Peter Kubelka’s design for the Invisible Cinema
“
Property relations in Mickey Mouse cartoons: here we see for the first
time that it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body,
stolen.
The route taken by Mickey Mouse is more like that of a file in an
office than it is like that of a marathon runner.
—Walter Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse” (1931), trans. Rodney Livingstone,
in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2 (1999)
What if Appropriation [Ereignis]—no one knows when or how—were
to become an insight whose illuminating lightning flash enters into
what is and what is taken to be? What if Appropriation, by its entry,
were to remove everything that is in present being from its subjection
to a commandeering order and bring it back into its own?
—Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language” (1959), trans. Peter D. Hertz,
in Heidegger, On the Way to Language (1971)
— Boon, Marcus, In Praise of Copying (Harvard University Press, 2010)
Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words—and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I’m scared of the moments in which I don’t use thought and that’s a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produced. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?
“Acéphale’s centre is the colon; the colon is labyrinthine. A colon’s end is shit. Not transcendence but waste. Beyond meaning. For the head is no longer the head; we live, perceive and speak, in our bodies and through our bodies. There is no escape from that, us, which is subject to death and will become excrement: there is no escape from this labyrinth. The nature, the being of the body. We who pretend to know, to criticize, are frail, uncertain, and more ungainly than swans who have risen out of their natural element and are walking on solid ground.”
- Kathy Acker, “Bodies of Work: Critical Languages”
(Source: lovevoltaireusapart)
“FORMLESS.- A dictionary would start from the moment in which it no longer provides the meaning of words but their job. Formless is thus not merely an adjective with such and such a meaning but a term for lowering status with its implied requirement that everything have a form. Whatever it (formless) designates lacks entitlement in every sense and is crushed on the spot, like a spider or an earthworm. For academics to be content, the universe would have to assume a form. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of fitting what is there into a formal coat, a mathematical overcoat. On the other hand to assert that the universe resembles nothing else and is only formless comes down to stating that the universe is something like a spider or spit.”
— Georges Bataille, Informe, 1929
“
What the architect has, among other things, is a knowledge of materials, and this knowledge is in perpetual negotiation with the actual material practices that the architect must marshall to his/her cause. Without exploring all the multiple dimensions of how architects identify with the construction of the buildings to which they never, literally, put a hand, one can say that the sense of object-loss or object-lament is a very strong strand in architectural history. …
For mastery over the object, becoming one with the object, is not possible in architecture (in fact, it is possible nowhere), and women, in spite of their conflicting hisotry, have traditionally almost always stood for the failure of that mastery.
”— Catherine Ingraham, Missing Objects, in: Argest D., et al.eds., The Sex of Architecture, 1996, Hary An Abrams
Water was running, children were running
You were running out of time
Under the mountain, a golden fountain
Were you praying at the Lares shrine?
But ohh oh your city lies in dust, my friend
We found you hiding, we found you lying
Choking on the dirt and sand
Your former glories and all the stories
Dragged and washed with eager hands
But ohh oh your city lies in dust, my friend
… Hot and burning in your nostrils
Pouring down your gaping mouth
Your molten bodies blanket of cinders
Caught in the throes …….
“The story tellers have not realised that the sleeping beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spider’s webs that would have torn apart at the first movement of her red tresses. Meanwhile dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and uniformly defile them as if it were a matter of making attics and old rooms for the imminent occupation of the obsessions, phantoms, spectres that the decayed odour of dust nourishes and intoxicates…….one day or another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over domestics, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, deserted dockyards; and, at that distant epoch, nothing will remain to ward off night terrors, for lack of which we have become such great book-keepers.”
Georges Bataille
human being building, workshop Elefsina 2007, tutors:
Tijana Stevanovic, Inara Nevskaya, Sara Vall
“I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not even see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. This window, if it gets a bit dark, and if I have reasons for thinking that there is someone behind it, is straightaway a gaze. From the moment this gaze exists, I am already something other, in that I feel myself becoming an object for the gaze of others. But in this position, which is a reciprocal one, others also know that I am an object who knows himself to be seen.”
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-54, New York: Norton 1988 p.215
“Pleasure, whether art, permissible debauchery , or play, is definitely reduced, in the intellectual representation in circulation, to a concession; in other words it is reduced to a diversion whose role is subsidiary. the most appreciable share of life is given as the condition - sometimes even as the regrettable condition - of productive social activity.”
Georges Bataille, The Notion of Expenditure, OC
