LOOKING AWRY (2004)
IDOLS, ICONS, AND THE METAPHYSICAL GAZE
"To think of one thing, one must first think of something else." --Jean-Luc Godard (2001)
If it may be said that modernity is effectively distinguished by ‘its’ production of idols (and idylls) of the metaphysical gaze -- idylls (and idols) of modern subjectivity -- it is /S/ome-thing Else, then, that calls in the contemporary phenomenological works of Jean-Luc Marion (after Derrida), and after the twin idols of modern Architecture and modern Landscape Architecture have been surpassed (synthesized).
“Golden apples of the sun”, then, if you will (if you wish), and, as such, the timely appearance of certain provisional works that no longer look in two directions (or three, or four) at once, representing, after all, a type of unfashionable /S/ynthesis (a type of sublime /S/ome-thing Else buried ‘below’, ‘beyond’, and ‘within’ signifying chains). Perhaps, since Descartes, and since Pascal and Rousseau, this repressed sublimity within things has always-already been waiting ‘off-stage’, in the ‘wilderness’ of language and form (the phenomenological ‘ground’ of all formal languages), looking here and looking there, gazing toward the transfigured ground of modern subjectivity, announcing (giving) Itself when and wherever possible, calling nonetheless from and within the folds of representational systems, not as the monstrous (absent) thing characterized by the Lacanian Master Signifier, nor as the phantasmatic Real, but as the conceptual sign of Time Itself (forms of time, times lost and times found).
ENTR'ACTE / DREAMING THE DREAM
Rites of Passage (Paysage)
"Sometime, somehow, along the way, and always-already en route somewhere else, they had all become Brahmanians. It was unclear when they had taken this nominally sharp left turn, but it was clear that it originated within the short windowless Time when the enigmatic gesture of the Real-Real took root; a small seed planted in the soul, then, unfurling its delicate radical and turning, in turn, toward the moist earth of critical and poetical reflection, the soil of that collective state of things reflected in the specular, Pascalian wager regarding discours naturel, a nothing much spinning down through the centuries as a mysterious and incomplete Carte de Tendre, consulted here, and consulted there, but most often set aside again for reasons having more to do with the love of abstraction than anything resembling simple facts on the ground [...]" The Young Brahmanians (Rizoma)
PROVISIONAL DOCUMENTS AFTER THE FACT (RTF & OTHERWISE)House of the Wind (RTF) / The Coming-Coming (HTML/RTF) / Linguistic Dust (HTML) / L + A (+ This + That) = ???? (HTML) / Being Jean-Luc Marion (HTML/RTF) / Architectural Body (HTML/RTF) / The Given, The Taken, and The Given-Back (RTF) / The Eisenman Juggernaut (HTML) / Hommage à Godard (HTML) / Linnaeus’ Gaze (RTF) / The Affective Sublime (HTML/RTF) / Pays de Tendre (HTML/RTF) Sublime Scare Tactics (HTML/RTF)
