All entries for Wednesday 31 May 2006

May 31, 2006

Partial Objects

A few scraps of mental shrapnel:

1) Pierre Boulez defined three forms of electronic music:

  • sounds that mimic non-electronic sounds;
  • sounds that are pure invention, with no relation to pre-existing sounds;
  • sounds that take non-electronic sounds and extend, distort, deterritorialize – these are the most interesting.

2) Synthetic versus analytic cubism – what is the concept of synthesis?

3) Rauschenberg’s artwork as a mirror (relation to D&G’s monumental art), minimalism, the “gap between art and life”. Escape from shame into zero intensity. Re-emergence from minima – Lawrence and the clock in the rape scene.

4) A geophilosophy of shame should be written, demonstrating that the shame/glory mechanism (of rising and falling intensities) is not a product of some foundational ontological truth, but rather a product of space, history and theatre (the theatre of battle, the theatre of the Idea, the theatre of cruelty). In my entry on Lawrence and Abu Ghraib I ask whether there is a moral distinction between the nomadic war machine and the state war machine. Lawrence seems to claim that the former exists without shame, the latter sadistic system imposes a moral of shame/glory. And what of Lawrence’s theatricality and masochism? How is that an attempt to escape the state war machine? And the there is the conflict between the writer and the war, the eloquent creator and the illiterate destroyer. WWI as the most brutal and direct manifestation of the states glory/shame machine.

5) Concepts – historical events, conceptual components are historical (can disconnect and reconnect with each other).