#approaching artaud

[mask131]

The myth of Dionysos (6)

And we reach the last part of the second article about Dionysos! If you haven't caught up, the first part of the second article is here ; and if you want to go even further back check the first part of the first article here.

III) Modern approaches to Dionysos: Theater and drunkenness

Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy

We evoked before how during the Lenaia , Dionysos assisted to the preparation of the wine in the shape of a mask. When it comes to theater, it is by the magic of the god that the mask “comes to life”. The Greek theater was born of the invocations of Dionysos: it was to him that the chorists of the dithyrambic contests addressed their salutations ; it was him who was supposed to inspire the poets of the dramatic contests, during the rustic Dionysia (December-January), the Lenaia, ad especially during the Great Dionysia (March-April). On the benches of the theater, just like in the thiasis, the genders and the social classes were mixed together (at least, in theory) ; and on the stage, madness ruled as the imagination triumphed over the reality. But the genre that truly held the Dionysian spirit, more than the comedy or the satirical drama, was the tragedy.

In his The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche highlights the analogies between the tragic genre of Ancient Greece and the cult of the god. At the core of each dramatical representation, there is a metamorphosis, a form of “enchantment” that reminds one of the Dionysian possession. The tragic chorus, spectators and actors of the play at the same time, symbolize “the crowd possessed by Dionysos” ; and the tragedy brings the same forgetfulness of the past, the same deliverance and the same catharsis as the Bacchic intoxication. Taking back the idea according to which “tragedy” comes from “tragos”, the goat, the sacred animal of Dionysos supposedly sacrificed to the god during the dramatic contests, Nietzsche proposes an hypothesis according to which the “passion/suffering” of Dionysos was the first subject of tragedies – or the first tragedy lot. Nietzsche was certain that the cruelty inherent to the tragic genre was the same that the god encouraged the Bacchants to practice: madness, murder, destruction, ripping apart, are all told or symbolized on the tragic stage as much as within Dionysos’ own myth.

Nietzsche concluded by announcing a renewal of the tragedy, that Aristotle’s influenced had suddenly made “gone astray” from its Dionysian role. It is this same renewal of the theater that Artaud demanded in his manifest The Theater and its Double (1938). While he does not name Dionysos, he insists that tragedy should be given back its original inspiration: cruelty. Free from its psychological deviations, once again metaphysical, the theater had to bring, just like a plague, a liberating catharsis. According to Artaud “theater is a plague because it is the supreme balance that is only acquired with destruction. It invites the spirit to a delirium that causes the exaltation of the energies.” This last sentence recalls the Bacchic “mania”, but if Artaud disdains Dionysos and prefers to reference the Balinese theater, it is because he sees in the Dionysian madness a force of anarchy rather than something planned. But still, for Artaud the theater stays a political force of subversion, that “reveals to the collectivities their dark power, their hidden side”. For him the action of the theater is a Dionysian one, a nocturnal, dark, dangerous power, just like a bacchanal.

Bacchic madness and contemporary poetry

The entire work of Nietzsche is placed under the invocation of Dionysos. In Thus spoke Zarathustra (1885), he glorifies a “Dionysian demon”. Beyond his numerous references to the attributes of the god in his poems (honey, wine, donkey, lion, snake), his writings glorify the two side of the Dionysism, the dance and the drunkenness, both tied by laughter. Nietzsche, however, prefers insisting on the abolition of the frontier between human and divine, allowing for the existence of “superior men”, rather than on the abolition of the frontiers between humans, despite the latter being essential to the Dionysian spirit.

Before Nietzsche, Rimbaud gave a very different description of the “saintly intoxication” in his Matinée d’ivresse (Morning of drunkenness, in his 1872-73 Illuminations). There, he recreates the ambivalence of the Bacchic madness by having pleasure meet pain. Suffering becomes the promise of a consecration, and while Dionysos is never named, it seems that the theme of a painful intoxication leading to salvation was inspired by him. “Oh, us, now worth of those tortures! Let us gather faithfully this superhuman promise […] this promise! This madness!”. The “superhuman promise” can be the one of the enthusiasm, literally the identification to the god. Just like within a bacchanal, children, slaves and maidens gather for a nocturnal ritual, for an “eve” ; as for the “madness” and the “violence” regularly announced, they can be linked to the bloodthirsty cruelty of the Bacchants by the last words  “Here comes the time of the Assassins”.

Claudel will renew the ancient image of the Maenad in the middle of a mystical delirium, by adapting her convulsive dance to the syncope-rhythm of his verse, in the first of his Five great odes (1908) “The Muses”: “A drunkenness like the one of the red wine and a pile of roses! Grapes under the feet that squirt, great flowers all sticky with honey! / The Maenad distraught by the drum! At the piercing scream of the fife, the Bacchant stiffens within the thundering god. / All burning, all dying, all languishing!” We can notice that the ecstasy of the Bacchant is described like the deadly one Semele knew before Zeus (the “thundering god”), and the last verse translates the mix of the loving desire and of death. The interpretation of Claudel reminds us that it was said that Semele, when pregnant, had been overtaken by a strong desire to dance: Claudel sees in her the first of the Maenads, a victim of Dionysos before he was even born. But for Claudel the Bacchic madness, in its musical aspect, is also a symbol of poetic inspiration: “Ah, I am drunk! I am offered to the god! I hear a voice in me, and the rhythm goes faster…” The poet and his text are both invaded by, possessed by the divine force.

Finally, Saint-John Perse, in Winds (1946), gives to this possession a larger scope, at the size of “the entire world of things”, and thus he sees in her and in those hosting it one of “those great forces” of subversion that are erasing the wearing-out of the century: “Unpredictable Men, Men harassed by the god, Men fed with a new wine and who seem pierced with lightning / Our salvation is with us, in the wisdom and in the intemperance.” Just like with Claudel, the mania is associated with thunder, and finds back the ambiguity of the union of the opposites. “Wisdom” and “intemperance” are one and the same. It is the Dionysism, destruction and balance all in one: it is can lead to anarchy, it is not in itself anarchic (unlike what Artaud believed), rather it is a “method”, as Rimbaud said, that corresponds to the three steps of the “orgia”. But balance does not mean stability, nor serenity. Not at all: Dionysism is a balance, for it is the counterweight, the counterpower needed to oppose the Apollonian order, and to make the “normal” world more moderate.

IV) Conclusions

In The Bacchants, Pnetheus says “Wise Tiresias, do not believe the illusion of your sick mind to be wisdom.” But it is Pentheus who has an illusionary wisdom, for he refuses to accept madness. “He who lives without madness is not as wise as he believes,” La Rochefoucauld once wrote. The paradox of the wise-madness should not let us believe that the delirium is limited to a few holidays and a few moments of disruptions. True wisdom is knowing when madness and when cruelty cannot be escaped. As for the real madness, it would be if someone tried to make this out-of-boundaries god an institution, if someone tried to make a system out of the consecration of his possessed followers – those that Nietzsche called “super-humans”. It would be a dictatorship, it would be the negation of the very Bacchic freedom, it would be the death of Dionysos.

#dionysos #dionysus #greek mythology #greek gods #bacchus #maenad #bacchae #semele #french literature #bacchanal #bacchant

[f--e-u-e-r-t-r-u-n-k-e--n]

Sick of it all. Sickness. Collection of notes.

Sickness is a language

Body is a representation

Medicine is a political practice

— Bryan S. Turner, The body and the society

"What I lack is words that correspond to each minute of my state of mind."

— Antonin Artaud, The nerve meter

"Desmesurado enfermo Bárbaro limpio de rutinas y caminos marcados No acepto vuestras sillas de seguridades cómodas Soy el ángel salvaje que cayó una mañana En vuestras plantaciones de preceptos Poeta Anti poeta"

—Vicente Huidobro, Altazor.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" —Allen Ginsberg, Howl.

"First, we believe that the world must be changed. We desire the most liberatory possible change of the society and the life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that such change is possible by means of pertinent actions". —Report on the Construction of Situations

"In his 1954 book Mental Illness and Personality Foucault combines the subjective experience of the mentally ill person with a sociocultural historical approach to mental illness and suggests that there exists a reciprocal connection between individual perception and sociocultural development. (…) what I call a historical phenomenology that combines the subjective experience of the mentally ill person with a sociocultural historical approach to mental ill-ness." —Line Joranger, Individual perception and cultural development: Foucault's 1954 approach to mental illness and its history

"The former, a lovely maiden in the broad daylight, rocked its cradle, endowed it with a charm and glory of its own. Presently it fell sick, lost itself in the darkness of the Middle Ages, and was hidden away by the Witch in woods and wilds: there, sustained by her compassionate daring, it was made to live anew. (…) Are we quite sure of what has been so often repeated, that the gods of old had come to an end, themselves wearied and sickened of living; that they were so disheartened as almost to send in their resignation; that Christianity had only to blow upon these empty shades? (...) By a vow my mother made in her sickness my youth and my life are bound for ever." —Jules Michelet, La Sorcière.

"At the point of departure, then, one may place the political project of rooting out illegalities, generalizing the punitive function and delimiting, in order to control it, the power to punish. From this there emerge two lines of obiectification of crime and of the criminal. On the one hand, the criminal designated as the enemy of all, whom it is in the interest of all to track down, falls outside the pact, disqualifies himself as a citizen and emerges, bearing within him as it were, a wild fragment of nature; he appears as a villain, a monster, a madman, perhaps, a sick and, before long, 'abnormal' individual. It is as such that, one day, he will belong to a scientific objectification and to the 'treatment' that is correlative to it." —Michel Focault, Discipline and Punish

Nastasya was overcome with a fit of laughter. She was given to laughter and when anything amused her, she laughed inaudibly, quivering and shaking all over till she felt ill. "And have you made much money by your thinking?" she managed to articulate at last. "One can't go out to give lessons without boots. And I'm sick of it." "Don't quarrel with your bread and butter." "They pay so little for lessons. What's the use of a few coppers?" he answered, reluctantly, as though replying to his own thought. —Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.

"What I’d felt there was true, no doubt about that. The experience had revealed to me, in a brutal way, the unreality of this world, the realized abstraction which is the Spectacle. The whole metaphysical – and thus total and filled out all the way to the existential sphere– dimension of this concept had appeared clearly to me in this private mode of disclosure, and could appear as it really is, as something really strange, posing a problem the essence of which is absolute foreignness, only insofar as it is lived as an experience, as a phenomenon. Habit makes phenomena be forgotten as phenomena, that is, the supra-sensible – must I add that Hegel’s famous affirmation too took on a kind of dazzling conreteness, the power of a revelation? And yet, habit is precisely the characteristic means of commodity metaphysics, its manifestation, which never manifests anything but the forgetting of its character as a manifestation… That’s how the bulging intuition of Absence also reveals that it’s already transcended as such, since it presents itself as a manifestation of the forgetting of the manifestation as such, meaning as the revealing of the commodity mode of disclosure, as the revealing of the Spectacle." —Tiqqun, Phenomenology of Everyday Life

"17.- Sense is the element of the Common, that is, every event, as an irruption of sense, institutes a common. The body that says "I," in truth says «we." A gesture or statement endowed with sense carves a determined community out of a mass of bodies, a community that must itself be taken on in order to take on this gesture or statement.

50.- Empire exists "positively" only in crisis, only as negation and reaction. If we too belong to Empire, it is only because i is impossible to get outside it .

52.-At first glance, Empire seems to be a parodic recollection of the entire, frozen history of a "civilization." And this impression has a certain intuitive correctness. Empire is in fact civilization's last stop before it reaches the end of its line, the final agony in which it sees its life pass before its eyes." —Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War

"For Americans are finding more and more that they lack muscle and children, that is, not workers but soldiers, and they want at all costs and by every possible means to make and manufacture soldiers with a view to all the planetary wars which might later take place, and which would be intended to demonstrate by the over-whelming virtues of force the superiority of American products, and the fruits of American sweat in all fields of activity and of the superiority of the possible dynamism of force. Because one must produce, one must by all possible means of activity replace nature wherever it can be replaced, one must find a major field of action for human inertia, the worker must have something to keep him busy, new fields of activity must be created, in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake manufactured products, of all the vile synthetic substitutes in which beatiful real nature has no part." —Antonin Artaud, To Have Done With the Judgement of god

"A study published in the May 2021 issue of the British Journal of Health Psychology looked at health-related guilt in relation to having chronic pain. (…) The research turned up three major themes that had been reported on in the previous research. These included the following.

-Management of chronic pain -Diagnostic uncertainty or legitimizing pain -How the person impacted others by their action or inaction. -The health-related guilt that many people with chronic pain experience is from coping with the condition and the decrease in quality of life that it often brings about. (…) Those who have chronic pain may feel guilty because they are unable to do things they want to do. They may feel that they are letting others down, or they believe they are doing something wrong or intentional. The guilt can lead to more issues, such as depression, making it something that should be addressed." —Steven H. Richeimer, The Impact of Health-Related Guilt and Chronic Pain

"No soy Pasolini pidiendo explicaciones No soy Ginsberg expulsado de Cuba No soy un marica disfrazado de poeta No necesito disfraz Aquí está mi cara Hablo por mi diferencia Defiendo lo que soy y no soy tan raro Me apesta la injusticia y sospecho de esta cueca democrática Pero no me hable del proletariado Porque ser pobre y maricón es peor Hay que ser ácido para soportarlo (…) ¿Van a dejarnos bordar de pájaros las banderas de la patria libre? El fusil se lo dejo a usted que tiene la sangre fría y no es miedo El miedo se me fue pasando De atajar cuchillos (…) Aunque después me odie Por corromper su moral revolucionaria ¿Tiene miedo que se homosexualice la vida? Y no hablo de meterlo y sacarlo Y sacarlo y meterlo solamente Hablo de ternura compañero." —Pedro Lemebel, Hablo por mi diferencia

"In late 2014, I was sick with a chronic condition that, about every 12 to 18 months, gets bad enough to render me, for about five months each time, unable to walk, drive, do my job, sometimes speak or understand language, take a bath without assistance, and leave the bed. This particular flare coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests, which I would have attended unremittingly, had I been able to. I live one block away from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, a predominantly Latino neighborhood and one colloquially understood to be the place where many immigrants begin their American lives. The park, then, is not surprisingly one of the most active places of protest in the city.

I listened to the sounds of the marches as they drifted up to my window. Attached to the bed, I rose up my sick woman fist, in solidarity.

I started to think about what modes of protest are afforded to sick people – it seemed to me that many for whom Black Lives Matter is especially in service, might not be able to be present for the marches because they were imprisoned by a job, the threat of being fired from their job if they marched, or literal incarceration, and of course the threat of violence and police brutality – but also because of illness or disability, or because they were caring for someone with an illness or disability.

I thought of all the other invisible bodies, with their fists up, tucked away and out of sight. If we take Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political – which is still one of the most dominant in mainstream discourse – as being any action that is performed in public, we must contend with the implications of what that excludes. If being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the street.

(…) The Sick Women are all of the dysfunctional, dangerous and in danger, badly behaved, crazy, incurable, traumatized, disordered, diseased, chronic, uninsurable, wretched, undesirable and altogether dysfunctional bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuroatypical, differently-abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered unmanageable, and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible." — Johanna Hedva, Sick Woman Theory

"I’m all for the death of capitalism, but what the hell was this? Sick, pained, expensive, sensitive: these were not words that inspired any revolutionary fervor in me. My anarchism had always been a thing of life, vitality, and beauty. When I think of it energetically, I feel strong rivers of red force, unbridled kinetic power moving reality. It’s a verb, something you do.

My heroes didn’t go to General Assemblies to talk, they robbed banks and shot fascists. They burned down houses or construction equipment instead of engaging in sit-in’s or camping sessions. My anarchism is unapolegetically violent, even gleefully so, and I long for the acrid smoke of a riot like junkies long for meth.

Here appeared to be the quiet, soothing politics of the ill. Anarchist therapy. I was happy to see those confined to a hospital bed could display solidarity in their own way, but I walked away firmly convinced I’d taken a stroll through a world that had no bearing on mine.

Some people’s revolution involved care and love and feelings. Mine involved bullets and fire and blood.

Yet…something lingered, some subtle shift deep within my mind. I began to realize that just because the response of the ill to capitalism might be different from mine, that did not mean the exploitation they lived under was any less brutal." — Dr. Bones, Too Weird to Live: The Case for the Individual in a Sick Woman’s World

"And, left to themselves, men lived long before they understood that they all ought to, and might be, happy. Only in the very latest times have a few of them begun to understand that work ought not to be a bugbear to some and like galley-slavery for others, but should be a common and happy occupation, uniting all men. They have begun to understand that with death constantly threatening each of us, the only reasonable business of every man is to spend the years, months, hours, and minutes, allotted him—in unity and love. They have begun to understand that sickness, far from dividing men, should, on the contrary, give opportunity for loving union with one another." — Leo Tolstoy, Work, Death and Sickness

#leftism #leftblr #anarchism #anarchist #postmodernism #postmodern #postmodern literature #politics #Antonin Artaud #Leo Tolstoy #Pedro Lemebel #tiqqun #Collection of notes #comunismo #communism #mental illness #chronic pain #chronic fatigue #antiwork #anti landlord #michel foucault #foucault #sickness #chronic illness #chronically ill #poetry #words words words

[dearorpheus]

The desire to catch the audience unawares and ambush it is a fundamentally terrorizing, Messianic approach to art-making, one that underestimates the capacities and intelligence of most viewers, and overestimates that of most artists. “They always want to hear about; they want an objective conference on ‘The Theater and the Plague,’ and I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken,” Artaud reportedly told Anaïs Nin, in explanation of his notorious performance of his essay “The Theater and the Plague” at the Sorbonne in 1933, during which he dispensed with his planned lecture and acted out the delirium and death throes of the plague itself. “They do not realize they are dead,” Artaud insisted. 

— Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty

#eccentricity is stored in the frenchman #gnawing at their vitals #return us to life more violently #my upload

[trigopoulou]

Aristotle's definition of tragedy

«ἔστιν οὖν τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας μέγεθος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰδῶν ἐν τοῖς μορίοις, δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι᾽ ἀπαγγελίας, δι᾽ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν.»

“A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in appropriate and pleasurable language;… in a dramatic rather than narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish a catharsis of these emotions.” The aristotelian definition of tragedy.

Mimesis and catharsis are the fundamental terms on Aristotle’s definition of tragedy.

Aristotle argued that tragedy cleansed the heart through pity and terror, purging us of our petty concerns and worries by making us aware that there can be nobility in suffering. He called this experience 'catharsis'. Catharsis is a medical term referring to purging or cleansing. Thus there is a therapeutic value in theatre. In other words catharsis in theatre is an emotional release. An emotional release that is not that simple since it leads to construction of ethos for the viewers.

The other principle concept in Aristotle’s definition is ‘’mimesis’’. As Aristotle mentions, the habit of imitating is congenital to human beings from childhood (actually man differs from the other animals in that he is the most imitative, and learns his first lessons through imitation). As children we learn new skills, we grow, and we change through mimicking. Put another way, we learn by acting like those we see around us. Aristotle is a strong defender of mimesis which has been ‘’accused’’ by his teacher Plato.

Plato also considers the ‘’mimesis’’ as the general philosophical principle behind all art, including poetry and theatre but ontologically is inferior as it is an imitation or a representation of reality, not reality itself, but an illusion, a mirror of something else and therefore deceptive.As Plato argues in his great work ‘’Republic’’ artists are tricksters, imitating reality without capturing its essence and always presenting corrupt images of the truth. Also, ,modern theatrical writers Antoine Artaud and Bertolt Brecht are famously labelled anti-Aristotelian in regard to the Aristotelian concept of mimesis.

Focusing on the perspective of Aristotle’s analysis we can understand that it is a solid interpretation of the essence of drama and poetry. And the weak points mentioned by the modern writers criticizing it, are due to the different context in which the meaning of drama’s purpose is interpreted. The same applies to Plato’s underestimation of poetry. Plato’s underestimation of ‘mimesis’ and poetry (and art) is quite comprehensible in the frame of is ontological system. ‘Tragic irony’ lies in the fact that Plato’s dialogues are so theatrical ...though.

Finally, Aristotle uses in his definition of poetry a cookery term ‘’ ἡδυσμένῳ’’ (ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ) as a metaphor to convey the grace of poetry, where the used language is pleasurable and functions as the condiment of poetry and drama ( like a condiment which is provided to enhance the flavour of the food).

All in all, Aristotle does not focus solely on the ethical but also on the aesthetical part of a fine tragedy, starting though from an ontologically vague claim expressed by the use of the word ‘’mimesis’’. We could say that Aristotle’s definition is more an existential one far from the metaphysical platonic approach or the sociologically burdened interpretations of modern theatrical writers.

Theognosia Rigopoulou ✍️

#theatre #Aristotle #philosophy #catharsis #poetry #art #drama

[5starcinema]

The Passion of Joan of Arc

(1928, Denmark-France, silent, directed by Carl Dreyer)

Carl Dreyer's legendary picture about the martyr Joan of Arc has been cloaked in mystery from the day its production began. French nationalists were concerned that such a controversial project was being carried out on French soil by avant garde (read: non-Catholic) artists. Predictably, censors severely edited the film for its French premiere. Meanwhile, Dreyer's original version was destroyed in a fire. After the director composed an identical second print from remaining elements, a second fire destroyed that print. As the notes in the Criterion DVD version of the film point out, Dreyer's film endured the same fate as Joan herself: judges, scissors, and fire.

Over decades, badly altered and "musically enhanced" versions could be seen in theaters, and Dreyer is said to have been devastated by the sorry state of affairs. He died believing that his greatest work had been lost forever. However, in 1981, someone discovered in an office closet several canisters of film, one of which contained an original print . The office was located in a mental institution in Oslo, Norway.

For almost half a century, the only audiences enjoying an authentic version of this marvelous film were comprised of the mentally ill and their caretakers. Yet there's an uncanny consistency in that fact. Renee Falconetti, the actress who portrays Joan, is said to have never worked in motion pictures again because she was so emotionally spent by the experience (she did suffer some emotional breakdowns during and after production).

Another key player, Antonin Artaud, the Dada-Surrealist wild child, opium fiend, and Theatre of the Absurd founder, was eventually institutionalized (after a short and notorious career) because he was tormented by "voices." All of the bizarre circumstances of the film's history notwithstanding, Dreyer's work remains a landmark example of cinema as art.

Regarding its impact—primarily through a highly stylized conveyance of a real event—Jean Cocteau commented, "It seems like an historical document from an era in which the cinema didn't exist."

Dreyer's achievement is remarkable considering that he abandoned every common cinematic technique that might convey anything approaching reality. Art director Hermann Warm (The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari) found inspiration in the primitive art of illuminated manuscripts, in which perspective is entirely ignored. The result is an Expressionist take on medieval art (a successful convergence of Surrealism and medieval minimalism, one could argue) manifested in one of the most peculiar sets in film history. In this realm, physical structures, light, and angles do not observe geometry, and it is not possible to perceive their scale in relation to the actors.

The "geometry" and rhythm commonly associated with motion pictures are also absent from Dreyer's work. Spatial relationships between actors are seldom consistent, if they can be determined at all. There are no establishing shots as such, and cuts from one player to another do not always match dialogue or action. Most of the shots are close-ups of faces—but what amazing faces they are. Gifted veterans from the French stage are captured in carefully sustained, intricately detailed shots, and the result is unforgettable. Except for a few brief glimpses, almost none of the set is visible.

Dreyer's production notes indicate that he merely wished to employ a set that could immerse his actors in a milieu that might emotionally transport them to the historical setting. That speaks to Dreyer's confidence considering that he was working with gifted set designers at the peak of their talents. Notes also suggest that the disorienting visual style works at "unmooring from the present" the imaginations of viewers.

This method provides a stunning emotional immediacy appropriate to a historical subject. The resulting series of images is also beautiful (that's hardly surprising with cinematographer Rudolph Maté at the helm), and at some point it is uncertain if the film seems like a work of art because we are so disoriented, or if encountering such a deeply satisfying image disorients us. Add to this Renee Falconetti's performance, which utterly defies comparison, and you have a rare motion picture experience.

#silent era #Carl Dreyer

[grandhotelabyss]

Excellent Weekly Readings this week, John. It's inspired me to the below thoughts, a systematically intuitive rhapsody (apologies for some of my sloppiest prose):

I think the aim of artistic education (i.e., education of the artist rather than the aesthete) is to systematically expand one’s intuitions. Note *both* words — not merely to expand haphazardly, nor to systematise your imagination, but to take a dedicated approach to expanding the areas that you can feel your way through. Building a structure of similarities and differences, viewed from a hundred different angles, which becomes so natural that your taste can intuitively (usually unconsciously) run through it when you begin to work.

Because art education is extension of this awareness, criticism is central to it, in that it provides an example of/foundation for your own map, which is of course unique, but will coincide in a thousand ways with other people's, and perhaps — if you are a great imaginative poet — differ in a few truly new ways. The construction of your own poetic ancestry, as you keep talking about on the Invisible College, could be seen as one end goal of all this.

I have so far gone fairly deep into this process for music (where I think Kyle Gann might be the only consistent systematic-imaginist, though David Schiff's 'The Ellington Century' and Joseph Kerman's 'Opera As Drama' also qualify) and literature (where you have been a wonderful guide, and we can turn to many others from Aristotle to Shelley to Wilde to Frye to Paglia). I'm trying to start it for visual arts, where there are again a multitude of useful guides — art critics and 'art schools' generally being better, which is why half my friends are visual artists; while attempts in film have been hampered by its youth as an artform (Eisenstein and Deren probably come closest, but their insights were about a quarter of the way through cinema history, and so necessarily limited). I would love to hear other people chime in about other artforms!

But as you say, all of these can only point us towards maps, so above all we must read, listen, watch, gaze, wear, taste, smell and feel our way around the real world of art, guided but unhampered by even the most imaginative of maps. Theatre, for example, has its Virgils too — Aristotle again, Artaud, LeCoq, Mamet — but I have learned more from performing Shakespeare than from any of them. Is my idea of art, then, a mystical-scientific religion? I would say no, for religion is an offspring of art, a boundary-setting around a certain part of this kind of systematic imagination.

One final key point: a systematic intuition is, of course, a contradiction. If it wasn't, we'd be doing science, not art. Without contraries there is no progression!

Thank you, very well said! Sometimes I think the questions I receive about what or how to read are about how to begin this process of expanding intuition. My advice is usually just to jump in anywhere that looks inviting, but you are of course correct that criticism helps us navigate once we're "in." And then there's the Wildean argument that criticism and art are co-extensive, the eras of great art also the eras of great criticism.

(I'm not actually sure about that. The great ages of criticism in English literature are the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, nestled in the two gaps between the three explosions of the Renaissance, Romanticism, and modernism. The greatest American criticism was arguably written in the middle of the 20th century, between the high periods of modernism and postmodernism. Major criticism seems to happen in the aftermath of great creative periods as an attempt to explain what happened and to point the way forward. Even considering Wilde's own example of "the Greeks," Aristotle was born a century after Sophocles, just as Wilde's contemporary Nietzsche would stress the belatedness of Socrates's critical spirit in relation to the tragedians.)

Re: other art forms, yes, especially the younger ones. Comics has perhaps had its Aristotle in Scott McCloud, but there's much more to do, and the academic absorption of the form has been a been a bit misleading in its essentially literary and sociological preoccupations.

#criticism #literary criticism

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary103

12/24-25/2023

sunday - monday

it's christmas

and i don't feel a lot especially. i'm not sad about it, i'm just apathetic towards it. i kind of felt like it might be something more this year but this last little while has been kind of a nightmare, on top of a year that's been a nightmare all over earth basically. but it's not so horrible. my girlfriend and i, my friends, all seem like we're going to be fine, basically at least.

i watched this in lieu of reading:

i like that he positions himself here against post-humanism, i don't know if i agree entirely or not, i find posthumanism to be interesting and i don't know if it's totally accurate to say it's seeking to keep in place the logic of enhancement, however my understanding of posthumanism is based in the antihuman. i also find it connected to the monologic/dialogic interestingly, where the posthuman, in remaining in contact with these zones of exclusion where agentic capacity and so on are kept in place as criteria for political ability, valuation (when he brings forth the example of agentic matter and the reference to the roman plebians becoming deserving of democracy), it keeps in place an essential signification, or of observing certain acts, stratifying and excepting them, essentially, they require one to cleave closely to a way of thinking that would very quickly do away with waste-thought, the abject or anything beyond, anything that could be a germ against the thought / lingual structure is not just ejected, but ignored. the negative potentiality of the dialogic is necessarily ignored, instead a positivism must occur, ability must always been observed/in place. he at a point mentions how the current philosophies he is approaching leave us with few things to approach disability, as he is using the term, affect being one of those, which is curious to me. i know distantly that kristeva is often seen as related to affect theory, but she also seems strongly concerned with the different ways things are expressed which are not in the regular sociality/typically constructed way, her approach art which uses madness, artaud, bataille, and so on, who fail to express 'normal ability' i suppose, which will here might refer to as risk when being appraised by capital, is of interest to me. i could only imagine her book black sun has anything to say re: disability in a more proper sense.

in defense of my linkage to kristeva, it seems constantly useful to me to think about the semanalytic processes at play in dealing w/ the constructions we are interred in. the posthuman seeking to escape the human by instead sort of approaching everything from an almost bare life method, thus instead of enabling totally (arguably, i do not know if i am there entirely in disagreement but negativity towards at least a sect of it seems necessary (though i will always enjoy the antihuman as an approach/weapon against the human as it has been constructed, and i suppose i have been right in having been where i am, closely beside that conception (as i have always like foucault's approaches (as he has always liked nietzsche (which is important to me)))) our escape, it only sort of creates the criteria / semantic structure in which we struggle. constantly appraised and in need of correction / placement.

but yes i need to get back to the young girl soon.

also, i feel like i should sleep, but i can't. idk why. i have a rush of energy right now though.

now it's 12 pm and i'm starting to get tired. i have at least begun work on the bug tracing stuff, i have 10 done so far. i should maybe get 20? idk, i also need to get more that have layers so i can separate them out into pieces so there can be some fun layering w/ them.

anyway okay , i am finally really actually tired.

so

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!

#Youtube

[thejoyofviolentmovement]

New Audio: The Vacant Lots Share A Brooding Club Banger

New Audio: The Vacant Lots Share A Brooding Club Banger @THEVACANTLOTS @JAREDARTAUD @FuzzClub @NoExitPR

With the release of 2020’s Interzone through London-based psych label Fuzz Club, the Brooklyn-based psych duo and JOVM mainstays The Vacant Lots — Jared Artaud (vocals, guitar, synths) and Brian McFayden (drums, synths, vocals) — crafted an album that saw the duo seamlessly blending dance music and psych rock while maintaining the long-held minimalist approach that has earned the duo acclaim…

View On WordPress

#New Audio #New Single #post punk #psych rock #Single Review #The Vacant Lots Closure #The Vacant Lots Evacuation #The Vacant Lots Interiors #The Vacant Lots Interzone

[zappak]

Shuta Hiraki & Shuma Ando [idiorrythmie]

Release date: September 01, 2023 Catalog no. zappak-007

https://zappak.bandcamp.com/album/idiorrythmie

[Tracklist] 1. bifurcation [2:03] 2. en avançant dans la prose je rencontre [15:11] 3. les cyprès ne bougeaient pas [21:22] 4. les ombres errantes [7:03] 5. biffure [1:03]

Excerpt: https://soundcloud.com/zappak/zappak-007

Hario Radio Tower (旧佐世保無線電信所/針尾送信所) This tower was built in 1922 for radio transmission by the Japanese Navy. It stands 136 meters tall, made of concrete, and it is the tallest structure built before World War II in Japan. The interior of the tower has many hollow and steel columns, and there is a very deep reverberation. Hiraki and Ando brought shruti boxes, percussion instruments, and objects, and did improvised performances for over two hours. These tracks are excerpts of a few parts. It was raining on the day of the performance due to an approaching typhoon, and raindrops were falling everywhere inside. However, the weather gradually cleared up during these two hours, the wind and rain inside the tower eased. To capture the situation of the day, they put the recordings in chronological order.

1. Shuta Hiraki & Shuma Ando (Some Percussions & Objects) 2. Shuma Ando (Shruti box), Shuta Hiraki (Bystander) 3. Shuta Hiraki (Shruti box), Shuma Ando (Bystander) 4. Shuta Hiraki & Shuma Ando (Voice) 5. Shuta Hiraki (Whistle)

Recorded at Hario Radio Tower, Nagasaki on September 2, 2022 Recorded and Mastered by Shuta Hiraki Drawing by Shuta Hiraki Layout by Leo Okagawa

---

Shuta Hiraki and Shuma Ando visited the former Sasebo Wireless Telegraph Station (Hario Transmitting Station) in Nagasaki and performed inside. They brought percussion instruments, whistles and a shruti box inside, and the recording was over two hours. They arranged chronologically excerpts from the recordings into a five-track composition. When they started recording, the weather was bad and we could hear the sound of rain, but the weather gradually calmed down. The performance of the two in deep reverberation is filled with ambience that seems to be released from tension. The sense of hearing of listeners will unconsciously mutate from "listening" to "hearing" and slowly sink into the sound.

平木周太と安藤秀満は長崎にある旧佐世保無線電信所(針尾送信所)へ足を運び、その内部にて演奏をおこなった。彼らはパーカッション類やホイッスル、そしてシュルティ・ボックスを持ち込み、録音は2時間以上にわたったという。彼らはその録音からの抜粋を時系列に並べ、5曲による構成とした。 録音を始めたころは天候が悪く雨音が聞こえているが、徐々に天気は落ち着いてきて、終盤では晴れたのか、鳥の鳴き声も聞こえてくる。深い残響のなかでおこなわれた2人の演奏は、緊張感から解放されたようなアンビエンスに満ちている。聴き手の聴覚は「聴く」から「聞こえる」へと無意識のなかで変異していき、緩やかにその音のなかへと沈み込んでいくことだろう。

"『idiorrythmie』セルフライナーノーツ by Shuma Ando ” - note

---

Shuta Hiraki (平木周太)

Japanese musician living in Nagasaki, Japan. Using various techniques such as synthesis, field recording, acoustic instrumentation, and sampling collage, he creates music that aspires to the critical edge of ambient and drone music in terms of both structure and thought. He has released works on numerous labels including Rottenman Editions, LINE, The Collection Artaud, and VAAGNER. He also reviews and critiques music under the name yorosz. 長崎県在住の音楽家。音響合成、フィールド・レコーディング、アコースティック楽器の演奏、サンプリング・コラージュなど様々な手法を駆使し、構造／思想の両面からアンビエントやドローン・ミュージックの臨界を志す音楽を制作。これまでにRottenman Editions、LINE、The Collection Artaud、VAAGNERなど多数のレーベルから作品を発表。よろすず名義で音楽に関しての執筆も行う。 https://obalto.bandcamp.com

---

Shuma Ando (安藤秀満)

A Japanese musician living in Saitama. He is the guitarist and composer for the ambient-folk band Grace Cathedral Park. They released their first album “Grace Cathedral Park” in 2019. He is also a doctoral student in the Department of French Langage and Literature at the University of Tokyo, and researches in the field of 20th and 21st century French literature and visual culture. 埼玉県在住の音楽家。アンビエント・フォークバンドGrace Cathedral Parkにて主にギターと作曲を担当し、2019年に1stアルバム『Grace Cathedral Park』を発表。また、東京大学大学院にてフランス文学を専攻し、20世紀・21世紀のフランス文学と視覚文化について研究している。 https://gracecathedralpark.bandcamp.com

【Reviews】

Vital Weekly: https://zappak.tumblr.com/post/728299704939626496

[graywyvern]

( via / via )

Bad Air.

"Virgil is represented as a kind of supernatural sage, already halfway to Master Virgil, the sorcerer of medieval folklore." --Fulgentius the Mythographer

"As the Tet Offensive raged in Vietnam in the spring of 1968 and President Lyndon Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for another term, Ms. Didion profiled Jim Morrison and Nancy Reagan." (via Mefi)

"People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term." --Susan Sontag, "Approaching Artaud" (via @_ryanruby_)

Alien Clown.

[nanaqui]

Fundamentally I think that my problem with Paule Thévenin & her approach to Artaud's work, beyond the obvious qualms I have with her holding hostage his manuscripts because of some grand idea she had of herself & her vicious (and unfounded) contempt for Artaud's family, is that she believes herself to have more legitimacy than other Artaud scholars because of her personal connection to him. One example among many is a commentary she wrote about one of Artaud's self-portraits (she published a collection of them with Jacques Derrida), in which her entire interpretation of the drawing is based on the fact that while he was drawing it, Artaud pointed out to her that part of it was supposed to be a cafetière & another part was supposed to be "une théière cachée". From there she takes her entire argument into a single direction because she's working under the assumption that because this is what he told her about his drawing, it is the "correct" way to look at it. & while yes, she does end her text with the caveat that she isn't trying to present a theoretical or artistic analysis of the piece but rather her own personal thoughts about it, 1/she did write this as commentary for an album called "Artaud / Dessins et portraits", not "Réflexions personnelles sur les dessins d'Artaud" & 2/she did reprint it in a collection of her essays - which tells us what she really thinks that piece is achieving.

Her entire work is similarly disingenuous. She's "la néophyte, sans aucune référence universitaire" ("j'étais naïve. Je crois bien l'être encore"), she's uwu smol bean who got catapulted out of the blue into her life's mission, but then she becomes irate at the thought that people might disagree with her method because they didn't know him, they aren't the one Artaud asked to publish his work, they don't know his handwriting - & she becomes possessive of both the work AND the man, & it's all very strange. I find it funny that she's salty at his heirs for not allowing her to print his drawings in Ce désespéré qui vous parle when she's the one who spent the last 45 years of her life stealing from him & from his family for her own profit. And for what! Her "scholarship" isn't even good! It's not even methodologically sound!

#fake thesis tag #antonin artaud tag

[andydelire]

On Douglas Gordon

This week in Hauntology we read an essay on Douglas Gordon. His work is a bit all over the place and writing about it seems to be a challenge even for professional art critics. The most interesting aspect of his work from what I gathered in the essay by Nancy Spector (2001) is his usage of doubling personas. As someone who is interested in theater, my index of doubling did a large travel loop. My train of thought started in the Spanish Tragedy (1592), by Thomas Kyd. There is a scene (that Shakespeare took for Hamlet) that a play-within-a-play happens for very similar revenge reasons as in Hamlet—however in this example a total trick is played on both audiences (the real audience and the actor audience) when Hieronimo and Bel-imperia swap the fake daggers with real daggers, and they end up killing Lorenzo and Balthazar respectively. Imagine conceptually, how the audience would have reacted to this situation if the actors played it well. When the prop is swapped with a real item, all of a sudden the illusion is put into question. The audience no longer has the doubling effect to take comfort in, “Oh it is just a play,” when in the play itself that element has been challenged. I feel that Douglas Gordon is using this long-standing literary function which was common in theater and used by the likes of Samuel Beckett, and so many more, to take his conceptual ‘art persona’ and turn it on its head. It was interesting to me to read about his work—I felt like I was reading a piece of literary criticism—and yet there was no novel or text to speak of. He does a sort of vanishing-act/free fall hybrid, that rides the line between pop-culture-induced dissociation and vital matter surrealism (the way objects in various contexts change the way we feel). His website reflects this maximalist, multi-medium approach with a chaotic home page that looks like you have hundreds of windows open. It reads like spam or a virus of sorts, and yet when you read each box, poetic texts engage in his past works like an online retrospective exhibition. For additional material on doubling and authorial heteronyms, I recommend the Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud and the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. but more on them later.        

[byneddiedingo]

Kurt Raab and Margit Carstensen in Satansbraten (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976) Cast: Kurt Raab, Margit Carstensen, Helen Vita, Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Y Sa Lo, Ulli Lommel, Armin Meier, Katherina Buchhammer, Vitus Zeplichal, Brigitte Mira, Hannes Kaetner, Heli Finkenzeller, Marquard Bohm, Christiane Maybach, Nino Korda, Adrian Hoven. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus, Jürgen Jürges. Production design: Ulrike Bode, Kurt Raab. Film editing: Thea Eymèsz. Music: Peer Raben. Although it was written for the screen, Rainer Maria Fassbinder's Satansbraten (aka Satan's Brew) feels stagy. Its absurdist comedy evokes Beckett and Ionesco, and especially Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, which Fassbinder more or less acknowledges by appending a quotation from Artaud as a kind of epigraph for the film. But it also harks back to Fassbinder's earliest films, the ones like Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) and Gods of the Plague (1970) that followed his involvement with the Anti-Theater in Munich. In a way it merges the often eccentric performance in those films with the florid style of Fassbinder's Douglas Sirk-inflected melodramas like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Veronika Voss (1982). The central character of Satansbraten, Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab), is a poet with writer's block who, while trying to work his way out of inertia, unconsciously (or not?) plagiarizes a poem by Stefan George, and when his theft is brought to his attention decides that he is the reincarnation of George. Among other things, this leads him to explorations of his sexuality -- George was gay. But mostly the film tracks Kranz's various involvements with women, including his wife, Luise (Helen Vita), who claims that he hasn't slept with her for 17 days, as well as Lisa (Ingrid Caven), the wife of his friend Rolf (Marquard Bohm); a sex worker (Y Sa Lo) whom he interviews; a wealthy patron, Irmgart von Witzleben (Katherina Buchhamer), who has an orgasm while signing a check for him and whom he then murders; and an adoring fan, Andrée (Margit Carstensen). Meanwhile, he is also dodging a detective (Ulli Lommel) investigating the murder of Irmgart while contending with his brother, Ernst (Volker Spengler), a mentally disordered man who is fascinated with the sex lives of houseflies. It's all very silly but watchable in a "what next?" way. Efforts have been made to explicate the film as a commentary on fascism -- George was enthusiastically courted by the Nazis for his visions of an emergent Germanic national culture, though he shrugged off their approaches -- but such exegeses are kind of wobbly.

#Satansbraten #Rainer Werner Fassbinder #Kurt Raab #Margit Carstensen

[kserpa23]

QCQ 2: Anarchitecture

Q: Matta-Clark’s writings display a striking affinity with Artaud’s particularly in the search for a participatory, spatially engaged art. Matta-Clark asserts, “You have to deal with a specific situation and the character of your dealing with that specific situation is the piece, the work.” He contrasted engaged and organic creativity with the prescriptive and removed designs of architects: “If . . .you unquestioningly admit the notion that things can be asserted with finality, that the human condition can be dictated . . . then you unquestioningly also assume that things can be solved. This is one of the attitudes that the politics of architecture intentionally promulgates, one which is inherent in the machine tradition… Where you have people solving, eventually you get the total solution.”

C: This whole quote and idea coming from Matta-Clark is interesting as it shows his understandings of different mindsets when it comes to creation. The more artistic mindset basically says that how you decide to solve a problem is the piece in which you actively create while the architectural mindset basically says that because humans can be told to solve, inevitably they’ll find a solution. One solution is based in organic creative nature while the other is based on machine understandings of people. In his Anarchitecture, Matta-Clark took the machine solution and answered a new question with the creative mindset in order to create new art. I think it’s cool to think about taking something made through one’s mindset and creating something else from it using your own creativity, especially if the original creation is very dictated or regulated by rules or standards. I think the whole idea can also be related to using found objects in artworks that give them new purposes.

Q:

The idea that the qualities in how you approach a situation can create your creative solution sounds like a very engaging and proactive process. It seemingly involves participation into a fluid way of thinking through the situation. The idea that a person being told to solve a situation will inevitably find a solution sounds like it could be labor intensive, but also could have a lazier approach to it. On one side you can be working through many problems until you find the ultimate solution or you can think that no matter what you’ll eventually have some solution no matter how long it takes. That said, do you think it is easier to approach a problem with the mindset that through a creative process you’ll find your solution or with the mindset that because you’re a person being told to solve something you’ll eventually find a solution? 

#qcq

[schizotechnics]

A brief introduction to ‘Schizotechnics’

Toute l’écriture est de la cochonnerie. — Antonin Artaud, Le Pèse-Nerfs.

All writing is a filth. Not erotic filth, but grotesque, mucky, irresponsible filth. For Bataille, the writer is a culprit who must expiate himself by going beyond the limits of language and thought. 

Life is traversed by impersonal thought, thought by writing and writing by text. We are more effect than cause, and we are condemned to become-cause in order to realize an authentic artistic creation. Thus the outside is an instance of active force that pushes the subject to pursue thought: it is the chosen one and at the same time the condemned.

Bataille calls the "mystical experience" the emotional experiences in solitude of the anchorite. It is the task of those who experience these sensations empirically to express them with technique and to capture even the linguistically unattainable: the poetic pen is the most suitable for the vast enterprise of expressing the inexpressible, but my campaign wishes to take the direction of the directly material to show the evident of the Third World reality, which seems to be, paradoxically, the least evident.

I am a person who has nothing new to say, but rather a thousand things to show. I tend to think of myself as a simulacrum of Walter Benjamin, a simulacrum of a simulacrum, which undertakes its revolutionary task by painstakingly compiling different fragments that end up forming a totality. My technique is to repeat what has already been said with new approaches, a rigorous analysis of an infinite multiplicity of thoughts, to weave a rhizomatic web, to compact them as integral parts of a total assemblage, 'to take different authors by the back and give them a child, thus creating a new monster', as Deleuze claims, and open up new horizons of possibilities. I do not take authors as I please, nor do I embrace them dogmatically: my task is that of the palimpsest in order to make possible philosophies out of them. I am a subject constantly exposed to the schizophrenic flow of outside forces — as every person does — , and many times I have been brought down by these forces, not to mention the times when I have let them have their way with me. Still, I accept the guilt as a writer and take the condemnation with the risky aim of atoning myself.

I apologize in advance for the details that I might overlook in the course of time.

Schizotechnics

Finally, to conclude this introductory post regarding the ultimate purpose of the blog, an explanation of its name is required.

We must understand that 'schizo', in a purely schizoanalytic sense, is that which accelerates the rhythm of the unconscious, i.e. schizophrenia is synonymous with speed. The flows of desire, schizophrenically liberated and self-limited by capitalism, while revolutionary, exhaust the body as it resists. Although, in the span from Anti-Oedipus (1972) to What is Philosophy? (1995) we note a no small change with respect to the schizo, a shift from advocating the acceleration of the flows of desire in order to overcome the flows of desire — liberated and self-limited by the capital  — to a clamour for stability and deceleration:

We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. — Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?

There is a fatal flaw in the Deleuzoguattarian anti-capitalist project, and that is to proclaim the acceleration of the deterritorialisation of social subjectivity without any mastery of technique. Thus Schizotechnics is the management, control and domination of the tools necessary to preserve the integrity of our bodies, and at the same time, a science in constant updating in pursuit of [re]formulating optimal strategies for revolution.

Revolution haunts as an unsuspected virtuality, and schizotechnics is the only bridge capable of materializing its possibility, of turning potency into an act.

#deleuze #accelerationism #marxism #biopolitics #ccru #markfisher #reza negarestani #georges bataille #antonin artaud

[paenling]

no ones saying you cant enjoy daniil? people like him as a character but mostly Because he’s an asshole and he’s interesting. the racism and themes of colonization in patho are so blatant

nobody said “by order of Law you are forbidden from enjoying daniil dankovsky in any capacity”, but they did say “if you like daniil dankovsky you are abnormal, problematic, and you should be ashamed of yourself”, so i’d call that an implicit discouragement at the least. not very kind.

regardless, he is a very interesting asshole and we love to make fun of him! but i do not plan to stop seeing his character in an empathetic light when appropriate to do so. we’re all terribly human.

regarding “the racism and themes of colonization in patho”, we’ve gotta have a sit-down for this one because it’s long and difficult. tl;dr here.

i’ve written myself all back and forth and in every direction trying to properly pin down the way i feel about this in a way that is both logically coherent and emotionally honest, but it’s not really working. i debated even responding at all, but i do feel like there are some things worth saying so i’m just going to write a bunch of words, pick a god, and pray it makes some modicum of sense.

the short version: pathologic 2 is a flawed masterwork which i love deeply, but its attempts to be esoteric and challenging have in some ways backfired when it comes to topical discussions such as those surrounding race, which the first game didn’t give its due diligence, and the second game attempted with incomplete success despite its best efforts.

the issue is that when you have a game that is so niche and has these “elevated themes” and draws from all this kind of academic highbrow source material -- the fandom is small, but the fandom consists of people who want to analyze, pathologize, and dissect things as much as possible. so let’s do that.

first: what exactly is racist or colonialist in pathologic? i’m legitimately asking. people at home: by what mechanism does pathologic-the-game inflict racist harm on real people? the fact that the Kin are aesthetically and linguistically inspired by the real-world Buryat people (& adjacent groups) is a potential red flag, but as far as i can tell there’s never any value judgement made about either the fictionalized Kin or the real-world Buryat. the fictional culture is esoteric to the player -- intended to be that way, in fact -- but that’s not an inherently bad thing. it’s a closed practice and they’re minding their business.

does it run the risk of being insensitive with sufficiently aggressive readings? absolutely, but i don’t think that’s racist by itself. they’re just portrayed as a society of human beings (and some magical ones, if you like) that has flaws and incongruences just as the Town does. it’s not idealizing or infantilizing these people, but by no means does it go out of its way to villainize them either. there is no malice in this depiction of the Kin. 

is it the fact that characters within both pathologic 1 & 2 are racist? that the player can choose to say racist things when inhabiting those characters? no, because pathologic-the-game doesn’t endorse those things. they’re throwaway characterization lines for assholes. acknowledging that racism exists does not make a media racist. see more here.

however, i find it’s very important to take a moment and divorce the racial discussions in a game like pathologic 2 from the very specific experiences of irl western (particularly american) racism. it’s understandable for such a large chunk of the english-speaking audience to read it that way; it makes sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. although it acknowledges the relevant history to some extent, on account of being set in 1915, pathologic 2 is not intended to be a commentary about race, and especially not current events, and especially especially not current events in america. it’s therefore unfair, in my opinion, to attempt to diagnose it with any concrete ideology or apply its messages to an american racial paradigm.

it definitely still deals with race, but it always, to me, seemed to come back around the exploitation of race as an ultimately arbitrary division of human beings, and the story always strove to be about human beings far more than it was ever about race. does it approach this topic perfectly? no, but it’s clearly making an effort. should we be aware of where it fails to do right by the topic? yes, definitely, but we should also be charitable in our interpretations of what the writers were actually aiming for, rather than reactionarily deeming them unacceptable and leaving it at that. do we really think the writers for pathologic 2 sat down and said “we’re going to go out of our way to be horrible racists today”? i don’t.

IPL’s writing team is a talented lot, and dybowski as lead writer has the kinds of big ideas that elevate a game to a work of art, particularly because he’s not afraid to get personal. on that front, some discussion is inescapable as pathologic 2 deals in a lot of racial and cultural strife, because it’s clearly something near to the his heart, but as i understand it was never really meant to be a narrative “about” race, at least not exclusively so, and especially not in the same sense as the issue is understood by the average American gamer. society isn't a monolith and the contexts are gonna change massively between different cultures who have had, historically, much different relationships with these concepts.

these themes are “so blatant” in pathologic 2 because clearly, on some level, IPL wanted to start a discussion. I think it’s obvious that they wanted to make the audience uncomfortable with the choices they were faced with and the characters they had to inhabit -- invoke a little ostranenie, as it were, and force an emotional breaking point. in the end the game started a conversation and i think that’s something that was done in earnest, despite its moments of obvious clumsiness. 

regarding colonialism, this is another thing that the game is just Not About. we see the effects and consequences of colonialism demonstrated in the world of pathologic, and it’s something we’re certainly asked to think about from time to time, but the actual plot/narrative of the game is not about overcoming or confronting explicitly colonialist constructs, etc. i personally regard this as a bit of a missed opportunity, but it’s just not what IPL was going for.

instead they have a huge focus, as discussed somewhat in response to this ask, on the broader idea of powerful people trying to create a “utopia” at the mortal cost of those they disempower, which is almost always topical as far as i’m concerned, and also very Russian.

i think there was some interview where it was said that the second game was much more about “a mechanism that transforms human nature” than the costs of utopia, but it’s still a persistent enough theme to be worth talking about both as an abstraction of colonialism as well as in its more-likely intended context through the lens of wealth inequality, environmental destruction & government corruption as universal human issues faced by the marginalized classes. i think both are important and intelligent readings of the text, and both are worth discussion.

both endings of pathologic 2 involve sacrifice in the name of an “ideal world” where it’s impossible to ever be fully satisfied. in the Diurnal Ending, Artemy is tormented over the fate of the Kin and the euthanasia of his dying god and all her miracles, but he needs to have faith that the children he’s protected will grow up better than their parents and create a world where he and his culture will be immortalized in love. in the Nocturnal Ending, he’s horrified because in preserving the miracle-bound legacy of his people as a collective, he’s un-personed himself to the individuals he loves, but he needs to have faith that the uniqueness and magic of the resurrected Earth was precious enough to be worth that sacrifice. neither ending is fair. it’s not fair that he can’t have both, but that’s the idea. because that “utopia” everyone’s been chasing is an idol that distracts from the important work of being a human being and doing your best in a flawed world. 

because pathologic’s themes as a series are so very “Russian turn-of-the-century” and draw a ton of stylistic and topical inspiration from the theatre and literature of that era, i don’t doubt that it’s also inherited some of its inspirational literature’s missteps. however, because the game’s intertextuality is so incredibly dense it’s difficult to construct a super cohesive picture of its actual messaging. a lot of its references and themes will absolutely go over your head if you enter unprepared -- this was true for me, and it ended up taking several passes and a bunch of research to even begin appreciating the breadth of its influences.

(i’d argue this is ultimately a good thing; i would never have gone and picked up Camus or Strugatsky, or even known who Antonin Artaud was at all if i hadn’t gone in with pathologic! my understanding is still woefully incomplete and it’s probably going to take me a lot more effort to get properly fluent in the ideology of the story, but that’s the joy of it, i think. :) i’m very lucky to be able to pursue it in this way.)

anyway yes, pathologic 2 is definitely very flawed in a lot of places, particularly when it tries to tackle race, but i’m happy to see it for better and for worse. the game attempts to discuss several adjacent issues and stumbles as it does so, but insinuating it to be in some way “pro-racist” or “pro-colonialist” or whatever else feels kind of disingenuous to me. they’re clearly trying, however imperfectly, to do something intriguing and meaningful and empathetic with their story.

even all this will probably amount to a very disjointed and incomplete explanation of how pathologic & its messaging makes me feel, but what i want -- as a broader approach, not just for pathologic -- is for people to be willing to interpret things charitably. 

sometimes things are made just to be cruel, and those things should be condemned, but not everything is like that. it’s not only possible but necessary to be able to acknowledge flaws or mistakes and still be kind. persecuting something straight away removes any opportunity to examine it and learn from it, and pathologic happens to be ripe with learning experiences. 

it’s all about being okay with ugliness, working through difficult nuances with grace, and the strength of the human spirit, and it’s a story about love first and foremost, and i guess we sort of need that right now. it gave me some of its love, so i’m giving it some of my patience.

#meta #discourse #long post #ipl #writing #Anonymous #slight edit for colonialism #untitled plague game #pathologic