FASHIONABLE INKSUMMER 2004
REGARDING YOUR CINEMATIC SELF
"There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." --Werner Herzog, Minnesota Declaration (1999)
VOTRE VOUS - "We all have a movie within. What’s yours?" --Samsung Videophone Advertisement (Vogue, 08/2004)
THE ANTI-ANTI-THEORY TRILOGY (08/2004)
Flying under the radar in the deepest recesses of cyberspace: Three essays pitched to the wolves from the on-racing, anti-anti-theory troika in ‘wintry’ late-summer 2004 ... Apropos de rien (of course), yet dedicated to W. J. T. Mitchell and the editorial politburo at Critical Inquiry vis-à-vis the summary auto-da-fé issued in early 2003 and scandalized here and there as the “Death of Theory” symposium (starring W. J. T. Mitchell and Fredric Jameson) ... Includes a summary salute to the sarcastic comments visited therein upon the so-called "therapeutic turn" (narcissistic navel-gazing?) within cultural criticism (especially, apparently, Lacanian cultural criticism) and/plus cultural production (especially, obviously, self-inflected video and installation art?) ... For details of this now-irrelevant(?) symposium (and tell-tale texts, missing and otherwise ... Jameson’s, in particular, is ‘missing’), cliquez ici ... / For "The Way Out", cliquez ici ...RELOADING PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS?
1/ Letter to Paolo Bartoloni (RTF) - Wherein the author responds to Paolo Bartoloni’s glorious essay on the problems of translation in Benjamin and Agamben and the speculative, extant traces of the thing otherwise known as discours naturel within arguments concerning (circling) a ‘mythic’ proto-natural language ...2/ Letter to No One (HTML/RTF) - Wherein the author tackles the subject of architectonic and topological thought (and a possible-impossible fusion) within discourse (architectural and otherwise) ...
3/ Infinity Doubled / Double-Black Cat (RTF) - Wherein the author suggests that the sign of Infinity doubled is also the sign of Philosophical Aesthetics (and wherein the sign of philosophical aesthetics is condensed within the dream image of a double-long black cat ... Subjectivity doubled = the Sublime?) ... Includes a peep at Godard’s Eloge de l’Amour (2001) and a detour to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta (en passant) where garden-architectural rhetoric always-already returns ‘home’ as saturated phenomenon ...
TATTOO YOU / BEAUTY INTELLIGENCE / DISAPPEARING INK
While cultural criticism now includes criticism of cultural criticism, if you’ve got theory under your skin, it’s not so easy to get rid of. - See "Loved it then but loath it now? The darker the design, the more treatment it will take to erase." SELF Magazine (May 2003), p. 56
Tainted by fashionable ink?: "You’re not alone" / "You need a doctor" / "You may end up with a scar"
