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marx and me

neuronal aesthetics

‘Brain images display the beauty and complexity of consciousness‘ proclaims the New Scientist. Except they don’t. The images might be beautiful and complex but they do not display consciousness.

For a while I took images like this and asked people what they looked like.

a metallic vertebrae trapped in fine blue hair

a transparent fish

an aerial view of a dark island surrounded by currents of mercury and ice

clumps of fibres

the mane of a golden electric horse

swirls of opaque liquid amid fine grasses

streetlights clumped at the edge of an illuminated park

the searchlights emitted by a deep sea vessel entering a phosphorescent reef

something mysterious travelling through the night

rainbow cauliflower

opalescent eggs clustered on the branches of tiny low hanging dead trees

petrol in water

I wrote something once about this kind of thing

http://www.linkartcenter.eu/public/editions/Torque1_Mind_language_and_technology_Link_Editions_2014.pdf

old notes on anne carson’s ‘dirt and desire’

arcadematerials

Call for statements of interest for contributions to a series of thematic pamphlets on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

To be edited by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor, & designed by Sophie Carapetian

In 1927 Walter Benjamin began taking notes for an essay entitled “Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Fairyland”. Soon the material became unwieldy, his note cards and papers piled up, and he began arranging his sheaves of notes into ‘Convolutes’ on various themes, episodes and figures. The project was never finished. Bundles of fragmentary citations, images and reflections were gathered together and published posthumously – the resulting book remains unsynthesised, labyrinthine, contradictory, open-ended.

We are looking for writing or visual responses to The Arcades Project that magnify overlooked fragments, reshuffle material to create new constellations, highlight absences, excavate forgotten figures and movements, explore marginalised and muted histories; that collide with the present moment ‘to ignite the explosive materials that are latent in what has been’ (Convolute K).

Irreverent, experimental, politically-engaged and critical of hagiography, contributions could be short or long form, scholarly or impressionistic, philosophical or subjective, dense essays or sketchy diagrams, vignettes or drawings, somber tracts or playful polemics. We hope to include work by writers and artists from different fields and disciplines; pieces by those new to Benjamin’s work alongside work by established Benjaminians.

We are proposing to design each pamphlet around a different colour, to print 100 copies of each, and to post PDFs online, releasing them intermittently so that they might eventually form a kind of ‘magical encyclopaedia’ (Convolute H), or a ‘library where the books have melted into one another and the titles have faded away’ (Convolute K).

Potential themes:

TEXT/FORM: filing, archiving, symbols, montage, rearrangements, etc.

HISTORY/HISTORIOGRAPHY: primal history, fashion, progress, catastrophe, dreams, etc.

OBJECTS: coins, shells, umbrellas, fountains, maps, etc.

ECONOMY: money, value, infrastructure, crisis, profit, commodity, labour, etc.

FIGURES: Historical figures including those central to The Arcades Projects (Charles Baudelaire, Charles Fourier, Baron Haussmann, Victor Hugo, etc), those who Benjamin mentions but whose significance he does not fully explore and those who he overlooks completely.

TYPES: Either the most prominent (the prostitute, the gambler, the flâneur, the rag-picker, etc.) or the more marginal (the woman on the barricades, the slave, the factory worker, etc.)

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: the Vésuviennes, Saint-Simonians, Blanquists, etc.

MATERIALS: asphalt, glass, iron, velvet, etc.

TECHNOLOGIES: photography, electric lights, barricades, clocks, compasses, etc.

The first pamphlet will focus on SPACES, including contributions from Yanik Avila on the Bibliothèque Nationale and its ceiling, Sean Bonney on the entrance to the subterranean labyrinth, Rebecca Comay on streets and street names, and Sam Dolbear on aquariums. More proposals however would be welcome on this theme. Esther Leslie on Urformen will be among the contributions for the second edition on HISTORY/HISTORIOGRAPHY.

If you are interested in contributing, please send a short abstract or idea to [email protected] by 30th June 2017. If you’d like to speak to us beforehand please feel free to contact [email protected] and/or [email protected]. Also, if you know anyone who might be interested, please share this call with them.

A PDF of the Arcades project can be found here.

Moscow, summer 2013

Khlebnikov

Käthe Kollwitz, Gedenkblatt für Karl Liebknecht (1920)

1937 – Hitler is in the Reichstag, terror reigns in Moscow and the Republican Army are battling the fascists in Spain. In Berlin, a group of young communists gaze at the ancient battle of deities and giants depicted on the Pergamon altar. This is how Peter Weiss begins his epic three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.

Sinewy stone figures wrestle in a state of petrified unrest, their heroic actions frozen in media res. The scene is ‘shattered into fragments’. ‘Yawning cracks’ cut once whole figures to pieces. Muscular stumps, bits of jaw, leg, ankle, and ‘tremendous and dismembered hands’ protrude from the hard marble. Hands without fingers, shoulders without arms, fists without swords. Mutilated bodies strangle, clamber and clutch at one another desperately. Torsos convulse in pain. Ligaments tear, sweat pours, blood congeals, arteries swell. Body parts intertwine, twist, stretch, gape, leap, flutter, fall, hang, loom and coil. The silence, occasionally broken by the soft echoes of tourists’ footsteps, seems to contain an ‘inaudible roaring’ that the young observers strain to hear:

We heard the thuds of the clubs, the shrilling whistles, the moans, the splashing of blood. We looked back at a prehistoric past, and for an instant the prospect of the future likewise filled up with a massacre impenetrable to the thought of liberation.

They gaze at the beaten and the dying. They stare at the stone and it is as though they can see their own future defeats unfold before their eyes, brutal defeats that the novel goes on to trace in similarly visceral detail. ‘The silence, the paralysis of those fated to be trampled into the ground continued to be palpable.’ But they perceive other struggles contained in the panorama of devastation. The scene is also a source of hope, confirming the necessity to keep on fighting.

The Aesthetics of Resistance itself stands as a scarred monument to past struggles. Weiss is unflinching in his portrayal of political defeats and the historical wreckage of 20th century Europe. But, as Fredric Jameson discusses, he is concerned with asking ‘how to draw energy from such endless images of horror.’ Forced to contemplate the novel’s corpse-strewn pages, Weiss places the reader in the position of his young protagonists at the Pergamon altar in order to provide ‘a lesson about the productive uses of a past and a history that is not simply represented or commemorated but also reappropriated by some new future of our own present.’ The novel ends by returning to the frieze, dwelling on the empty space on the altar where the paw of Hercules should be: ‘The empty space in the frieze, at the spot where the lion’s paw of Hercules would hang, designates precisely something absent, unrealised.’ The empty space is left open for future intervention. As Weiss himself stated, both the Pergamon and his novel are addressed to the present: ‘that turmoil, those figures tangled up in relentless, dreadful combat, figures strangling one another, lacerating one another with spears. It is the very same struggle that we are engaged in today.’