February 16, 2015

Winter Still Life 1956 William Scottb. February 15, 1913

A warning from a time prior to hyper-connectivity…from Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday LifeDeterritorial Investigations Unit

At the extreme, signs and significations which are nothing more than significations lose all meaning. At the extreme looms that shadow of what we will call ‘the great pleonasm': the unmediated passing immediately into the unmediated and the everyday recorded just as it is in the everyday – the events grasped, pulverized, and transmitted as rapidly as light and consciousness – the repetition of the identical in a wild whirling dance devoid of Dionysian rapture, since the ‘news’ never contains anything really new. If this extreme were reached, the closed circuit of communication and information would jeopardize the unmediated and mediated alike. It would merge them in a monotonous and Babel-like confusion. The reign of the global would also be the reign of a gigantic tautology, which would kill all dramas after having exploited them shamelessly. Of course, this extreme is still a long way away. It would be a closed circuit, a circuit from hell, a perfect circle in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities emerge. But it will never come full circle. There will always been something new and unforeseen, if only in terms of sheer horror.

The Harbour William Scott1952

The stones in your garden Vénus Khoury-GhataTranslated from the French by Marilyn Hackerprairie schooner The stones in your garden speak louder than the people passing by they claim an ancestry that goes back to the first cave when two flintstones controlled fire and a pauper wind swept the brambles of an alphabet gone deaf

A List, not a Map Paul Jaussenjacket22

Whenever I move to a new place, I find that getting lost is essential. I’ve never been very good at top-down, abstract forms of orientation. I have to feel my way around. I drive, walk, take a bus. Certain locations become reference points, often unusual ones. I remember a street because of a particular laundromat or the bright purple paint job on a house. That subject-position of being disoriented, uncertain, and unacclimated will be my approach to this series of commentaries, wherein I explore Detroit poetry as a complete outsider, a new-comer, a non-expert.

If I had to use a metaphor, I think I would borrow and extend Young’s goal, which was to use the Jacket2 commentary series to push herself beyond her “neck of the woods.” As a newcomer, I have no natural habitat. I’m simply trying to learn the basic contours of the landscape. To that end, I’m calling this account “field notes,” an incomplete record, a draft of a draft. Over the next months, I will offer an accidental list of poetry in the broadest of senses, wherever I find it, wherever it leads me. I’ll leave the mapping and counter-mapping for others, more qualified than myself, hoping that the observations published here might contribute to that project to come.

Harbour William Scott 1950–1951

Philosophy is a Bunch of Empty Ideas: Interview with Peter Ungerauthor of Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy

In a way, all I’m doing is detailing things that were already said aphoristically by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. I read it twice over in the sixties, pretty soon after it came out, when I was an undergraduate. I believed it all — well, sort of. I knew, but I didn’t want to know, and so it just went on. And basically what Philosophical Investigations says is that when you’re doing philosophy, you’re not going to find out anything. You find out some trivial things, you’ll be under the delusion that you’re doing a great deal, but what you should do is stop and do something more productive. But you didn’t stop. Neither did Wittgenstein. He kept scribbling away! What stopped him from doing that was terminal cancer. Only cancer had that desired effect. But it also had some other undesired effects — namely, ending his life. (Laughter) Even though Wittgeinstein is perhaps the most widely admired philosopher of the twentieth century, at least amongst mainstream philosophy, nobody really pays attention to his main conclusion: you can’t really do anything when you do this stuff, you should stop it. He basically said you should try to be a therapist for young people who are starting out in philosophy, to get them away from the field and turn them into something more useful. No more of of this fruitless, self-deluding endeavor. So really, what I’m doing is detailing some of that.

A philosophy for militants Alain Badiou interviewed by Aaron Hess

What is a political orientation today? With the failure of the old communism, with the development of neoliberalism, with the rise of an authoritarian-capitalist China, it remains an open question. The new wars today, the imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, too, are complex—there is no clear case of the “good” against the “evil.” In this situation, to find some clear points of orientation, some common principles for action, is a necessity. That is why many people interested in philosophy today are looking for a general orientation toward political life, and that the question of a general orientation is obscure is not surprising. It is not so much the question of immediate struggles which is obscure. In many cases it is not. For instance, that you should struggle against racist police violence is clear. But of course in the long-term it is not enough to defend a purely negative indignation. You must have some principles, some positive will, an affirmative determination. So, finally, in this present obscurity, the search for light by way of philosophy is normal. Of course it may be difficult for philosophy to give a clear answer to these demands, but that is its problem.

Cornish Harbour William Scott 1950 or 1951