The Faces of Battle

Project Façade

The Wellcome Trust

The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain
Suzannah Biernoff
Department of History of Art and Screen Media
Birkbeck, University of London

(named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books)

Possessed To Write

Graphomania: (from Greek γραφειν — writing, and μανία — insanity), also known as scribomania, refers to an obsessive impulse to write. When used in a specifically psychiatric context, it labels a morbid mental condition characterized by the writing of long successions of unconnected meaningless words.

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This mediating term uniting inner and outer is in the first place itself external too. But then this externality is at the same time taken up into the inner; it stands in the form of simple unbroken externality opposed to dispersed externality, which either is a single performance or condition contingent for the individuality as a whole, or else, in the form of a total externality, is fate or destiny, split up into a plurality of performances and conditions. The simple lines of the hand, then, the ring and compass of the voice, as also the individual peculiarity of the language used: or again this idiosyncracy of language, as expressed where the hand gives it more durable existence than the voice can do, viz. in writing, especially in the particular style of “handwriting” — all this is an expression of the inner, so that, as against the multifarious externality of action and fate, this expression again stands in the position of simple externality, plays the part of an inner in relation to the externality of action and fate. Thus, then, if at first the specific nature and innate peculiarity of the individual along with what these become as the result of cultivation and development, are regarded as the inner reality, as the essence of action and of fate, this inner being finds its appearance in external fashion to begin with in his mouth, hand, voice, handwriting, and the other organs and their permanent characteristics. Thereafter and not till then does it give itself further outward expression in its realization in the world.

- G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit  (1806)

Bouvard and Pecuchet is the narrative of two loony Parisian bachelors who, at a chance meeting, discover between themselves a profound sympathy, and also that they are both copy clerks. They share a distaste for city life and particularly for their fate of sitting behind desks all day. When Bouvard inherits a small fortune the two buy a farm in Normandy, to which they retire, expecting there to meet head on the reality that was denied them in the half-life of their Parisian offices. They begin with the idea that they will farm their farm, at which they fail miserably. From agriculture they move to a more specialized field: arboriculture.

Failing that they decide upon garden architecture. To prepare themselves for each of their new professions, they consult various manuals and treatises, in which they are extremely perplexed to find contradictions and misinformation of all kinds. The advice they seek in them is either confusing or utterly inapplicable; theory and practice never coincide. But undaunted by their successive failures, they move on inexorably to the next activity, only to find that it too is incommensurate with
the texts which purport to represent it. They try chemistry, physiology, anatomy, geology, archeology… the list goes on. When they finally succumb to the fact that the knowledge they've relied upon is a mass of contradictions, utterly haphazard, and quite disjunct from the reality they'd sought to confront, they revert to their initial task of copying. Here is one of Flaubert's scenarios for the end of the novel:

They copy papers haphazardly, everything they find, tobacco pouches, old newspapers, posters, torn books, etc. (real items and their imitations. Typical of each category). Then, they feel the need for a taxonomy. They make tables, antithetical oppositions such as "crines of the kings and crimes of the people"-blessings of religion, crimes of religion. Beauties of history, etc.; sometimes, however, they have real problems putting each thing in its proper place and suffer great anxieties about it. -Onward! Enough speculation! Keep on copying! The page must be filled. Everything is equal, the good and the evil. The farcical and the sublime-the beautiful and the ugly-the insignificant and the typical, they all become an exaltation of the statistical. There are nothing but facts-and phenomena.

Final bliss.

Douglas Crimp, "On The Museum's Ruins"  (1980)

(government offices from around the world)

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The Economy of Texts

“What’s an apparatus, and who would want one?”

Most modern Bible translations of the Bible are based on the modern critical text(s). The standard text of the Bible is an ‘eclectic’ manuscript. That is, it isn’t a simple reproduction of a particularly good early manuscript that has been found. Rather, it is the product of work done to evaluate various available manuscripts to reconstruct what is thought to be the best reflection of the original canon/autographs.

In other words, textual critics have sifted through manuscripts (and manuscript fragments, citations within the writings of the fathers, lectionaries, and all sorts of very early translations [Syriac, Latin, etc.]) to obtain a better picture of which text was most likely the earliest and original. The Greek text itself is the product of that scholarship; the apparatus shows how and why the product ended up like it did.

What I’m trying to single out with this term [apparatus ('dispositif')] is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus is the network which can be established between these elements . . .

by the term ‘apparatus’ I mean a kind of formation, so to speak, that at a given historical moment has as its major function the response to an urgency. The apparatus therefore has a strategic function. . . . The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.

- Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge

Over the past three years, I have found myself increasingly involved in an investigation that only know is beginning to come to an end, one that I can roughly define as a theological genealogy of economy. In the first centuries of Christian history – let’s say between the second and sixth centuries C.E. – the Greek term oikonomia develops a decisive theological function. In Greek, oikonomia signifies the administration of the oikos (the home) and, more generally, management. We are dealing here, as Aristotle says (Politics 125b21), not with an epistemic paradigm, but with a praxis, with a practical activity that must face a problem and a particular situation each and every time. Why, then, did the Fathers of the Church feel the need to introduce this term into theological discourse? How did they come to speak about a “divine economy“?

What is at stake here, to be precise, is an extremely delicate and vital problem, precisely the decisive question in the history of Christian theology: the Trinity.

Giorgio Agamben, What Is An Apparatus?

Unsaidquarters – Lone Lagoon (5/23/12)

In a condominium, on the day she heard about the X one, Amelia’s partner died. He lay sprawled back on the mattress. Her partner, she believes, could have been an entertainer if he hadn’t been so brought up by the Mormons. He could have played the Mirage. After the inquest, she will sell the pickup, buy a helicopter and learn to fly it. What she will blink at through the windscreen is pure illusion. Or it is art? A private, basalt airstrip curling into tail of suckling pig. Or is it a dark-pink, briny vein of living shrimp? The water, circus-lemonade in color, will flash out—Ah!—under a gold-tooth solstice sun. And Amelia—rich and leisured and bedazzled—will go down.

Against Humanism – “Mockumentality” and Monstrous Hybridity

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.

JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.

BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.

~

TREASURY OF THE CONSCIENCE OF MAN.
MASTERWORKS COLLECTED, PROTECTED AND
CELEBRATED COMMONLY. TIMELESS IN
CONCEPT THE MUSEUM AMASSES TO
CONCERTISE A MOMENT OF PRIDE
SERVING TO DEFEND THE DREAMS
AND IDEAL APOLITICALLY OF MANKIND
AWARE AND RESPONSIVE TO THE
CHANGES, NEEDS AND COMPLEXITIES
OF CURRENT LIFE WHILE KEEPING
HISTORY AND LOVE ALIVE.

~

Rauschenberg’s drawing for Canto 31 attempts, as do all of his Dante drawings, to “scan” the given canto, as the artist creates images suggested by the text, operating generally by association and analogy, disposing the images on the page working from top to bottom with the compositional instincts that are certainly Rauschenberg’s forte. In the upper left hand corner is the toweled image of a man lifted from a Sports Illustrated ad and used throughout the series of drawings to represent Dante as Everyman in a twentieth-century context. He has descended, presumably after his early morning shower, into a modern “Hell” (the recurrent “steps” image just below), which translates, in some of the drawings, Dante into John Kennedy and Virgil into Adlai Stevenson, and Dante’s various sinners, devils, and angels into astronauts, racecar drivers, riot police, umpires, etc.

– Eugene Paul Nassar, “Dante Illustration: Fidelity to Text and Tone as Criterion”

Robert Rauschenberg
Dante’s Inferno (1959-60), “The Titans”

The Gnostic God Ialdabaoth

Robert Rauschenberg
Monogram (1959)
Multi-media “Combine”

What Does Genius Look Like Today?

Los Angeles Review of Books
“Catherine Malabou on the Brain and Other Topics”
April 2012

Catherine Malabou, a French philosopher who teaches at Kingston University in England, is the author of ‘The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage,’ ‘What Should We Do With Our Brain?‘ ‘Changing Difference,’ ‘The Future of Hegel,’ and other books. She speaks here with LARB Philosophy/Critical Theory Editor Arne De Boever.

(click to hear podcast)

That night, the one I still recite each morning, that final night, is, like all other nights, not anymore. We drove our horses to the edge of the great precipice beyond which plains appear, the basin where the Dealer worked his business. And we smacked the horses with twin flaming brands as if to make them carry us full gallop. But we had never mounted. We listened for death whinnies and the wind that filled the wide abyss, listened for the beat of horses touching desert floor, the noise of horses bursting, as sure as horses roar when forced into night sky.

And we heard nothing.

–BK, from “Over The Mountain,” Unsaid 6

Selection and Combination – Le Rapport Sexuel

“Each sees the other do what it both does and demands of the other. Action needs both from both.”

“The middle term is Self-Consciousness which splits into the extremes; and each extreme is this exchanging of its own determinateness and an absolute transition into the opposite. Although, as consciousness, it does indeed come out of itself, yet, though out of itself, it is at the same time kept back within itself, is for itself, and the self outside it, is for it.”

- G.W.F. Hegel

Michael Taussig undertakes a history of mimesis, the practice of imitation, and its relation to alterity, the opposition of Self and Other.