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