Evergreen Course Blog | Spring 2011 | Reclaiming Public Spaces

Posted by Daniel Brittain

 

A summary, getting us back to last time, including pictures.

The beginning immanence (a negative thought based around our historical perspective of a desired returned to immanence, the inability to transcend the world):

I am able to say that the animal world is that of immanence and immediacy, for that world, which is closed to us, is so to the extent that we cannot discern in it an ability to transcend itself…Unavoidably, in our eyes, the animal is in the world like water in water. (Theory of Religion, 23-24)

The sun (founding the immanence), the giver that never receives, that continually gives, creating an excessive burden that is spent or wasted:

The Mithraic cult of the sun led to a very widespread religious practice: people stripped in a kind of pit that was covered with a wooden scaffold, on which a priest slashed the throat of a bull; thus they were suddenly doused with hot blood, to the accompaniment of the bull’s boisterous struggle and bellowing- a simple way of reaping the moral benefits of the blinding sun. (Rotten Sun, Visions of Excess, 57)

A “mechanic” “world’, a collection of expenditures that spill out, life forms that press out, like the shit out of the anus, from a point of privilege, where that which is gives away. Entry and exit points based around the three general principles of Limit, Pressure, and Extension.

When the great anthropoid carcass found itself standing on the ground, no longer swinging from one tree to another, itself now perfectly straight and parallel to a tree, all the impulses that had up to that time found their point of free expulsion in the anal region ran up against a new barrier. Because of the erect posture, the anal region ceased to form a protuberance, and it lost the “privileged power of points”: the erection could only be maintained on condition that a barrier of contracted muscles be regularly substituted for this “power of points.” Thus the obscure vital thrusts were suddenly thrown back in the direction of the face and the cervical region: they were discharged in the human voice and in more and more fragile intellectual constructions. (Pineal Eye, Visions of Excess, 89)

Conceived in a tremendous historical perspective returning to a time when the sea liquefied like female sex under the caresses of the sun and ejaculated life onto the land like the male:

The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheel and pistons. These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other. Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus. (The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess, 6)

Two realms of movement, horizontal and vertical planes, the vertical following the horizontal, in which once the horizontal possibilities have been filed, the vertical finding locations suitable for erection:

I imagined on the one hand plants, which are uniformly animated by a vertical movement analogous to that of tides, which regularly elevate water, and on the other hand animals, which are animated by a horizontal movement analogous to that of the turning earth. Thus I arrived at reductions that were extremely simple and geometric but at the same time monstrously comic (for example, I saw that the alternating movement of all the coituses on the surface of the earth is similar to that of locomotive pistons, so that the continual movement of coituses on the surface of the earth is as closely tied to the earth’s rotation as the movement of pistons is to that that of wheels). (The Jesuve, Visions of Excess 75)

The Erection, raising toward the sun, that gives birth to “homo sapiens”. The Big Toe “founding” the step towards Reason. Changing an ontological perspective of mouth driven consumption (ruled by sharp teeth) to creation via hand manipulation.

The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals; in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighboring animals. (Mouth, Visions of Excess, 59)

The function of the human foot consists in giving a firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud (the big toe, ceasing to grasp branches, is applied to the ground on the same plane as the other toes. (The Big Toe, Visions of Excess, 20)

In this new standing perspective (man is shat upon the earth, as heterogeneous, outside the immanence. This otherness seen in early forms of expression: the hidden body, the poetry based upon the animal.

In effect, prehistoric man depicted animals in fascinating and naturalistic images, but when he wanted to represent himself, he awkwardly concealed his unique, distinguishing features beneath those of the animal that he was not. He only partially divulged his human body, and he gave himself an animal head (Cradle of Humanity, 60).

Man’s first movement amid the animals and trees had been to concede of the existence of the animals and trees and to negate his own. The human body appears as a Cartesian diver, like a toy of the wind and the grass, like a cluster of dust charged with an activity that decompress it. The blatant heterogeneity of our being in relation to the world that gave birth to it, which we have become so incapable of proving through tangible experience, seems to have been for those among us who have lived in nature, the basis for all representation (Cradle of Humanity, 46)

The feeling of inferiority based around a world of small technical possibility (though rich(er) in possibilities of expression), though, slowly disappearing as things fill the world and constitute history, changing form of expression, defining the sacred, mastery being Mastered. Mastered as identified, conceptualized, i.e. Myths, Totems, Legend…Becoming HIM-the singular concept, an all encompassing word in a sentence in a book, the Book, the transition to that which is always being written, dogmatism, universality:

It is the book that always serves as the temptation of a certain literalism: the idea that not only is there a transcendent God who serves as a human ideal (he is just, permanent, transcendent, vengeful, peaceful, etc), but that God’s Word is definitive, not subject to the vicissitudes of interpretation. The religion of the Book presupposes not only a fixed doctrine, absolute and unchanging, but a corps of specialists (clerics) who teach it as Law and impose it on all believers. (Bataille’s Peak, 64)

In this follow up lecture we are going to be exploring what it means to be a writer (writing the Book) and how this writing affects Possibility. In exploring the writer we are going to use the most monstrous writer Sade and hopefully come to terms with our morality, our religion (a shift to atheism in relation to HIM), and our personal perversions in the process.

For Saturday:
Read the final dialogue, the 7th, in Philosophy of the Bedroom

(Though if you can, try to read the complete story. For those who have just got done reading Kan’ts Critique of Judgement, your in a prime position after reading Sade’s novel to move to Lacan’s Kant with Sade).
Read the Statutes in the Introduction (starts on Page 40) of the 120 Days of Sodomy. Or, at least glance through the introduction. The work is heavy so its very easy to find a place in the text to sink down and be amazed without having any background.

Extra: Bataille: The Use Value of D.A.F De Sade

 

This Wednesday (the 18th) we’ll continue our discussion on constraint, procedure, and ritual as they relate to writing.  Because a few of you were not able to get the readings, due to blog problems, last week, I’m asking those of you who did get the readings to re-read last week’s work (below) and for those of you who could not access last week-s work to do so today or tomorrow.  Please note that I’ve added one short further reading (John Cage).   FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO GET READINGS FROM THIS BLOG: THERE IS A PDF FILE THAT YOU NEED–EMAIL ME FOR THAT PDF IF YOU DO NOT HAVE IT, AS I CANNOT POST IT HERE (IE, FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DID NOT GET THE PDF IN ANY EMAIL YET, EMAIL ME AND I’LL SEND IT TO YOU!). 

I’ll be lecturing on this work for the 2nd half of class.  For the first half we’ll do a post-fire ritual debrief and pass around your ashen poetic remainders.  See you in tomorrow!

Student BLOG POST: by Dan Brittain for his essay on Battaille

Thank you to Dan Brittain for sending this to us and for facilitating seminar in my absence during this day of class.

Georges Bataille (Sept. 10, 1987 to July 8, 1962)

1. A minor associative collection of individuals near/friends with Bataille:

Kadinsky and Kojeve (Kadinsky is Kojeve’s uncle)

Husserl Heidegger Levinas
(Levinas studies with Husserl, attends Heidegger’s lectures, and is close friends with Blanchot, who is close friends with Bataille.

Blanchot

Bergson Durkheim Mauss Hubert, Durkheim was classmates with Bergson, and is the Uncle of Mauss. Mauss working with Hubert, write works on Magic, Gifts, and Sacrifices: anthropology and sociology. Many of Bataille’s peers are influenced by this work, or, studied under Mauss. Hubert’s work the Gift is a work that brings to focus the potlach in French thinking, which is a title the Situationists will use for one of their journals.

Lacan
Bataille’s first wife will marry Lacan after Bataille and her divorce. Bataille was an early supporter of Lacan’s work and urged him to publish.

Surrealists
Bataille was a member of the surrealists for a short time before falling out with Breton. With other fringe members Bataille will start…

Accephale/College of Sociology/Documents
Accephale was a human sacrifical secret cult, though, no one was ever sacrificed.

The College of Sociology was a group of thinkers attempting to combat fascisim through new sociology. The Frankfurt School showed interest in trying to connect with the group (Benjamin had daily relations with Bataille at the Library where Bataille worked at), though, I believe the Frankfurt school thought there were too many fascist undertones in the College.

Documents was an early anti-surrealist magazine started by Bataille that was part ethnography, part essays and creative writing. Much of this work hasn’t been traslated, though, pieces can be read in the collection Visions of Excess, such as the piece the Big Toe.

Members in these groups included:
Roger Caillois
Pierre Klossowski
Andre Masson
Jules Monneral
Jean Wahl
Colette Piegnot (A major figure in Bataille’s life. Will leave his first wife to have an affair with her. The story Blue of Noon is based off of their relation. A collection of their letters has been published by city lights book).
Jean Paulhan (Was a partner to Ann Desclos, who wrote the Story of O)

Influenced by Bataille: Foucault, Derrida, Sollers (Kristeva), Barthes, Baudrillard, Deluze…

2. Thinking Bataille:

To experience Bataille, one must be both light and heavy. Able to reach the point where laughter emerges. For like tears, laughter appears in a way different from thought, from reason. At the Limit, the erotic, the relationship between life and death.

Influences are Hegel via Kojeve, Sociology/Anthropology through Durkheim and Mauss, friends with Blanchot, and Lacan (who will marry Bataille’s first wife after their divorce). Bataille is quite central in 20th century thought. He appears, quite everywhere.

Bataille would not refer to himself as a “philosopher.” Likewise, I think it would be wrong to refer to him as an “economist,” or a “surrealist”, a “pornographer”, “a librarian”, a “mystic”, “a yogi”, a writer. Maybe getting closer to Bataille with the term writer, but using that term in an incredible deceptive way, for if Bataille is a writer, he is one that is against project:

I wanted experience to lead where it would, not to lead it to some end point given in advance. And I say at once that it leads to no harbor (but to a place of bewilderment, of nonsense). I wanted non-knowledge to be its principle…The opposition to the idea of project-which takes up an essential part of this book-is so necessary within me that having written the detailed plan for this introduction, I can no longer hold myself to it. (I.E. 3, 6).

Expenditure, associated with project, possibility. A question: how to create without project, to act without direction?

Nietzsche: “Except for a (few) exceptions, my company on earth is mostly Nietzsche.” (On Nietzsche, viii). A strength for approaching the limit, for path walking. Confronting staring into the abyss, into death.

“The young and seductive Chinese Man I’ve spoke of, given over to the labor of the torture- I loved him with a love in which the Sadistic instinct had no part: he communicated to me his pain, or rather the excess of his pain and that was precisely what I was looking for, not to enjoy it, but to ruin in myself what was opposed to ruin (Inner experience, 120).

Fleeting Inner Experience of shock present (presence) solidifies into a word: Heterogeneity. That which is excluded from the system, expelled by the group, the organism. That which we violently dispel. That which is beyond appropriation, that which one can’t consume: shit, blood, vomit, the cadaver, etc.

The Other, alterity…

Bataille’s writing is incredibly unsystematic. Though, it molds together, a text that plays most playfully, each text pouring into a single one: the Book.

Lightness:
Glances wherein I perceive the path traveled. Fifteen years ago (perhaps a bit more), I returned from I don’t know where, late in the night. The rue de Rennes was deserted. Coming from Saint Germain, I crossed the rue du Four (the post office side). I held in my hand an open umbrella and I believe it wasn’t raining. (But I hadn’t drunk: I tell you, I’m sure of it.) I had this umbrella open without needing to (if not for what I speak of later). I was extremely young then, chaotic and full of empty intoxications: a round of unseemly, vertiginous ideas, but ideas already full of anxieties, rigorous and crucifying, ran through my mind. In the shipwreck of reason, anguish, the solitary fall from grace, cowardice, bad faith profited: the festivity started up again a little further on. What is certain is that this freedom, at the same time as the “impossible” which I had run up against, burst in my head. A space constellated with laughter opened its dark abyss before me. At the crossing of the rue du Four, I became in this “Nothingness” unknown-suddenly…I negated these gray walls which enclosed me, I rushed into a sort of rapture. I laughed divinely: the umbrella, having descended upon my head, covered me (I expressly covered myself with this black shroud). I laughed as perhaps one had never laughed; the extreme depth of each thing opened itself up-Laid bare, as if I were dead. (I.E., 34)

The heaviness:

A giant female gibbon struggles with three men, who tie her with long cords: her face is even more stupid than it is ignoble, and she lets out unbelievable screams of fear, screams answered by the various cries of small monkeys in the high branches…The three men tie her upside down to a stake planted in the middle of the pit. Attached in this way, her bestially howling mouth swallows dirt while, on the other end, her huge screaming pink anal protrusion stares at the sky like a flower…They are all armed with shovels, except the Englishwoman: the earth destined to fill the pit is spread evenly around it. The ignoble gibbon, in an ignoble posture, continues her terrifying howl, but, on a signal from the Englishwoman, everyone busies himself shoveling dirt into the pit, and then quickly stamps it down: thus, in the blink of an eye, the horrible beast is buried alive.

A relatively silence settles: all the stupefied glances are fixed on the filthy, beautifully blood-colored solar prominence, sticking out of the earth and ridiculously shuddering with convulsions of agony. Then the Englishwoman with her charming rear end stretches her long nude body on the filled pit: the mucous flesh of this bald false skull, a little soiled with shit at the radiate flower to its summit, is even more upsetting to see when touched by the pretty white fingers. (Visions of Excess: The Pineal Eye, 85-86)

It is easy to not take Bataille seriously, or, to take him casually. A way of writing that is common, that is non-academic. He is easily cast aside (as Sartre would do, thinking Bataille a mystic). However, beneath the pornography, beneath the simple diction, there is a depth that is shattering, a universality that is staggering, at the heart.

One perspective of Bataille applied to writing: Barthes, influenced by Bataille’s work with expenditure will pose these questions in The Pleasure of the Text about writing and the writer:

Does luxury of language belong with excessive wealth, wasteful expenditure, total loss? Does a great work of pleasure (Proust’s for example) participate in the same economy as the pyramids of Egypt? Is today’s writer the residual substitute for the beggar, the monk, the bonze: unproductive, but nevertheless provided for? (Pleasure of the Text, 23).

In exploring Bataille this Saturday we will be exploring expenditure (extension, pressure, and limit), and its relation to writing. Using the Accursed Share as a foundation I will walk us through Bataille (and possibly other thinkers who lend themselves to Bataille) linking the economic works (the Accursed Shares) with his Summa Theologica (Inner Experience, Guilty, On Nietzsche).

One of the goals of this presentation will be the ability to reflect deeper on the Retallack essay with her discussion of Poetics:
a) There is the shock of alterity. Or should be.
b) There is the pleasure of alterity. Or should be.
c) We humans with all our conversational structures have yet to invite enough alterity in.
d) Experiment is conversation with an interrogative dynamic. Its consequential structures turn on paying attention to what happens when well-designed questions are directed to things we sense but don’t really know. These things cannot be known by merely examining our own minds.

3. The Readings:
The Solar Anus is a great short piece to start with Bataille really showing the division of his thinking. Though I might not be able to mention this piece specifically, much of the lecture is walking through this work.http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_010/solar.htm

The Accursed Share-
Present is the first two chapters from the work. The Accursed Share provides a new perspective of economy based around consumption rather than conservation. The first chapter provides a context into the contemporary (the planning of a new ethics) while the second provides the laws of the General Economy. Bataille begins by providing a general topographical perspective of energy movement, excessively created by the sun, and then follows the movement of this excess. This work is influenced heavily by the Potlatches of the North West Natives, and the human sacrifices of the Aztek and Mayans.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ah1yks’>http://www.sendspace.com/file/ah1yks>>

A User’s Guide to Entropy-
This work is a nice overview of the theory of Entropy seen through contemporary art. Written by Yve Bois for the October Group, it goes through such individuals as Duchamp, Robert Smithson, Merleau-Ponty, and Georges Bataille. It’s a great article (though one that I don’t think you will have time to read.) If you do have time, read the last section on Zones (areas that can’t be said to exist at all)

http://www.jstor.org/pss/778906

(Will have to be printed out on campus, or you are going to have to go through Evergreen library webpage to log into Jstor).

4.Extras:
Story of the Eye.Quick short transcendental pornography that picks up incredibly fast that revolves around eggs and eyeballs.

http://supervert.com/elibrary/zips/bataille_story_of_eye.zip

Bataille was incredibly concerned with death and the erotic. These two works, albeit uncomfortable like the image of the torture of 1,000 pieces, introduce the relationship quite heavily.

Stan Brakhage- The act of seeing with ones own eyes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrU65rlruXM

Nekromantik Trailer

Philosophy in the Bedroom

http://supervert.com/elibrary/zips/sade_philobed_pdf.zip

120 Days of Sodomy

http://supervert.com/elibrary/zips/sade_120_days_pdf.zip

 

Edmond Jabes:

 

Three times was God exiled: in the Name, in the bursting open of the Name, and in the effacing of this bursting open. (The Book of Questions)

 

Augustine, Confessions X:

 

I run through all these things, I fly here and there in my mind, and penetrate their workings as far as I can.  But I never reach the end” (*Conf *10.17.26).

 

From Beckett, The Expelled:

 

There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the figure has gone from my mind.  And when I say that the figure has gone from my mind, I mean that none of the three figures is with me anymore, in my mind.  It is true that if I were to find, in my mind, where it is certainly to be found, one of these figures, I would find it and it alone, without being able to deduce from it the other two.  And even were I to recover two, I would not know the third.  No, I would have to find all three, in my mind, in order to know all three.  Memories are killing

 

Again, from Augustine’s Confessions:

But what when the memory itself loses anything, as falls out 

when we forget and seek that we may recollect? Where 

in the end do we search, but in the memory itself? 

And there, if one thing be perchance offered instead of 

another, we reject it, until what we seek meets us; 

and when it does, we say, "This is it"; which we should 

not unless we recognized it, nor recognize it unless 

we remembered it. Certainly then we had forgotten it. 

Or, had not the whole escaped us, but by the part 

whereof we had hold, was the lost part sought for; 

in that the memory felt that it did not carry on 

together all which it was wont, and maimed, as it 

were, by the curtailment of its ancient habit, 

demanded the restoration of what it missed?  

For we have not as yet utterly forgotten that 

which we remember ourselves to have forgotten. What 

then we have utterly forgotten, though lost, we cannot 

even seek after. How then do I seek a happy life, seeing 

I have it not, until I can say, where I ought to say it, 

"It is enough"? How do I seek it? By remembrance, as 

though I had forgotten it, remembering that I had 

forgotten it? Or, desiring to learn it as a thing 

unknown, either never having known, or so forgotten it, 

as not even to remember that I had forgotten it?

From The Calmative:

So I’ll tell myself a story, I’ll try and tell myself 

another story, to try and calm myself, and it’s there 

I fell I’ll be old, old, even older than the day I fell, 

calling for help, and it came.

From The Expelled:

My shadow, one of my shadows, flew before me, dwindled, slid under 

my feet, trailed behind me the way shadows will.  This degree of opacity 

appeared to me conclusive.

 

Descartes, Meditations II

 

But how could I deny that I possess these hands and this body, and escape being classed with persons in a state of insanity, whose brains are so disordered and clouded by dark bilious vapors as to cause them to assert that they are monarchs when they are in the greatest poverty; or clothed [in gold] and purple when destitute of any covering; or that their head is made of clay, their body of glass, or that they are gourds? We say, for example, that we see [things as they are.]  There is the analogous instance of human beings passing on in the street below, as observed from a window. In this case I do not fail to say that I see the men themselves; and yet what do I see from the window beyond hats and cloaks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions might be determined by springs?

 

 

From The Calmative:

 

To say that there was no one abroad, no, I would not go that far, for I remarked a number of shapes, male and female, strange shapes but not more so than usual.

 

 

From The Expelled

 

I found myself at the foot of a staircase which I began to climb, mindless of my heart, like one hotly pursued by a homicidal maniac…

 

But soon I was descending a wide street, vaguely familiar…

 

 

“The individual himself is revealed to be a historical category, both the outcome of the capitalist process of alienation and a defiant protest against it, something transient . . . . Endgame [Beckett] assumes that the individual’s claim to autonomy and being has lost its credibility.”

                                                –Adorno, 1961

 

 

Marjorie Perloff, “In Love With Hiding”: Samuel Beckett’s War:

 

The step-counting ritual that opens “The Expelled” is the sort of absurd mental exercise one engages in when trying to keep oneself going in a moment of unbearable stress. The narrator admits that “After all, it is not the number of steps that matters.” (He has been considering whether to count the sidewalk as the first step which would give him n + 1, or to count the top of the steps as well, which makes n + 2.) “The important thing to remember is that there were not many, and that I have remembered.”

Wittgenstein, Letters 1949:

 

It’s like this: In the city, streets are nicely laid out.  And you drive on the right and you have traffic lights, etc.  There are rules.  When you leave the city, there are still roads, but no traffic lights.  And when you get far off there are no roads, no lights, no rules, nothing to guide you. (Culture and Value)

 

Wittgenstein:

 

To imagine is to imagine a form of life  (Philosophical Investigations)

 

 

Here are the readings for this Wednesday, November 5th.  Please read Texts for Nothing 4, by Samuel Beckett, then the 2 Marjorie Perloff articles linking Beckett, exile, and Wittgenstein.  Finally, take a look at the 1973 San Quentin Drama Workshop production (7 minutes) of Beckett’s Not I.  The San Quentin group, a combination of inmates at the prison and dramatists, including Beckett himself, is considered to this day one of the most inventive drama collectives that has come out of the United States.  Beckett himself said that inmates at San Quentin staged the best version of Endgame he’d seen.  So, as you read these articles and Beckett, do think about the implications of an artist’s collective literally, or, maximally imprisoned.  This will be where Wednesday’s lecture is heading.

http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Text4Nothing4.html

http://www.samuel-beckett.net/PerloffBeckettsWar.html

http://jacketmagazine.com/14/perl-witt.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8C4HL2LyWU