Centers-Surfaces: It is important to note that the idea of centers is one that Benjamin is explicitly at odds with in The Arcades Project. In convolute "K," "Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung": Benjamin states:
What follows here is an experiment in the technique of awakening. An attempt to become aware of the dialectical--the Copernican--turn of remembrance. The Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in "what has been," and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal--the flash of awakened consciousness. (The Arcades Project 388)
What follows here is an experiment in the technique of awakening. An attempt to become aware of the dialectical--the Copernican--turn of remembrance. The Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in "what has been," and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal--the flash of awakened consciousness. (The Arcades Project 388)
* * *
See Borges' "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths"--Borges explores the ideas of smooth and striated spaces through his depiction of two very different kinds of labyrinths. One is "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths":
(note: the footnote after "Labyrinths" says "This is the story read by the rector from his pulpit." See p. 257)
It is said by men worthy of belief (although Allah's knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder. In time there came to the court a king of the Arabs, and the king of Babylonia (to mock the simplicity of his guest) bade him enter the labyrinth, where the king of the Arabs wandered, humiliated and confused, until the coming of the evening, when he implored God’s aid and found the door. His lips offered no complaint, though he said to the king of Babylonia that in his land he had another labyrinth, and Allah willing, he would see that someday the king of Babylonia made its acquaintance. Then he returned to Arabia with his captains and his wardens and he wreaked such havoc upon the kingdoms of Babylonia, and with such great blessing by fortune, that he brought low its castles, crushed its people, and took the king of Babylonia himself captive. He tied him atop a swift-footed camel and led him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then he said to him, "O king of time and substance and cipher of the century! In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, no doors to force, nor wearying galleries to wander through, no walls to impede thy passage."
Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst. Glory to Him who does not die. (Borges 262).
See here how the concept of the labyrinth is inverted. In the first example, the labyrinth is complicated by its exteriority—the fact that it is difficult to navigate…however, the labyrinth that is made is “unseemly”—and is therefore not just, for it is only God who may “strike confusion and inspire wonder”: only that which is not synthetic evades understanding. Confusion and humiliation is the result of losing one’s way--of being seduced, diverted from one's path; however, the Arab's vengeance is one of complete inversion, a seductive reversal involving a terrain more difficult to navigate than a maze, the desert, for its vastness—for the 3-day length of the journey into it, a fatal number of days because it is the highest number of days a human can go without water)—mirrors the TIME SPENT in navigating a small, convoluted maze, in which one may also die of “exposure”/starvation, thirst. Exposure/Exteriority and Containment/Interiority are equated here in that they both have the same effect upon the body. In the case of this story, the true challenge of the labyrinth is in managing one's needs, of maintaining the balance between taking in and producing. It is that need for water, nourishment, the basics, that makes time a factor.... MORE ON THIS, MUCH MORE, AND MORE THOUGHT TOO.
GETTING LOST and the HERO’S JOURNEY…the quest narrative…but think—the flâneurbegins by losing himself….the losing of oneself becomes the true objective of the game he has made for himself. His strategy is to reach out--to extend his boundaries. To increase the size of his dwellings to include the whole world. What separates him from many people in the booming 20th century is that he used his own feet for locomotion, as opposed to the many machines that had becomes the superior prostheses of transportation.
See Rules.
See quote from Baudrillard's Seduction:
"Doesn't the seducer end up losing himself in his strategy, as in an emotional labyrinth? Doesn't he invent the strategy in order to lose himself in it? And he who believes himself the game's master, isn't he the first vitim of strategy's tragic myth?" (Baudrillard Seduction 98)
See Robert Frost's "Directive": “a guide who only has at heart your getting lost…”
Think of Edmund Burke here and the sublimity of complexity,
Think too of Deleuze's "Faciality" and the idea that faces are like WALLS (and BLACKHOLES).:
...Significance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundnacies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. (Deleuze-Guatarri A Thousand Plateaus, 176) . . .
Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the The Arcades Projectpropriate significations. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and made it conform in advance to a dominant reality. The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of significance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. . . . Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a face but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the changeable combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble what it produces or will produce” (Deleuze-Guatarri A Thousand Plateaus 168) Connect to Baudrillard's idea of surfaces / The Arcades Projectpearances.
Benjamin’s chThe Arcades Projectter on gambling—the opening passage connects the idea of the gambler in the arcade to a man in a labyrinth of faces—pulled hither and thither by his desire…
See also Deleuze’s discussion of the refrain for more on the construction of “centers”.
ANNOTATIONS:
(note: the footnote after "Labyrinths" says "This is the story read by the rector from his pulpit." See p. 257)
It is said by men worthy of belief (although Allah's knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder. In time there came to the court a king of the Arabs, and the king of Babylonia (to mock the simplicity of his guest) bade him enter the labyrinth, where the king of the Arabs wandered, humiliated and confused, until the coming of the evening, when he implored God’s aid and found the door. His lips offered no complaint, though he said to the king of Babylonia that in his land he had another labyrinth, and Allah willing, he would see that someday the king of Babylonia made its acquaintance. Then he returned to Arabia with his captains and his wardens and he wreaked such havoc upon the kingdoms of Babylonia, and with such great blessing by fortune, that he brought low its castles, crushed its people, and took the king of Babylonia himself captive. He tied him atop a swift-footed camel and led him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then he said to him, "O king of time and substance and cipher of the century! In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, no doors to force, nor wearying galleries to wander through, no walls to impede thy passage."Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst. Glory to Him who does not die. (Borges 262).See here how the concept of the labyrinth is inverted. In the first example, the labyrinth is complicated by its exteriority—the fact that it is difficult to navigate…however, the labyrinth that is made is “unseemly”—and is therefore not just, for it is only God who may “strike confusion and inspire wonder”: only that which is not synthetic evades understanding. Confusion and humiliation is the result of losing one’s way--of being seduced, diverted from one's path; however, the Arab's vengeance is one of complete inversion, a seductive reversal involving a terrain more difficult to navigate than a maze, the desert, for its vastness—for the 3-day length of the journey into it, a fatal number of days because it is the highest number of days a human can go without water)—mirrors the TIME SPENT in navigating a small, convoluted maze, in which one may also die of “exposure”/starvation, thirst. Exposure/Exteriority and Containment/Interiority are equated here in that they both have the same effect upon the body. In the case of this story, the true challenge of the labyrinth is in managing one's needs, of maintaining the balance between taking in and producing. It is that need for water, nourishment, the basics, that makes time a factor.... MORE ON THIS, MUCH MORE, AND MORE THOUGHT TOO.
GETTING LOST and the HERO’S JOURNEY…the quest narrative…but think—the flâneurbegins by losing himself….the losing of oneself becomes the true objective of the game he has made for himself. His strategy is to reach out--to extend his boundaries. To increase the size of his dwellings to include the whole world. What separates him from many people in the booming 20th century is that he used his own feet for locomotion, as opposed to the many machines that had becomes the superior prostheses of transportation.
See Rules.
See quote from Baudrillard's Seduction:
"Doesn't the seducer end up losing himself in his strategy, as in an emotional labyrinth? Doesn't he invent the strategy in order to lose himself in it? And he who believes himself the game's master, isn't he the first vitim of strategy's tragic myth?" (Baudrillard Seduction 98)See Robert Frost's "Directive": “a guide who only has at heart your getting lost…”
Think of Edmund Burke here and the sublimity of complexity,
Think too of Deleuze's "Faciality" and the idea that faces are like WALLS (and BLACKHOLES).:
...Significance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundnacies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. (Deleuze-Guatarri A Thousand Plateaus, 176) . . . Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the The Arcades Projectpropriate significations. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and made it conform in advance to a dominant reality. The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of significance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. . . . Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a face but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the changeable combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble what it produces or will produce” (Deleuze-Guatarri A Thousand Plateaus 168) Connect to Baudrillard's idea of surfaces / The Arcades Projectpearances.
Benjamin’s chThe Arcades Projectter on gambling—the opening passage connects the idea of the gambler in the arcade to a man in a labyrinth of faces—pulled hither and thither by his desire…
See also Deleuze’s discussion of the refrain for more on the construction of “centers”.
ANNOTATIONS:
"for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and
inspire wonder": note the manner in which the labyrinth is here
described much resembles the "ironic strategy of the seducr" as laid
out by Baudrillard's critique of Kirkegaard's "Seducer's Diary" in Seduction: just
as Kirdegaard's seducer is prompted into forminig his strategy by, as
Baudrillard puts it,
No comments:
Post a Comment