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Speaking the same language
On problems of intersubjectivity. Language changes and evolves, gifted as it is with its only means of transmission - the human brain, a medium which habitually mutates its contents.
Leaving aside, at one extreme, the Derridean problem - all language is deferred - and thus utterly subjective, and God only knows (as it were) why we're able to understand each other at all, there is still the evolution of language. WIlliams says -
"this is a very slow process indeed; it needs the passage of centuries to show itself actively, by results, at anything like its full weight."
Hence the genius of 'A Clockwork Orange' (book and film) which telescopes the glacial evolution of language, and hence the alienation of mutated language, into frightening proximity.
Tags: alienation deconstruction intersubjectivity language semiotics
The Pinprick Master
Foul, scurrilous, abusive, satirical, witty and barbed.
A selection of poetry written with bile.
"Hatred is by far the longest pleasure
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure".
Don Juan, Lord Byron
Baker writes, in his introduction, "In an age of wanton violence the lethal accuracy of the poet is as much to be valued as ever." A pity then that contemporary poetry is virtually indistinguishable from Gardener's Question Time. This volume is a rebuke.
I Wish You All Had One Neck
'Voices of Desperate Illumination 1558 to Present' is the subtitle of this awesome book, which I have read and re-read over and over since I stole it from my father's bookcase several years ago.
It brings together a collection of polemics whose authors are largely the forgotten and disenfranchised, though some of the authors are more widely known in subcultural fields - Antonin Artaud, Tim Leary & Hakim Bey - and one or two are very recognisable: Ezra Pound and Marquis de Sade.
These rants come from the anarchists, the situationists, the revolutionaries, the outlaws, the criminals and the mad. Every one is worth rushing across your lobes: as the opening quote lifted from Blake says: "Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you." An adage I keep close to my thoughts these days.
And I have to say, that alongside the condemned Mexican bandit's response to his judge - "...you dirty-nosed, pot-bellied, dung-eating descendant of an outhouse maggot. I defy you to the end. You can hang me by the neck until I'm dead, dead, dead, and you can kiss my ass until it's red, red, red, and God damn your foul old soul..." - my favourite is from Carl Panzram, who was hung for murdering 21 victims:
"I tell you now that the only thanks you or your kind will get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it."
Fucking awesome
Tags: anarchism bile incendiary rant tract
Class and Capitalism
One of the most important, inspiring, seminal, influential, forceful, controversial, and enduring, documents ever published.
"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."
Tags: communism manifesto marxism revolution
Techno-utopianism
This book charts the place of hippy counterculture in the development of the utopian view of the communitarian ethos of the Internet, placing Stewart Brand - creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue, itself a counterculture, do-it-yourself bible - at the centre of events.
And as you might expect, it's a pretty utopian view of the story itself.
Identity - creativity - flow
David Gauntlett's latest book has an interesting and accessible chapter on the nature of creativity, in which he explains some of the important ideas by the likes of Csikzentmihalyi (psychology) and Bohm (physics) on the nature of creative activity in arts and sciences.
He also notes that the latest 'truth statements' about creativity coming from cognitive science barely exceed what we know from common sense, let alone tell us much about our individuality, indentity, sense of self or - even - what creativity really is.
Tags: creativity identity self
Translations
We tend to focus on 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' when we think of Benjamin's relevance to media and theory, but his essay, 'The Task of the Translator' is also a really interesting exploration and meditation on what at first glance appears to be a straightforward task: translating text from one language to another.
Benjamin's essay really exposes this apparent simplicity for the much more ambiguous, collaborative and creative process that translation must be... indeed you realise that in, for example, poetry, translation is not only impossible, but goes beyond 'adaptation' into the act of creation, with the source text as inspiration.
Before Being and Nothingness
Nausea (1938) was written 5 years before Sartre's philosophical work Being and Nothingness (1943), but there's a precursor to the thought here.
"... we find it so difficiult to imagine nothingness. Now I knew. Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing."
Live or recount
"... a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it."
A stunning couple of pages in Nausea in which Sartre suddenly spears the illusion of meaning that we grasp from thin air and try to smother over the yawning abyss of existence. We narrativise existence, construct and impose meaning onto experience - but Sartre recognises we can only do so in retrospect:
"...people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be such things as true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begin at the beginning [...] in fact you have begun at the end."
When we 'recount' our lives, we try to seek out the pinnacles and troughs, the 'annunciations' and 'promises', as though they were events there to be recognised and named, rather than conjured and created retrospectively.
"We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents."
It is a Nietzschean moment, where Sartre manages, as he said was his intention, to follow the consequences of atheism to their conclusion. Without any inherent order to experience, we create our own illusion of order; but examination reveals the futility:
"I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail."
Post-apocalyptic desolation
McCarthy's novel is set in the bleak devastation of some unknown global catastrophe; a father and son struggle through a 'sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular' (p293). The road is a double-edged sword, which is necessary for the pair to plot their way slowly through a burnt, sunless 'crozzled' wasteland, but it also carries the dangers of meeting desperate men who have gone wild at the edge of survival.
McCarthy is persuasive in the way he portrays what words pass between the grizzled father and the son who has no memory of any other kind of world. What meaning or purpose can there possibly be in continuing their journey?
'Where men cant live gods fare no better'. (p183)
Tags: fiction godless post-apocalypse road