Badiou: Genesis as Representation

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg/conf2010cfp.html

As early on as his The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics Alain Badiou nominates as "bourgeois epistemology" the notional ensemble of formalism and empiricism. Badiou's exception to any representational relation between the given terms, any totalization of their differential, is telling. For Badiou, as a faithful Platonist, Being is a donation of given transcendental mathematical forms. The onto-empirical is re-presented; a profane image of truth, or evil itself.

(to be continued)

Double Barricade (1848)

First born outlines of a newly eternal city.

'The discoveries of modern poetry

regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.'

-Debord & Wolman, 'A User’s Guide to Détournement'

'We need to flood the market —

even if for the moment merely the intellectual market — with a mass of desires whose fulfillment is not beyond the capacity of humanity’s present means of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of the old social organization.'

-Guy Debord, 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography'

'Those who wish to write quickly a piece

about nothing that no one will read through even once, whether in a newspaper or a book, confidently extol the style of the spoken language, because they find it much easier, more modern and direct. They themselves do not know how to speak. Neither do their readers, the language actually spoken under modern conditions of life having been socially reduced to a mere representation of itself, as endorsed by the media, and comprising some six or eight constantly repeated turns of phrase and fewer than two hundred terms, most of them neologisms, with a turnover of a third of them every six months.'

-Guy Debord, Panegyric

ANTROBUS: a play in less than ten minutes

by MAXWELL OWEN CLARK

Cast:
Maxwell Owen Clark (Max)
The Ghost of Thorton Wilder (TW)

Act I, Scene I

Stage is empty and unlighted. It will remain unlighted for the entire performance.

[Cue song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COpf1Kfq320 ]

Enter Max at the conclusion of the song

MAX:

"ANTROBUS: a play in less than ten minutes
by MAXWELL OWEN CLARK

Cast:

Maxwell Owen Clark (Max)
The Ghost of Thorton Wilder (TW)

Act I, Scene I

Stage is empty and unlighted. It will remain unlighted for the entire performance.

Enter Max at the conclusion of the song
....
(mumbles, laughs to himself)
A beginning begins at the beginning, it is said,
But what before the beginning?
The beginning of the beginning?
Haven't I, whom am and am not the author here,
To impossibly account for this infinity?
But, then, delve shallow with I here,
At the very surface of these depths,
Because of bottomless abysses I haven't the least.
Or, they haven't the least themselves, perhaps,
But, yet, again, and we were at the outworks of the beginning and whatnot,
Or, rather, at the truth of all appearances,
And I've lost you again, so it seems.
Ever and again it seems
I can do no other.
What has all this to do with Thorton Wilder
I've not the faintest.
Excepting the fact his ghost approaches,
Or is due, stipulated, to manifest,
As it were.
Faith, it would be odd if he,
If he is the right word for a ghost,
Or beast,
Did not arrive.
Because he could not.
Or was already arrived,
Or arriving,
Stuck somewhere otherwise
In moving to be here, presently.
Presently,
Some faith I've he's a pithy and orotund specter,
But no reason,
I lend him, credit him, as such,
Absent his future unbeing being non-absent as such,
Or whatever.
Ever what is is whatever is, I think,
And well concrete was that, I take it.
Allow me, not therefore,
Not to unlearn you with the facts and facets of his life.
His spirit is a haunting already.
Thusly, delve shallow!
Or, do no other than you can,
Otherwise you cannot do nothing,
And to do nothing being the apex of the holy.
Abdicate, in a word, or, as I would say,
Be released,
As Thorton was at least in death;
Submit to living death and live,
Live against death and die.
Ah, Thorton, I knew ye not,
But neither did ye know thineself,
For what is the human being,
Of what is antrobus,
But a engulfing void engulfing the world?
A black hole of in-sinking matter,
Girded with an exoskeleton-fossil of ruins.
Oh earth,
Oh beings,
thou art too wonderful for anywho to realize you.
Oh, be dull Maxwell,
All-sided obsidian razors are unwieldy.
Oh, likkle fool bumbohole
All expiating your taints,
Be calmed.
Lo, yonder darkness,
Hither darkness,
Betwixt darkness and darkness
Highest darkness
Under abyss of lights,
Fragile, suffering animality
Cupped inwards with feeling,
I am callow and calloused nah more.
Breathing darkness,
Viperous,
I love thee,
I love thee,
I love thee,
I love thee,
I love thee,
I love thee,
I love thee,
I love thee,
I love thee,
I love thee.
Amen.
Acidic cowbells away!

Cue music."

[Cue music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lfs6s6e_Io ]

"Art is unfortunate."

-Marianne Moore, 'Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle'