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by Volteccer_Jack » 26 Apr 2009 18:32
If there are any heroes left in this world of ours it has to be the terrorists and the criminals
by icycalm » 26 Apr 2009 20:16
Jean Baudrillard wrote:THE THEOREM OF THE ACCURSED SHARE
The uninterrupted production of positivity has a terrifying consequence. Whereas negativity engenders crisis and critique, hyperbolic positivity for its part engenders catastrophe, for it is incapable of distilling crisis and criticism in homeopathic doses. Any structure that hunts down, expels or exorcises its negative elements risks a catastrophe caused by a thoroughgoing backlash, just as any organism that hunts down and eliminates its germs, bacteria, parasites or other biological antagonists risks metastasis and cancer -- in other words, it is threatened by a voracious positivity of its own cells, or, in the viral context, by the prospect of being devoured by its own -- now unemployed -- antibodies.
Anything that purges the accursed share in itself signs its own death warrant. This is the theorem of the accursed share.
The energy of the accursed share, and its violence, are expressions of the principle of Evil. Beneath the transparency of the consensus lies the opacity of evil -- the tenacity, obsessiveness and irreducibility of the evil whose contrary energy is at work everywhere: in the malfunctioning of things, in viral attacks, in the acceleration of processes and in their wildly chaotic effects, in the overriding of causes, in excess and paradox, in radical foreignness, in strange attractors, in linkless chains of events.
The principle of Evil is not a moral principle but rather a principle of instability and vertigo, a principle of complexity and foreignness, a principle of seduction, a principle of incompatibility, antagonism and irreducibility. It is not a death principle -- far from it. It is a vital principle of disjunction. Since the Garden of Eden, which Evil's advent closed to us, Evil has been the principle of knowledge. But if indeed we were chased from the Garden for the sin of knowledge, we may as well draw the maximum benefit from it. Trying to redeem the accursed share or the principle of Evil can result only in the establishment of new artificial paradises, those of the consensus, which for their part do indeed embody a true death principle.
William Plank wrote:Equilibrium and decadence: the origin of the moral
Equilibrium models and Random Walks are part of the Will to Power just as are diffusive, dynamic, creative models. By extrapolating from Nietzsche's system, it becomes evident that he valorized the diffusive models as creative-positive and damned the equilibrium models as conservative, negative, destructive and sick. This is a game-model theory for the origin of Nietzschean values and the enhancement of life for the type Mensch. Morality and ethics are thus seen to be differential valorizations of equilibrated vs diffusive systems. Equilibrated systems preserve their weaknesses at the risk of stasis and catastrophe. In Nietzschean terms, Christianity, Buddhism, nationalism, etc., are such conservative, equilibrated systems. There are no equilibrated survivable models in biological evolution, and even though certain organisms appear stable they lead a precarious existence and become evolutionary dead ends. Rats and cockroaches are successful biologically because they are not equilibrated systems. Genetic and moral stasis guarantees catastrophe.
The idea of the diffusive lowers the usefulness, the value, the reputation of stability. The diffusive makes variation possible. Prigogine states it this way in the language of chaos theory: "The 'attractor' which dominated the behaviour of the system near equilibrium may become unstable, as a result of the flow of matter and energy which we direct at the system. Non-equilibrium becomes a source of order. New types of attractors, more complicated ones, may appear, and give to the system remarkable new space-time properties...." (Highley and Peat, p.206). (My emphasis.)
Nietzsche wrote:Innumerable individuals of a higher type now perish: but whoever gets away is strong as the devil.
Baudrillard wrote:"Every system that approaches perfect operativity simultaneously approaches its downfall... it approaches absolute power and total absurdity; that is, immediate and probable subversion. A gentle push in the right place is enough to bring it crashing down."
by icycalm » 26 Apr 2009 20:40
Nietzsche wrote:Evening twilight of art. -- Just as in old age one remembers one's youth and celebrates festivals of remembrance, so will mankind soon stand in relation to art: it will be a moving recollection of the joys of youth. Perhaps art has never before been comprehended so profoundly or with so much feeling as it is now, when the magic of death seems to play around it. Recall that Greek city in south Italy which on one day of the year continued to celebrate their Greek festival and did so with tears and sadness at the fact that foreign barbarism was triumphing more and more over the customs they had brought with them; it is to be doubted whether the Hellenic has ever been so greatly savoured, or its golden nectar imbibed with so much relish, as it was among those declining Hellenes. The artist will soon be regarded as a glorious relic, and we shall bestow upon him, as a marvellous stranger upon whose strength and beauty the happiness of former ages depended, honours such as we do not grant to others of our own kind.
by Worm » 27 Apr 2009 06:53
icycalm wrote:Added to the above, with the death of the religions artists do not even have fantastical heroes to depict any more. We have fantasy, but no one believes in that -- the thing that made the art of the religions valuable was that people believed in those fantastical heroes -- and could therefore be inspired by them. But the art that stems from pure fantasy is of a cheaper, a much less valuable sort. It's not even real art any more, but mere escapism.
by JoshF » 27 Apr 2009 07:39
by mees » 27 Apr 2009 08:00
Worm wrote:But then why should the death of the religions be a problem for artists any more than the death of Greek mythology was a problem for Cellini?
by icycalm » 27 Apr 2009 14:58
Worm wrote:So why did you choose that picture as an example of art?
Worm wrote:Surely Cellini didn't believe in Perseus.
Worm wrote:But then why should the death of the religions be a problem for artists any more than the death of Greek mythology was a problem for Cellini?
by icycalm » 27 Apr 2009 15:08
by icycalm » 27 Apr 2009 15:19
icycalm wrote:That is why escapist art is not really art -- because the power of the artwork is not directed back into the world, but goes on orbit, escaping altogether from reality, thus proving that the artwork has little to no artistic value.
by mees » 28 Apr 2009 18:47
And he entered art not as a philosopher, but as a traitor, in Deleuze's sense, inventing his own itinerary. He just went to the other side, becoming a practicing artist of sorts, imperturbably showing in galleries photographs that he didn't really believe in. And then becoming a traitor to art again by refusing to own up to it.
Baudrillard's rejection of art was all the more unexpected, and appeared all the more outrageous for that to those who believed he had crossed over. And yet he didn't seem to notice the contradiction. The episode of the "simulationist school" (and of the "anti-simulationist" controversy) may have had something to do with it. In 1987 Baudrillard didn't yet know much about the American art world and didn't quite realize what was happening around his name. At best, he told me later, he sensed that "there was something fishy there" [Je me suis méfié] with a sound peasant-like distrust of sleek city talkers. So he flatly refused to play into the artists' hands. He might as well have acceded their demand, the way he subsequently accepted the gallerists' offer to exhibit his photographs because it would eventually have amounted to the same. How could anything one does ever be wrong coming "after the orgy"? If art ceased to matter as art, then what prevented anyone from joining in? Actually that he, who admittedly had no artistic claim or pedigree, would be invited to exhibit his work, amply proved his point: there was nothing special anymore about art. Groucho Marx once said that he would never join a club that accepted him as a member. Baudrillard did worse: he joined a group whose reasons to exist he publicly denied.
For Baudrillard the actual photographs are beside the point. It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes -- the mental event of taking a picture -- and this could never be documented, let alone exhibited. But what could be more gratifying than having fully paid-up members of the conspiracy exhibit something that he himself doesn't consider art?
by icycalm » 28 Apr 2009 20:14
by zinger » 28 Apr 2009 20:34
by icycalm » 28 Apr 2009 22:27
zinger wrote:Oh, right. From your post I got the idea he had lost interest in new material of basically all forms of expression (except for philosophy). I'm glad I misinterpreted you, considering how depressing that sounds. Back to reading then...
by icycalm » 28 Apr 2009 22:31
"Of the theater. -- I had strong and elevated feelings again today, and if I could have music and art in the evening, I know very well what sort of music and art I do not want -- namely, the kind that tries to intoxicate the audience and to force it to the height of a moment of strong and elevated feelings. This kind is designed for those everyday souls who in the evening are not like victors on their triumphal chariots but rather like tired mules who have been whipped too much by life. What would men of this type know of "higher moods" if there were no intoxicants and idealistic whips? Hence they have those who enthuse them even as they have their wines. But what are their drinks and their intoxication to me? Does he that is enthusiastic need wine? Rather he looks with some sort of nausea at the means and mediators that are trying to produce an effect without sufficient reason -- aping the high tide of the soul! -- What now? One gives the mole wings and proud conceits -- before it is time to go to sleep, before he crawls back into his hole? One sends him off into the theater and places large glasses before his blind and tired eyes? Men whose lives are not an "action" but a business, sit before the stage and observe strange creatures for whom life is no mere business? "That is decent," you say; "that is entertaining; that is culture." -- Well, in that case I often lack culture; for much of the time I find this spectacle nauseous. Whoever finds enough tragedy and comedy in himself, probably does best when he stays away from the theater. Or if he makes an exception, the whole process, including the theater, the audience, and the poet, will strike him as the really tragic or comical spectacle, while the play that is performed will mean very little to him by comparison. What are the Fausts and Manfreds of the theater to anyone who is somewhat like Faust and Manfred? But it may give him something to think about that characters of that type should ever be brought upon the stage. The strongest ideas and passions brought before those who are not capable of ideas and passions but only of intoxication! And here they are employed as a means to produce intoxication! Theater and music as the hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of the European! Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? -- It is almost the history of "culture," of our so-called higher culture."
by icycalm » 28 Apr 2009 22:48
Jean Baudrillard wrote:When nothing moves you any more, you must find a sign to stand in for passion.
When nothing is at stake any more, you must find a rule to stand in for necessity.
Jean Baudrillard wrote:Melancholy is just as much an affectation as joie de vivre* -- who is happy to be alive? Beings, like things, are naturally prostrate and only manage to seem happy by a superhuman effort, which has a great deal of affectation in it, but this is more in line with the involution of things.
by icycalm » 29 Apr 2009 09:30
Nietzsche wrote:No colour for painting the hero. -- Poets and artists who really belong to the present love to lay their colours on to a background flickering in red, green, grey and gold, on to the background of nervous sensuality: in this the children of this century are skilled. The disadvantage of it -- if one beholds these paintings with eyes other than those of this century -- is that when they paint their grandest figures they seem to have something flickering, trembling, giddy about them: so that one simply cannot credit them with heroic deeds, but at the most with boastful misdeeds posing as heroism.
by icycalm » 29 Apr 2009 10:05
Nietzsche wrote:Artistic need of the second rank. -- The people no doubt possesses something that might be called an artistic need, but it is small and cheap to satisfy. The refuse of art is at bottom all that is required: we should honestly admit that to ourselves. Just consider, for instance, the kind of songs and tunes the most vigorous, soundest and most naive strata of our populace nowadays take true delight in, dwell among shepherds, cowherds, farmers, huntsmen, soldiers, seamen, and then supply yourself with an answer. And in the small town, in precisely the homes that are the seat of those civic virtues inherited from old, do they not love, indeed dote on, the very worst music in any way produced today? Whoever talks of a profound need for art, of an unfulfilled desire for art, on the part of the people as it is, is either raving or lying. Be honest! Nowadays it is only in exceptional men that there exists an artistic need of an exalted kind -- because art as such is again in decline and the powers and expectations of men have for a time been directed at other things. -- In addition, that is to say apart from the people, there does indeed still exist a broader, more extensive artistic need in the higher and highest strata of society, but it is of the second rank. Here something like a seriously intentioned artistic community is possible: but just look at what elements it consists of! They are, generally speaking, the more refined discontented unable to take any real pleasure in themselves: the cultivated who have not become sufficiently free to do without the consolations of religion and yet find its oil insufficiently sweet-scented: the half-noble who are too weak to correct the one fundamental mistake of their life or the harmful inclinations of their character through a heroic conversion or abstinence: the richly gifted who think themselves too fine for modest useful activities and are too indolent for a serious, self-sacrificing labour: the girl who does not know how to create for herself a satisfying circle of duties: the woman who has tied herself to a frivolous or mischievous marriage and knows she is not tied to it tightly enough: the scholar, physician, merchant, official who became one too soon and whose nature has as a whole never been given free rein, and who pays for this by performing his duties efficiently but with a worm in his heart: finally, all the imperfect and defective artists -- it is these who now possess a true artistic need! And what is it they really desire of art? That is shall scare away their discontent, boredom and uneasy conscience for moments or hours at a time and if possible magnify the errors of their life and character into errors of world-destiny -- being in this very different from the Greeks, to whom their art was an outflowing and overflowing of their own healthiness and wellbeing and who loved to view their perfection repeated outside themselves: -- self-enjoyment was what led them to art, whereas what leads our contemporaries to it is -- self-disgust.
by icycalm » 02 May 2009 16:51
Nietzsche wrote:Achilles and Homer. -- It is always as between Achilles and Homer: the one has the experience, the sensation, the other describes it. A true writer only bestows words on the emotions and experiences of others, he is an artist so as to divine much from the little he himself has felt. Artists are by no means men of great passion but they often pretend to be, in the unconscious feeling that their painted passions will seem more believable if their own life speaks for their experience in this field. One has only to let oneself go, to abandon self-control, to give rein to one's anger or desires: at once all the world cries: how passionate he is! But deep-rooted passion, passion which gnaws at the individual and often consumes him, is a thing of some consequence: he who experiences such passion certainly does not describe it in dramas, music or novels. Artists are often unbridled individuals to the extent that they are not artists: but that is something else.
Nietzsche wrote:Alleged 'real reality'. -- When he describes the various professions -- e.g. that of the general, the silk-weaver, the seaman -- the poet poses as knowing of these things to the very bottom; indeed, when it comes to the conflict of human actions and destinies he acts as though he had been present at the weaving of the whole nexus of the world; to this extent he is a deceiver. And he practises his deception only before those who do not know -- and that is why his deception is successful: the latter commend him for his profound and genuine knowledge and in the end induce in him the delusion that he really does know these things as well as do the individuals he is describing, indeed as well as the great world-spider itself. Thus at last the deceiver becomes honest and believes in his own veracity. People of sensibility, indeed, even tell him to his face that he possesses a higher truth and veracity -- for they are for a time tired of reality and accept the poetic dream as a beneficent relaxation and night for head and heart. What this dream shows them now seems to them more valuable, because, as remarked, they find it more beneficent: and men have always believed that which that which seems more valuable is the truer and more real. Poets conscious of possessing this power deliberately set out to discredit that which is usually called reality and transform it into the uncertain, apparent, spurious, sinful, suffering, deceptive; they employ all the doubts that exist as to the limitations of knowledge, all the extravagances of skepticism, to spread a wrinkled veil of uncertainty over things: in order that after this darkening their sorcery and soul-magic shall be unhesitatingly taken for the path to 'true truth', to 'real reality'.