Tuesday 21 December 2010

LE COMBAT À LA BARRIÈRE















Jacques Callot (1592 - 1635) The Combat at the Barrier. 1627.

… Karl Freund, who [Godard tells us] invented in advance the lighting effects of Nuremberg… and which they themselves derived from Goya, Callot or Rembrandt and his 'terrible black and white'
Ranciere - The Future of the Image - Sentence, Image, History p54

three solitudes


Walter Benjamin: “When Fourier looked for an example of travail non salarié mais passionné, he found none that was more obvious than the building of barricades.”

Sunday 19 December 2010

the thin fluorescent line/ kettled at the palace 30.11.10




Labour of Dyonisus: Weak subjects and the politics of avoidance.

In the development of the postmodern liberal argument State power is not exerted according to what Foucault calls a disciplinary paradigm […]. State power here does not involve the exposure and subjugation of social subjects as part of an effort to engage, mediate, and organise conflictual forces within the limits of order. The thin state avoids such engagement: this is what characterises its “liberal” politics. […]

The liberal notion of tolerance coincides here perfectly with the decidedly illiberal mechanism of exclusion. The thin state of postmodern liberalism appears, in effect, as a refinement and extension of the German tradition of the science of the police. The police are necessary to afford the system abstraction and isolation: the “thin blue line” delimits the boundaries of what will be accepted as inputs in the system of rule. […]

The crucial development presented by the postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft, is that now society is not infiltrated and engaged, but separated and controlled: not a disciplinary society but a pacified society of control. The police function creates and maintains a pacified society, or the image of a pacified society, by preventing the incidence of conflicts on the machine of equilibrium. […]

The method of avoidance then carries implicitly a postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft that effectively, and in practical terms, abstracts the system from the field of potential conflicts, thus allowing the system to order an efficient, administred society.

Saturday 18 December 2010

square halos, lozenge armorials, female lines
































Trace the diagonals in the rectilinear space of control: oppose diagonals to charts, interstices to grids, movements to positions, futures to identities, unending cultural multiplicities to simple natures, artifacts to pretensions of origin.


Inventing the Common
Antonio Negri and Judith Revel

Wednesday 8 December 2010

Capri/ Café Hiddigeigei
















„Ich verbringe hier regelmäßig am Nachmittag einige Stunden im Café“, schrieb Benjamin im Juni 1924 an seinen Freund Gershom Scholem und stellte fest: „Mit der Zeit lerne ich in dem Scheffel-
Café Hiddigeigei (an dem außer dem Namen nichts unangenehm ist) einen um den anderen kennen.“

via Inselbesucher

Thursday 2 December 2010

observations, weather changes or other events of daily importance

TIKKUN / repairing the world

Lurianic Kabbalah has also been used to explain the role of prayer and ritual action in tikkun olam. According to this vision of the world, God contracted part of God's self into vessels of light to create the world. These vessels shattered and their shards became sparks of light trapped within the material of creation. Prayer, especially contemplation of various aspects of the divinity (sephirot), releases these sparks and allows them to reunite with God's essence. Wikipedia

According to Isaac Luria's Kabbalist doctrine of Tikkun, the breaking of the 'vessels' of God's attributes scattered divine sparks in fragments throughout the material world. The task of healing these broken vessels, an enterprise in which "man and God are partners", reestablishes the "harmonious condition of the world" not as a restoration, but "as something new".

Susan Buck Morss p235 Dialectics of Seeing