Month: December 2016

The Terror of Being Human: Technicity and the Inhuman

A lucid review of what must be a difficult book, indeed… unless you like mud-wresting with language for its own sake. Had I youth and time, I would, based on this review alone, jump in and read it… having neither (the one condition foreshortening the other), I really appreciate this.
Of the several passages that gave me pleasure, and got my mind buzzing (as an artist, you can see why… ) –I’ll leave this. ” He also sees the arts as something we need to re-center in our cultural praxis, saying in a recent interview “an artist is capable of affecting, in and of themselves, a line of transmission from Paleolithic art through to contemporary art, and this transmission is a relationship to time, to human—I don’t like the word “human,” so perhaps we could say “mortal”—experience. These lines are within the artist, not made manifest by him or her, nor are they structures of representation, and they are put into effect through their practice, through the contact with them”.

The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

For Bernard Stiegler the philosopher has from the beginning been a self-divided being at odds with himself and his time, a creature of crime and havoc, remedy and poison. The Sophist would stake her claim in the black holes of linguistic turpitude, relishing the intricacies of illusion as the art of life. The Sophist was an admirer of what we now term the social construction of reality, a magician of language constructing the fictions by which society blesses and curses itself. While the philosopher or ‘lover of wisdom’ – or as Aristotle was want to say, philia: the lover of togetherness otherwise known as politics, the bringing together the brotherly love of the other in communicity, or a gathering of solitudes. In Stiegler the truth is that the philosopher sought to hide himself from himself, to repress the truth of his lack and inhumanity. The truth that culture is a machine…

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#624

31″ x 24″ Acrylic on Masonite. Not sure I’ve reached the end of this ‘kaleidoscope’ series, or pushing on to a new phase. I started out with some heavy, black bars, horizontals and verticals and connecting beams; the idea was to devise a scaffold, like beams of a building with the walls torn down–but again, like related paintings, giving the illusion of depth through layering, not geometric perspective.
It didn’t work, or didn’t work the way I’d anticipated. Those bars were too heavy and defied being pushed into the background until they were almost completely covered over. They did work to divide the rectangle and give it some structure, but without nearly as much depth as I would have liked. Some of that was a problem with value; was this light coming through dark, or light over dark? –a struggle that isn’t resolved here. Got more what I wanted in the other pieces (#604, 612, 615).
That I’m not satisfied suggests that there’s more to explore in this mode.
624

View portfolio here ART BY WILLARD
For photos on this blog:CLICK HERE, and scroll down.

#622 – with page from Goby’s Journal: Stasi Trump Jesus and the Subjunctive Voice

18″ x 24″ Acrylic on wood.
Layering. Interested in giving an impression of depth, without resorting to geometric perspective. Pollock, of course… but also, the illusion that one is looking at something… both real, and mysterious, like Hubble photos, or electron microscopy… in color. right click on photo for more detail.

622
View GALLERY HERE.

… I’m thinking of using this piece of a packing crate for a frame. Paint it black.
packing-crate-622

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Goby’s Journal: December 23, 2016

Stasi, Trump, Jesus and the Subjunctive Voice

In an age when anyone who hears us speak, in person, or through social media, students in our classrooms, our patients or customers–when anyone might feel empowered by the Trumpocracy, to report you, to troll you, to try to get you fired, blacklisted, kicked off a plane…
It would be well, were we to revive the long neglected subjunctive voice.
To polish our skills at not quite saying what we mean.

If one were to imagine oneself, say, in 1956 East Berlin, one would find ways, even in front of a class, of speaking to those who “had ears to hear,” without giving cause to those who would take you down, were they so inclined. Which brings to mind–that phrase, “those who have ears to hear” — the language used by Jesus in the Gospels: speaking in parables. Jesus, too, lived under a hostile power. How much of that language was made to pass safely through the Roman occupation?

We aren’t at that level, yet… of Stasi, say… where no one, not even our most radical friends, can be trusted, because anyone can be made to be an informant. Let them only describe what will happen to your children, your aging parents, should you refuse. But this is where we are headed.

I have heard stories. Some reported in news, some seen on social media. Would that it were true that nothing of the kind had happened to anyone I know.

Be careful. Don’t say anything in private you wouldn’t say in public, cause… nothing is private. Learn from poets how to say more and less and other than what you mean.

Putin Trump Heidegger The End of the World

macabre-artists-687

Why would Putin love Trump… other than oil, I mean?
What Heidegger was to Hitler, Dugan is for Putin

The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the World ?

<Dugin thinks Trump’s victory is a monumental strike against the “globalists”, whose candidate was Hillary Clinton – the same language that you can easily find peppering conservative American websites like Breitbart News, Drudge Report and conspiracy king Alex Jones (a particular favorite of Dugin’s). He thinks Trump’s victory was a kind of “revolution” started by American people and should lead to worldwide defeats of the globalist agenda, draining the proverbial “swamp” the world over.

Dugin doesn’t stop there, however. His visions of what Trump’s victory means go into the apocalyptic and civilization-changing:

“We need to return to the Being, to the Logos, to the foundamental- ontology (of Heidegger), to the Sacred, to the New Middle Ages – and thus to the Empire, religion, and the institutions of traditional society (hierarchy, cult, domination of spirit over matter and so on). All content of Modernity – is Satanism and degeneration. Nothing is worth, everything is to be cleansed off. The Modernity is absolutely wrong — science, values, philosophy, art, society, modes, patterns, “truths”, understanding of Being, time and space. All is dead with Modernity. So it should end. We are going to end it.”
>http://bigthink.com/…/the-dangerous-philosopher-behind-puti…
Dugin thinks Trump’s victory is a monumental strike against the “globalists”, whose candidate was Hillary Clinton – the same language that you can easily find peppering conservative American websites like Breitbart News, Drudge Report and conspiracy king Alex Jones (a particular favorite of Dugin’s). He thinks Trump’s victory was a kind of “revolution” started by American people and should lead to worldwide defeats of the globalist agenda, draining the proverbial “swamp” the world over.

Dugin doesn’t stop there, however. His visions of what Trump’s victory means go into the apocalyptic and civilization-changing:

“We need to return to the Being, to the Logos, to the foundamental- ontology (of Heidegger), to the Sacred, to the New Middle Ages – and thus to the Empire, religion, and the institutions of traditional society (hierarchy, cult, domination of spirit over matter and so on). All content of Modernity – is Satanism and degeneration. Nothing is worth, everything is to be cleansed off. The Modernity is absolutely wrong — science, values, philosophy, art, society, modes, patterns, “truths”, understanding of Being, time and space. All is dead with Modernity. So it should end. We are going to end it.”