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Thursday, January 18, 2007

Awesome Systems

posted by on January 18 at 13:42 PM

Russian Futurist Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) wrote:

God, feeling the weight in himself, dispersed it in his system, and the weight became light and relieved him, placing man in a weightless system; and man, not feeling it, lived like and engine driver who does not feel the weight of his locomotive in motion, but had only to remove one part of the system for its weight to come down and crush him. Likewise, Adam transgressed the limits of the system and its weight collapsed on him. As a result the whole of humanity is laboring in sweat and suffering to free itself from beneath the weight of the collapsed system, is striving to distribute the weight in the systems, wishing to repair the mistake—hense his culture consists of distributing weight in the systems of weightlessness. God relieved himself of weight or, as weight, dispersed himself in weightlessness, himself remained free. Man too in all three points strives for the same thing—to disperse weight and himself become weightless, i.e. enter God.

This passage is as beautiful as this image:

4phot-07a-00-normal.jpg

A quick note:

In terms of content, Kazimir Malevich passage is a poetic expression of the modernist project—or, to use a more defined literary term, the neo-modernist project (Stein and Williams). This modernism, according to Jeffrey M. Perl, wants thinness as opposed to the thickness of originary modernism (Joyce and Pound).

Neo-modernism corresponds with the international modernism in architecture and ultimately becomes postmodernism. What postmodernism breaks with is not neo-modernism but original modernism. There is, however, a touch of the original modernism in Malevich’s passage, in the sense that he makes a reference to the ancient past, to myth—Adam, Eden, and The Fall.

At the center of the originary modernist project was a doomed drive to salvage the fallen present, a disenchanted society, a mass produced world consciousness. Hence an ad representative for a Dublin newspaper becomes Odysseus. The ancient myth is called upon to give thickness to the thin present.

What our point in time needs is a return of the thickness but without the dead heroes of Eliot and old Europe exerting their ghost force from outside of time, from a distant place (Greece, Venice) imagined to be better than the now. What is needed is a thickness that is synchronic, simultaneous, and entirely in world space. A humanism without a God entering and trying to save the system. We need to be builders of thick, human systems. We must no longer see the heroes of history as reaching out from the past to redeem the surface of the now but must see them and all of history as actually present in the way memories are not in the past but in the flesh of the living body.


To conclude: We must image an absolute but not an abstract one. A functional world absolute, and I limit the absolute to the world, can only be a concrete absolute.
SNV31104.JPG (Thanks to Slog reader Neil Corcoran for the image.)

RSS icon Comments

1

Beauty.

Although not to be annoyingly particular, his surname was spelled "Malevich".

Posted by Trevor | January 18, 2007 1:11 PM
2

How did Chaikavski spell his name?

Posted by elswinger | January 18, 2007 1:45 PM
3

sorry, you read a draft. i had no idea it was posted.

Posted by charles mudede | January 18, 2007 1:50 PM
4

A contrary view:

And it is then--this is still you speaking--that new economic relations will come, quite ready-made, and also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will vanish in an instant, essentially because they will have been given all possible answers. Then the crystal palace will get built. Then...well, in short, then the bird Kagan will come flying. Of course, there's no guaranteeing (this is me speaking now) that it won't, for example, be terribly boring then (because what is there to do if everything's calculated according to some little table?), but, on the other hand, it will all be extremely reasonable. Of course, what inventions can boredom not lead to! Golden pins also get stuck in from boredom, but all that would be nothing. That bad thing is (this is me speaking again) that, for all I know, they may be glad of the golden pins then. Man really is stupid, phenomenally stupid. That is, he's by no means stupid, but rather he's so ungrateful that it would be hard to find the likes of him. I, for example, would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, amid the universal future reasonableness, some gentleman of ignoble, or, better, of retrograde and jeering physiognomy, should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: "Well, gentlemen, why don't we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our own stupid will!" That would still be nothing, but what is offensive is that he'd be sure to find followers: that's how man is arranged. And all this for the emptiest of reasons, which would seem not even worth mentioning: namely, that man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere liked to act as he wants, and not at all as reason and profit dictate; and one can want even against one's own profit, and one sometimes even positively must (this is my own idea now). One's own free and voluntary wanting, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, though chafed sometimes to the point of madness--all this is the same most profitable profit, the omitted one, which does not fit into any classification, and because of which all systems and theories are constantly blown to the devil. And where did all these sages get the idea that man needs some normal, some virtuous wanting? What made them necessarily imagine that what man needs is necessarily a reasonably profitable wanting? Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and wherever it may lead. Well, and this wanting, the devil knows...
Dostoevsky

Posted by charles | January 18, 2007 2:30 PM
5

It is almost impossible to respond to such a post, but then if it would truly be impossible, then wouldn't that achieve the goal you seek. To send out a message that no one can answer to is to master the field of answerability, to make it unanswerable, or entirely something else, I would think. And, if so, then such a passage would be something that trips up the reader, that causes him to falter, to become something else...

"and man, not feeling it, lived like and engine driver who does not feel the weight of his locomotive in motion, but had only to remove one part of the system for its weight to come down and crush him."

Perhaps, then, a text is like something that invites the reader to reconstruct it, to make of it a broad machine, which he then drives to its inevitable deconstruction. And this is because he is endlessly trying to reconstruct, or put to an answer, a something that is fundamentally unanswerable, a text without meaning.

Posted by Dobbs | January 19, 2007 10:45 AM

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