A Little Evil Goes A Lot Further Than A Little Good

Fig. 1. 'Don Draper' (John Hamm) - Mad Men

Power and agency are synonymous, but they are not isomorphic. At its worst, power is an end in itself, with the means to match; while agency, when it is predominantly benign, can never be utterly self-serving. Of course, agency without power, or power without agency, are rare. In order to set the two apart, we need to locate them within the matrix of human desire: agency is what we crave, power is what seduces us.


Addendum:

Nirvana -The Man Who Sold The World (click to watch music video)

For Lovers Young And Old Of A Certain Nothingness

René Magritte (1898-1967) - The Treason of Images, 1928-9


'In order to understand Sartre's thought regarding the imagination, it is necessary to examine first an aspect of Husserl's phenomenology, the noetic/noematic structure of awareness. According to Husserl, it is a fact that we can be aware of the same object in different ways, of different objects in the same way, and also of different objects in different ways. For example, with respect to the object, I can perceive a table, a pen, and a framed picture; with respect to the mode of awareness, I can perceive a table, I can imagine a table, and I can remember a table - in each case, the same table. Husserl termed the object of awareness the noema and the mode of awareness of the object, the noesis. To understand Husserl's phenomenology on the problem of the imagination it is important to keep in mind that when I perceive this table or when I imagine this same table, I am aware of the same noema in two different modes. Of course, the image of he table is not the table, but by means of my apprehending the image of the table I have a secondary apprehension of the table itself. Sartre concerns himself with studying the essential difference between perception and imagination with respect to the modes in which each of these presents its object, rather than distinguishing as Husserl does between a primary and secondary apprehension. The object of perception is posited as real; that is, the object perceived is, in virtue of its being perceived, taken to be a real object. But in the case of the imagination either the object is posited as non-existent, as absent, as exiting elsewhere, or, in the neutral case, the object simply may not be posited as existing at all. Thus the characteristic possessed by an image that distinguishes the image from the object of perception is that, according to Sartre, the image ". . . involves a certain nothingness":

Alive, appealing and strong as an image is, it presents its object as not being. This does not prevent us from reacting to the image as if it were before us . . .

Regarding this distinction between perception and imagination, Sartre makes two observations. The first is that, in the case of perception, the object perceived is given against a background of total reality; the object is, as it were, the figure, and reality is the ground. The top of the desk now visible is part of the desk, itself part of what is in the room, and so on. In contrast to this mode of givenness of the perceived object is that of the imagined object. Instead of being given against the ground of the totality of the real, the imagined object is given (to take only one of the four possible modes listed above) precisely as absent, which is to say, the imagined object is given as something which is nothing in relation to the background of real things.

In virtue of this nothingness of the imagined object, it is necessary to take up the question: How is the nature of consciousness to be construed so that it will be possible to understand how consciousness can posit an image; that is, how consciousness can bring before itself an object that is nothing in relation to the contents of reality? It is Sartre's contention that, if consciousness were but one event among others in the world, and if it were also in thoroughgoing casual interaction with these other events, that there could be no awareness of images as images, as representations:

If we assume a consciousness placed at the very bosom of the world as one existence among others, we must conceive it hypothetically as completely subjected to the action of a variety of realities - without its being able to avoid the detail of these realities by an intuition which would embrace their totality. This consciousness could therefore contain only real modifications aroused by real actions and all imagination would be prohibited to it, exactly in the degree to which it would be engulfed by the real.

Sartre's thesis is that, in order for an image to be entertained as an image, consciousness must set the image over against the totality of the real, since the image is not one real item among others but merely a representation. But, in order for the imagination to posit the image as over against reality, it is necessary that consciousness not be "engulfed in the real" and determined in all its aspects by the causal efficacy of reality upon it. Consciousness has to disentangle itself from reality in order to posit the image as nothing in relation to the real, since, if such a disentanglement were not effected, the image could only be one other real item among others. As such, it would not be an image, but merely another item presented to consciousness because of the activity on consciousness of the other events that constitute reality. And it is just this ability to set itself over against the totality of the real that constitutes the freedom of consciousness:

For a consciousness to be able to imagine it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to by its own efforts to withdraw from the world. In a word it must be free.

This freedom from reality, this escaping from the world, is conceived by Sartre as definable correlatively to a (Heideggerian) being-in-the-world. In other words, consciousness can withdraw from the world on the ground of a logically prior being in the world. Consciousness, which has now been shown to be in essence imaginative, posits the image as a nothing in relation to the real in which consciousness is basically engaged but which, in virtue of its imaginativeness, it can transcend . . .

[The] concept of meaning for Sartre rests on his theory of imagination and therefore on the nature of freedom. Although consciousness is a being-in-the-world, there is yet a sense in which the concept of the world is not fundamental but rather derivative from the fact of the imaginativeness of consciousness. Simply stated, Sartre's point is that

The imaginary thus represents at each moment the implicit meaning of the real.

The real is what is simply there for awareness. Therefore, to apprehend the real as world, as a meaningful articulation of data, it is necessary that the real, the simply there, be surpassed toward the imaginary. The sense of this notion of surpassing toward the imaginary is that the situation directly confronted perceptually receives definition by having placed (metaphorically) alongside it an imaginative consciousness which is in an essential respect a reverse of the perceived situation. For example, I note the absence of my dictionary not simply because the dictionary is not perceptually encountered in the bookcase, but also because the imaginativeness of my consciousness places beside what I do perceive in the bookcase the image of the dictionary, an image which presents the dictionary as being absent. The real is what I immediately confront; the world is that same situation, meaningfully articulated by the imagination and set over against the consciousness that is there engaged:

. . . imagination, far from appearing as an actual characteristic of consciousness turns out to be an essential and transcendental condition of consciousness.

As well as of freedom in the world . . . '

F. Molina

Obituary: How Do You Say Goodbye To A Grasshopper?

Fig. 1. David Carradine (December 8, 1936 - June 3, 2009) - Kung Fu, 1972-1975

Yes, You Can Colour My Pleasure Night Vermillion*

Fig. 1. Takashi Murakami (click) - Army of Mushrooms, 2001


'I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.'

Hunter S. Thompson

Addendum: Click Meeee! Click Meeee!

One Point English Lesson (from Vermillion Pleasure Night) - Lesson 1: First Rate Cunt Lapping

The Fuccons (from Vermillion Pleasure Night) - Trailer

* With thanks to Dive for bringing Vermillion Pleasure Night to my attention.

Hi - My Name Is Lucio And I Am A Manic-Depressive

Fig. 1. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Grand Opera House, San Francisco, 1901

Is Mood A Language?

Sadness is the fundamental mood of depression, and even if manic euphoria alternates with it in the bipolar forms of that ailment, sorrow is the major outward sign that gives away the desperate person. Sadness leads us into the enigmatic realm of affects - anguish, fear, or joy. Irreducible to its verbal or semiological expressions, sadness (like all affect) is the psychic representation of energy displacements caused by external traumas. The exact status of such psychic representations of energy displacements remains, in the present state of psychoanalytic and semiological theories, very vague. No conceptual framework in the relevant sciences (particularly linguistics) has proven adequate to account for this apparently very rudimentary representation, presign and prelanguage. The "sadness" mood triggered by a stimulation, tension, or energy conflict within a psychosomatic organism is not a specific answer to a release mechanism (I am not sad as a response to a sign or for X and only to X). Mood is a generalised "transference" (E. Jacobson) that stamps the entire behaviour and all the sign systems (from motor functions to speech production and idealisation) without either identifying with them or disorganising them. We are justified in believing that an anarchic energy signal is involved, a phylogenetic inheritance, which, within the psychic space of the human being, is immediately assumed by verbal representation and consciousness. Nevertheless, such an "assumption" is not related to what occurs when the energies that Freud calls "bonded" lend themselves to verbalisation, association, and judgement. Let us say that representations germane to affects, notably sadness, are fluctuating energy cathexes: insufficiently stabilised to coalesce as verbal or other signs, acted upon by primary processes of displacement and condensation, dependent just the same on the agency of the ego, they record through its intermediary the threats, orders, and injunctions of the superego. Thus moods are inscriptions, energy disruptions, and not simply raw energies. They lead us toward a modality of significance that, on the threshold of bioenergetic stability, insures the preconditions for (or manifests the disintegration of) the imaginary and the symbolic. On the frontier between animality and symbol formation, moods - and particularly sadness - are the ultimate reactions to our traumas, they are our basic homeostatic recourses. For if it is true that those who are slaves to their moods, being drowned in their sorrows, reveal a number of psychic or cognitive frailties, it is equally true that a diversification of moods, variety in sadness, refinement in sorrow or mourning are the imprint of a humankind that is surely not triumphant but subtle, ready to fight, and creative . . .

Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect - to sadness as an imprint of separation and beginning of the symbol's sway; to joy as imprint of the triumph that settles me in the universe of artifice and symbol, which I try to harmonise in the best possible way with my experience of reality. But that testimony is produced by literary creation in a material that is totally different from what constitutes mood. It transposes affect into rhythms, signs, forms. The "semiotic" and the "symbolic" become the communicable imprints of an affective reality, perceptible to the reader (I like this book because it conveys sadness, anguish, or joy) and yet dominated, set aside, vanquished.

Julia Kristeva

Addendum #1:

Fig. 2. The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (still), 2006 - Stephen Fry (click image to start watching this documentary on YouTube)

Addendum #2: And Now For Something Completely Foreseeable

The Life of Brian, 1979 - d. Brian Jones (click image to watch clip on YouTube)

Between These Covers, There Is No False Amiability*

Fig. 1. M. C. Escher - Bonds of Union, 1956

'In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.'

Marcel Proust

* 'In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends it is because we genuinely want to.' Marcel Proust

Your Ears Will Orgasm #25: J. S. Bach - Sonata for Violin Solo No.3 in C, BWV 1005, v. Arthur Grumiaux (MixPod Player)

Addendum: I'll Have The Sole, Please ... And Don't Dawdle - I'm About To Die!

'There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction.

Anyone looking for a paper to read in Paris in the 1920s might have picked up a title called L'Intransigeant. It had a reputation for investigative news, metropolitan gossip, comprehensive classifieds and incisive editorials. It also had a habit of dreaming up big questions and asking French celebrities to send in their replies. "What do you think would be the ideal education to give your daughter?" was one. "Do you have any recommendations for improving traffic congestion in Paris?" was another. In the summer of 1922, the paper formulated a particularly elaborate question for its contributors.

An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you're concerned, what would you do in this last hour?

The last celebrity to be consulted on his pre-apocalypse plans was a reclusive, mustachioed novelist not known for his interest in golf, tennis or bridge [though he had once tried draughts, and twice aided in the launching of a kite], a man who had spent the last fourteen years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woollen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp. Since the publication of its first volume in 1913, In Search of Lost Time had been hailed as a masterpiece, a French reviewer had compared the author to Shakespeare, an Italian critic had likened him to Stendhal and an Austrian princess had offered her hand in marriage. Though he had never esteemed himself highly ["If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible!"] and had once referred to himself as a flea and to his writing as a piece of indigestible nougat, Marcel Proust had grounds for satisfaction. Even the British ambassador to France, a man of wide acquaintance and cautious judgement, had deemed it appropriate to bestow on him a great, if not directly literary honour, describing him as, "The most remarkable man I have ever met - because he keeps his overcoat on at dinner."

Enthusiastic about contributing to newspapers, and in any case a good sport, Proust sent the following reply to L'Intransigeant and its catastrophic American scientist:

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies it - our life - hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.

But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn't happen this time, we won't miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X., making a trip to India.

The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.

Feeling suddenly attached to life when we realize the imminence of death suggests that it was perhaps not life itself which we had lost the taste for so long as there was no end in sight, but our quotidian version of it, that our dissatisfactions were more the result of a certain way of living than of anything irrevocably morose about human experience. Having surrendered the customary belief in our own immortality, we would then be reminded of a host of untried possibilities lurking beneath the surface of an apparently undesirable, apparently eternal existence.

However, if due acknowledgement of our mortality encourages us to re-evaluate our priorities, we may well ask what these priorities should be. We might only have been living half a life before we faced up to the implications of death, but what exactly does a whole life consist of? Simple recognition of our inevitable demise does not guarantee that we will latch on to any sensible answers when it comes to filling in what remains of the diary. Panicked by the ticking of the clock, we may even resort to some spectacular follies. The suggestions sent by the Parisian celebrities to L'Intransigeant were contradictory enough: admiration of Alpine scenery, contemplation of the extraterrestrial future, tennis, golf. But were any of these fruitful ways to pass the time before the continent disintegrated?

Proust's own suggestions (Louvre, love, India) were no more helpful. For a start, they were at odds with what one knows of his character. He had never been an avid museum visitor, he hadn't been to the Louvre for over a decade, and preferred to look at reproductions than face the chatter of a museum crowd ["People think the love of literature, painting and music has become extremely widespread, whereas there isn't a single person who knows anything about them".]. Nor was he known for his interest in the Indian subcontinent, which was a trial to reach, requiring a train down to Marseilles, a mailboat to Port Said and ten days on a P&O liner across the Arabian Sea, hardly an ideal itinerary for a man with difficulty stepping out of bed. As for Miss X, to his mother's distress, Marcel had never proved receptive to her charms, nor to those of the Misses A to Z; and it was a long time since he had bothered to ask if there was a younger brother at hand, having concluded that a glass of well-chilled beer offered a more reliable source of pleasure than lovemaking.

But even if he had wanted to act according to his proposals, Proust turned out to have had little chance. Only four months after sending his answer to L'Intransigeant, having predicted that something like this would happen for years, he caught a cold and died. He was fifty-one. He had been invited to a party and, despite the symptoms of a mild flu, he wrapped himself in three coats and two blankets and went out all the same. On his way home, he had to wait in a glacial courtyard for a taxi, and there caught a chill. It developed into a high fever which might have been contained, if Proust hadn't refused to take the advice of doctors summoned to his bedside. Fearing that they would disrupt his work, he turned down their offer of camphorated oil injections, and continued to write, failing to eat or drink anything besides hot milk, coffee and stewed fruit. The cold turned into a bronchitis, which snowballed into a pneumonia. Hopes of recovery were briefly raised when he sit up in bed and requested a grilled sole, but by the time the fish was bought and cooked he was seized by nausea and was unable to touch it. He died a few hours later from a burst abscess in his lung.'

Alain de Botton (from How Proust Can Change Your Life)

Addendum #2: Monty Python's All-England Summarise Proust Competition