Wednesday, October 09, 2002

 
I'm disappearing.

A letter arrived today, and on the front cover was the printed legend - "Your personal illustration is enclosed"

" ... bearer of randomness ... if ... a woman wearing stockings might whisper the word ... " DeLillo - MAO II

It could have been 1989, it could have been 1885 according to Winston Churchill

"The great victories had been won. All sorts of lumbering tyrannies had been toppled over. Authority was everywhere broken. Slaves were free. Conscience was free. Trade was free. But hunger and squalor and cold were also free; and the people demanded something more than liberty. The old watch-words still rang true; but they were not enough. And how to fill the void was the riddle ..."

Terror & Anti-Terror

"In principle we have never rejected terror, nor can we reject it." Vladimir Lenin

... after a century in which more than 125 million people lost their lives ...
The Ineducable Left remains, barely breathing under the rubble, can we revive ourselves?

"'Lenin' is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite on the contrary, to put it in Kierkegaard's terms, THE Lenin which we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to REINVENT Marxism--recall his acerb[ic] remark apropos of some new problem: 'About this, Marx and Engels said not a word.' The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today's constellation."
Slavoj Zizek Slavoj Zizek Slavoj - What Can Lenin Tell Us about Freedom Today?

Terror and Just-Response by Noam Chomsky
Chomsky and Kosova
When terror becomes the order of the day

Caleb Carr - The Lessons of Terror - Chapter Six - To Preach Hatred (Little, Brown - New York & London - 2002)

In the European future shaped by the French Revolution lay conflicts and terrors beyond the scope of anything seen on that continent in generations ...

In response to proroyalist military intervention by outside powers, Article 1 of the mass conscription order was passed by the French National Convention in August 1793.
It states:-

All Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for service in the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge weapons and transport supplies; the women
will make tents and clothes and will serve in the hospitals; the children will make up old linen into lint; the old men shall have themselves carried into the public squares to
rouse the courage of the fighting men, to preach the unity of the Republic and hatred against Kings.
The public buildings shall be turned into barracks, the public squares into munition factories, the earthen floors of cellars shall be treated with lye to extract saltpetre.
All firearms of suitable calibre shall be turned over to the troops: the interior [of the country] shall be policed with shotguns and with cold steel.
All saddle horses shall be seized for the cavalry; all draft horses not employed in cultivation will draw the artillery and supply wagons.

Every element of society, then was expected to specifically and explicitly turn its energies toward the prosecution of a national military effort. In so doing, all elements
would, whether they realized it or not, make themselves potential targets for enemy retaliation. As the British historian and military theorist J.F.C.Fuller later observed,
"Such was the birth-cry of total-war."

From 'The Lessons of Terror' by Caleb Carr (Pages 115 - 117)
Information poisoning

School of Soft Self-Flagellation - On some mysteries of the East in relation to the West
text by Alexander Yakimovitch - in Moscow Art Magazine, No. 22 - October 1998
"A completely modern experience of deconstructive, rough non-enlightening thinking and genealogical demystification of hidden motives is in our hands."

"This is the lesson of both psychoanalysis and the Jewish-Christian tradition: the specific human vocation does not rely on the development of man's inherent potentials (on the awakening of the dormant spiritual forces OR of some genetic program); it is triggered by an external traumatic encounter, by the encounter of the Other's desire in its impenetrability." Slavoj Zizek

That was the Pick that was

BIG OTHER

Cyber and my body - Bojana Kunst
In 1914, the young T. S. Eliot spent a quiet Christmas Eve with his schoolfellow, describing him later in his correspondence as "a vegetarian and the lightest eater I have ever seen." The description pertained to no other than the young Norbert Wiener, the future father of cybernetics, a genius of weak body, and of amazing mind.

... of the lamella in the work of David Lynch, Harpold rightly sees Zizek's ... In performances that make extensive use of cyborg and post-human metaphors, Stelarc ...
http://enculturation.gmu.edu/3_1/herzogenrath/ - 46k

Automatism/Autonomy/Virtual Unconscious II

Psychosis in a Cyberspace Age

On the back cover someone had scrawled - tHE qUESTION IS - Are you being Borged?


posted by Andrew 10/09/2002 02:19:00 PM