Month: January 2016

Slavoj Žižek: The Anxiety of Retroactive Trauma

Bloom, or course. If poets, why not philosophers?… or painters? or musicians?  Thinking about art history and criticism–my question is–and this has been on my mind for some time, as an artist of an eclectic bent–why this need for pedigree? For lines of descent? For a clear central stream of perpetual renewal and repetition, or repetition as renewal? How male! What is the anxiety here, if not fear of the feminine, of creation without the paternal marker of ownership and mastery? What is the critical scorn for eclecticism if not an expression of enforced patriarchal monogamy–itself, but a disguised longing for polyamory? May love be free to choose its favorites, and free to choose again! Fuck the Gatekeepers!

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

The essence of Slavoj Žižek’s vision is that philosophy is the result of a critical act of buggery, by which another, earlier philosopher is deliberately misread, and hence re-written, retroactively absorbed and incorporated into the ongoing project of the making of a Subject. In one of those impromptu interviews he has had over the years, Žižek once related the notion that “Hegel didn’t know what he was doing”. He went on to say,

You have to interpret him. Let me give you a metaphoric formula. You know
the term Deleuze uses for reading philosophers—anal interpretation, buggering them. Deleuze says that, in contrast to other interpreters, he anally penetrates the philosopher, because it’s immaculate conception. You produce a monster. I’m trying to do what Deleuze forgot to do—to bugger Hegel, with Lacan [chuckles] so that you get monstrous Hegel, which is, for me, precisely the underlying radical dimension of subjectivity which then, I think…

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Life with No Future

imagesa mood is not something you can pin to a point in time. It’s traced over the course of a day. Or weeks. Or months. Or years. Like weather–there will be seasons, there will be storms. There will be, now and then, blessed breakthroughs of sun and light. So it’s no good, telling yourself… or anyone else, that your mood is this or that.
This was a day that began with near panic attack anxiety level. I suppose it got better. Acute blurred into chronic, if that’s what you call, better. I need dystopic reading material… to distract me from this dystopia I inhabit.
No, it’s not all in my head. It’s out there. Everywhere. I’m just registering it at sometimes what approaches near suicidally acute levels… than, like I said… it blurs into a more general miasma.
It’s completely beyond my comprehension–why anyone would choose to have a child now, given what they are likely going to endure.
Life without a future. There is no future. This is all we have. All we’re gonna get.

We Who came of age at the dawn of R&Roll

images.jpgAll the stuff from people two generations younger, on how much they got from Bowie and what the aging and passing of generations of pop stars born within a year or two of my own entrance to planet Earth, meant to them. Lennon, Dylan…et al.
I was born 1941, the day the Nazi’s invaded the USSR. I’m an artist filled to choking with debt to the past and no clue how to deal with it, but to use it for my own vision against the stream of recent history. 50’s rock of my teens broke down borders for me, I discovered, not David Bowie–who came way later when I was in my 30’s…but be-bop and cool jazz. The Beatles, the rock of the late 60’s and first couple of years of the 70’s were like movie soundtrack to my 20’s –while my own head was all Bach and Josquin du Pres and Palestrina and late 19th C, early 20th Modernists–artists both literary and visual. My overwhelming sense from all this is that, as an artist, I have no place in history, and not a sq mm of space free from it. I feel like a Lost Generation of One

Cold! We are aliens in this universe.

imagesThe human body adjusts well to heat… if one doesn’t spend much of the day in AC, or going in and out, hot to super cooled. And you can stay out of direct sun, and be where there’s at least minimal air circulation. But the only way to adjust to extreme cold, is with layers of clothes. The cold will kill you. And it doesn’t fuss around about it. Three hours is like, max… and you won’t notice it much beyond the first hour or so. In cold like we have in Philly now–not even that much time (Siberia, Antarctica…hell, Ely, Minnesota!–minutes!) .
Dress warm, peeps.

That’s the real voice of this Universe you think you’re a part of.

It’s saying: die!

Without that thin blanket of air around the planet–we’d have joined up with the Universe long ago.

Look up at the stars. They’re plenty hot. But most of what’s out there is near absolute zero. It’s telling you, you don’t belong. And won’t last long, either, by its reckoning.

Yep. We’re star stuff alright. Wrap that thought around you and walk out naked into this night… and see how long it keeps you warm… or alive

 

#423 Watercolor, because the End is Near

#4235×7″ watercolor, ink

Water colors are fragile. Even with high quality pigments and all cotton paper, they require special care: store away from direct sun, florescent lights, or too bright light of any kind. They need to be matted with non-wood pulp, acid free board and kept behind glass, with mats of sufficient thickness to leave air space between the paper and glass. There are other treatments–covering with resin, but I doubt if conservators would recommend them.
But then, we are at the end of human habitation on this planet (or any other), so who needs to consider ‘posterity?’ Let fragility be a virtue. Let our art perish with us–they’ll be no one to enjoy it when we’re gone. Let it feed the rats and roaches that survive us!