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