Skinner's Room

Mike Kelley quotes Dorothea Tanning

2012-02-02T13:44:00.002Z

There in the red world of jagged souvenirs signed by the great glacier, pioneers named their scenic views to bring them down to size. Cathedral Rock was a ruddy mass imitating for those childlike settlers a cathedral. Courthouse Rock, noble giant reduced in name to a reminder of fiefs and files. Just west of Sedona was Cleopatra’s Nipple. It isn’t known of course who named it so, or why anyone as remote as Cleopatra should occupy the imagination of the American cowboy – for it must have been a cowboy – but it was often thus pointed out to us, just as naturally as the other poverty stricken titles. Coming back years later and encountering an entirely different population; retirees hoping to live ten minutes longer than they would elsewhere, failed doctors with cloudy pasts, wistful but determined unpublished writers, painters with camera eyes and a penchant for scenery, old adepts at new religions or, in general, people who didn’t get along with their relatives back home; coming back then, we found Cleopatra’s Nipple no longer existed; its name had been cleaned up by less fevered imaginations, that it was now known as Chimney Rock and had never, in anyone’s memory, been called anything else.

Foul Perfection

http://www.dorotheatanning.org/index.php

trying to get a live feed through the cintiq

2012-02-02T13:33:00.000Z

schady-chalk

2012-01-30T19:21:00.001Z

double sided 2001

2012-01-30T19:18:00.002Z

(manuscript note at the top of the final proofs of Prisoner of Love)

2012-01-29T20:28:00.002Z

Put all the images in language in a place of
safety and make use of them, for they are in the
desert, and it’s in the desert we must go
and look for them.

Jean Genet

The penal colony is fixed in the middle of a desert: a desert of stones rather than sand: an immense plain, burned by the sun. No plants grow. The camera must photograph these stones with precision, showing their glittering surfaces which contain mica. The penal colony needs to be shown as existing at the centre of an aridity that is perfect, mineral and crystallized… Time there is always the same. It never rains. Unless I decide to mention them, there are never storms. And no animals, except for flies: at certain moments, they form thick excessive black clouds.

PRELIMINARY NOTES FOR MOVING BETWEEN DESERT AND OCCUPATION:

2012-01-28T09:03:00.003Z

PRELIMINARY NOTES FOR MOVING BETWEEN DESERT AND OCCUPATION:

LOUISA MINKIN / FRANCIS SUMMERS

28.01.12 > 12.02.12

WEB PROJECT.

NO GALLERY SHOW.

Dear _{–––––––––––––––}

We hope you are well.

We are thinking about St. Jerome. We are addressing him as a thought-image, a figure in pictures that allows us to pose our thoughts, a figure that can allow the framework of some ideas, an excuse for an articulation. A figure as a fly-trap, perhaps, a sticky surface of contiguity more than a substantial body. More than religious history and the recent revival of certain saints as figures of materialist militancy, we are interested in the places in which he is pictured and how these locations operate together; the possible movements between them. We are thinking about how Jerome oscillates between spaces of connection and disconnection, how he poses a dual practice of wandering as desertion and studied contemplation as transformation.

He is often pictured in a study at a desk, occupying the place of connection. Here he disseminates the biblical word into different languages, making it available to more general use. Here he is at work, ensuring the flow of knowledge. He is a multilingual historian who produces chronicles and hagiographies; a father of provenance and patrimony who translates the bible into the vulgate, pushing its dissemination further and further afield. He is also an ascetic anchorite who exiles himself to the Syrian desert, beating himself with a rock to assuage his erotic visions.

In this guise he is pictured in the wilderness: the desert where he would turn away from the world. Here he meets and befriends the lion that becomes one of his most pictured emblems. This desert of the early Christians is lousy with hermits, heaped upon pillars and dressed in filthy rags as a matter of disciplining attention. This desert is uncertain ground, shifting its contour, neither concrete nor stable. It swallows idols, abrades boundaries, and clogs airways. It chokes and parches. The sand shifts, defying the red pen of nation state cartographers, closing over the lines, flowing back into itself, indivisible by nature.

To think of the desert is to think of a double valence. We turn to Retort's invocation of Tacitus: 'They make a desert and call it peace'... States are deeply war machines, and the peace they make is the peace of pacification. Always they are in search of better ways of making a desert. Such a desert is a place without life, a permanent peace as permanent war as total pacification. This desert is growing. This is a desert created by bombs, but also by social relations, by the organisation of time and space to manage possible forms-of-life. The tanks keep rolling into the desert, at home and abroad, the war machines are ever present as steel and as the iron-gripped management of appearance, the meticulous control of the public sphere. This is a desert of imagination, a desert of sense, an austere desert of possiblities. The desert here is also the wilderness of utopian deferral, the cold impossibility of acting upon the here and now whilst holding out for a better future. In the face of this deferral we re-encounter the motto No Future for Us. These bleak words remind us of the necessary desire to work on matters in the present tense.

Why no demands? Here refusal is the refusal of the demand and of the assignable position. Better to have five hundred mice run into the room and cause havoc than one giant lion that they know very well how to shoot; this is something we learn from Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames. The lion that Jerome befriends in the desert may have to be exchanged for that swarm constituting Legion, a constellation of margins rather than a united front. An identity that brings the swarming of becoming into a unity might need to be forestalled, a disaster of reconciliation to be averted. The desert of desertion here can be thought of as a series of swerves and gaps: the practice of enacting, thinking, overcoming and operating in and around division. Desertion means making the gap evident rather than seeking to close the void. We hear again and again the claim; we are the crisis. The gap of antagonism is claimed, occupied and made to become.

We are sure you are also aware about some other modes of occupation, from the occupied institutions of Greece, California and the U.K. (including finance offices and universities) to the widespread occupations of streets, public spaces and financial sectors including Occupy Wall Street and beyond. Here occupation takes on the notion of occupying public ground - perhaps attempting to re-establish the commons that have been enclosed and privatised. We observe that we need to, in the words of McKenzie Wark, learn how to occupy a space but we must also learn how to occupy an abstraction: to disrupt those vectors that have come to dominate and constitute public life. From the occupations already underway we learn more on how to occupy, how to not demand, how to explore and conduct experiments with the possible space and time of our lives in relation to buildings, institutions and vectors, sometimes through the act of formulating being itself as a territory. The correct term becomes density rather than space. The question is not to possess the territory but to be the territory: a density of communes, circulation and solidarity: the construction of a world out of the desert of current social relations. Occupy everything as occupy yourself. Occupy emergence, then.

Practising a desertion of classical political rhetoric, the call Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing is a call to make the density of world appear, a call for a density that chokes the flows necessary to the functioning of capital. To move towards immobilisation. To think of blockades, of the symbolic as well as material form of the barricade, to think of the way of immobilising, re-routing or re-using the logistical structures that service the bounty we call desert. We can then wonder aloud about the different occupations we might enact, the different functions we could operate within as we sit at our desks, the different ways to examine the entry and exits points of knowledge, exposition and appearance. Here we could dream about the different surfaces that would subsequently become accessible to inscription. Here we wonder about how we can occupy ourselves otherwise.

Beauty is in the streets, certainly.

But beauty is in the study as well. If only the labour within it doesn't fixate, if only the disseminated words don't become dogma. Beauty is also in the desert as long as we can find the densities of solidarity, the bonds of a necessary collectivity.

How can we meet again?

Yours sincerely,

LM/FS

The limmes of these great Triumphall bodies [lately disjointed and taken in sunder]

2012-01-24T21:10:00.003Z

The Print in Stuart Britain 1603 -89 / Griffiths / British Museum

Triumphal Arches 1604 Stephen Harrison

Dekker The Magnificent Entertainment 1604

Londinium

Garden of Plenty

The New World

Temporary architectures erected for ceremonial events

‘an entry’ into the city

7 plates show 7 arches erected along the route of James 1 procession which passed beneath each of them. Orations and songs performed as they passed.

40 > 70 feet across, wood construction

Parry The Golden Age restored/ 1981

The limmes of these great Triumphall bodies [lately disjointed and taken in sunder] I have thou seest [for thy sake] set in their apt and right places again. So that now they are to stand a s perpetuall monuments, not to be shaken in pieces, or to be broken downe, by the malice of that envious destroyer of all things, Time..

London pageants:

I. Accounts of sixty royal processions and entertainments in the city of London; chiefly extracted from contemporary writers : II. A bibliographical list of Lord mayors' pageants

The last Arch at Temple Bar represented a Temple of Janus. The principal character was Peace, having War groveling at her feet; by her stood Wealth; below sat the four handmaids of Peace, Quiet treading on Tumult; Liberty treading on Servitude; Safety on Danger; and Felicity on Unhappiness.

MB

2012-01-23T19:14:00.002Z

Presence is only presence at a distance, and this distance is absolute--that is, irreducible; that is, infinite. (Blanchot, Friendship, 218)

The mono-monostatic gömböc in the stable equilibrium position

2012-01-22T22:50:00.002Z

protocols of escape

2012-01-21T21:33:00.005Z

In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character which invokes an alternative interpretation on subsequent characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharacters. The ASCII "escape" character (octal: \033, or ^[, or, in decimal, 27) is used in many output devices to start a series of characters called a control sequence or escape sequence.

Vincenzo Curcio (born c. 1960), a member of the Sicilian Mafia, is famous for escaping from his Turin prison cell by sawing through the bars of his cell with dental floss on March 17, 2000.[1

Curcio was convicted of one murder and arranging seven others. The jail had been built in the 1970s and was designed to withstand outside attacks rather than breakouts, and as such the bars were made of iron low in carbon which were ductile but easy to saw through. Curcio tied bedsheets together and climbed down to the ground, scaling the outer fence to gain his freedom.^[2]

On July 11, 2000, Curcio was captured in Pancalieri, in the Province of Turin.^[3]

the desert is growing

2012-01-21T18:50:00.000Z

assorted meteorites

2012-01-18T17:11:00.002Z

Any element which bends space around itself, makes other
elements dependent upon itself and translate their will
into the language of its own. ....

tektite - meteorite silica glass
campo del cielo / iron

pasolini / palestine

2012-01-16T19:53:00.001Z

ubuweb

pearl diving

2012-01-14T21:00:00.000Z

Pearls, too, were one of Tesla's phobias. If a woman guest at a dinner party to which he was invited wore pearls, he was unable to eat. Smooth round surfaces, in general, were an abomination to him; it had even taken him a long time to learn to tolerate billiard balls.

partes extra partes

2012-01-14T13:29:00.003Z

melencolia / durer's solid

2012-01-13T22:50:00.006Z

When thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches an historical subject only when he encounters it as a monad.

WB/ TPH/XVII

abrasives/ wet n dry

2012-01-13T07:13:00.001Z

black box white box kernel shell

2012-01-11T20:50:00.003Z

crazy horses

2012-01-10T22:15:00.001Z

here / there

2012-01-09T17:55:00.001Z

2012-01-07T00:26:00.000Z

Gilles et Jeanne / body armour

2012-01-06T11:03:00.002Z

I really come from the beyond and I leave no messages.

2012-01-04T22:34:00.002Z

weeds, rubbish, broken glass

2012-01-03T20:47:00.001Z

caprice

2012-01-02T23:06:00.004Z

1.	a sudden or unpredictable change of attitude, behaviour, etc; whim
2.	a tendency to such changes

noun

a sudden, unpredictable change, as of one's mind or the weather.

a tendency to change one's mind without apparent or adequate motive; whimsicality; capriciousness: With the caprice of a despotic king, he alternated between kindness and cruelty.

Music . capriccio ( def. 1 ) .

Origin:
1660–70; < French < Italian; see capriccio

Synonyms
1. vagary, notion, whim, fancy.

Indemnity and Oblivion Act

2012-01-02T15:56:00.002Z

Eikonoklaste, Eikon Basiliki and Idolatry

2012-01-02T12:02:00.004Z

It is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to say that the English Civil War was fought over the issue of images, and not just the question of statues and other material symbols in religious ritual but less tangible matters such as the 'idol' of monarchy and, beyond that, "the idols of the mind" that Reformation thinkers sought to purge in themselves and others.
Mitchell/ Iconology/ 7

AlJazeera The Image War

War images / Iraq

Christopher Hill Milton & the English Revolution

non sine oleum iris

2012-01-02T11:29:00.001Z

Sua cuique persona

2012-01-01T23:05:00.007Z

26. Sua cuique persona (Latin, “to each his own mask”)
This phrase is associated with a painting variously called The Veiled Woman and The Nun, dating from around 1510 and today attributed to Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio.
This unusual portrait includes a painting designed to cover it;
a false panel painted with grotesque reliefs including a flesh- colored mask with tight lips and black, empty eye-holes. An inscription reads Sua cuique persona.
The painting calls into question the nature of the false identities we create in our social environments, and in portraits specifically.

Tiqqun / Theory of Bloom II/ appendix

Entre nous

2012-01-01T16:50:00.003Z

The secrets of Polichinelle are "stage whispers" told to all the audience.

SP the secret known to all.

Mrkgnao!

oh brave new world

2012-01-01T13:53:00.000Z

illapsus

2011-12-30T12:40:00.001Z

Il*lapse"\, n. [L. illapsus. See Illapse, v. i.]
A gliding in; an immisson or entrance of one thing into another;
also, a sudden descent or attack. --Akenside.

I call insinuation — the illapsus, according to medieval philosophy — a strategy consisting in following the twists and turns of thought, the wandering words that win me over while at the same time constituting the vague terrain where their reception will establish itself. By playing on the relationship of the sign to what it refers to, by using clichés against themselves, like in caricatures, by letting the reader come closer, insinuation makes possible an encounter, an intimate presence, between the subject of the pronouncement and those who re- late to the pronouncement itself. “There are passwords hidden under slogans,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “words that are pronounced as if in passing, components of a passage; whereas slogans mark points of stoppage, stratified and organized compositions.” Insinuation is the haze of theory and suits a discourse whose objective is to permit struggles against the worship of transparency, attached at its very roots to the cybernetic hypothesis.

Tiqqun/ Cybernetic Hypothesis /58

script

2011-12-29T16:51:00.002Z

now listen to me

lord of the flies

2011-12-27T12:15:00.004Z

Joined to the god of sovereignty by initiatory rites, the young warriors willingly distinguished themselves in particular by a bestial ferocity; they knew neither rules nor limits. In their ecstatic rage, they were taken for wild animals, for furious bears, for wolves. The Harii of Tacitus augmented the fright provoked by their delirium by employing black shields and, wanting to surprise their enemies, to terrify them, rubbed their bodies with soot. This 'funereal army' in order to augment the terror, chose 'pitch-dark nights.' Often the name Beserkir ['warriors in bear skins'] was given to them...

Bataille / Gilles de Rais / 33

black box white box

2011-12-25T19:17:00.003Z

black box testing where you don’t know what is in the box , testing functionality, behaviour of overall system, u know the requirements that went into the code.

With (Hegel, the dialectic) is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell

Marx/Kapital/Afterword to second section

white box testing –you can look at algorithm / source code

2011-12-25T08:36:00.002Z

scanned snow

2011-12-24T09:34:00.002Z

http://www.microscopics.co.uk/blog/2008/microscopic-snow-and-ice-zoom/

'allegorical interpretation is a type of scanning that, moving back and forth across the text, readjusts its terms in constant modification of a type quite different from our stereotypes of some static or medieval or biblical decoding'

Jameson/ Postmodernism or The cultural logic of late capitalism/ Duke / 1991/ p168

2011-12-22T22:27:00.002Z

The cuffs of his trousers were full of sand as if he had been walking on a beach...

NYTimes '78
Moro

████ ███ ██████ ████ ███ ██████ ████ ███ ██████ ████ ███ ██████

2011-12-22T12:40:00.001Z

crop

2011-12-22T11:12:00.001Z

2011-12-21T19:44:00.002Z

He too fought under television for our place in the sun.
Robert Lowell on Lieutenant Calley, 1971
nyrb
retort

2011-12-18T20:02:00.000Z

2011-12-18T11:53:00.001Z

observations, weather changes and other events of daily importance

2011-12-17T19:58:00.000Z

2011-12-14T19:11:00.001Z

war vision / polemoscope

2011-12-11T12:57:00.002Z

All day permanent red

bronze

2011-12-09T22:02:00.000Z

AH_H_H_UH_H_HMMM

2011-12-07T21:39:00.001Z

calculus / pebbles

2011-12-07T09:44:00.004Z

The gesture of tapping with the fingertips on the keys of an apparatus can be called “calculate and compute.” It makes mosaic-like combinations of particles possible, technical images, a computed universe in which particles are assembled into visible images.

Flusser-Vilém-Universe-Technical-Images

Just as mosaics preserve their majesty despite their fragmentation into capricious particles, so philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum. Both are made up of the distinct and the disparate; and nothing could bear more powerful testimony to the transcendent force of the sacred image and truth itself. The value of fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their relation to the underlying idea, and the brilliance of representation depends as much on this value as the brilliance of the mosaic does on the quality of the glass paste. The relationship between the minute precision of the work and the proportions of the sculptural or intellectual whole demonstrates that truth content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of subject matter. In their supreme, western form the mosaic and the treatise are products of the middle ages; it is their very real affinity which makes comparison possible.

WB / Origin of GTD / 29

Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened up the Web to the general public.^[3] Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate window.^[4] While often described as the first graphical web browser, Mosaic was preceded by the lesser-known Erwise^[5] and ViolaWWW.

eye stone

2011-12-06T16:36:00.005Z

an eye made of semi-precious material removed from a statue, often with an inscription on it, used as a bead.

Nergal was a god associated with the Underworld and was usually regarded as the husband of Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld. He was also associated with forest fires, fevers and plagues, and sometimes, as here, he had a warlike aspect, usually carrying a scimitar and a single or double-headed lion-sceptre.

Nergal (deity; Mesopotamian; Male)

Biography

King of the underworld; benefactor of men, who hears prayers, restores the dead to life and protects agriculture and flocks; also a god of pestilence, hunger and devastation.

Also Known As

Nergal; Nergal of Tarbisu; Nirig

Die Wuste wächst

live and latest

2011-12-03T10:16:00.002Z

Socrates Corinth Democracia

2011-12-02T14:08:00.001Z

Socrates turns his back to Plato, who has made him write whatever he wanted while pretending to receive it from him

leveson 2

2011-11-30T15:24:00.002Z

live and latest / strike

2011-11-30T09:47:00.000Z

leveson 1

2011-11-29T11:54:00.007Z

leveson

2011-11-29T11:00:00.005Z

reverie

2011-11-28T19:17:00.001Z

mistah kurtz he dead

2011-11-26T22:07:00.001Z

take a horse to water

2011-11-26T21:03:00.000Z

painting with thirty pieces of silver

2011-11-26T11:34:00.005Z

“Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?”

“A component, like a capacitor?” *

A capacitor stores a charge in an electrical field. It might be subject to resistance, crossed wires, open circuit; signals are lost. There could be a residual spark in the system. This is a pre-digital painting. It didn’t anticipate its future as a google-able image. I don’t think it considered itself as image at all and it barely holds together as painting. It is a makeshift, improvisational structure something like a vernacular circuit board cobbled together from discarded pieces. It is a washed-up, wasteland assembly of hard and soft structures, trying to find a position somewhere against the vast wave of commodification about to break all over the new decade that was the ‘90s.

*William Gibson Count Zero 1986

Painting in the RCA Collection, currently up in the SCR I hear

Doctrine of similarity?

google reinhardt

2011-11-26T09:43:00.005Z

Vilem Flusser / Television image and political space in the light of the Romanian Revolution

2011-11-23T21:08:00.004Z

April 7^th 1990 Kunsthalle, Budapest

I believe that whatever happened in Romania merits philosophical reflection. Of course it is too early, we do not have the necessary distance, but still something seems to have happened there, it is called here a revolution. I think that is a wrong term, because revolution is a political category and it doesn’t look to me that what happened over there is political at all. Now whatever happened there may, in the future be interpreted as a turning point. It may be that what French and American philosophers used to call post-history. Post-histoire has found its first, or almost first, expression in that small country, off Broadway if I may say so. Imagine for a moment, and this is why I accepted the invitation to come here to this meeting, imagine for an instant that such a thing should happen, let’s say in the United States or even in Western Europe. Imagine for an instant that television in the United States would take over and I think you would have imagined the end of history, the end of what we are used to call history. Now of course it happened all away in Romania, where nobody cares about, but imagine for a moment that it happens in what we are used to call the centres of decision, even in Moscow. I will submit to you the hypothesis that a new situation in the image culture is about to happen, but in order to sustain such an hypothesis I will have to give you a few theoretical concepts..

We have at least two possibilities to face our world. One is through image and another is through linear writing. Originally man was immersed in his circumstance. Now when Homo Sapiens came about he made a step back from this circumstance, what Heidegger calls ein Schritt zuruck, and he tries to look at the circumstance from a subjective distance and the result was an image. Now the image transforms the world into a scene. Through Image the world has a scenic character, it shows contexts, what Wittgenstein calls Sachverhalte, what Heidegger calls Verhältnisse. Bezüge. The world seen through imagination is a context wherein things relate to each other. Now this has a magical character. Every image is strongly magically loaded. When the first images were made, let’s say at Lascaux, they were meant to orient people in the world, for instance they were meant to show how to hunt oxen or ponies. And when people were exposed to these images they probably danced, they made ritual happenings. And then they went out to hunt the animal. It is absolutely impossible to see the image outside magic… there is a voodoo character in every image. I told you that the image had the purpose to orient people from outside in the world in which they are thrown. An image is the possibility for me to step out from the world and see it from outside. So they are sorts of maps, mediation or as you say here media, which is a barbarian way to use latin. So they are mediations, they mean the world. But by meaning the world they also hide it. This is an inner dialectics of every mediation.

For those who speak German it becomes very clear: Bilder verstellen was sie vorstellen, sie stellen sich vor dass was sie vorstellen sollen. Now this inner dialectics which is responsible for the fact that images hide the world, is the reason for a very profound alienation. Images are meant for people to orient themselves in the world, but when they become very strong, people use their experience in the world to orient themselves in the image. The image becomes the concrete reality and the world is only a pretext. Now this inversion of the relationship between the world of experience and the world of imagination, this is called by the prophets idolatry. This is the reason why Plato wanted to prohibit art and images in the Republic. Images are anti-republican, anti-political. The purpose of image in this stage is to hide what happens. When this idolatry, this curious sort of paganism, against which not only Jewish prophets, but also the pre-Socratic philosophers argued. When this became too dense linear writing was invented. The purpose of linear writing was to open up the images by explaining them and thus open up a vision of the experienced world. Now let me open up the difference between a scenic and a processual vision. In the scene things happen; everything is a happening. In the linear, processual world nothing happens; everything is an event. The difference between an happening and an event is that the happening is the result of chance, of accident. It is an accident which becomes necessary. ..

The world of happening is a chaotic world but everything repeats itself in that chaotic world. But in the event of history, in the vision of the world as a process, nothing ever repeats itself, everything is an event which has causes and will have effects. It is a world which can be rationally explained. To give you an example, for instance, the coronation of a king is a happening, it is the result of some accident, the old king dies, it happens all the time, Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi and it is always something festive and magical. Now the discussion of the law in parliament is not a happening it is an event. It has causes and it will have effects and it is done in order to have effects. The consciousness which corresponds to image is called the magical, mythical consciousness. And the consciousness that corresponds to linear writing, to this processual vision is called political consciousness. Television cannot be like any other image, a political thing, it is anti-political by its very structure. And political consciousness is always directed against the image

Now as you know Western history begins with linear writing for the simple fact that before the invention of linear writing there was no history, there were no events, everything only happened. And with the invention of linear writing events were created, but of course images didn’t give up, as the linear writing advanced against images in order to explain them away, the images infiltrated themselves into the texts and they began to illustrate the texts. The dynamics of western civilization, this inattention within western civilization, the tremendously so explosive and so dangerous for other civilizations, is the fact that image and text, imagination and conceptual thinking, magic and politics are always in conflict with us. Now during most of Western history this was a very creative process, imagination became ever more conceptual, and conceptual thinking ever more imaginative. But with the invention of print, with Gutenberg, this changed. Images were eliminated from our culture; they were enclosed into glorified ghettoes called museums or academies and the situation was dominated by writing. The triumph of linear writing was the Enlightenment, C18, and this was also the moment of the most developed political thinking. But as rational thought, political and scientific thought advanced, its message became ever less and less imaginable. You can see that with science, that science projects a vision of the world that is perfectly conceivable but totally unimaginable. So that in the C19 the world is becoming less and less imaginable and this is the real reason why photography was invented. The political characteristic of linear writing before the invention of newspapers is that you write in private and then you publish in the open space. If you want to get the message you have to go in the open space, get the text and take it home in order to read it. Now these dialectics between private creation and publication, this is the dialectics of politics. Politics is the distinction between a private space and a public space, an οἶκος and an agora, a domus and a forum. Now this pendulum use- I go out from the private to the public space in order to get the information, I take the information from the public space and take it home in order to elaborate on it and store it away, this is the dynamics of political consciousness. Hegel used to call it the unhappy consciousness because he said, when I leave home to conquer the world I lose myself and when I go home in order to find myself again, I lose the world and this pendulum, is political consciousness and political consciousness is always unhappy, there can be no political paradise because political consciousness is an unhappy consciousness, every consciousness is unhappy, if you want to be happy it doesn’t help you to have consciousness, an earth worm I think is happy. Now if you take this into account, please consider what is happening to images. The images are no longer published, they are elaborated in a private place and they go directly to the other private place, the sender is private and the receiver is private and the public space has become unnecessary, redundant. There is no use for a forum any longer, because everything goes directly from the private place to the private place, where the public space, the political space used to lie now there are visible or invisible cables. Now I do not say that the same is not true of writing. Newspapers for instance are distributed through the private space even newspapers can be anti-political. ..The information revolution, the term is correct, the impact of the information revolution is that if you want to be informed you have to stay home, you go to the public space, you lose information. Now let me go back to photography. Photography was invented in order to render imaginable the events around us, not only the political events but also the scientific, the technological events. History advanced linearly, but photographs transcended history and they froze the events into happenings. They took the events out of their context they transcoded them into happenings and then they went back to history and they could be used as a sort of memory of history. Now this is called documentation. Images were used to document historical events. It wasn’t so easy. The problem of subjectivity came into it. Photography was invented to give an objective image, but since the camera is coded, it is even less objective than a painting, still the ideal was that there is history and then there is a photographer and he steps back from history into something which we might call mystical transcendence and out of this mystical transcendence a photograph.. there is a problem, the moment you step back from politics into image you can have no point of view. The political point of view is lost because the moment you get out from politics you can see that every event has many possible points of view, none of it is correct and what you can do is multiply points of view, you dance around the event, and the more you collect points of view the better is your image. So that a photographer who dances around event looking at the people with a camera, there are dancers they are Husserlian people, they try to be phenomenological, of course they can’t succeed, because you know image makers do not think, you know they cannot think. Thinking is anti-image. Now they dance around it, and by dancing, by collecting points of view, they destroy ideology – which is the insistence of one point of view- you hear political people speaking, they say my point of view is the right one, and yours is the wrong one, but if you listen to a photographer he will say every point of view is the same, the problem is how many points of view I can collect. All these ideas aside, the idea was that the image should document politics, but in the first half of the C20 and even stronger after the second war, this relationship began to change, all of a sudden politics was made in order to get into an image. The purpose of politics, and so far nobody knew the purpose of politics, progress is not a purpose, progress is a method, but where do we advance at? What do you mean we advance? We don’t know where. All of a sudden we discovered where. We advanced to an image. Everything wanted to be photographed and filmed and taken in a video. The purpose of everything, like a wedding, the purpose of marrying was to be photographed. The purpose of going on the moon was so that Mr. Nixon could appear on television and see how people walked on the moon. The purpose of Arab hijackers of airplanes was to be taken on television. So all of a sudden people discovered what politics is about, politics is aimed at being taken, aufgenommen, in an image. And this created a curious phenomenon, events began to accelerate, they roared toward the image, one event followed another, because every event wanted to be taken in an image. There were the people with the film cameras and there were the photographers and there were the people standing there with the video cameras and all history roared towards them and said please take me, please put me into the image. It is curious why should we do that? What happened in Romania, there is another inversion, if I am right it is the image which now causes the event. What I am saying is terribly frightening. I don’t know whether you share my..

I don’t know if we are aware when we speak about post-history, whether we are aware of the terror we are speaking about. Imagine magic. We saw yesterday and this morning, I think all of us don’t want to see the face of Mr. Ceaucescu ever again in our life. So what we saw the images yesterday and today was highly aesthetic

… it is the purpose of theatre, I think it was Lessing who said the purpose of theatre is Mitgleid und Furcht zu erwachen, to provoke sympathy and fright. So that happened. You ask whether those bodies are real or not which we saw, whether the water in Timișoara was really poisoned or not, that’s a bad metaphysical question .. the real experience is in the image, what happened behind the image is no use to us. Political reasoning is no longer valid. There is no reality behind the image. There are realities in the image. What is now happening in Romania cannot be history, it is something else. Political reasoning does not apply to it. It is the result of magic. It is a sort of technical voodoo. How can we judge it if we do not have the criteria for it? We do not have a philosophy of post-history. We do not yet have a philosophy of an image in power.

Vilém Flusser -- Television Image and Political Space in the Light of the Romanian Revolution

Faint star, Star, Star

2011-11-23T17:54:00.008Z

Blaze, Stripe, Stripe (or thin blaze) and snip, Irregular blaze, Interrupted stripe, bald face.
Faint star, Star, Star and strip, irregular star, snip, lip marking

There was a whole collection made. A damp cloth, an oyster, a single mirror, a manikin, a student, a silent star, a single spark, a little movement and the bed is made. This shows the disorder, it does, it shows more likeness than anything else, is shows the single mind that directs an apple. All the coats have a different shape, that does not mean that they differ in colour, it means a unison between use and exercise and a horse.

Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

13. Pied Beauty


GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

animal eyes

2011-11-22T19:10:00.000Z

tapetum lucidum

bookmarks

2011-11-22T15:04:00.000Z

graces

2011-11-22T15:02:00.000Z

the veiled image at Saïs

2011-11-22T09:27:00.011Z

the veiled image at Saïs

turn at the statue of Champollion, says the guide

Lacan / ecrits/ 160

Apocalypse:
late 14c., "revelation, disclosure," from Church L. apocalypsis "revelation," from Gk. apokalyptein "uncover, disclose, reveal," from apo- "from" (see apo-) + kalyptein "to cover, conceal"

Calypso

Sheet of paper has gone missing must look for it at home. It contained:
1. The discussion of the concept of “system” and the doctrine of the extinguishing of intention in the truth, explained in terms of the veiled image of Sais.
2. Discussion of the concept of “essence” as the mark of truth.’

WB 1913-1926 /272

M. Champollion paid a visit, in his way, to the ruins of Sais, ... That part of the enclosure might well have contained great temple of Neith, the chief goddess of Sais, and we drove away, by our musket-shots, some owls, ...

The Asiatic journal and monthly register for British and foreign India, China and Australasia Vol 27

Novalis Die Lehrlinge zu Sais 1799

I. The Pupil. — Men travel in manifold paths: whoso traces and compares these, will find strange Figures come to light; Figures which seem as if they belonged to that great Cipher-writing which one meets with everywhere, on wings of birds, shells of eggs, in clouds, in the snow, in crystals, in forms of rocks, in freezing waters, in the interior and exterior of mountains, of plants, animals, men, in the lights of the sky, in plates of glass and pitch when touched and struck on, in the filings round the magnet, and the singular conjunctures of Chance. In such Figures one anticipates the key to that wondrous Writing, the grammar of it; but this Anticipation will not fix itself into shape, and appears as if, after all, it would not become such a key for us. An Alcahest seems poured out over the senses of men. Only for a moment will their wishes, their thoughts thicken into form. Thus do their Anticipations arise; but after short whiles, all is again swimming vaguely before them, even as it did.

TO ENVISION ✴ 39 Flusser / technical image
And so it looks as though our historical development in the West has reached a final stage that does not look significantly different from a Buddhist worldview: a veil of Maya surrounds the yawning nothingness of nirvana. From this standpoint, the powerful stream of Western history is about to empty into the ocean of the timeless Orient.
There is considerable evidence that such a suicidal view of Western society is justified. And yet this view largely overlooks what is significant in the current cultural revolution. That is, the visionary power that we are beginning to use and that we owe to technical images makes us capable of calculating and computing the whirring nothingness around us. Therefore our illusions are not things we should abandon to fall into nirvana but rather are quite the opposite, our answer to the yawing nothingness that threatens us. The veil of technical images that surrounds us, as similar as it may appear to an Oriental veil, challenges us to an engagement neatly opposed to the Oriental. Our veil is not to be torn but rather woven more and more closely. The following chapters are dedicated to looking at this increasingly dense mesh.

stjerner og hester stamper uroligt

2011-11-21T13:49:00.003Z

stjerner og hester stamper uroligt

Henrik Nordbrandt

epistemo-critical prologue

2011-11-21T11:45:00.004Z

In literary-historical analysis differences and extremes are brought together in order that they might be relativized in evolutionary terms; in a conceptual treatment they acquire the status of complementary forces, and history is seen as no more than the coloured border to their crystalline simultaneity.

WB / The Origin of German Tragic Drama / 38

2011-11-16T22:38:00.001Z

aristotle's sleeping geometer

2011-11-16T20:46:00.000Z

Wie eine Strecke, die nach dem apellinishcen Schnitt geteilt wird

Benjamin GS 5.558

jerome appears to augustine

2011-11-16T19:54:00.002Z

rock for beating breast with

2011-11-16T13:58:00.003Z

rocher de bronze

Sinnbild unerschütterlicher Festigkeit,

Thoreau - 26 Jan 1858
Some men have a peculiar taste for bad words, mouthing and licking them into lumpish shapes like the bear her cubs,—words like “tribal” and “ornamentation,” which drag a dead tail after them. They will pick you out of a thousand the still-born words, the falsettos, the wing-clipped and lame words, as if only the false notes caught their ears. They cry encore to all the discords

pearly horses

2011-11-15T22:29:00.002Z

The Triumph of David

about 1445-55, Francesco Pesellino National Gallery London

face pattern

2011-11-14T18:27:00.000Z

Last words

2011-11-13T20:50:00.002Z

Alle Apparate auschalten

Kittler and the Sirens

Farewell all joys or more geese than swans

2011-11-13T20:37:00.002Z

reminder re orlando gibbons

the upper and the lower Waters

2011-11-12T15:06:00.004Z

א

א

We are forced then to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier - which Ferdinand de Saussure illustrates with an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and the lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis; a double flux marked by fine streaks of rain, vertical dotted lines supposedly confining segments of correspondence.
All our experience runs counter to this linearity, which made me speak once, in one of my seminars on psychosis, of something more like 'anchoring points', [points de capiton] as a schema for taking into account the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject.

(Écrits. New York: Norton, 1977. 154)

א

laws against images / patterns and licences 1563

2011-11-10T09:50:00.006Z

For as much as through the natural desire that all sorts of subjects and people both noble and mean, have to procure the Portrait and Picture of the Queen's Majestie, great nomber of Painters, and some Printers and Gravers, have already, and do dayly attempt to make in divers maners portaietures of her Majestie, in paynting, graving, and prynting, wherein is evidently shewn that hytherto none hath sufficiently expressed the naturall representation of her Majestie's person, favour, or garce, but for the most part have also erred therein, as thereof dayly complaints are made amongst her Majestie's loving subjects, in so much that for redress hereof hir Majestie hath lately bene so instantly and so importunately sued unto by the Lords of hir Consell and others of her Nobility, in respect of the great disorder herein used, not only to be content taht some speciall coning payntor might be permitted by access to hir Majestie to take the naturall representation of hir Majestie, whereof she hath bene allweise of hir own right disposition very unwylling, but also to prohibit all manner of other persons to draw, paynt, grave, or pourtrayit her Majestie's personage or visage for a tyme, untill by some perfect patron [pattern] and example the same may be by others followed. Therefor hir Majestie being herein as it were overcome with the contynuall requests of so many of her Nobility and Lords, whom she cannot deny, is plaesed that for their contentations, some coning person, mete therefor, shall shortly make a pourtraict of her person or visage to be participated to otheres for satisfaction of hir loving subjects, and furtdermore commandeth all manner of persons in the mean tyme to forbear from paynting, graving, printing, or making of any pourtraict of hir Majestie, until some speciall person that shall be by hir allowed shall have first finished a pourtraicture thereof, after which fynished hir Majestie will be content that all other painters, printers, or gravers, that shall be known men of understanding, and so thereto licensed by the hed officers of the plaices where they shall dwell [as reason it is that every person should not without consideration attempt the same], shall and may at their pleasures follow the said patron or first portriature. And for that hir Majestie perceiveth that a grete nombre of her loving subjects are much greved and take offence with the errors and deformities allredy committed by sundry persons in this behalf, she straitly chargeth all hir officesr and ministers to see to the due observation hereof, and as soon as may be to reform the errors already committed and in the mean tyme to forbyyd and prohibit the shewing or publication of such as are apparently deformed, until they may be reformed which are reformable.

The progresses and public processions of Queen Elizabeth / John Nichols / on authority of Strype

obverse reverse

2011-11-09T14:32:00.003Z

Drama, Fields and Metaphors / Victor Turner / 1974 / london / Cornell

1. breach of the regular norm-governed social relations
2. crisis, during which there is a tendency for the breach to widen
3. redressive action, the performance of public ritual
4. reintegration of the disturbed social group

thresholds between stable phases of social process

separation, marginal period, reincorporation

power manifest in spectacle, ceremony, pageantry

court ritual / court politics

La Peregrina

2011-11-09T10:40:00.001Z

pearl diving - such a general sighing, groning, and weeping, as the like hath not beene seene or knowne in the memory of man

2011-11-09T09:23:00.006Z

barocco

With respect to the rich pearl earrings above mentioned, it may not be uninteresting to remark, that Elizabeth seems to have been particularly fond of pearls, and to have possessed the same taste for them from youth to even a later period than "her sixty-fifth year." The now faded wax-work effigy preserved in Westminster Abbey (and which lay on her coffin, arrayed in royal robes, at her funeral, and caused, as Stowe states, "such a general sighing, groaning, and weeping, as the like hath not being seen or known in the memory of man") exhibits large round Roman pearls in the stomacher; a carcanet of large round pearls, &c. about her throat; her neck ornamented with long strings of pearls; her high-heeled shoe-bows having in the centre large pearl medallions. Her earrings are circular pearl and ruby medallions, with large pear-shaped pearl pendants. This, of course, represents her as she dressed towards the close of her life. In the Tollemache collection at Ham House is a miniature of her, however, when about twenty, which shows the same taste as existing at that age. She is here depicted in a black dress, trimmed with a double row of pearls. Her point-lace ruffles are looped with pearls, &c. Her head-dress is decorated in front with a jewel set with pearls, from which three pear-shaped pearls depend. And, finally, she has large pearl-tassel earrings. In the Henham Hall portrait (engraved in vol. vii. of Miss Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England), the ruff is confined by a collar of pearls, rubies, &c., set in a gold filagree pattern, with large pear shaped pearls depending from each lozenge. The sleeves are ornamented with rouleaus, wreathed with pearls and bullion. The lappets of her head-dress also are adorned at every "crossing" with a large round pearl. Her gloves, moreover, were always of white kid, richly embroidered with pearls, &c. on the backs of the hands. A poet of that day asserts even that, at the funeral procession, when the royal corpse was rowed from Richmond, to lie in state at Whitehall,—

"Fish wept their eyes of pearl quite out,

And swam blind after,"

La Perspective ou raison des ombres et du miroir.

2011-11-08T23:35:00.004Z

Salomon de Caus

Solomon de Caus was the Prince's Drawing Master. All we know of him is that in 1612, the year of the Prince's death, he published a book intituled La Perspective ou raison des ombres et du miroir. with several engraved plates. It is addressed from Richmond Palace to Prince Henry, after he had been, as he tells his Highness, two or three years in his service.

* the front of Wilton by Inigo Jones was conducted by this de Caus

Walpole/ Anecdotes

those curious but mangled figures of some of our princes, which were carried at their interments*

2011-11-08T22:47:00.005Z

In a chamber or gallery over Islip's Chapel, not ordinarily accessible to the public, is an exhibition of, perhaps, equal interest to the monuments interspersed throughout the sacred edifice, or rivalling in interest the famous exhibition of a somewhat similar character in Baker Street—that of Madame Tussaud. The collection has received the name of the "Ragged Regiment," and also "the Play of the Dead Volks." For many centuries preceding the present a curious custom prevailed at State funerals—namely, having exposed to view in the funeral car, or carried in the procession, a waxen effigy of the individual whose remains were about to be consigned to the tomb. The head of the defunct monarch, statesman, or warrior was modelled in wax, an effigy was built up, and clad in the actual garments worn by the deceased in his lifetime, but embellished with false gems. When the coffin had been deposited in the vault, the waxen effigy was either placed over the tomb as a sort of temporary substitute for a stone monument, or in some other convenient spot. Several of these effigies are preserved in glass cases like zoological specimens in the narrow chamber above referred to.

"View of the CHantry Chapel in Westmisnter Abbey, over the Tomb of Henry V, where the Curious Figures, commonly called the Ragged Regiment, now lie (in 1786) neglected, and mouldering into dust"

The Ragged Regiment - Max Beerbohm visits the effigies

*Walpole / Anecdotes of Painting in England

a horse led, called le cheval de deuil, covered in black velvet

2011-11-08T09:54:00.008Z

Sully, in his Memoirs [iii 143] says: ‘I made a present in the name of his most Christian Majesty to the King of England, of six beautiful horses, richly caparisoned, and the Sieur de S. Anthoine as riding master’. Sully also presented Prince Henry with a lance and helmet of gold, enriched with diamonds; together with a fencing master, and a vaulter or tumbler.

On the death of Prince Henry in 1612, the French Equerry, Mons. St. Anthoine, led a mourning horse – the cheval de deuil – in the funeral procession. He then became Equerry to Charles and is represented holding his helmet in Vandyke’s equestrian portrait. It was later engraved by Lombart, who substituted the head of Cromwell for Charles'.

After Cromwell's death in 1658, Lombart burnished out his head, and substituted a portrait of Louis XIV (reigned 1643-1715), the King of France. Subsequently, Louis was scraped out and Cromwell's head re-engraved. Later again, probably after Lombart's death, Charles I's portrait was restored, but in the final state of the plate, Cromwell's portrait reappears for the last time. Throughout these alterations, the horse and rider, with commander's baton and elegant armour, were left unchanged.

2011-11-07T12:57:00.002Z

Here is discovered, behind a traverse, the artificial figures of Antonio and his children, appearing as if they were dead

presence chamber

2011-11-06T19:58:00.004Z

Definitions of presence from the International Society for Presence Research

the floor, after the English fashion, strewed with hay,

image stands in for face, sign stands in for image

2011-11-06T17:49:00.003Z

The descendants of every man who had borne a curule office were entitled to an image of that person, and at the funeral of every member of a family thus ennobled, all the images to which the ius imaginum entitled him, were produced and formed the most important part of the procession. As many as three hundred are said to have been displayed at the funeral of one person. The mind is immediately struck with the resemblance which this custom bears to that, which arose after the introduction or armorial bearings, of exhibiting at the funerals of the noble the banners and pennons to which the laws of arms entitled them, and the testimonies of their high descent and honourable connections.

Encyclopaedia heraldica

The ius imaginis is a Roman custom that (1) allowed a member of the nobility to have a wax mask (imago) of himself that would be handed down to descendants and (2) granted the privilege of a public funeral at state expense. At the funeral, the imago would be worn by an actor in the procession. The actor would also wear the clothing and insignia of the highest office and play the part (persona) of the deceased. [Incidentally, persona is the term for theatrical mask. The personae covered more than the face; the imagines, only the face.] Other actors would play the role (also, personae) of ancestors and wear their masks.

To obtain the ius imaginis right required obtaining one of the curule magistracies:

curule aedile,
praetor,
censor, or
consul.
Although often called death masks, since they were used in funerals, the imagines are now thought to have been life masks, made during the lifetime of the office holder, if possible.
Ancestral maps were displayed in the cupboards (armaria) of the family atrium, and were considered symbols of high status. They were displayed during special festivals and public sacrifices, as well as in funerals and in the atrium.

Pollini says there is substantial evidence that the wax ancestral mask began in the second half of the 4th century B.C., after the passage of the Lex Licinia Sextia [367 B.C.] requiring that at least 1 consul be plebeian and later laws that led to the creation of a new, plebeian nobility. By obtaining a curule office, such a plebeian became a noble, a novus homo, and entitled to the ius imaginis. This was also the time the Senate first sanctioned theatrical performances (ludi Scaenici), which is worth noting, given the theatricality involved in the funeral parade.

Source:
Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean #13 "Ritualizing Death in Republican Rome: Memory, Religion, Class Struggle, and the Wax Ancestral Mask Tradition's Origin and Influence on Veristic Portraiture." John Pollini, University of Southern California.

a horse led, called le cheval de deuil, covered in black velvet

2011-11-06T17:16:00.015Z

CHAPERON, CHAPOURN or CHAPERONNE from the old French word for hood, which by metonymy hath given name to the little shields containing deaths-heads, crests or other devices, placed on the foreheads of the horses drawing hearses at pompous funerals. They are called chaperons or shafferoons because these devices were fastened to the chaperones or hoods, formerly worn over the heads of those horses with their other coverings of estate.

CHAPEROON or CHAPERON, by corruption termed shafferoon, [French, chaufries de cheval de deuil.]

Encyclopaedia heraldica or complete dictionary of heraldry, Volume 1

By William Berry

They wintered on board the ships, and did not return till after the Prince’s death

2011-11-06T14:49:00.009Z

after an original oil in possession of G. M. Traheren, Glamorganshire, Wales.

His Highness being convinced of how much importance the discovery of a North-West passage, formerly attempted in vain, would be, and being now resolved to employ for that purpose Captain Thomas Button, who had been employed in 1601, at the siege of Kinsale in Ireland, and was now in the Prince’s service, an able seaman, and eminent in other branches of knowledge; Mr Pett was ordered to assist that Captain in the choice of a proper ship for the undertaking. The Captain accordingly set sail in April 1612 with two vessels, one called the Resolution, in which he sailed himself and the other the Discovery commanded by Captain Ingram; being both victualled for eighteen months. They wintered on board the ships, and did not return till after the Prince’s death, which prevented Captain Button making another voyage for the purpose of the discovery. But from the observations, which he made, especially of the tides, he came home perfectly satisfied, that a North-West passage might be found… Birch / 265

A Condensation, Not Ripe For His Sickle
The Attempt of Captain Thomas Button to Discover the Northwest Passage

The aftermath of Hudson's Voyages

Discovery and Resolution, with a crew of 160 men, were sent out by Prince Henry (the Prince of Wales) and the directors of the Muscovy Company, under command of Capt. Thomas Button (a gentleman of Prince Henry's Household). They set out to search for the Northwest Passage, and search for any survivors. Three former members of Hudson's crew, Abacuck Prickett, the Welshman Robert Bylot (as pilot) and Edward Wilson, were aboard. Prince Henry gave specific instructions to Button on how to govern his crew to avoid another mutiny. Five of his men died on Digges Island attempting to commandeer some canoes from the Inuit. The Resolution was crushed by ice and sank.
Expecting to find a passage to Cathay, Button carried a letter from King James addressed to the emperor of Japan. Button crossed Hudson Bay to the west side around 61° N, then sailed south exploring the bay. The ships stopped and and wintered at the mouth of the Nelson River. Port Nelson, where they wintered-over, was named after one of the mates who was buried there.
Next spring, the ships headed back north along the coast, until shallow water convinced him he had found a sound (now Roe's Welcome Sound), not a passage west. The Resolution was crushed by the ice and sank. Discovery sailed north to what was called Sir Thomas Roe's Welcome, between Southampton Island and the east coast of America, before turning for England. A considerable length of coastline was charted on this expedition. It was also determined that no westward passage from Hudson Bay existed. Button headed east and returned home to England, 16 months after his departure.

a picture of Pope Alexander III putting his foot upon the neck of the Emperor

2011-11-06T14:09:00.008Z

Federico Zuccaro (Sant' Angelo In Vado, Marches 1540/42 - 1609 Ancona) Submission of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to Pope Alexander III.

Sir John Harington at the same time sent to his Highness a picture of Pope Alexander III putting his foot upon the neck of the Emperor, with all the circumstances of that story, exactly as it was represented in the hall of the grand council of Venice. His reason for his sending this picture was, that as this behavious of the Pope had been positively denied in the last book, published under the name of Tortus*, against the oath of allegiance, his Highness might see the effrontery of those men in denying the truth, of which that picture was a perpetual monument.

*Cardinal Bellarmin disguised himself under that name

Birch/ 168

2011-11-06T12:04:00.014Z

archaeologia vol XV
An Account of the Revenue, the Expenses, the Jewels & c. of Prince Henry

The funerals of the High and Mighty Prince Henry 493

epicede George Chapman

The Life and Death of our Late most Incomparable and Heroique Prince Henry, Prince of Wales 442

A True Account of the of the Most Trimphant and Royall Accomplishment of the Baptism of the Most Excellent, Right High and Mighty Prince Henry Frederick 429

A catalogue and description of King Charles the First's capital collection of pictures, limnings, statues, bronzes, medals, and other curiosities; : now first published from an original m anuscript in the Ashmolean Musaeum at Oxford. Van der Doort, Abraham d. 1640.

The Life of Henry Prince of Wales Thomas Birch

England as seen by Foreigners

Peck's Desiderata Curiosa Liber VI Number 1 / 199

The true picture and relation of Prince Henry his noble and vertuous disposition: containing certaine observations and proofes of his towardly and notable inclination to vertue, of the pregnancie of his wit, farre above his age, comprehended in sundry of his witty and pleasant speaches. By W.H ... Sir Théodore Turquet de Mayerne

Occurrences on Prince Henry’s Death 6th November 1612

2011-11-05T20:46:00.002Z

The same day se’ennight he died there fell out a very ridiculous accident. A very handsome young fellow, much about his age and not altogether unlike him, came stark naked to St. James’s, while they were at supper, saying, he was the Prince’s ghost from Heaven with a message to the King: but by no manner of examination or threatening could they get more out of him, or who set him at work. Some say he is simple, others mad. He belongs to one of the Chancery.

All the penance they gave him was two or three lashes, which he endured, as it seemed, without sense, and keeping him naked as he was all night and the next day in the Porter’s Lodge, where thousands came to see him. The King sent forth for him to be dismissed without more ado or inquiry.

but without any profit

2011-11-04T20:00:00.001Z

On the following, the eleventh day, a cocke was cloven by the back and applied to the soles of his feete, but in vaine, the cordials were also redoubled in number and quantitie, but without any profit.

polish yer hexayurt

2011-11-03T22:55:00.003Z

On Tuesday November 3d, and the tenth of his sicknesse, he became worse than before, all his former accidents encreasing exceedingly, his boundings being turned into convulsions, his raving and benumbing becoming greater, the fever more violent; where upon bleeding was agiane proposed by Doctor Mayerne and the favourers thereof, who still affirmed that he did mislike the too sparing proceeding with his Highnesse; alledging, that in this case of extremity, they must, if they meane to save his life, proceed in the cure, as though it were to some meane person, forgetting him to be a Prince whom they now had in hand, otherwise he said, for ought he saw, because he was a Prince he must die, but if he were a meane person he might be saved. This day for the easing of the extreme paine of his head, the hair was shaved away, and the pigeons and cupping glasses applied to lessen and draw away the humour and that superfluous blood from the head, which he endured with wonderfull and admirable patience, as though he had beene insensible of paine; yet all without any good, save perhaps for some small seeming hope of comfort for the present. Now began the pilots who guided this frail barque of his Highnesse’s body almost to despaire to escape the ensuing tempests; some of whose lookes did now more than ever discourage the rest. For this night he became very weake, the fever augmenting, the raving becoming worse than ever, in which he began to tosse and tumble, to sing in his sleepe, proffering to have leaped out of bed, gathering the sheets together, the convulsions being more violent.

...in order to leave the reader no other way out than the way in... Lacan / Ecrits / Five / The agency of the letter..

horse by vera, tune by edward

2011-11-02T10:55:00.003Z

On Monday the second of November, the ninth day…

This night came upon him greater alienations of braine, ravings and idle speeches out of purpose, calling for his cloathes and his rapier, &c. saying, he must be gone, he would not stay, and I know not what else, to the great griefe of all who heard him, whose hopes now began to vanish.

La la, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La la, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La la, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La la, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La la, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La la, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la

2011-11-01T21:11:00.002Z

only that which is without a principle truly lives

the median of his right arme

2011-11-01T19:05:00.002Z

On Sunday the first of November, and the eighth day of his sicknesse… was drawne out of the median of his right arme, seven or eight ounces of blood; during which time he fainted not, bleeding well and abundantly, desiring and calling them to take more, as they were about to stop the same, finding some ease as it were upon the instant.

processual <> scenic
>
political

groundless

2011-10-30T16:49:00.001Z

Seen as originary, disorientation is always constituted by identifiable, characteristic orientation-markers (cardinalité( designating its borders, in- dicating North and South, Orient and Occident. In disorientation, how- ever, Orient and Occident are not simply geographic givens; Orient and Occident designate particular experiences of disorientation. Such cardi- nal directional markers, insofar as they open (to) the horizon of meaning and configure the motif for all motivation, can be reified only through experience of and in the world. Observed over significant lengths of time, establishment of such cardinal points is what “adjusts” both techno-gen- esis and socio-genesis. Through this positing of directions and their ad- justments, disorientation opens a space of difference, between here and there, public and private, profane and sacred, strange and familiar, and so on. Adjustments (re-)orient, and originary disorientation is converted, if not occluded. If such adjustments are the engine of all motivation, and if they must be oriented, it is because the orient (the other) is missing. From this missing other, cardinal designation produces a figure (a motive that is a goal) in which what is being oriented is reflected—the Orient is this mirage.3
This cardinal orientation is not successfully occurring today; thus we are suffering from disorientation as such.

stiegler / t&t 2 / Intro

Althusser had warned (citing Bergson), “One has ‘to wait until the sugar dissolves’”:

2011-10-30T11:09:00.006Z

On Thursday the 29^th and fifth day of his sicknesse, hopes began a little to diminish; howbeit that morning his headache was somewhat lessened, his breath also, which before was short, being longer, which moved him to put on his cloathes, endeavouring to rise as he had done before; but his head being so giddy that he was not able to stand alone, he was forced to betake him to his bed againe; from henceforth ever keeping to his bed. This evening there appeared a fatall signe, about two hours or more within the night, bearing the colours and shew of a rainbow*, which hung directly crosse and over Saint James’s House. It was first perceived about seven a clocke at night, which I my selfe did see, which divers others looking thereupon with admiration, continuing until past bed-time, being no more seene. This night was unquiet and he rested ill.

* A lunar rainbow, as presaging the death of Princes and the desolation of Kingdoms.

Desert in the desert (the one signaling toward the other), desert of a messianicity without messianism and therefore without doctrine and religious dogma, this arid and horizon-deprived expectation retains nothing of the great messianisms of the Book except the relation to the arrivant who may come—or never come—but of whom, by definition, I must know nothing in advance. Nothing, except that justice, in the most enigmatic sense of the word, is at stake. And, for the same reason, revolution, in that the event and justice are tied to this absolute rip in the foreseeable concatenation of historical time. The rip of eschatology in teleology, from which it must be dissociated here, which is always difficult. It is possible to renounce a certain revolutionary imagery or all revolutionary rhetoric, even to renounce a certain politics of revolution, so to speak, perhaps even renounce every politics of revolution, but it is not possible to renounce revolution without also renouncing the event and justice.
—Jacques Derrida

A demonstration is political not because it takes place in a specific locale and bears upon a particular object but rather because its form is that of a clash between two partitions of the sensible.
—Jacques Rancière

From Philip Armstrong / Recticulations