phaedrus227a

[phaedrus227a]

Perfect Blue

indeed, k-pop/j-pop idols are the perfect votive statues for the contemporary capitalistic regime. Like one is consuming something that never was real yet nevertheless persists on itself being real. Yet precisely because it is comprised first of discernible bodies, and then of personalities in its maturity, the fiction is so believable... Somehow, moreover, both Japanese and Korean industries found a way to re-justify the age-old economy of the (young) female body -- I think the Anglicans called it "chastity" -- by intensifying it, and with a foucaultian irony they promote an insatiable lust for the body by strip-teasing personalities, sexual visualities, etc. the initiating psychology of the industry is a Lolita complex...

And no, it is not about female choice, nor about re-claiming female sexuality. to co-opt a neoliberalist rhetoric in supporting the industry is perhaps as sinister and as precocious as the image of young girls scouted and then marched into rooms and halls and salons wherein they are taught how best they can realize their sexual potential, their sexual appeal, such that we may, in our lethargic gazes, continue to look, look, look.

[phaedrus227a]

An Early Thought on Photography and Death...

(Watchman -- Jasper Johns, 1964).

Preface:

The following was written roughly two years ago in a strange yet momentous period of my life... 

...where I was intensely embroiled with doubts concerning my religious belief (which has now metamorphosed into a weakling pseudo-absurdism), an unhealthy admiration of Roland Barthes’s prosaic style (the original draft had a lot more semi-colons), and a giant and inchoate attempt at designing an entire thesis -- very little screams more “undergraduate” than this -- on the militant politicization of art via the presupposition that art is a priori a function of didacticism. The lattermost emerged from a fight I had with a friend on a Sunday morning at Memorial Glade, who I believed hazarded my love for him by being so anti-intellectual that I felt it was only my duty to save our friendship by launching an entire treatise on why he was so (so) wrong. Needless to say, I was a pesky and vindictive little snatch that had just finished his core curriculum for critical theory, and at that time was all too ready to flex a lexicon for which I clearly lacked serious nuance and knowledge.

All neurotic attempts to excuse the following aside, I think it is worth recording here simply because the spontaneous conclusions reached therein illustrate the kind of machinations from which I developed most of the thoughts and opinions I seriously entertain in the present. Movement, the fetishism of mortality -- tropes that enmesh in my current expressions. And to some extent, when I look back at my style and my intensity and my temperament, I’m slightly wistful -- wistful that I was so blindly confident in expressing my opinion, and even in writing a succession of sentences that marched on with that distinct and reckless passion of a new initiate. I’m immobile in comparison, now. But I still am a university student, so I suppose it’s silly for me to be wistful, some may say...but thought now presupposes a lack that only grows larger when I attempt to articulate it...Antonio’s first line in The Merchant of Venice, the conditions of the Faustian deal, Lacan’s psychoanalysis...

Anyways, here it is. 

“On Photography”

The photograph is to me an expression of a fundamental fear of death. For what does it mean to take a photograph? It is first to understand that there is a thing, and then that its relation to the photographer is one of aura (cf. Walter Benjamin), and lastly that there is an exigency to possess that thing in some capacity. The subject of the photograph is typically that of a moment intuited to be precious, like a marmalade sunset, or the birthday of a dear friend. Otherwise, it is a portrait of a being or of a mood – nevertheless the photograph is by definition an attempt to capture the transient. Yet the capacity is that of virtual simulation, it is ritualistic; it has an eternity in its modality; it’s aura, moreover, affects its physicality inasmuch as it does its spirituality. For if I went into one’s attic and marked or cut a photograph of one’s deceased aunt, would not I be committing – and one feels this on their body and on their soul – a grossly mortifying transgression?

There is therefore a kind of religious credence involved in the attitude toward the photograph, an animism, or at the very least the existence of associations that are at once deeply personal and transcendent to what we immediately are. We understand that the thing, in its encounter with us, like that of the burning bush, has such a significance that we cannot hazard its memory to our forgetful minds, so we render it – before with a shock of light and gear, now with a silent shutter – to what we subconsciously believe promises permanence. Experience as opposed to eternity. Can one say that the numinous with which we place faith in the notion of a thing, and the notion that it has such a meaning such that we are quickened to capture it, identifies with that of the fear of God?

Maybe so, but more immediately this set of attitudes belie a specific philosophy of existence. “There exists something”…what if, and here I am trying to signify the truth of this thesis reductio ad absurdum, one did not fear death? Meaning, that death is not a state but something that happens; consequently, life is not existent but existing and will soon be not death but being not. What if one saw life thus as a movement? As a phenomenon rather than a state? It throws off pretensions to permanence, for one, and reveals the dishonesty with which one sees something as a thing. Would there really be an exigency to capture anything if that thing will never be what it was in its moment of perception, that one has caught it in one of its infinite shifting modes, and that even the photograph itself will be subject to the relentless weather of time? 

But what of aura? What becomes of the cult of eternity? Does the removal of the fear of death effectively deny the validity of religion? No, nor does it imply necessarily that life, a firelight that extinguishes faster than its burning, is devoid of meaning. No – there is not the removal of aura but perhaps a different one, one that celebrates time rather than a rebellion against it. When one lets go of the fear of one’s death, when one accepts life to be like that of a certain wave in congeries of waves, there results a gentle cult of mortality. Things become and remain and vanish beautifully precisely because they once are but will never be again. I am suggesting here that the reality of life and all of its contingencies is its beauty; I am cautioning those who obsess over eternity with images of despair – a boy who loses his sand structure to the ebbing tide, a man who loses a friend, and the graying moribund who mutter tired verses of hope. Let us welcome an aesthetics of death…as for the idea of life beyond, let us first be content with the life that is, and will soon be very well as never have been.  

[phaedrus227a]

A Phonology

La langue -- blight of my mind, ether to my soul. 

The dance of the tongue's tip taps the palette twice and suspends in the air; the breath that carries it also holds, but in the back, where it cannot release until the weight of its yoke lets down. So has it always eluded me, la langue -- language -- but only back toward my innermost being, the force of its issue waiting upon the tension of either my asphyxiation or my abnegation.