March 26, 2015

wheelbarrow and flower pots 1920Edward Steichen March 27, 1879 - March 25, 1973

Last Things William Meredith
For Robert Lowell
I In the tunnel of woods, as the road Winds up through the freckled light, a porcupine, Larger than life, crosses the road. He moves with the difficulty of relics— Possum, armadillo, horseshoe crab. To us they seem creatures arthritic with time, Winding joylessly down like burnt-out galaxies. In all their slowness we see no dignity, Only a want of scale. Having crossed the road oblivious, he falls off Deliberately and without grace into the ferns. II In another state are hills as choppy as lake water And, on a hillside there, Is a junkyard of old cars, kept for the parts— Fenders and chassis and the engine blocks Right there in the field, smaller parts in bins In a shed by the side of the road. Cows graze

Pastoral MoonlightEdward Steichen 1907

Put simply, we should avoid the temptation of becoming memory snobs, as any of us could find ourselves downwardly mobile so far as memory goes.

The disrememberedDementia undermines all of our philosophical assumptions about the coherence of the self. But that might be a good thing Charles Leadbeateraeon

Dementia raises deeply troubling issues about our obligations to care for people whose identity might have changed in the most disturbing ways. In turn, those changes challenge us to confront our philosophical and ethical assumptions about what makes up that identity in the first place. Everyone touched by the disease goes through a crash-course in the philosophy of mind.

Dementia is the newest form of identity politics which has remade how we think of race, sexuality, gender and disability. At the core of identity politics is the claim that people deserve equal recognition, despite being different in ways that turn out to be far less significant than first thought. That same insight now needs to be applied to people with dementia: their failing memories make them different, but they are not lesser people, with fewer rights. Their ‘difference’ should not be translated into ‘difficult’. Philosophy gives us a choice about how to understand this challenge as people in their hundreds of thousands are diagnosed with this condition. Once the mind is invaded, all hope of maintaining a memory-based identity goes, and with that goes everything we value about the idea of independence and self-fulfilment. Living with dementia then becomes a long process of mourning someone who is no longer there. But if we understand our identity as something held by relationships, expressed through feelings, reflected by our environment and enacted bodily, dementia instead becomes a daily puzzle to find common ground with people different from us, and to find new, often non-verbal forms of communication and communion that make people feel good about themselves without necessarily knowing why.

Time-Space ContinuumEdward Steichen 1920

America Politica Historia, in Spontaneity Gregory Corso b. March 26, 1930 O this political air so heavy with the bells and motors of a slow night, and no place to rest but rain to walk—How it rings the Washington streets! The umbrella’d congressmen; the rapping tires of big black cars, the shoulders of lobbyists caught under canopies and in doorways, and it rains, it will not let up, and meanwhile lame futurists weep into Spengler’s prophecy, will the world be over before the races blend color?

Communicative Capitalisma response to Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of DriveMcKenzie WarkPublic Seminar Commons

How can we even write books in the era of Snapchat and Twitter? Perhaps the book could be something like the tactic of slowing down the pace of work. Still, books are a problem for the era of communicative capitalism, which resists recombination into longer threads of argument. The contours of Dean’s argument are of a piece with this media strategy. Dean offers “an avowedly political assessment of the present” rather than a technical one. The political – a term greatly expanded in scope and connotation across a half-century of political theory – becomes the language within which to critique the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the technical. But perhaps this now calls for a kind of ‘dialectical’ compliment, a critical scrutiny of the expanded category of the political, perhaps even from the point of view of techne itself. We intellectuals do love the political, perhaps on the assumption that it is the same kind of discourse as our own. If industrial capitalism exploited labor; communicative capitalism exploits communication. It is where “reflexivity captures creativity.” Iterative loops of communication did not really lead to a realization of democratic ideals of access, inclusion, participation. On the contrary, it is an era of capture, of desire caught in a net and reduced to mere drive.

Woods, TwilightEdward Steichen 1899

A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

Company (pdf) Samuel Beckett

A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine. To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified. As for example when he hears, You first saw the light on such and such a day. Sometimes the two are combined as for example, You first saw the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark. A device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other. That then is the proposition. To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future as for example, You will end as you now are. And in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company. Quick leave him. Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third that cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not. Apart from the voice and the faint sound of his breath there is no sound. None at least that he can hear. This he can tell by the faint sound of his breath. Though now even less than ever given to wonder he cannot but sometimes wonder if it is indeed to and of him the voice is speaking. May not there be another with him in the dark to and of whom the voice is speaking? Is he not perhaps overhearing a communication not intended for him? If he is alone on his back in the dark why does the voice not say so? Why does it never say for example, You saw the light on such and such a day and now you are alone on your back in the dark? Why? Perhaps for no other reason than to kindle in his mind this faint uncertainty and embarrassment.

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From Jeff Fort, The Imperative to WriteSpurious

In this way, Company foregrounds equally the two dimensions of Beckett’s writing which make up the paradox I would like to discuss – formalizing abstraction and obtrusive affect, the ‘timeless void’, with its indeterminate blanks, and the time of life on earth – and it shows how these dimensions are inextricably linked in the language issuing from a narrative voice. And Beckett’s voices, despite their attenuation, are committed to being narrative voices: voices that tell stories and posit worlds in which events are said, however equivocally and indefinitely, to unfold in time. The repulsion of the subject and of a past thus draws into fictions that would be absolute, but that continually meet with the stuff of a singular time, on a scrambled border that divides ‘my own’ from the pure forms that make it possible. Another way to pose this problem is to point out that, regarding the apparently forced synthesis of abstraction and affect in the preceding passage, for example, it is impossible to determine which of these two terms has priority – that is, which one was forced on the other. The passage suggests, as does most of Company, that an impersonal language drones on in a void and nowhere’ space, blankly and indifferently, determined more by a machinelike grammar than by anything like ‘experience’, injecting its tales with a perfunctory and artificial pathos. But the fact that this droning language drones from a voice, and that each time it speaks it has a given source in a singular instance of language, entails its own inevitable structural implications.

The Imperative to Write:Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett google books

Milk Bottles Spring New YorkEdward Steichen 1915

HumanityGregory Corso What simple profundities What profound simplicities To sit down among the trees and breathe with them in murmur brool and breeze — And how can I trust them who pollute the sky with heavens the below with hells Well, humankind, I’m part of you and so my son but neither of us will believe your big sad lie

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