“Born—Bridalled—Shrouded.”
— Emily Dickinson, excerpt of “Title—divine is mine !”, in Une Âme en Incandescence / Incandescent Soul
Tag: q
The Automation Charade
[V]iolence has reasons that reason itself cannot know.
André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs, p. 97
“Can the movements and flows of an opened body be represented, or does representation itself only function upon a foreclosure of such nomadic flesh?”
— Jonathan Kemp, The Penetrated Male
At its most mechanistic, trauma is a simple register of impact upon the organism – Freud cites the example of railway accidents – the transmission and distribution, through the organism, of exogenous stimuli. Ballard’s contribution, in The Atrocity Exhibition, is to radi- calise the Freudian account of trauma by generalizing it. Rather than treating trauma as something with which the organism is affected only contingently, Ballard implies that trauma is a general condition, a non – or anti- – biotic transmission system, distributing particular tics – swarms of repetition-com- pulsions – across a culture that is indistinguishable from nature. Culture, like the organism, is composed of tics, compulsions and looped behaviours, rather than simply afflicted by them. The “abstract patterns” that Dr. Nathan and his supposedly psychotic patients discover repeated across architectural, bio- logical and geological assemblages are the vectors through which this trauma spreads. Trauma is not merely about processes of wounding and scarring, but also about the response to violent incursions (indeed, wounding and scarring are already such responses); it is a distributed event, not merely echoed or ref- erenced in the repetition-compulsions, but continued, prolonged, propagated.
Flatline Constructs
Mark Fisher
“When we are in front of an abstract painting, we have the license to interpret in any way we want. Or music—music is a medium that we might not understand, but that we feel and enjoy. But in the case of cinema many expect to receive a clear and unified message, but what I’m suggesting is that a film could be experienced as a poem, a painting, or a piece of music.”
“We can certainly say that Oedipus is disillusioned and not [a] hopeful subject, but at the same time Lacan very much insists upon the fact that ‘he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled.’ Giving up hope does not mean reconciling oneself with what is — and trying to get the best out of it. On the contrary, it can be a condition in which we are able to engage with the world, and not simply with our personal hopes and expectations about it. Perhaps this is my philosophical (and political) bias, but my understanding of analysis is that, to some extent at least, it replaces hope with courage. The courage to fight.”
countervisuality 