When I left seminary I pretty much gave up theoblogging, but a few interactions with an alumnus from my alma mater got me rifling through my archives. Here are a few choice pieces I thought that might be worth (re)reading:
I have been mucking around a bit with sound equipment recently and have been particularly curious about the real world voices of bloggers and their relationship to their writings. So, in that spirit, I thought you would get a kick out of a few thoughts on Von Trier’s Dogville.
My friend Rick asked me these questions in the new-ish clusterflock interviews clusterflock series:
Q: Andrew, I just finished watching Dogville, the second time. You spoke of “shaking for days,” after seeing it. If you can recall, what shook you?
(I ask because I’m shaking again, or at least, I’m haunted.)
A: Download
Q. What have you carried with you, since viewing the film. Were you changed in some elemental way?
A: Download
The late Derrida penned those words knowing full well that they were just that, penned words.
He must have seen those as an affront to his very ideas, the philosopher’s critique on meta-statements being a meta-statement itself. A critique, so named, because it was long thought (among philosophers) that philosophy was the queen of thought. She’d ask the most fundamental questions and these questions demanded answers and, as such, demanded an unparalleled gravity. In other words, they set the rules of the game. Derrida dared to question the question (he was not the first):
The interesting thing is that this gives Being and words (signs of vocables of beings) a strange polarized power. On the one hand, language could become a great means of power for those who best commanded and shaped it, but, on the other, it causes a break between the thing and the thing signified rendering language vacuous. Both ideas have equal merit depending on the presuppositions on is drawing from.
The consequences of these ideas is that there is no privileged, absolute perspective or language that stands above the rest: scientist, philosophers, and theologians command equal power. None trumps the other, instead we are to read each perspective as its own rhetoric in its most unpejorative sense (hopefully). At least, that is my reading of Derrida.
Regardless of one’s pressuposition, however, it is clear that we live in a world where signs and signs of signs of things capture our imagination. We call there collection media and, when we are not consuming it, we are talking about it or trying to monitize it.
Media shapes the way we think:
If we take David’s argument seriously, then the need to parse and present visual language should be placed in the same category as other forms of language and should be understood as rhetoric, given my current line of thinking. Consequently, the interaction of these things in media, which is called design demands as much attention as philosophy or science.
Inspired by Snarkmarket’s Liberal Arts 2.0
NB: I was going for brevity over specificity here. There is, obviously, loads to unpack.
A classic essay by Albert Camus which you need to read.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward tlower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Edipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What!—by such narrow ways–?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
N+1 has an interesting article on the RNC:
If I had to play for one side or the other, and I had no other thoughts or feelings but the will to side with genius, I’d play for the Republicans. The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil; a trafficker in political eschatology, unafraid to trespass on myths of the gravest consequence. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. This was the burden of the Vice Presidential and Presidential addresses, and the galvanism of the last few days.
To understand the trick worked, you must see the core conceit: that John McCain is already dead. Nominee Palin’s speech was a memorial. Her strange phrases conjuring the Presidential nominee as the kind of fellow whose name you will find on war memorials in small towns across this country hung fire, on screens across the country and in the convention hall, until she qualified them—only he was among the ones who came home. The true feeling was that he did not: that somewhere on a town green beneath a motionless flag you can find his name inscribed in stone.
Presuming that McCain, given his age, will not live through one term Mr. Grief pens further:
Above all, the mythology must prove that the man in the flesh, standing before you, is not the man who matters. He is larger than this; his blood has been spilled and his spirit loosed; we will be washed in his blood. Is it a Christian allegory? McCain can’t lift his arms high enough to be pinned to a cross. It is all loose revelation: he died for us; he is the Great Papa in the sky; he was a man, but it’s all right if he should disappear; he is spread out in the soil, and above the clouds; this time, it is Country First.
Now I find this not the least bit uninteresting, particularly the idea of a President Palin and her extension of the George W. legacy. However vilified that story may sound, there are competing narratives typified by the essay A Truman for out Times. Plus, if we are to buy this whole narrative angle that the more leftist leaning academes have been pushing these days (an idea, frankly, I think has great appeal), then we cannot neglect the Obama mythology.
Hope, of course is nothing short of an eschatological claim which is building on the classic mythology of American progress, a myth underscored by the quantity of melanin in Obama’s skin. It doesn’t help that the mythology is hip and we find ourselves shamed into thinking he is the right man for the job (such has been my experience, at least). We should not, however, neglect how fantastic it is that a black man can be taken seriously in politics, but this shouldn’t distract us from the fact that both sides are using the Elightenment project’s eschatology, they just dress it differently.
Asking for Atlas (i.e.) is naive, it is only asking for the myth of Sisyphus in a different form. I do, however, know a guy but that is another story.