mujalifah's Xanga

Symbolism: throwing things together, the measure of authenticity?

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 23:00:30 GMT

symbolism 1654, “practice of representing things with symbols,” from symbol. Attested from 1892 as a movement in Fr. literature that aimed at representing ideas and emotions by indirect suggestion rather than direct expression; rejecting realism and naturalism, it attached symbolic meaning to certain objects, words, etc. Fr. symboliste was coined by poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96) in 1885.
symbol Look up symbol at Dictionary.com->

symbol c.1434, “creed, summary, religious belief,” from L.L. symbolum “creed, token, mark,” from Gk. symbolon “token, watchword” (applied c.250 by Cyprian of Carthage to the Apostles’ Creed, on the notion of the “mark” that distinguishes Christians from pagans) from syn- “together” stem of ballein “to throw.” …

… The sense evolution is from “throwing things together” to “contrasting” to “comparing” to “token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine.” …

… Hence, “outward sign” of something. The meaning “something which stands for something else” first recorded 1590 (in “Faerie Queene”). Symbolic is attested from 1680.

First: I’m struck by this notion of symbolism meaning “throwing things together” - I suppose for something to stand for something else, it must put its back up to it and project [blank], that is, project its case for standing for something else.

Second: What is sense evolution? An interesting phrase, because what of the sense remains the same and what changes?

Third: In a curious and potentially unconscious/ conscientious move, “Saudi authorities” in 2004 replaced the three jamarats, obelisk shaped targets in the Stoning of the Devil ceremony that is part of Hajj, with three walls accessible by a great multi-levelled bridge.

The expressed reason for the reconstruction is safety, and that makes perfect sense, but what I see in the wall is an enlargement of the pillars to unrepresentable proportions. To remain a jamarat (a pillar), the community of participants must fill in that which lies beyond the crop marks to its imaginable size.

Thanks to imagination, the wall can secure the well being of the masses as they reject the devil.

Yet this is not the only activity taking place. There is a projection involved in securing a safe site of projection. The act on the day is a “throwing something together”, but so too is the jamarat bridge - this passageway over and upon which the projection is made - a throwing of concrete, a throwing of people. This is the Jamarat Bridge and one can see the three pillars.

The site is being reconstructed again. 362 died in 2006 at the event, something to do with luggage getting in the way of the flow of the crowd. Apparently not everyone makes it over the bridge. According to Alexander Trevi at Pruned:

Dirk Helbing, a professor in crowd dynamics at the Dresden University of Technology, et al., will be complemented by a reorganization of the streets leading up to the bridge, and a time schedule and route assignments as determined in real time through video monitoring and on-site surveillance.

As stones are throne at these pillars/half-done, people are throne across the bridge. And this is how a community of self projection evolves, through conscientious and imaginative commitment to throwing something together. This is how the obelisk is built.

Trevi’s piece on the Bridge pointed me to something analogue to this - the 10 Mile Spiral, a great big coiled rattlesnake of a roadway near Las Vegas that conceptually give you all the pleasure of Vegas while maintaining efficient throughput.

Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch, authors of this concept in their book Tool, have, like the developers of the Bridge, decongestion and cultural facilitation as their aim.

First, it acts as a massive traffic decongestion device… by adding significant mileage to the highway in the form of a spiral. The second purpose is less infrastructural and more cultural: along the spiral you can play slots, roulette, get married, see a show, have your car washed, and ride through a tunnel of love, all without ever leaving your car. It is a compact Vegas, enjoyed at 55 miles per hour and topped off by a towering observation ramp offering views of the entire valley floor below.

The obelisk of the 10 Mile Spiral appears to be negative-space obelisk, but I don’t know if I buy that. The folks at BLDGBLOG, who introduced me to the 10 Mile Spiral, point out some scene in J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, where a character driving around in the madness of London’s motorways loathes the other drivers. The stick shifts of other drivers could quite possibly be our obelisks, but so what if I loathe everyone today and care little tomorrow? There’s nothing very together about it - I still go out driving. I like a spectacle. A mass gathering - congregating to maintaine the etymological integrity of symbol-the-verb. Motorways spin around a city, perhaps that is our obelisk (or obelisk park, since all respectable cities are filled with them.) Washington D.C. spins around the Washington Monument - there’s an obelisk that took a couple of decades to build!

But on the stones we throw in Vegas, I know something:

It is dice we throw together.

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Å½iÅ¾ek on the formally evil: unconditional love

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:08:35 GMT

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/DhDuYfZa5dE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

“Assume the mistake and go to the end; this we call love.”

I buy it.

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Best birthday card ever

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 11:51:27 GMT

Thanks, Zack, and everyone else who signed the card and came to La Conner. It was the pleasantest of surprises.

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Foreign Policy calls Boer cause in Boer War a sham

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 12:43:41 GMT

It’s understandable that a group feeling its loss of status would want to reach back for icons and moments in history to be proud of. But, aside from the fact that chanting a general’s name is a strange habit in a democracy, the cause that De la Rey fought for was less than commendable. Sure, the Boers were resisting British imperialism, but it was for the sake of their own right to marginalize and exploit the African population without British interference. - Thursday Video: Rock song rekindles ethnic tensions in South Africa - FP Passport

Michael Cognato’s expression of the “cause they fought for” may be an unconscious slight of the American and Canadian causes which motivated self-government in these countries. A mimetic desire to defer guilt or at the very least, a sense of responsibility, for our American and Canadian past upon the Boers is a curious, but I believe real phenomenon in North America. The Boers/Afrikaners are so well known by their critics here on the North American continent, because the Boers are a vivid image of themselves.

But there is great cause for self-doubt, problems for the language which we decide to frame the past of South Africa and for assuming that the Boers do not share a common history with their Canadian and American counterparts: Milnerism is one (which mhambi puts out well), but another problematic phenomenon to be wrestled with is the “race conciliation” discourse of Louis Botha’s first government of the Transvaal and subsequently of the Union. That discourse, albeit referring to white - white race relations, ought to jar our ability to wholesale blame the past - for there is something there that sounds very similar to the most progressive or perhaps simply the conscientious of us.

H/T: mhambi

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Pick an enemy, make community.

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:49:50 GMT

â€œIt is only out of a community forged by the recognition of a shared danger that a common readiness for responsible action can come into being.â€ - Moltmann, C of G, 211)

Which is the most legitimate enemy and why? Despots, Democrats, Death, Deities or Global Warming? Any other suggestions? Is ethics dependent on the recognition of a shared danger?

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NOTED :: thought police bust googling spouse of a dead man

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:26:31 GMT

Cop: Wife googled ‘How to commit murder’ - Daily Record

A woman’s web history used against her in a murder case. Does this sign the increasing calculability of history?

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Who are We?

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 13:53:31 GMT

We are those who will association.

Is there any Right for We to be?

No. It is simply done; an action varying in degree of violence against those who do not or will not associate.

We are not Them. But this does not mean our will to associate is against Them, although the will to associate is always against something. What We are against is something calling us nothing. What We are against defines us, though we may be against it.

Diseases are the names of the asssociations that fight it. We will be no longer when We take the right to be from the disease. Then We will be something like it was something. And it will be nothing like We are nothing. In those days afer the End, only the delight of memories of suffering will keep us together, reminiscing on the stoop under the twilight.

And night will fall again, the darker our isolation the deeper into the house of Right We will be. And in that house, which all have access to, we will clamour around the furniture, our memories the hard spots of former leisures. All will seek. But there will be some who in the darkness will despair - throwing memories at those who are all just ghosts to them. But then there will be those who will seek a hand. They will themselves not into further isolation, but unto association. In memory of those who confronted the Night before, We will emerge.

We who are emerging the house of Right, will risk in our errors to will repitition. We will repeat life under the light of day with our appeals made unto that living Hope whose being is our object.

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What is the definition of Europe?

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 20:46:50 GMT

That’s it. That’s my question. For a backgrounder to the question read: The lie of the land - Economist.com.

For those who use â€œEuropeanâ€ as a term of approbation, surely faraway Canada and New Zealand are much more â€œEuropeanâ€ than, say, Albania. But the map doesnâ€™t lie. Albania is between Greece and Italy, the historic hearts of everything the Europhiles count their own.

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The places of naming: museums as cathedrals

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:41:11 GMT

Is the museum an accessible storage room for old curiosities? Is it a set of educational toys spaced evenly down long halls with which to simultaneously teach kids and get them tired with all the walking? Ought it be a mall of fun for dates and dull days? Do they exist solely for the cultured elite and the faithful? Are museums part of a grand project? What role does the museum play in mediating self-understanding? What are the questions that people ask about museums?

In a lecture at the ROM, Adam Gopnik outlined the three phases in the history of the modern museum that helped me form some of these questions. His three phases are:

The museum as mausoleum - a place where objects with certain associated rituals or meanings are positioned in an accessible space for new aesthetic encounters with the past.
The museum as machine - a tool for the education and the enrichment of human understanding.
Two potentialities:
1. the museum as mall - where the smell of the restaurant travels down the halls; where museums in form and content appeal to our baser tastes or where one school of thought dominates the selection of works.
2. the mindful museum - a place that has a sense of itself, where the better elements of museum as mausoleum and machine are refined to an end of potential aesthetic unity and not a certain aesthetic unity. Practically speaking this means emphasizing (or balancing) chronology over themes, because themes mean someone is mediating one’s encounter of history where chronologies are easier for people to understand and open up people to their own potential interpretations. It also means realizing the diversity rather than unity of social functions that the museum serves, for some it is a place to go on a date, for another it may be a place for meditative instruction on a subject.

Interspersed in his discussion on these three phases of the museum was some focus on the silence of museums. Although one can talk at a museum, prolonged conversation is unwelcomed socially and by the structure. Gopnik suspects that silence is major drawing point of the museum and that it may even have an erotic, mysterious quality to it.

Added to this was a discussion of the museum as a social metaphor - the museum and its parts are a representation of ourselves, presumably of our life together. Unto this idea of the museum as a social metaphor and as a location of silence among the signifiers to our collective memory, I start to wonder what a massive gathering of individuals to the museum would add. I’ve experienced the alarming numbers that roam single-mindedly down the winding halls of the Vatican museum toward the Sistine Chapel. It was brutal and oppressive. A ritual akin to that inhumanely filing cattle through chutes and on to trucks.

Considering that the objects in a museum were previously part of some work place or social ritual, or that the works of art in a gallery were an expression born of a particular context, ought not the new context of these artifices also be rituals bearing new memories and meanings? To some degree this is done - exhibition openings, lectures at museums, field trips in primary school - but these are the rituals of the few and generally not considered rituals. To borrow a comparison from Gopnik, museums are our cathedrals. As our cathedrals, they impose their belonging to all of us and not the few.

On the comparison of cathedrals to museums, the comparison is instructive. A cathedral is a place for national ceremony, such as coronations and funerals, but on the more local level, of say a church, the rituals that remain, maintaining the place of that institution in society, are christenings, weddings, and funerals. Rituals of naming.

Can the museum be a place of naming? A place where we come to know - standing against history, our short life juxtaposed with the era or deep time, who we are? A place poised on the silence of great halls, that by the objects of memory seduces our thirst for knowledge, desire for higher aesthetic pleasures, our confessions, and our struggle for certainty. That to me would be the mindful museum, the museum that truly is a social metaphor.

Two practical suggestions unto this end, and in the exploration of an end, include:

Figure computer mediated relationships into the equation that defines a museum. Cyberspace, as an actively computer mediated domain of human interaction, is on the whole disembodied. Museums, as a silent reflection of human interactions, is embodied in bricks and mortar. Projects such as … are a way to back up the sovereignty of the museum to the benefit of as many as possible in their own or collective quests for self-understanding. It is a way to step out of the noisy divide of cyberspace and meatspace into the silent message of it all that through the museum can resonate the present image of the person in our world.
Pursue museum literacy. This can be facilitated by fostering and experimenting with different rituals that through the objects, silence, and spaces extant in the museum could invoke new meaning.

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NOTED :: Persecuted atheists on youtube

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 20:23:50 GMT

Nick Gisburne and YouTube: a new context for an old debate - .mwj

Matt gives a good background on the persecution of atheists on youtube.

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