catastrophe

so...

2009-11-04T09:23:00.001Z

So: cake-eating and collective fly-posting dérive it is. Details to be announced off-site.

Notes from the final session

2009-11-03T21:22:00.002Z

30.10.09 mind map

2009-11-02T10:36:00.000Z

27.10.09 mind map

2009-11-02T10:32:00.004Z

23.10.09 mind map

2009-11-02T10:29:00.001Z

Like a scene from a movie (repeat)

2009-10-26T16:12:00.002Z

Meteorite-like object falls in Latvia

Readings for session six

2009-10-26T11:38:00.002Z

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

2009-10-26T11:37:00.002Z

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

2009-10-25T22:25:00.002Z

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

2009-10-24T12:56:00.002+01:00

I saw this when it came out in 2002. IMDB

Interview with Alfredo Jaar from December 2008

2009-10-22T10:13:00.001+01:00

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

It was like a scene from a movie!

2009-10-19T19:56:00.005+01:00

"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.)

2009-10-19T16:23:00.001+01:00

link to PM talking about climate catastrophe

mind map from 12.10.09

2009-10-14T23:38:00.001+01:00

Reading and Catastrophe

2009-10-14T22:23:00.004+01:00

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

2009-10-14T10:47:00.000+01:00

Eurydice, Bracha Ettinger

2009-10-14T09:52:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-14T09:11:00.001+01:00

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

2009-10-12T23:27:00.006+01:00

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

2009-10-12T21:05:00.001+01:00

Video link in correct aspect ratio here.

For Tom

2009-10-12T15:23:00.000+01:00

oh for crying out loud

2009-10-12T09:24:00.002+01:00

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

does someone know how to make this into a hyperlink?

url

2009-10-12T09:24:00.001+01:00

didn't seem to appear on last post

double take

2009-10-12T09:17:00.002+01:00

'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.

2009-10-11T13:53:00.000+01:00

Old Man Atom

2009-10-11T02:05:00.002+01:00

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..

2009-10-10T13:24:00.001+01:00

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

2009-10-10T12:57:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-09T21:05:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-08T21:14:00.002+01:00

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"?

2009-10-08T20:28:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-08T19:06:00.005+01:00

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

2009-10-08T13:01:00.006+01:00

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

2009-10-08T00:37:00.012+01:00

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

2009-10-06T15:03:00.003+01:00

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

2009-10-05T18:17:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-05T10:01:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-05T08:28:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-04T16:43:00.006+01:00

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

2009-10-04T16:23:00.004+01:00

#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?

2009-10-04T15:14:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-04T13:55:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-04T12:41:00.004+01:00

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!)

2009-10-03T21:16:00.007+01:00

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!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

2009-10-02T14:13:00.004+01:00

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

Michael Taussig has been hiding at the back of the classroom

2009-05-11T18:20:00.003+01:00

So Michael Taussig has started a class called "Preëmptive Apocalyptic Thought: The Angel of History Reconsidered in Light of Climate Change, the War on Terror, and Financial Meltdown” at Columbia University...
The report from The New Yorker is making me wonder if we've been infiltrated:
"For the final session, the theme was the cyclical interrelationship of trauma and the apocalypse, and Thurner, after screening the movie, tried to create a theoretical framework for discussion by drawing a series of diagrams, all arrows and blobs, on the blackboard. “So here,” he said, drawing a swooping arc, “we’re coming around to catastrophe. But if we’re preëmptively thinking about it, it’s making it happen faster, right?” He stepped back and looked at the diagrams, puzzled."

link to the story

utopia/dystopia/apocalypse - a playlist

2009-03-22T13:59:00.002Z

a playlist written by the disaster:

The Dead Only Quickly (w/Neil Hannon) -- The 6ths
The Gulag Orkestar -- Beirut
The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice? -- The Books
Earth Died Screaming -- Tom Waits
Sferics -- Alvin Lucier
Strange Pursuits -- Devo
Avalanche -- Leonard Cohen
Dancing In the Dark -- Diamanda Galás
Forest Of Memories -- Dumb Type
6.5 -- supersilent
The Bombs That Keep Dropping Make It Hard To Sleep -- Yellow Swans
Tabla Bol (Catastrophe) -- Asa-Chang & Junray
Atrocity Exhibition -- Joy Division
A Fire In The Forest -- David Sylvian
Messages from the Unseen World -- Matmos
4 or 5 Trees -- Rachel's
a tabula rasa -- Arvo Pärt

(after the) collision course

2008-12-07T23:27:00.005Z

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)

2008-11-13T10:01:00.004Z

Evidence

2008-11-12T18:07:00.006Z

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

2008-11-10T11:44:00.006Z

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

2008-11-06T15:47:00.003Z

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

2008-11-05T21:06:00.000Z

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

catastrophe conference call for papers

2008-11-05T21:03:00.004Z

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

2008-11-05T09:33:00.002Z

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

2008-11-04T14:28:00.003Z

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

2008-11-04T10:21:00.002Z

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

2008-11-04T07:59:00.002Z

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

2008-11-03T19:23:00.002Z

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

2008-11-03T19:05:00.005Z

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

2008-11-03T17:49:00.002Z

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!

2008-11-02T11:39:00.002Z

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’)

2008-11-02T11:28:00.005Z

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

2008-11-01T20:54:00.001Z

Concluding Session of the Catastrophe Committee

2008-10-31T13:57:00.001Z

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

Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau

2008-10-30T16:46:00.001Z

Mind Map from Tuesday October 28th

2008-10-30T11:33:00.002Z

Mind Map from Friday October 24th

2008-10-30T11:30:00.001Z

2008-10-28T21:40:00.002Z

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

2008-10-28T19:27:00.003Z

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

2008-10-28T07:22:00.002Z

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

2008-10-28T07:18:00.001Z

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

2008-10-27T18:52:00.004Z

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)

2008-10-22T09:58:00.001+01:00

a friend in america sends me this link:

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

Mind Map from Friday, October 17th

2008-10-21T22:47:00.002+01:00

Exhibition: This is War

2008-10-20T09:56:00.003+01:00

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.

2008-10-18T16:49:00.003+01:00

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

2008-10-17T07:13:00.003+01:00

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.

2008-10-16T09:15:00.002+01:00

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

hopkins

2008-10-14T08:26:00.004+01:00

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

2008-10-12T23:56:00.003+01:00

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

2008-10-12T22:51:00.003+01:00

Methodist Madness

2008-10-12T17:07:00.002+01:00

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

2008-10-10T12:50:00.000+01:00

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...!

2008-10-09T23:03:00.007+01:00

"...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

2008-10-09T22:24:00.002+01:00

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

2008-10-09T20:58:00.002+01:00

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.

2008-10-09T18:12:00.003+01:00

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

2008-10-09T16:23:00.007+01:00

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)

2008-10-08T10:53:00.003+01:00

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?

2008-10-06T16:34:00.003+01:00

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

2008-10-05T11:36:00.002+01:00

Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962)

2008-10-04T16:49:00.002+01:00

2008-10-04T16:21:00.002+01:00

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

2008-10-04T16:13:00.002+01:00

It is forbidden!

2008-10-04T10:38:00.002+01:00

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

2008-10-03T21:22:00.004+01:00

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.

2008-10-03T18:31:00.004+01:00

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

2008-10-03T18:25:00.000+01:00

Earthquake compilation

2008-10-03T15:41:00.002+01:00

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.