The Invisible Man - How Parrhesia Works through Art: The Elusive Role of the Imagination in Truth-Telling Foucault Studies, 2019 Marrigje Paijmans

How Parrhesia Works through Art: The Elusive Role of the Imagination in Truth-Telling

Foucault Studies, 2019

Marrigje Paijmans

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. ..Krishnamurti

Creation takes place in choked passages" (G. Deleuze) which means for me there's no passage which is unchoked - hence, any creation for which "passage" is taken for granted (especially the one from 'noise to voice' (The Logic of Sense) cannot be creative at all.

I would say prison is a “choked passage.”

Laboratory of Nano-Fascism:  Although this relationship to death was once thought to belong originally to punk, expressed specifically in the funeral sculptures of Joy Division covers such as Closer and Love Will Tear Us Apart, and PIL’s Death Disco, it has been repurposed by Neanderthal capital in order to zombify the world.

Non Conceptual Negativity  Zafer Aracagök

Can we come back to Krishnamurti on this please. " It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." My personal feeling is that if you are not depressed, melancholy or bi polar or schizophrenic you are not paying attention.

This is interesting: “Owen Andree Um, no. The hysterics' *desire* is to continually and question/harangue the Master/authority's position.”

To see the Invisible Man may be to instantly recoil in fear, disgust, horror, side step, turn away from an image covered face to toes with dark prison tattoos. Not a human one wishes to link with.

A live human image that has disintegrated the boundaries, the limits of class, sex, age and race.

AND NON DECORATIVE

An image that is irreplaceable, non-reproducible, non-commodified, non exchangeable or accumulated. You cannot buy it, sell it, hoard it, own it, keep it, display it. A living image that can be destroyed physically, but alive forever in the imaginations of subjects who have allowed themselves to experience the Invisible Man. A digital image existing in Simulated Reality will be as useless as J. Hillis Miller tells you the reading of Heart of Darkness will be if you do not already know it from experience, and if you do you will not need to read it. The image recorded is not to experience the REAL. Only the experience of the real Invisible Man will challenge you with parrhesia, the truth of parrhesia that confronts you in your experience of him. Did it?

Without experiencing the confrontation of parrhesia inherent in his image your imagination cannot transform the work of art that he is, which precludes any change in your mode of being, your lived life, by your experience of him. An image of the human body aligned and defined in great classical beauty resonating with classical Greek sculpture inscribed, desecrated with ugly prison tattoos - some ironically funny and some cliches, but never aesthetic. And so the different levels of episteme through time from ancient Greece to the post modern NOW hit you between the eyes.

 Richard Hambleton- Jumping Shadow       Fight Club?

Foucault’s genealogical method reveals The Invisible Man’s fusion with other works of art signaling parrhesia and challenging us with confrontation and a demand for change, for transformation of ourselves to a different way of seeing, perceiving and being. Only OTHERNESS can accomplish this. Not different. OTHERNESS.

Velasquez: Las Meninas

Manet: Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe / Luncheon on the Grass

Picasso:Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; Guernica

Warhol:Campbell Soup Cans

Jasper Johns:Flags and Destruction of Abstract Expressionism
Kathy Acker: everything
Herman Melville:Moby Dick:Ishmael and Queequeg
Leslie Fiedler:essays (football et al)
Leo Steinberg: art history and essays
Shakespeare: everything

Banksy: Performance Piece Dismaland;wall murals of political parrhesia

Ai WeiWei: Sculptures
Mark Tansey: everything

Marina Abramovic: Performance Art; The Artist Is Present

Luce Irigaray: Speculum of the Other Woman

Roberto Bolano: 2666

Eugene:The Invisible Man 

Herman Melville: Moby Dick: Ishmael and Queequeg (p. 535)

With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a seachest: and emptying into his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid  with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy  parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read though his own live heart beat against them;and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg - "Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!"

IF YOU CANT BE A WORK OF ART, WEAR A WORK OF ART. - OSCAR WILDE

Genealogy of Body Tattoos - Tamati Waka Nene by Gottfried Lindauer (1839-1926), 1890, oil on canvas, 40”x33”, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand. 

Beautiful Face.

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” - William Faulkner

In Robert Wilson's Opera
The Life and Times
Of Sigmund Freud,
I watched you run
Before you were born.
A Mercury of Time,
Now a running Apollo
Scribbled all over
By drunken Dionysians
With intentions of Parrhesia
You know nothing about.
Seeing you now confuses
The past which was
The future and this present
Mirroring the past.
Is there a tense somewhere
That they call
Future past or past future
Like the Intentional of the Hopi?
Because her car was laden
With Destiny that came
Crashing across my lifeline
Forcing me to live
In Alterity; waving at her
Drifting farther away,
Until I almost can't hear her sigh.

It is not the present which influences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward.  Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable. CHILDREN OF DUNE  Leto II p. 278 *
___________________________________________________

They aren’t all prison tattoos 

She screamed at me
On Facebook! 

This one and this one

Were done on the outside.

My brother did the cross

He tattooed over!

There are more prisons 

In this world, Horatio

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy
______________________________________________________

The Aral Sea is the future. Since it exists in the present we fail to recognize that it is only
wearing the mask of the present. It is a Debordian spectacle concealing the REAL forming
the present from the future.A radical piece of the future detached and both visible and invisible.

Neil Burger's Divergent

opens with Lake Michigan mirroring the Aral Sea and surrounding areas, the future in the
fantasy movie image of a present Chicago

Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson Debate

Zizek and Peterson Debate

Much can be said and unsaid about this debate. The tickets were expensive and scalped even higher, showing the Brandens were ultimately right and Ayn Rand not. People will pay for philosophy lectures.

The Intro listed the academic credentials beginning with Z who was immediately disgusted. The ritual of the accounting and awards of the institutions of the repressive states that have granted their seals of approval - read BRANDS - for the presence of Z and Peterson on this stage, before this audience, presented for the cameras and manufactured for the prestige and brownie points - gold stars? - that will be received by the producers. Slavoj Zizek of course is being pimped for Peterson, his western supporters and their institutions.

Peterson presents a formidable and fashionable image, carefully trimmed beard, hair, and I bet finger and toenails. A Simulacrum of the early T.S. Eliot Virginia Woolf describes in her diary.

I invited X - sorry forget? - for lunch. Do come. Eliot will be here in his four piece suit. 

And this is how Wyndham Lewis has painted his portrait as a young man in Ezra Pound's salon.

T.S.Eliot Portrait by Windham Lewis

The simulacrum also smacks of the great, brilliant and unwavering man of integrity, charm and charisma, the older Leo Steinberg, who said, "Psychoanalysis saved my life." Those of us who have experienced analysis - experienced is the only valid familiarity that really counts when one is talking, writing, thinking about analysis - have all been saved by it, by Freud, and all those already saved, in order to suffer ordinary normal unhappiness rather than neurotic misery.

The other statement among many Steinberg tossed off was that in art school he graduated with first prizes in all his exhibited senior work. "And I knew then that I would never be great." So he stopped, because anyone who has personally experienced the presence of Steinberg, knew that he wanted to be great. He was superb in seeing what he called the watershed moment - 

The Foucaldian CUT

 -  in a painter's life or in painting in particular. That moment when Jasper Johns first exhibited, Steinberg was disturbed. He didn't like the work but it disturbed him so he went back and he made the Foucauldian CUT that ended Abstract Expressionism with John's breakout work. He tells of this in his book Other Criteria. 

Anyway Peterson mimics the image of those two men: urbane,cultured, educated, an extremely attractive and articulate man of his time. Z is Z, rumpled T-Shirt, roughly groomed and shaved, and wildly gesturing. A man utterly himself, warts and all, who exhibits a mass and mess of thinking that defies all linearity, continuity, persuasive progressions, categorizations and lists. 

Ah those fascist ever present lists that delineate all knowledge for us.

Two Choruses from The Rock-Eliot

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. p. 81

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD,

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

And Foucault:

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not knowing. Knowledge is made for CUTTING

Peterson is a clinical psychologist by training and he sees - saw? - patients. In the part of the debate about ethics and morality he uses the example of the patient that cannot stop wrong actions, but who has also formulated a goal for therapy. To reach his goal in therapy these obstructions to getting to the goal must be confronted. Peterson employs stopping the action of wrongness in one of small seemingly unimportant instances as a point of a beginning, an initial starting place.

A series of wrong actions? A repetition of wrong actions? And Peterson is using Wolpe and Goldstein's Behavior Therapy method of "thought stopping" turned into "action stopping" while Z has quoted Hegel, "To act is always to err," which Peterson seizes on.

The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.- Hegel

Here is where I might have intervened with, "If your patient repeatedly performs the 'wrong' action," reading through Simone Weil here, "What is the value of the opposite, the 'right action' and consider if the patient almost always knows the wrong action, then your patient almost always knows the 'right action' and avoids it. Does the patient know the right action or does your patient know the right action but does not know she knows?"

This is what would interest my knowing in just one of these exchanges lost in the morass of communication - discourse? - between Z and P.

The civilized discussion Peterson feels has taken place has occurred on the surface, yes. Because Zizek has not probed deeper to expose the contradictions, and Peterson's use of The Communist Manifesto - which was written for the workers in the factory - instead of a deep and thorough reading of Capital. The Grundrisse is not even mentioned. And Althusser's unsurpassed reading of Marx in his Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses of Reproduction.

The inadequate scholarship of Peterson, the Western debater, is visible, but only to those who have some grasp of the invisible scholarship here in this debate. The scholarship displayed by a celebrity figure the west has manufactured and produced to be pimped by the incomparable, irreplaceable, anti-xeroxible Slavoj Zizek.

The reader might also remind herself that the USSR employed many therapies, to its dissidents especially. Behavior Therapy based on Pavlov's Conditioned Response and Skinner's Operant Conditioning was especially honored. The only one that was banned, disallowed, punished was psychoanalysis.

So of course, that was the one I wanted most to experience since I was/am a negatively suggestible person. Did I write about Happiness and Capitalism here?

STEFAN SIMCHOWITZ Enters the Art Market and Changes the DISCOURSE.

STEFAN SIMCHOWITZ

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/a-word-from-the-devils-advocate-54458?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=121416_magazine_simchowitzredux_master&utm_term=Master

Quoting Jean Baudrillard on 9-11 the bombers had a PACT with each other, not a contract.In the Order of  Symbolic  Exchange and Death there is not a legal contract. That belongs to the Order of Production in which CAPITALISM is its prime subject.

Simchowitz has begun a new model for entering into a relationship with artists, helping to manage their careers and sell their work so they can be supported on a regular basis to be able to keep "playing" with their imagination.

How does he do this? He simply buys a lot of a new unknown artist's work. How much do you want for it, and then he pays it. From there he will go on to hook the artist up with a gallery/galleries, print a book, promote them in his original way. He may sell to a collector a piece he wishes to be in the collection of a particular collector.

He builds the relationship over time. Some are more intimate and deep than others. But what is significant and infuriating to the big player dealers in the commercial art world is what is invisible to them. Simchowitz is successful, his artists slowly grow to recognition and Simchowitz makes his fees from the art he bought at the beginning. Although he will buy in the middle and the end also. 

And that is his relationship with the artist. He OWNS the work of the artist and this allows him to be aligned with the desire of the artist. The artist wishes to have his works known and so does Simchowitz.

WHAT IS STARTLING AND WONDERFUL TO ME IS THAT SIMCHOWITZ'S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ARTIST TAKES PLACE IN 

THE SYMBOLIC ORDER

OF PASSION,LOVE,LIVING,SEDUCTION,SACRED,REVERSIBILITY,PACT,SINGULARITY

As the Order of Production is taking over all our lives, turning all the territory into a MAP (Borges:The Map and the Territory) here is a hero standing alone in a world of elegance, affluence,bureaucracy,fascism in a smaller sense than world domination.

AND HE IS FUCKING WINNING!

The artists he chooses get to stay in the studio and do what they love.They don't have to tour,go to fairs, and all that hoopla.They just get to do their work and stay PURE. 

SIMCHOWITZ IS THROWING THE MONEY CHANGERS OUT OF THE TEMPLE!

WE NOW HAVE OUR VERY FIRST CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHER ART PATRON IN OUR ERA. 

The Great LEO STEINBERG would have been thrilled.John McCoubrey would have been thrilled. And many others still alive who studied with them will also be THRILLED.

The beauty of all this that he does is THAT IT CANNOT BE REPLICATED, MANUFACTURED,TURNED INTO AN ASSEMBLY LINE OF ART FROM AN ARTIST.

WALTER BENJAMIN THE WORLD IS HEARING YOU AT LAST.

https://www.amazon.com/Illuminations-Reflections-Benjamin-published-Paperback/dp/B00ES28DO6/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481847953&sr=1-2&keywords=walter+benjamin+illuminations

In Illuminations is that gold standard essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

 What Andy Warhol took apart in a way that CUT into the DISCOURSE of art history and put a slice deep enough to challenge all artists.

Leo Steinberg

Synopsis

Leo Steinberg is one the 20th century's foremost historians and scholars on the works of Michelangelo, Leonardo and other Italian Renaissance artists. 


Throughout his career, Steinberg has paid particularly close attention to the depiction of Christ in art, and in the process caused much controversy and debate. 


In addition to his scholarly work of Renaissance art, Steinberg is also a significant authority on 20th-century modern art, including the paintings and sculptures of Picasso, Jasper Johns's Flag series, and Willem de Kooning's Woman series. 


His scholarly work has consistently placed art and artists in a historical context, yet he is known for his less than formal approach to criticism by often using a first-person narrative in his essays. This style has personalized art criticism, making it experiential for readers and museumgoers.


He writes in his essay, Contemporary Art and the Plight of the 


Public, "It seems that during this first encounter with Johns's work,

few people were sure of how to respond, while some the 


dependable avant-garde critics applied tested avant-garde standards 


- which seemed suddenly to have grown old and ready for dumping. 


My own reaction was normal. I disliked the show, and would gladly 


have thought it a bore. Yet it depressed me and I wasn't sure why." 


In the works of Jasper Johns, Steinberg identifies a theme of great 


consequence that is not clear to the naked eye, that of waiting. 


Steinberg points out the "sense of desolate waiting" in Johns's 


works, which all contain objects (flags, faces, coat hangers, etc.) 


designed to move and function in a particular way, yet they are held 


absolutely rigid and still. This technique, according to Steinberg, is 


how Jasper Johns manages to invert the viewer's expectations of 


what makes for significant art. 


http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MBizOTQ2LCEJ:www.theartstory.org/critic-steinberg-leo.htm+photographs+%2B+exhibitions+%2B+leo+steinberg&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari&source=www.google.com




"...it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as 


a bad risk. And we the public ... should be proud of being in this 


predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to 


life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life." 




"If a work of art or a new style disturbs you, then it is probably good work. If you hate it, it is probably great." - Leo Steinberg

"All art is infested by other art." - Leo Steinberg


The photo above is how I remembr him in the mid-1970's

Steinberg made a Foucauldian "cut" in the Dominating Discourse of art criticism.