(after the) collision course

If you still have an appetite for destruction, the Royal Academy has a 'bleak and austere' season running from the 13th (saturday the, alas). Sudden White has projections and lightboxes behind a post-apocalyptic London cityscape, Dark Materials has Banks Violette's blasted Church ruins and Burroughs, through a selection of films, is cast as puppet master to the mutant artistic proceedings.

research (fragments)

Evidence

Now that I have properly edited out any sensitive content and classified statements, I can now reveal to you the long awaited sound files of Catastrophe 08. Each file contains both Marko and Tom's lecture/presentations. Seemingly at complete random, I have included various fragments of discussions and class presentations. Play it in the background while you are reading over your essay and channel the lost spirits of the Catastrophe...

The First Catastrophe:
one
two

The Second Catastrophe
one
two
three

The Third Catastrophe
one
two
three

The Fourth Catastrophe
one
two

The Final Catastrophe
one
two

Preparing For Emergencies

Some listening material for those of you that can afford a small break from essay writing.

It's from my small library of public information recordings; a roasting chestnut of "common sense useful advice" for all types of emergencies. If you lived in London (and I'm assuming the rest of the UK) a few years back, you may remember getting a pamphlet through your door containing advice on what to do in the event of a wide variety of disasters. My favourite part is about 3'30" into the recording where the male voice says "Of course, there are always going to be particular occasions when you should not go into a building. For example: if there is a fire."

Common sense from The Cabinet Office.

Here's a 4 minute excerpt.

If that's got you worried that you don't know enough about these issues, and you need to listen to the entire program (approx. 23 minutes) then there's also a full length version there (33mb)

Have a look at the website for more information

"Ready" The US version is friendlier looking but slightly more sinister for the fact, especially the 'Kids' section.

Catastrophe 2008, in pictures

Hi everyone. Here are some pictures from a few of the Catastrophe sessions, especially the last one. I have completed the editing of the sound files, getting rid of loud background noises and excessive silences. The only think now is that I need a place to host the files. A friend of mine in Los Angeles has agreed to give me space on his server, I am just waiting for the ftp info. Check back soon for audio!

format crap

Sorry it's pasted so craply. Don't know how to do it otherhow.

catastrophe conference call for papers

The organisers have been following our blog and asked me to post this to invite any of you to submit proposals. Tom x

Call for papers |Conference 2009 | Tickle Your Catastrophe!

We cordially invite you to submit a proposal for the Tickle Your Catastrophe! conference, which will take place from 6 to 7 March 2009 at the Vooruit Arts Centre, in Ghent, Belgium, during the arts festival The Game is Up! How to Save the World in Ten Days (from 4 to 14 March 2009). This conference is a joint initiative of the NGE (Dutch Aesthetics Society), Ghent University, the KASK (Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts) and Vooruit. Check out our website on www.catastrophe.ugent.be

Programme:

Whereas the twentieth century was dominated by political extremism and (coping with) trauma, it is the fear of the inevitable and complete catastrophe that reigns at the beginning of a new century. Although worst-case scenarios have always been part of our cultural identity, the catastrophe has taken on a different form at the beginning of a new millennium. The impending depletion of the world’s oil resources and the implosion of the global economy, international terrorism, the breakdown of the financial market, overpopulation, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, pollution, major climate change, disastrous floods and new epidemics... Not only have we become increasingly aware that the threat of a catastrophe is real and inevitable, we also realize that we are not exactly innocent when we consider the causes of these catastrophes, and therefore cannot blame divine providence, fate or forces of nature. Yet we know that we alone cannot change the world. Tickle Your Catastophe! doesn’t want to wallow in doom and pessimism, but wants to question our idea of a catastrophe and the role it plays in philosophy, art and science today. As the original meaning of the conference title suggest, we want to give this concept ‘a kick up the bum’ in order to discover how the catastrophe was and is represented in art and philosophy. What is its significance when we shed the light of tomorrow on it, and when we compare it to the shadows of the past? What is the point of these visions and what is their disadvantage? Does this vision paralyse us with fear or can we see it as a comforting release? Do we have a death wish or do we simply see it as a great excuse to embrace hedonism in the here and now? Does it offer us the illusion of a chosen downfall or does it force us to act and take up responsibility, right before it is too late?

Starters: To face this many-headed monster, we start with the introduction of two antagonistic images of our downfall. We use them as a starting point, to stimulate our mind, as something to go on, or never to return to.

1# The Svalbard Global Seed
Vault In 2007, on the Spitsbergen archipelago (Norway), the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was opened, or rather, sealed off. In this underground vault, deep in the arctic rocks, specimens of seeds of millions of plants are preserved to assure the diversity of vegetation in case of a global crisis. This futuristic-looking complex, which was built to resist any possible catastrophe - from global warming to a nuclear holocaust - functions as a sort of time machine. It should enable us to turn back time and return to a past unaffected by the catastrophe. The Seed Vault raises some important questions: can we imagine a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for philosophical ideas, scientific theories or works of art? What is the value of a masterpiece or the Western canon in light of a catastrophe? And what do we NOT want to save for the next generation? What’s the difference between plants and weeds? Isn’t the idea of a new beginning, a life after the future, nourished by our lack of initiative and our inability to take action now, whether it be on a political, environmental or economic level? Are we being held hostage by traumas of the past, making it impossible for us to dream, and instead only safeguarding what we might lose? Are the arts condemned to a similar immobility, as they are locked behind the doors of the market and the museum? Or is art where we’ll find a seed, ready to grow and bring forth new life?

Keywords are (but are not limited to): art and commitment, messianism, transhumanism, the environment, revolution; art as time capsule; creativity and scientific survival strategies

2# Albert Speer’s ruin value
As the chief architect of the Third Reich, Albert Speer designed Germania, the future capital of the new world. Speer tried to mirror Hitler’s power in his architecture. Hitler wanted the ruins of his empire - should it one day collapse – to rival those of the ancient Greek and Roman empires, and remind future societies of its past grandeur. To meet with these demands, Speer developed the theory of the ruin value: by using the right materials and construction methods, you can ensure that today’s grand buildings will become tomorrow’s sublime ruins, after the downfall and decay. The idea of the ruin value is a complex and dark, but also powerful metaphor. If the seed vault raises questions about art, philosophy, and science as strategies to survive the inevitable catastrophe, then Speer’s ruin value celebrates the aesthetics of destruction, where beauty, knowledge, and culture can ultimately be found in decay. It conveys a dark vitalism: it is a perverse antidote for the catharsis of forgetting and our mortality, a Pandora’s box. The vision of the ruins of the apocalyptic landscape after the catastrophe paves the way for an ode to decay, for a rebellious aesthetic of the downfall, a therapeutic revolt by mutilation, an orgy of destruction.

Keywords are (but are not limited to): the aesthetics of destruction, the destruction of aesthetics, cyberpunk, dystopia and utopia, cultural pessimism, trauma.

Call: The conference committee welcomes proposals for papers, presentations, roundtable debates and sessions exploring these themes or any other topic relevant to the theme of the conference. Contributions from a variety of disciplines are welcome: fine art; media art; philosophy (of art); performance art and theatre; film studies; art history; cultural studies; science factions,... Interdisciplinary papers are especially welcome. Papers or presentations can be in English or Dutch, but sessions will be monolingual. A detailed programme and a list of invited speakers will be announced in January 2009. A selection of participants will be invited to submit an essay, either for the online review Esthetica. Tijdschrift voor Kunst en Filosofie, or for a book that will be published at the occasion of the conference. Please send a summary of your project (400-word limit) and a short biography to catastrophe@ugent.be.

Deadline: 1 December 2008. You will be notified of the acceptance of your proposal before the end of 2008.

Conference Committee: Dominiek Hoens (Jan van Eyck academie, KASK), Frederik Le Roy (Ghent University), Mia Vaerman (NGE), Robrecht Vanderbeeken (KASK, Ghent University), Nele Wynants (University of Antwerp), Tom Bonte and Eva De Groote (Vooruit).

Sickness Bags

I don't know if it would sound too materialistic to some of you, but I would love to see our manifesto printed on Sickness Bags in airplanes! It seems to me that in this case it is not about self-advertising, as Clodagh was pointing out about the stickers. Firstly because we are sort of exorcising catastrophe (or maybe provoking sickness?) by printing the manifesto in such bags, secondly because people while in the no man's land of airplanes are kind of unconciously cultivating some kind of secret fear about a potential crash. They are thus more receptive / susceptive to such messages as the manifesto ones. Last but not least, while emptying my mind for sleep when flying from one country to another, the catastrophe's manifesto printed in from of my seat seems to be a nice time killer that not only will keep me awake for some time but will intrigue a series of strange self-intrinsic thoughts that most people normally do staring at the void out of their cabin window.
Low-cost companies like easy-jet would be my suggestion.

The Catastrophe Committee Public Broadcasting Corp

Or, to complicate matters more (in true committee stylee) why not make it accessible via a podcast or radio broadcast on Resonance FM or the Architectural Associations excellent aair.fm? I think it would be very interesting (not to mention fun) to record, for instance, the entire committee chanting the manifesto, singing it, screaming it or whispering it, all together or solo...

Or broadcast it publicly? Even get together to perform it publicly - just in time for Christmas caroling? We could compose the piece as committee, eg: Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra...

Thus we need no money - I have all the recording and editing hardware/software we may need - only logistical support, and some type of organisation to get us all in a room together (well, at least most of us) Then again, for those who wish hardcopy, we could have it 'inscribed' on CD, Cassette, Vinyl in limited edition. Then we need to create a meme, a viral advertising campaign for the public good.

What do you think?

stickers

Another reason I favour these is that sandwich bags are quite complicated: we'd have to do deals with several sandwich shops, who will already have deals with other people, and might not want biohazard stuff written on their food. Stickers you can just smear anywhere: up and down the balconies, in sports stadia and transport networks, taken up by muttering bums... (as Burroughs would say)...

the leaking of the signifier

We want leakage. Crypts leak. Marko and I aren't academics: we're artist types who like to see things have effects in the world, leave traces, seep out. I favour a simple sticker format, with a kind of logo and some of the lines from the manifesto/manual, and it can be up to individuals to leave them where they like, or not to if they don't want.

What do you think Marko?

What it would cost

Hello all,

I have found a quote for the sandwich bags, not from Bag Media but from Caterprint. The minimum order is 10,000 which seems a bit excessive to me, but maybe you guys really like sandwiches. And carrying them in many, many bags.

Anyway, the cost is £405.90, plus £70 for ‘originations’ (anyone know what that means? Is that if we ask them to do the design?), plus VAT, which is… £559.19. Plus delivery, which is £18-25.

Alternatively we could have 1000 Catastrophe Napkins (33cm, 2-ply, white) for £175 + £40 originations + VAT = £252.63. Plus delivery.

Paper Cups, Sandwich Bags, Napkins

Apologies to Jamie and Sarah who have put energy into getting quotes and the like, but do we really have to blow up to £500 on publicity without any real consideration for why and for what end we're doing it? I know I'm not the only one that feels deeply uncomfortable about this manifesto and its use. Why does the manifesto need to be made public in this disposable way? Why do we need 'a product'?

Manifesto Sleeves

So I did some research to see what it would cost to put the little jewels we came up with in last class on to coffee cup sleeves. According to Printed Cups UK, the minimum quantity we can order is 1,000, and for the 12-16 oz size sleeve (with 1 color) it would cost 148.75, for a 2 color sleeve it is 168.75. There is also a one off charge of 95.00 per order. This could all be done within a week to two weeks. This is just one idea, so do with it what you will.

The Outsider is me!

Just a note that I published the previous post using my existing blogger account, which showed as "The Outsider".

/Mohamed

The Year of Taba’a (The Great ‘Sinking’)

The Arabian Gulf (aka Persian Gulf, but the Arabs of the region, including me, will not call it that off course!), is mostly known around the world for its oil fortunes. But, like other places, it had its share of disasters, both natural and man-made: wars (naturally!), earthquakes (in Iran), plane crashes, and storms.

This post is about a disaster of the last kind: the great sea storm of 1925. People in the gulf call it the “Taba’a” (the ‘sinking’) because when it happened, it sank almost all the ships in the gulf. In Arabic, a “Taba’a” also means a “print” or an “imprint”. The “Taba’a” catastrophe was imprinted for decades on the gulf people’s minds and souls.

In the third decade of the twentieth century, the gulf states economy was still impoverished. It was based on pearl diving, palm cultivation, and fishing. Devastating storms were not a frequent event in the generally calm waters of the gulf, but they were not unheard of either. There were several “sinkings” other than that of 1925, like the “Kuwaiti’s sinking” when in 1871 Kuwaiti trading ships where stormed and sunk while they were on their way back from Muscat and India just before reaching the Straits of Hormuz. Other “sinkings” happened inside the gulf waters in 1910, and in 1916.

The “sinking” of 1925 was by far the most devastating. Bahrain, the island in the middle of the gulf, lost about 5,000 of its population that night (its total population was less than 80,000!).

On a quiet September night in 1925, the pearl diving season was coming to an end with only two days left for the ships to sail back to the shore. Early that night, all the ships have taken their positions on their designated “dives”. The crews were preparing for their pearl diving rounds first thing in the morning.

It was a full moon and the sea was so quiet, as one survivor remembered. Many sailors stayed awake on the decks chatting and resting in what appeared to be a pleasant night. Little after midnight, the weather changed suddenly. A strong wind blew accompanied by heavy torrential rain. The sea roared beneath the ships taking them by surprise. Everyone on board ran for cover. Just a few moments afterwards, every cover blew away. The ships, which were stationed close to each other, started twirling hysterically in the sea and crashed into each other.

The screams of sailors fighting the monstrous waves and calling for each other, mixed with the groans of those injured by the ships wreckage. Their outcries of prayers and supplications to God, in which they deeply believed, were lost in the thundering noise of the sinking ships.

The mayhem lasted for a little over half an hour. When the storm finally waned down, ships from neighbouring ports rushed to the scene to rescue the survivors. It was said that 80% of the ships on the gulf water that night sank, and even the ships that did not sink sustained great damage.

In the morning, the sea surface was crowding with dead corpses. The scores of torn naked bodies floating in the water were the inscription of the brief catastrophic event. The survivors returned to the shores severely injured and traumatised.

Cut out and keep

Concluding Session of the Catastrophe Committee

1. The catastrophe is always closer than you think.
2. Fuck! Unpack.
3. In case of catastrophe, expose yourself.
4. Men, cover your heads with the symbolic. Women, lift your skirts for the sublime.
5. Take the catastrophe in every orifice and smile for the camera.
6. Exploit your catastrophe before others do.
7. Use skeleton key to access death drive.
8. You are the biohazard.
9. Catastrophe ToReachPast ChaosPatter RotPastAche ThatACorpse
10. When the sun goes out we will all be stars.

Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau

Mind Map from Tuesday October 28th

Mind Map from Friday October 24th

In this fine example of tragic loop, the wheatherman has to relive the same tedious day(and reenact his grumpy self) over and over again. However, unlike in greek tragedies and nuclear accidents, normality is restored through "personal improvement", thus not passed on to next generations. Or maybe we'll see Bill Murray's great great granchildren in a remake of the Groundhog day .

The Terminal Classic

this article in today's guardian debates whether we are heading for Maya II: The Eternal Return, and posits the following catastrophic equation:

when
environment + economy + politics > technology = disaster

however, by fusing the binary nature/culture (Foucault and Derrida are guffawing...) apparently we may be able to save ourselves with now superior technology and the 2009 Spring/Summer trend 'natural capital'.

staggered event-structure

Event-structures are staggered. This doesn't mean there is no event, or that the event doesn't matter, but rather that to understand it we have to see it as played out over time, in a series of repetitions and reiterations and mediations. Notice the implicit importance of witnessing in this passage:

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-pace, to the old ineradicable rhythm…

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 1936

The Whiteness of the Whale

Pondering the terror conveyed by the colour white, Melville writes in Moby-Dick:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

About black and white

According to additive colour theory (colour generated as light),

Black is the lack, the absence of any possible colors in the visible light spectrum - and therefore not a colour - while

White, on the contrary, is the combination of all of all possible colors in the visible light spectrum, which is more usually explained as being "all the colors of the rainbow". That is, if you take the classical round wheel we've learnt at school (a round disk with red, yellow and blue being the primary colours in its opposite thirds) and then spin the colour wheel, the result you will get is white.

In the Lament of images (Alfredo Jaar, 2002) it could be thus interesting how it is sometimes the exposition to all sort of colours that turns us blind - just like the overexposure to images of catastrophe can turn us finally pathetic.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_black_and_white_if_they_are_not_colors ; http://www.colormatters.com/vis_bk_white.html

catastrophic space (beirut)

a friend in america sends me this link:

http://www.partizanpublik.nl/catastrophicspace/

Mind Map from Friday, October 17th

Exhibition: This is War

https://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=8029

The Barbican has a new exhibition of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro's war photography which may be interesting to view after reading the Sontag book. Another part of the exhibition is artists' responses to Iraq and Afghanistan.

iitmari

"cryptic" telegrams in henry james's portrait of a lady.

after our discussion on the encoding and decoding of messages yesterday, i couldn't resist posting this passage from henry james's portrait of a lady:

'I see - very kind of her,' said Lord Warburton. 'Is the young lady interesting?'

'We hardly know more about her than you; my mother has not gone into details. She chiefly communicates with us by means of telegrams, and her telegrams are rather inscrutable. They say women don't know how to write them, but my mother has thoroughly mastered the art of condensation. "Tired America, hot weather awful, return England with niece, first steamer decent cabin." That's the sort of message we get from her - that was the last that came. But there had been another before, which I think contained the first mention of the niece. "Changed hotel, very bad, impudent clerk, address here. Taken sister's girl, died last year, go to Europe, two sisters, quite independent." Over that my father and I have scarcely stopped puzzling; it seems to admit of so many interpretations.'

'There's on thing very clear in it,' said the old man; 'she has given the hotel-clerk a dressing.'

'I'm not even sure of that, since he has driven her from the field. We thought at first that the sister mentioned might be the sister of the clerk; but the subsequent mention of a niece seems to prove that the allusion is to one of my aunts. Then there was a question as to whose the two other sisters were; they are probably two of my late aunt's daughters. But who's "quite independent," and in what sense is the term used? - that point's not yet settled. Does the expression apply more particularly to the young lady my mother has adopted, or does it characterise her sisters equally? - and is it used in a moral or in a financial sense? Does it mean that they've been left well off, or that they wish to be under no obligations? or does it simply mean that they're fond of their own way?'

'Whatever else it means, it's pretty sure to mean that,' Mr Touchett remarked.

[a couple of chapters later, the sender of the "inscrutable" telegrams, Mrs Touchett, arrives back in England, and her son asks her]:

'What you meant then, in your telegram, was that her character's independent.'

'I never know what I mean in my telegrams - especially those I send from America. Clearness is too expensive.'

[perhaps it isn't only the receivers of messages who are at fault when it comes to mis/interpretations? and what is there to be said for mis/communication between sexes?]

hopkins vs mallarmé

By the way, if anyone's at a loss for an essay topic, a comparison between Hopkins shipwreck poem below and Mallarmé's shipwreck poem/manifesto 'Un Coup de Dés' would be a very interesting exercise.

This is my nephew's homework. "Imagine...you are on an expedition when a dormant volcano becomes violently active."

hopkins

Jamie's post is bang on the money. I want to post Hopkins's 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', but it's way too long. I'll post a link to it, and just two stanzas. Five exiled Franciscan nuns die in the wreck of the ship Deutschland - and five is the number of vowels in the alphabet and wounds on Christ's body. So the catastrophe is the route by which godhead enters and ravishes us, shows us its divine sexy mangled body:


Loathed for a love men knew in them,
Banned by the land of their birth,
Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;
Surf, snow, river and earth
Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light; 165
Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,
Thou martyr-master: in thy sight
Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.

22

Five! the finding and sake
And cipher of suffering Christ. 170
Mark, the mark is of man’s make
And the word of it Sacrificed.
But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,
Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced—
Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token 175
For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.


The whole poem can be seen online here:

http://www.bartleby.com/122/4.html

The American War

In light of Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, I thought it might be interesting to look at a recent example of an artist dealing with images of war. Harrell Fletcher's American War is an exhibition that presents the contents of a museum in Ho Chi Minh City, re-photographed and presented in various galleries around the USA. In America, no such museums exist, and certainly none curated with such a direct focus on atrocity and violence. Even the solemn list of names in Maya Lin's Vietnam War Veteran's Memorial is more some can take. As for Harrell's intervention, I can't claim that it takes a critical stance on the images, but rather puts them through a series of framing devices (his camera, the gallery) to affect their meaning. You can see a selection of the work and read his statement on the website.

Mind Map from Thursday October 9th

Methodist Madness

I just came across this hymn composed by Charles Wesley in response to Lisbon, and thought it might be worth posting. In Part 2 it is Jesus’s wounds into which we are enjoined to ‘sink’ ourselves; this provides the Kantian safe place from which to 'view the final scene', enjoying the sight of the destroying Lord, ‘Sublime upon his azure throne’. The disaster as cinematic triumph for those spared; and a reminder that Ballard’s erotics can be traced back to a tradition of religious allegory. This also makes it possible to understand the final image of Vaughan, in the lifting aircraft freighted with his semen, as a transcendental rise, with his apostle Ballard left to spread the message by designing the elements of his own car crash.

An Hymn upon the Pouring Out of the Seventh Vial, Rev. xvi, xvii, etc., Occasioned by the
Destruction of Lisbon.

[Part 1.]

1
Woe! To the men, on earth who dwell,
Nor dread th’ Almighty frown,
When God doth all his wrath reveal,
And shower his judgments down!
Sinners, expect those heaviest showers,
To meet your God prepare,
When lo! The seventh angel pours
His vial in the air!

2
A voice out of the temple cries,
And from th’ eternal throne,
And all the storms of vengeance rise,
When God declares ’TIS DONE!
’TIS DONE! Ten thousand voices join
T’ applaud his righteous ire,
And thunders roll, and light’nings shine,
That set the world on fire.

3
The mighty shock seems now begun,
Beyond example great,
And lo! The world’s foundations groan
As at their instant fate!
Jehovah shakes the shattered ball,
Sign of the general doom!
The cities of the nations fall,
And Babel’s hour is come.

4
Lo! From their roots the mountains leap,
The mountains are not found,
Transported far into the deep,
And in the ocean drowned!
Jesus descends in dread array
To judge the scarlet whore:
And every isle is fled away,
And Britain is no more!

5
She sinks beneath her ambient flood,
And never more shall rise:
The earth is gone, on which we stood,
The old creation dies!
Who then shall live? And face the throne,
And face the Judge severe?
When earth and heaven are fled and gone,
O where shall I appear?

Part 2.

1
Now only now against that hour
We may a place provide
Beyond the grave, beyond the power
Of hell our spirits hide:
Firm in the all-destroying shock
May view the final scene,
For lo! The everlasting Rock
Is cleft, to take us in.

2
By faith we find the place above,
The Rock that rent in twain,
Beneath the shade of dying LOVE,
And in the clefts remain:
Jesus, to thy dear wounds we flee,
We sink into thy side,
Assured that all who trust in thee,
Shall evermore abide.

3
Then let the thundering trumpet sound,
The latest light’nings glare,
The mountains melt, the solid ground
Dissolve as liquid air.
The huge celestial bodies roll
Amidst that general fire,
And shrivel as a parchment-scrowl,
And all in smoke expire.

4
Yet still the Lord, the Saviour reigns,
When nature is destroyed,
And no created thing remains
Throughout the flaming void:
Sublime upon his azure throne
He speaks th’ almighty word:
His fiat is obeyed: tis done,
And paradise restored.

5
So be it: let this system end,
This ruinous earth and skies,
The New Jerusalem descend,
The new creation rise:
Thy power omnipotent assume,
Thy brightest majesty,
And when thou dost in glory come,
My Lord, remember me!

Catastrophic Charts

Marko kicked off with Ultravox, I submit The Normal's tribute to J.G's masterwork. All contributions to Catastrophe in Pop welcome! Can we get a top 40?

Officially The Best Cinematic Explosion Ever...!

"...in Antonioni, the face disappeared at the same time as the character and the action, and the affective instance is that of the any-space-whatever, which Antonioni in turn pushes as far as the void..." Deleuze

Antonioni's counter-culture classic Zabriskie Point was an economic catastrophe for producers MGM. Featuring the usual meanderings of a couple of disaffected drop-out 'protagonists', it asks what solace might remain to be discovered in the generative potential of the desert - the leitmotif of today's talks. What sublime can the counter-culture fabricate from hated capitalist totems? Something like Burroughs' auto-annihilating cinema perhaps...Following the temporary respite of a sex/death orgy in the terminal heat, the film's famous extended final sequence dissolves (evolves?) into an orgiastic cultural freefall, where materialist junk becomes, with the help of Pink Floyd, the ultimate sublime ally. Endless repetitions, more concertina collisions and the ambiguous smile of Daria, silently bearing witness to the secret of the disaster's internal beauty and then 'just walking out'.

'gash' jacket

at south kensington underground station not long after our talks about frankenstein and wounds. i wish i could have gotten a clearer picture of this black lace cutout..

incest and disgust

The thing I forgot to tell you all about Bryon, the second reason why he was a scandalous figure in England in 1818 (apart from his support of the Luddites): he and his half-sister Augusta Leigh were publicly carrying on an incestuous liaison!

A ref for the mention I made in relation to disgust, and whether we find something disgusting or aesthetically attractive: 'The Torture Garden', by Octave Mirbeau, a French novel published in 1899. Amazing book set in a garden in which torture is practiced as an art form. The narrator is repulsed as he's led around by a sensuous and depraved, but ultimately perversely-enlightened English woman named Clara. It's just been republished in English by Bookkake, with an introduction by - oh! (fancy that!) me:

http://bookkake.com/books/

Lyotard and the sublime.

Speaking of the sublime, Lyotard says that it is the Now, the very Heideggerian moment of Happening, which is always inseparable from his idea of the Differend - the unspeakable, insurmountable silence or aporia. The incommunicable fact of witnessing or non-witnessing. The moment of the Now, in bearing witness, is always inaccessible, cut off. Can we experience the sublime?

Lyotard's favourite example of the sublime in avant-garde art is Barnett Newman, whose work seems to remind me of these gaps, silences, or incisions in communication. Lyotard's sublime is never separable from the silence of bearing witness.

The Royal Road

Two excerpts spliced together from Adam Curtis's excellent Century Of The Self, a documentary about the use and abuse of psychoanalysis and psychology by state and business (Freud's American nephew, Edward Bernays helped introduce the world to the art of 'Public Relations' for some fairly sinister ends). The first excerpt is of psychoanalyst Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud's daughter) and the second of Bill Schlackman, a psychologist speaking about his time working for Ernest Dichter, pioneering marketing researcher in 1950's America.

J. G. Ballard's The Terminal Beach (1964)

The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, microseconds in duration, of thermonuclear time. Typically the island inverted the geologist’s maxim, ‘The key to the past lies in the present.’ Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.

You can read the full text of this short story here on pages 125-145.


Infomercial describing the first test of a hydrogen bomb in 1952 at Eniwetok, setting for The Terminal Beach.

A Palimpsest?

Is seems that disasters or catastrophes supersede mere interpretation or mere understanding. They even surpass sheer description. Their qualitative and quantitative values that cannot be so easily isolated and examined. Perhaps “isolation” could be a wrong approach. Perhaps disasters and catastrophes should be perceived only in_association_with and in_relation_to i.e. human existence and psychic, and therefore anthropomorphic. An interesting observation is also the fact the catastrophes caused sequentially by nature, move in a hermeneutical cycle, instead of moving towards recurring mechanistic circles of causalities. This hermeneutical cycle seems to elevate 'new awareness' due to the previous stages in the cycle causing thus multiple layers of awareness_es and thus a deeper understanding.

A few pictures: 1] from an earthquake in 1953 in Zante, Greece where my grandmother almost lost her life and my father had to change his life radically in order to support his family. 2] working on the visual representation of a catastrophy.

Mind Map from Friday, October 3rd

Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962)

I don't think my text posted properly with those photos, so here it is again:

Bataille kept these photographs of a Chinese prisoner being tortured to death on his desk, so he could look at them every day.   He uses an intriguingly catastrophic turn of phrase when discussing the erotic appeal of the images:

"The young and seductive Chinese I spoke of, at the mercy of the torturer's skill, I loved him of a love free of sadistic instinct.  He communicated to me his pain, or rather his excess of pain, and it was precisely this which I sought, not to enjoy, but to ruin in me what resisted ruination."

The ruination of the self is perhaps the lure of catastrophe, that which draws Herzog and the viewer inside the exclusion zone.  The erotic charge, for Bataille, lies in the momentary dissolution of the self, "the fusion of the object and the subject [...] to escape from isolation, from the compression of the individual."

This isolation haunts Murakami: the indifference the characters display towards their absent relatives, separated from them by a mundane catastrophe that never appears in the text, is mirrored in images of entrapment.  Satsuki dreams she is a "rabbit in a hutch", Miyake imagines himself suffocating to death in a refrigerator, while Sala has nightmares about the Earthquake Man putting her in a tiny box.  Fleeting moments of ek-stasis offer the only consolation: Junko's "wad of feeling" when she contemplates a bonfire recalls Blanchot's "primal scene", while Yoshiya escapes his search for meaning in dance, feeling "the whole forest was inside of him."  Bataille could have been describing Murakami's world when he writes: "We are discontinuous beings, individuals dying isolated in an unintelligible adventure, but we feel nostalgia for a lost continuity."

Like Herzog awaiting the eruption, however, we find ourselves in a catch 22 situation.  The self cannot be abolished by the self; if such a thing were possible, the self would no longer be there to witness it.  The best we can hope for is to reduce the self to momentary "ruination": collapsed but still present.  Blanchot's paradoxical phrase is the "pas au-dela", the step/not beyond.  Throughout Blanchot, we get the feeling this is the true disaster, our inability to think what is beyond comprehension, "that in thought itself which dissuades us from thinking of it."

Bataille's catastrophic ecstasy

It is forbidden!

Some of you may recall this sequence of events: Against the wishes of his now-extinct father, Superman takes control of time and space as he boorishly turns back the clock to save his ladyfriend from the jaws of an earthquake caused by Luthor's hijacked nuclear missile. The actual consequences of all this temporal tomfoolery continue to be a hot topic in Superman focus-groups. As one blogger reports: 'the kinetic energy to stop and reverse the earth in the time shown would probably boil the oceans. Hell it would probably boil the crust.' Quite.

Ballard's Crash

Contrary to popular belief, Cronenberg wasn't the first to adapt Ballard's work for the screen. Here is Harley Cokeliss' 1971 film of the same name, starring Ballard himself, that happens to predate the book by two years. The relationships between this film, Ballard's short story, his novel, and then Cronenberg's film, are somewhat winding, but it makes me think that there are always crashes rather than the single, lonely event.

the neglected image, restored.

After an apt interval, here is Icarus, or a splayed foot in the bottom right hand corner. Although formally appearing to receive short shrift (less seismic than the whale which amused us in today's class), his near absence is perversely the focus - playing in to our discussions of perspective, fragments and aporia.

Also a link to an interesting article about Auden, his collaboration with Isherwood on the hybrid mediation of the 'catastrophic' Sino-Japanese War, Ovid, and wider representational combats between the fatalistic heroes and anonymous victims of disaster. It's here -

http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/current/31n4nemerov.html

brueghel's fall of icarus

Earthquake compilation

This is the selection of earthquake money shots, with which the National Geographic youtube channel invites viewers to See earthquakes pound San Francisco and pulverize Taiwan.

Housekeeping

Just to say that I've now sent out invitations to all of you, to the email addresses you registered with the London Consortium so please sign up and post.

You've got two options: you can either respond to an existing article (comment) or write a new article (post). Over to you!

And Now Bad Cop

PS On a more authoritarian note: the 'Reading' items listed under each week's session are mandatory. The longer list at the bottom is optional. Please all read Ballard's *Crash* and the two Freud chapters before the next session.

Tom McC

NEW IMPROVED CATASROPHE: IT'S BACK, AND THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL...

Welcome to the blog, everyone. Thanks for making the first session of 08 come alive. Loads of ground covered: intervals and aporia, sacred porn (the crucifixion as a snuff movie through which we can live out our own death/orgasm and find our own redemption in the process), comedy and tragedy, and much, much more besides.

Being a writer 'n stuff, I'm going to paste two poems. One is Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, which I cited as displaying the type of 'nostalgia in advance' that was so magnificently captured in the Herzog film we saw the first ten minutes of:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

(Another instance of this, in which the hero literally travels in time from after the disaster to just before, so that he can (pre)mourn things while they're still there, might be Chris Marker's brilliant 'La Jetée', which I believe you can now watch in its entirety on Youtube or Ubuweb (does someone more technically advanced than me want to post that here?)

The other poem I'd like to past is Auden's 'Musée de Beaux Arts'. I was reminded of it by what Marko said about the catastrophe that doesn't register because no one cares enough about it. Auden is commenting on Breughel's 'The Fall of Icarus', in which Icarus's disastrous plunge is ignored by the farmer and the sailors:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on

Again, perhaps someone can post the Breughel image here.

Best,

Tom McC