Like a scene from a movie (repeat)

Meteorite-like object falls in Latvia

Readings for session six

Please note that the readings for session six are the following two texts by Guy Debord, replacing the Futurist Manifesto.

Détournement as Negation and Prelude (1959) http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/3.detourn.htm

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988) http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html

joyce on facts

Re all the facts and judicial processes we've been discussing, this passage from Finnegans Wake came to mind:

Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible where his adjugers are semmingly freak threes but his judicandees plainly minus two. Nevertheless Madam's Toshowus waxes largely more lifeliked (entrance, one kudos; exits, free) and our notional gullery is now completely complacent, an exegious monument, aerily perennious.

So much going on here: deed-poll becomes leg-pull, Horace's line Exegi monumentum aere perennius ('I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze') becomes a gutted shell (another crypt?). Earlier in the book we're told:

'in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightiness that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls'

notice the riff on Scheherazade: in lieu of pure fact/truth, we have endless narrative, at stake in which is a woman's life: if she stops narrating, she gets the chop!

we are connected through...and through

Ken Loach's piece in 11'09"01 September 11

I saw this when it came out in 2002. IMDB

Interview with Alfredo Jaar from December 2008

http://www.euroalter.com/2008/interview-with-alfredo-jaar/

It was like a scene from a movie!

"Taken together, the energy crisis and the ecological mise-en-scène are themselves a disaster movie, in the same style (and with the same value) as those that currently comprise the golden days of Hollywood. It is useless to laboriously interpret these films in terms of their relation to an 'objective' social crisis or even to an 'objective' phantasm of disaster. It is in another sense that it must be said that it is the social itself that, in contemporary discourse, is organised along the lines of a disaster-movie script."

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation (Sheila Faria Glaser, trans.)

link to PM talking about climate catastrophe

mind map from 12.10.09

Reading and Catastrophe

Here's an article on reading and catastrophe I found in the latest issue of Geist, a Canadian literary magazine. A bit sentimental but good read.

http://www.geist.com/opinion/reading-time-catastrophes

Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice Series, n. 16. 1994-96

Eurydice, Bracha Ettinger

Bracha Ettinger was the artist/theorist/psychoanalyst I mentioned in class, and there is a good section on her work in a book by the art historian/cultural analyst Griselda Pollock, 'Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, space and the archive' (Routeledge, 2007), which is in itself eerily relevant to lots of what we seem to be talking about in class.

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is central to Ettinger's work, she posits a distinction between an 'Orphic' and a 'Matrixial' gaze in the art-viewing experience: as we look back (in time), like Orpheus looked behind him in the myth, we consign Eurydice (the viewed subject) to objectivity, abandoned at the mouth of Hell. Ettinger's series entitled 'Eurydice' (1994-8) uses photographs (sometimes of her mother, for example as a young woman in Lodz in 1937-8), which she photocopies, interrupting the copying process so the photocopic dust does not fix to the paper. Crucial to her theory (the bit I forgot) of ''reconnaissance'', a word which the artist splits up into its constituent parts (re-co-naissance), a 'co-re-birthing' of subjectivity, Ettinger then uses tiny horizontal brush strokes of coloured paint to 'join up' the gaps in the dust, to build a a membrane between the image looking out, and the gaze of the viewer. Pollock says it better: "colour in its vibration creates space, and the space it creates becomes an affective threshold that reaches out to embrace the viewer in a thickening of what lies between viewer and image, now and then/m, that binds seer and seen, world and subject, image and psyche.''

The Matrixial gaze (as an alternative to the Orphic aggression of looking as possessing), is an idea which is linked to Levinas' idea of 'matrixial painting', and to say it with Pollock once again, it is related to a way of looking in which "our unsighted eyes become what she [Ettinger] calls 'erotic aerials' of the psyche.''

If I'm clever enough I'll post some images from the Eurydice series, so get your Matrixial glasses at the ready...

etching

How good to see a work of art being put forward as an 'exhibit'. Perhaps we could get an image of it on the blog Alex.

Also, Helen mentioned an artist who photocopies her parents: perhaps an image or two, or a link...?

Group 1's Victory Picture

Hello everyone.

I'm sorry for the delay in posting this. I meant to do it last week but I had to work on this week's presentation with some beautiful people.

So, here's group one, victorious after their presentation.

I've not seen someone with a pen behind their ear since my nan hired a 'fella' to plaster her front room in the 90s.

For Tom, Fixed

Video link in correct aspect ratio here.

For Tom

oh for crying out loud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCWzQSQwNxk&feature=related

does someone know how to make this into a hyperlink?

url

didn't seem to appear on last post

double take

'scuse the plug, but here's a trailer for the film by Johan Grimonprez for which I wrote the story. It's all about the Cold War and catastrophe. It premieres in London next week:

Thu 15 Oct | 16:15 | NFT1

Fri 16 Oct | 20:30 | NFT2 (followed by Q&A with the producer)

Mon 19 Oct | 16:30 | ICA 1 (followed by Q&A with the director)

Johan's other film, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, is perhaps even more relevant to our subject: full of airline hijack footage. It won the Documenta Prize a decade ago.

Old Man Atom

Here's a link to Alice's song and here's a link to the info about it. If the video link doesn't work let me know; I set it to only allow limited views to avoid getting into trouble for copyright material.

Hiroshima Research..

Hi All.

we left our bibliography and a download of our PPT at www.shainhouse.com/hiroshima.

and here's it copied/pasted:

- Nick, Shain, Jacob and Kai.

Hiroshima

Here is a list of all the materials we found/sourced for the presentation.

Link to PPT –> http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhtr4vvd_231g554gjck

- Shain, Kai, Nick, Jacob (and Helen - the mindmapess).

Course Materials:
J.G.Ballard, Crash, London, 1973
Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Lecture 17 (The Sense of Symptoms) and Lecture 18 (Fixation to Traumas-The Unconscious). (296-326, i.e. 30 pages in the Penguin Complete Freud, Vol. 1, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis)

Further Reading on Crash:
www.jgballard.com
www.ballardian.com

Further Explanation of Freud:
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/psychoanalysis/freud5.html

Barefoot Gen, The Atomic Bomb and I:
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Nakazawa-Keiji/2638

Hiroshima and the Power of Pictures: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/hiroshima-and-the-power-of-pictures

Hiroshima Picture Gallery:
http://fogonazos.blogspot.com/2007/02/hiroshima-pictures-they-didnt-want-us_05.html

Ken Domon Photo Archive / Essay:
http://japan-photo.info/blog/tag/ken-domon/
and book: http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/ro/gj13019/gjlivres/livres/livre_r180.htm
or: http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/ro/gj13019/gjlivres/livres/livre_r180.htm

Japanese Landscape:

http://home.nps.gov/pwr/customcf/apps/ww2ip/assets/images/event/detail/main_1945hiroshima.jpg

John Hersey’s Hiroshima:
http://www.amazon.com/Hiroshima-John-Hersey/dp/0679721037

The Hiroshima Panels (Memorials) - 1950-82
http://www.aya.or.jp/~marukimsn/english/INTRODUCTION.htm
http://www.japanfocus.org/data/nanjing-1975marukis.JPG
http://www.aya.or.jp/~marukimsn/english/genbakuE.htm

The Remembering of Hiroshima as Trauma in Post-War Japan:
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/4/6/3/p94639_index.html

Routine Investigations (slide 5)
http://routineinvestigations.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html

Atomic Archive / Charts (from slide 2):
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Maps/HiroshimaMap.shtml

The Music We Played: Krzysztof Penderecki
‘Threnody To the Victims of Hiroshima’ (1960)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfBVYhyXU8o

Google Earth Images / Modern Hiroshima:

On Blanchot's the Outside

I don’t know that much about Blanchot’s work, only the parts I read carefully. Describing the Outside [le dehors] is difficult – and possibly ‘impossible’ because Blanchot questions the very act of defining and positing anything. It’s hard to write rigorously without getting tangled up into layers upon layers of sub-clauses, qualifications and parenthetical remarks. But I, personally, have always found it somewhat helpful to begin by naively introducing the Outside as simply the Outside: that which is ‘radically’ outside of anything and everything – particularly, in the case of Blanchot, outside of Being, of thinking, and of language. Le dehors is, in a sense, language’s ‘other’.

The cool thing is that the Outside is so infinitely exterior that it ‘tunnels to the other side’ and becomes infinitely interior (hence, its so-called rustling intimacy). Being exterior even to exteriority itself, the Outside is, in a sense, neutral with respect to in versus out, here versus beyond, and immanence versus transcendence. We may crudely say that the Outside is what is both outside and at the ‘heart’ of language, what is both within and without. So the spatiality goes haywire here and becomes less rigid or less geometric, at least in the Euclidean sense.

Moreover, this non-relation, this absolute separation from everything, makes the relation with the Outside an infinite relation, the most ‘authentic’ of relations. The event of this relation might be worthy of being called an Event or even, in some cases, a Catastrophe or a Disaster.

Another crude way to introduce the Outside is by comparing it to the ‘primal Khaos’ of the ancient Greeks: the original disorder or background noise from which everything bubbles forth or ‘froths’ out.

“Events are the foam of things, but what I am interested in is the sea,” writes Paul Valery. And we could say that almost every philosopher –I am over-generalizing, I know – has devised his/her own vocabulary to help speak of this first ‘sea’: negativity in the dialectic (for Hegel); Dionysian energy (for Nietzsche); Sein & then Earth (for Heidegger); God (for those who believe); the Unconscious & the Id (Sigmund); il y a & the Other (Levinas); the Dao (Daoists); Dan (certain Asian philosophies); transgression (Bataille); vitality & the virtual (Deleuze); ur-noise (Serres); turbulent nonlinearity (chaos theorists); the generic set (Badiou); bla bla bla.

Blanchot uses other terms as well, like ‘the Other Night’, ‘the Obscure’, ‘the Unknown’ and ‘the Neutral’. He came to talk a lot about the Outside in an earlier book, ‘The Space of Literature’. The most famous secondary literature on this topic is Foucault’s ‘Maurice Blanchot & the Thought from the Outside’. There’s also the second section to Deleuze’s book on Foucault, which is, in a way, Deleuze’s rather idiosyncratic reading of Foucault’s rather idiosyncratic reading of Blanchot.

levinas

Christopher asked me to summarize Levinas's thought today, and I said this was impossible in a sentence. But I think the important point for us is that he doesn't see trauma as something to be 'cured' and moved beyond - rather, it is the precondition of ethics. In other words, it is only by remaining *within* trauma that we can be ethical subjects. Why? Because we are split open by the other. This is an anti-positivist and ultimately anti-humanist stance. As he writes:

‘I am not merely the origin of myself, but I am disturbed by the Other. Not judged by the Other, but condemned without being able to speak, persecuted. But we have shown that it is necessary to go further: to be substitutable for the persecutor; whence the idea of responsibility preceding freedom.’

and:

‘Modern antihumanism, which denies the primacy that the human person, a free end in itself, has for the signification of being, is true over and above the reasons it gives itself. It makes a place for subjectivity positing itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, and in substitution. Its great intuition is to have abandoned the idea of person as an end in itself. The Other (Autrui) is the end, and me, I am a hostage.’

re this 'hostage' idea:

‘It is through the condition of being a hostage that there can be pity, compassion, pardon and proximity in the world’

and yet, at the same time:

‘the past of the Other must never have been present.’

Thinking of 'Hiroshima mon Amour' again: it is precisely because of all the substitutions and ruptures and eruptions (of one subject into another, one unnamed past into the present and so on) that a set of ethical relations are established. I think it's a beautiful film for this reason - and many others...

Outside

To a certain extent, this is directed at our resident Blanchot expert, but of course all impressions are appreciated:

How do you understand Blanchot's use of the term "outside"?

"A tear of petrol is in your eye / As the handbrake penetrates your thigh"

Warm Leatherette by The Normal (aka Daniel Miller), a 1978 transmediation of Crash.

Kinda jokey, but the label Miller founded went on to release the work of Diamanda Galas, whose LPs about AIDS and the Armenian genocide constitute pretty much incomparable attempts to address catastrophe via sound and performance...

Cai Guo-Qiang, Memory, Energy Transferral and Catastrophe

This a long one, my apologies in advance. Frankly, a good deal of the information presented is contextual, as I am unsure of the degree of familiarity many of you have with the Chinese artistic tradition. It does relate to catastrophe though on some level, I assure you. It just takes a bit of time to get there.

Some time after posting that photo of Guadalcanal, I got to thinking about catastrophe in very rudimentary terms. Specifically, I began to consider the nature of all things that we consider catastrophic and came to the conclusion that at their most basic, they are all forms of energy transferral. Energy is transferred during a catastrophe in a number of ways: physically, chemically, through radioactive emissions and so on. This issue of energy transferral reminded me of an artist whose work I particularly enjoy, Cai Guo-Qiang. In essence, I would like to briefly discuss some of his works, which I believe may be framed as controlled "micro-catastrophes," and see if anything can be gleaned from them on the broader nature of catastrophe in the context of the "macro-catastrophes" around which the class has been structured.

The specific aspect of Cai's oeuvre that I'd like to discuss are his gunpowder drawings and potentially some his "social projects."* The creation of a gunpowder drawing entails the laying of cardboard stencils, fuses and powder over hemp paper. Wood is layered on top of these to control the dispersal of smoke and localize the explosion. All of the above are then weighted down with rocks and detonated by Cai, typically using a stick of incense.

There is a relationship between this mode of production and Daoist conceptions of art. Traditionally, the relationship of the viewer with the image in the Chinese context is not linear, as in Europe and North America**, but circular. It is an exchange of qi between the viewer and the image, with the image itself being a vessel of its creator's qi, under the tradition of biji. This tradition, translated as "trace of brush," encapsulates the belief that the artist is present within the image. The act of painting is thus the act of projecting oneself onto a medium. I would argue that the act of gunpowder drawing is analogous. The incense acts as a medium between the artist's body and the paper for the transferral of energy from body to surface.

Cai's first gunpowder drawing, Self-Portrait: A Subjugated Soul (1986), is a direct engagement with both biji and "spirit-resonance." First coined by Xie He***, who codified what was to be considered desirable in Chinese art for millennia, this term refers to the desirability of capturing the spiritual essence of the subject over physical mimesis. The volatility of gunpowder as a material is indexical of Cai's inner turmoil during this period.

From here, I would like to diverge from my discussion of art into one on catastrophe. Finally. If a catastrophe, is indeed a transferral of energy, do catastrophes have "spirit resonance?" In the case of disasters involving radiation, the answer is self evidently yes. Nuclear meltdowns and detonations irradiate the environment for decades after they occur, causing the catastrophe to linger. But what of the image of Guadalcanal? The site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War, though a seemingly quaint tropical paradise in the photo that I posted, skull aside. Without knowledge of the Second World War, it generally appears to be a good vacation spot. Sans skull. I'm thus tempted to say that we as human beings are the spirit of the disaster, it requires us to propagate.

In the above sentence, I have deliberately broken with the convention that I established earlier of resonance, by using the term propagate instead. I've done this as I've been racked with illness on more than one occasion the past couple of weeks, and this has given me the opportunity to consider what I would term the viral nature of catastrophe. In my experience, I have found that mass coverage of catastrophe doesn't negate the importance of catastrophe so much as free it from needing to occur. Blanchot particularly piqued my interest in this respect. The constant media coverage of disasters of all shapes and sizes occurring in a broad geographical space is internalized by us. To borrow from Christopher's post, when the New York Times reports on the disastrous impact of tainted hamburger meat on one young woman, the seemingly innocuous act of food preparation becomes tainted with the potential for catastrophe. When one's body is invaded by a virus, it reproduces by inserting rogue strands of DNA into the nuclei of the host's cells. I would argue, in a vaguely Jungian sense, that we are all carriers of the metaphorical DNA of hundreds of catastrophes transcending time and geography.

On the other hand, returning to Cai, perhaps the catastrophe's spirit is not of destruction. I would additionally argue that it is not one of rejuvenation either. One Maoist slogan of the Cultural Revolution was "no destruction, no construction." When a gunpowder drawing is created, nothing in the traditional sense has been constructed. But nothing has been destroyed. As any student of rudimentary chemistry will tell you, when a chemical reaction occurs energy may be released in myriad forms, but mass is conserved as a constant. The gunpowder may no longer be in its initial state, but it is still all there. Perhaps at their most simple, catastrophes are reconfigurations of mass initiated by a violent outburst of energy. Cai's The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century (1995-1998) illustrates this. Here he has painted a lingzhi mushroom, used to detoxify in traditional medicine, and stylized it as a mushroom cloud, balancing both rejuvenation and destruction.**** Perhaps we can thus say that the catastrophe is in fact a balanced and self-negating event. Considering this, a catastrophe needn't leave behind a wasteland or gleaming Haussmannised metropolis in order to resonate.

I feel like I've said a lot without reaching any definite conclusion. Feel free to gift me with your feedback.

*The relationship between Cai and the catastrophic is relatively evident here, considering that the namesake of these large scale works has its roots in the Cultural Revolution.

**I stress the term "traditionally" here, as this relationship has grown increasingly complicated in both contexts.

***Other literati painters who have written extensively on this concept are Guo Xi and Gu Kaizhi.

****Not to mention culture and intellectualism with violence and barbarism.

Some thoughts

Hi everyone. Firstly to all the non-Brits who thought last week’s weather was surprisingly nice: welcome to the English autumn.

A couple of points. Firstly I was considering the relation of a word to the concept it represents and the extent to which we need to think about the word ‘catastrophe’. I thought this consideration is perhaps necessary so that catastrophe doesn’t simply become whatever our committee wants it to be. (Would that be a problem? I don’t know). Is it useful for us to anchor our consideration of 'catastrophe' in language? Would this be restrictive / prescriptive or an interesting way of generating new perspectives on the concept?

The Greek root of ‘catastrophe’ (from the OED) contains many of the elements we discussed last week but, it seems to me, without the violent or negative connotations:

[a. Gr. overturning, sudden turn, conclusion, f. to overturn, etc., f. down + to turn.]

The fuller OED definition of ‘catastrophe’, part of which is at the top of the Catastrophe course webpage, emphasises more the ideas of Finality, Negativity, Suddenness, Revolution, Violence. Perhaps the usage of the word has gained this more negative slant over time - is this something we should consider? I thought particularly interesting is the co-existence of ‘finality’ and ‘revolution’, which to some extent seem to me to be in opposition. A ‘Blanchotian’ paradox perhaps.

I also turned the definition into a ‘wordle’ - a very nice (if useless) tool that can be found here. I did edit the text to get rid of a huge skew toward the word ‘catastrophe’ and terms such as I, II, III, etc.

Secondly, I’m wary of sounding unsophisticated here but wanted to propose the idea that [cliché alert] media sensationalism and “round-the-clock coverage” of events desensitise both the public and the media themselves to the possibility of catastrophe. We are told that everything is newsworthy (if not catastrophic): does this lead to a situation where nothing is? I suppose this theory hinges on the question of whether catastrophe as an occurrence in the world is relative or necessarily absolute. Anyway, something to think about I hope. Feel free to criticise - everybody seems to be too polite to comment on anybody else on the blog so far!

Finally, for your enjoyment...

Barney

Memorandum

Official Communication: re. Hiroshima, 06.08.45 (09.10.09)

i) Jacob Dreyer replaces Alex Donnelly as member of the Hiroshima sub-committee.

ii) Kai Liu and Helen Stokes have reversed their roles (mind-mapper/sub-committee member), to the greatest of satisfaction to both parties.

Catastrophe as Exception

Adorno has his famous line about there being no poetry after Auschwitz. This is a difficult statement to dismiss. In The Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben emphasizes the reconstructive power of the crimes of World War II (Agamben argues that the term holocaust is inadequate and inappropriate). He claims that ethical endeavors such as Nietzsche's Eternal Return of the Same are no longer valid in a world after World War II. His argument is rather simple. Nietzsche's Eternal Return is predicated on answering Yes to the angel who asks if you would be willing to experience everything, in every detail, with every pain, as it happened again and again for all eternity. By entering the horrors of the holocaust into this equation, Agamben sympathetically responds with an emphatic No. In this case a Catastrophe is not a descriptive term at all. Were it to be a general phenomenon, a catastrophe would never compromise the Eternal Return. Agamben is not alone in his fear of the concentration camps' ethical significance. Robert Mishari argues that there would be no Spinozism after the Holocaust, that adequate Reason thinking the idea of a perfect reality, becomes absurd. One might want to ask what catastrophes were like before World War II, if they still permitted Ethics of reason and Eternal Return. One might also have to confront that despite what seems the unbearable singularity of what happened during the past century, that it, like all the rest of what has been smoothed over by time, decays into the narrow confines of human forgetting. In either case, catastrophes have their own qualities, and the various resonances that are thought are reflections of them. And it would seem easy to remain locked in the past if the catastrophe there is valued supreme. On a smaller scale, psychological malfunction usually gets stuck in all its turmoil when grasping on to self-catastrophes, or making them up.

Super-Frog Saves Tokyo and Barefoot Gen

I have been thinking about what Marko said: representation is culturally specific and has its own history.

Murakami's Super-Frog story that is to say the image of Frog's disintegration (sickening smell, maggot like worms crawling out of Frog's body) reminded me of the images of Japanese victims of the atomic bomb as depicted in the manga Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa (a survivor himself): skins melting, maggots breeding in the wounds ...

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Nakazawa-Keiji/2638

Apropos extinction, archives, trauma and a whole bunch of other stuff, you should all go check out Gustav Metzger's show that opened at the Serpentine last week. Metzger invented 'auto-destructive art' in the sixties, burning sheet metal with flames and acid and the like. When The Who smashed their guitars and had all these caustic psychedelic displays in the background it was directly referencing that (indeed, I think Metzger even made their displays). He came to the UK as a Kindertransport refugee, and so much of his work is to do with displacement, and scraps. For me, his most powerful piece is 'The Angel of History' (after Benjamin after Klee), in which endless newspapers were piled up in a glass case that reproduced the one in which Eichmann was tried. Guardian images of the show:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/sep/28/gustav-metzger-serpentine

Tom McC

La Soufrière

Werner Herzog's La Soufrière (1977) , subtitled, "waiting for an unavoidable catastrophe" (that never happened) is a perfect example of the non-representability of catastrophe - in his case because it doesn't occur. Herzog, never happier than when he does the voiceover of assorted marginalised, doomed characters, produced this elegiac and hopelessly romantic documentary attempting to capture the threatened cataclysmic explosion of volcano and ended up arguing that the real catastrophe was that the catastrophe he was looking for, and which would have led to his death, never happened.

two points

#on catastrophe & repetition:
catastrophe is often associated with the new -- as a specific manifestation of novelty -- not only because a catastrophe has to be, to a certain extent, a surprise, a Bang, a deus ex machina, a rupture from the Outside, but also because it often creates the conditions for the new, for rebirth, etc -- as in the example discussed in the class about the destruction of a city in an earthquake, fire, tsunami etc. enabling for new buildings to be built, bla bla bla.

so, to a certain extent, this 'novelty' aspect about catastrophe is opposed to repetition, to the old.

but there's this cool, well-known & almost cliche idea -- probably popularized by Deleuze's Difference et Repetition -- although it probably comes from Nietzsche's infinite return (Blanchot also talks about it in the eternal return) -- that repetition and the new (i.e. difference) are both two sides of the same coin -- that they manifest or effectuate themselves through each other. of course, psychoanalysis talks about this as well.

#catastrophe theory
i also forgot about 'catastrophe theory', a subfield in mathematics that used to be quite popular several decades ago -- although the field is pretty much dead now and is no longer an active topic in research among mathematicians.

i remembered about catastrophe theory, this because the mathematician Rene Thom, the big dick in this field, appears in the reading list.

i don't have much background in the topic, but i remember thom's main result being the geometric classification of catastrophes in 2 dimensions (or was it 3?). we normally associate the catastrophe, the disaster & the event with the unsayable and the unstructurable. but it turns out, using thom's result, that the kinds of catastrophes is actually finite. this, of course, relates to chaos theory bla bla bla.

i guess the study of catastrophes in mathematics & science has been replaced with the more general study of geometrical singularities -- black holes, cusp moments, hironaka's theorem about the 'resolution of singularities', bla bla bla.

but there's also the question of in what sense can catastrophes be understood to exist in space & time, and whether a geometric & algebraic approach is justifiable and, if yes, what is the truth-status of such articulations.

Can I do this?

I'm a compulsive Tumblr who is utterly beyond rehabilitation. Something of substance coming soon.

A Skull Lying Half Covered by Sand on the Beach. Guadal Canal, Solomon Islands, June 1951. Photograph by Howard Sochurek.

reflections on the first session

apologies in advance for the relatively disjointed nature of what I've written here- it reflects a thought in the process of development, and not a finished idea. i'd really appreciate any input because i'm very much not quite clear about how I think about these things...

i've been thinking about the theme claire brought up about repetition. the postminimalist artist eva hesse said 'endless repetition can be considered erotic,' in this way i think referring to eroticism as 'play,'with a set of variables that are changed and new. this also follows claire's points about how disaster allows us to reconceptualize our situations and make the new- for example the city planner recreating lisbon, or contemporary reconstructions (lets remember that actually while they were around NYers hated the twin towers, famously an ugly blot on the skyline- and though the subsequent quest for a 9-11 memorial has been basically fruitless, it has for better or worse symbolized a concept of rethinking the city, a sort of regeneration, as when forest fires create an area of emptiness that are actually crucial for the long term health of forests). Or as harry lime says in the third man, ''in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.'' basically this simplistic idea is at the core of many more specific and complicated works- i'm thinking of 'radical reconstruction,' by lebbeus woods, which gives specific situations (sarajevo) and how destruction allowed for subsequent modification to the city. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Radical-Reconstruction-Lebbeus-Woods/dp/1568982860)

so if repetition is play, a constant alteration of a cultural continuum, then is the catastrophe itself repetitive?
Even though it seems bracing and unprecedented, we are used to our cities being destroyed- to the extent that most major metropoli have many imagined catastrophes (those imagined for los angeles, for example, written about in 'the ecology of fear' by mike davis; but paris has banlieue 13, new york has escape from new york (not to mention actually dozens of movies that imagine a destroyed new york, etc)
i got a sense from what claire was saying about how maybe, catastrophe can offer a relief from monotony, even if terrifying. it can offer us central narratives to build around perhaps?
well, thats a lot of details that seem disorderly. but I guess the real question is, is disaster a catalyst for modernism, and actually is modernism a catastrophe?
modernity has
-destroyed dialects, family links, traditional ways of life, religious practices, etc

I guess i'm trying mainly to work my mind around the idea of catastrophe as repetition- even though it seems that unprecedentedness and shock is built into the concept, it does seem that perhaps it is repetitious or serial in nature.

disaster of the ordinary

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/10/03/health/1247464978948/tainted-meat.html

Paul's mention of "poles of Infamy" and his "quiet" examples made me begin to muse about the scale and amplitude of catastrophe.

This article and video made think about the catastrophe of the everyday, the ordinary. While this class traces large scale disasters-known and reported, or as Marko pointed out- the unreported, large trees crashing in the woods. We are bombarded, usually via "the human interest story" with the always unfolding disaster of just getting out of bed. That cup of coffee is carcinogenic, that burger is blighted, the very dust in the corner of out rooms-quite unsettled, poisons us one-by-one.

Identifying the Intricate (and Two Stories!)

I would rather like to air some of my wonderings regarding catastrophe:

In this post, I don't want to question that catastrophe has endless meanings. I don't want to question anything at all, in fact. This thought shouldn't subvert anything; it's exploratory. Having been bombarded by images and theories surrounding Hiroshima (whose name has become synonymous with an attack, interestingly), suicide, earthquake, et cetera, I feel the need to become a little more sensitised to the intricacies of catastrophe and this post is only about one intricacy. It's difficult to position it, as I see it, but it's something to do with infamy, impact, and experience. I will try to explain more specifically in two sections below (Poles of Infamy, and Silence and Near Silence). Please remember that these sections are just mechanisms in order to identify what I want to discuss. It's not very easy to contribute to something intricate without going through where I think the intricacy is in the first place. Due to the personal and non-academic nature of those sections, it might seem unnecessary to some but, please, humour me!

Poles of Infamy

I see that Catastrophe can be dramatic and examples of such catastrophes are manifold: when I think 'catastrophe', 'disaster', 'cataclysm', or any other terms a thesaurus would recommend, I link it with 'bombs!', 'earthquakes!', 'death!'. The word does imply 'big things are happening and it's bloody obvious!'. Earthquakes, nukes, volcanic eruptions, if reported and in some way felt, roughly form one pole (for me, at least). Marko gave a great example of the other pole, when he mentioned the earthquake where all the witnesses died and it took days for news to filter of the destruction, by which point no one cared to report the quake internationally. This shows that a massively destructive quake needn't be infamous. Both poles don't have an ultimate: that is there isn't a 'most' infamous or a 'least' infamous, rather the poles are incredibly fuzzy but I want to focus in on some of the less infamous fuzz; something between the overt and reported and the unknown and unreported: perhaps something not quite silent but something extremely quiet, yet its impact may be far-reaching; the gravitational pull of such a disaster could be felt and not even known about! We might not even know that something had happened, however 'big' it was; it would just silently direct the flow of our existence. And I'm sure things like that do happen and do direct the flow of our existence and colour our experience of it, and we haven't the foggiest idea about it.

Silence and Near Silence

Now, I think I've identified what the Americans would call a 'ball park' and would like to draw an analogy. I want to think about an oft-cited lesson of John Cage and countless of his disciples: that there was no such thing as absolute silence. Even when you reach total sonic isolation in an anechoic chamber, you still hear the high buzz of your nervous system and low pumping of the blood around your body. With that in mind, I once produced a CD meant to relax me during one of my episodes of insomnia. I played recordings of incidental noises and gradually, and almost imperceptibly, faded them out over 40 minutes or so. That way, there would come a point, towards the end of the track, where the incidental noises on the CD would be a similar volume to the incidental noises in the room. I found that the noises nearer to the end of the track gave me heightened awareness of the 'silence'. I was consciously aware of silence, and the gaps in between almost inconceivable sound, half-imagining what true silence might be. At any rate, it got me to sleep!

I want to look at two micro-narratives from the same source in a similar way in order to approach things that might have massive affects but not be infamous (though, obviously, they are known about or I couldn't cite them). While we can't know the unknown, I think that we can approach its limits and half imagine it.

The Micro-Narratives

A few years ago, I saw a book that I wouldn't usually buy. The topic of animal extinction is of only minimal interest to me but this book, 'A Gap in Nature' (2001) by Flannery and Schouten was so remarkable in its presentation that I simply had to buy it. It profiles quite a few recently extinct animals and I want to reproduce two of those profiles as micro narratives in this blog. If I can get my scanner to work, I'll follow with beautiful pictures of those creatures!

Now, I've always liked micro-narratives and how fragments of information can work together to almost map out the contours of a much larger, inexpressible phenomenon. I see these two micro-narratives as contributing to an enormous pool of unidentified fragments, never to be united.

At last! Finally! I offer the Catastrophe Committee profiles of two extinctions that I find remarkable!

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Name: Huppe (Fregilupus varius)

Last Record: between 1835 and 1840.

Distribution: Reunion Island, Mascarenes.

'Starlings are great colonisers, and many islands once had their own distinct species, evolved from ancestors that arrived in the remote past. None was so peculiar as the hippe of Reunion Island, whose most distinctive feature was described by one ornithologist as a 'crest of pale, decomposed feathers'. Like man island birds, the hippe appears to have been remarkably unafraid of humans, and could even be knocked down with sticks. One resident wrote:

"their song was a clear note [and they were] very tame and, being young, I killed dozens of them. When I returned to the island after ten years in Paris, I found no further trace of them. I used to keep them in a cage without any trouble. They eat bananas, potatoes, cabbage etc."

The story is almost a parable of human interaction with vanished species, in which a carefree youth kills thoughtlessly, only to repent in maturity the loss of such magnificent creatures. The final cause of the huppe's demise may have been the introduction of rats and, given the above, their decline to extinction may have been swift. Given their adaptability to life with humans, it was a great pity that a captive population was not established.' (pp31)

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Name: Stephens Island Wren (Xenicus Iyalli)

Last Record: 1894.

Distribution: Prehistorically, North and South Islands, New Zealand; Historically, Stephens Island, New Zealand.

'Very few species have been exterminated by a single individual of another species, but such seems to have been the fate of this wren. Its last redoubt was Stephens Island in Cook Strait, between North and South Islands, where it survived until the New Zeealand government built a lighthouse there in 1894. The lonely lighthouse-keeper, David Lyall, decided that he must have a cat, and other a year or so that solitary feline exterminated the entire species. It brought them, one by one, to the lighthouse-keeper's door and, thinking them strange birds, Lyall sent seventeen little bodies for identification to a museum.

This, however, is not the entire story of this curious little wren, the only known perching bird ever to lose the power of flight. Fossils reveal that before the arrival of the Pacific rat of kiore (Rattus exulans) in New Zealand around 1000 years ago Stephens Island wren was common throughout the archipelago. Predation by the rat eliminated it from over 99 per cent of its habitat before the arrival of Europeans. A single cat was then enough to push this precariously balanced species into oblivion.

Lyall was the only European ever to see the birds alive, and even he observed them just twice. He reported that they ran about like mice among the rocks of their island home. Twelve of Lyall's specimens are still hed in museum collections.' pp83

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It's fairly obvious that other issues, or fragments of issues, are touched upon and beg further exploration, such as folly of youth and its' contribution to unforeseen consequences in the first micro-narrative, for example. And how, if the lighthouse keeper in the second story opted for a dog (which you'd think would be an obvious choice for a lonely man in a lighthouse, wouldn't you?) instead of a cat, the most extreme catastrophe of extinction would have been avoided - or at least deferred until the rats took over. I find these small details fascinating!

There we go!

It's unlikely that you've heard those stories before but what could be more catastrophic than to become extinct?

And, come to think of that, what about our own extinction? Will it be as uneventful? Would it, too, merit a little entry in a esoteric book? It will come at some point, surely but is it a catastrophe if we can't think about it, can't write about it?

Also, you can see that each story has an interesting and intricate web of reasons surrounding the extinction. For me, this highlights how deeply imbedded catastrophes are within the fabric of existence (if such a phrase is at all useful!).

I know this was a little long for a blog post, but I imagine this might be the place for such discussion!

The Third Catastrophe Committee is in session

Welcome to the Third Catastrophe Committee. I'll sign you up as editors of the blog as soon as I have all your email address from Karen. For now, just a summary of roles:

Session 2: Nick, Shain, Alex D, Helen. Mind-mapper: Kai
Session 3: Robert, Marc, Paul, Alex M. Mind-mapper: tbc
Session 4: Joey, Christopher, Anna, Barney. Mind-mapper: Ross
Session 5: Walter, Tina, Alice, Dagmara. Mind-mapper: tbc
Session 6: Daniel, Sami, Jacob, Burhanuddin. Mind-mapper: Thomas
Keeper of the Map: Clare Heath

Helen Stokes is the mind map and session broker. If anyone wants to change the session they're working on, Helen will broker any mutually agreed swaps.

Looking forward to your posts.

Marko