1/29/03

More B. quotes about synethesia…

Three models of time linear (beginning-and-end theology), circular (seasonal), spiral (more eastern kind of enlightenment crap).

Nietzsche: Twilight of the Idols… the indispensablility of the frenzy (above all the frenzy of sexual excitement), strong cravings (feasts), contest, all extreme movement, frenzy of cruelty, destruction, frenzy of spring, drugs, frenzy of an overcharged and frozen will.

The central philosophical trope is the will to power, it’s a function of these sorts of intoxication.

Thus Spoke: (critique of linear model of time) To recreate a ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’ is to recreate the past according to one’s volition. Revenge is the will against time’s ‘it was.’ All it was is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident, until the creative will says to it ‘but thus I willed it.’ The coherence of the past exists for the volition to bring it all together. That fragmentary nature of the past… the dramatic psychology of the birth of tragedy, the polarity is what he sees more as the inner polarity of each person (the baseless-ness of the passions, and the constant need to create a series of masks to cover up that abyss)

Freud: one of the most famous descriptions of the libido (pure energy)… a seething cauldron of energy… the reality principle is a function of the repression of the libido, repression causes the mask-ego that interfaces with the world (on the dynamic model). The Ego and the ID. he speaks of the ego as the body-ego, the surface of the body is a border between the world and the libido. the whole sensorial surface is a mask (topographic model).

Adorno’s book on Wagner: characterization of phantasmagoria in Wagnerian opera… the absence of harmonic impression is the phantasmagoria of time standing still… occultation of nature… time is guaranteed by stars…

star·ling2 n
a structure made of piles surrounding a pier of a bridge to protect the pier from floating debris

For Nietzsche and Baudelaire: two structural features:
1. the use of chromatisism,
2. infinite melody (caused by use of chromaticism): usually a composer starts at a tonal center and moves toward atonality in order to drive the melody as to end up with the same melody… the playing against that tonal center…. chromatisism finds ways of moving from one tonal center to another… you don’t have to end up where you began… infinite melody… you can make it as long as you want… changing keys and making sense of those changes… the question of infinity...

Baudelaire is a post-romantic: his poetry and critical work… he’s interested in the poetry of the sublime (interest in the infinite)… the extreme value he places on aesthetic individualism and interiority,

Breaking the linearity of time… Artaud re-creates his past by destroying all predecessors…
Freud followed Nietzsche (changing your past psychoanalytically)

Treatise with Stimulants: Balzac when tot he opera after drinking ten bottles of wine… sounds of heavens falling to the ear of the women in ecstasy. He concludes that alcohol is a poison

writhe v
1. vi to make violent twisting and rolling movements with the body, especially as a result of severe pain
2. vti to move in a twisting, squirming way, or to cause the body to move in this way
3. vi to feel a particular emotion, especially embarrassment or shame, very strongly, and experience internal stress as a result of it

How do we deal with writings by the mentally ill? Should they be treated differently…
Conclusions? seven major modalitys of modern aesthetics based upon these theories of intoxication
1. from Romantic poetics: sublime (infinite—Kant—beyond human perception) is interiorized and corporeal… The previous notions of the sublime was exterior (landscapes, storms, etc.)… quest for infinitude through intoxication. Isn’t Dionysus the emblem of the corporeal sublime
2. Sublimation is differentiated from the sublime so that for the first time, de-sublimation becomes a part of aesthetics… Aesthetics for the most part was a function of beauty… in 19th century you get transformation… consideration of ugliness as an appropriate thematic… B’s poetry offensive because you don’t write poems about cadavers unless they’re moral lessons…
3. The aesthetic field is open to perverse limbidinal states (intoxication, unlimited libido)… Aesthetically, one no longer needs to fully contain the libido, beginning of the breakdown of aesthetic form (and of beauty)… connected to metaphysical and
4. perception is conceived as a synethestic system… destroys the hierarchy of the senses… (hierarchy: vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell)
5. The arts are freed from mimesis and representation (why? Because of the preveious consideration of synesthesia)
6. Total art work: (you’re a fucking bastard from hell—don’t look at me like like I’m an idiot because I don’t know how to spell that fucking German word—I know you hate my guts—you can kiss my wonderbread ass—you bastard) The totalization of the the aesthetic field.
7. The hybridization of artistic genres. One always had hybrid works of art… in the 19th century you get the notion of hybridization of the arts…

red her·ring n
something introduced, for example, into a crime or mystery story, in order to divert attention or mislead

red squill n
a squill plant whose red bulbs are used as a source of rat poison. It belongs to the lily family. Latin name: Urginea maritime

Hah. The lily kills the rat. You got that, asshole. Lily trumps the rat.

NOW CAN WE START TALKING ABOUT FUCKING ARTAUD?

The interest of the art of the insane (the objectification of the voice) the voice becomes the object (disassociated from the body)… the voice becomes object of linguistics as well… The reversabiliy of time as the moment of the invention of time. What’s curious about cinema, you can reverse time.

At the beginning of Artaud’s career he wanted to be published… (one often sees him as outside the literary world) but he’s still published throughout his life…
ohhhhhhhhhh god. The contradictions within the theater and its double is what gives it a charm, makes it....

Artaud is neither Aristotelian in logic and writing… He’s always contradicting himself. There is a profound exestentialism in this way of reading…

Artaud hates Lewis Carol (Jabberwocky)… merely linguistic word play (language can never be that)

Jacques Riviere: leading publisher of the times… Artaud, in defending his own poetry by saying that the poetry isn’t that important because ‘the horrible sickness of the mind.’ Thus, as whenever he grasps a form, he pins it down for fear of losing the thought… In his early works he’s got a morbid consideration of dying.

He argues that the poetry isn’t important, that the feeling is important… he’s already setting up the fact that he’s more interesting than his poetry (he’s putting the weight on his psychological state and the presentation of the self for judgment) We’re already in a paradox, and it becomes more interesting in theater and its double… Artaud’s defense of the poetry is psychological (hmmm.) He’s arguing from the point of view of extremes. (what we can call psycho-pathological).

The theater of cruelty is inarticulate language… it is disarticulated language… a language that has been taken apart… Structural parallel because psycho and aesthetic… Artaud’s aesthetic of the fragmented is different because his life is at stake. Artaud’s glossolalia doesn’t correspond to the structure of French… (Turkish and Greek)

The voice in 19th century becomes objectified (recording and linguistics), the disassociation of the voice, disarticulation of language—Yacupstein (does work with babble) (Futurist/linguist) and Saussure (arbitrary nature of the sign) at the same time… the use of language at the pre-lexical level… social motivation of the destruction of language… also these poetic moements are related to the theoretical modalities of the structure of poetic languages… again, one notes that these linguistic studies and determined by psycho-pathological cases that were central these linguistic figures

Saussurean model : disjunction between signifier and signified (central to Lacan because psychoanalysis is about language)… explain the dreams (make things mean something… you could have signified that are shifting all over the place)…

Yacubsone (childhood aphasia)… some things are more or less constant and meaningful… if that’s the case, how does one read? Glossolalia occurs in multiple contexts (it appears within other forms of text… there are words that bear on meaning… there are certain sense of certain letters in relation to the erotics of speech/mouth… corporeal significance… one adds the theological significance… Even if the theology is a mad theology it’s very specific.

The theological question shows up very early in his work… to enter language again… to speak to write… to the point in which he actually re-enters the church and then renounces that.

Dangerous ambiguity is exactly what he bases his entire career on…
Artaud is obsessed with judgement… (theological)… final work: to have done with the judgment of God… to become a human, you must destroy the infinite

The metaphor of nothingness and emptiness (equates consciousness with nothing… consciousness is a hole in the universe). Artaud also suffers from nothingness… (Sarte’s writings on nothingness)… The nothingness within him, not quite like Sartre, but what is at the core of himself is nothingness… it becomes a central trope… Oh God… shut the fuck up… shut the fuck up.