melancology

Black metal irrupts from a place already divested of nature, a site of extinction, ‘a place empty of life / Only dead trees …’ (Mayhem, ‘Funeral Fog’, 1992); ‘Our skies are forever black / Here is no signs of life at all’ (Deathspell Omega, ‘From Unknown Lands of Desolation’, 2005). As such black metal could be described as a negative form of environmental writing; the least Apollonian of genres, it is terrestrial – indeed subterranean and infernal – inhabiting a dead forest that is at once both mythic and real unfolding along an atheological horizon that marks the limit of absolute evil where there are no goods or resources to distribute and therefore no means of power and domination, a mastery of nothing.

A new word is required that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction. A new word implies a new concept and we know from Deleuze and Guattari that concepts have to fulfil three criteria. Accordingly, the plane of immanence of melancology is extinction and non-being. All things are destined for extinction; immanent to all being is the irreducible fact of its total negation without reserve or remainder. The development of the characteristics of melancology is to be addressed at the Symposium, of course, but there are already a number of apophasic determinations: it is not ecology, it is anorganic; it is not political economy, it is anti-instrumental; it is not love of nature, environmentalism, Gaia, geophilosophy … But it implies an ethos and a style that delineates the third aspect of the concept, its embodiment in a conceptual personae: the black metal kvltist whose ethos runs across the spectrum of melancholy from bile and rage to sorrow, depression and the delectation of evil all the better to affirm the desolation s/he contemplates in the sonorous audibility of black metal’s sovereign dissonance.

-BlackMetalThreorySymposium, Nov 2010

berlinde de bruyckere

Berlinde de Bruyckere at Hauser&Wirth, Zurich
Published in Sculpture Magazine

Is religious art compatible with today’s post-modern and cynical attitudes? Very rarely does one see contemporary artwork infused with the sublime: that characteristic that makes you feel as if there really is something beyond the physical self, something more permanent. Berlinde de Bruyckere’s sculptures are indeed imbued with that quality – they combine awe and anxiety to bring you closer to something akin to spiritual upliftment.

The Belgian sculptor who has become an international sensation in recent years, works in Ghent, Belgium in a former Catholic boys school transformed into a studio, which she shares with her husband, also a sculptor. They also live in the building along with their two children.

In this large space, Berlinde surrounds herself with reproductions of works by old masters including Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grünewald, and Luca Giordano, to study the positions of the painters’ subjects in motion and pain. The influence from these religious artists is very visible in Berlinde’s work – it is clear that there is a search for the Christian ecstasy often found in the paintings of old masters that the artist so admires.

Berlinde’s search for truth, however, is not answered with a revelation about God, but rather it is a Kierkegaardian process, filled with pain, anguish, and doubt – a representation of the human condition. Her figures are fragments of bodies, some contorted, some graceful, all immensely beautiful. They allude to the horrors that have occurred in recent times, but reveal the universal reality of suffering through the ages.

In her most recent exhibition at Hauser and Wirth, Zurich, Berlinde exhibits some new works in her characteristic style, and some much more abstract, but throughout she continues her examination of death, pain, and solitude.

In Lange Eenzame Man, or Lonely Man, a body is lying sideways on a pillow, encased in a vitrine, headless, armless, with his feet together in a contorted twist. The figure was made after the wax cast of a male model, so it is hollow on the inside, allowing us to peek through the empty space where the head and neck would have been, inside the body’s cavity. The texture of the wax of which the sculpture is made seems skin-like, but there is much red pigment in the coloring, evoking blood, of course. How can such a corpse still contain red blood, the color of life? Berlinde’s goal is not to detach the viewer from death, but bring its horrible reality into our consciousness. Like the vitrine encased molds of Mt. Vesuvius’s victims that still remind visitors of the painful death Pompeiians experienced during the volcanic eruption more than 1900 years ago, so the Lonely Man becomes a permanent testament to human suffering. Yet his pose, the fragility of the body itself, and the pillow underneath are also direct references to depictions of Christ by Old Masters. The specificity and universality of the piece are in keeping with religious art over the last few hundred years.

This influence is no surprise considering Berlinde’s upbringing in a Catholic family, with a Catholic school education, and her studio’s location, but her preoccupation with the existential concerns of humanity make her very much a part of our modern world.

In another piece, Inside Me, Berlinde uses a new material, iron, to tackle the beautiful and the terrifying. The sculpture of a horse’s carcass is cast in iron and is covered with horse skin, a method which both objectifies the horrors of violent death by focusing on the graceful form of the animal, and triggers visions of war and destruction that are only too timely. The horse as symbol of the tragedy of war has been used throughout the Western canon for many generations, but Inside Me especially brings to mind the chapter in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front describing in great detail the cries of the wounded horses on the front, and the soldiers’ hesitation at putting the horses out of their misery.

In her newest series, which is a leap from her previous, more literal work, antlers hang in twos in various conformations on the wall. These pieces, all called Romeu (my deer) are also cast in iron, then covered with Berlinde’s signature wax layers and red pigment, more metaphorically and subtly allude to death. But the death in these pieces is mythological – the antlers conjure up the story of Actaeon the hunter and Artemis the goddess of the hunt, who was caught bathing in the woods by Actaeon, and out of anger turned him into a deer that was ultimately killed by his own dogs. These pieces are intriguing for their subtlety and elegance. One of the pieces in the series is even wrapped in a soft gauze as a sort of bandage, evoking the fragility of life in a delicate and rather abstract fashion.

Berlinde de Bruyckere’s work is arresting and disturbing, but it also combines the dark with the light to bring forth the duality of our condition. It is comforting to know that the great existential themes of the modernist period are still being explored, but with a contemporary touch, thus connecting our indifferent times with the impassioned ones of the first part of the 20th century. It is also this bridge between the now and the then that makes Berlinde’s work so saturated with spiritual wonder, the same feeling elicited by the Old Masters’ depictions of man’s fate as rendered in their paintings of Jesus.

another pessoa

"like all men endowed with great mental mobility, i have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. i abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places."
- 121, fp.

aesthetics of artificiality

"i live aesthetically as someone else. i've sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that's foreign to my being. having employed myself-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, i sometimes no longer recognize myself. who am i behind this unreality? i don't know. i must be someone. and if i avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it's so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personality. i want to be exactly like what i wanted to be and am not. if i were to give in to life, i'd be destroyed. i want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since i can't be one in my body. that's why i've sculpted myself in quiet isolation and have placed myself in a hothouse, cut off from fresh air and direct light - where the absurd flower of my artificiality can blossom in secluded beauty."
- 114, fp.

The book of disquiet

Fernando Pessoa

"I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it - without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgments based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he's a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. That's why I didn't give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshiped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.

And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what's left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny? Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn't acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we're left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves.

Retaining from science only its fundamental precept - that everything is subject to fatal laws, which we cannot freely react to since the laws themselves determine all reactions - and seeing how this precept concurs with the more ancient one of the divine fatality of things, we abdicate from every effort like the weak-bodied from athletic endeavors, and we hunch over the book of sensations like scrupulous scholars of feeling.

Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it's because the poetry or prose we write - devoid of any desire to move anyone else's will or to mold anyone's understanding - is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.

We're well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect. There's no sunset so lovely it couldn't be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn't bring a yet sounder sleep. And so, contemplations of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses, which when they're finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day.

This isn't the viewpoint of pessimists like Vigny, for whom life was a prison in which he wove straw to keep busy and forget. To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that's both excessive and uncomfortable. While it's true that we ascribe no value to the work we produce and that we produce it to keep busy, we're not like the prisoner who busily weaves straw to forget about his fate; we're like the girl who embroiders pillows for no other reason than to keep busy.

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing - for myself alone - wispy songs I compose while waiting.

Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not entertained, that's fine too."

Operette Morali

"There is no disgust with life, no despair, no sense of the nothingness of things, of the worthlessness of remedies, of the loneliness of man; no hatred of the world and of oneself; that can last so long: although these attitudes of mind are completely reasonable, and their opposites unreasonable. But despite all this, after a little while; with a gentle change in the temper of the body; little by little; and often in a flash, for minuscule reasons scarcely possible to notice; the taste of life revives, and this or that fresh hope springs up, and human things take on their former visage, and show they are not unworthy of some care; not so much to the intellect, as indeed, so to speak, to the sense of the spirit. And that is enough to make a person, aware and convinced as he may be of the truth, as well as in spite of reason, both persevere in life, and go along with it as others do: for those very senses (one might say), and not the intellect, are what rules over us...And life is a thing of such small consequence, that man, as regards himself, ought not to be very anxious either to keep it or to discard it. Therefore, without pondering the matter too deeply; with each trivial reason that presents itself, for grasping the former alternative rather than the latter, he ought not to refuse to do so."

"For the excellence of souls brings greater urgency to their lives; which in turn brings a greater feeling of their own unhappiness; which is as much as to say greater unhappiness. In the same way, the larger degree of life in these souls implies more active self-love, wherever this may lead or whatever form it may take: and this surplus of self-love induces a more intense longing for beautitude, and therefore more vexation and suffering at being deprived of it, and deeper sorrow at the adversities that come along. All this is contained in the primeval and perpetual order of created things, which I cannnot alter."

"Ancients lived more fully than we do, partly because, on account of the grave continuous dangers they were accustomed to undergoing, they commonly died earlier than we do? And you will bestow the greatest blessing on men: whose life was always, I will not say happy, but less unhappy insofar as it was the more powerfully excited, and the more fully occupied."
-G. Leopardi

Peste Noire (France)

Amazing album. La Sanie des siècles - Panégyrique de la dégénérescence. 2006.
"RAWSTHETIC"



"1° Pure filth. 2° The love of that filth, expressed in beauty, in musical flavour, in refinement."


Interview (Englsih)

1. The black metal of Peste Noire is a bewildering sort, full of so many contrasts: rawly recorded, yet played with an extreme level of technical finesse and, especially, emotion; filthy and ugly and intimidating in that (textural) rawness, yet shot through with a certain beauty or least melancholy within those textures; staunchly (BM)traditional on the surface, yet so defiant of the artform's norms beneath that surface; grim and hateful, yet communicating infinitely more in less tangible words/manners. So, are you aware of these contrasts, and are they something you've consciously explored and developed from the beginning?

An excerpt from the interview featured in the album's booklet reads: " Searching for a divine ray of light in a cesspool, under faeces and refuses, such is PESTE NOIRE's musical mission. " To the Sublime by way of the Putrid, to the Spiritual by way of the Squalid ", such is the band's motto. As a kid, I was only fascinated by punks and Jehovah's Witnesses. Today, PN is still a straddle between scatology and eschatology. " Only in filth can I find beauty and luminosity. For us, perfection, the Absolute Truth and the highest elevation, id est God, are only accessible through Evil — I wish to make it clear that we like filth AS filth, we like sin IN REGARD OF morals: we are conscious of Good but we only like to rape it. That rape is divine. We are immoral, not amoral — spiritual men, not animals. PN's filth can be equated to human torture, that is refined. That is why one can feel PN is simultaneously grubby and classy. 1° Pure filth. 2° The love of that filth, expressed in beauty, in musical flavour, in refinement. As far as the traditional/non-traditional contrast is concerned, I would say Beauty, Grandeur, Nobleness emanate when PN evoke the European PAST (which explains that melancholy, which is nostalgia) with a Black Metal in accordance with our forefathers's tradition (BURZUM, MÜTIILATION, VLAD TEPES). Hatred, terror, DISORDER, madness break out when we conjure up the CURRENT democratic world. Naturally that disorder is expressed in forms which are less conventional.


2. What, then, would be your conception of "black metal"? Like, what does it mean to you?

Black Metal is the musical memory of our bloodthirsty ancestors of blood, it is the marriage of Tradition, of old racial patrimony with fanaticism, with the rage and the rashness of a youth now lost. It is a CHTONIAN religion: a cult of the EARTH and a return to it, therefore a nationalism; a cult of what is BELOW the earth: Hell — the adjective "chtonian " applies to the Infernal gods as well. BM is a fundamentalism, a music with integrity (from latin integer, complete) which helps me to remain complete in a dying world, amidst a people in decay, unworthy of its blood. It is the apology of the dark european past. It is a psychosis which helps us to flee a reality we cannot tolerate anymore.


3. Is Peste Noire your ideal form of BM, or is PN simply an extension of your inner self?

Our ideal form of BM ? We try... I have a precise IDEA of what PN MUST be as regards its sound, its universe and its instrumentation. We would wish to add violin, bombard and accordion but we have not reached this point yet. PN is still a project. It is indeed an extension of my inner self but not only. Above all else, PN is an extension of the Devil, its representation BY me. BECAUSE Satan enters into me, or BECAUSE He touches me from the outside, because in both cases I am brimful of Him. I feel the need to exteriorize my possession or my love for Him (I conceive the Devil in different ways: He is a lanscape, an era, an instant, a dream, a pulsion...). But the love, the emotion for Him — which are REACTIONS — are fully mine in PN. The rest is His direct language filtered by my aptitudes and the technical means at my disposal. Inversely, when the emptiness of my life makes me suffer I summon the Devil through my music, to bring Him back, to be reminded of Him, with nostalgia. Satan is the cause of my music, I am His means (He is also mine), my listeners a goal to reach, an audience to convert. Thus, PN is as much possessed and inspired as individual and subjective. Not only is my role to stand for something (the Devil, France d'Oïl (Northern mediaeval France), the Past, my environment etc.) but it is also to stand for myself (actual experience, personal emotions).


4. Thus, what can you reveal about your personal life and how it relates to Peste Noire's music?

I come from the North of France but I grew up with the hatred of a region of latin culture, the extreme South-West of France where I was born by mistake. As far as my life is concerned, I am a deserter, living as far away as I can from the " world ". Calm hermit in libraries or in the psychiatric hospital I was brought to in 2005, loud hooligan in the streets. Shunning or beating one's fellow human being, it is always severing contact. That is why my music is distant. It sings of the Elsewhere (the North or Darkness), of the Other and of the Old. It is the symphony of the aged, of the homeless, of the Barbarian, of the sick, of demons, of the lunatics, the symphony of those who are far, far away from here. I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time and I do everything I can to escape.


5. To that end, *should* one's music be a direct reflection of one's personality and inner self? or, can a certain "mask" or artifice - a *facade*, even - in musical/lyrical form still be potent art?

Music is always the reflection of one's inner self as it expresses a particular taste or personal feelings. But BM is ALSO a mask, it goes without saying... Why do most of the bands use corpsepaint ? I AM MY PSEUDONYM, out of spite for my social being. La sale Famine de Valfunde is less a person than a character. Through PN I created an IDEAL and LESS FRAGILE Ego. 1° IDEAL because I AESTHETIZE the being I am and I do not expose it as a whole or in its bare truth. In a way I CHOSE myself (if not my music and my lyrics would be as gross and ugly as the reality I loathe). 2° A LESS FRAGILE Ego because thanks to PN I break free from my little and ephemeral body to become incarnate somewhere else, LONGER and MORE GREATLY; in a record, in a piece of paper, in a photo, prepared, studied and selected as were Mussolini's — For instance he was always very careful to conceal his baldness. However the transference from my person to my character has become permanent and irreversible. As the saying goes, I " sold my soul to the devil " to become powerful, a statue, a monument... Art is by definition a RE-presentation, a NEW made-up presentation of oneself. Only through PN can I conceive a noble existence.


6. All that said, is one goal of Peste Noire's to have the music reflect back upon the listener - meaning, seeing/hearing themselves within the contrasts you present? or, ultimately, is Peste Noire entirely selfish and for yourself only?

"Art's external aim is not the work created but the work received by the world " (Bernhild Boie). We are little toads who sing they are Kings. And if we sing, it is because we want to get heard. We want to stir our soul brothers — only them — to the point when they acknowledge us as elects, as messengers from the Netherworld, as angels (from greek aggelos, messenger).


7. From the beginning, you've kept Peste Noire a fairly clandestine affair, but are at last finally granting a few interviews. Is some degree of secrecy necessary to give the music the proper mystique and, more so, allow it to communicate on broader, myriad levels? Or, is sometimes dictating to listeners/readers that "This is this and that is that" necessary to keep things defined and not allow motivations/intentions to be confused or distorted?

First and foremost, PN is stimulation of the flesh, passion, pathos. It is music and wordless mysticism. Beyond that, it is also a SECT which communicates an ideology, a rational Word, giving a new meaning, a direction to our unknown Brethrens. Still, we do not speak a lot and with everybody. I have decided to speak once and in depth to the suitable audience. LA MESNIE HERLEQUIN, the literary review I created with L'atrabilaire Maldoror (who translated this interview into English) will allow me to do so. However, it cannot be denied total secrecy in order to keep the appropriate mystique is often a ruse used by non-mystical bands that want to appear mystical. Such bands have nothing to say and they feign mystery. To come back to question 5, there is a good and a wrong " mask ". 1° Real possession, transference, the Id which manages to become real (mechanics of psychosis), transference which becomes real in the work of art. 2° Charlatanism which consists in pretending one owns a secret, that one is someone else, without believing it oneself. That is the case for some 90 % of BM bands. The cause for my BM: becoming MY desire, being my desire. The cause for theirs: being YOUR desire, pretending.


8. Speaking of which, Peste Noire was once construed as NS, mostly down to the 'Aryan Supremacy' and 'Macabre Transcendence' demos...care to clear this up? Are you in fact anti-NS, or are some NS tenets plausible?

I am a nationalist, not a socialist... My two nations are : France d'Oïl and Hell. BM is a double nationalism, temporal and spiritual, horizontal and vertical. 1° TEMPORAL as it is always the heritage of a BLOOD and of a material EARTH it has to worship. 2° SPIRITUAL (vertical) in that it is metaphorically a nationalism from Hell and from Darkness, an ethical and aesthetic allegiance to the Kingdom Of Evil. Of course I share (I say " I " because it is not necessarily the case for the other members) some principles of National-socialism but I reject some too. To my mind, without being necessarily NS, real BM is always extreme right-wing music — be it from Asia or Latin America as extreme-right politics are not the appanage of the white race — and it is always Satanic.


9. Another thing I've often wondered and am imploring your 'definition' of - what's the meaning behind the logo? I absolutely love it, but find a certain degree of twisted humor behind it, too...

The death's-head is smiling. So, in spite of all, it lives. We are walking corpses, I have written it in the introduction to the interview featured in the album. But its smile is cynical, malicious and sardonic. It expresses an aristocratic sneer, haughty towards mankind, and an amused disgust. The death's-head is as we say it " une tête brûlée " (French expression, literally " a burnt head " translated as " daredevil " in English). It is one-eyed to show the blindness of our fanaticism.


10. And if I'm to ask for yet more clearly defined terms, what are the lyrical subjects on 'La Sanie des siecles - Panegyrique de la degenerescence'? I'm guessing there's an overall theme or themes, yes?

A parallel between mediaeval and modern apocalypse; the decline of the current world and the desire to see it die out since it cannot be saved; vengeance and the fantasized return of our Own (our Own: a fallen nobility humiliated socially, psychically and physiologically) are the leading themes of the album. Annihilating the world which has annihilated us. It invites people to do so.


11. With this album, it appears (and sounds) like Peste Noire is a full 'band' now whereas, obviously, you were solo before. Is this (perceived) collaboration invigorating, as far as getting new input into the PN sound? Or can it be frustrating in that it's not solely a extension/representation of yourself anymore, but of a few additional members?

I keep control of the composition, i.e guitar riffs which are the leading soul. Winterhalter (drums) and Indria (bass) set these riffs in motion, propel them, enrich them and build over them giving them the most perfect colour. They refine and expand PN. If I had to lose these two individuals, PN would not disappear but would get much poorer given the absence of similar musicians in BM. The same applies to Neige who will compose some titles — his musical sensitiveness is very close to mine. Therefore, the two new members — Neige has always been a member, except in 2005 — gave a great energy to PN, which has now become an undefeatable commando. The only things I will never share are the concept and the surrounding universe (musical, aesthetic and textual), which have grown and matured in my brain only. That is why I am the one who answers to your interview. I am the Word and the Miry Spirit of PN. They are PN's body and armour. Far from being frustrated, I am stronger and better armed.

Wild Law, Dark Ecology, Silent Animals

On Nature and Melancholy: The Silent Animal
by Tom Bailey

In medieval European literature, it is a theme in commentaries on the Apocalypse that, before the day of God’s judgement, animals, plants and stones are all endowed a voice, through which they cry out to God. One poem, the anonymous “Quindecim Signa ante diem Judicii” (‘The Fifteen Signs Before the Day of Judgement’), describes a scene in which all creation laments the sins of man:

“The same day, a wondyr it is,
As the prophecy tellyth it truly:
That all thynge shall speke then,
And cry in the earthe aftyr the stain of man,
And bemoan themselves of our sins
Right as they may speke.”[1] [Spelling partially modernised]

Likewise, in similar commentaries all manner of inanimate objects from the vegetable and mineral kingdoms rise and do battle with one another, before lamenting the sins of man in a language that only God can comprehend. Whether or not man can understand this language, it is unspecified.

Whether we agree with the severity of their tones or not, a legion of climate scientists and journalists has been warning us that we are on the cusp of a similar apocalypse. Indeed, different kind of judgement has also been called for, that of Wild Law, the concept of a South African lawyer, Cormac Cullinan. He provides an interesting critique of a grossly anthropocentric legal system, in which the interests and fictional ‘rights’ of humans dominate above all other concerns. Since other species are outlawed by this system, when the opposition between land development and ecosystem preservation comes about, the former inevitably wins. Cullinan proposes a framework of Earth Jurisprudence, whereby the members of what he calls the “Earth Community” must be granted similar rights as humans in legal cases. Working under the aegis of ‘Gaia’ theory, scientific holism and the interdependence of all species for the sustenance of life on Earth, Cullinan attempts to assign a right to anything which fulfils its evolutionary function on Earth, and that helps to develop a balance of life within a web of other beings. These other beings, rather than remaining natural objects, become legal subjects. And this is not simply theory: there are legal firms practicing along these lines around the world – for instance, Client Earth, based in London. Despite the importance of Cullinan’s expedient thinking, it is a cruel reminder that, at the point of granting the natural object legal subjectivity, it is we who are speaking for the other species.

Until recent times, Western philosophy has concluded that there is one, insurmountable metaphysical attribute which separates man from the animals: language. This is not simply denying other species the ability to communicate – for all species clearly do – but denying the ability for others to communicate in a means as complex as human language, or communicate in any way that remotely approaches intelligibility or proximity to the human language. It is a remarkable and sometimes unnerving thought to think that humans have evolved on such a path that we do not understand the language of other species; that there is an (as of yet) unbridgeable cognitive gap between us and animals and plants. More to the point, can other species speak amongst themselves? And why is it, perhaps, that evolution is means whereby the signs of another species are only vaguely intelligible, if at all, to another?

Problems arise when a species begins to consider its different quality of communication as a mark of its own superiority, and such has happened with mankind. The ability to speak human language has become synonymous with the ability be conscious, to reflect upon oneself, and to contemplate death. Animals, because they do not speak, are considered to be less reflectively conscious. A concept which epitomises this idea, and which has become an axis for debate and contention within the humanities during the last two decades, is the following tripartite division by philosopher Martin Heidegger:

The human has a world
The animal is poor in the world
The stone has no world

Briefly, Heidegger defines the ‘world’ not as a physical entity such as the earth or a tree, but as a state of poietic, metaphysical revelation of the truth of those objects, earth or tree. And these things reveal their essence through human language. The animal, because it theoretically possesses no language, is only poor in the world – it perceives the existence of objects, but the true essence of these objects is not revealed to them. Needless to say, the conscious-less stone has no world.

Another Modernist philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin (although opposed to Heidegger’s ideas) demonstrates a similar emphasis on human language being the highest form of communication among all species. His theological arguments are stylistically dazzling as they are enigmatic, and here is not the space to do this writer critical justice. Suffice to say that he grants all things, animate and inanimate, an essence of linguicity, all of which find their essential truth in the human act of naming. One of Benjamin’s most scintillant essays, ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’ (1916), provides the following short review of Genesis, naming, and what Benjamin identifies as the muteness of nature:

“The life of man in pure language-mind was blissful. Nature, however, is mute. True, it can be clearly felt in the second chapter of Genesis how this muteness, named by man, itself became bliss, only of lower degree. Friedrich Miller has Adam say to the animals that leave him after he has named them, 'And saw by the nobility with which they leaped away from me that the man had given them a name'.

"After the Fall, however when God’s word curses the ground, the appearance of nature is deeply changed. Now begins its other muteness, which we mean by the deep sadness of nature. It is a metaphysical truth that all nature would begin to lament if it were endowed with language. (Though to ‘endow with language’ is more than to ‘make able to speak’). This proposition has a double meaning. It means, first: she would lament language itself.

"Speechlessness: That is the great sorrow of nature (and for the sake of her redemption the life and language of man – not only, as is supposed, of the poet – are in nature). This proposition means secondly: she would lament. Lament, however, is the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language; it contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath; and even when there is only a rustling of plants, in it there is always a lament. Because she is mute, nature mourns.”[2]

Benjamin’s poetical criticism and the conviction of his language can make some immediately sceptical to his truth claims. Yet without doubt he best identifies articulates the sadness felt by man amidst a nature that does not respond to language. Perturbed by the lack of a response, the human is reminded of its loneliness, and a melancholy disposition becomes inescapable.

The feeling is often intensified in relation to biodiversity loss in the face of climate change. The Anthropocene Extinction, as it is termed, the sixth great extinction event in the history of the planet, is already under way. If emissions do not undergo immediate and radical cutbacks, then the background rate of species extinction may be one hundred times faster than it already is. Without anywhere near as many species with whom we can share our planet, it will become a far lonelier place.

The loss of species is of course reason enough for grief. Inarticulable grief. In denying other organisms the same superior levels of consciousness as humans, man has made the profound mistake of forgetting his compassion towards the suffering of others. French philosopher Jacques Derrida has gone as far to call the mechanised mass-slaughter of animals for meat and other purposes deserves no other term but genocide:

“No one can seriously deny, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves, on order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide…

"the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organisation and exploitation of artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside every supposed norm of life proper to animals…”[3]

At the heart of Derrida’s enquiry is a prolonged enquiry into the barbarity with which Western philosophy has approached the concept of ‘the animal’. The conceptualisation of the myriad of species into ‘the animal’ or ‘the animal kingdom’ is exemplary of this stultifying inability of man to empathise with that which does not speak his language. Derrida’s concern is that humans must attempt identify with their own animality, our own animal nakedness, in order to relearn how to live amongst other species. It’s his contention that in the immediate moment of human nakedness before an the gaze of an animal, the true experience of the both limit of the human and a deeper sense of what it is to live with a another entirely separate species emerge:

“As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the border-crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself. And in these moments of nakedness, under the gaze of the animal, everything can happen to me, I am like a child ready for the apocalypse…

"When the instant of extreme passion passes, and I find peace again, then I can relax and speak of the beasts of the Apocalypse, visit them in a museum, see them in a painting…”[4]

After the experience, he will speak of animals as conceptual objects (in art, in a museum, etc.) but for that moment of nakedness he began to relearn what it was to be of the human species.

In the above passage Derrida also mentions the “abyssal limit of the human” felt when face to face with an entirely separate species. The mention of ‘abyss’ is important here, because it recalls the vitally important relation between human melancholy and space. The melancholic oscillates between the exposed sadness and agoraphobia of an abyssal and limitless space, and the claustrophobic dread of a living within prison. It is these two paradoxical attitudes towards space that I believe haunt the contemporary human consciousness. On the on hand, the science of the last two centuries has revealed to us that we are living in a limitless expansion of space. The again, as the climate change scenarios and prophecies proliferate throughout the media, we are experiencing a resurgence of the Malthusian argument which underpinned Darwin’s understanding of evolution. As a population expands, it will exhaust its resources, which will lead to keeping this expansion within its natural limits. Malthusianism, at heart, is about reasserting spatial limitation. We are told that 3 planets will be needed to feed nine billion humans, and we recoil at the thought of such unthinkable claustrophobia here on Earth. From another perspective, the excessive urbanisation and technologisation of the planet creates an increasing cognitive distance between man and nature. An inability to connect the trees in the forest or the cows in the field to mass-produced furniture or burgers develops. Humans no longer know what nature is, other than its own empty appearance. According to another modernist philosopher, Theodor Adorno, in such a situation “nature turns into an irresistible allegory of imprisonment.”[5]

Then again, the idea of an abyssal, limitlessness nature has given rise to the dread of the inescapable purposelessness and futility of human action, a wallowing insignificance that the more we think about our relation to vast universe, the more we are as motes of dust in the sunlight. This is a purposelessness to which writers such as Dawkins stoically refer, and which is softened by evoking the wonderful and creative mechanism of evolution that has occurred amid a sea of nothingness. A similar argument can be seen in an article by George Monbiot:

“Like other life forms, we exist only to replicate ourselves. We have become so complex only because that enables us to seize more energy. One day, natural selection will shake us off our planet. Our works will be forgotten. There will be nothing capable of remembering.

"But a curious component of our complexity is that, in common with other complex forms, we have evolved the capacity for suffering. We suffer when the world becomes a less pleasant and fascinating place. We suffer because we perceive the suffering of others. It seems to me that the only higher purpose we could possibly possess is to relieve suffering: our own and that of other people and other animals. This is surely sufficient cause for any project we might attempt. It is sufficient cause for the protection of fine art or rare books. It is sufficient cause for the protection or rare wildlife.”[6]

Amid an apparently meaningless universe, where things are not conscious of any purpose they already fulfil anyway (such as self-preservation), humans, who as a species are burdened with a necessity for purpose, must relieve suffering through an appreciation of aesthetic brilliance. Monbiot’s article is titled ‘Natural Aesthetes’, and in it he addresses some reasons why conservationists and others find it such a difficulty to express the deep importance of biodiversity. He laments the state of conservation when all it can do, in some cases, is to stress the utilitarian value of a species (this frog’s poison might one day provide a cure for cancer). Instead, Monbiot argues for conservation on purely aesthetic grounds:

“The legacy of exclusion makes conservation look harder to justify on the grounds of aesthetics. But it seems to me that this is the only sensible argument that can be made. It is surely sufficient to say that wildlife should be preserved because it is wonderful”[7]

The argument here is resoundingly similar to an influential essay by biologist N.J. Collar, titled ‘Beyond Value: Biodiversity and Freedom of the Mind’, which attempts to confront the problem of how the argument for species preservation must make its case in line with the economic value of that species. Instead, like Monbiot, argues for an inherent link between biodiversity and a mental freedom to wander and to imagine possibilities:

“The diminishment of nature is the diminishment of man. Extinction is the negation of the possible; it creates poverty in the mind. Our capacity to experience, to imagine, to contemplate, erodes with the erosion of nature, and with it we forfeit piecemeal — landscape by landscape, site by site, species by species — the freedom of mind which yet we cherish as ultimately the greatest feature of our human identity.”[8]

There is indeed virtue in this argument, and I believe that Collar is right that in addressing conservation we must begin first of all to reconsider our underlying mental attitude towards the natural world. But within both his and Monbiot’s articles there is nonetheless the saddening sense that notions of ‘wonder’ and ‘poetic mental freedom’ which biodiversity inspires are palliative aesthetics, somewhat decadent and aware of their own futility as an argument for co-existing with another species.

Conservation is indeed a melancholy science – it is burdened with the task of defending the right of a species not to die. Without ever communicating with its defendant or comprehending what it truly feels, it must plead to a jury which is hand in hand with the executioners. Perhaps, as Collar argues, conservation needs to reassert its foundations as to why it is doing what it is doing, to arm itself with a greater and more irrefutable arsenal of arguments that it already has at its disposal.

Another problem with halting ecosystem destruction, I believe, lies with human melancholy itself. In one sense, climate change is a continuation of the Genesis narrative: once the exit from Eden has begun, an already profane Earth becomes more and more profane, the further we attempt to ameliorate it. It seems that we are caught in a cycle from which it will be difficult to escape, where sadness at the Earth’s destruction will compound upon greater sadness as that destruction becomes worse. The mood of the times, as one prominent psychoanalytical theorist claimed at a climate change seminar, is melancholy. Another literary theorist, Tim Morton of the University of California, Davis, has come up with the idea of Dark Ecology: from his point of view we are past the ‘tipping point’ of destruction and already in the midst of the catastrophe of global warming. It does not exist somewhere in the future, it is with us now. The challenge for artists, writers and others is to understand and articulate the grief that this is already happening. Speaking in a seminar in California, he talks of a kind of rite of passage whereby we can come to comprehend the interconnectedness of all species. A realisation of ecosystem destruction, according to Morton, first incites a feeling of guilt, then of shame, then depression, then sadness, then of an inner openness, in which we realise the interconnectedness of beings.[9]

Melancholy is a feeling that can be wallowed in, or it can be overcome – at least, I think this is where Morton is pointing. From a personal view it seems that, in relation to climate change, everyone is mourning in expectation of loss, because sadness in the twenty-first century is such a seductively simple emotion. It is a challenge and an art to think one’s way out of it. Climate change and biodiversity loss are indeed terrible, almost inconceivable things. Sadness at what is happening and guilt for being, even to a minor extent, complicit in the destruction are perhaps instinctive reactions. But following this impulse I suggest that there is a need, amongst those defending the environment, for a certain exculpation and overcoming of bad conscience. In melancholy, as I have touched upon here, lies the perceived disjunction of a species and its environment. If humans dwell too long upon the guilt and mourn what is lost, then the more that the climate changes, the more they will believe that they are walking ever further from Eden over an increasingly unbearable Earth. And such sadness and guilt leads to despair, a stagnant pool whence no good action springs.

---

[1] Quindecim Signa ante diem Judicii" (ed. in Furnivall, Hymns to the Virgin and Christ EETS OS 23, 118-25.)

[2] Benjamin, W. (trans. E. Jephcott) ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’ Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1986) p.329-330.

[3] Derrida, J. (Trans D. Wills) ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ Critical Enquiry (Winter 2002) p.394.

[4] Derrida, J. (Trans. D Wills) ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ Critical Enquiry 28 (Winter 2002) p.381.

[5] Adorno, T. ‘Part III: Models. World Spirit and Natural History. Excursus on Hegel’ Negative Dialectics (1966), p.351. Available online at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1966/negative-dialectics/ch04.htm

[6] Monbiot, G., ‘Natural Aesthetes’ in Bring on the Apocalypse (London: Guardian Books 2008), p.56.

[7] Monbiot, G., ‘Natural Aesthetes’ in Bring on the Apocalypse (London: Guardian Books 2008), p.55.

[8] Collar, N. J. ‘Beyond Value: Biodiversity and Freedom of the Mind’ in Global Ecology and Biogeography 12, p.269.

[9] Talk available at: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/

Source: http://www.conservationtoday.org/index.php?/Editorials/Tom-Bailey/On-Nature-and-Melancholy-The-Silent-Animal.html

Melancholy dialectics

"Our truly essential experiences are encapsulated and invisible in our lives, as seeds. That which is fruitful in the fullest sense lies enclosed within the hard shell of the incommunicable, of immediacy. Nothing distinguishes genuine productivity from its failed or inauthentic forms more clearly than the question: has the man experienced at the right time - between fiftenn and twenty-five - what seals his mouth, what silences him, makes him knowing and reflective, what gives him an experience to which he will always testify, never betray, never rashly reveal?"
- Walter Benjamin, "Theologische Kritik, Zu Willy Hass"

What comes when folk fades away

Vydraga

Jurij Dobriakov: What Comes when Folk Fades Away (Music Export Lithuania)

It was a golden age when, in the era of traditional ways, folklore was an integral part of life, governing, structuring and enriching the essential everyday cycles and rituals. Back in those days it was at least clear that folklore was not a placebo or a simulacrum of any kind, since it grew out of vital practice organically. It was part of reality as authentic as harvesting barley or making bread.

Things are not so simple anymore, for better or for worse. Technically speaking, folk music is not necessary anymore, except some remote cultures that have retained the old ritualistic ways. There are not so many of those left nowadays, however, and it may be argued that the scenes for folkderived or folk-related music forms (dubbed habitually as post-folk, neo-folk, free folk, etc.) are much more developed in the countries that have progressed far beyond the traditional cosmology that once was the governing principle underlying all creative activities.

So why would one need folk music at the beginning of the 21st century in a fairly advanced country like Lithuania? And what happens to folk music when it becomes a thing in itself, detached from its primary function and freed from its 'orthodox' forms, serving as just one of the myriad elements that comprise the kaleidoscopic lifestyle and attitude of today's urban, alternative-minded individuals?

Nostalgia for the utopian past

It is hardly deniable that nostalgic sentiments play a certain part in any revival of traditional forms. What does folk music stand for in the minds of its revivalists, re-interpreters and reformers? First and foremost, it brings to mind things like patriotism, heroism, the glorious past, ancestry, authenticity, pagan mythology and ethnocentrism. One shall also bear in mind that in Lithuania, the term 'folk music' is predominantly used to refer to ethnic musical tradition, unlike, for example, in North America.

From the practical perspective, however, all 'new folk' is 'authentic' to the same degree as any other music, since it is not an essential structural element of its listeners' everyday life. Thus, it assumes a rather decorative quality (this is not to suggest that new folk music may not possess certain spirituality, emotional depth and musical density, which may be characteristic of any contemporary musical form as well).

Speaking of the Lithuanian post-folk scene, the diversity of forms here is quite impressive: from close-to-the-original recreations of historically known archaic ritual folklore (the prime example would be Kūlgrinda, the ritual pagan folk collective known particularly for their renderings of the old Lithuanian polyphonic sutartinė song form) to modern industrial and post-industrial music that incorporates little or no actual folk material, relying on archaic, pagan imagery and atmosphere instead (such acts as Girnų Giesmės, Lauxna Lauksna and Oorchach).

Yet even the most careful renderings of the surviving ethnographical records, boosted with neopagan attitude, should not be taken for granted and viewed as 'pure' or 'authentic' folk (let alone the electronic, experimental and polystylistic free-folk manipulations). Rather, it is what today's folks think 'authentic' archaic folk music should sound like. Most post-folk performers are far from being escapists and outsiders; they take part in today's world just as all other people. It is logical to assume then that they are united by the specific nostalgia for the utopian pagan past that is perceived as 'better' than contemporary reality – fairer, purer and, ultimately, more real. The surrounding world was veiled with mystery, the deities were always at hand, and strong, virtuous people lived in concord with the Mother Nature. Such is the mythical pure primal universe that many people feel vaguely nostalgic for every now and then – nostalgic, but not unable to live in the present.

It seems that many of these artists wish to reinvent the past they have never experienced, rather than to relive it. As such it is an aesthetically curious and appealing phenomenon. If they are not to become peculiar anachronistic simulacra or mere impersonators, the key thing for post-folk musicians, it seems, is to maintain a bit of a critical distance and avoid falling into the trap of simulated authenticity and unreserved identification with the glorified pagan lifestyle, as attractive as it may be. Post-folk is perhaps best understood as a brand of contemporary music inspired by traditional forms.

Closer to the living tradition?

One principal thing that distinguishes Lithuanian folk music tradition is its continuity. While in most of Western Europe folk music is something hailing from the era of wandering minstrels and troubadours, in Lithuania, like in a number of other Eastern/Central European and Baltic countries, it was preserved in a relatively pure form by rural communities well into the early twentieth century.

That passage about Western Europe is an exaggeration, of course. But it is still an actual fact that Lithuanians are the last pagan nation of Europe (which seems to have never really abandoned the old religion altogether, incorporating its elements into the newly introduced Christian faith or, in some cases, secretly observing old pagan rites) and, therefore, 'remember' their folk roots slightly better. Even the strongly promoted 'fakelore' of the Soviet era, meant to become an ideologically safe substitute for the traditional folk culture, did not manage to erase the knowledge originating from proper ethnographic research carried out earlier.

Therefore, while West European post-folk often has a connection to older traditional culture whose presence can be felt within the imagery employed, its Lithuanian counterpart seems to be making better use of whatever evidence and knowledge is left of the actual archaic (pre-Christian) instrumental and vocal forms of folklore. This makes the Lithuanian variety of post-folk (and especially the reconstructed ritual folk music) sound fairly authentic, as if it were really performed in that precise way for ages (surprisingly enough, that holds true even when distinctively modern instruments are thrown in the mix).

One must stay at least somewhat sober though, as the only real factor enabling such continuity is the oral heritage passed on from generation to generation, which, even if one assumes it is passed on in uninterrupted succession, is bound to be distorted in one way or another. Even so, the magnetism of this pseudo-authenticity is undeniable.

On the darker side

Most of Lithuanian folk music (speaking about the ethnographic renderings) is characterised by a fairly minor mood (some of the traditional sutartinės, especially as performed by Kūlgrinda, even have a somewhat psychedelic, darkly ethereal quality). That might be the reason behind the fact that post-folk is predominantly associated with the dark music scene in Lithuania, even though the actual sound might not bear any resemblance to dark music whatsoever (as in the case of Atalyja, a world music-influenced folk-rock band).

There are some other reasons, too, that might explain this phenomenon. During the mid-to-late 90's upsurge of interest in the old pagan culture, the majority of those rediscovering it were previously or simultaneously involved in the heavy music scene – mostly metal and industrial. Later on they began organising pagan-themed events and festivals (Mėnuo Juodaragis – translating as The Blackhorn Moon – being the most important one, set to take place for the 11th time the coming summer), to which they invited ritual pagan folk collectives and folk-rock bands, alongside the more radical industrial, post-industrial, and folk/pagan metal acts. The latter trend of post-folk music was just another result of the metalheads' taste for the old, largely martial folklore.

Especially dark-themed are the sub-styles that fuse folk influences with industrial, post-industrial, metal and dark ambient sound – the already mentioned Lauxna Lauksna and Girnų Giesmės, Vilkduja, Donis, Zpoan Vtenz, Andaja, etc. These demonstrate the somber or, in some cases, war-like nostalgia for the past heathen world (so characteristic of the most of Lithuanian postfolk) quite vividly, some in an abstract and others in a more direct, literal manner. For example, the music of one-man project Girnų Giesmės, a.k.a. Oro! Oro!, is purely electronic, yet it somehow manages to express a strangely cosmological, archaic quality, being different from the majority of similar electronic acts in an almost ineffable way. There are several notable exceptions to the abovementioned trend, however. One is the recently revived 'improfolk' collective Ženklas X, which incorporates folk-derived sonorities and rhythmic structures into a seamless stream of improvisational music, free jazz, world music elements and sonic experiments. Another example is the appropriately named Keisto folkloro grupė (The Weird Folklore Group), whose last album features a number of traditional Lithuanian Advent songs rearranged in a way that makes them sound almost like Eastern mantras – through the use of 'exotic' instrumentation and particularly slow meters.

To a certain extent, the mentioned folk-rock band Atalyja, which combines the elements of funk, rock, jazz and Oriental music, falls out of the dark folk 'circle' as well, even though it appears at the dark-themed neo-pagan events once in a while. The same can be said about Liberté, an adventurous neo-folk band whose melancholic sound has many 'exotic' features – again, with some reservations. Žalvarinis, the folk-rock band that was originally a collaboration between the female members of Kūlgrinda and the metal band Ugnėlakis, also sounds considerably lighter than most other Lithuanian acts that fuse electric guitars and folk elements, not avoiding a touch of jazz and blues.

Still, most of those are released or distributed by the same labels that normally deal with more esoteric neo-folk, pagan/folk metal and folk-tinged industrial music (most prominently, Dangus Records, the organiser of the Mėnuo Juodaragis festival), which makes precise distinctions impossible. In Lithuania, it seems, there is a certain (and wide enough) circle of people interested in the old traditions of ethnic culture and open to very different interpretations thereof – from Ženklas X' abstract improvisational avant-folk to Kūlgrinda's recreations of archaic rites to Vilkduja's dark folk-flavored neo-cabaret.

The rise of a different concept of folk

For some time already, the monopoly on the use of the word folk itself is being challenged in Lithuania. There are increasingly more musicians (and listeners) who begin understanding folk music not only in terms of traditional ethnic culture, but also in the more North American way – as a singer/songwriter type of acoustic (or semiacoustic) music to be performed in an intimate and informal setting. Such musicians often refer to themselves as 'bards' and classify their music as 'sung poetry' – a genre that is presently very popular among Lithuanian urban youth.

Alina Orlova, the recent discovery, is a good example of the quirky acoustic folk music closer to the so-called 'freak folk' of America, exemplified by the likes of CocoRosie and Devendra Banhart, than to Lithuanian ethnic music. Eglė Sirvydytė (and the like) plays more in the vein of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, even though an occasional bard-style rendering of a traditional Lithuanian folk song is also possible. Obscure singer/songwriter Lukas Devita is perhaps the only one leaning towards the 60's/70's folky psychedelia and 'outsider folk'.

The type of music that is still practically nonexistent in Lithuania is the contemporary psychedelic folk that has developed vibrant scenes in the U.S., Japan and Finland – championed by the bands like Six Organs of Admittance, Pelt, Kemialliset Ystävät, Fursaxa and many others. Maybe this brand of folk is yet to come: imagine if Lithuanian bards of today became weary of their melancholy and lyricism and tried something more daring!

© Jurij Dobriakov

Lithuanian Music Link No. 16
Source: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=80201952&blogId=414644601

Tigersprung: Self-referential

"the modernite...is, by definition, ephemeral and eternal at the same time. in its urge to be radically new, it has to be conscious of what came before. fashion is the perfect vehicle for fusing novel aesthetics with an underlying recourse to the past. but it is only the truly modern artist who uses this device deliberately. his or her art becomes self-referential, ironically conscious of the quotation from the past...it was sartorial fashion that made modernity aware of its constant urge and necessity to quote from itself." - U. Lehmann, Tigersprung

On theater...A passing comment

all panoramas and dioramas, including their variations, are enveloped in containers that are as large as a georama dome and as small as a honeycomb box for the diorama model i make. on one level, the containers control light and, therefore, what can be and cannot be viewed. on another, they create, what bachelard calls, an illusion of shelter that allows one 'to dream,' to wander. to bachelard, many memories are impregnated in a house where every nook and corridor serves to delineate them. the more securely they are fixed in space, he claims, the sounder they are. the notion of memory then begins to shift from time to space where determination of dates for our intimacy becomes no longer relevant; rather "the spaces in which we have suffered...enjoyed, desired and compromised...remain indelible within us." in tsai ming liang's goodbye, dragon inn, the architectural space of the fu-ho theater also contains the cityscape of various people, noise, activities, and even ghosts. the theater is the city's oneric house where many movies have been screened and stories scratched onto the heavily textured walls and floors of the building. it is a residue of which the city has left its traces; it represents a soon to be lost aesthetic shelter.

if goodbye is about capturing a sense of place...that is dying, diorama is about capturing a sense of place that is about to begin. a diorama model is contained in a box, a device that controls the direction and magnitude of light so that it can appear more realistically in a photograph. it also acts as a three-dimensional stage to construct and display a potential landscape scenario. in landscape design, the diorama box houses the future of a place, steered by our curiosity to what appears strangely familiar. imagination of a designer and viewers take place in this box; beyond the three-dimensional objects in foreground and the two-dimensional photograph of a site context in background, one begins to daydream about the possible place that can come to life.

then, there is a paradox. on one hand, both movie theater and diorama box control movement and vision of a spectator; on another, they serve as a bachelardian shelter that encourage mental wandering. to achieve a perfect illusion of reality, earlier panorama and diorama accompanied highly calculated rotundas and props inside to manipulate spectator's vision. modern movie theaters follow the same path: a darkened room and the screen bordered with black walls or heavy curtains allow no exchange, no circulation and no communication with any outside. screening takes place in a closed space where viewers are not expected to move out of their assigned seats. every viewer faces in one direction toward the screen, toward the same film; all cellular phones must be turned off and no babies must cry. in a similiar principle, a diorama box selects, crops, and fragments landscape that only matches the designer's intention to be shown. the landscape is presented and represented as an object that demands compliance.

according to baudry, cinema presumes a subject as this passive observer. the screen reflects images, not reality; cinematic apparatus lends the film spectator the position of a trancendental subject and at the same time blocks the insight that this position is something that is constructed. baudry relates the spectator's self-misrecognition to lacan's theory of the mirror phase: at an age when it experiences its own body as uncoordinated and fragmentary, the child is provided with a visual impression of individual physical wholeness in the mirror image. the mirror image appears to him as an ideal ego; the identity available to the child, therefore, derives from a site external to itself. baudry explains: "just as the mirror assembles the fragmented body in a sort of imaginary integration of the self, the trancendental self unites the discontinous fragments of phenomena, of lived experience, into unifying meaning. through it each fragment assumes meaning by being integrated into an 'organic' unity." according to him, cinema fulfills this wish by producing a phantasmification of the subject. the cinematic apparatus is intended to be hidden in order to maintain a fiction, which exists in the first place due to a denial of a real social coercion. for baudry, the only way to break through this phantasmification was to make its production obvious and visible.

however, what baudry seems to underestimate is that this self-surgery - assembling discontinuous fragments into a body of meaningful narratives - is in fact an act of empowerment. the long, static camerawork in goodbye forces us to pause...until our eyes, either out of boredom or curiosity, begin to wander themselves in the screen searching for own meaning. even the crowd in tsai's film doesn't seem to be affected by the rules of the theater: a young couple chews on popcorn too loudly; an old man joins the auditorium at his convenient time; and the japanese tourist constantly switches his seat and pursues erotic encounter while ignoring the screening entirely. perhaps this is where freedom seeps in. and imagination. the impression of reality during cinematic experience is produced not due to what baudry claimed a denial of social coercion but due to a willingness to overcome and rebel against such coercion. and perhaps in the diorama, a small fragment of the selected landscape and its deadly silence, must i add, trigger the viewer in the same way that tsai's long, static shots did....especially in the case of diorama models, there is still a charm to its naively deceptive nature. parcell claims that because diorama is not a historical reconstruction, it retains a potential for fiction without an authorized narrator to explain what it means. also relevant is its delivery of the qualities of space not through a measured space-making but through a hybrid of suggestive materials such as barbeque brush and color pencil shavings that defy literal and to-scale conventions in landscape representation. it is a play afterall, a spectacle of deception that requires the spectators to consent to being duped; the consent, however, is not inflicted.

Cineplastics

Das cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919) by Robert Wiene (Germany)

"a street at night: yawning blackness in the background - empty, starless, abstract space, against it a square, lopsided lantern hung between lurching walls. doors and windows constructed or painted in wrenched perspective. dark segments on the pavement accentuate diminishing effect. the slinking of a brutal figure pressed against the walls and evil spots and shadings on the pavement give a sinister expression to the street. adroit diagonals lead and rivet the eye."

""a room: or rather a room that has precipitated itself in cavern-like lines, in inverted hollows of frozen waves. here space becomes cloistral and encompasses the human - a man reads at a desk. a trinagular window glares and permits the living day a voice in this composition."

- Hermann G. Scheffauer on Caligari, 1920

Haptic reality

Dioramas @ American Museum of Natural History

"journey poems, view paintings, and garden views were among the new forms of shared spatiovisual pleasure [during the eighteenth century]. they combined a sensualist theory of the imagination with the touch of physicality. a haptic consciousness was being produced. the broadening of visuality inaugurated at this time was essentially about changing the way desire was positioned: it effectively 'located' desire in space and articulated it as a spatial practice."

"working closely with topographical representation, this genre of view painting emphasized the drama of location; the portrait of the city in italian vedutismo, that is, tended toward a narrative dramatization of sites, characterized by a heightened and tactile texture of place."

- G. Bruno, Atlas of emotion: journeys in art, architecture, and film

diorama is a simulacrum of haptic reality, a design tool in which a narrative and material texture can be imagined and tested as an extension of site context. it is not necessarily a historical reconstruction, as stephen parcell argues; it retains a potential for fiction without an authorized narrator to explain what it means. it's a metaphor free from didactic feeds.

Dearth of tragedy

"where the fusion of appropriate elements is realized, we do find more than the individual poet: aeschylus is followed by sophocles and euripides; marlowe, by shakespeare, jonson, and webster; corneille, by racine. with goethe came schiller, kleist and buchner. ibsen, strindberg, and chekhov were alive in 1900. but these constellations are splendid accidents. they are extremely difficult to account for. what we should expect, and actually find, are long spells of time during which no tragedies and, in fact, no drama of any serious pretensions is being produced. but although this is a reasonable view of the matter, it is distinctly modern. it reflects the problem we are concerned with: the long pursuit of the tragic ideal. it is because there have been in english drama no successors to the elizabethans, nor in french drama any later rivals to corneille and racine; it is because the spanish theatre after calderon falls into dusty silence and because the death of buchner seems to date so precisely the close of the high period of german tragedy, that we now look on the creation of great drama as a rare and rather mysterious piece of good fortune....we cannot understand the romantic movement if we do not preceive at the heart of it the impulse toward drama. the classical imagination seeks to impose on experience attributes of order and accord. the romantic imagination injects into experience a central quality of drama and dialectic. the romantic mode is neither an ordering nor a criticism of life; it is a dramatization. and at the origins of the romantic movement lies an explicit attempt to revitalize the major forms of tragedy....the romantics believed that the vitality of drama was inseparable from the health of the body politic. that is the crux of shelley's argument in his defense of poetry: 'and it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence: and that the corruption or extinction of drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of socil life.' " - steiner


"in spite of all the unavoidable cleavages, disharmonies, animosities and antagonisms which are the perennial lot of human beings and human societies, there is a possibility--and this possibility is called culture when it is realized--of a community of men living together...in a state of tacit agreement on what the nature and meaning of human existence really is...such must have been the society for which the performances of the tragedies of aeschylus and sophocles were national celebrations; such were wide stretches of what we rather vaguely call the middle ages; such were, to judge by their artistic creations, the days of the renaissance and of elizabeth. the age of goethe, however, was not of this kind." - e. heller


"the rousseauist and romantic vision had specific psychological correlatives. it implied a radical critique of the notion of guilt. in the rousseauist mythology of conduct, a man could commit a crime either because his education had not taught him how to distinguish good and evil, or because he had been corrupted by society. responsibility lay with his schooling or environment, for evil cannot be native to the soul. and because the individual is not wholly responsible, he cannot be wholly damned. rousseauism closes the doors of hell. in the hour of truth, the criminal will be possessed with remorse. the crime will be undone or the error made good. crime leads not to punishment, but to redemption...this redemptive mythology may have social and psychological merit, freeing the spirit from the black forebodings of calvinism. but one thing is clear: such a view of the human condition is radically optimistic. it cannot engender any natural form of tragic drama. the romantic vision of life is non-tragic. in authentic tragedy, the gates of hell stand open and damnation is real. the tragic personage cannot evade responsibility...to ask of the gods why oedipus should have been chosen for his agony or why macbeth should have met the witches on his path, is to ask for reason and justification from the voiceless night. there is no answer. why should there be? if there was, we would be dealing with just or unjust suffering, as do parables and cautionary tales, not with tragedy." -g.s.

On tragedy

"...i emphasize this because i believe that any realistic notion of tragic drama must start from the fact of catastrophe. tragedies end badly. the tragic personage is broken by forces which can neither be fully understood nor overcome by rational prudence. this again is crucial. where the causes of disaster are temporal, where the conflict can be resolved through technical or social means, we may have serious drama, but not tragedy. more pliant divorce laws could not alter the fate of agamemnon; social psychiatry is no answer to oedipus. but saner economic relations or better plumbing can resolve some of the grave crises in the dramas of ibsen. the distinction should be borne sharply in mind. tragedy is irreparable. it cannot lead to just and material compensation for past suffering. job gets back double the number of she-asses; so he should, for god has enacted upon him a parable of justice. oedipus does not get back his eyes or his sceptre over thebes. tragic drama tells us that the spheres of reason, order, and justice are terribly limited and that no progress in our science or technical resources will enlarge their relevance. outside and within man is l'autre, the 'otherness' of the world. call it what you will: a hidden or malevolent god, blind fate, the solicitations of hell, or the brute fury of our animal blood. it mocks us and destroys us. in certain rare instances, it leads us after destruction to some incomprehensible repose." - g. steiner in the death of tragedy