a certain something

2.Vanity.90. Anyone who wants to appreciate man's vanity to the full need only reflect on the causes and effects of love. The cause is a je ne sais quoi (Corneille) and its effects are appalling. The je ne sais quoi, which is such a tiny thing that we cannot even recognize it, rocks the world, thrones, armies, the whole of creation to their foundation.
The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.
- Pascal, Pensees.

the power of image

2. Vanity. 81. Imagination. Our judges are very conscious of the secret power of imagination. Their red robes, the ermine in which they swaddle themselves like furry cats, the courts where they sit, the fleur de lys-- all the august display is very necessary; if physicians did not have cassocks and mules, and doctors did not have square hats and robes four sizes too large, they would never have fooled people who cannot resist a display which looks like authentic. If the judges possessed true justice and the physicians the true art of healing, there would be no need for square hats; the majesty of their science is purely fictitious, they are obliged to deck themselves out with vain ornaments that strike the imagination which is what they are aiming at; and in this manner, in fact, they win respect. Soldiers alone do not disguise themselves because the part they play is essential: they establish themselves by force, the rest by giving themselves airs.
- Pascal, Pensees

postmodernism, film

"Without much difficulty, postmodernism may be conceived as sharing some characteristics with the avant-garde that oppose it to mainstream cinema. These include "narrative intransivity" (gaps, interruptions, and digressions as contrasted to clear causal development of the story line) and Brechtian estrangement (an alienation effect rather than the viewer identification with characters sought by traditional filmmakers). ...[however] postmodernism does not share the avant-garde's overarching desire "to connect with the experience of particular classes and to place that experience within new explanatory models"...." (43)

"A. Spica is above all a speaker. Although Albert does not acknowledge the pleasures of speaking (he says early in the film: "money is my business; eating my pleasure") and says that he is always hungry, it is just as true to say that he is always speaking. As he speaks, he cannot tolerate any dissent, anything that will interrupt the relentless flow of words from his mouth-- and his mouth alone, for he is incapable of dialogue. He knows only monologue. Albert's monologue, which revels in puns and is constantly ripe with vulgarities, never shies from verbal abuse and is supplemented occasionally by acts of physical abuse. Albert's smearing Roy with dog shit and pissing on him at the beginning of the film is a grim harbinger of much worse to come." (47)

"Offered the opportunity to speak, Michael has the change to create a discourse of his own; as a reader, Michael has always been a consumer of others' discourses. Even Georgina is unable to understand Michael's pleasure in reading. ... She asks him, "What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them. How can they make you happy?" "I've always found them very reasonable," replies Michael, "They don't change their minds while you're not looking." It seems that Michael regards the texts he reads as essentially static, having stable fixed meanings.... These texts, then, are not postmodern. The bookkeeper's passive reading (which suggests that intentionality is somehow independent of his reading and is fixed within the pages of the book) is a far cry from the active reading encouraged, for example, by Roland Barthes. "The goal of literary work (of literature as work)," says Barthes, "is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (S/Z 4)." (48-49)

"Jameson shrewdly suggests that it is misleading to talk about realism, modernism, and postmodernism as existing independently of one another. In fact, these three terms represent three stages in the evolution of capitalism; and "the three stages are not symmetrical, but dialectical in their relationship to each other" (Signatures 157). Thus, although we may imagine that we can escape postmodernism and find outselves in realism or that we can move from realism into postmodernism, it is not a question of moving backward or forward in time, but of existing constantly within the dialectic. At a particular stage of the dialectic, the tell-tale signs of postmodernism remain for Jameson the eclipse of the individual self and a privileging of space rather than time, but a work can never be purely postmodern any more than it can be purely modernist." (50)
Pagan, Nicholas O. 1995. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover": Making Sense of Postmodernism. South Atlantic Review 60(1):43-55.

urban art forms

"…urban art is not site-specific but relationship-specific. The relation always arrives, coming to us through a leading perceptual edge-- usually visual-- in advance of its next sequential unfolding. In other words, it arrival is a promised event that has yet to occur: an appointment with a known but not yet actually afforded outcome. To afford oneself of the outcome is to eventuate the relationship, to perform it: to follow through with its actual step-by-step unfolding.
…The art parasitizes the expected event with its own happening. The Situationists also had a name for this practice of inserting unexpected encounters-with-potential into existing landing sites: detournement (hijacking or detouring).
"Documentation is the art event’s park bench: the form in which it rests. Except that documentary rest is for transport, since it is in documentary form that the event may move from one “park” to another. Documentation as vehicular event benching. To vehiculate the event, the documentation cannot be conceived merely as reflecting or representing it. It must be thought of as, and designed to be, the event in seed for. If the documentary germ falls on fertile urban ground, the performative prototyping may well resprout. … It is the event’s way of angling itself, or generally affording its own rehappening. (11-12)
-- Massumi, Brian. “Urban Appointment: A Possible Rendez-Vous With the City.” In Making Art of Databases, ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder. Pp. 28-55.

More Jean Genet

"I live in so closed a universe, the atmosphere of which is thick, a universe seen through my memories of prisons, through my dreams of galleys and through the presence of convicts: murderers, burglars, gangsters, that I do not communicate with the usual world or, when I do perceive it, what I see of it is distorted by the thickness of the wadding in which I move with difficulty. Each object in your world has a meaning different for me from the one it has for you. I refer to everything in my system, in which things have an infernal signification, and even when I read a novel, the facts, without being distorted, lose the meaning which has been given them by the author and which they have for you, and take on another so as to enter smoothly the otherworldly universe in which I live."
- Miracle of the Rose

"Life brings its modifications, and yet the same disturbance (through one that, paradoxically, would spring from the end of a conflict-- for example, when the concentric waves in a pond move away from the point at which the stone fell, when they move farther and farther away and diminish into calm, the water must feel, when this calm is attained, a kind of shudder which is no longer propagated in its matter but in its soul. It knows the plenitude of being water."

"I ruminated for perhaps six second on the words "get used to" and felt a kind of very slight melancholy that can be expressed only by the image of a pile of sand or rubbish. Jean's delicacy was somewhat akin (since it suggests it) to the grave sadness that issues-- along with a very particular odor-- from mortar and broken bricks which, whether hollow or solid, are made of apparently very soft clay. The youngster's face was always ready to crumble, and the words "get used to" have just crumbled it. Amidst the debris of buildings being demolished I sometimes step on ruins whose redness is toned down by the dust, and they are so delicate, discreet, and fragrant with humility that I have the impression I am placing the sole of my shoe on Jean's face."
- Funeral Rites

Jean Genet

"Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by propiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind."

"If Divine is willing to see in her man anything other than a hot, purplish member, it is because she can follow its stiffness, which extends to the anus, and can sense that it goes further into his body, that this is the body of Darling erect and terminating in a pale, tired face, a face of eyes, nose, mouth, flat cheeks, curly hair, beads of sweat."
- Our Lady of the Flowers

"Certain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces if our eyes are keen enough to see them in a flush, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for after the thrilling moment in which it reveals itself it diminishes in meaning."

"My childhood was dead and with it died the poetic powers that had dwelt in me. I no longer hoped that prison would remain the fabulous world it had long been. One day I realized from certain signs that it was losing its charm, which meant perhaps that I was being transformed, that my eyes were opening to the usual view of the world. I saw prison as any ordinary roughneck sees it. It is a dungeon where I rage at being locked up, but today, in the hole, instead of reading "Tattoed Jean" on the wall of the cell, I read, because of a malformation of the letters carved in the plaster, "Tortured Jean."
- Miracle of the Rose

erving goffman - the presentation of self in everyday life

"When we allow that the individual projects a definition of the situation when he appears before others, we must also see that the others, however passive their role may seem to be, will themselves effectively project a definition of the situation by virtue of any lines of action they initiate to him. Ordinarily the definitions of the situations projected by the several different participants are sufficiently attuned to one another so that open contradiction will not occur. I do not mean that there will be the kind of consensus that arises when each individual present candidly expresses what he really feels and honestly agrees with the expressed feeling of the others present. This kind of harmony is an optimistic ideal and in any case not necessary.... Rather, each participant is expected to suppress his immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a view of the situation which he feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable. The maintenance of this surface of agreement, this veneer of consensus, is facilitated by each participant concealing his own wants behind statements which assert values to which everyone present feels obliged to give lip service. Further, there is usually a kind of division of definitional labor. Each participant is allowed to establish the tentative official ruling regarding matters which are vital to him but not immediately important to others, e.g., the rationalizations and justifications by which he accounts for his past activity." (9)
"... the individual whose presentation has been discredited may feel ashamed while the others present may feel hostile, and all the participants may come to feel ill at ease, nonplussed, out of countenance, embarassed, experiencing the kind of anomy that is generated when the minute social system of face-to-face interaction breaks down." (12)

slippery thinking

"A general rule of biology, migratory species are less "aggressive" than sedentary ones.

There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimmage, is the hard journey: a "leveller" on which the "fit" survive and the stragglers fall by the wayside.

The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The "dictators" of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are "gentlemen of the road.""
- Bruce Chatwin, Songlines, pp 272-3

wanderlust

This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window.
I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.
- Baudelaire, "Any Where Out of This World"