, I would guess, stick around until
>>>>> death, whether or not they are particularly important to the person dying.
>>>
>>>> That's it they are unimportant.
>>>
>>> Nope. Consider how they might impact on the small things, like your
>>> treatment, how much morphine you get - or whether you might get enough to
>>> die; or, loosely, what kind of support care you might get. This has a lot to
>>> do with your dying, let alone Montaigne's sense of learning how to die.
>>
>> These are nothing, no consolation at all.
>
>I didn't mean that they were consolations, on the contrary, they might be
>aids to die (the helpfully large dose of morphine). They make no difference
>to the brute fact of death, but they certainly have a lot to do with dying,
>even with being able to accept death on your terms. It can be hard to be 'as
>if already dead' when your body is stubbornly insisting that you aren't by
>continual pain.
But even this is different - terminal pain is absurd - the point of pain
- to alert and help sustain life is not reversed but made to look simply
foolish, like all the money in your bank pointless.
>
>> At best lies - we had this
>> debate. The ordinary conventions no longer apply. Of course you want to
>> make the dying comfortable - but you would rather make them alive and
>> uncomfortable
>
>Blimey. Where did you get that from what I wrote?
Miss reading - i suspect, replace *you* with *one* and see if it makes
any more sense...
>
>> - here is my sense of a reversal or denial of values - or
>> denial of your trinity.
>
>But there are all sorts of conventions about dying (and about death) and
>they certainly apply - like it or not - to the cancer patient, even if they
>are no longer applicable for the patient. The world, bluntly, won't leave
>you alone. Then there are other problems, like our inability to sit silently
>in a room, even when dying, even when the world hasn't any point, but then I
>am back to Beckett.
So you get a big tax bill, the world wont leave you alone - but nature
has played its highest card. (one knew it was always in the deck), so
the games over and nature cannot have any more fun with you.
>
>[snip]
>
>>>>> That's what I guessed, which is why the metaphor doesn't work - otherwise
>>>>> the cancer patient would have to be looking back on her death, a tricky
>>>>> thing to pull off, particularly if she is realist.
>>>>
>>>> They in a sense are dead already - they live in another world.
>>>
>>> Two things. First, you and I clearly have very different experiences of
>>> dying. Second, as far as I can tell, both personally and theoretically, the
>>> problem with dying is precisely that one is not already dead.
>>
>> Precise problems - eh! Death like birth is messy. It blurs out into
>> life, alters values - lots of things. Death - dying is not a problem or
>> a theory, how post-modern then it seems, but this is the other way
>> around.
>
>I mostly agree with this and, standing corrected, withdraw the words 'the'
>and 'precisely'. But dying is a problem - or a whole galimaufrey of problems
>rolled into one. I'll try to be clearer below.
But there's no solution - so its not really a problem is it?
Realistically being aware of this might be so though you could come to
realise this at the point of diagnosis. Very young children and animals
are blissfully unaware of the nature of the game they are playing.
So nature plays the Ace, you look at your hand - though it might seem
promising (a king) or be useless its of no consequence. Though yet to
play your card you've already lost. Now your feelings at this point can
be as varied as you like, but it makes not a jot.
Now you may think that this card game was a one off - or one of many.
You might imagine a game where you beat the Ace, you might then keep
this card so you always beat nature, but then how boring the game would
become. So we decide not to play, my analogy breaks down here, but the
Dam Buddhist nothing creates the something... so deals the cards.
>
>>> Both theoretically and
>>> personally, I think you are simply wrong. I'm not going to ask any personal
>>> questions, but do you really think that dying - whether one wishes to die or
>>> not - can possibly be equivalent to 'I'm already dead' (as in 'They are in a
>>> sense dead already')? If you do, then you are hugely wrong.
>>
>> ok i'm wrong? and yes i do.
>
>Then this is where we, and our experiences, disagree profoundly.
>
>>>> not in your trinity at least.
>>>
>>> The dead see no value, sure - but, I have to keep saying this, you and I
>>> were talking about dying, not death.
>>
>> im talking about life, death, your trinity, dying - if you want to talk
>> about dying as some biological thing, watching the screen of brain waves
>> slowly flatten, is that dying, is the flat line death? Is that what you
>> mean by dying? Some definite state on the graph. A change in the
>> trajectory (on topic!) which we colour on the spreadsheet and say =
>> 'look dying has begun, and look there - he is dead.'
>
>I've more or less already said this, although I'm not happy with it, but
>dying would be the recognition of finitude, and, perhaps, also the
>recognition of death's ungraspability. Anything else is merely a transition,
>not death and therefore not dying. But death as a brute fact, a flat line on
>some monitor, yes, I'd go along with that. We might or might not find that
>things are otherwise, afterwards. In the meantime, neither the world, nor
>being still alive will leave us alone. In fact, being us won't leave us
>alone.
I agree with much of what you say above except the ungraspabilty bit.
That death may or may not be final. Its a simple case then to explore
the possibilities and see what difference it makes. From my wanderings
i'd say not much.
>
>[snip]
>
>>> I'm only going to say this once, ever, and I mean really ever.
>>> James, sometimes you are a love bundle.
>>
>> is this good?
>
>Depends on your point of view, but it was meant as approbation. I thought
>you might prefer it to 'sometimes I could kiss you'. Although I have shaved.
Yes ok thanks :-) further a kiss can have many meanings.
>
>[snip]
>>>> But that's not to say that po-mo is nothing to do with sex or death.
>>>> The hopelessness is nothing to do with these...
>>>
>>> I was presuming that this was the case. But isn't it odd how one's metaphors
>>> can get out of control?
>>
>> I have never been happy with my english.
>
>Nor I mine, but metaphors are sly creatures; shapeshifters and escape
>artists, even for the best keepers.
They just want their independence.
>
>[snip]
>>>> No that's always been around. Amnesia would mean someone could write the
>>>> wastelands again - which would be ironic. Death wont kill an ideology?
>>>> Or if it does it would appear to kill all of them?
>>>
>>> You said there was only one way out. You were wrong. Death is a way out.
>>> (And has been a way out for millenia. Calling Moggin...).
>>
>> Giles! are you attempting Necromancy?
>
>I hope not . But should any shades appear before us, uttering terrible words
>of truth, I might have done it accidentally.
This is why i wanted some garlic - i wasn't planning a French evening,
though a good red would placate even the most fiendish.
>
>> The one way out was a thought about po-mo - not dying. You might be able
>> to die more than once
>
>Now you are frightening me.
as life teaches one - shit happens.
>
>> but to lose your virginity more than once requires
>> you to forget.
>
>One might have many deaths but only one virginity? You are a cruel
>visionary. Although now that I think about it...
>
>>> You wanted a
>>> metaphor of the recognition that one would die as a version of pomo. So the
>>> result is dying as pomo, death as a way out - not as a solution, of course.
>>> But then, as Adorno points out, utopia in modernity always has the features
>>> of death.
>>
>> (James imagining Adorno showing him round Manhattan)
>
>A good guide, I would have thought, if not a very enthusiastic one, and you
>wouldn't get the cheap meal at the kickback restaurant.
>
>[snip]
>>>> No - i don't mean that at all, the mistake was reading the book - it
>>>> structures life into beginnings and ends.
>>>
>>> Then you are reading the wrong books. No, really, you are. Try some
>>> modernism.
>>
>> Books imply narrative and an author outside, they project such images
>> onto life, ok they are arbitrary, but they don't suit me. One of
>> Modernism's big problems was the edge.
>
>It is with the edge that some books wrestle/play/fight/collude. The
>implication of narrative and author might be there, but it is an expectation
>often denied, confused, frustrated or emptied of sense. In doing that,
>perhaps modernism projected life onto books?
I think so - and with post-modernism the edge dissolves.
>
>[snip]
>
>>>> Of course, but po-mo is different, nothing can escape from a black hole
>>>> - that's not like death but more like po-mo.
>>>
>>> A black hole where nothing happens, ever? I think you might have found your
>>> metaphor, but I am no physicist. But then, in a black hole there is no time
>>> and thus no death.
>>
>> I think you cant even say inside there is no time, what we are gets
>> stuck to the event horizon. - forever modern.
>
>Only to the outside observer, surely, and where are they?
Well i think the sticke sees the whole of space and time at that moment.
So the 'they' would be there.
>
>>> "C'est la Mort qui console, helas! et qui fait vivre;
>>> C'est le but de la vie, et c'est le seul espoir"
>>>
>>>
>> getting out the garlic -
>
>or better still, the cheap, untaxed wine.
>
>Regards
>
>Giles
>
Ok and some un-pasteurised cheese.
--
James Whitehead
G*rd*n
ale...@my-deja.com:
| >| [grizzling] Aesthetic is a matter of taste, and taste is a matter of
| >| hierarchical differentiation of "good" art and "bad" art. But speaking
| >| of art (in the western context atleast), I don't think one can talk
| >| about it today without reference to cultural policies and fundins as
| >| dictated by the governments. If one argues that one of the function of
| >| art is about ethics (imaginary one, arbitrary and whatnot), and of the
| >| representing the society and its members, would postmodern art be about
| >| the (re)production of postmodern subjects???
G*rd*n <g...@panix.com> writes
| >But why would you argue that art is about ethics? One of
| >the nostrums of the 20th century is that you can have good
| >art with bad ethics -- the Nazi flag, for example.
James Whitehead <jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk>:
| Hold on G. the Nazi's appropriated the Swastika, its was not a result of
| their ethic, though in its Jain and Saxon fylfot origins does have
| ethical connotations.
The "original" swastika was a symbol for the sun, later other
venerated objects, and usually pointed to the left. By itself
it's a rather stable design, although the "wings" probably
represent beams or flames. Hitler (supposedly the designer
of the Nazi flag) pointed the swastika to the right (the
direction one reads in Western languages, and therefore
"forward") turned it 45 degrees on its corner so that it looks
like it's moving, and placed it on a white circle with a red
background -- the old German imperial colors of iron and blood.
A very accomplished modernist work, in my opinion, immediately
suggestive to almost anyone of irresistable power and aggression.
Among other things the Nazi flag (like some other flags) shows
that fairly minimalist works can provoke considerable emotional
response.
Although the design of the flag and the bad ethics associated
with it had to be made explicit by an accompanying narrative,
the design was certainly accessible to and supportive of the
ethics. So: good art, bad ethics.
G*rd*n:
| > But this
| >is because art is seen as a hanger-on of far greater facts
| >like the facts of politics and economics. Modernistic art
| >is then the decor of national capitalism, and postmodern
| >art of multi-national capitalism. It's not telling anyone
| >anything, it's being told.
James Whitehead <jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk>:
| Difficult to separate the two at times. Modern art i think was more
| adopted by capitalism, its origins being separate. (As technology adopts
| Science.) I'm still trying to work out post-modern art?
Multi-national capitalism, as I said. We no longer have a
_grand_écrit_ for art, except, of course, money. The fact
that Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and so on could sell works which
violated Modernist principles to rich people changed the art
world. How could they do this? The answer seems to be that
many rich people were appearing in New York City and other such
places who were unschooled in Western traditions and irreverent
about established cultural authority. They liked the way the
stuff looked! And then their hangers-on began to like the
way it looked, too. The rest is history.
James Whitehead
>The "original" swastika was a symbol for the sun, later other
>venerated objects, and usually pointed to the left. By itself
>it's a rather stable design, although the "wings" probably
>represent beams or flames.
> Hitler (supposedly the designer
>of the Nazi flag) pointed the swastika to the right (the
>direction one reads in Western languages, and therefore
>"forward") turned it 45 degrees on its corner so that it looks
>like it's moving, and placed it on a white circle with a red
>background -- the old German imperial colors of iron and blood.
>A very accomplished modernist work, in my opinion, immediately
>suggestive to almost anyone of irresistable power and aggression.
>Among other things the Nazi flag (like some other flags) shows
>that fairly minimalist works can provoke considerable emotional
>response.
>
>Although the design of the flag and the bad ethics associated
>with it had to be made explicit by an accompanying narrative,
>the design was certainly accessible to and supportive of the
>ethics. So: good art, bad ethics.
>
Well here we go - (my take on this is ->) the symbol has two (at least)
origins and in the west i think represents a cycle of life (a saxon
pagan symbol), in Coventry Cathedral destroyed by German bombers baring
this insignia is a tomb of a medieval cleric - (might be a Bishop)
decorated with swastikas - its still there now in the burnt out ruins.
The direction being the same as that used by the nazis, as is the
direction in Jain cosmology, the Buddhists reversed it - much later. The
symbol was a good luck charm in the 20s - cards with it on were sold in
the USA. It appeared on the frontispiece of a late 19th? century book on
german nationalism - which is probably where Hitler got it from. But
interestingly he chose the Sanskrit name - not the Saxon. Its
orientation on German aircraft tail planes i thought came from Paul Klee
- in his notebooks (the thinking eye page 39) he explored its dynamics.
You can see the sketches.
So factually we have some problems.
>G*rd*n:
>| > But this
>| >is because art is seen as a hanger-on of far greater facts
>| >like the facts of politics and economics. Modernistic art
>| >is then the decor of national capitalism, and postmodern
>| >art of multi-national capitalism. It's not telling anyone
>| >anything, it's being told.
>
>James Whitehead <jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk>:
>| Difficult to separate the two at times. Modern art i think was more
>| adopted by capitalism, its origins being separate. (As technology adopts
>| Science.) I'm still trying to work out post-modern art?
>
>Multi-national capitalism, as I said. We no longer have a
>_grand_écrit_ for art, except, of course, money. The fact
>that Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and so on could sell works which
>violated Modernist principles to rich people changed the art
>world. How could they do this?
The impressionists beat them to it- they sold to the Naive rich
Americans - why else did Van Gough sign Vincent - he says cuz the
Americans would not be able to pronounce Van Gough - pity he sold
nothing.
> The answer seems to be that
>many rich people were appearing in New York City and other such
>places who were unschooled in Western traditions and irreverent
>about established cultural authority. They liked the way the
>stuff looked!
Get outa here - some critic told them what nice was...
> And then their hangers-on began to like the
>way it looked, too. The rest is history.
>
history - phaw.!
--
James Whitehead
G*rd*n
| >The "original" swastika was a symbol for the sun, later other
| >venerated objects, and usually pointed to the left. By itself
| >it's a rather stable design, although the "wings" probably
| >represent beams or flames.
|
| > Hitler (supposedly the designer
| >of the Nazi flag) pointed the swastika to the right (the
| >direction one reads in Western languages, and therefore
| >"forward") turned it 45 degrees on its corner so that it looks
| >like it's moving, and placed it on a white circle with a red
| >background -- the old German imperial colors of iron and blood.
| >A very accomplished modernist work, in my opinion, immediately
| >suggestive to almost anyone of irresistable power and aggression.
| >Among other things the Nazi flag (like some other flags) shows
| >that fairly minimalist works can provoke considerable emotional
| >response.
| >
| >Although the design of the flag and the bad ethics associated
| >with it had to be made explicit by an accompanying narrative,
| >the design was certainly accessible to and supportive of the
| >ethics. So: good art, bad ethics.
James Whitehead <jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk>:
| Well here we go - (my take on this is ->) the symbol has two (at least)
| origins and in the west i think represents a cycle of life (a saxon
| pagan symbol), in Coventry Cathedral destroyed by German bombers baring
| this insignia is a tomb of a medieval cleric - (might be a Bishop)
| decorated with swastikas - its still there now in the burnt out ruins.
| The direction being the same as that used by the nazis, as is the
| direction in Jain cosmology, the Buddhists reversed it - much later. The
| symbol was a good luck charm in the 20s - cards with it on were sold in
| the USA. It appeared on the frontispiece of a late 19th? century book on
| german nationalism - which is probably where Hitler got it from. But
| interestingly he chose the Sanskrit name - not the Saxon. Its
| orientation on German aircraft tail planes i thought came from Paul Klee
| - in his notebooks (the thinking eye page 39) he explored its dynamics.
| You can see the sketches.
|
| So factually we have some problems.
I don't see any problems. I think the Nazi use of the swastika,
including its Sanskrit name, derived ultimately from the
considerable German interest in the linguistic and ethnic
connections between India and Western Europe. Although it
was the British who made the discovery, the preeminent Sanskrit
scholars of the 19th century tended to be German. This sort
of thing seems to have filtered gradually into the intellectual
demimonde and underworld of the middle and lower classes,
where it was picked up by anti-Semites, who invented a myth
of a conquering "Aryan" race. The genealogy of the Nazi
swastika doesn't seem all that important, though -- the
thing I was trying to point out was that Nazi symbols were
well-designed, potent, and modernistic, especially the flag,
but the aesthetic values are not generally thought to have
associated with them good moral or ethical values.
G*rd*n:
|>|> But this
|>|>is because art is seen as a hanger-on of far greater facts
|>|>like the facts of politics and economics. Modernistic art
|>|>is then the decor of national capitalism, and postmodern
|>|>art of multi-national capitalism. It's not telling anyone
|>|>anything, it's being told.
James Whitehead <jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk>:
| >| Difficult to separate the two at times. Modern art i think was more
| >| adopted by capitalism, its origins being separate. (As technology adopts
| >| Science.) I'm still trying to work out post-modern art?
G*rd*n:
| >Multi-national capitalism, as I said. We no longer have a
| >_grand_écrit_ for art, except, of course, money. The fact
| >that Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and so on could sell works which
| >violated Modernist principles to rich people changed the art
| >world. How could they do this?
James Whitehead <jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk>:
| The impressionists beat them to it- they sold to the Naive rich
| Americans - why else did Van Gough sign Vincent - he says cuz the
| Americans would not be able to pronounce Van Gough - pity he sold
| nothing. ...
It's true that Impressionism was a radical break with the
past, more of one I think than Modernism, but like the Modernists
I think the Impressionists still believed in the one good and
true art. I certainly get this idea from reading Van Gogh's
and Gauguin's writings. So, mostly, believed the Modernists.
It's only when you get to fairly recent times -- to the era of
multinational capitalism, in fact -- that we begin to observe
artistic value being widely relativized. So then what is an
art critic to do? There's no there there, no intrinsic thing
underlying the paint and the canvas for him to discover and
reveal, and what's more, there's no longer the possibility of
making up an illusion of such an intrinsic thing. This is
the postmodern condition, at least with respect to the plastic
arts.
Vincent often didn't sign his paintings at all. He said if
they were any good, people would know who painted them. This
is very much in the mode of the one good and true art and not
only that, witness to a company of inherently good and true
artists. For that, however, we need that _grand_écrit_ up
there somewhere holding it all together.
u...@nadaredhotant.com
I might have to vanish for a bit after this - and certainly after the next
few days. So, if I don't get a reply in, sorry. Thanks James, I've really
enjoyed it.
>> I agree that science would see death - as a brute facticity - as graspable,
>> but that is partly the problem, surely. For the cancer patient, or
>> ourselves, death is not graspable because it is a brute facticity. It is not
>> his, her, yours or my death.
>
> I'm not understanding here - my death will be mine - and mine alone.
How? It will be *a* death, and it will be your end, but it what possible way
is it *your* death? You cannot make sense of it (I think we agree on that);
you cannot make experiential or phenomenological sense of it. Your death is
meaningless and so is not *yours* anymore than any other brute fact is
yours. It might even be truer to say that it is not yours, it happens to
you.
>>> On the other hand -"we all die" - well i'm not
>>> so sure.
>>
>> Traces of hope on your part?
>
> No no even NO! I *think* that it will *not* be an end... that's the
> problem.
Then we are closer than I thought.
> (it makes things more complicated - certainly Nietzche's eternal return
> has implications ... more that just going to sleep, as does any concept
> of heaven or void... )
I'll come back to the eternal return below.
[snip]
>>> To get out of the process of becoming - i take it as a wish for
>>> immortality. Can you guarantee death as giving nothing?
>>
>> Traces of hope on my part? Anyhow, I thought the process of becoming was
>> over in postmodernism?
>
> Don't know the answer to this one - who do we ask? - i thought process
> was very po-mo?
Really? Why? I thought that becoming, implicit logics and all, was terribly
modern in your book. Oh well.
[snip]
>> I still can't think of any Marxist condemnation of suicide. I could well be
>> wrong, but none come to mind.
>
> Not a quote but a consequence of the theory - its a waste of material.
> Its selfish - which certainly is counter to Marxism?
Bluntly nah. For starters, for Marx, and many Marxists, the idea is that the
decision as to what constitutes waste is taken out of the hands of a mad
economic structure and left to, well, you and me and everybody else,
individually and collectively. Second, selfish? Marx, and most Marxism is
about freedom - an end to coercion - nothing about suicide as selfish. Marx
is interested in the achievement of a situation where *having* to destroy
oneself and others (in some way or other) for a putative greater good, or
simply for profit, is not necessary.
Not that he advocates suicide either. It just isn't there in Marxism (except
the SU and, in a reverse sense, perhaps Adorno and Benjamin).
>> [snip]
>>>> Sartre's freedom is the decision in the face of absurdity - the decision
>>>> for
>>>> no reason, which is the responsibility of being. In a place with no point
>>>> and no hope, then making a decision on the basis of one's self and
>>>> *nothing*
>>>> else, (not the same as self interest), is freedom. Personally, I think this
>>>> is crap, but it is a counterpoint to your claim that this is suicide.
>>>
>>> In "roads to freedom" the hero effectively kills himself - the old
>>> Sartre - physically - whilst the new Sartre becomes a Marxist - another
>>> death of self?
>>
>> Only if you take self as being embodied in the content of the ideas. If the
>> self is rather in the act of decision, then it is the life of self, not its
>> death. After all, as you pointed out at the beginning, the ideas are
>> pointless.
>
> But in both cases the act of decision is the last act of self. How is
> the Marxist able to change his/her mind?
What? First off, in the Sartrean version, the self only 'truly' exists in
the act of making the decision, so it is not simply 'the last act of self',
but a continual 'first and last'. Second, why couldn't a Marxist change
his/her mind? Marxism is not an absolute doctrine. Oh and then there are no
shortage of ex-marxists out there.
[snip]
>>>> Losing, not lost. You confuse failing with nothing.
>>>
>>> then your confusing (or wishing) death with nothing.
>>
>> Yes, I am. As you pointed out, we have lost our virginity, (although I
>> suspect we have done so repeatedly).
>
> You need to expand on this bracketed section please?
It is purely a suspicion. As a f'rinstance. Writing was invented and lost
again, repeatedly it seems, before the 'birth of European civilisation'. The
invention of writing would have to count as a loss of virginity, surely. But
your invocation of the eternal return below would do just as well - to live
the same live over again has to include virginity.
>> To do otherwise than see death as
>> nothing is to have recourse to faith or an overcoming of some sort. "We have
>> lost all sense of decency admittedly, but there are still certain depths we
>> prefer not to sink to."
>
> Well Nietzche's faith was more like dread, which i think became
> happiness? I'm trying to culture a feeling of amusement about it.
> (thought of the Hollywood version where he gets the girl in the end)
Umm. Nietszche's eternal return is, as far as I recall, posed as a 'what if'
question from a demon. I don't remember it ending in happiness, although I
could certainly be wrong. But even then, it strikes me as a similar problem.
On the one hand a meaningless death, on the other, a continual going on (a
version of life without a meaningful completion? Sounds similar). In both
cases what one is presented with is the chance to say yea or nea to
something without purpose, goal, or end (because death is an end to life
only in the sense of brute facticity).
If, and it is a big if, the two are more or less equivalent then the problem
presented by Nietzsche's demon is 'yea or nea'. This was the problem that
you avoided in the first place ('I choose to be happy, but I am allowed to
worry') and that you didn't seem to think had to be addressed, spiritually
at least. But then I suspect that it doesn't matter whether one says yea or
nea. They are both answers, to be sure, but not to the problem. Perhaps this
is what Critchley meant about spiritual recession - settling for an answer
where there is none.
[snip]
> Still waters (do not run deep) go stagnant. (paraphrase of Blake)
>
> The trinity you referred to doesn't necessarily help (in dying well) -
> you said it might - better treatment- i offered a counter example.
You didn't offer a counter example. I had said that 'life', in the form of
race, class and gender had an impact on dying. I didn't say that it would
necessarily help, although it might or might not. The 'counter example' from
you was to say that someone with a shit life might welcome death. So there
you are, someone's class position having an impact on their relation to
death. Just what I said.
>If we
> now focus on the point of death itself then life doesn't seem to be of
> much help.
Now there we agree. Death as ungraspable even?
> That's the impression i was trying to make, a significant
> feeling of difference about dying.
Clearly there are differences in feelings about dying, and clearly dying
feels different to not *having* to confront the brute fact of death, but
that is not the same as having accepted death - some idea of death maybe,
but that is back to consolation.
[snip]
>> I didn't mean that they were consolations, on the contrary, they might be
>> aids to die (the helpfully large dose of morphine). They make no difference
>> to the brute fact of death, but they certainly have a lot to do with dying,
>> even with being able to accept death on your terms. It can be hard to be 'as
>> if already dead' when your body is stubbornly insisting that you aren't by
>> continual pain.
>
> But even this is different - terminal pain is absurd - the point of pain
> - to alert and help sustain life is not reversed but made to look simply
> foolish, like all the money in your bank pointless.
Yes, so? We are clearly not talking about biology pure and simple.
[snip]
>> But there are all sorts of conventions about dying (and about death) and
>> they certainly apply - like it or not - to the cancer patient, even if they
>> are no longer applicable for the patient. The world, bluntly, won't leave
>> you alone. Then there are other problems, like our inability to sit silently
>> in a room, even when dying, even when the world hasn't any point, but then I
>> am back to Beckett.
>
> So you get a big tax bill, the world wont leave you alone - but nature
> has played its highest card. (one knew it was always in the deck), so
> the games over and nature cannot have any more fun with you.
Sure, but it can until death, and so can culture, given that 'you' and
culture ain't distinct. Losing yourself before death? 'They are as already
dead'? Frankly I don't think so.
[snip]
>> I mostly agree with this and, standing corrected, withdraw the words 'the'
>> and 'precisely'. But dying is a problem - or a whole galimaufrey of problems
>> rolled into one. I'll try to be clearer below.
>
> But there's no solution - so its not really a problem is it?
Why you modern you - no problem without a solution? Tsk.
[snip]
>> I'm suggesting something else: That death, as anything other than a brute
>> facticity, is ungraspable; That dying involves both a recognition of the
>> fact of death and an inability to make that fact meaningful, at least
>> without recourse to some kind of faith or some kind of overcoming - which is
>> what 'they are dead already' means to me. As you metaphorically suggested at
>> the beginning of this exchange, death renders the world hopeless and
>> pointless, not for the dead, but for the dying. If death cannot be
>> meaningful, without recourse to faith or perhaps fantasies of immortality -
>> as in 'my works will live on...'- then neither can life. Dying without
>> illusion, as you asked of your cancer patient, involves the recognition that
>> life consists in dying, right from the get go.
>
> Realistically being aware of this might be so though you could come to
> realise this at the point of diagnosis. Very young children and animals
> are blissfully unaware of the nature of the game they are playing.
Oh sure and not just children, it is given to very few to be always dying or
even dying at all (and I certainly don't include myself in that group).
> So nature plays the Ace, you look at your hand - though it might seem
> promising (a king) or be useless its of no consequence. Though yet to
> play your card you've already lost. Now your feelings at this point can
> be as varied as you like, but it makes not a jot.
Agreed as to not a jot.
> Now you may think that this card game was a one off - or one of many.
> You might imagine a game where you beat the Ace, you might then keep
> this card so you always beat nature, but then how boring the game would
> become. So we decide not to play, my analogy breaks down here, but the
> Dam Buddhist nothing creates the something... so deals the cards.
You see, this is my problem, once you make death metaphorical (losing a card
game, losing virginity, postmodernism) then it becomes meaningful in some
way (life is short so enjoy it; leave something behind you etc. etc. in
endless registers and variations or Bergman films). But death isn't
meaningful, any attempt to find a metaphor for it, no matter how apparently
negative, is consolation - avoiding death and giving meaning to life. A
decent film would be Bunuel not Bergman.
[snip]
>> I've more or less already said this, although I'm not happy with it, but
>> dying would be the recognition of finitude, and, perhaps, also the
>> recognition of death's ungraspability. Anything else is merely a transition,
>> not death and therefore not dying. But death as a brute fact, a flat line on
>> some monitor, yes, I'd go along with that. We might or might not find that
>> things are otherwise, afterwards. In the meantime, neither the world, nor
>> being still alive will leave us alone. In fact, being us won't leave us
>> alone.
>
> I agree with much of what you say above except the ungraspabilty bit.
> That death may or may not be final. Its a simple case then to explore
> the possibilities and see what difference it makes. From my wanderings
> i'd say not much.
From my walking in circles, I'd say the same. But It really doesn't matter
whether you wander or not; any attempt to make death graspable is, as far as
I can see, consolation of one sort or another. Death may or may not be
final, but any conjecture beforehand involves making death meaningful.
[snip]
>> Depends on your point of view, but it was meant as approbation. I thought
>> you might prefer it to 'sometimes I could kiss you'. Although I have shaved.
>
> Yes ok thanks :-) further a kiss can have many meanings.
I haven't received thirty pieces of silver, if that is what you mean.
[snip]
>>> Giles! are you attempting Necromancy?
>>
>> I hope not . But should any shades appear before us, uttering terrible words
>> of truth, I might have done it accidentally.
>
> This is why i wanted some garlic - i wasn't planning a French evening,
> though a good red would placate even the most fiendish.
I never drink ... wine.
[snip]
>>> Books imply narrative and an author outside, they project such images
>>> onto life, ok they are arbitrary, but they don't suit me. One of
>>> Modernism's big problems was the edge.
>> It is with the edge that some books wrestle/play/fight/collude. The
>> implication of narrative and author might be there, but it is an expectation
>> often denied, confused, frustrated or emptied of sense. In doing that,
>> perhaps modernism projected life onto books?
> I think so - and with post-modernism the edge dissolves.
I have to say I doubt that. Personal narratives, if not meta-narratives
seem very strong in Postmodernism, if you take it as a cultural condition .
The novel has become displaced into the self help book (e.g. the perfect
idiotic fusion along the lines of Alain de Botton's monumental How Proust
can help you make friends and influence people). Books that actually make
the edge between narrative and life difficult still remain in the realm of
modernism, I feel, almost by default.
>>>>> Of course, but po-mo is different, nothing can escape from a black hole
>>>>> - that's not like death but more like po-mo.
>>>>
>>>> A black hole where nothing happens, ever? I think you might have found your
>>>> metaphor, but I am no physicist. But then, in a black hole there is no time
>>>> and thus no death.
>>>
>>> I think you cant even say inside there is no time, what we are gets
>>> stuck to the event horizon. - forever modern.
>>
>> Only to the outside observer, surely, and where are they?
>
> Well i think the sticke sees the whole of space and time at that moment.
> So the 'they' would be there.
Hardly my field of expertise, but this was not my understanding - I thought
that the event horizon was only visible from outside, whilst that which had
passed beyond visibility (and time) was both destroyed and temporally
frozen. I cannot recall any suggestion that the, umm, participant remains on
the event horizon, just that their trace remains there for the outside
observer. But who knows? Certainly not me.
Regards, for the present
Giles
James Whitehead
writes
>James Whitehead wrote:
>
>I might have to vanish for a bit after this - and certainly after the next
>few days. So, if I don't get a reply in, sorry. Thanks James, I've really
>enjoyed it.
So here goes my post into the void....
>
>>> I agree that science would see death - as a brute facticity - as graspable,
>>> but that is partly the problem, surely. For the cancer patient, or
>>> ourselves, death is not graspable because it is a brute facticity. It is not
>>> his, her, yours or my death.
>>
>> I'm not understanding here - my death will be mine - and mine alone.
>
>How? It will be *a* death, and it will be your end, but it what possible way
>is it *your* death? You cannot make sense of it (I think we agree on that);
>you cannot make experiential or phenomenological sense of it. Your death is
>meaningless and so is not *yours* anymore than any other brute fact is
>yours. It might even be truer to say that it is not yours, it happens to
>you.
I disagree - whether i make sense of it or not - that's my privilege -
just like when i cut my finger - its all mine - my left foot is
meaningless - yet i still think of it as being mine. If its the
ownership of consciousness then that might be different.
>
>>>> On the other hand -"we all die" - well i'm not
>>>> so sure.
>>>
>>> Traces of hope on your part?
>>
>> No no even NO! I *think* that it will *not* be an end... that's the
>> problem.
>
>Then we are closer than I thought.
probably...
>
>> (it makes things more complicated - certainly Nietzche's eternal return
>> has implications ... more that just going to sleep, as does any concept
>> of heaven or void... )
>
>I'll come back to the eternal return below.
>
>[snip]
>>>> To get out of the process of becoming - i take it as a wish for
>>>> immortality. Can you guarantee death as giving nothing?
>>>
>>> Traces of hope on my part? Anyhow, I thought the process of becoming was
>>> over in postmodernism?
>>
>> Don't know the answer to this one - who do we ask? - i thought process
>> was very po-mo?
>
>Really? Why? I thought that becoming, implicit logics and all, was terribly
>modern in your book. Oh well.
Modernity in the arts looks for results - and in science also i would
suppose. If you mean the process of say evolution or the dialectic then
there is even here some fixedness.
>
>[snip]
>>> I still can't think of any Marxist condemnation of suicide. I could well be
>>> wrong, but none come to mind.
>>
>> Not a quote but a consequence of the theory - its a waste of material.
>> Its selfish - which certainly is counter to Marxism?
>
>Bluntly nah. For starters, for Marx, and many Marxists, the idea is that the
>decision as to what constitutes waste is taken out of the hands of a mad
>economic structure and left to, well, you and me and everybody else,
>individually and collectively. Second, selfish? Marx, and most Marxism is
>about freedom - an end to coercion - nothing about suicide as selfish. Marx
>is interested in the achievement of a situation where *having* to destroy
>oneself and others (in some way or other) for a putative greater good, or
>simply for profit, is not necessary.
>
>Not that he advocates suicide either. It just isn't there in Marxism (except
>the SU and, in a reverse sense, perhaps Adorno and Benjamin).
I think its left to logic and reason (of the collectivity) else the
collectivity could say it likes mad economic structures (it does say
just that!) but then Disney would be Marxist?
>
>>> [snip]
>>>>> Sartre's freedom is the decision in the face of absurdity - the decision
>>>>> for
>>>>> no reason, which is the responsibility of being. In a place with no point
>>>>> and no hope, then making a decision on the basis of one's self and
>>>>> *nothing*
>>>>> else, (not the same as self interest), is freedom. Personally, I think this
>>>>> is crap, but it is a counterpoint to your claim that this is suicide.
>>>>
>>>> In "roads to freedom" the hero effectively kills himself - the old
>>>> Sartre - physically - whilst the new Sartre becomes a Marxist - another
>>>> death of self?
>>>
>>> Only if you take self as being embodied in the content of the ideas. If the
>>> self is rather in the act of decision, then it is the life of self, not its
>>> death. After all, as you pointed out at the beginning, the ideas are
>>> pointless.
>>
>> But in both cases the act of decision is the last act of self. How is
>> the Marxist able to change his/her mind?
>
>What? First off, in the Sartrean version, the self only 'truly' exists in
>the act of making the decision, so it is not simply 'the last act of self',
>but a continual 'first and last'. Second, why couldn't a Marxist change
>his/her mind? Marxism is not an absolute doctrine. Oh and then there are no
>shortage of ex-marxists out there.
Exactly - ex-Marxists - or Did Marx write in a proviso that you can in
effect think anything you like and still be a Marxist.
>
>[snip]
>>>>> Losing, not lost. You confuse failing with nothing.
>>>>
>>>> then your confusing (or wishing) death with nothing.
>>>
>>> Yes, I am. As you pointed out, we have lost our virginity, (although I
>>> suspect we have done so repeatedly).
>>
>> You need to expand on this bracketed section please?
>
>It is purely a suspicion. As a f'rinstance. Writing was invented and lost
>again, repeatedly it seems, before the 'birth of European civilisation'. The
>invention of writing would have to count as a loss of virginity, surely. But
>your invocation of the eternal return below would do just as well - to live
>the same live over again has to include virginity.
This is the logical problem of ER.
>
>>> To do otherwise than see death as
>>> nothing is to have recourse to faith or an overcoming of some sort. "We have
>>> lost all sense of decency admittedly, but there are still certain depths we
>>> prefer not to sink to."
>>
>> Well Nietzche's faith was more like dread, which i think became
>> happiness? I'm trying to culture a feeling of amusement about it.
>> (thought of the Hollywood version where he gets the girl in the end)
>
>Umm. Nietszche's eternal return is, as far as I recall, posed as a 'what if'
>question from a demon. I don't remember it ending in happiness, although I
>could certainly be wrong. But even then, it strikes me as a similar problem.
>On the one hand a meaningless death, on the other, a continual going on (a
>version of life without a meaningful completion? Sounds similar). In both
>cases what one is presented with is the chance to say yea or nea to
>something without purpose, goal, or end (because death is an end to life
>only in the sense of brute facticity).
>
>If, and it is a big if, the two are more or less equivalent then the problem
>presented by Nietzsche's demon is 'yea or nea'. This was the problem that
>you avoided in the first place ('I choose to be happy, but I am allowed to
>worry') and that you didn't seem to think had to be addressed, spiritually
>at least. But then I suspect that it doesn't matter whether one says yea or
>nea. They are both answers, to be sure, but not to the problem. Perhaps this
>is what Critchley meant about spiritual recession - settling for an answer
>where there is none.
Nietzche's construct - which we can argue over, what he meant - what he
really meant - or what i think he means, is still a construct. I don't
understand - or should i say appreciate - your brute facticilty.
>
>[snip]
>> Still waters (do not run deep) go stagnant. (paraphrase of Blake)
>>
>> The trinity you referred to doesn't necessarily help (in dying well) -
>> you said it might - better treatment- i offered a counter example.
>
>You didn't offer a counter example. I had said that 'life', in the form of
>race, class and gender had an impact on dying. I didn't say that it would
>necessarily help, although it might or might not. The 'counter example' from
>you was to say that someone with a shit life might welcome death. So there
>you are, someone's class position having an impact on their relation to
>death. Just what I said.
Not so - its a valuation of their life - not their death. The dead -
like mystics see no value in your trinity.
>
>>If we
>> now focus on the point of death itself then life doesn't seem to be of
>> much help.
>
>Now there we agree. Death as ungraspable even?
if you wish to see it that way, but you cant present that to me in any
meaningful way.
>
>> That's the impression i was trying to make, a significant
>> feeling of difference about dying.
>
>Clearly there are differences in feelings about dying, and clearly dying
>feels different to not *having* to confront the brute fact of death, but
>that is not the same as having accepted death - some idea of death maybe,
>but that is back to consolation.
The brute facts are those of life - not being of any help.
>
>[snip]
>>> I didn't mean that they were consolations, on the contrary, they might be
>>> aids to die (the helpfully large dose of morphine). They make no difference
>>> to the brute fact of death, but they certainly have a lot to do with dying,
>>> even with being able to accept death on your terms. It can be hard to be 'as
>>> if already dead' when your body is stubbornly insisting that you aren't by
>>> continual pain.
>>
>> But even this is different - terminal pain is absurd - the point of pain
>> - to alert and help sustain life is not reversed but made to look simply
>> foolish, like all the money in your bank pointless.
>
>Yes, so? We are clearly not talking about biology pure and simple.
Then what's your brute factility?
>
>[snip]
>>> But there are all sorts of conventions about dying (and about death) and
>>> they certainly apply - like it or not - to the cancer patient, even if they
>>> are no longer applicable for the patient. The world, bluntly, won't leave
>>> you alone. Then there are other problems, like our inability to sit silently
>>> in a room, even when dying, even when the world hasn't any point, but then I
>>> am back to Beckett.
>>
>> So you get a big tax bill, the world wont leave you alone - but nature
>> has played its highest card. (one knew it was always in the deck), so
>> the games over and nature cannot have any more fun with you.
>
>Sure, but it can until death, and so can culture, given that 'you' and
>culture ain't distinct. Losing yourself before death? 'They are as already
>dead'? Frankly I don't think so.
So what's it going to do - what new tricks?
>
>[snip]
>>> I mostly agree with this and, standing corrected, withdraw the words 'the'
>>> and 'precisely'. But dying is a problem - or a whole galimaufrey of problems
>>> rolled into one. I'll try to be clearer below.
>>
>> But there's no solution - so its not really a problem is it?
>
>Why you modern you - no problem without a solution? Tsk.
you can syndicate any boat you row...
Our focus has shifted - from post-modernism to death, you are saying
there is no metaphor for death. You are saying for you death is
meaningless, well that doesn't mean its not possible to devise a
metaphor. There is something very special then about your death? Is it
the inability to write about it due to the *brutal* fact of you not
being there? Simply generalise this - all metaphors are stupid. There
are snow drops in the garden - they are meaningless and described
metaphorically. Are we just criticising language?
>
>[snip]
>>> I've more or less already said this, although I'm not happy with it, but
>>> dying would be the recognition of finitude, and, perhaps, also the
>>> recognition of death's ungraspability. Anything else is merely a transition,
>>> not death and therefore not dying. But death as a brute fact, a flat line on
>>> some monitor, yes, I'd go along with that. We might or might not find that
>>> things are otherwise, afterwards. In the meantime, neither the world, nor
>>> being still alive will leave us alone. In fact, being us won't leave us
>>> alone.
>>
>> I agree with much of what you say above except the ungraspabilty bit.
>> That death may or may not be final. Its a simple case then to explore
>> the possibilities and see what difference it makes. From my wanderings
>> i'd say not much.
>
>From my walking in circles, I'd say the same. But It really doesn't matter
>whether you wander or not; any attempt to make death graspable is, as far as
>I can see, consolation of one sort or another. Death may or may not be
>final, but any conjecture beforehand involves making death meaningful.
However it applies to everything else doesn't it? Does the Snow Drop
mean spring?
>
>[snip]
>
>>> Depends on your point of view, but it was meant as approbation. I thought
>>> you might prefer it to 'sometimes I could kiss you'. Although I have shaved.
>>
>> Yes ok thanks :-) further a kiss can have many meanings.
>
>I haven't received thirty pieces of silver, if that is what you mean.
That's one meaning that crossed my mind, and the other was being very
small a kissed by large adult women.
>
>[snip]
>>>> Giles! are you attempting Necromancy?
>>>
>>> I hope not . But should any shades appear before us, uttering terrible words
>>> of truth, I might have done it accidentally.
>>
>> This is why i wanted some garlic - i wasn't planning a French evening,
>> though a good red would placate even the most fiendish.
>
>I never drink ... wine.
Interesting, i probably drink too much, now that's a worry, which a
drink may cure.
>
>[snip]
>>>> Books imply narrative and an author outside, they project such images
>>>> onto life, ok they are arbitrary, but they don't suit me. One of
>>>> Modernism's big problems was the edge.
>
>>> It is with the edge that some books wrestle/play/fight/collude. The
>>> implication of narrative and author might be there, but it is an expectation
>>> often denied, confused, frustrated or emptied of sense. In doing that,
>>> perhaps modernism projected life onto books?
>
>> I think so - and with post-modernism the edge dissolves.
>
>I have to say I doubt that. Personal narratives, if not meta-narratives
>seem very strong in Postmodernism,
agreed - but they have no edges
> if you take it as a cultural condition .
>The novel has become displaced into the self help book (e.g. the perfect
>idiotic fusion along the lines of Alain de Botton's monumental How Proust
>can help you make friends and influence people). Books that actually make
>the edge between narrative and life difficult still remain in the realm of
>modernism, I feel, almost by default.
>
>>>>>> Of course, but po-mo is different, nothing can escape from a black hole
>>>>>> - that's not like death but more like po-mo.
>>>>>
>>>>> A black hole where nothing happens, ever? I think you might have found your
>>>>> metaphor, but I am no physicist. But then, in a black hole there is no time
>>>>> and thus no death.
>>>>
>>>> I think you cant even say inside there is no time, what we are gets
>>>> stuck to the event horizon. - forever modern.
>>>
>>> Only to the outside observer, surely, and where are they?
>>
>> Well i think the sticke sees the whole of space and time at that moment.
>> So the 'they' would be there.
>
>Hardly my field of expertise, but this was not my understanding - I thought
>that the event horizon was only visible from outside, whilst that which had
>passed beyond visibility (and time) was both destroyed and temporally
>frozen. I cannot recall any suggestion that the, umm, participant remains on
>the event horizon, just that their trace remains there for the outside
>observer. But who knows? Certainly not me.
>
>Regards, for the present
>
>Giles
>
have a nice vacation
--
James Whitehead
James Whitehead
[..]
>
>I don't see any problems. I think the Nazi use of the swastika,
>including its Sanskrit name, derived ultimately from the
>considerable German interest in the linguistic and ethnic
>connections between India and Western Europe. Although it
>was the British who made the discovery, the preeminent Sanskrit
>scholars of the 19th century tended to be German. This sort
>of thing seems to have filtered gradually into the intellectual
>demimonde and underworld of the middle and lower classes,
>where it was picked up by anti-Semites, who invented a myth
>of a conquering "Aryan" race. The genealogy of the Nazi
>swastika doesn't seem all that important, though -- the
>thing I was trying to point out was that Nazi symbols were
>well-designed, potent, and modernistic, especially the flag,
>but the aesthetic values are not generally thought to have
>associated with them good moral or ethical values.
Here is my point - they didn't design the swastika - they appropriated
it - so this doesn't invalidate its ethical qualities if it has any -
and hence the aesthetic - ethic argument. If you look a Nazi art and
architecture which was not appropriated then i would maintain the
simplistic realism and brutal architecture *is* ugly.
agreed!
>
>Vincent often didn't sign his paintings at all. He said if
>they were any good, people would know who painted them. This
>is very much in the mode of the one good and true art and not
>only that, witness to a company of inherently good and true
>artists. For that, however, we need that _grand_écrit_ up
>there somewhere holding it all together.
>
is this the cost of post-modernity?
--
James Whitehead
Tim
<jl...@jliat.demon.co.uk> writes
>
> In article <967o20$ced$1...@news.panix.com>, G*rd*n <g...@panix.com>
writes
>
> [..]
> >
> >I don't see any problems. I think the Nazi use of the swastika,
> >including its Sanskrit name, derived ultimately from the
> >considerable German interest in the linguistic and ethnic
> >connections between India and Western Europe. Although it
> >was the British who made the discovery, the preeminent Sanskrit
> >scholars of the 19th century tended to be German. This sort
> >of thing seems to have filtered gradually into the intellectual
> >demimonde and underworld of the middle and lower classes,
> >where it was picked up by anti-Semites, who invented a myth
> >of a conquering "Aryan" race. The genealogy of the Nazi
> >swastika doesn't seem all that important, though -- the
> >thing I was trying to point out was that Nazi symbols were
> >well-designed, potent, and modernistic, especially the flag,
> >but the aesthetic values are not generally thought to have
> >associated with them good moral or ethical values.
>
> Here is my point - they didn't design the swastika - they appropriated
> it - so this doesn't invalidate its ethical qualities if it has any -
> and hence the aesthetic - ethic argument. If you look a Nazi art and
> architecture which was not appropriated then i would maintain the
> simplistic realism and brutal architecture *is* ugly.
So James, we can all spot the nazis at hundred paces because they're the
ugly looking fucks, is that what your saying? After all if you can apply
your ethics / ascetics to artefacts why not use it to distinguish
between artisans.
Tim ;-)
Joyce Wu
business mergers (deja users will know what I'm going on about).
[snipette]
>[snip]
>>> Books imply narrative and an author outside, they project such images
>>> onto life, ok they are arbitrary, but they don't suit me. One of
>>> Modernism's big problems was the edge.
>
>>> It is with the edge that some books wrestle/play/fight/collude. The
>>> implication of narrative and author might be there, but it is an
expectation
>>> often denied, confused, frustrated or emptied of sense. In doing that,
>>> perhaps modernism projected life onto books?
>
>> I think so - and with post-modernism the edge dissolves.
>
Interesting discussion on books here - I've always thought that books are a
sort of testing (or rather, legitimising) experiment for the author to work
out his/her philosophical theories. Same with postmodern texts.
So what does that leave us? The postmodern theorists have always been
actively
disavowing the canons of the grandnarratives, yet is does not prevent their
own texts being taught in educational institutions, quoted, cited, referred
to
endlessly in various journals and interpretations. Hell, even Foucault
wishes
our era to be known as "Deleuzian"!
>I have to say I doubt that. Personal narratives, if not meta-narratives
>seem very strong in Postmodernism, if you take it as a cultural condition .
I don't know whether by the reclaimation of micronarratives, postmodern
subjectivity means having to only talk about oneself?
best regards,
Joyce (the same one)
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James Whitehead
@madasafish.com> writes
the aesthetics of the Nazis didn't necessarily refute an argument which
relates aesthetics to ethics. A better example might be the dubious
funding of the art works of the renaissance. Should we re-evaluate the
art on the basis of the morality which underpins it. Your final
proposition is also interesting, does the inner life of a person show it
self in their looks. I think there is something here to explore, The
Portrait of Dorian Grey (sp?) comes to mind, where just such a link is
made. A counter to that could be the beautiful people of the 19th C -
who lived off the backs of the ugly working class. Or the American
Beauty (of the film) she isn't a *nice* person, but is she beautiful or
just pandering to a stereotype?
Finally looking back to what i said - it was that the art which the
Nazis did create i find ugly. As for the Nazis themselves - the leaders
- they don't strike one as cute. Should we be surprised at Bill
Clinton's antics - he does look like a big penis after all?
--
James Whitehead
marcel duchamp
Tangentially, it can be speculated that the abstract expressionists took
a stance in oppostion of the social realism /required/ by Nazi Germany
of their artists. For them, it was in part, a celebration of some
freedom that they had and the Germans did not.
Malevich too had to resort to realism to survive in his country. Still,
he died a poor man.
As for the Nazis themselves - the leaders
> - they don't strike one as cute. Should we be surprised at Bill
> Clinton's antics - he does look like a big penis after all?
Ya killin' me!
Treeclimbr
philosophy to the point where one doesn't need to bear alligence to canonized
"western philosophy" if one isn't being nourished by it, there is enough
brilliant thought going around in other fields. In a way, one might say
philosophy has been abandoned by many great minds by the creation of many new
fields of study.
What were the writings of the Surrealist Andre Breton? Where they aesthetics
or philosophy? We need to see outside the boundaries to understand what
philosophy really is today because philosophical thought has become chameleon.
___________________
Robert Pearson
Creative Virtue: http://www.eskimo.com/~telical/
ParaMind Brainstorming Software http://www.paramind.net/
R.S. Pearson Music Page http://users.50megs.com/rspearson/