My Mind Went Back

… it recapitulates its former lives.

This is from The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922; 1965):

… It is midday but it is pitchy dark, and it is not warm.

As we rested my mind went back to a dusty, dingy hoffice in Victoria Street some fifteen months ago. ‘I want you to come,’ said Wilson to me, and then, ‘I want to go to Cape Crozier in the winter and work out the embryology of the Emperor penguins, but I’m not saying much about it — it might never come off.’

[line break added] Well! this was better than Victoria Street, where the doctors had nearly refused to let me go because I could only see the people across the road as vague blobs walking. Then Bill went and had a talk with Scott about it, and they said I might come if I was prepared to take the additional risk. At that time I would have taken anything.

… What is this venture? Why is the embryo of the Emperor penguin so important to Science? And why should three sane and common-sense explorers be sledging away on a winter’s night to a Cape which has only been visited before in daylight, and then with very great difficulty?

The Emperor is a bird which cannot fly, lives on fish and never steps on land even to breed. It lays its eggs on the bare ice during the winter and carries out the whole process of incubation on the sea-ice, resting the egg upon its feet, pressed closely to the lower abdomen.

[line break added] But it is because the Emperor is probably the most primitive bird in existence that the working out of his embryology is so important. The embryo shows remains of the development of an animal in former ages and former states; it recapitulates its former lives.

My most recent previous post from Cherry-Garrard’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Danger

“… to accept the radiance and effect of things as evidence of their goodness …”

This is from Bruce Nauman by Eugen Blume (2010):

… It is not the empty corridor that becomes the object of perception but the person inside it, entering into a surprising self-examination. In line with the Augustinian notion of “quaestio mihi factus sum” (a question I have become for myself), this experience provided Nauman with the point of departure for his artistic practice overall.

… the art world of the late 1970s could not only be observed from the perspective of hermeticism but also as an exhaustion of art’s intellectual and spiritual resources. In a certain regard, then, the objective was to turn over a new leaf, to contest the whole mechanical, routine, unresisting code of affirmativity.

[line break added] Characteristic of this move is Nauman’s work Partial Truth which dates from the late 1990s. Consisting solely of the two words of the title written in uppercase letters, the piece was executed both in stone and in print form.

[line break added] The ontologically concerning — if not downright dangerous — thing about art was sharply articulated by Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century as follows: “The danger of art lies in our propensity to become accustomed to imaginary things, to even hold them in higher regard: to favor the partial truths, the brilliant ideas, in short to accept the radiance and effect of things as evidence of their goodness, or indeed of their reality.”

My most recent previous post from Blume’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Out of True

… by the little deviation within a vicinity: that which is ready to be born …

This is from The Birth of Physics by Michel Serres, translated by David Webb and William Ross (2018; 1977):

… An instant and a minimum deviation are enough. An instant later, turbulence forms a pocket in the three-dimensional flow.

… This pocket, this seed, this island, this turbulence, holds for a certain time before disintegrating, before being carried away by the cataract, the current of atoms that wear it out and break it down. They are preserved by their differential deviation from every static law.

… Why does this hold? Simply because it does not hold completely. Everything must be out of true by a minimum degree. There has to be a minimally open solid angle. Yes, it holds by a miracle. And by a miracle I mean a statistical case of extreme rarity.

… Hence the scandal of declination in the eyes of classical and modern physicists: it interrupts the universality of laws. It opens the closed system. It places physical laws under the rule of exception. Under the protective roof of its solid angle. And yet, that is the way it is. Lucretius is right.

He accomplished the revolution being carried through by the sciences of today, which philosophy continues to neglect. If the fall is universal, if its law, both kinds, can never suffer any exceptions, then every construction becomes impossible: there will be no world and there can be no physics.

… If there is something, it is nature. The rare formation of pockets, of islands, of waterspouts and seeds. The ultra-rare and aleatory birth, by the little deviation within a vicinity: that which is ready to be born, what is going to be born or to appear, in the open proximity of the differential inchoation.

My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Reading Their Significance

… There is magical logic to the idea that there is never any magic …

This is from The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing by Steven Connor (2019):

… Like other kinds of knowledge, omniscience must always be supposed, imagined or assumed, so it is often a kind of omnipotence by proxy. Nowhere is this more the case than in the apparently defining and governing assumption of psychoanalysis that there are no accidents in unconscious life — that things that seem trivial, inattentive, arbitrary or coincidental are in fact determined in various ways.

… There is magical logic to the idea that there is never any magic, for it gives omnipotence to the thought that makes out the universal reasons for things, or universally makes out the reasons for them. As Ernest Gellner has observed, psychoanalytic rationality ‘indulges wholeheartedly in the sense of a tight determination of things, as do many primitive thought-systems.’ Indeed, psychoanalytic thinking resembles in this the kind of thinking it regularly subjects to analysis, having:

“a marked similarity to a certain kind of paranoia, in which the sufferer sees all events as menacing or significant, and credits himself with the intuitive power of reading their significance. In this form of paranoia, our pattern-seeking sense of causation seems to become overactive, unrelenting and compulsive.”

My most recent previous post from Connor’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Innocence

… Simply the longing to resemble nothing.

This is found in Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus, edited by Philip Thody and translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1968):

… The memory of these joys holds no regret, and that is how I know that they were good. After so many years, they are still there, somewhere in this heart that finds fidelity so difficult. And I know that today, if I want to go back, the same sky will still pour its cargo of stars and breezes upon the deserted dunes. These are the lands of innocence.

But innocence needs sand and stone. And man has forgotten how to live with them. At least, this appears to be the case, since he has enclosed himself in this strange town where boredom slumbers. Yet it is this confrontation which gives Oran its value.

[line break added] The capital of boredom, besieged by innocence and beauty, is hemmed in by an army of as many soldiers as stones. At certain times, though, how tempted one feels in this town to defect to the enemy! How tempting to merge oneself with these stones, to mingle with this burning, impassive universe that challenges history and its agitations!

[line break added] A vain temptation, no doubt. But every man has a deep instinct that is neither for destruction nor creation. Simply the longing to resemble nothing. In the shade of the warm buildings of Oran, on its dusty asphalt, one sometimes hears this invitation. For a while, it seems, minds which yield to it are never disappointed.

[line break added] They have the shades of Eurydice and the sleep of Isis. These are the deserts where thought recovers its strength, the cool hand of evening on a troubled heart. No vigil can be kept upon this Mount of Olives; the mind joins and sanctions the sleeping Apostles. Were they really wrong?

My most recent previous post from Camus‘ book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

History

… Only the frame provided inner cohesion to the image.

This is from Art History after Modernism by Hans Belting, translated by Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen along with Kenneth Northcott (2003):

… The ideal art history was a narrative of the meaning and course of historical art. If today the image bursts out of its old frame, then we have reached the end of an old and most successful academic game. It was the frame that turned all it contained into a picture.

[line break added] It was art history that gathered the art of previous centuries into the picture, where we learned to see it. Only the frame provided inner cohesion to the image. Everything within it was, as art, privileged over everything outside, just as in a museum, which collects and displays only art that has already gone down in art history. The age of art history as an academic discipline coincides with the age of the museum.

The age of art history? Once again, we must define concepts. The idea of a general history of art was not established until the nineteenth century, while the material it gradually accumulated came from all previous centuries and millennia. Let us put it another way. Art had long been produced without any idea that it was fulfilling the course of art history.

… The struggle over “art and life” is, therefore, telling, suggesting as it does that art was only found outside life’s reach: in the museum, in the concert hall, in books. The expert’s gaze at a framed picture was a metaphor for the cultivated person’s attitude to culture as an ideal. He or she always remained the audience, while artists and philosophers “made” culture.

My previous post from Belting’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Primary Force

… the force of instinct — when it is impeded in its development — or the force of a defied ideal is more primary and more “elementary” than the force of an overinflated balloon that bursts.

This is from Neofinalism by Raymond Ruyer, translated by Alyosha Edlebi (1952; 2016):

… It would be puerile to imagine that the “force of enthusiasm” directly increases a man’s productivity. It is quite probable that the biologist and the psychologist, in studying these kinds of phenomena, will always stumble on a physicochemical relay, on a “servo-mechanism” interposed between the order and the realization.

[line break added] But we should not conclude that, from relay to relay, we go to infinity without ever discovering the point at which the “substituted chains” stop and allow the direct command to become visible. This point is probably situated beneath the cell’s order of magnitude, at the level of the molecules used by cellular chemistry, as neomaterialists recognized.

[line break added] But whether it lies there or elsewhere, the moment necessarily comes when the command is direct. Expressions such as “Caesar forged a bridge” or “Khufu constructed a pyramid” are not, strictly speaking, figures of speech.

[line break added] They are condensed but literally exact expressions, and it would be more artificial to say that the will of Caesar or Khufu played no role in the movement of the laborers who alone, in the eyes of a superficial observer, constructed the bridge or the pyramids, just as in the eyes of mechanists or organicists it is the physicochemical forces alone that construct the organism.

… We think we are speaking in metaphors when we apply these psychological descriptions to force in general, when we speak of the “force” of an authority that persuades us and converts us to its ideal. But in fact we discover here the truly primary nature of force. It is the force of statistical physics that is, if not metaphorical, at least “degenerate.”

[line break added] The pressure of a gas, of a liquid, or of a Gestalt-form out of its state of equilibrium is the outcome of billions of elementary actions, each of which manifests the primary force generated by the obedience to an ideal norm.

[line break added] Just as the elephant is, despite appearances, more “microscopic” than a soap bubble, so the force of instinct — when it is impeded in its development — or the force of a defied ideal is more primary and more “elementary” than the force of an overinflated balloon that bursts.

My most recent previous post from Ruyer’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Nothing Solid

… I awoke, hearing a noise.

This is from The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922; 1965):

… We could not see nothing owing to the black mist, everything looked solid as ever, but I [this is from Bowers’ record of events] knew enough to mistrust moving ice, however solid it seemed. … I said to Cherry … that I would take no risks and camp well over the other side on the old sound ice if we could get there. This we managed to do eventually.

… I went out and saw everything quiet: the mist still hung to the west, but you could see a good mile and all was still. The sky was very dark over the Strait though, the unmistakable sign of open water. I turned in. Two and a half hours later I awoke, hearing a noise. Both my companions were snoring, I thought it was that and was on the point of turning in again having seen that it was only 4:30, when I heard the noise again. I thought — ‘my pony is at the oats!’ and went out.

I cannot describe the scene or my feelings. I must leave those to your imagination. We were in the middle of a floating pack of broken-up ice. The tops of the hills were visible, but all below was thin mist and as far as the eye could see there was nothing solid; it was all broken up, and heaving up and down with the swell. Long black tongues of water were everywhere.

[line break added] The floe on which we were had split right under our picketing line, and cut poor Guts’s [one of their ponies] wall in half. Guts himself had gone, and a dark streak of water alone showed the place where the ice had opened under him. The two sledges securing the other end of the line were on the next floe and had been pulled right to the edge.

[line break added] Our camp was on a floe not more than 30 yards across. I shouted to Cherry and Crean, and rushed out in my socks to save the two sledges; the two floes were touching further on and I dragged them to this place and got them on to our floe. At that moment our own floe split in two, but we were all together on one piece.

… While one was acting all was well, the waiting for a lead to close was the worst trial. Sometimes it would take 10 minutes or more, but there was so much motion in the ice that sooner or later bump you would go against another piece, and then it was up and over. Sometimes they split, sometimes they bounced back so quickly that only one horse could get over, and then we had to wait again.

… Meanwhile a further unpleasantness occurred in the arrival of a host of the terrible ‘killer’ whales. These were reaping a harvest of seal in the broken-up ice, and cruised among the floes with their immense black fins sticking up, and blowing with a terrible roar.

My most recent previous post from Cherry-Garrard’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Action in Question

… It is this alone that distinguishes the action in question from a trivial one.

This is from Bruce Nauman by Eugen Blume (2010):

… Nauman takes emptiness and a lack of knowledge as the point of departure for his activity, to explore the value of the simplest of things and the relationships between them.

[line break added] His main preoccupation, then, in the most Western country on earth, takes a direction counter to the one in which the Western, rationally and positivistically oriented faction of humanity seems to be moving: instead of the permanent devaluation effected by finite knowledge, he examines the worth of the seemingly infinite scope of the worthless and meaningless.

… his theme is more the search for the reality of transcendence, which is sarcastically formulated in the leaking heads and fish appearing in his later work. Is transcendence not also a form of corporeal leakiness, or an extension of the body letting the soul leak out into infinity?

… Nauman’s anti-illusionism is not explicitly directed towards the optical illusion constitutive of painting and other genres. Rather, he takes aim at art’s self-referential discourse by attributing the intention of both his own work and art in general to the human condition, to the question of existence and its conditions. He explores the illusion, the delusion, the self-deception, the illusory hope and the possibility of true transcendence brought to bear by disillusionment.

… Being altogether without pathos, the chosen form — which ranges through to the most banal of activities, such as walking around the studio, making coffee or doing nothing — is consciously understood as a grasping of the world by means of action.

[line break added] The particularity of the intention underlying the form, as conveyed in terms of action, can be discerned through the self-determination or assertion of a subject as a professional or rather vocational artist. It is this alone that distinguishes the action in question from a trivial one.

[line break added] Yet it also consciously exposes itself to the risk of the converse realization stored within it: nothing is authorized by someone else; nothing that we perceive is actually true. Whatever the artist, the individual, does, is not per se true. Neither is it art merely because he or she intends it to be so.

[line break added] If it is true, if it is art, then it is because it reveals itself to the viewer or ‘recipient’ through a certain action on his or her part. Inherent in the prerequisite of an active counterpart is the hope of some kind of mutual understanding, regardless of how it might come to bear.

My most recent previous post from Blume’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Outside in the Storm and the Rain

… Science is shut inside.

This is from The Birth of Physics by Michel Serres, translated by David Webb and William Ross (2018; 1977):

… No one reads the meteōra , not those of Lucretius, of Descartes or of anyone. Why this repression? Because philosophers, historians and the masters of science are concerned only with the ancient idea of law. With exact determination or rigorous overdetermination, and with the god of Laplace.

[line break added] With absolute control, and thus with mastery without vacillation or the ambiguity of margins. With power and order. The weather now and the weather to come infinitely surpass our account of them, so they are of no account. Because it is the place of disorder and the unforeseeable, of local danger, of the formless.

… Science is shut inside. From the start, it moves from the meteōra to the crucible and will never again leave this closure, which excludes chance and the uncontrollable, what today we would call hyper-complexity.

Lucretius’s physics is out in the open air. And ours is too, once again. The old closed systems are abstractions or ideals. The time for openness has arrived. Lucretius is prehistoric by comparison with Descartes, Laplace and every thermodynamic, that is to say metaphysical, closure; now these are prehistoric with respect to us. And the De rerum natura is there ahead of us. Outside in the storm and the rain.

My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/