Cullinane Journal 2009 February 16-28

Time and Chance
continued

Lasting Significance

Or perhaps in a name...

If you liked Badiou
(previous 5 entries),
you'll love Zizek!

Truth and
Consequences:

From Roger Cohen
to Alain Badiou
to Wallace Stevens

"That summer of '68, I was in a vast crowd in London's sunlit Hyde Park listening to Pink Floyd's free concert:

One inch of love is one inch of shadow
Love is the shadow that ripens the wine
Set the controls for the heart of the sun!

Right on! Anything seemed possible...."

-- Roger Cohen, May 28, 2008, on 1968,
"The Year That Changed the World"

"Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris."

-- European Graduate School biography

"The Event of Truth,"
European Graduate School video:

Quoted by Badiou at
European Graduate School,
August 2002:

We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano and in speech,
As in a page of poetry—
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos.
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.

-- Wallace Stevens,
from "July Mountain"

Or Pennsylvania:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090226-View.jpg

See Ash Wednesday.

'One inch of love, one inch of ashes'-- Li Shangyin

Midnight

"Dead time lasts for one hour-- from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin' good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin' evil...."

-- Glenna Whitley, "Voodoo Justice"

Cover of 'Theory and the Common from Marx to Badiou,' by Patrick McGee (2009)

From the Curriculum Vitae
of Patrick McGee:

"Theory and the Common
from Marx to Badiou
(Palgrave 2009, scheduled for
March 31 publication)"

Thanks for the warning.

From the publisher:

Using a method that combines analysis, memoir, and polemic, McGee writes experimentally about a series of thinkers who ruptured linguistic and social hierarchies, from Marx, to Gramsci, to Badiou.

About the Author

Patrick McGee is McElveen Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

Theory Postmortem: Derrida
Political Sense and Sensibility: Gramsci to Bourdieu
Genealogies of Common Sense: Marx and Nietzsche
Folklores of the Future: Wilde and Lawrence
The Transcendental Ordinary: Wittgenstein to Badiou

Related Categories

Found in: Cultural Theory, Literary Theory & Criticism, Ethics

STICKS NIX HICK PIX

in the Garden
of Good and Evil

Ideas of Reference
for Ash Wednesday

Happy trails to you...

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090225-Trails.jpg

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090224-PAlotteryMardiGras.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

These numbers from yesterday
(Mardi Gras, 2009) are random,
yet have a particular
meaning for me and
perhaps one other person.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090225-VachelLindsay.jpg

-- Google Book Search

Hollywood Nihilism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism

Tina Fey to Steve Martin
at the Oscars:
"Oh, Steve, no one wants
to hear about our religion
... that we made up."

Tina Fey and Steve Martin at the 2009 Oscars

From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:

... in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer...

A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination.

Superficially the young men's philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls "pantheistic solipsism"-- noting, however, that "This article has multiple issues."

As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism-- a philosophy (properly called "eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism") devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.

Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up-- namely, the properties of space.

Heinlein:

"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three-- you seem to be smart at such projections."
I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it."

Stevens:

A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:

For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:

The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...

The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,

Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.

The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
 point A
In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango's rind.

                    (Collected Poems, 528)

Stevens's rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests "nothingness" to one literary critic:

B. J. Leggett, "Stevens's Late Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens-- On the poem "The Rock":

"... the barren rock of the title is Stevens's symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, 'That in which space itself is contained'.... Its subject is its speaker's sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it."

This interpretation might appeal to Joan Didion, who, as author of the classic novel Play It As It Lays, is perhaps the world's leading expert on Hollywood nihilism.

More positively...

Space is, of course, also a topic
in pure mathematics...
For instance, the 6-dimensional
affine space (or the corresponding
5-dimensional projective space)

The 4x4x4 cube

over the two-element Galois field
can be viewed as an illustration of
Stevens's metaphor in "The Rock."

Heinlein should perhaps have had in mind the Klein correspondence when he discussed "some way to project six dimensions into three." While such a projection is of course trivial for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in linear algebra, the following remarks by Philippe Cara present a much more meaningful mapping, using the Klein correspondence, of structures in six (affine) dimensions to structures in three.

Cara:

Here the 6-dimensional affine
space contains the 63 points
of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
the 3-dimensional affine
space contains as its 8 points
Conwell's eight "heptads," as in
Generating the Octad Generator.

Another Manic Monday--
McGee and Smee

At the Oscars, 2009

Related material:

Frame Tales and Dickung

Themes and
Variations

Horace Brock with his collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

The Boston Globe today on a current Museum of Fine Arts exhibit of works collected by one Horace Brock--

"Designed objects, Brock writes, can be broken down into 'themes' and 'transformations.' A theme is a motif, such as an S-curve; a transformation might see that curve appear elsewhere in the design, but stretched, rotated 90 degrees, mirrored, or otherwise reworked.

Aesthetic satisfaction comes from an apprehension of how those themes and transformations relate to each other, or of what Brock calls their 'relative complexity.' Basically-- and this is the nub of it-- 'if the theme is simple, then we are most satisfied when its echoes are complex... and vice versa.'"

Related material:

Theme

and Variations

See also earlier tributes to
Hollywood Game Theory

and Hollywood Religion:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090222-SoundOfSilence.jpg

For some variations on the
above checkerboard theme, see
Finite Relativity and
A Wealth of Algebraic Structure.

Design at Harvard:
Natural or Unnatural?

From the Harvard
Graduate School of Design--

Call for Entries:
The Space of Representation

DEADLINE FEBRUARY 27, 2009 8PM EST

"According to Henri Lefebvre, the social production of space has three components: spatial practice, the representation of space, and the space of representation. The latter two are integral to both design and the review process."

Also according to Henri Lefebvre:

An 'epoch-making event' from Lefebvre, 'The Production of Space'

This is clearly nonsense.
It is also, like
much else at Harvard,
damned Marxist nonsense.

I recommend instead
James Joyce on space --

Dagger Definitions

From 'Ulysses,' 1922 first edition, page 178-- 'dagger definitions'

The Graduate

Today's New York Times:

New York Times executive Mary Jacobus dies at 52

The Times goes on to say...

"A native of Buffalo, Ms. Jacobus
graduated from Le Moyne College
in Syracuse."

She died yesterday.

A quotation from
yesterday's entries
may be relevant:

"Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint...."

-- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

In memory of Mary Jacobus-- Clint Eastwood sings 'Accentuate the Positive'

Related material:

From a previous appearance
of the Eastwood meditation
in this journal:

Click on image
for details.

The Cross
of Constantine

mentioned in
this afternoon's entry
"Emblematizing the Modern"
was the object of a recent
cinematic chase sequence
(successful and inspiring)
starring Mira Sorvino
at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.

In memory of
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,
dead by his own hand
on this date
four years ago --

Rolling Stone memorial to Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Click for details.

There is
another sort of object
we may associate with a
different museum and with
a modern Constantine ...
See "Art Wars for MoMA"
(Dec. 14, 2008).

This object, modern
rather than medieval,
is the ninefold square:

It may suit those who,
like Rosalind Krauss
(see "Emblematizing"),
admire the grids of modern art
but view any sort of Christian
cross with fear and loathing.

For some background that
Dr. Thompson might appreciate,
see notes on Geometry and Death
in this journal, June 1-15, 2007,
and the five Log24 entries
ending at 9 AM Dec. 10. 2006,
which include this astute
observation by J. G. Ballard:

"Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom."

Selah.

A Kind of Cross

Descartes portrait

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."

-- Thomas Pynchon in
Gravity's Rainbow

Click for source.

Related material:

A memorial service
held at 2 PM today at the
U.S. Space & Rocket Center
in Huntsville, Alabama, and
today's previous entry.

Emblematizing
the Modern

The following meditation was
inspired by the recent fictional
recovery, by Mira Sorvino
in "The Last Templar,"
of a Greek Cross --
"the Cross of Constantine"--
and by the discovery, by
art historian Rosalind Krauss,
of a Greek Cross in the
art of Ad Reinhardt.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090220-CrossOfDescartes.jpg

The Cross of Descartes

Note that in applications, the vertical axis
of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes
the timeless (money, temperature, etc.)
while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time.

T.S. Eliot:

"Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint...."

There is a reason, apart from her ethnic origins, that Rosalind Krauss (cf. 9/13/06) rejects, with a shudder, the cross as a key to "the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it." The rejection occurs in the context of her attempt to establish not the cross, but the grid, as a religious symbol:

"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid
is somehow connected to its structure as myth,
I may of course be accused of stretching a point
beyond the limits of common sense, since myths
are stories, and like all narratives they unravel
through time, whereas grids are not only spatial
to start with, they are visual structures
that explicitly reject a narrative
or sequential reading of any kind.

[1] Success here refers to
three things at once:
a sheerly quantitative success,
involving the number of artists
in this century who have used grids;
a qualitative success through which
the grid has become the medium
for some of the greatest works
of modernism; and an ideological
success, in that the grid is able--
in a work of whatever quality--
to emblematize the Modern."

-- Rosalind Krauss, "Grids" (1979)

Related material:

Time Fold and Weyl on
objectivity and frames of reference.

See also Stambaugh on
The Formless Self
as well as
A Study in Art Education
and
Jung and the Imago Dei.

A Sunrise
for Sunrise

"If we open any tract-- Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance-- we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete." --Rosalind Krauss, "Grids"

Yesterday's entry featured a rather simple-minded example from Krauss of how the ninefold square (said to be a symbol of Apollo)

may be used to create a graphic design-- a Greek cross, which appears also in crossword puzzles:

Crossword-puzzle design that includes Greek-cross elements

Illustration by
Paul Rand
(born Peretz Rosenbaum)

A more sophisticated example
of the ninefold square
in graphic design:

"That old Jew
gave me this here."
-- A Flag for Sunrise

The 3x3 grid as an organizing frame for Chinese calligraphy. Example-- the character for 'sunrise'

From Paul-Rand.com

Raiders of
the Lost Well

"The challenge is to
keep high standards of
scholarship while maintaining
showmanship as well."

-- Olga Raggio, a graduate of the Vatican library school and the University of Rome who, at one point in her almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized "The Vatican Collections," a blockbuster show. Dr. Raggio died on January 24.

The next day, "The Last Templar," starring Mira Sorvino, debuted on NBC.

"The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure, the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine Indiana Jones derring-do with 'Da Vinci Code' mysticism."

-- The New York Times

Sorvino in "The Last Templar"
at the Church of the Lost Well:

Mira Sorvino at the Church of the Lost Well in 'The Last Templar'

"One highlight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first overseas trip will be a stop in China. Her main mission in Beijing will be to ensure that US-China relations under the new Obama administration get off to a positive start."

-- Stephanie Ho, Voice of America Beijing bureau chief, today

Symbol of The Positive,
from this journal
on Valentine's Day:

"Stephanie started at the Voice of America as an intern in 1991. She left briefly to attend film school in London in 2000. Although she didn't finish, she has always wanted to be a film school dropout, so now she's living one of her dreams.

Stephanie was born in Ohio and grew up in California. She has a bachelor's degree in Asian studies with an emphasis on Chinese history and economics, from the University of California at Berkeley."

"She is fluent in
Mandrin Chinese."
--VOA

As is Mira Sorvino.

Chinese character for 'well' and I Ching Hexagram 48, 'The Well'

Those who, like Clinton, Raggio, and
Sorvino's fictional archaeologist in
"The Last Templar," prefer Judeo-
Christian myths to Asian myths,
may convert the above Chinese
"well" symbol to a cross
(or a thick "+" sign)
by filling in five of
the nine spaces outlined
by the well symbol.

In so doing, they of course
run the risk, so dramatically
portrayed by Angelina Jolie
as Lara Croft, of opening
Pandora's Box.

(See Rosalind Krauss, Professor
of Art and Theory at Columbia,
for scholarly details.)

Rosalind Krauss

Krauss

Greek Cross, adapted from painting by Ad Reinhardt

The Krauss Cross

Diamond-Faceted:

Transformations
of the Rock

A mathematical version of
this poetic concept appears
in a rather cryptic note
from 1981 written with
Stevens's poem in mind:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090217-SolidSymmetry.jpg

For some explanation of the
groups of 8 and 24
motions referred to in the note,
see an earlier note from 1981.

For the Perlis "diamond facets,"
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle.

For a much larger group
of motions, see
Solomon's Cube.

As for "the mind itself"
and "possibilities for
human thought," see
Geometry of the I Ching.

About the Author

Table of Contents

Related Categories