Nochassnotes

magh nochassNotes on a wordplay on Gnosis-Nauseous being attraction/repelliontowards the sublime (or something),both the bliss and the nauseouspart of the bigger-than-life aesthetics of the sublime inromanticism/modernism/... Nochas also as 'night'... No chass...NauseousMany people say, when sick to their stomachs, that they feel"nauseous" (pronounced "NOSH-uss" or "NOZH-uss") but traditionalistsinsist that this word should be used to describe something that makesyou want to throw up: something nauseating. They hear you as sayingthat you make people want to vomit, and it tempers their sympathy foryour plight.-- http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/nauseated.htmlSublimeAesthetic concept that was held to be distinct from the beautiful andthe Picturesque and was associated with ideas of awe and vastness...growing feeling for the grandeur and violence of nature...awe-inspiring, and stupendous aspects of natural scenery... 'terror',Burke says, 'is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly orlatently, the ruling principle of the sublime.' His work is importantfor being one of the first to realize (in contrast with the emphasison clarity and precision during the Age of Enlightenment) the power ofsuggestiveness to stimulate imagination. Speaking of painting he saysthat 'a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effectof the picture', because in art as in nature 'dark, confused,uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the granderpassions than those which are more clear and determinate.'...Reynolds: 'The Sublime in painting, as in poetry, so overpowers, andtakes possession of the whole mind, that no room is left for attentionto minute criticism. The little elegancies of art, in the presence ofthese great ideas thus greatly expressed, lose all their value, andare, for the instant at least, felt to be unworthy of our notice...-- http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=145620Romanticismrepresents an attitude of mind rather than a set of particularstylistic traits and involves the expression of an idea that tends tohave a verbal rather than a visual origin. In this context a ruinedtemple is more significant than a new one because it is moresuggestive of the passage of time and human frailty. What is broken orpartial can never be archetypally classical because the classicalobject is whole and coherent, not fragmentary. A view that finds aruined temple beautiful is a Romantic view, though the temple may oncehave been a classical masterpiece. Romanticism lends itself moreeasily to expression through music and literature than through thevisual arts, as a sense of the infinite and the transcendental, offorces exceeding the boundaries of reason, must necessarily bevague--suggestive rather than concrete, as it must be in painting andeven more so in sculpture. On the other hand, although there is nospecific Romantic school in architecture, the Gothic Revival,especially in its early, non-scholarly phase, is an aspect ofRomanticism.-- http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=145286Gnosisknowledge of spiritual mysteries. [Gk gnosis knowledge (as gnomon)]Gnosis/NauseaAt 6:00 pm Central Time, 5 pm Eastern, 7.00 pm Mountain, 8.00 pm onthe West Coast, TAZ group members will rendezvous before St LouisCathedral in Jackson Square. There, after a group banishing, themembers will begin slowly spinning while chanting "Thoth, Thoth,Azathoth"..."Zerbat, Zerbat"...or "Begin Transmission". Group memberswill continue spinning and chanting ever more frantically until gnosis(or nausea) is achieved, at which point members will visualize a greatgreen, gold, and purple beam of light shooting forth from the spire ofthe Cathedral and intersecting with the Zerbat satellite. At thispoint the satellite network will be activated and a simply stunninggreen, gold and purple web will fluoresce across the astral skies ofPlanet Earth. The ritual will close with a banishing, or the summaryarrest of members by the police (an event that nearly occurred at thelast public Z(Rite) on Halloween.-- http://www.choronzon.com/tocmirror/tzimon/Workings/fat tues.htmlGinsberg found that... self-programming could createformidable psychic tensions often resulting in awfulbummers. ([L06],110).On one trip, he... felt faced by Death, my skull... rolling backand forth... as if in reproduction of the lastphysical move I make before settling into real death -got nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, allcovered with snakes... I felt like a snake vomitingout the universe... ([B15],56).-- http://www.adamford.com/swb/html/paths.htmlLate modernism and the sublimeNaturally, the sublime itself spoke up for its relevance, too. ForBurke or Kant, it meant the experience of human limits, notably thelimits of rationality. One can find a parallel in many midcenturyconcerns. I think of the stress on the unconscious and symbol makingin psychology, the Other in Existentialism [nausea and the sublime?],Isamu Noguchi's private garden, primitive cultures in the criticalexamination of imperialism. All these fed into American art soon afterSurrealism. (Forget the idea of a postwar American century.) AsMichael Leja has described, their influence ranges all the way fromAbstract Expressionism to film noir.Forget singleness. The sublime looks toward a unity outside humankind.The new art sought fragments, like the concept of the self inpsychology and Existentialism. T. J. Clark has compared the gaps in adrip painting to gaps in the supposed unity of artistic identity. Inthe same way, the fits and starts of making art correspond to the lackof a fixed creator, and an emphasis on free association means abreakdown of artistic intention. Just as imperialism was alreadygiving way to multiculturalism, unity had fallen into multiplicity.Anonymity and intimacy: When late Modernism reached for the sublime,it landed firmly on earth. Newman's zips or the drips in a Pollockannounce an abstract painting's material fact, including its scale,refusing to be either larger than life or dwarfed by nature. Theysuggest motion, as in the verbs "drip" and "zip," the motion of apainter at work, rather than confronting nature as a foreignsubstance. They suggest a place, too, for the viewer within the work,in the space between drips... Like the earlier century's sublime, thisone responds with perverse pride to the terrifying anonymity of modernexistence... What has changed is the familiarity of it all. Anonymousthreats and universal promises lie withinwithin the mind, withinhuman constructs such as culture and class divisions.As I mean in elucidating the sublime, the mythic self will not go awaywithout a fight. It gave the generation after Abstract Expressionismsomething to admireand yet something to put aside. Later artistsbuild on each of the terms that went into the modernist sublime. Atthe same time, they demythologize it, replacing cathedrals and chapelswith Minimalist boxes and dung-laden Madonnas. In the process, theydestroy the whole idea of the sublime pretty much for good.Minimalism removes a myth of the sublime, while leaving each of itsterms intactart's presence, material reality, love of envelopingsurfaces, multiplicity, human scale, and art too cool to stand for manor woman. Pop and Postmodernism instead highlight the myth, so as toexamine skeptically whether any culture can dispense with one.-- http://www.haberarts.com/sublime.htmElen Feinberg: The Post-Modern SublimeThe sublime has been a site of contestation ever since it began topreoccupy the post-religious minds of the 18th century - not least,but not entirely, as a metonymy for the God who had receded from viewduring the Enlightenment. The concept of aesthetic (or aestheticized)awe, articulated by Burke one way, Kant another, helped pave the wayfor Romanticism and Modernism both, and the concept's own metonyms -madness, the spectacle, the nano- and macro-infinitudes of inner andouter space and the para-infinitude of cyberspace - endure in thepost-Modernist moment. Thank God (extant or no) they endure, as thepersistence of the sublime, even if only as a historicizing trope oras an onscreen display of special effects, saves post-Modernism fromits overweening cynicism and anaesthetic ennui.-- http://www.elenafeinberg.com/t.modern.htmlthe "relativity" of aesthetics: beauty, the sublime, the picturesque:Another aspect of the new relativity was the belief that beauty mightnot be a universal principle. Here the philosopher David Hume was toplay an important role, writing in 1757 that beauty is no quality inthings themselves; it exists merely in the mind which contemplatesthem....Each mind perceives a different beauty. For those who didcontinue to believe that beauty was a universal principle, the notionthat there might be other kinds of aesthetic experiences becameimportant. Two new categories of the aesthetic were formulated: thesublime and the picturesque.the sublime: the experience of terror with the knowledge of being safe-- Roots of Modernism [defunct URL]Ingemar Haag: The Grotesque. The language of the body and the body ofthe language in Swedish lyrical modernismThis connection to the sublime is inherited by the 20th centurypoetry. It is my intention to show that the grotesque images inSwedish modernism reveal the same urge as the sublime when it comes toaffecting the supersensual spheres.-- http://www.su.se/forskning/disputationer/spikblad/IngemarHaag.htmlKatherine Dodds in the Spring edition of the Canadian magazineAdbustersDodd continues: "As for the question of the self, Lyotard retreatedinto the ecstasies of the sublime (a tasty little theoretical currentthese days). Pondered by philosophers over the years, its meaningcontinues to shift. Linked to aesthetic concepts of beauty and ofnature (and the glories of womanhood), it is the moment when anindividual is overwhelmed, perhaps when standing at the edge of acliff or an immense waterfall. This experience cannot be experiencedthrough viewing a calendar photo. The force of something immense andcontinuous, beyond our control, and our finite human limitations mustalso be felt. In this way it encompasses a movement between pleasureand pain. Deviled eggs and angel's food, the sublime represents asomewhat 'divine' outlet for the secular mind."Lyotard cannot accept an absolute God, at least not in theory. And inLyotard's sublime the pleasure of feeling "part of it all" is modifiedby the pain of not being able to adequately represent the moment."Within Lyotard's postmodern condition there is no safe site forstruggle, no authentic experience to seek out, and as for the politicsof the sublime, Lyotard says that too would be terror. Representationof revolution as a grand tale would be at best inadequate, and atworst fascist. However, if we can't have a politics of terror do weend up with malaise?"... It is indicated in the Adbusters article that Katherine Dodds isplanning to go back to one of her earlier careers, performance poetry,where she will "reunite the ridiculous and the sublime.-- http://home.newmedia.no/~olavege/epm8fnf.htm." In the age of global capitalism, the utopian sublime of modernismhas indeed been dissolved, but not in the way originally intended; theanxieties and voids of modernism have been filled to overflowing bythe postmodern cultural logic of consumption.-- http://eserver.org/clogic/3-1&2/mooers.html(Post)Modernism - TV and the sublimeThe Screamer [Munch] personifies the introverted, alienated psychologyof modernism. In Munch's painting, this psychology is literalized inthe roughly circular movement of the viewer's eye, which makes theworld literally revolve around the solipsistic Screamer. Moreover,that world, as Munch gives it to us, has been swallowed up by theScreamer's extruded ego, dyed strange colors and twisted into alienshapes by his emotions.By contrast, the postmodern self is mediated, not mediating. In OliverStone's Natural Born Killers, for example, the exteriorizedsubconscious of The Scream has been turned inside out. In themodernist world-view articulated by Munch's proto-Expressionism, thepsyche oozes, blob-like, beyond its bounds, engulfing the outsideworld; in NBK, resonant images from the 20th century - "the filmedcentury," as Don DeLillo observed - inundate the mass- mediated dreamlives of Stone's TV generation. Childhood memories are relived as animaginary sitcom, complete with laughtrack, and Nature has beenreplaced by Second Nature: the world outside Mickey and Mallory'smotel windows consists of flickering TV images. Celebrity is the onlyreal life, reflection in the camera eye the only confirmation that theself truly exists.... Utterly unlike the hypersensitive Munch-ian self, this new psycheis characterized, says Jameson, by a "waning of affect" which is notso much the android autism Andy Warhol aspired to as it is the giddyexperience of emotions as "free-floating and impersonal" sensations"dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria." This psychologicalweightlessness, at once terrifying and exhilarating, is the result oflife lived in the mass-media centrifuge, where everything, fromhaemorrhoid-treatment ads to R. Budd Dwyer's televised suicide,carries equal weight and where reality and its simulation arebeginning to look more and more alike. Call it Angst Lite.... Jameson calls it the "camp sublime" - camp in the sense that campdelights in depthlessness, celebrates surface; sublime in the sensethat this "peculiar euphoria" is the postmodern equivalent, forJameson, of what Edmund Burke called "the Sublime" - the vertiginousloss of self in the presence of nature's awful grandeur.-- http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199801/msg00047.htmlSimulacrum and the sublime?In the first case, the image is a good appearance--representation isof the sacramentalorder. In the second, it is an evil appearance--it is of the order ofmaleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance--it is ofthe order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order ofappearances, but of simulation.Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," Simulacra and Simulation,p. 6.The Examples of Simulation:A. the biological and scientific -- 1. simulation of symptoms; 10. DNAmodel reproduction; 11. Nuclear deterrenceB. the religious -- 2. the simulacrum of divinity;C. museumification of culture -- 3. the return of the Tasaday; 4. thesalvage of Rameses' mummy, 5. return of part of a Cloister to itsorigin,D. popular culture -- 6. Disney; 9. the filming of the LoudsE. the political -- 7. Watergate; 12. Vietnam war, Algerian warF. social crimes -- 8. all holdups, hijacks--http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary Criticism/postmodernism/Baudrillard.htm#Simulationpostmodern sublime/unpresentable of the postmodern art"The sublime evokes a contradictory feeling" (The Idea of thePostmodern: A History 133). It is "... a strong and equivocalemotion: it carries both pleasure and pain... in it pleasurederives from pain." (p43)For Kant, sublime occurs "when the imagination fails to present anobject which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept."This is the relation beween Kantian aesthetics of sublime andunpresentable. (p43)Lyotard's postmodern sublime is "an art of negation, a perpetualnegation... based on a never-ending critique of representation thatshould contribute to the preservation of heterogeneity, of optimaldissensus... [it]does not lead towards a resolution; theconfrontation with the unpresentable leads to radical openness" (TheIdea of the Postmodern: A History 133).... "modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublim, though anostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only asthe missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizableconsistency, continues of offer to the reader or viewer matter forsolace and pleasure" (p46)."The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward theunpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself thesolace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make itpossible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable;that which searches for new presentations... in order to impart astronger sense of the unpresentable" (p46).--http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary Criticism/postmodernism/Lyotard outline.html/bjorn magh