We are All Radiant under the Aocalypse

Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance-to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven (136).
-Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself

The idea of facing an imaginative void made me think about an actual void, the empty canvas, or an empty sheet of paper, and how that moment of beginning is loaded with possibility and fear. In these first sketches, I am playing with a straightforward depiction of the artist facing the blank canvas, an artist becoming a canvas, an artist painting in the wrong direction and an artist seen through a transparent canvas.

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/12/02/opinion/lbl_poster10/lbl_poster10-popup.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]James McMullan in via The New York Times’ Line by Line[/author_info] [/author]

Black Liberation in Media Res et Contentio

Without succumbing to the temptation of romantic absolutism, Baldwin provides a bit of realism’s real talk, notably, in typical Balwin-esque bravado, Jimmy B. offers a biting – and ‘severe,’ as he puts it himself – critique of White-Europeans’ Cult of Asceticism that’s been cultivated & propagated by History’s (Tragic) Corruption of the Christian Faith.
Finally, Baldwin ends with a Zealous (Perhaps Life-Blistering) Ode to Human Potential. By means of a Life-Affirming Crescendo James Baldwin Pays Testament to the Undying & Eternal Pulse of Humanity that Beats Courses in the Veins and Beats in the Heart the Black Liberation Struggle for Freedom.

—-Note: (‘Social Fabric’ is marked here because of the specificity of its meaning for Baldwin in being a term the great American novelist & activist has spoken publicly upon & written about, at great lengths no less, in his essays & expositional works of non-fiction).

 

As Nightfall does not come all once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of darkness.

- U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

The Douglas Letters : Selections from the Private Papers of Justice William O. Douglas (1987), edited by Melvin I. Urofsky and Philip E. Urofsky, p. 16.

Old White Men in Smoke Filled Rooms

faire du feu du Feminine Le Ecriture

Via Flickr:
Raquel Welch in a publicity shot for One Million Years B.C.

New work from Zero Books, published in Cloud Time itself:

The Cloud, hailed as a new digital commons, a utopia of collaborative expression and constant connection, actually constitutes a strategy of vitalist post-hegemonic power, which moves to dominate immanently and intensively, organizing our affective political involvements, instituting new modes of enclosure, and, crucially, colonizing the future through a new temporality of control. The virtual is often claimed as a realm of invention through which capitalism might be cracked, but it is precisely here that power now thrives. Cloud time, in service of security and profit, assumes all is knowable. We bear witness to the collapse of both past and future virtuals into a present dedicated to the exploitation of the spectres of both.

Jussi Parikka, Author of both ‘Digital Contagions’ & ‘Insect Media,’ offers a provocative review:

It’s not only your head that is in the Cloud, but your whole body in its desires, actions, reactions, hiccups and errors too. Coley and Lockwood show in their strong theoretical take on cloudy media cultures that the more invisible control becomes, the more we need to develop fresh theoretical tools to open it up. Cloud Time offers a much-needed analysis of contemporary capitalism as a perverse form of informationalization and quantification of life to which we happily, voluntarily contribute. Even Microsofts Steve Ballmer has admitted to the difficulty involved in clearly defining the Cloud – and yet, Coley and Lockwood give us excellent clues.

They do not resuscitate old myths or archaic figures; they are the new figures of a transhistorical assemblage (neither historical nor eternal, but untimely): the nomad warrior and the ambulant worker. A somber caricature already precedes them, the mercenary or mobile military adviser, and the technocrat or transhumant analyst, CIA and IBM. But transhistorical figures must defend themselves as much against old myths as against preestablished, anticipatory disfigurations. “One does not go back to reconquer the myth, one encounters it anew, when time quakes at its foundations under the empire of extreme danger.” Martial arts and state-of-the-art technologies have value only because they create the possibility of bring together worker and warrior masses of a new type. The shared line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure possibility; a mutation. there arise subterranean, aerial, submarine technicians who belong more or less to the world order, but who involuntarily invent and amass virtual charges of knowledge and action that are usable by others, minute but easily acquired for new assemblages. The borrowings between warfare and the military apparatus, work and free action, always run in both directions, fo r that struggle that is all the more varied (a thousand plateaus; 1227: Treatise on Nomadology-The War Machine, 403).

You don’t make an atomic bomb with a secret, any more than you make a saber if you are incapable of reproducing it, and of integrating it under different conditions, of transferring it to other assemblages. Propagation and diffusion are fully a part of the line of innovation; they mark a bend in it (a thousand plateaus; 1227: Treatise on Nomadology-The War Machine, 405).

We always get back to this definition: the machinic phylym is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-flow can only be followed (a thousand plateaus; 1227: Treatise on Nomadology-The War Machine, 409).

the artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It is intuition in action. (a thousand plateaus; 1227: Treatise on Nomadology-The War Machine, 403)

As cited in
Applebaum: Gulag A History

The parasite invents something new. He obtains energy and pays for it in information. He obtains the roast and pays for it with stories. Two days of writing the new contract. He establishes an unjust pact; relative to the old type of balance, he builds a new one. He speaks in a logic considered irrational up to now, a new epistemology and a new theory of equilibrium. He makes the order of things as well as the states of things — solid and gas — into diagonals. He evaluates information. Even better: he discovers information in his voice and good words; he discovers the Spirit in the wind and the breath of air. He invents cybernetics.
— Michel Serres, The Parasite

[learn_more caption="Learn More about Michael Serres & The Parasite; Posthumanism's Foundational Text" state="open"] Further reading: The Parasite from the The University of Minnesota Press The foundational work in the area now known as posthuman thought Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite && In Praise of the Parasite: The Dark Organizational Theory of Michael Serres by Steven D. Brown[/learn_more]

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Michel_Serres_-_Rennes_20110215.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]The son of a barge man, Serres entered France’s naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure (“rue d’Ulm”) in 1952. He aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. He spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate in 1968, and began teaching in Paris. As a child, Serres witnessed firsthand the violence and devastation of war. “I was six for my first dead bodies,” he told Bruno Latour.These formative experiences led him to consistently eschew scholarship based upon models of war, suspicion, and criticism. Over the next twenty years, Serres earned a reputation as a spell-binding lecturer and as the author of remarkably beautiful and enigmatic prose so reliant on the sonorities of French that it is considered practically untranslatable. He took as his subjects such diverse topics as the mythical Northwest Passage, the concept of the parasite, and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. More generally Serres is interested in developing a philosophy of science which does not rely on a metalanguage in which a single account of science is privileged and regarded as accurate. To do this he relies on the concept of translation between accounts rather than settling on one as authoritative. For this reason Serres has relied on the figure of Hermes (in his earlier works) and angels (in more recent studies) as messengers who translate (or: map) back and forth between domains (i.e., between maps). In 1990, Serres was elected to the Académie française, in recognition of his position as one of France’s most prominent intellectuals. He is an influence on intellectuals such as Bruno Latour and Steven Connor. He currently serves as a Professor of French at Stanford University. Serres is a vocal enthusiast for freely accessible knowledge, especially Wikipedia. via Wikipedia[/author_info] [/author]

In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete institutions: either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for the instantaneous cataloging and preservation of data, from music, photographs, and videos to personal information gathered by social media sites.

In this digital landscape, the archival-oriented media theories of Wolfgang Ernst are particularly relevant. Digital Memory and the Archive, the first English-language collection of the German media theorist’s work, brings together essays that present Ernst’s controversial materialist approach to media theory and history. His insights are central to the emerging field of media archaeology, which uncovers the role of specific technologies and mechanisms, rather than content, in shaping contemporary culture and society.

Ernst’s interrelated ideas on the archive, machine time and microtemporality, and the new regimes of memory offer a new perspective on both current digital culture and the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. For Ernst, different forms of media systems—from library catalogs to sound recordings—have influenced the content and understanding of the archive and other institutions of memory. At the same time, digital archiving has become a contested site that is highly resistant to curation, thus complicating the creation and preservation of cultural memory and history.

Thus, even more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; it is, as its common name indicates, ubiquity made visible; and it is indeed in this aspect that it stands as a miraculous matter: the miracle is always a brusque conversion of nature. Plastic has remained totally impregnated with this admission: it is less an object than the trail of a movement.
-Roland Barthes.

Neuroscientists from China have devised new means of unleashing the sublime resonance between the science and the soul of music. In the peer-reviewed PLOS ONE journal’s recent article, Scale-Free Brain-Wave Music from Simultaneously EEG and fMRI Recordings, Jing Lu, Dan Wu, Hua Yang, Cheng Luo, Chaoyi Li, & Dezhong Yao provided empirical evidence for the existence of  ”one of the human brain’s intelligence products,” namely, “brain music.” Chaoyi Li et al describe the unconscious rhythms & flows of thinking as the neuro-embodiment of “the secret of brain in an artistic style.”

Chaoyi Li et al describe the method & aims of their initial research. The researchers:

The Symphonic Enlightenment inaugurated through Chaoyi et al’s novel experiments are pregnant with potential. Their  innovative method :

provides the platform for scientist and artist to work together to understand ourselves, and it is also a new interactive link between the human brain and music. We hope the on-going progresses of the brain signals based music will properly unravel part of the truth in the brain, and then to be used for clinical diagnosis and bio-feedback therapy in the future.

Brandon Keim from Wired Science suggests that Chaoyi et al’s study offers a vessel for sensing, feeling, and perceiving the mind as a kind of “cognitive symphony.”

Trajectories from similar theoretical backgrounds have already begun to proliferate. Take, for instance, the aptly named, Neuroblast. This company  is feverishly developing a “neural algorithm evolution engine [that] can create neural algorithms for many different kinds of complex, non-linear, multiple input/output tasks — just the kind of intelligence needed for sophisticated autonomous behaviors in complex, real-world settings.”

Neuroblast’s producers highlight horizons fraught with uncertain promises and possible perils that lie ahead – yet these indeterminate thresholds of technology-to-come are precisely the stuff of stimulation providing the impetus for their work.

Only one kind of device has ever exhibited real intelligence: biological brains. And only one kind of design paradigm has ever produced such a device: biological evolution. Neuroblast creates artificially intelligent neural algorithms from a virtual evolutionary world of genes, genomes, organisms, and populations, all competing against one another in a rigorous selection regime of survival of the smartest.

While the researchers may simply be providing insight into a phenomenon that was already obvious, it is now up to the producers of quantum sounds to exceed the bounds of sinusoidal forms, the conductors of cybernetic harmonies to surpass their static postures upon pedestals, and the enchantress-esque performers of musical creations to conjure the melodic metaphysics of the Machine.

Perhaps we simply need more imaginative machines to make manifest music’s aesthetics of existence. In the  keynote speech “Imaginary Music Technologies” (Technologies Imaginaires: l’approche pataphysique de la musique), delivered at the Université de Paris-IV Sorbonne, Professor Andrew Hugill uses Raymond Roussel himself trained as a musician” as a inspirational example to compel us toward a more vitalist vision of music technologies.  compelling example for  us to adopt a more vitalist vision of musical technologies as

In the Impressions d’Afrique, we encounter examples of apparently physical and apparently metaphysical music technologies, but all are in fact ‘pataphysical according to the definition given earlier. Thus, the thermo-mechanical orchestrion of the chemist Bex translates variations in temperature into musical timbres, but does so as the result of the punning phrase “sabot à dégrès”, where ‘sabot’ means either a clog or a dud violin, and ‘dégrès’ refers both to the steps of a musical scale and the degrees on a thermometer. This fact is concealed from the reader, who only discovers the truth of the poetic method after reading Roussel’sComment j’ai écris certains de mes livres...We encounter: Louise Montalescot, who breathes through the braiding on a military uniform each pipe of which contains a small reed, which means that she emits a chord that rises and falls in intensity with her breath; Skariofszky’s worm, which raises segments of its body in sequences to allow single drops of heavy water to fall through holes drilled in the bottom of an aquarium onto the strings of a zither below, playing czardas and other Hungarian dances; Stephen Alcott and his six sons, whose concave stomachs are arranged in a careful disposition across a wide area of ground such that a sound can be passed around and around, bouncing off the stomach walls, creating unbelievable echoes; Cuijper’s squeaker, which allows him to deliver enormous amplification and effects with seemingly little effort; A chariot which emits a C drone as it travels along; Lelgoualch’s flute carved from his own tibia; The singer Ludovic, whose flexible lips allow him to sing all four voices in a round of Frère Jacques. The descriptions even include an account of an imaginary technology of composition: the composer Handel writing an oratorio based on a theme which has been mechanically constructed using chance.

 Perhaps we never remember the sounds of the past not because we cannot recall the experience, but because they are contained within the barely recognizable sensus of the Now. Perhaps, “sounds once generated never die, but rather have a half-life like radioactive elements.”

  - Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter – by Geoffrey Sonnaben, an exhibit – preserved by The Museum of Jurassic Technology - that demonstrates the inextricable sinews of sound that connect memory to matter & experience to schematics:

We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events.

Perhaps, only by taking Sonnabend’s premise to its point of implosion can we learn to forget the buffer of remembrance between ourselves and Rousseau – who, in 1768, opined:

As soon as Music had learned to portray and to speak, the charms of feeling soon caused those of the wand to be neglected, the Theater was purged of the jargon of Mythology, interest was substituted for merveilleux, the machines of the Poets and of the Carpenters were destroyed and lyric Drama took a more noble and less gigantic form. All that could move the heart was employed in it with success, there was no longer need to impress upon it with beings of reason or rather of folly, and the Gods were chased from the Stage when they learned how to represent men.

- “Opera,” Dictionary of Music  

Meeting of eyes,

In the Inadvertent

Grabbing of Attentions,

In the Lingering,

Faltering,

Depths

Of your Eyes,

In the Pause ~

To Embrace the

Voluptuous Curvatures

Of Unknown

Worlds

In / T(w)o

Erotics Of Encounter.

Unsaid Pressures

Undress

Unease Unravels

In / T(w)o

Impossibly Firm

Throbs of Desire.

With Every, Undulating Breath,

With Each Stroking Heart Beat,

Our Bodies Heave

In / T(w)o

Entangled~Combustions.

Fleeting Glimpses

Contain Possibilities’

Coming

In / T(w)o

(Direct).&.And.&.(Immediate)

ContactwithaMoment’sImmanence

Seduction Will

Now&Again

Entangle Be/fore(‘s) Play

With

Vibrancy’s Now.

The Senses of the Soul

Speak Tongues

Known to All,

But

Always Perform

In / T(w)o

Poem(s).

The energized profusion of the virtual transforms the agora from a place into a practice, and from an idea into a stylistic technique. In the emergence of new forms of pragmatic democratic deliberation, how must movements resiliently adapt to ensure they maintain flexibility in the face of unforeseen forces of friction?

To guarantee the renewal of energetic investments of attention & care in the name of a dialectic of social struggle, the Virtual Agora is Becoming the an atmospheric of the soul, let us enchant our collective sensorium through an experimental poesis that attempts to map time and purge the archives of space from memory.

http://services.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=jpdo\fl

‘For the first time in human history, it is not essential that participants occupy the same physical space. Virtual common spaces can allow all who have interest and knowledge in the area to weigh in — whether the topic is the protection of sources by journalists, the determination of which intellectual property can legitimately be downloaded and which not, whether studies of the creation of a deadly new strain of virus should be published. Indeed, in the last decade, in professions ranging from journalism and law to medicine and science, such spaces have been created and, in some case, have been ably curated.’

Rather than closing down the possibility for participatory democracy or reducing the weak ties of civil society to the point of dissolution, the constriction of time and space in the 21st century instead stimulates an innovative system of currents, a fluvial delta of networked governance, and a dispersed, yet interconnected, grid of deliberative flows.
The rushing, surging fountains of the demos disclose an irrepressibly, undeniably symphonic ensoulment of the gathering assembly.

This footnoted fragment expresses Calder’s dexterous capacity to fulfill Socrates’ exhortations to the playwright at the end of the Symposium, that is, the ability to simultaneously express the tragic & the comic:

Comics..are particularly slippery and remarkable in their narrative overdetermination. And while this is not the place nor I the writer to do so, it would be worth exploring their peculiar capacity to draw forth a sense of combined and uneven worlds, with the sense of events that are both mutually existent and mutually exclusive. This results largely from the structure of comic book publishing and the creation of the publishing house “universes” (i.e. the DC universe, the Marvel universe), in which all the different story-lines and micro worlds of individual series bleed over into one another, with characters from one appearing gin others. Events happen that are not registered in other parts of the universe, massive internal contradictions emerge. However, unlike capitalism, comic books negotiate these crises of legitimacy with far more sophistication: reloading universes, creating parallel histories, rewriting the past, raising the dead. Or, we should specify, they do the same things capitalism does. They just admit it more openly.

The Black position, beckoning from somewhere on the other side of the pleasure principle, imbricated with the death drive, also invokes the Derridean neologism, ‘hauntology,’ as a ‘category [that is] irreducible, and first of all to everything it makes possible.’18 That is, as a spectral form of non-being that is the condition of possibility for Human being. It opens up a space for a politics that does not privilege the Human as a universal or pre-political category, but which marks the Human as precisely the category that must be the object of an emancipatory politics. A Black hauntology, finally, offers the promise of the Lacanian ‘second death’: ‘not the death of the so-called “real object” in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself.’19 Insofar as the Black is a wellspring of negative meaning, is that against which all conceptions of the Human are aligned, it is also the subject position which offers the most radical destabilization of meaning as such

- The Parallax View, The Ziz a.k.a. Slavoj Zizek, a.k.a. The Monster from Slovenia

“Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep” (140).

This CybeRio post marks the beginning of a genealogy’s birth by means of enunciation, the initial, groundbreaking penetrations of a fragmented historicity of race, and the outlined contours of a counter-cartography which attempts to enter into dialogue with the constellated works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and contemporary activist anthropologists whom have forged the living, textual fabric documenting “the desperate struggles of a Negro who is driven to discover the meaning of black identity” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 6).

From out of the furrowed contradictions between the Roots & Routes explanatory models emerge more than just a set of oppositions locked in dialectical interplay. Encounters with the “entangled tensions” (Clifford, “Diasporas,”__) of Diasporic Identifications during “observant participation” (Vargas, Hyper-consciousness of Race,__) call for both tempered receptivity in firmament and a passionate diligence; a concentrated pathos which is oft displaced by the distractions of an overly sentimental pseudo-praxis. In order to overcome the abhorrent system of social relations waging an anti-black genocide today, activists must return their attention to the most fundamental horizon of critical inquiry, namely, The Fact of Blackness, or the process whereby the “Negro [comes] face to face with his race” (sic, Fanon, ibid. 6 & Chapter 5).

Contemporary scholars must attend to the totalizing nature of the operations of Whiteness more comprehensively as “a massive psychoexistential complex” (Fanon, ibid. 5). Neither the methods that profess neutrality through detachment nor abstract, phenomenological accounts suffice alone. Nay, what is needed is an attempt at forging “a total understanding” (Fanon, ibid. 5). Or as Fanon once put it:

The black man must wage his war on both levels: Since historically they influence each other, any unilateral liberation is incomplete, and the gravest mistake would be to believe in their automatic interdependence. Besides, such a systematic tendency is contrary to the facts. This will be proved. Reality, for once, requires a total understanding. On the objective level as on the subjective level, a solution has to be supplied (emphasis mine, Fanon, ibid. 4-5).

Hopefully, this work will be able to map out a more sophisticated critique of race relations that accounts for the necessary frustrations involved in the reconciliations of man’s absent coherence, the dizzying experiences which occur where the Material and the Ideal collide, and the ambiguous crossings of “paths in a mobile space of translations, not equivalences.” (Emphasis mine, Clifford, 324).

 Darkwater; voices from within the veil 

W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

                                      Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

IX

OF BEAUTY AND DEATH

For long years we of the world gone wild have looked into the face of death and smiled. Through all our bitter tears we knew how beautiful it was to die for that which our souls called sufficient. Like all true beauty this thing of dying was so simple, so matter-of-fact. The boy clothed in his splendid youth stood before us and laughed in his own jolly way,—went and was gone. Suddenly the world was full of the fragrance of sacrifice. We left our digging and burden-bearing; we turned from our scraping and twisting of things and words; we paused from our hurrying hither and thither and walking up and down, and asked in half-whisper: this Death—is this Life? And is its beauty real or false? And of this heart-questioning I am writing.

….\\\Suddenly your heart chills. You turn yourself away toward the golden twinkle of the purple night and hesitate again. What’s the use? Why not always yield—always take what’s offered,—always bow to force, whether of cannon or dislike? Then the great fear surges in your soul, the real fear—the fear beside which other fears are vain imaginings; the fear lest right there and then you are losing your own soul; that you are losing your own soul and the soul of a people; that millions of unborn children, black and gold and mauve, are being there and then despoiled by you because you are a coward and dare not fight!

Suddenly that silly orchestra seat and the cavorting of a comedian with funny feet become matters of life, death, and immortality; you grasp the pillars of the universe and strain as you sway back to that befrilled ticket girl. You grip your soul for riot and murder. You choke and sputter, and she seeing that you are about to make a “fuss” obeys her orders and throws the tickets at you in contempt. Then you slink to your seat and crouch in the darkness before the film, with every tissue burning! The miserable wave of reaction engulfs you. To think of compelling puppies to take your hard-earned money; fattening hogs to hate you and yours; forcing your way among cheap and tawdry idiots—God! What a night of pleasure!

Here, then, is beauty and ugliness, a wide vision of world-sacrifice, a fierce gleam of world-hate. Which is life and what is death and how shall we face so tantalizing a contradiction? Any explanation must necessarily be subtle and involved. No pert and easy word of encouragement, no merely dark despair, can lay hold of the roots of these things. And first and before all, we cannot forget that this world is beautiful. Grant all its ugliness and sin—the petty, horrible snarl of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than I—notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be denied.

Casting my eyes about I dare not let them rest on the beauty of Love and Friend, for even if my tongue were cunning enough to sing this, the revelation of reality here is too sacred and the fancy too untrue. Of one world-beauty alone may we at once be brutally frank and that is the glory of physical nature; this, though the last of beauties, is divine!

And so, too, there are depths of human degradation which it is not fair for us to probe. With all their horrible prevalence, we cannot call them natural. But may we not compare the least of the world’s beauty with the least of its ugliness—not murder, starvation, and rapine, with love and friendship and creation—but the glory of sea and sky and city, with the little hatefulnesses and thoughtfulnesses of race prejudice, that out of such juxtaposition we may, perhaps, deduce some rule of beauty and life—or death?

There mountains hurl themselves against the stars and at their feet lie black and leaden seas. Above float clouds—white, gray, and inken, while the clear, impalpable air springs and sparkles like new wine. Last night we floated on the calm bosom of the sea in the southernmost haven of Mount Desert. The water flamed and sparkled. The sun had gone, but above the crooked back of cumulus clouds, dark and pink with radiance, and on the other sky aloft to the eastward piled the gorgeous-curtained mists of evening. The radiance faded and a shadowy velvet veiled the mountains, a humid depth of gloom behind which lurked all the mysteries of life and death, while above, the clouds hung ashen and dull; lights twinkled and flashed along the shore, boats glided in the twilight, and the little puffing of motors droned away. Then was the hour to talk of life and the meaning of life, while above gleamed silently, suddenly, star on star.

Bar Harbor lies beneath a mighty mountain, a great, bare, black mountain that sleeps above the town; but as you leave, it rises suddenly, threateningly, until far away on Frenchman’s Bay it looms above the town in withering vastness, as if to call all that little world petty save itself. Beneath the cool, wide stare of that great mountain, men cannot live as giddily as in some lesser summer’s playground. Before the unveiled face of nature, as it lies naked on the Maine coast, rises a certain human awe.

God molded his world largely and mightily off this marvelous coast and meant that in the tired days of life men should come and worship here and renew their spirit. This I have done and turning I go to work again. As we go, ever the mountains of Mount Desert rise and greet us on our going—somber, rock-ribbed and silent, looking unmoved on the moving world, yet conscious of their everlasting strength.

About us beats the sea—the sail-flecked, restless sea, humming its tune about our flying keel, unmindful of the voices of men. The land sinks to meadows, black pine forests, with here and there a blue and wistful mountain. Then there are islands—bold rocks above the sea, curled meadows; through and about them roll ships, weather-beaten and patched of sail, strong-hulled and smoking, light gray and shining. All the colors of the sea lie about us—gray and yellowing greens and doubtful blues, blacks not quite black, tinted silvers and golds and dreaming whites. Long tongues of dark and golden land lick far out into the tossing waters, and the white gulls sail and scream above them. It is a mighty coast—ground out and pounded, scarred, crushed, and carven in massive, frightful lineaments. Everywhere stand the pines—the little dark and steadfast pines that smile not, neither weep, but wait and wait. Near us lie isles of flesh and blood, white cottages, tiled and meadowed. Afar lie shadow-lands, high mist-hidden hills, mountains boldly limned, yet shading to the sky, faint and unreal.

We skirt the pine-clad shores, chary of men, and know how bitterly winter kisses these lonely shores to fill yon row of beaked ice houses that creep up the hills. We are sailing due westward and the sun, yet two hours high, is blazoning a fiery glory on the sea that spreads and gleams like some broad, jeweled trail, to where the blue and distant shadow-land lifts its carven front aloft, leaving, as it gropes, shades of shadows beyond.

Why do not those who are scarred in the world’s battle and hurt by its hardness travel to these places of beauty and drown themselves in the utter joy of life? I asked this once sitting in a Southern home. Outside the spring of a Georgia February was luring gold to the bushes and languor to the soft air. Around me sat color in human flesh—brown that crimsoned readily; dim soft-yellow that escaped description; cream-like duskiness that shadowed to rich tints of autumn leaves. And yet a suggested journey in the world brought no response.

“I should think you would like to travel,” said the white one.

But no, the thought of a journey seemed to depress them.

Did you ever see a “Jim-Crow” waiting-room? There are always exceptions, as at Greensboro—but usually there is no heat in winter and no air in summer; with undisturbed loafers and train hands and broken, disreputable settees; to buy a ticket is torture; you stand and stand and wait and wait until every white person at the “other window” is waited on. Then the tired agent yells across, because all the tickets and money are over there—

“What d’ye want? What? Where?”

The agent browbeats and contradicts you, hurries and confuses the ignorant, gives many persons the wrong change, compels some to purchase their tickets on the train at a higher price, and sends you and me out on the platform, burning with indignation and hatred!

The “Jim-Crow” car is up next the baggage car and engine. It stops out beyond the covering in the rain or sun or dust. Usually there is no step to help you climb on and often the car is a smoker cut in two and you must pass through the white smokers or else they pass through your part, with swagger and noise and stares. Your compartment is a half or a quarter or an eighth of the oldest car in service on the road. Unless it happens to be a thorough express, the plush is caked with dirt, the floor is grimy, and the windows dirty. An impertinent white newsboy occupies two seats at the end of the car and importunes you to the point of rage to buy cheap candy, Coco-Cola, and worthless, if not vulgar, books. He yells and swaggers, while a continued stream of white men saunters back and forth from the smoker to buy and hear. The white train crew from the baggage car uses the “Jim-Crow” to lounge in and perform their toilet. The conductor appropriates two seats for himself and his papers and yells gruffly for your tickets before the train has scarcely started. It is best not to ask him for information even in the gentlest tones. His information is for white persons chiefly. It is difficult to get lunch or clean water. Lunch rooms either don’t serve niggers or serve them at some dirty and ill-attended hole in the wall. As for toilet rooms,—don’t! If you have to change cars, be wary of junctions which are usually without accommodation and filled with quarrelsome white persons who hate a “darky dressed up.” You are apt to have the company of a sheriff and a couple of meek or sullen black prisoners on part of your way and dirty colored section hands will pour in toward night and drive you to the smallest corner.

“No,” said the little lady in the corner (she looked like an ivory cameo and her dress flowed on her like a caress), “we don’t travel much.”

Pessimism is cowardice. The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the “Jim-Crow” car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either of himself or of the world. There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood than the “Jim-Crow” car of the southern United States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica. And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither can be denied.

The sun, prepared to cross that awful border which men call Night and Death, marshals his hosts. I seem to see the spears of mighty horsemen flash golden in the light; empurpled banners flame afar, and the low thunder of marching hosts thrills with the thunder of the sea. Athwart his own path, screening a face of fire, he throws cloud masses, masking his trained guns. And then the miracle is done. The host passes with roar too vast for human ear and the sun is set, leaving the frightened moon and blinded stars.

In the dusk the green-gold palms turn their star-like faces and stretch their fan-like fingers, lifting themselves proudly, lest any lordly leaf should know the taint of earth.

Out from the isle the serpent hill thrusts its great length around the bay, shouldering back the waters and the shadows. Ghost rains sweep down, smearing his rugged sides, yet on he writhes, undulant with pine and palm, gleaming until his low, sharp head and lambent tongue, grown gray and pale and silver in the dying day, kisses the molten gold of the golden sea.

Then comes the moon. Like fireflies nesting in the hand of God gleams the city, dim-swathed by fairy palms. A long, thin thumb, mist-mighty, points shadowy to the Spanish Main, while through the fingers foam the Seven Seas. Above the calm and gold-green moon, beneath the wind-wet earth; and here, alone, my soul enchained, enchanted!

……..

Once upon a time I took a great journey in this land to three of the ends of our world and over seven thousand mighty miles. I saw the grim desert and the high ramparts of the Rocky Mountains. Three days I flew from the silver beauty of Seattle to the somber whirl of Kansas City. Three days I flew from the brute might of Chicago to the air of the Angels in California, scented with golden flowers, where the homes of men crouch low and loving on the good, broad earth, as though they were kissing her blossoms. Three days I flew through the empire of Texas, but all these shall be tales untold, for in all this journey I saw but one thing that lived and will live eternal in my soul,—the Grand Cañon.

It is a sudden void in the bosom of the earth, down to its entrails—a wound where the dull titanic knife has turned and twisted in the hole, leaving its edges livid, scarred, jagged, and pulsing over the white, and red, and purple of its mighty flesh, while down below—down, down below, in black and severed vein, boils the dull and sullen flood of the Colorado.

It is awful. There can be nothing like it. It is the earth and sky gone stark and raving mad. The mountains up-twirled, disbodied and inverted, stand on their peaks and throw their bowels to the sky. Their earth is air; their ether blood-red rock engreened. You stand upon their roots and fall into their pinnacles, a mighty mile.

Behold this mauve and purple mocking of time and space! See yonder peak! No human foot has trod it. Into that blue shadow only the eye of God has looked. Listen to the accents of that gorge which mutters: “Before Abraham was, I am.” Is yonder wall a hedge of black or is it the rampart between heaven and hell? I see greens,—is it moss or giant pines? I see specks that may be boulders. Ever the winds sigh and drop into those sun-swept silences. Ever the gorge lies motionless, unmoved, until I fear. It is a grim thing, unholy, terrible! It is human—some mighty drama unseen, unheard, is playing there its tragedies or mocking comedy, and the laugh of endless years is shrieking onward from peak to peak, unheard, unechoed, and unknown.

One throws a rock into the abyss. It gives back no sound. It falls on silence—the voice of its thunders cannot reach so far. It is not—it cannot be a mere, inert, unfeeling, brute fact—its grandeur is too serene—its beauty too divine! It is not red, and blue, and green, but, ah! the shadows and the shades of all the world, glad colorings touched with a hesitant spiritual delicacy. What does it mean—what does it mean? Tell me, black and boiling water!

It is not real. It is but shadows. The shading of eternity. Last night yonder tesselated palace was gloom—dark, brooding thought and sin, while hither rose the mountains of the sun, golden, blazing, ensanguined. It was a dream. This blue and brilliant morning shows all those burning peaks alight, while here, shapeless, mistful, brood the shadowed towers.

I have been down into the entrails of earth—down, down by straight and staring cliffs—down by sounding waters and sun-strewn meadows; down by green pastures and still waters, by great, steep chasms—down by the gnarled and twisted fists of God to the deep, sad moan of the yellow river that did this thing of wonder,—a little winding river with death in its depth and a crown of glory in its flying hair.

I have seen what eye of man was never meant to see. I have profaned the sanctuary. I have looked upon the dread disrobing of the Night, and yet I live. Ere I hid my head she was standing in her cavern halls, glowing coldly westward—her feet were blackness: her robes, empurpled, flowed mistily from shoulder down in formless folds of folds; her head, pine-crowned, was set with jeweled stars. I turned away and dreamed—the cañon,—the awful, its depths called; its heights shuddered. Then suddenly I arose and looked. Her robes were falling. At dim-dawn they hung purplish-green and black. Slowly she stripped them from her gaunt and shapely limbs—her cold, gray garments shot with shadows stood revealed. Down dropped the black-blue robes, gray-pearled and slipped, leaving a filmy, silken, misty thing, and underneath I glimpsed her limbs of utter light.

My God! For what am I thankful this night? For nothing. For nothing but the most commonplace of commonplaces; a table of gentlewomen and gentlemen—soft-spoken, sweet-tempered, full of human sympathy, who made me, a stranger, one of them. Ours was a fellowship of common books, common knowledge, mighty aims. We could laugh and joke and think as friends—and the Thing—the hateful, murderous, dirty Thing which in American we call “Nigger-hatred” was not only not there—it could not even be understood. It was a curious monstrosity at which civilized folk laughed or looked puzzled. There was no elegant and elaborate condescension of—”We once had a colored servant”—”My father was an Abolitionist”—”I’ve always been interested in your people”—there was only the community of kindred souls, the delicate reverence for the Thought that led, the quick deference to the guest. You left in quiet regret, knowing that they were not discussing you behind your back with lies and license. God! It was simply human decency and I had to be thankful for it because I am an American Negro, and white America, with saving exceptions, is cruel to everything that has black blood—and this was Paris, in the years of salvation, 1919. Fellow blacks, we must join the democracy of Europe.

…….

And then—the Veil. It drops as drops the night on southern seas—vast, sudden, unanswering. There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. As one peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old, old design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding. And yet it hangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and Black and White—between You and Me. Surely it is a thought-thing, tenuous, intangible; yet just as surely is it true and terrible and not in our little day may you and I lift it. We may feverishly unravel its edges and even climb slow with giant shears to where its ringed and gilded top nestles close to the throne of God. But as we work and climb we shall see through streaming eyes and hear with aching ears, lynching and murder, cheating and despising, degrading and lying, so flashed and fleshed through this vast hanging darkness that the Doer never sees the Deed and the Victim knows not the Victor and Each hates All in wild and bitter ignorance. Listen, O Isles, to these Voices from within the Veil, for they portray the most human hurt of the Twentieth Cycle of that poor Jesus who was called the Christ!

There is something in the nature of Beauty that demands an end. Ugliness may be indefinite. It may trail off into gray endlessness. But Beauty must be complete—whether it be a field of poppies or a great life,—it must end, and the End is part and triumph of the Beauty. I know there are those who envisage a beauty eternal. But I cannot. I can dream of great and never-ending processions of beautiful things and visions and acts. But each must be complete or it cannot for me exist.

On the other hand, Ugliness to me is eternal, not in the essence but in its incompleteness; but its eternity does not daunt me, for its eternal unfulfilment is a cause of joy. There is in it nothing new or unexpected; it is the old evil stretching out and ever seeking the end it cannot find; it may coil and writhe and recur in endless battle to days without end, but it is the same human ill and bitter hurt. But Beauty is fulfilment. It satisfies. It is always new and strange. It is the reasonable thing. Its end is Death—the sweet silence of perfection, the calm and balance of utter music. Therein is the triumph of Beauty.

So strong is the spell of beauty that there are those who, contradicting their own knowledge and experience, try to say that all is beauty. They are called optimists, and they lie. All is not beauty. Ugliness and hate and ill are here with all their contradiction and illogic; they will always be here—perhaps, God send, with lessened volume and force, but here and eternal, while beauty triumphs in its great completion—Death. We cannot conjure the end of all ugliness in eternal beauty, for beauty by its very being and definition has in each definition its ends and limits; but while beauty lies implicit and revealed in its end, ugliness writhes on in darkness forever. So the ugliness of continual birth fulfils itself and conquers gloriously only in the beautiful end, Death.

At last to us all comes happiness, there in the Court of Peace, where the dead lie so still and calm and good. If we were not dead we would lie and listen to the flowers grow. We would hear the birds sing and see how the rain rises and blushes and burns and pales and dies in beauty. We would see spring, summer, and the red riot of autumn, and then in winter, beneath the soft white snow, sleep and dream of dreams. But we know that being dead, our Happiness is a fine and finished thing and that ten, a hundred, and a thousand years, we shall lie at rest, unhurt in the Court of Peace.

The article continues to push Diaspora scholars toward understanding issues of Afr0-Brazilian race relations as diachronically experienced and dynamically manifested in which:

A new religious expression is then created. No more an  African-Brazilian, but instead, an Afro-Brazilian-diasporic (or  universal), which shows the construction of a new network  of sociability articulated among foreigners (Americans and  Europeans) and minorities (Brazilians, Cubans, Nigerians,  Haitians …), African-Brazilian religions and african-derived  religions (Candomble, Umbanda, Lukumi) santeria, palo,  Voodoo, Ifa, center vs. periphery, global vs. local, media  and identity, tradition and modernity, new technologies of  communication and transnationalism.

Thus, the dynamics of ecumenism that has oscillated  between African-derived religions in Brazil, United States, and  Europe through the web, begin to be prepared, even before  the virtual space, in the space of the terreiro itself.   A real  space, it is. (Emphasis mine, Oliveira, 74-5)

This work links up well with other engagements with the Digital Diaspora as well, such as Parham’s 2004 work “Diaspora, Community and Communication: Internet Use in Transnational Haiti. Global Network” or Chamber Music Today’s Digital Diaspora: Virtual Chamber Music Communities which, through a Foucauldian approach to Critical Media Studies, argues, with a hopeful flare:

that it’s vital to not see technologies themselves as facilitating marginalization, but rather to understand these processes within the scope of broader cultural practice—the practices of using technologies in certain ways that affect spatial organization and function. When the space in question is cultural space—where individuals and groups experience cultural products/symbols (such as chamber music)—personal and group experiences and mediations of cultural products are affected by the practices of production and dissemination of those products which are experienced within social space. And, whereas products produced by the transnational entertainment/information industry seek to promote the universal value of mass consumption and clichéd mainstream values, alternative or activist or indigenous cultural products and discourses can potentially have unique practices of production that serve diverse goals and diverse meanings. When these types of alternative communications are disseminated through contemporary communications media, they’re able to (1) resist the colonization of cultural space by homogenous mass-culture products pushed by transitional capitalism, and (2) support identities at the individual and group/community levels. This is part of the message that authors like Saskia Sassen and Howard Rheingold put forward.

CMT: The postmodern global political economy suggests that the politics of capitalism is increasingly dictating or at least facilitating the myths of social and political discourse, though . . .

DSM: And the use of media technologies in the dissemination of cultural products has been disassociated from the political, cultural and social implications of this process. National media for the most part facilitate colonization within the norms both of modernity and postmodernity. In most democracies, alternative domestic media do exist and are vital for challenging social, political and economic injustices. Generally, these are important alternatives to national and global hegemonic communication infrastructure, although in real life categorizing many institutions within either side is difficult.

The blog and new media websites are constantly evolving, updating, destroying and reappearing even to themselves, they enjoy the splitting wide of open of aesthetically veiled wounds of their structural, substantive and infrastructural self – both the impetus for and the produced effect of a willed self-destruction which incurs the full weight of absolute loss and pays the ultimate spectre its phantasmic toll – the fee brought on by giving the debt relation its due.

The archive is a stylized technology which endows collective regimes with the potentiated process brought on by the storms of politicization emboldened by the cultivation of a new ethos, a new dialect, a different mirrored cylinder for fictionalizing the savoir, a secret power contained in the impulse to judge the world aesthetically whereby paying tribute to the individual’s self-fashioning creativity bursts the collective shackles of the masses asunder, not in one great upheaval, but in a symphonic display of ecologically reciprocal effectextuality, fabulosity, and angst before the death of transcendence. 

I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate my cycle of freedom.

“[T]he disruptiveness of the diasporic gazes” provides the impetus “for  a  thorough  investigation of what  seems  to  constitute  and  set  apart  a  ‘traditional national’ gaze and in what ways the  ‘diasporic gazes’ can  be  revealed to differ, and as the case may be supplement seeing.” The study attempts to deal with post-Enlightenment psychology’s ‘fossils in the closet,’ if you will. Given “the  ‘multiple viewpoints’ of diasporic people” the study asks whether mapping diasporic gazes will reveal “hybrid, or better, palimpsest gazes which comprise at least two ‘national’ gazes” or manifest the complementary, contrapuntal effect thereby unveiling a picture of “cultural transfer and cultural fossilisation in diasporic subjects’ viewing processes (emphasis added)?”

The study utilizes a series concepts or presuppositions that derive from a cultural studies paradigm but tests them according to more positivist and observations of phenomena which more readily translate into metrics, variables, and data sets . The test uses red eye tracking technology to monitor only “directed eye movement,” or patterns wherein “subjects’ eyes followed the structure of the image, governed by cultural relations.”

Images are understood as semantic webs of cultural nodes, varying in terms of intensity, fixation, familiarity, and aesthetic desirousness. The test thus measures a gaze according to certain basic habituated or socialized patterns engrained within perceptual behaviorisms. In writing of their methodology “[f]or reading eye movements,” Breninger & Kaltenbacher contend that “the duration of all fixations (= gaze duration) on a word may show whether subjects are familiar with a word and whether it is unknown, uncommon or not frequently used.” Thus, the relationship between the gaze of the subject of study and the subjects supposed level of knowledge about an object are mapped onto one another, although often producing many data points that defy researchers lustful invitations culling explanations to emerge  from their opaque positionings.

Ultimately the test only proved that its gaze was smaller than the image it laid its eyes upon. The researchers admit the uncertain, incomplete and open-ended nature of the experiments initial findings: “Further research will be needed in order to compare and interpret the ‘otherness’ and read the multiplicity of hybrid gazes and its possible potential, which could neither  have been proven nor made visible in this study.” Breninger and Kaltenbacher live to see the gaze another day, from a different position, a larger scale, and with  more eyes looking back, but also with more possibilities of experiencing dispersed points of blindingly beautiful Blackness.

But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve?   And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud, – and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good, – the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress. 

   So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past, – physical freedom, political power, the training of hands, – all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overoast. Are they all wrong, – and false? 

***

More can be found @occupywallstNYC @Cyberhetoric  www.ocupario.org

via Rio +20, Rio+99: A Context Note | #OcupaRio.

When the global south and my eyes first met my heart was in for a shock. Rio is considered by Brazilians to be a tourist city, not the heartland of the country. Yet, the first glimpse of the city seen from the oval window of a Boeing 767 is an immense bay speckled by cargo ships and Favelas lined natural coasts.

The airport was littered with more foreigners than usual, however, due to the U.N’s Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development and the Environment. Over 20,000 security personnel are stationed in the city for increased protection. Yet, such a large influx of armed soldiers does not seem to phase any of the locals. Police and military personnel seem to be around every winding corner of Rio’s narrow streets. Despite the increased presence of physical force, the people seem to feel freer than in most Westernized countries. A culture of conversation pervades – in front of every street shop, in every park, and on every subway people are chummily conversing, couples are publicly affectionate, and children are playing.

Everyone has a dog (and no, not just an L.A. outfit accessory dog) and everyone is concerned about your family. No one in this country would think that saying “I like to meet new people” is a personality characteristic, its just a fact of life common to the human condition. At the Universidade em Rio de Janeiro the professores are Occupying the Campus and the students are the ones desiring to attend class. The educational culture is topsy-turvy compared to the U.S.

When people hear you speaking English you are either met with a slight scowl or a glance of guilty curiosity.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

At a conference in Tel Aviv, standing next to Israel’s top Defense Official, Kapersky told reporters he’s “scared.” He went accentuated his remarks with this little tidbit:

It’s not cyber war, it’s cyber terrorism and I’m afraid it’s just the beginning of the game … I’m afraid it will be the end of the world as we know it.

Note he writes that this is “the beginning of the game” not the ‘end.’ Catastrophe is in the offing, and this man is giving a pregame speech… Recently, leadership Republicans have been complaining about security leaks. Some see it as an attempt to stop an unpopular President in an election year from claiming political victory out of the ashes of covert military operations. News of America admitting to have colluded with Israel in the creation and design of the Stuxnet virus that targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities has been rather openly leaked.

Kapersky when on to subtly oust a whole host of countries, listing many with “cyber terrorism” operations already underway, but refusing to specify each of the countries individual levels of involvment. He went on to name

the United States, Britain, Israel, China, Russia and possibly India, Japan and Romania as countries with the ability to develop such software.

For being a man with the wit to discover such a virus, Kapersky seems paranoid to the point of madness. He spoke in a rushed manner of his fear of the over-saturation of information in a postmodern age. The data transfers, the software development, the stakes are all surging too fast for his liking, heading inimitably toward a dark end point he would like nothing more than to escape.

Finally he coined the term “CYBER BOOMERANG,” meaning the effect that the coding of cyber viruses has on actually spreading the knowledge of how to construct a fatal virus. Once a virus has been discovered by rival hacktivists they can reverse engineer and critically deconstruct it down to the level of its component parts. This process in turn teaches them the basic formula for retaliating. Such a business can be foolhardy, if not outright irrational. Yet, in a realm lacking known deterrents, what are your other options. Kapersky said of the boomerange effect that:

“These ideas are spreading too fast…That cyber boomerang may get back to you.”

Every fool, from king to policemen, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weakness of human nature. Yet how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

It doesn’t get any better than this…

In the fall of 1966 Alfred Appel, Jr interviewed Vladimir Nabokov ‘in an opulent hotel’ overlooking Switzerland’s viviparous Lake Geneva.

When asked to give his advice to young literary critics, Nabokov Replies:  

My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on “ideas.” Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have  detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the “how” above the “what” but do not let it be confused with the “so what.” Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs.  Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.

* . * . * .

  Q…Yet your novels are filled with little details that seem to have been purposely pulled from your own life, as a reading of Speak, Memory makes clear, not to mention the overriding patterns, such as the lepidopteral motif, which extend through so many books. They seem to partake of something other than the involuted voice, to suggests to me clearly held idea about the interrelationship between self-knowledge and artistic creation, self-parody and identity. Would you comment on this, and the significance of autobiographical hints in works of art that are literally not autobiographical?

 

 

 

A. I would say that imagination is a form of memory. Down, Plato, down, good dog. An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne’s mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may use when combining it with later recollections and inventions. In this sense, both memory and imagination are a negation of time.

 

 

. * . * .

The tactile delights of precise delineation, the silent paradise of the camera lucida, and the precision of poetry in taxonomic description represent the artistic side of the thrill that accumulation of new knowledge, absolutely useless to the layman, gives its first begetter. Science means to me above all natural science. Not the ability to repair a radio set; quite stubby fingers can do that. Apart from this basic consideration, I certainly welcome the free interchange of terminology between any branch of science and any raceme of art. There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts. Aphoristicism is a symptom of arteriosclerosis.

 

. * . * .

And this is how the dialogue dies:

Q. And as a closing question, sir, may I return to Pale Fire: where, please, are the crown jewels hidden?

 

A. In the ruins, Sir, of some old barracks near Kobaltana( q.v.); but do not tell it to the Russians.

 

Check the Index for Kobaltana or for “crown jewels,” but you still may never find them.

‘via Blog this’

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‘via Blog this’

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Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (H.R. 3523) – GovTrack.us

Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (H.R. 3523) – GovTrack.us.

Log in and use Google or Facebook (two of the primary lobbyists for this bill) to connect with the .gov website and track CISPA’s status as it moves through Senate Procedures

&&

Now, the Word’s dynamic potentia, the metamorphoses of word’s ancient ciphers, need ”

to shift their force and form” – Sponsor a Word – You can own a bit of man’s meaning all for yourself.
The force of Etymonline.com “becomes more explicit as it multiplies ‘folding and unfolding the roots of its slightest signs’ (Online Etymological Dictionary, Derrida, Mallarme).

Or else:

The battles fought between the Forget & the Word will “drill themselves into” a ”stalemate:”

 

Chess, game of the privileged and the indolent, of clerks and monks, the “World of Warcraft” of the Middle Ages. Talking among themselves under the college stones, groping for images to contain difficult thought-webs, the boys hauled up chess, an available symbolic language built on situations they all knew they all understood. It could speak in tongues the Bible didn’t know, and they wove “mate” — that strange Arab word for the death of kings, the fate of kings at the moment when they act with perfect freedom yet all paths lead to death, a luscious image — from their eclectic little game, into the tongues of Europe in manifold ways.

 

If you didn’t before, follow stalemate to its source, its origin, and then tell me whether it is as much “a play on words” as it is a play anew.

There are many meanings to be found with the roots, a large company of co-conspirators that never cease dancing. One need not emphasize the_the singularly switched Fate of the second born Gemini.

Yet, a Word will always stall before presenting its meaning – in the youthful adolescence of a word, say of 15-20, allurement is learned – a word follows the thieve’s noble lie in loyal assistantship, until the Word learns the true meaning of an assistant, in the absence thereof.  But don’t let my explanation be any pretext or  excuse for not asking the source to tell you the story itself…

 
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One of the many reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev

was put to death by Lenin’s ruffians thirty odd years ago was that

during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor’s dim office, in the torture

house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that

took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of

shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, t h e p o e t

k e p t s m i l i n g  - Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

Despite the hard experiences of real travels and battles, he remained, to the end of his life, a schoolboy entranced by the Iliad of childhood – the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He never outgrew the influence of Mayne Reid, Alexandre Dumas, père, Jules Verne, Gustave Aimard and others- “Gumilyov’s Magic Wand” – Mikhail Sinelnikov. Moscow News, CULTURE; No. 15. April 18, 1996.

I remember originally watching this commercial on a larger screen and feeling the sensations of the slow onset of an uncanny nausea. This phone is omniscient.
I’m reminded of Marx’s allusion to the camera obscura in The German Ideology -

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

Between the claims that ‘it knows who you are’ and ‘it follows your every move’ there is a shot in the commercial angled toward the sky, as if shot from the ground, with a girl jumping about the camera, and even though the physical relation between man and his creations would seem to follow the traditional hierarchy of anthropocentric mastery – I feel that the sense of disorientation provoked inverts the relation. In the clip the girl jumps around in aimless circles and veils are flying whimsically in the breeze – a jovial scene sure – but now the phone’s point of view and power has moved to the center position. The galaxie’s photographs allow for the camera to to be placed upside down, while man remains a purposeless object to be captured.

Perhaps the actual difference between the inverted images of man in relation to the camera are not actually very large, in form, and moreso, are the necessary result of the dialectic of historical life processes. But I think that something more might be going on with this ad than the traditional ideological method critique would discern, do you?