Jon Wozencroft on the Unknown Pleasures artwork. With Joy Division and everything that surrounded them, you are constantly confronted by the vast difference between the - improvised, provisional - conditions of the work's production, its dependence on a particular set of historical contingencies, and its mythic insistence, its timelessness. If Saville 'helped to create the reality whereby the group could be perceived as truly great' (Morley) it was by correlating their sound with an imagery that was impersonal, abstract, coldly rather than pyschedelically cosmic. With every year that passes, Joy Division seem less like the transmitter of their own era's geist than the medium through which the ghosts of a dead future - our present - first made their sepulchural voices heard.
Larval Subjects with a response to my attack on Deleuze's affirmation, every bit as detailed and thorough as my piece was peremptory and polemical. Not that I'm abandoning the position - but to respond adequately to LS's post would take more time than I have at the moment. My brief response would be that there is a persistent tendency in Deleuze to slip from supposedly neutral ontological claims (the world is produced by affirmations) to valorisations (and isn't this good!) It hardly need be added that the use of a word like 'affirmation' (cf 'intensities') already invites such a slippage. Of course, for Nietzsche there can be no 'neutral' claims, ontological or otherwise. Cue the cold laughter of Schopenhauer...
Foucault is Dead extends and finesses IT and my observations on class and self-belief. A point relevant to FiD's idea of self-belief as an 'impossible object'.... Therapists will confirm that the level of self-belief required to avoid depression is generally too high; most people systematically overrate their capacities, achievements and level of happiness. A functional level of self-belief, therefore, is in most cases self-delusory.
Posted by mark at May 21, 2007 12:06 AM | TrackBack