Month: January 2015

Simulacra and Simulations (part 2) Tues 20th Jan

Baudrillard heads his essay: ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ (already quoted from on 5th Jan) with these lines from Ecclesiastes:

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

This powerful introduction, not so much header as headstone, sets the tone for the whole piece, an excoriation of the 20th century consumer dream made reality, that in Baudrillard’s view:

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real.

It is therefore appropriate that this quote from Ecclesiastes is a fake. Even the word simulacrum was only first recorded as being used in the English language in the 16th Century.

Here’s some genuine verses from Ecclesiastes:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together…
(Ecclesiastes 3: 1-5, King James Version)

Given my current interests, I particularly like the last line of this quote.

Atlantis – Mon 19th Jan

They say that somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic, lies a vast floating island made out of millions of tons of the plastic bags, bottles, bin liners, nylon ropes, nets and all the disposable containers we have jettisoned over the years. Gaily coloured and rotating slowly with the currents that gathered its component pieces, it is both a death trap to myriads of marine creatures and a monument to our unsupportable lifestyles. And yet if someone said to me, let’s go and see it, I’d jump at the chance. In my imagination I am already there.

Does this make me a monster?

Murmuration – Sun 18th Jan

Murmuration is the specific name given to a flock of Starlings. Why not just flock? Only when you see them massed in their thousands, tens of thousands, turning in unison with no perceptible hesitation, do you realise that ‘flock’ is inadequate for this most remarkable phenomenon. The sound of their amassed wing-beats as they fly overhead is as much felt as heard.

How do they create such extraordinary, evolving, three-dimensional shapes in the sky without ever crashing into each other? Apparently someone has worked out a computer program that creates nearly identical formations, simply by inputting optimal maximum and minimum wingtip distances, alongside flight speed. So much for the how. The why is not answered there, but even this can probably be accounted for via Dawkins’s theories on the extended phenotype. And maybe he’s right, but the poet inside me howls and rebels at such a thought. Just go and look at one of their extravagant displays and tell me there is no joy unaccounted for by biological imperatives. I am not a believer in intelligent design, but neither am I a reductionist.

Perch (part 2) – Sat 17th Jan

Yesterdays post caused quite a stir, eliciting several responses. Among these were two from regular readers, both of whom pointed out that being in a bar ‘with someone three or more times your size and a completely different shape’ was not supposition but fact, if you live in either Glasgow or Plymouth.

This discovery gives rise to the following questions:

  1. What kind of bars were they hanging around in?
  2. How much had they had to drink?
  3. Am I getting out enough?

Of course, this reported phenomenon might actually be based on an incomplete grasp of the laws of perspective. Since I used to teach this subject, I am aware of a number of teaching resources which might help clear up any possible misconceptions and I append one of the finest lectures I know of, dealing with just this matter. Please don’t be confused by the Father Ted preamble, it is well worth watching till the end:

Perch – Fri 16th Jan

At the café on the sea front where I seem to end up on most days, there are the following: one wagtail, one starling, a family of four crows, around ten pigeons and a population of herring gulls (mainly juveniles) whose number is hard to estimate because they are so mobile. I’m therefore not sure they count as you’d have to see them as passing through rather than truly resident, although there seems to be at least two who have claimed the location as actual territory. These take it in turns to sit on the roof of the café, regularly making more noise than all the other birds put together.

Sometimes the seagulls mob the crows, sometimes the crows mob the gulls. Indeed the gulls often mob each other, seemingly just for the hell of it – and these altercations can, at times, be quite vicious. The pigeons just edge and barge persistently regardless of any other species (including human) or sit on the ground, waiting, like docile cattle, for more food to show up. The starling appears out of nowhere and then vanishes just as mysteriously, while the wagtail spends the majority of its time on the ground, darting hither and thither like a demented clockwork micro-hoover, cleaning crumbs from the cracks between the paving stones.

What gets me though is that despite the fact that they are all after food, when they aren’t actively engaged in foraging they just hang out together, any past misdemeanours seemingly forgotten. And what gets me even more is the disparity in scale between species. This’d be like standing at the bar or waiting at the bus stop with someone three or more times your size and a completely different shape.

Fold – Weds 14th Jan

Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake – or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational – the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero’s draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric – the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco’s disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of the world’s essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of every lover’s dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation – inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand – of tone into tone, of one indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which disposes is ultimately the artist’s temperament, proximately (at least in portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted drapery. Between them, these two may decree that a fete galante shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy…

Aldous Huxley. The Doors of Perception (1954)

Shelter – Tues 13th Jan

So you find yourself in town without a raincoat and suddenly out of nowhere there’s a downpour so heavy everyone is running for doorways and bus stops and you curse the weather and how long are you going to have to stand cramped under a tiny and inadequate awning with some bloody smoker because it seems endless and you also curse your luck and indeed you are unlucky because had you been out in the open like on the beach you could have seen the gathering storm grow from a hairy dog to an elephant to a gigantic whale till finally it becomes the huge upswept wing of the angel of obliteration before it passes overhead shedding rain like tattered curtains but before you know it dwindles from the apocalypse to merely a gigantic whale and then an elephant before becoming once more a hairy and retreating dog and then the sun bursts through and you can hardly see for all the dazzlement.

Veil – Mon 12th Jan

Enigmatic signifiers are messages received in early infancy that the fledgling human subject is simply unable to comprehend. These messages, which can be verbal, visual, tactile, or even olfactory, constitute the prototype for all future experiences of bewilderment. While the infant may understand that they are addressed to her, and that they demand a response of some kind, their content is wholly unintelligible. To make matters worse, these communications are permeated with meanings of which even their senders are unaware; they are unconscious on the part of both parties. They also lack originals; according to Laplanche, every enigmatic signifier is a copy of an endless series of copies that has been passed down through the generations as in a game of telephone. For Laplanche, these signs do not disappear with mature understanding but rather remain at the heart of human interaction. The originary scenario of the enigmatic signifier is retriggered throughout the subject’s life whenever he or she is sent a mixed message, hailed by an ambiguous address, or confronted with a scenario that seems to invite and yet resist decoding.

King, Homay: ‘Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier’ Duke University Press (23 Sep 2010). pp3-4

Gone with the wind – Sun 11th Jan

In ancient Greece, followers of Pythagoras were expressly prohibited from eating beans. This was actually quite a sensible proscription if you consider that, in the ancient Greek language the word πνευμα (pneuma) means not only ‘wind’ (hence pneumatic: inflated, or pneumonia: πνευμονία) but also ‘soul’, which meaning still survives today as a linguistic metaphor, as in: ‘breath of life’, and the rather quaint custom of saying ‘bless you’ to someone who has just sneezed.

While the real purpose of this blessing is now ambiguous, it stems from the European belief that the soul is expelled from the body when sneezing and that, variously, the devil might either steal away your soul while in this homeless state, or, conversely, that our temporarily vacant bodies could become occupied by the devil in our absence. Incidentally, Judith, one of the canteen ladies where I work, told me off recently when I thanked her for her answering benediction, telling me that to express gratitude in this particular instance would negate the response.

As above, so below, as the saying goes. I’m not sure if Brussels sprouts were known to the Pythagoreans but if they were, I suspect they would have been forbidden too.

Language can be a tricky thing.