Re: [-empyre-] Re: TechnoPanic

[Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au>]

some thoughts in response: I distrust Bataille, but even more Batailleans.
The embrace of corruption and evil may be an aesthetic of sorts, but to me
indistinguishable from the aesthetics of torture.

(also in relation to christian's post) the future is a battlegrpund: the
five year plan is gone from Russia, but survives intact in the Fortune 500
corproration. Controlling the future - risk management - to ensure that
nothing happens that would really change things. As a contrary you could
take Pissarro's brand of anarchism, where the immediate future - right
now, this morning - is open to all possibilities; especially the
possibility that I put down my work and just lol about by a stream poking
the mud with a stick - a utopia of leisure available for the price of just
working as much as necessary and no more.

Panic enters through the mechanisation of anxiety in the insurance business.

I also greatly appreciate the spectre of herzog at the feast: responding
to the idea of the necessarily totalitarian nature of the image is a tough
one to nut out. I will think about it as i poke the mud

s


<snip>>
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>