...it is a matter of indifference what you do as long as history itself is preserved nice and "objective", namely by those hwo can never themselves make history. And since the eternally feminine will never draw you up to itself, you draw it down to you and, as neuters, take history to be a neuter as well. (eternally objective)
Thursday, February 25, 2010
keep your thoughts at a distance
notes on a brief interaction with tony (02.23.2010) about writing down thoughts in our moleskine. life is a process of forgetting. forgetting and memory being an active component to induction of lack. Lack being necessary for metaphor. Metaphor is space. Space is potentially infinite.
we keep our thoughts at a distance by writing about them instead of embedding them into our daily life (we are passive, inactive contributors to society...whispering into empty voids...all for vanity sake)
In how unnatural, artificial, in any case unworthy a condition must the most sincere of all the sciences, hte honest naked goddess philosophy, find herself in an age which suffers from general education! In such a world of forced extermal uniformity she remains a learned monologue of the lonely walker, the chance prey of the solitary thinker, a hidden private secret or harmless gossip of academic old men and children.
we keep our thoughts at a distance by writing about them instead of embedding them into our daily life (we are passive, inactive contributors to society...whispering into empty voids...all for vanity sake)
In how unnatural, artificial, in any case unworthy a condition must the most sincere of all the sciences, hte honest naked goddess philosophy, find herself in an age which suffers from general education! In such a world of forced extermal uniformity she remains a learned monologue of the lonely walker, the chance prey of the solitary thinker, a hidden private secret or harmless gossip of academic old men and children.
take of your jackets or be what you seem
And now back to our first proposition: modern man suffers from a weakened personality. As the Roman of the Empire ceased to be Romans with regard to the region of the world which was at his service, as he lost himself in the influx of the foreign and degenerated in the cosmopolitan carnival of gods, customs, and arts, so it must go with modern man who continuously has the feast of a world exhibition prepared for him by his historical artists; he has become a spectator merely enjoying himself and strolling around and brought to a condition which can hardly be altered for a moment even by great wars and great revolutions. The war is not yet over and already it has been transformed a hundred thousandfold into printed paper, already it is being served up as a new stimulant for the weary palates of those greedy for history. It appears almost impossible to elicit a strong full sound even with the mightiest sweep of the strings: it fades away immediately, and in the next moment it already echoes away strenghless in historically subdued vapours. In moral language: you no longer succeed in holding fast the sublime, your deeds are sudden claps, not rolling thunder. Achieve the greatest and most wonderful: it must nevertheless go to Orcus unsung. For art flees if you immediately spread the historical awning over your deeds. Whoever wants to understand, calculate, comprehend in a moment where with profoundly sustained emotion he ought to hold fast the unintelligible as the sublime, may be called rational, but only in the sense in which Schiller speaks of the reason of reasonable men: he fails to see something which is yet seen by the child, he fails to hear something which is yet heard by the child; this something is exactly the most important: because he does not understand this his understanding is more childish than the child and more simpler than simplicity—despite the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face and the masterly skill his fingers have unraveling tangles. It comes to this: he has annihilated and lost his instinct; when his reason wavers and his way leads through deserts he can no longer let go the reins and trust in the “divine animal”. So the individual becomes timid and unsure and may no longer believe in himself: he sinks into himself, into his inner being, which here only means: into the heaped up chaos of knowledge which fails to have an external effect, of teaching which does not become life. If we regard their outside we notice how the expulsion of the instincts by history has almost transformed men into downright abstractists and shadows: no one dares to show his person but masks himself as an educated man, as a scholar, a poet, a politician. If one takes hold of such masks believing them to be real and not just a puppet show—for they all pretend to be real—one suddenly has hold of nothing but rags and multi-coloured patches. Therefore one ought no longer to allow oneself to be deceived. Therefore on ought to address them imperiously: “take off your jackets or be what you seem!” No longer shall everyone who is serious by nature become a Don Quixote. , for they have better things to do than fight with such presumed realities. At least each ought to look closely, call his “Halt! Who goes there?” to each mask and tear it off, How strange! One should think that history would above al, encourage men to be honest—even if it were to be an honest fool; and it has always had this effect, but no longer! Historical education and the universal frock of the citizen rule at the same time. While there has never been such sonorous talk of the “free personality” one does not even see personalities, not to speak of free ones, rather nothing but timidly disguised universal men. The individual has withdrawn into his inner being : externally on discerns nothing of him anymore whereby one may doubt whether there can be any causes without effects. Or is a race of eunuchs required to guard the great historical world-harem? Pure objectivity is most becoming in such men, of course e. It almost seems as though the task were to guard history so that nothing could come of it but stories. But by no means history-making events!—to prevent its making personalities “free”, that is sincere toward themselves, sincere towards others, and that in word and deed. Only through this sincerity will the distimidly hidden convention and masquerade can then be replaced by art and religion as true helpers, together to plant a culture which is adequate to true needs and not like contemporary general education, only teach to lie to oneself about these needs and thus to become a walking lie.
Page 28
Page 28
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Us Germans...
Nietzsche tangents to his Germanic race...
Form is for us Germans generally a convention, a costume and disguise, and for that reason it is, if not hated, at least not loved; it would be more correct still to say that we are extraordinarily afraid of the world 'convention', and surely aslo of the thing 'convention'.
...our inner being is too weak and disorderly to have an external effect and give itself form...
we germans feel with abstraction...
the unity of the German spirit and life after the annihilation of the opposition of form and content, of inwardness and convention.
Form is for us Germans generally a convention, a costume and disguise, and for that reason it is, if not hated, at least not loved; it would be more correct still to say that we are extraordinarily afraid of the world 'convention', and surely aslo of the thing 'convention'.
...our inner being is too weak and disorderly to have an external effect and give itself form...
we germans feel with abstraction...
the unity of the German spirit and life after the annihilation of the opposition of form and content, of inwardness and convention.
on culture
Modenr culture is nothing living just becuse it cannot be understood at all without that opposition, that is: it is no real culture at all, but only a kind of knowledge about culture, it stops at cultured thoughts and cultured feeilngs but leads to no cultured decisions.
we become walking encyclopedias...the whole of modern culture is essentially internal: on the outside the book binder has printed something like "handbook of inner culture for external barbarians".
barbarians give rise to the "weka personality" as a rsult of which the actual and enduring make only a minimal impression; in externals one finally becomes ever more casual and indolent and widens the critical gulf between content and form to the point of insensitivity to barbarism, if only the memory is stimulated ever anew, if only ever new things to be known keep streaming in to be neatly put on display in the cases of that memory.
If you want to strive for and promote the culture of a people, then strive for and promote this higher unity and work to annihilate modern pseudo-culture in favour of a true culture; dare to devote some thought to the problem of restoring the health of a people which has been impaired by history, to how it may recover its instincts and therewith its integrity.
we become walking encyclopedias...the whole of modern culture is essentially internal: on the outside the book binder has printed something like "handbook of inner culture for external barbarians".
barbarians give rise to the "weka personality" as a rsult of which the actual and enduring make only a minimal impression; in externals one finally becomes ever more casual and indolent and widens the critical gulf between content and form to the point of insensitivity to barbarism, if only the memory is stimulated ever anew, if only ever new things to be known keep streaming in to be neatly put on display in the cases of that memory.
If you want to strive for and promote the culture of a people, then strive for and promote this higher unity and work to annihilate modern pseudo-culture in favour of a true culture; dare to devote some thought to the problem of restoring the health of a people which has been impaired by history, to how it may recover its instincts and therewith its integrity.
critical history
Here it becomes clear how badly man needs, often enough, in addition to the monumental and the antiquarian ways of seeing the past, a thrid kind, the critical: and this again in the service of life as well.
We must drag history to the bar of judgment, interrogating it metiuclously and finally condemning it...
occasionally, however, the same life which needs forgetfulness demands the temporary destruction of this forgetfulness; then it is to becoe clear how unjust is the existence of some thing, a privilege, a caste, a dynasty for example, how much this thing deserves destruction.
Since we hapen to be the results of the earlier generations we are also the results of their aberratios, passions and errors, even crimes; it is not possible quite to free oneself from this chain.
...It is an attempt, as it were, a posteriori to give oneself a past from which one would like to and be descended in opposition to the past from which one is descended:--always a dangerous attempt becuse it is so difficult to find a limit in denying the past and because second natures are mostly feebler than the first. Too often we stop at knowing the good without doing it because we also know the better without being able to do it. Yet here and there a victory is achieved nevertheless, and for the fighters who use critical history for life there is even a remarkable sonsolation: namely, to know that this first nature was, at some time or other, a second nature and that very victorious second nature becomes a first.
(we must use all three of these histories [when each form is required] and as long as we remain active and do history for the sake of life and not for knowledge...we must make history purposeful)
We must drag history to the bar of judgment, interrogating it metiuclously and finally condemning it...
occasionally, however, the same life which needs forgetfulness demands the temporary destruction of this forgetfulness; then it is to becoe clear how unjust is the existence of some thing, a privilege, a caste, a dynasty for example, how much this thing deserves destruction.
Since we hapen to be the results of the earlier generations we are also the results of their aberratios, passions and errors, even crimes; it is not possible quite to free oneself from this chain.
...It is an attempt, as it were, a posteriori to give oneself a past from which one would like to and be descended in opposition to the past from which one is descended:--always a dangerous attempt becuse it is so difficult to find a limit in denying the past and because second natures are mostly feebler than the first. Too often we stop at knowing the good without doing it because we also know the better without being able to do it. Yet here and there a victory is achieved nevertheless, and for the fighters who use critical history for life there is even a remarkable sonsolation: namely, to know that this first nature was, at some time or other, a second nature and that very victorious second nature becomes a first.
(we must use all three of these histories [when each form is required] and as long as we remain active and do history for the sake of life and not for knowledge...we must make history purposeful)
antiquarian history
preserving and revering soul-supplants itself from man into the things of history....the walls, the turreted gate, ancestral furniture, and changes meaning within these things.
When the sense of a people hardens in this way, when history serves past life so as to undermind further and especially higher life, when the thistorical sense no longer preserves life but mummifies it: then the tree dies unnaturally, beginning at the top and slowly dying toward the roots--and in the end the root itself generally decays. Antiquarian history itself degenerates the moment that the fresh life of the present no longer animates and inspires it. Now piety withers away, scholarly habit endures without it and, egoistically complacent, revolves around its own centre. Then you may well witness the repugnant spectacle of a blind lust for collecting, of a restless raking together of all that once has been. Man envelops himself in an odour of decay; through his antiquarian habit he succeeds in degrading even a more significant talent and nobler need to an insatiable craving for novelty, or rather craving for all things and old things; often he sinks so low as finally to be satisfied with any fare and devours with pleasure even the dust of bibliographical quisquilia
quisquilia - also trifle, a minor detail.
antiquarian history merely understands how to preserve life, not how to generate it; therefore it always underestimates what is in process of becoming because it has no instinct for discerning its significance-unlike monumental history, for example which has this instinct. Thus it hinders the powerful resolve for new life, thus paralyzes the man of action who, as man of action, will and must always injure some piety or other.
When the sense of a people hardens in this way, when history serves past life so as to undermind further and especially higher life, when the thistorical sense no longer preserves life but mummifies it: then the tree dies unnaturally, beginning at the top and slowly dying toward the roots--and in the end the root itself generally decays. Antiquarian history itself degenerates the moment that the fresh life of the present no longer animates and inspires it. Now piety withers away, scholarly habit endures without it and, egoistically complacent, revolves around its own centre. Then you may well witness the repugnant spectacle of a blind lust for collecting, of a restless raking together of all that once has been. Man envelops himself in an odour of decay; through his antiquarian habit he succeeds in degrading even a more significant talent and nobler need to an insatiable craving for novelty, or rather craving for all things and old things; often he sinks so low as finally to be satisfied with any fare and devours with pleasure even the dust of bibliographical quisquilia
quisquilia - also trifle, a minor detail.
antiquarian history merely understands how to preserve life, not how to generate it; therefore it always underestimates what is in process of becoming because it has no instinct for discerning its significance-unlike monumental history, for example which has this instinct. Thus it hinders the powerful resolve for new life, thus paralyzes the man of action who, as man of action, will and must always injure some piety or other.
Monumental History
Monumental History
each peak is compiled to understand history as an assortment of major events intersperced with smaller less significant events (hardly remembered). History is pieced together.
it will always approximate, generalize and finally equate differences; it will always weaken the disparity of otives and occasions in order, at the expense of the cause, to present the effect monumentally, that is, as exemplary and worth of imitation. Monumnetal history the, since it disregards causes as much as possible, could without much exaggeration be called a collection of "effects in themselves", or of events which will at all times produce an effect.
...whenever the monumental vision of the past rules over the other ways of looking at the past, I mean the antiquarian and the critical, the past itself suffers damage: very great portionas of the past are forgotten and despised, and flow away like a grey uninterrupted flood, and only single embellished facts stand out as islands: there seems to be something unnatural and wondrous about the rare persons who become visible at all, like the golden hip which the pupils of pythagoras thought they discerned their master.
each peak is compiled to understand history as an assortment of major events intersperced with smaller less significant events (hardly remembered). History is pieced together.
it will always approximate, generalize and finally equate differences; it will always weaken the disparity of otives and occasions in order, at the expense of the cause, to present the effect monumentally, that is, as exemplary and worth of imitation. Monumnetal history the, since it disregards causes as much as possible, could without much exaggeration be called a collection of "effects in themselves", or of events which will at all times produce an effect.
...whenever the monumental vision of the past rules over the other ways of looking at the past, I mean the antiquarian and the critical, the past itself suffers damage: very great portionas of the past are forgotten and despised, and flow away like a grey uninterrupted flood, and only single embellished facts stand out as islands: there seems to be something unnatural and wondrous about the rare persons who become visible at all, like the golden hip which the pupils of pythagoras thought they discerned their master.
mastering history
Three kinds of history: monumental, antiquarian, critical
history belongs to man in three respects:
history belongs to man in three respects:
- so far as he is active and striving
- so far as he preserves and admires
- so far as he suffers in need of liberation.
history to science. excess to degeneration.
History, so far as it serves life serves an unhistorical power. While so subordinated it will and ought never, therefore, become a pure science, like, say, mathematics. But the question to what degree life requires the service of history at all is one of the highest questions and concerns affecting the health of a man, a people, a culture. For with a certain excess of history life crumbles and degenerates, and finally, because of this degeneration, history itself degenerates as well.
progress
as long as we (historical men) constantly learn to improve our ability to do history for the sake of life (and not wisdom). So long as we may always be sure of more life than they, we will gladly grant the superhistorical men that they have more wisdom: for in this way, at any rate, our unwisdom will have more of a future than their wisdom.
historical and superhistorical men
The historical man believes that ever more light is shed on the meaning of existence in the course of its process, and they look back to consider that more vehemently. They do not know how unhistorically they think and act despite all their history, and how even their concern with thistoriography does not serve pure knowledge but life.
The superhistorical man does not see salvation in the process, for whom, rather, the world is complete and achieves its end at every single moment. What could ten years teach that the past ten years were incapable of teaching!
Superhistorical men have never agreed whether the significance of the teaching is happiness or resignation, virtue or penance; but opposed to all historical ways of viewing the past, they are quite unanimous in accepting the following proposition: the past and the present is one and the same, that is, typically alike in all manifold variety and, as omnipresence of imperishable types, a static structure of unchanged value and eternally the same meaning.
The superhistorical man does not see salvation in the process, for whom, rather, the world is complete and achieves its end at every single moment. What could ten years teach that the past ten years were incapable of teaching!
Superhistorical men have never agreed whether the significance of the teaching is happiness or resignation, virtue or penance; but opposed to all historical ways of viewing the past, they are quite unanimous in accepting the following proposition: the past and the present is one and the same, that is, typically alike in all manifold variety and, as omnipresence of imperishable types, a static structure of unchanged value and eternally the same meaning.
I finally picked up One Place
Throughout the text Kwon raises a number of key issues around the ambiguities of community-based art, intervention and interaction as well as overlapping relationships between art, artists, institutions and the general public. Relying heavily on the popular case study of Richard Serra’s Arc (1981-1989), Kwon draws out the historical shifts of Fine Art through public sculpture. More importantly, she denotes the movement of Art as an object oriented practice (a private and specialized interest) toward a new (or at minimum, a now acceptable) socially oriented and mutually beneficial praxis. This shift from the physical to the ephemeral, from material to immaterial, highlights important responsibilities while simultaneously fingering the pulse of dangerous (post-modern) uncertainty.
At first, Kwon (like Hal Foster and Grant Kester) is cautious of this gesture toward the romanticized nomadic wanderings of New Genre public art practices, but eventually she warms up to the idea after reading and citing Deleuze, Guitarri, Bourdieu, Adorno and Derrida. After sorting through messy issues of artists over generalizing, self-serving and disingenuous misidentifying with his or her community, Kwon lands on the crucial underpinnings of contemporary art that are being labored over by way of facilitators, educators, coordinators, curators, administrators and community organizers. Ultimately, Kwon replaces community-based art with collective artistic praxis.
The issue here for Kwon is not in the spelling of the term community-based art, (and does not change anything by renaming it), but she concerns herself with a new understanding of the term by grabbing (however aimlessly) at its roots and re-contextualizing it through brief references of post-modern aesthetic theory. (see list of references above…)
Kwon references Suzanne Lacy’s distinction between the public art movement that developed through the 1970s and 1980s and new genre public art of the last two decades to distinguish the transformation that has taken place between the artist and the community.
“drawing on ideas from vanguard forms” –i.e., installation, performance, conceptual art, mixed-media art—new genre public art “adds a developed sensibility about audience, social strategy, and effectiveness that is unique to visual art as we know it today.” In so doing, it shifts the focus from artist to audience, from object to process, from production to reception, and emphasizes the importance of a direct, apparently unmediated engagement with particular audience groups (ideally through shared authorship in collaborations). According to Lacy, these artists, herself among them, eschew the constricting limitations not only of artistic conventions but of the traditional institutional spaces of their production and reproduction, such as studios, museums, and galleries. They choose instead the “freedom” of working in “real” places, with “real” people, addressing “everyday” issues. In a move one critic has dubbed “postmodern social realism,” new genre public art also insists on a move away from the universalizing tendencies of modernist abstraction, to celebrate instead the particular realities of “ordinary” people and their “everyday” experiences.[1]
By pointing out this transformation, Kwon finally reaches her thesis with no more than sixteen pages left in the text. Her voice comes out in kernels wedged between Kenneth Frampton, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Margaret Morse, Michael Sorkin, Edward Soja, M. Christine Boyer, Rosalyn Deutsch, Stan Allen, Kyong Park, Henri Lefebvre, Lucy Lippard, Martin Heidegger, Yi-Tu Fuan, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Marc Augé, James Meyer, David Deitcher, Don DeLillo, Michael Majeski, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Homi K. Bhabha.
I can’t help but wonder which thoughts are hers, if any.
With the help of her laundry list of source materials, Kwon decides to promote the understanding of relationships between persons, places, thoughts and fragments as sustaining rather than opposing forces. Diagrammatically speaking, new genre public art can be understood as an extension of the rhizomatic framework that forms our everyday life, rather than the linear history that has been more notably distinguished by modernism. This is not exactly a new thought; however Kown does place this structure rather uniquely within the context of Fine Art and more precisely within the history of public art practice.
She utilizes in-depth case studies but one can not help but notice that these case studies are nearly a decade old from the time of the book’s publication in 2002. And although Kown does well to treat each example with a fair amount of unbiased care, her voice is drawn thin by consistent use of secondary sources. In result, the entire read feels as though I am reading the extended versions of Kwon’s notes taken via a public art practice survey class, reiterating tensions between artist vision, institutional forces and public reception. Overall, the text lacked foresight by neglecting to draw from so many great contemporary examples, and although it was sincere in its approach, there was nothing contributed in part by Kwon that would have been grasped simply by picking up the laundry list of primary source materials and thumbing through them. Positively, I can say that she did compile them in an order that allowed for a concisely abbreviated lesson on public art practice in the last forty years, but the depth and breadth of her bibliography only points to the derivative quality of
[1] Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another, Site Specific Art and Locational Identity. MIT Press, 2002.
must we learn to forget?
(Nietzsche, otaadohfl, 1)
we cannot learn to forget so we must always remain attached to the past.
life as a process of forgetting
(note to self: forgetting is a process of continual lack which must insert itself between metaphors)
...the animal lives unhistorically: for it goes into the present like a number without leaving a curious fraction; it does not know how to dissimulate, hides nothing, appears at every moment fully as what it is and so cannot but be honest.
we carry this weight of the past with us...and we are reminded when we see animal or child.
the child has no past to deny...
"it was", that remind him what his existence basically is--a never to be completed imperfect tense. And when death finally brings longed-for forgetfulness it also robs him of the present and of existence and impresses its seal on this which lives by denying itself, consuming itself, and contradicting itself.
...hapiness: being able to forget or, to express it in a more learned fashion, the capacity to live unhistorically while it endures. Whoever cannot settle on the threshold of the moment forgetful of the whole past, whoever is incapable of standing on a point like a goddess of victory without vertigo or fear, will never know what happiness is, and worse yet, will never do anything to make others happy.
...all acting requires forgetting...(otherwise we are released downstream through ever becoming, forced to remain from sleeping)
There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which inujures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people or a culture.
Two extremes: intolerance, and absolute tolerance, the latter in the form of a clear conscience.
be able to forget at the right time as well as remember at the righttime.
discern with strong instinctual feelings when there is need to experience historically and when unhistorically
The Unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people and a culture.
we cannot learn to forget so we must always remain attached to the past.
life as a process of forgetting
(note to self: forgetting is a process of continual lack which must insert itself between metaphors)
...the animal lives unhistorically: for it goes into the present like a number without leaving a curious fraction; it does not know how to dissimulate, hides nothing, appears at every moment fully as what it is and so cannot but be honest.
we carry this weight of the past with us...and we are reminded when we see animal or child.
the child has no past to deny...
"it was", that remind him what his existence basically is--a never to be completed imperfect tense. And when death finally brings longed-for forgetfulness it also robs him of the present and of existence and impresses its seal on this which lives by denying itself, consuming itself, and contradicting itself.
...hapiness: being able to forget or, to express it in a more learned fashion, the capacity to live unhistorically while it endures. Whoever cannot settle on the threshold of the moment forgetful of the whole past, whoever is incapable of standing on a point like a goddess of victory without vertigo or fear, will never know what happiness is, and worse yet, will never do anything to make others happy.
...all acting requires forgetting...(otherwise we are released downstream through ever becoming, forced to remain from sleeping)
There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which inujures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people or a culture.
Two extremes: intolerance, and absolute tolerance, the latter in the form of a clear conscience.
be able to forget at the right time as well as remember at the righttime.
discern with strong instinctual feelings when there is need to experience historically and when unhistorically
The Unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people and a culture.
worth and worthlessness of history
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for life
(preface)
Nietzsche on historic education of man
Nietzsche understands historical education as a defect. With hypertrophic virtue comes hyptertrophic vice, and ultimately the decay of man.
why instruction fails to quicken activity
why knowledge enfeebles activity
why history as a costly intellectual excess and luxury must, in the spirit of Goethe's words, be seriously hated; for we still lack what is most necessary
superfluous excess is the enemy of the necessary.
we require history for life and action, not for avoiding it.
there is a degree of 'doing' history and an estimation of it which brings with it a wither and and degeneration of life: a phenomenon which is now as necessary as it may be painful to bring to consciousness through some remarkable symptoms of our age.
terms of thought:
historical reification
entropic humanity
degeneration
degradation
a posteriori lack
(preface)
Nietzsche on historic education of man
Nietzsche understands historical education as a defect. With hypertrophic virtue comes hyptertrophic vice, and ultimately the decay of man.
why instruction fails to quicken activity
why knowledge enfeebles activity
why history as a costly intellectual excess and luxury must, in the spirit of Goethe's words, be seriously hated; for we still lack what is most necessary
superfluous excess is the enemy of the necessary.
we require history for life and action, not for avoiding it.
there is a degree of 'doing' history and an estimation of it which brings with it a wither and and degeneration of life: a phenomenon which is now as necessary as it may be painful to bring to consciousness through some remarkable symptoms of our age.
terms of thought:
historical reification
entropic humanity
degeneration
degradation
a posteriori lack
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