In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Etwas Ähnliches gab es schon einmal, in den siebziger Jahren, als wir im amerikanischen Kino par excellence, dem Western, alten zornigen Männern bei den Mühen zusahen, die ihnen das Besteigen eines Pferdes machte. Auch damals waren die Jungen mehrfach verschwunden – in einem Krieg, den nachher niemand gewollt haben mochte, in den künstlichen Paradiesen der Popkultur und in den Fallen eines radikalen sozialen Umbaus.
Something similar has occured before, in the seventies, where the paradigm of American cinema, the Western, showed old angry men mounting their horse with great difficulty. Back then, too, the young ones had disappeared - into a war that afterwards nobody claimed to have wanted, into the artificial paradises of popular culture and into the traps of radical social restructuring.
G. Seeßlen, "
Indiana Jones kehrt zurück",
DIE ZEIT, 15.05.2008 Nr. 21
the burning bush
wu zhi yi wu de
Der Autohersteller Porsche hat ein kostbares Manuskript des Kulturtheoretikers und Schriftstellers Walter Benjamin an das Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach übergeben. Bei dem Manuskript handelt es sich um die Schrift "Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert", die Benjamin 1932 handschriftlich zu Papier brachte. [...] Die kostbare Handschrift ist auf dem Titelblatt Benjamins Sohn Stefan gewidmet, deshalb heißt sie auch das "Stefan-Manuskript".
The car manufacturer Porsche has bestowed upon the German Literary Archive Marbach a precious manuscript by author and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. The manuscript's title is "Berlin childhood 1900", written by hand in 1932. [...] Its title page has a dedication to Benjamin's son Stefan, and is consequently known as the "Stefan manuscript".
the owls are not what they seem
The
Great attractor is a "gravitational anomaly" somewhere in the Virgo supercluster, pulling the other galaxy groups towards the Hydra and Centaurus constellations. The Virgo supercluster is about 200 million light years in diameter.
Feet on the ground, head in the air
Ob in der Vorgeschichte des Protestantismus oder im 18. Jahrhundert, ob mit der Hilfe der Kirche oder des Staates, stets kann das Chaos der menschlichen Naturgeschichte, stets können Aberglauben und Sündhaftigkeit nicht allein durch die Deduktionslogik des verünftigen Kopfes beseitigt werden, sondern nur dann, wenn am Ende auch die Macht zugreift. Entweder “kindliche Liebe” oder “knechtische Furcht” vor der Strafe bahne den Weg zur Vernunft, sagen Wolff und Gottsched, später zieht man beides zum “freudigen Gehorsam” zusammen. Die Allianz der Einheitsvernunft mit der Macht reicht bis in die höchste Ebene: Die rationalistische Aufklärung ist die theoretische Stütze des aufgeklärten Absolutismus gewesen.
Whether in the prehistory of protestantism or during the eighteenth century, whether aided by church or by state, invariably superstition and sinfulness can not be removed by the deductive logic of reason alone, but rather, ultimately only once power intervenes. Either “infantile love” or “servile fear” of punishment paved the way to reason, argue Wolff and Gottsched; later these two are combined to “joyous obedience”. The alliance of unitary reason and power reaches the highest levels: the rationalist enlightenment was the theoretical support of enlightened absolutism.
Rolf Grimminger, Die Ordnung, das Chaos und die Kunst, Ffm., Suhrkamp, 1990, p.39. Transl. mine
File 1.93
Die Mutualisten
In der Evolution, das zeigt Robert Sussman (Harvard) sind aggressive Populationen wie die Meerkatzen oder die Paviane nur 1% ihrer Lebenszeit mit Raub oder Angriffen auf andere Tiere befaßt. 99% der gemessenen Zeit (in Betacam digital aufgezeichnet) verhalten sie sich "träge" oder "mutualistisch", d.h. sie lauschen auf Verständigung, sind kooperativ (um ihres Vorteils willen). Sussman hat gemessen: innerartliche and transartliche Kooperation, solche zwischen Laubbäumen und Pilzen, zwischen Haien und Pilotfischen usf. Hiervon zog er den Kollektivgeist großer Insektenstaaten (als Besonderheit) und Parasitismus ab [...] So kam er, seinen Zahlen nach, immer noch dazu, daß sich pure Egozentrik, wie sie die Evolution kennzeichnet, nicht in Aggression, sondern in Kooperationen äußert. Falls etwas im evolutionären Verlauf tückisch oder feindselig sein sollte, so sind dies die Koalitionen, nicht der offene Angriff.
The mutualists
In evolution, as shown by Robert Sussman (Harvard), aggressive populations such as meercats or baboons only spend 1% of their lifetime with predation or attack on other animals. 99% of their time measured (and digitally recorded) they behave as if "idle" or "mutualistic", that is, they listen out for cooperation, are cooperative (for their own advantage). Sussman has measured intraspecies and transspecies cooperation, such as between deciduous trees and fungi, between sharks and pilot fish etc. He excluded the collective spirit of large insect states (as an exception) and parasitism [...] Thus his figures still indicate that pure egocentrism, as designated by evolution, is expressed not in aggression, but rather in cooperation. If something in the course of evolution should prove deceitful or hostile, this would have to be the coalitions, not open attack.
A. Kluge,
Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt, Suhrkamp, p. 749. Transl. mine.
Boil 2.04
[Michael] guessed the culprit was one of the new middle-class [soup kitchen] clients. "The fastest-growing group we have." Most had lost their apartments, scorched by the real-estate boom. "They're difficult to help, because they have no street smarts, and they're pissed off and demanding."
One man used to arrive at the soup kitchen in his Jaguar, his last valuable possession and the one he refused to part with. He claimed to have worked for the FBI and during the height of the terrorist frenzy talked himself into a job as a security analyst for CNN. "He lasted there three weeks." Fancying himself a restaurant critic, he would occasionally send back his plate with a note informing Michael of his displeasure. "He ended up selling books from the sidewalk on Broadway."
Michael Greenberg, Commentary - Freelance,
TLS, January 25 2008, p.16
Ostatni dzien lata
how the light
on the nature of 'experts'
linkTo the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance [...]
Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
linkThe Guantánamo lawyers charged with devising interrogation techniques were inspired by the exploits of Jack Bauer in the American TV series 24.
The lawyers, all political appointees, who pushed through the interrogation techniques were Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes. Also involved were Doug Feith, Rumsfeld's under-secretary for policy, and Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two assistant attorney generals.
linkProfessor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School writes that "the simple cost-benefit analysis for employing such non-lethal torture [to extract time-sensitive information from a prisoner] seems overwhelming." Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago's School of Divinity acknowledges that torture remains a horror and is "in general [sic]...forbidden." But when interrogating "prisoners in the context of a deadly and dangerous war against enemies who know no limits...there are moments when this rule may be overridden."
Flure
adventures in deep time
[...] the greatest and longest work in Akkadian is the Epic of Gilgamesh, called in Akkadian, from its first line, sa naaba immuru, 'who saw the deep'. Most of its extant text comes from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, but enough fragments remain from other sites and earlier periods to show that as an Akkadian epic the work dates from no later than the early second millenium. The Russian Assyriologist I.M. Diakonoff argues that, at least in an oral form, it must date from as early as c. 2200 B.C. It had wide circulation: a fragment was found in Palestine and fragments from Boghazhwi in Turkey show that it had been translated into Hittite and Hurrian. It was based on Sumerian traditions: behind the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh lie at least four separate Sumerian stories which some anonymous Akkadian-speaking poet...wove into a unified narrative.
source lost.
that time of year
April 14
biosphere 0.999b
Hierüber [Moral im Angesicht des eigenen Todes] sind besonders die Zeugnisse der Alten von Gewicht; weil sie nicht unter christlichem Einfluß stehn. Ich führe demnach an, daß wir diese Tatsache bereits ausgesprochen finden in einer dem uralten Gesetzgeber Zaleukos zugeschriebenen, nach Bentley und Heyne jedoch von einem Pythagoreer herrührenden Stelle, welche Stobaios (>Florilegium< 44, § 20) uns aufbehalten hat: (Oportet ante oculos sibi ponere punctum temporis illud, quo unicuique e vita excedendum est: omnes enim moribundos paenitentia corripit, e memoria eorum, quae iniuste egerint, ac vehementer optant, omnia sibi iuste peracta fuisse.) [Man muß jene Zeit vor Augen haben,in der jedem das Ende herannaht, wo er das Leben verlassen muß. Denn alle werden, wenn sie sterben sollen, von Reue ergriffen, sobald sie an das Unrecht denken, das sie begangen haben, und von dem Wunsche, in allen Fällen gerecht gehandelt zu haben.] [...] Durchgängig lehrt die Erfahrung, daß Sterbende sich vor dem Scheiden mit jedem zu versöhnen wünschen.
Schopenhauer,
Gesammelte Werke, Bd III, 799.
fata morgana
My plan was to go out to the southern Sahara to shoot a kind of science-fiction story about aliens from the planet Andromeda, a star outside of our own galaxy, who arrive on a very strange planet. It is not earth, rather some newly discovered place where the people live waiting for some imminent catastrophe, that of a collision with the sun in exactly sixteen years.
, (ed.) Paul Cronin, faber and faber, 2002, p. 47.
pour ainsi dire
For one thing, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction is necessary to impose an interpretation on nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory. To provide a constituent structure for T(Z,K), the descriptive power of the base component is not to be considered in determining irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. So far, a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds is rather different from the extended c-command discussed in connection with (34). We will bring evidence in favor of the following thesis: most of the methodological work in modern linguistics cannot be arbitrary in an important distinction in language use. If the position of the trace in (99c) were only relatively inaccessible to movement, any associated supporting element is not subject to a descriptive fact.
sez the Chomskybot
We're to conclude not so much that Chomsky's generative grammar has been disproven, but that linguists like laughing, too. Jolly good then.
sunless
adventures in deep time
In 1859, on a field trip to the Malay archipelago, the naturalist and geographer Alfred Russel Wallace noticed that wholly different species of fauna inhabited islands only a few miles apart. The observation gave rise to what is now known as the Wallace Line, a meandering path of evolutionary separation that runs in a northeasterly direction through the Java Sea, dividing Bali from its neighbour Lombok, and Borneo from Sulawesi, before skirting the Philipines to the south, To the north-west are the animals, birds and insects of Asia; to the south-east the distinctive zoology of Australia and its adjacent islands. In the middle, where, to a limited extent, species overlap, is an area known to biogeographers as Wallacea. [...]in the case of Wallacea and its adjacent zones [...] after millions of years, distant cousins in the evolutionary tree found themselves reacquainted with each other.
Fiona Gruber, "Adventures in deep time", TLS January 11 2008, p. 9.
Labels: Marker's time, notes to Kluge
religion in ancient Etruria (Borges)
The religion of the Etruscans, so we are told, derived from a revelation. A peasant was ploughing his field close to the great Etruscan city of Tarquinii, when his ploughshare turned up a child in the furrow. The child, though youthful in appearance, promptly started to dictate the sacred books that lay at the heart of the Etruscan religion. The twelve peoples of Etruria [...] all attended to hear the revelation. By the end of the same day, the dictation was completed and with it the mission of the child, who was called Tages and grew old and died within the same day.
J.A. North, "Lost words", TLS March 9 2007, p. 24
hyssyttely
Vladimír Godár - Maykomashmalon for Female Voice:
link
biosphere 0.999a
Die Entwicklung der Produktivkräfte habe laut Seppmann ein Stadium erreicht, wo diese in Destruktivkräfte umschlagen würden. Mit der steigenden Zentralisation des Kapitals sei eine totale Umfunktionierung der Menschen für die Generierung von Profiten verbunden. Damit wachse die Tendenz unter den Arbeitskräften im Alltag zu resignieren und sich der Beschäftigung der gesellschaftlichen Ursachen zu verweigern. Die Krisenopfer übernähmen die Sichtweisen des Neoliberalismus, auch wenn dies ihren eigenen Interessen widersprechen würde. ... Conrad Schuhler referierte über das Subjekt der Veränderung. Während Marx noch angenommenn habe, daß der Kapitalismus mit einer Naturläufigkeit seine eigene Negation in Gestalt der assoziierten Arbeiterklasse hervorbrächte, wäre diese im postmodernen Diskurs als Subjekt der Veränderung verschwunden und damit verbunden auch die Eigentumsfrage nicht mehr zentral. Gesellschaft würde nicht mehr konfrontativ gedacht, sondern sich auf vBasis eines kooperatives Modell vorgestellt. Ähnlich wie Jürgen Habermas in der Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns würden auch die Regulationstheoretiker der Linkspartei den rationalen Diskurs zwischen Politik, Wirtschaft und Zivilgesellschaft anstelle der antoganistischen Züge betonen. Dennoch wäre mehr oder minder verklausuliert die Eigentumsfrage in deren Programmatik vorhanden, welche vollkommen unvermittelt neben dem Theorem der politischen Steuerbarkeit machtökonomischer Mechanismen stehen würde.
Joseph von Hynten, "Konfrontation statt Kooperation",
Junge Welt, 18.3.2008, S. 13
nichts 1.1
22. Historia in nuce. - Die ernsthafteste Parodie, die ich je hörte, ist diese: "im Anfang war der Unsinn, und der Unsinn w a r, bei Gott! und Gott (göttlich) war der Unsinn."
Friedrich Nietzsche, MA II, § 22, S. 388
nichts 1.0
Jedes Individuum, für sich betrachtet, ist ein herumwandelndes Konkretement von 1000 Bedürfnissen, die meistens so dringend sind, daß es ohne deren Befriedigung kaum einen Tag bestehen kann ... je höher die Organisation, vom Polypen bis zum Menschen, desto größer die Bedürfnisse und desto schwieriger ihre Befriedigung, desto unsäglicher das Mühen und der Schmerz: aber nicht so der Lohn: der bleibt die Existenz selbst, die alles letzten Zwecks entbehrt, und nicht weiß wozu sie da ist, wie die Langeweile bezeugt. Man muß blind seyn um nicht zu sehn, daß das ganze Leben und Daseyn selbst eine Verirrung ist, von der wir zurückzukommen haben: und so lehren es die alten Religionen Asiens. - Die Weisheit ist, einzusehn, daß der Ertrag die Kosten nicht deckt, und das Geschäft aufzugeben: dies Geschäft heißt aber nicht das Individuum, sondern der Wille zum Leben. ... Da wir aber ein so großes Mißverhältniß zwischen der Arbeit und dem Ertrag sehn, welches Mißverhältniß eigentlich der Grund ist, warum alles Leben im Leiden bleibt; - so müssen wir gestehn, daß der Wille zum Leben ein Thor ist.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Handschriftlicher Nachlaß, Band III, 328f.
Sans Soleil / Sunless
The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.
He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.
He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?
the full text of
Sans Soleil is here:
linksome screenshots:
link an elaborate analysis:
link
Boil 2.03
Es war einmal die Medien - Once upon a time the media
by the
monochrom kollektif
placebo - today's recommended drug of choice
Prozac, the antidepressant taken by 40 million worldwide does not work and nor do similar drugs, according to a major review that examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. (...) It appeared that patients had improved, but those on a placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs. The only exceptions were the most severely depressed patients, said the authors, Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada.
Guardian Weekly, 29.02.08, p. 7
pedagogia obscura
The ignorant schoolmaster (Rancière) as pdf:
linkvia
infinite thought
memory
natura lapsa
Planting trees was also one of the solutions seized upon by contemporaries who worked to master nature in a different way. Not fire, but sand, was the irritant across many parts of the north German plain. Giant shifting dunes filled the air with fine particles that obscured roads and drifted on to the fields, ruining standing crops. 'With the exception of Libya, few states can boast of being our equal when it comes to sand', wrote Frederick the Great to Voltaire, with rather heavy irony.
D. Blackbourn,
The Conquest of Nature, London, 2006, p.42
camera obscura
Many thanks to ank for
invaluable javascript/html assistance with the new header slideshow.
zoon
unendliche sehnsucht - dumpfes begleitgefühl
infinite longing - attendant dullness
Kantian anecdotes
In fact, dark coloring and black eyes are more closely related to the sublime, blue eyes and blonde coloring to the beautiful.
I. Kant,
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Berkeley, 1960, p.54
le conte du monde flottant
The segmentation in Kluge's stories, however, is not merely perspectival and cinematographic (a fifteen-minute sequence of experience juxtaposed with a paragraph of foreshorting eight years); it also projects qualitative leaps into incommensurable dimensions; this particular reading experience is prolonged in Geschichte und Eigensinn, where notes on Marx's "mode of production" (he dozed much of the day on the sofa, with people coming in and out, wrote nasty comments in the margins, strewed his papers with tobacco spots), disquisitions on Blitzkrieg and on the Chansons de Roland, illustrations drawn from evolutionary theory and the history of automata, anecdotes about Kant, quotes from the letters to Fliess, studies of domestic labor, the history of prices, the politics of the German romantics, on-the-spot readings of fairy tales, succeed each other unpredictably and compete with an extraordingary collection of hundreds of images drawm from medieval manuscripts, films, worker's newspapers, ads, graphs, scientific models, newsreel photographs, pictures of old furniture, science fiction illustrations, penmanship exercises, and the reconstruction of Roman roads or Renaissance battles.
Fredric Jameson, "On Negt and Kluge", October, Vol. 46, Alexander Kluge: Theoretical Writings, Stories, and an Interview (Autumn, 1988), p. 152
bye bye beauté Robbe-Grillet
Boil 2.02
November 2
I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.
November 3
Im not really sure what visceral realism is. I'm seventeen years old, my name is Juan Garcia Madero, and I'm in my first semester of law school.[...]
Roberto Bolano,
The Savage Detectives, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 3
hen diapheron eauto
Métiers nomadisants
Dans certains cas, des gens de certains métiers se déplacent en groupe pour exercer leur profession de manière temporaire hors de leur habitat ordinaire. Il se développe dans ces conditions des argots qu'on range dans la catégorie des argots de métiers.
Marcel Cohen,
Matériaux pour une sociologie du langage I (1954), Paris: Francois Maspero, 1971, pp. 160.
Boil 2.01
The google cell phone has now arrived:
the googleberrywith Automated Rapid Retrieval System (ARRS), if lost/stolen.
