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Post-Enlightenment Meditations [Jan. 22nd, 2010|02:25 pm]
Here, is our next set of readings. These should not be difficult in the expected sense. Most of the sentences can be parsed without much trouble. It's the provocative nature of the author's ideas which should challenge you. Is this provocative stance deliberate or accidental? Is the author's tone sincere or sarcastic? If those terms don't seem appropriate, which ones do? Once you've decided on the author's tone, what aspects of the text occasioned that judgment on your part?




Novalis
(1772 - 1801)
"Christendom, or Europe"
"Faith and Love, or King and Queen"



(optional readings/audio files below)



Caspar David Friedrich
(1774-1840)
Man and Woman Gazing at The Moon

Novalis
"Hymns to The Night"

(text)
(audio download)

* * *



Philipp Otto Runge
(1777-1810)
Morning

(click the image above and reflect on why i associated this
painting and the linked website. feel free to comment.)
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Very Brief But Important Reading Assignment for This Week [Jan. 18th, 2010|03:11 pm]
[Tags|]

Hi,

I'm giving you just a few pages to read for either Wednesday or Thursday. Some of you will be familiar with it already. Though it's still very early in the semester we need to keep moving forward, because our time is limited. Also, this will give you something on which to write for this week's journal post. Let's leave it at that for now. I look forward to seeing you all soon.

bk




Immanuel Kant
(1734-1804)
"An Answer to the Question: What is Enlighenment?" (1878)
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Steampunk and The Art of Filth [Jan. 15th, 2010|02:00 pm]
STUDENT:

Stab in the Dark-
Cyberpunk was the name of the genre given to it by Bruce Bethke from his novel, Cyberpunk.
It caught on with critics and readers, so they began calling every combination of noir and
sci-fi as such. Steampunk is called such because it throws the Victorian era into the mix.

TEACHER:

Yeah, steampunk is a trope of the term cyberpunk. And so, yeah, steam and not cyber. But one thing that makes the root term 'punk' interesting is its association with all that is low or filthy. And what we need to remember about the Victorian era is just how dirty it was. This was the height of the industrial revolution and London, along with all other major British cities were choked by pollution. As Friedrich Engels point out in his book The Conditions of the Working Class in England, capitalism is to blame for the famous London fogs we read about in Great Expectations and Sherlock Holmes, and which we are enjoying right now in Salt Lake City.



NPR Story: THE KILLER FOG OF '52 (read and listen)

And take a minute to consider this "beautiful" impressionist painting below. Click on the image for more information. If you want to read more about the intimate connection between industrial waste and impressionist painting, consult the remarkable scholarship of distinguished UC Berkeley professor T. J. Clark, in particular his superb The Painting of Modern Life.




Claude Monet
Houses of Parliament (1903)
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First Reading Assignment [Jan. 12th, 2010|05:22 pm]
[Tags|]

Here are the first two readings of the semester. Click on the highlighted text to download the pdf files. Also, you can click on the images to see large, high-definition versions. Either or both of these essays may be very unlike anything you've ever read before. They may discuss topics or issues about which you know little or nothing. I am fully aware of that. In fact, both essays, as their titles suggest, discuss this very issue, unfamiliarity and discomfort, one with respect to art and the science. Do your best to get through them both. Neither is especially long, and come to class prepared to share observations and ask questions. You don't need to begin journaling on these essays write away, but feel free to be bold and give it a shot if you read something that captures your attention. OK, best of luck to all. See you very soon.




Henri Matisse
The Joy of Life (1906)
Oil on canvas
69" x 95"
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA

Leo Steinberg
"Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public" (1962)





Thomas Eakins
The Gross Clinic (1875)
Oil on canvas
96" x 78"
Jefferson Medical College

Allan C. Smith III & Sherryl Kleinman
"Managing Emotions in Medical School" (1989)
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(no subject) [Jan. 11th, 2010|03:58 pm]
Anything highlighted on this page, or subsequent pages, is a live link. Get into the habit of clicking on them to explore the music, videos and back ground materials which I will regularly attach to our regular course readings. My goal is to make this class as rich an experience as possible. You can help the group and me, as well as boost your grade, by adding your own appropriate input in the form of various digital files. Let me know if you need assistance in learning to do this.



Novalis
[Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg]
(1772 - 1801)
"Chistendom; or, Europe"
"Faith and Love; or, King and Queen"

~



Caspar David Friedrich
(1771 - 1840)
"Man and Woman Gazing at The Moon"

~



Ludwig von Beethoven
(1770 - 1827)
"Piano Sonata #8 - Pathetique"
"Cello Sonata #4"
"Piano Sonata #14 - Mondschein"
"Song: Joy in Sadness"
"Piano Sonata #23 - Appassionata"

~



Novalis
"Hymns to The Night"


Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood -- the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it -- but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. -- Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world -- sunk in a deep grave -- waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes. -- The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?

What springs up all at once so sweetly boding in my heart, and stills the soft air of sadness? Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night? . . .


(read more, if you are so inclined)
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From Pott(er)y Art to Pott(er)y Barn . . . And Back Again [Jan. 5th, 2010|12:14 pm]
He knew perfectly well his trash would end up in a museum.

[Claes Oldenburg's]
The Store's idea takes off from the premise that all avant-gardist daring is assimilable, recuperable by middle-class culture ("The bourgeois scheme is that they wish to be disturbed from time to time, they like that, but then they envelop you, and that little bit is over, and they are ready for the next"). The projected solution to this dilemna: skip over the illusory stage during which art pretends to escape the condition of the commodity.

-- Rosalind Krauss, "A User's Guide to Entropy"




Based on the idea that the exhibition career predicts the market career Artfacts.Net has developed an "artist career analysing tool". This tool is aimed to provide professionals with the ability to monitor the career of 30,000 contemporary artists by visualizing key market information. The career analyzing tool consists of two graphs. The first graph visualizes the artists exhibition career and the second one his auction career. The art professional can monitor up to four artists in one graph to compare their exhibition and market career. Furthermore a trend line can be added and the time frame can be adjusted.



The ranking chart should be viewed as an aid to understand
an artist's exhibition career in relation to the other artists stored
in the Artfacts.Net Ranking System.



This chart compares the artist ranking with his auction
turnover in absolute numbers.



The ranking-auction relation chart compares the percentual change
in rank and auction turnover. The shift in the ranking position is often
followed by a shift in the auction turnover the following year.



It is possible to compare the exhibition and auction career of
up to 4 artists and to view the trend lines for different periods.
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Pertinent Stories on NPR [Dec. 13th, 2009|02:54 pm]


Was Ancient Historian One
Of The First Spin Doctors?


(read and listen)





Interview with the Director of the Vampire:
On Point with Werner Herzog


(read and listen)

'My Son, My Son': Matricide The Herzog Way
a film review


(read)

Filmmaker Herzog's 'Grizzly' Tale
of Life and Death


(read and listen)
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Melt-Banana [Dec. 9th, 2009|01:48 am]
This was fun.
Now it's time for bed.
See you in the morning.

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Ἀχιλλεύς - Ἕκτωρ - Last Readings of The Semester [Dec. 7th, 2009|06:29 pm]
[Tags|]





Homer
The Iliad

(books 18, 19, 22, 24)





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Steampunk [Dec. 7th, 2009|04:56 pm]
Not that this stuff is all that new anymore. But it actually provides a good analogue to the imaginative and playful spirit in which I have tried to teach each reading this semester. Not "Is it true?" but simply "What if?"

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"It just all seems so goshdarn atheisticalifragilistic after Kant!" [Dec. 6th, 2009|04:08 pm]
Uh, yeah. And for reasons anyone could imagine, even without necessarily accepting them. But it's not entirely atheism and irreligion after Kant. Religion, despite the numerous attack it sustains after Kant, does not disappear. But having been subject to rigorous critique, religion cannot continue on with business as usual, not without falling into dogmatism and hypocrisy anyhow.

So, what does Western religion become after Kant. Well, on new form of Western religion which emerges is Secular Humanism, which is what we saw in Feuerbach. According to this view of things it is possible to be deeply religious and moral without God, for God is really just a primitive understanding of Human nature projected into the heavens. Once we realize we have, in venerating some supposed Supreme Being, in fact been all along venerating our own nature, we are free to be human in the fullest sense. Humanity, in the most general sense and perfect form, then rightfully takes the place of God. This is precisely what Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) concluded after translating Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, and all the characters she creates in her novels can be seen as the result of this belief. In strict opposition to this kind of thinking, French marxist Louis Althusser, the man who brought us the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses, will insist, after a very careful reading of Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach," that the new Humanist faith is really nothing but a more insidious form of the old God-centered one. For this reason, amongst other Althusser is generally considered key proponent of post-Humanism.




But outright and committed theism also continues after the Kantian critique of religion. The most important defender of orthodox Christian faith to emerge after Kant was Soren Kierkegaard, a young Danish philosophy student. You may recall from the beginning of the semester the pivotal role his writings played in Leo Steinberg's "Contemporary Art and The Plight of Its Public". Kierkegaard, through his study of Hegel, whom he soon strenuously rejected, pursed the paradoxes internal to orthodoxy to the point where dogmatic adherence to the tenets of the faith could only appear patently absurd. And it was in wholeheartedly embracing absurdity, through an ungrounded and unjustifiable "leap of faith," the Kierkegaard became the founder of Existentialism. Any serious theologian since Kierkegaard (Barth, Bultmann and Maritain come to mind) will not have failed to give Kierkegaard's writings the most serious consideration. If Jesus is indeed the Way, then in many respects Kierkegaard is the very key to all modern theology.


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"the tenuous distinction between patriotic fervor and mindless brutality" [Dec. 5th, 2009|11:52 am]
STUDENT:

If Schopenhauer is a Kantian who does not believe in God, I should think that he would most definitely not see the history of the world as meaningless. He should see it as beautiful. Studying our own history only benefits ourselves in our current existence, and therefore we are living for the sake of ourselves. We make our own history meaningful, whether or not we have an afterlife, we give our history the importance of making our current existence happy.

And furthermore, if we in any country, are studying our history to achieve a happier existance now, than are we so little?

TEACHER:

Schopenhauer believes in the Kantian division between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between appearance and the things-in-themselves. While Kant believes we have no access to the real, but must simply posit its existence for the sake of sanity and motivation in moral life, Schopenhauer believes we can have an approximate access to the the real in certain respects, the most immediate is the inwardly-originating movement of the human body. It is not reason or matter itself which for Schopenhauer constitutes the thing-in-itself. Rather, the thing-in-itself, per se, is the Will, a completely irrational and insatiable force which underlies and drives all life. History can have no direction, firstly because it is pure illusion, but secondly because history, if it did exist at all, would driven by wholly aimless destructive forces.

Schopenhauer's intense hatred of all nationalism and patriotism derives directly from his belief, from having read Hegel (whom he despised), that countries are nothing more than grotesque superpowers, colossal manifestations of a thoroughly irrational collective Will. Rather than control the Will - which for Schopenhauer is quite a bit like the Tao, though with a voracious appetite and gnawing teeth - all we can hope to do is relinquish that aspiration and instead seek refuge in simplicity of living and art of the highest order. Interestingly, Schopenhauer is the philosopher most responsible for elevating classical music, which prior to him had always been understood as light diversion, to the exalted which it enjoyed through the 19th and up to the time of its death, in the 20th century. For it is music which for Schopenhauer most proximately expresses the motions and passions of the Will. And though Schopenhauer does not speak of dance, I would suggest that the rise of dance as art, as Dance, can with much justification be traced back to his writings.




Ludwig von Beethoven
Piano Concerto #5
"The Emperor"


STUDENT:

I think I understand my misconception of history. Schopenhauer is not against the study of history because to study it would be motivated by an intention to improve ourselves for the future-- that is our Will. Correct?

One thing I still don't understand though, is why the thing-in-itself is not a relevant matter here. Isn't studying history even though it is illusional and happened the way it happened without any forethought as to how things would result, we can still learn from it and we do. Our reflection on the past influences how we live in the current moment, we put effort forward to control bad things from happening and this as you said is Will, right? So if our will is how we are living, and we are living in a way that will enable our happiness while we are alive than we are back to the thing-in-itself idea. What am I missing?

TEACHER:

The ideas you mention are common assumptions which first originate with Kant and especially Hegel. But Schopenhauer, as ferociously anti-Hegelian, believed none of them. For Hegel, history, did indeed look, at first glance, like nothing but a long series of disasters. Nevertheless, it could be read, if one adopted an appropriate ideal perspective, as leading, despite the ignorance and ineptitude of individual human actors, slowly and inexorably toward a greater good for Humanity in general. Ideally viewed, history became History. But Schopenhauer thoroughly rejected that there was any sort of higher ground from which to observe the wreckage of history in any way which would make sense of it. No matter how you observed it, history was nothing but ceaseless failure and meaningless destruction. This, as you can imagine, is not a popular view in our own day. But it carried great currency beginning around 1850 or so, when Hegelian idealism had really lost its steam. Various key thinkers after Schopenhauer have used his writings as a basis from which to develop their own philosophies. Nietzsche and Freud are only two examples.

One of the great substances, or things-in-themselves, which Kant says much remain forever out of our grasp, is Reason itself. He takes the reality of Reason - the active force of mind - for an undeniable fact. But what exactly it is in its essence, he believes we cannot know. Schopenhauer, an extremely astute reader of Kant, but one who has read him after and not before the disasters of the Napoleonic Wars, continues to believe in some undefinable power which drives world events. But in stark opposition to Kant, he no longer sees this force as Reason but rather Unreason, as the wholly Irrational Will. A good way to understand the conclusions and tone to which this insight leads Schopenhauer, it might be appropriate to have a look at the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya's powerful and horrifying series of engraving, The Disasters of War. They are very disturbing, to say the very least. It's hard to see life from this perspective and imagine that history is History, and that is has any positive lessons to teach us at all. Might be interesting to compare and contrast Goya and Schopenhauer's understanding of war and that of Homer. If we want, however, to pursue these ideas from a strictly Hegelian perspective, the next obvious text for us to read would be Carl von Clausewitz's On War, which I will teach in IT3.




(You Were Born For This)
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Homer's Iliad [Dec. 5th, 2009|10:54 am]
[Tags|]



Ὅμηρος
(800 BCE)
The Iliad

(read books 1, 6, 8, 9, 16)
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You Know It's Gonna Be So Worth It [Dec. 4th, 2009|03:00 pm]
"making yourselves sick, that you may lay up
something against a sick day, something to be
tucked away in an old chest"

- Henry David Thoreau


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Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 [Dec. 4th, 2009|12:19 pm]
A high-modernist aspiration critically examined as early as 1940, in Clement Greenberg's classic study of medium specificity, "Towards a Newer Laocoon". This title brought forth by the Hirschhorn Musuem, the modern-art wing of the Smithsonian Institution.

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Confirmed Bachelor vs Olympia - Ain't Love Grand! [Dec. 4th, 2009|01:05 am]


The Rational Right of Marriage

For, this natural employment - the use of the sexual organ of the other - is an enjoyment for which the one person is given up to the other. In this relation the human individual makes himself into a thing, which is contrary to the right of humanity in his own person. This, however, is only possible under the one condition, that as the one person is acquired by the other as a thing, that same person also equally acquires the other reciprocally, and thus regains and reestablishes the rational personality.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

In the kingdom of ends everything has either dignity or a price.

- Immanuel Kant


Elin Woods Offered $80 Million
To Keep Playing Trophy Wife




"the beleaguered golfer is negotiating an immediate $5 million payout to his wife—and revising her prenup to give her as much as $55 million more to stay with him two more years."
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Anti-Hegel - "Artistic, Moral and Ascetic Forms of Awareness" [Dec. 3rd, 2009|11:35 pm]
Who else might we profitably read along with Marx, Thoreau and Lao-Tzu? This guy, who was the first Western thinker to take Eastern philosophy seriously. In particular Hinduism and Buddhism, though I believe certain legitimate connections could be made to Toaism as well.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.


- Arthur Schopenhauer


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Fate of The Master [Dec. 2nd, 2009|05:34 pm]



What else might we be reading along with Marx and Thoreau? Plenty, though clearly we can only do so much. Below I've displayed two classic texts, produced in Germany by two of Hegel's most brilliant disciples. Both authors were members, along with Karl Marx, of the forward-thinking group known as the Young Hegelians. The first, David Strauss's The Life of Jesus Critically Examined was published in 1835, and the second, Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, was published in 1841. Each uses the master Hegel's famous dialectical method, though in different ways, to disrupt some of Western culture's most cherished notions regarding the origin and function of the Christian faith. Both, immediately upon their first appearance, shook the Western Intellectual world. Interesting to note, too, that the standard English translations still in circulation today were produced, at the wage-slave rate of a few pennies per page, by a young woman, Mary Anne Evans, who later went on to publish, under the pseudonym George Eliot, some of the most important novels in all of English literature.




For what it's worth, these are materials I'll probably assign when I teach IT3. Join me this summer, if you'd like to read them. On the other hand, if you want, for whatever reason, to read classics in orthodox religious and spiritual history, take IT2 with me, in which I'll be teaching early and medieval Christianity with great enthusiasm and no apologies.
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Meet the Man Who Lives on Zero Dollars [Dec. 2nd, 2009|03:57 pm]


In Utah, a modern-day caveman has lived for the better part of a decade on zero dollars a day. People used to think he was crazy.

By Christopher Ketcham,
Photograph by Mark Heithoff


Daniel Suelo lives in a cave. Unlike the average American—wallowing in credit-card debt, clinging to a mortgage, terrified of the next downsizing at the office—he isn't worried about the economic crisis. That's because he figured out that the best way to stay solvent is to never be solvent in the first place. Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit.

(read details)
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"appropriate to a fun fair or the grand opening of a gas station" - Benjamin Buchloh [Dec. 1st, 2009|06:28 pm]


"How can I describe the exhibition to you: the exhibition which floats in my mind like a star?" - this letter revealed [Rudi] Fuchs's fundamentally contradictory perspective. On the one hand, he claimed that he would restore to art its precious autonomy, while on the other hand, he made no secret his desire to manipulate the individual works of art in conformity with his inflated self-image as the master artist of the exhibition. Whether the artists intended it or not, Fuchs would insure that their works would in no way reflect upon their environment: the world around them, customs and architecture, politics and cooking.

- Douglas Crimp




~Pamela Anderson and Her Vivienne Westwood
For Art Basel Miami~
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Lao-Tzu and Henry David Thoreau [Nov. 30th, 2009|03:19 pm]
[Tags|]



optional six-page reading:
"The Chinese Notion of 'Blandness' as a Virtue:
A Preliminary Outline"

Francois Jullien and Graham Parks
East and West, Vol. 43, No. 1, Jan. 1993


Music or the smell of good cooking
may make people stop and enjoy.
But words that point to the Tao
seem monotonous and without flavor.
When you look for it, there is nothing to see.
When you listen for it, there is nothing to hear.
When you use it, it is inexhaustible.

- Tao-Te-Ching

"What can you have in common with a man who does not know the difference between ice cream and cabbage and who has no experience of wine or ale?"

- Emerson on Thoreau




老子
(died 470 BC)
Tao-Te-Ching

(arbitrarily select and read ten sections)





Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862)
Walden (1854)

(approx 53:00)

"Economy" (7:08)
"Quiet Desperation" (3:45)
"Where I Lived" (5:37)
"Abode In The Woods" (4:05)
"Every Morning I Got Up Early" (4:43)
"Reading" (8:15)
"Sounds" (6:31)
"Solitude" (9:47)
"Homeric Man" (4:54)
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STUDENT: "turning the everday into art" [Nov. 25th, 2009|04:25 pm]
[Tags|]



Karl Marx & Fredrich Engels
"The Communist Manifesto" (1848)

(Part One - Bourgeois and Proletarians)




Henry David Thoreau
"On The Duty of Civil Disobedience" (1849)




Douglas Crimp
"The Art of Exhibition" (1984)
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Althusser & ISA ~ Atheism and Anti-Humanism Pushed To Their Most Desolate Extremes [Nov. 25th, 2009|02:02 pm]
NB: this double "currently" is one more proof of the fact that ideology is "eternal", since these two "currentlys" are separatedly by an indefinite interval; I am writing these lines on April 6, 1969, you may read them at any subsequent time.

- Louis Althusser, footnote to "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"

I'm reading Althusser now and savoring every single word. Forreals. I must say, his essay on ideology is justifiably considered a dazzlingly beautiful and savagely brutal masterpiece of critical theory. Like Mozart's Requiem, which to the uninitiated might also seem redundant, this essay will leave the prepared reader thunderstruck. Though of course this will be the case only for those who have read the essay with great care and curiosity, and done all the necessary prior labor. The rest will just shrug and say what has always been said in the presence of great and challenging art: "Too many notes; but, whatever, to each his own." No truer words.



Nevertheless, I understand that for a number of reasons - including your newness to the text and also the fact that you guys, unlike me, have lives outside theory - you probably won't end up reading it as closely and successfully as I. No problem. Just be aware that though the introductory sections are important, they are indeed repetitive. Also, we've already discussed many of the issues Althusser is discussing there back when we read Gramsci, who Althusser himself invokes by name. So, you can skim those sections.

However, do pay close attention when you hit pg. 1496, "Ideology Has No History". This is the part of the text that strikes me as most interesting and "revolutionary" - though many of Althusser's opponents would harshly attack these same statements for being utterly counter-revolutionary. If you have been following my posts on Saussure and Levi-Strauss, you will not fail to recognize that Althusser's discussion of the "eternality" of ideology derives directly from those seminal writers (as well as the notorious psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whom we'll read for Thursday). Hence the fact that Althusser is labeled a Structuralist. (If you haven't been following my posts, cool, you've probably got a life.) Also, this particular section in Althusser's essay is the place where his writing works most closely in concert with the brilliant and controversial essay by Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture In The Expanded Field".



Now, below is a letter I wrote not long ago to a friend, on the subject of what contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls "White Mythologies". I'm posting it here because of its relation to you. Not all of you will care to read this, I know. But perhaps at least one or two of you will.



Dear Z,

I'm glad you're still teaching Althusser. I won't even go so far as to say that he was unjustly maligned, but I nevertheless think he has much to offer, if only because he's doing something different. As you've seen, right now I teach medieval theology, and certainly the medieval Church has much not to be proud of. And yet each day I'm finding myself more and more impressed with the love of learning, as well as the disregard for popularity, and indifference to danger, evinced by the writers we're examining.

I think we're pretty much in agreement on the function of the compromise third-term as a performing a naturalizing function. My class has examined this, though not necessarily from the perspective of critique, in the writing of Augustine: his attempt to invalidate heretical readings of the Scripture, as either too lite
ral (Cyprian and Origen) or too capricious and symbolic (Tychonius) or too base (The Gnostics).

It seems that the Augustinian compromise formation results from a necessary ground operation: liberating the text from any necessary tie to history: i.e., from any “motivation”. Literality in Augustine (and of course this is merely my reading of him) means not what actually happened, but rather what the book, once the text has been properly established, actually says.

Augustine carries us from readings to Reading. I believe you can see how this shift from the literal to
Literality, from the text to Textuality, from the many to the one; is tied up with an entire ideological project based in the narcissistic moment of recognizing oneself as a soul, as Human.

Once a “Human” middle term has been established as "natural" one then is at liberty to wander into allegorical readings, or to speculate as to the historical veracity of certain Old Testament narratives. But these relative freedoms are always based upon the possibility of returning to the normalcy
and security of the Letter. (Or as Lacan would say, L'Etre.)

And I think it is preciesly this almost inescapably seductive ecstacy, or euphoria, of the Self recognizing itself in the Word, i.e., finding itself in the Field of the Other, which is the main target of Althusser's devastating critique of Marxist Humanism. I admire Althusser because his work allows me to see how ideological apparatuses operate at the most elementary (phonological) levels of everyday life, turning the mundane practice of reading (even the newspaper or the tabloids) into the Moral Act of Reading (and it's this sense of the quotidian as morally uplifting which I think is everywhere attacked in the Mythologies of Barthes).

From a purely critical perspective, it's nauseating to witness the self-satisfied and self-congratulatory middle-brow smugness I associate with consumers of the History-Channel and other equally banal mass-media representations provided by the Ideological State Apparatus. Yet perhaps, from time to time, we have to admire, and even envy, the childlike joy of the new convert. Perhaps, at times, this simplicity almost seems preferable to the generalized apathy by which we’re surrounded. Perhaps it might be tempting to hope for some moment of conversion of one’s own, to willfully cling to a naïve belief that not every initial burst of joy must soon give way to a banal happiness; a happiness which in turn gives way to a malaise whose only cure is to be found in converting one's neighbor (preferably an exotic one) specifically so that the Self can enjoy the comforting/scandalizing spectacle of watching it's own conception and birth re-staged for it by another.

As for Althusser, I think he is taught so little because, like the Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, or, even moreso, the Dominican Meister Eckhart, he utterly shatters our narcissism, reopens the wound sutured by our ego.

Your friend,

BK

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Documentary about the works/performances of John Cage and Meredith Monk, directed by Peter Greenaway [Nov. 25th, 2009|12:46 pm]


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French Structuralist Marxism - At War With Humanism [Nov. 25th, 2009|02:26 am]
That the concepts Althusser derived from his symptomatic reading of Marx, Lenin, and Mao were Marxist concepts was avowed. Nevertheless, Althusser also acknowledged that some of the concepts found latent in these texts were derived from and consistent with his philosophical and social scientific contemporaries as well as with those of Spinoza.


(some of the most brutally difficult books
i've encountered in 20 years of reading)





Louis Althusser







Julia Kristeva



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Artificiality, Problematicity, Contingency [Nov. 23rd, 2009|09:36 pm]


(Shi)



"From the Master to the Disciple:
The Proposition is only an Indication"





"The Force of Form, The Effect of Genre"


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"The Big Li(e)" [Nov. 23rd, 2009|06:25 pm]
STUDENT:

You're being facetious I presume when you say that "obedience and silence are the surest path to courage and self-reliance". Like your friend said in the interview at UC Berkley, only 3 students had been arrested at that point and the others were able to stand their ground. Even if they themselves don't cause the change, the publicity they create is bound to. Think about Tianenmen square for example, although tons of people died, it caused a huge outrage within the Western Culture and made people step back for once and question what was right and wrong.

TEACHER:

Yes and no to facetious. Think of it this way: As we discussed in class, it's possible to see the artificiality of rite, or of the museum for that matter, from two perspectives, from the outside and from the inside. It might also be possible, then, to see obedience and silence from two perspectives. And each of those perspectives might be entertained with two distinct attitudes, credulity and incredulity. Though a third perspective might be considered, that of assent, which knows itself to be inside an apparatus generating an effect of reality and knowingly affirms this. Which come pretty close to what Confucius says about 學.




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"I will be a naturalist." - Li Ji - "The Great Learning" [Nov. 23rd, 2009|05:32 pm]
Anybody able to use their understanding of Confucius
and Emerson to explain why Cardew might have abandoned
the avant-garde in "midlife" and become a Maoist?
Give it a shot.


大學



Cornelius Cardew
(1936 - 1981)
"The Great Learning"
(Paragraph 2)
(Paragraph 7)



"He later rejected the avant-garde
in favour of a politically motivated
'people's liberation music'."




"Long Live Chairman Mao"
"Revolution Is The Main Trend In The World Today"
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"a fixed point of fusion where form joins truth" [Nov. 23rd, 2009|11:33 am]



A recently translated study by a world-renowned Sinologist contrasting Eastern and Western art, published by the University of Chicago Press. François Jullien is professor of Chinese philosophy and literature at the University of Paris VII and director of the Institut Marcel Granet.











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"Site-Specific" Campus Politics: Strategically Occupying The Space of Exploitation [Nov. 22nd, 2009|04:57 pm]
Here's more from the ongoing UC Berkeley student strike, which has arisen in response to the recent proposed 32% hike in tuition. Click the image below of Tony Smith's Die to see a video of my friend Callie speaking on the CBS television network.




Of course we'd never see protests like this at the U of U, because no administrative abuses of this sort could ever take place on our campus. Nor would our students ever protest even if such abuses did take place. Always better just to be complaisant and submit to authority, no matter what it demands. Obedience and silence are the surest path to courage and self-reliance.
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