Re: [-empyre-] Re: TechnoPanic

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

> And it is so important not to make the mistake of mistaking the
> horror for the beautiful. There are artists who have gazed so long
> into the abyss that they can no longer distinguish the two: Bataille?

No, I would not have sent these lines if I thought that all that was at
stake was this Nietzschean topos. But already that is enough. No, Bataille,
for what reason?
>
> and "The possible end" - where the beauty lies in the possibility,
> the creation of, the pointing towards, the simply negative gesture of
> refusing horror that implies that it Doesn't Have To Be This Way.

No, these are Heiner Mueller's lines and I want to say, It Does Have to be
This Way, although qualifications may be appended, insofar as here is a
viewpoint, from such and such a geopolitical juncture. But in fact, I put in
these lines about aesthetics _per se_. No hope. No despair. Only refusal:
Aldo Busi! among others.
>
> beautiful lines: thanks

the "stone carriers," are they those in the camps who were set such tasks?
Or they, earlier, the stone cutters, Simonides was familiar with?

Is this the fate of all mountains/Alps? to bear witness, by being cut into
blocks, by being carried, by being inscribed - you say the dead(?) in your
answer to Timothy Murray, I would rather say the judgement - which returns
the machine to the human, again and again. Kafka might also say, the mice.
and then with the mice and the men we are in the arena of an elevated soap.

the image always has a tendency towards the totalitarian. Hence Werner
Herzog speaks of the inadequacy of contemporary images. I was speaking about
technopanic in terms of a simplification - a reducibility - of metaphysical,
general concept making, to the example, to the image, to a popular form,
where it founders, because of an irreducibility, and a complexity, which
credits a Repraesentationskrise with a certain actuality as an event and
which problematises - in the most abjectly historical sense - the retinal
(Duchamp), the illustrative (Bacon)... image making, whatever the medium be.
>
simon taylor
www.squarewhiteworld.com