philosophical conversations

at a bit of a loss

Trevor, I'm at a bit of a loss here with your turn to literature, as I do not have much in the way of literary knowledge. Nor have I read the literary texts you mention. So I'm not sure how this literature theme of philosophical conversations is going to develop. Maybe some form of collaboration?

I never really connected to poetry. Somehow this literary form did not really speak to me. The novel did, for a while. Then I stopped reading novels in the 1980s. I got bored by the narrative. I feel alienated from the literary institution. Nor do have I much desire to return to the literary institution even though it has a big presence in our public culture. Though I do relate to the way that Heidegger read the German poets, expecially Holderin, I have not followed Richard Rorty's pathway of weaving the tapestries of life by reading more novels.

I am more interested writing that breaks down the old genres-- a sort of combination of aesthetics, philosophy, writing and images that I am exploring in junk for code within the context of our visual culture.

I do find Bataille very innovative in terms of the form of his writing. I find the writings in the various magazines he was involved in, such as Documents, Critical Dictionary, Da Costa, (now collected in the Encyclopedia Acephalica) very appealing.

What initially attracts me is the way Bataille experimentally mixed up text and image within the context of French visual culture of the 1930s.

What also attracts me is the way Bataille brought together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists in a literary and philosophical project.

From what I can discover from this link here this is a photograph taken by Bataille:
You do not hear much about Bataille as a visual artist.

The photo is very much in the style of Eugene Atget.

Atget walked the streets of the Paris with his 18 X 24 glass plate camera in a wheelbarrow documenting its buildings and people during the late 19th and early 20th century.

Atget built up a huge archive and the photos were then sold them to the Parsian artistic community.

Rue des Ursins

This photo of a store window indicates why Atget's work was picked up the surrealists:
Atget was a deeply embedded in 19th-century French literature and he sought to recreate the Paris of the past. Hence his "photographing buildings and areas marked for demolition in the hope of preserving the ineffable imprint of time and usage on stone, iron, and vegetation. A series of tree and park images, made in the outlying sections to the south of Paris, suggest a compulsion to preserve natural environments from the destruction already visible in the industrialized northern districts of the city, and, in the same way, images of working individuals may have been made to record distinctive trades before the changes in social and economic relationships already taking place swept them away."

I do not know how Documents is related to André Breton’s surrealist journals given Breton's attack on Bataille. I interpret the 'strangeness' of this writing in the context of contemporary visual culture and the popular tabloid journals. I read them in terms of what some are doing with their image/writing weblogs.

It seems to me that the computer technology provides the weblog form to do this kind of cultural writing outside of academia, without the need to find a financial backer to defray the costs for a print journal of culture that would never make any money.

Bataille's On Nietzsche is relevant here. It appears to be a book on and about Nietzsche---say, in the style of current academic writing. But it is nothing like that at all. The text takes Nietzsche's conception of philosophy as way of life and then practices it. The writing consists of a series of short entries---up to half a page-- that are written on a regular basis. These fragments, aphorisms, journal entries and quotes don't really hold together. They are more reflections on daily life that are linked to passages in Nietzsche's texts--presumably the texts Bataille was reading during his wartime sojourn in the French countryside between 1941-1944.

It is what I was starting to do on my old a heap of junk for code weblog; but then stopped keeping Nietzsche company.

It is what the weblog allows you do today. But I know of no one currently using weblogs writing in this experimental Nietzschean style of Bataille. Perhaps the literary ones? (See Resources.) Perhaps the cyberpoets who take their inspiration from the futurists?

In the light of these remarks I will publish Bukowski's poems that you sent me as I read them, and also explore the world of poetics disclosed by Ron Silliman's blog.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 2, 2003 12:49 PM | TrackBack