For those who weren’t there, I’ll recall the fable, the apologue, the amusing image I briefly set out before you. Myself donning the animal mask with which the sorcerer in the Cave of the Three Brothers is covered, I pictured myself faced with another animal, a real one this time, taken to be gigantic for the sake of the story, a praying mantis. Since I didn’t know which mask I was wearing, you can easily imagine that had some reason not to feel reassured in the event that, by chance, this mask might have been just what it took to lead my partner into some error as to my identity. The whole thing was well underscored by the fact that, as I confessed, I couldn’t see my own image in the enigmatic mirror of the insect’s ocular globe. Which reminds me of the old joke, about a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed so is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. “Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man”. “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?” To listen to the radio, to put it off, to walk a bit, to think, to give up thinking, to look for the key, to wonder, to do nothing, to regret the passing of time, to find a solution, to want to go to the beach, to tell that the sun is coming down, to hurry, to go down with the key, to open the car’s door, to sit, to pull in the door, put in the key, turn it on, heat the engine, to listen, to make sure nobody’s around, to pull back, to go ahead, to turn right, then left, to drive straight on, to follow the road, to take many curbs, to turn left, then right, to, to rise early, to hurry down to the driveway, to look for the paper, take it out from its yellow bag, to read on the front-page WAR, to notice that WAR takes half a page, to feel a shiver down the spine, to tell that that’s it, to know that they dared, that they jumped the line, to envision a rain of fire, to hear the noise, to be heart-broken, to stare at the trees, to go up slowly while reading, to come back to the front-page, read WAR again, to look at the word as if it were a spider, to feel paralyzed, to look for help within oneself, to know helplessness, to pick up the phone, to give up, to get dressed, to look through the windows, to suffer from the day’s beauty, to hate to death the authors of such crimes, to realize that it’s useless to think, to pick up the purse, to go down the stairs, to see people smashed to a pulp, to say yes indeed the day is beautiful, not to know anything, to go on walking, meanwhile the aptly named assassin bug looks on and wonders what all the mercy is about, as it injects a toxin that paralyzes its victim in a fraction of a second and begins liquefying its innards, and “then once the victim stops twitching it can insert the maxillae even a little bit farther and start slurping up the contents.” It’s all quite a bit like that bug from Starship Troopers drinking that guy’s brains (link is NSFW, obviously, unless you work at the Official Starship Troopers Fan Club, in which case, kudos to you for not giving up on the things you love). But why, you might ask, is an argument between painters and art critics in long-ago Paris valuable to discuss in regards to video games now? While there are, of course, wildly different concerns between the mediums, let me draw these two worlds closer together by looking at the criteria that was used in the Academy and the Paris Salon. First off, they had a formal ranking of painting genres. These rankings of importance were decided on by the people in charge of school and Salon, who were also deeply concerned about what kinds of paintings sold well to their prime market (owners of massive villas). Which is to say, originally accompanied by Indonesian drum percussion, the reworked clip set Ms. Suryodarmo’s performance of a traditional Indonesian-inspired dance on 20 blocks of melting butter to Adele’s “Someone Like You.” Which is to say, I am largely going by Katerina Kolozova’s account of Laruelle’s non-philosophical humanism in the fourth chapter of Cut of the Real here. On the basis of that account, I think it makes sense to describe Laruelle as a humanist, and as a humanist “in theory” (according to a non-philosophical understanding of the scope and powers of theoria) as well as “in practice”. That is, if we see Althusser’s formulation, “theoretical anti-humanism, practical humanism”, as taking a cancelling, erasing, eliminationist stance towards the philosopher’s image of the human, then we can also see Laruelle as recovering and repurposing that image. But like poetry, which the press is always deeming irrelevant, I was interested in Polke’s films because everyone seemed so intent on ignoring them. In the town we find the monkey and his owner. The monkey does back flips. He walks on his hands, all while being tethered on a rope. At one point, his owner, who is hunkered down, takes a cardboard and gold foil crown out of his black duffel bag, along with a pair of yellow-framed sunglasses, and puts them on the monkey, who frowns. The owner adds a folded, fan-like piece of paper to the crown. After all this, he hands him a mirror, which the monkey holds up close and at an angle, and grimaces. At times, the monkey pulls his head back, as if he is about to be given a spoonful of awful-tasting medicine. Perhaps to reassure the small group of grinning men and boys that has gathered around them, most of whom are standing and keeping their distance, the owner pulls back the monkey’s lips to show that he has no teeth and isn’t dangerous. The owner produces a long stick and presses it down on the monkey’s neck, making him bow. Through it all, the monkey seems proud, defiant and defeated, perhaps even angry. There is a brief moment when he resembles a wizened, vanquished king pondering his fate. After the man removes the crown and sunglasses, he puts a small helmet with a chinstrap on the monkey’s head and gives him a toy wooden rifle, which he points straight up into the air, reminding me of a headline that appeared in the English version of China’s online version of People’s Daily, “Monkeys trained as battlefield killers in Afghanistan” (July 9, 2010): Reporters from the media agency spotted and took photos of a few “monkey soldiers” holding AK-47 rifles and Bren light machine guns in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The report and photos have been widely spread by media agencies and Web sites across the world. After repeatedly standing and squatting while pointing the gun in the air, as if he were mimicking a military exercise, the monkey falls on his stomach, the rifle beside him, and looks up at the owner. In a later sequence, the owner covers the money with a striped cloth, securing it with a cloth belt, which he ties around the animal’s neck. The monkey jumps and then begins shaking in convulsions before collapsing to the ground. The owner tries to force the monkey to sit up, but he falls prostrate, a rag doll. The owner places the monkey on a can, but he flops over. This is repeated a number of times. At one point the owner picks the monkey up and throws him to the ground, like a meat patty. Eventually the man undoes the belt around the monkey’s neck and wraps his prone, stretched-out body, still wrapped up in the cloth, in another cloth and neatly folds the ends, as if preparing the body for burial. Follow sun spots over it. To look through it, and discover a gigantic glass wall. To bring one’s glance back the way one brings a boat back to harbor. To compare the ivy to reptiles. To discover inner tears which turn into wounds. To explore new diseases. To vomit one’s stomach and spit out the heart. To amputate one’s head. To put off all lights and project mental images on the wall. The corpus includes 121 million words describing 197,000 trials over 239 years. According to researchers, it represents the largest existing body of transcribed trial evidence for historical crime; it is, they say, the most detailed recording of real speech in printed form anywhere in the world. On the question of whether the SUVs in heaven will have cup holders / sins drums pretenses and fusions fats vents and swines / night harm pretended and film tuned to crude / hinder and smother the sprites of the deed / there could be problems with / ground meat / wind ripped through the gifts / scattered parts now lie about what happened / for the new ‘landscaping plan,’ which / replaces ‘buffer strip’ with ‘sight lines to / the / soon there will be little bitty / bushes there, requiring a new water sys- / chlorine coughing out his eyes / your loss is my gun. In Considering how exaggerated music is a woman “woke up in bed and said that she had one of them, a cicada, in her mouth so that she was pressing it with her tongue to the roof of her mouth to make the sound come out.” One does not merely clear one’s throat of this. One does, however, ventriloquize. There is a whole chorus of cicadas up in this mother.
[Note: Sources: Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X; JBR: Slavoj Žižek, “How to Read Lacan • .........7. ‘God is Dead, but He Doesn't Know It’: Lacan Plays with Bobok”, at Lacan.com; Etel Adnan, “To Be In A Time Of War”, at Etel Adnan; Matt Staggs, “Assassin Bug vs. Vampire Bat”, at Disinformation, 22 Jun 014; Hrag Vartanian, “Required Reading”, at Hyperallergic, 22 Jun 014; JBR; Dominic Fox, “THE INHUMAN-IN-HUMAN”, at Poetix, 22 Jun 014; JBR; John Yau, “Sigmar Polke’s Sad, Sinister Little Movie of a Monkey and a Bear”, at Hyperallergic, 22 Jun 014 (re Polke’s Quetta’s Hazy Blue Sky / Quetta’s blauer dunstiger Himmel, Afghanistan-Pakistan, c1974-76); Sandra Blakeslee, “Computing Crime and Punishment”, at New York Times, 16 Jun 014; Crag Hill, “8 of Clubs”, at Crg Hill’s Poetry Scorecard, 22 Jun 014; Divya Victor, and Leslie Scalapino, Considering how exaggerated music is, quoted in Victor’s “Cicadas in the Mouth”, quoted in Robin Tremblay-McGaw, “Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in 21st Century Poetics--Simone White & Divya Victor”, at X Poetics, 22 Jun 014]
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