Chris At Home

I LIKE IT!

That's hilarious.

tuffbeingright writes:

It's nice... in spartan kind of way. I wouldn't overdo this genre though. It might kill your readership. I see you have compensated with a Filipine celeb post - well done.

I am inspired to paint upon this nihilistic canvas.


In the most nihilistic and absurd sense Here is a discussion of post-modernism and seminar list from the Tehran Museam of Modern Art. What could be more nihilistic than to have the highest expression of Western Art and Philosophical thought deep inside the one of the world's largest concentration camps and fundamentalist braindead mass culture?

In fact: One of the most significant and prevailing speculative issues of our time is the philosophy of post-modernism and thus the critique of modernity. Initially, the western concept of post-modernism arose in the field of architecture.It was then applied to other forms of art : music, painting, cinema, literature, literary criticism, etc. and was eventually used to characterise the social, economic, cultural and political aspects of contemporary life. However, no precise and agreed definition of post-modernism has as yet been provided to the plurality of thinkers who have discussed it and the diversity of their viewpoints. Needless to say this reflects the peculiar character of post-modernism:by its very nature it resists exact definition and is not bound by any single interpretation.
what is important however is that post-modernism is the continuation of modernity and of the spirit of an age, which commenced with the Renaissance and evolved into our present-day condition. Some Western philosophers even hold that post-modernism is an attempt at resolving the exigencies of modernity and contemporary man's problems. Hence, questioning the nature of modernity is fundamental to examining post-modernism. Without an intelligent discernment of modernity, and the question of its nature and essence, one can not hope to understand the insights and relevance of post-modernism.
...
Historical & Theoretical Principles of Post-Modernism:

Definitions of Post-Modernism
A Survey of the Historical & Social Conditions of Post-Modernism
A Critique of Modernism as offered by Marxism
Freudian Critique of Modernism
A Critique of Modernism from the viewpoint of Nietzsche
A Critique of Modernism from the viewpoint of Heidegger
Philosophical Trends Shaping Post-Modernism (the Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Wittgenstein, etc.)
Hermeneutics & the Philosophy of Post-Modern
Post-Modern Philosopher's Thoughts (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, etc.)
A Post-Modernism Critique of Modernism
A Critique of Post-Modernism: Habermas
Post-Modernism & Trans-Modernism
Post-Modernism & Contemporary Art

27 April - 1 May 2002


http://www.ir-tmca.com/calendar/envents/Post-Modernism.htm

http://www.tehranmoca.com/about/building.htm

nihilism, ethical
The denial of the validity of all distinctions of moral values. As this position involves in effect the denial of the possibility of all ethical philosophy, it has seldom been taken by philosophers. In the history of thought, however, less pure ethical nihilism sometimes appears as an intermediate stage in a philosophy which wishes to deny the validity of all previous systems of value as preliminary to substituting a new one in their places.

The Dictionary of Philosophy
Frederick L. Will



Ancient Zen Scripture

Meeting a Zen master on the road,
Face him neither with words nor silence.
Give him an uppercut
And you will be called one who understands Zen.


This is the Way I Think the World Is

People prefer self-delusion.
Belief in God and spirits is an expression of powerlessness.
Belief in morality is an expression of self-hatred.
The world is random and chaotic.
Magic is only tricks. Tricks are always done in the simplest way, but the eye is misdirected because people love to be fooled.
I have no control over anything.
I am alone.
Death is nothing. Then we rot and fall apart.
I like it this way.
I could be wrong about any of these things.


http://www.nihilists.net/morenihilism.html

Miss Japan expresses sexual Nihilism:




Aspects of Postmodern Practices in the Arts

1. Celebratory (This can be characterized as "nihilism without anxiety", or by what Jameson calls a "new superficiality". Since there is no underlying purpose or meaning in life, the only recourse is to take pleasure in this newly discovered freedom.)



The General Critique of the Project of Modernity


7. The alienation of the subject is replaced by a sense of "free-floating and impersonal" fragmentation. This signals the "death of the subject", i.e. the end of Individualism. Jameson explains this in the following way:

• Modernism valorizes personal style.

• This presupposes a unique individuality - a private identity or self (subject) - that generates his or her own style according to a personal vision.

• This individualism is put into question in High (or Late) Modernism. The concept of the individual, autonomous subject is looked upon as ideological.

• This presents us with a problem: If there are no individual, creative subjects, and nothing new is possible, what is it that an artist does?

• What is left to the postmodern artist is the possibility of imitation - the recycling of images and forms, i.e. pastiche.

• With the death of the Subject comes the notion that the Past is now "unreachable". This adds an historical component to the problem.

8. The postmodern condition is also characterized by Jameson as a kind of schizophrenia or postmodern temporality. This comes out of a Lacanian (structuralist) analysis of language and its role in the experience of time.

• There is no unmediated (direct) access to reality. Thus, the referent (object) drops out of the structuralist analysis and we are left with the sign and its two remaining aspects, i.e. signifier and signified.

• Meaning (signification) is not a one-to-one relation between a word and its related concept. Meaning emerges from a larger relationship, viz. that of the sentence. This places the signifier in the context of other signifiers. Thus, meaning (the signified) emerges from the signifier/signifier relations.

• "Schizophrenia is the breakdown of the relationship between signifiers." That’s because the experience of temporality itself depends on language. The sense of personal identity, i.e. a self that endures through time, is an effect of language. In fact, it is the very persistence of language over time that makes it possible for us to have an experience of time and, hence, of a continuous personal identity.

• In the schizophrenic, the language function is impaired and doesn’t allow for this sense of temporal duration and continuity.

9. Culture is seen by others (Jean Baudrillard) as an endless play of imitation (simulation) which signals the end of authenticity and reality and the emergence of "hyperreality".

10. The critique of Modernity often takes the form of a challenge to the norms and values of western culture as a whole. [Post-colonialism]

http://homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/pomo.html

DEMOCRACY IS A GOOD IDEA:
On politics, art and activism, idealism and pragmatism



Political activists and progressive artists inhabit parallel universes. When the activist decides to protest against an undemocratic, compliant and anti-social government, she does precisely what the artist does in seeking to create an artwork: she takes a retrospective look at the protests of earlier times and repeats the pattern. But how do we know what resistance looks like today? How do we know how a demonstrator behaves?

What we are looking for in the past is an identity model. A model that defines a pattern of agency, which is a function of the world-view we share. Modernism was one such world-view. The modernist utopia was a fantastic vision of an ideal world. The modern ideal: that man, aided by science, is able to establish an objective viewpoint from which the world can be over-looked at safe distance. In this modern gaze, the beholder is removed from the object of the gaze, and thus exerts no influence on what is seen. This dualist partitioning of the world is all pervasive in the West. It freezes personal identity into an I and a you and group identity into a them and an us.

Dualism likewise informs the Western idealist faith in progress, which –orchestrated through technological and political revolutions – will bring us ever closer to the modern utopia. Western scientists, along with the revolutionary avant-garde, lead the way. Both are, by virtue of their positions – in the laboratory or as part of the political elite – immune to pressures from “the natives” they control. The myth of the artist-genius is also part of the legacy of the modernist identity model. The male artist-ego sequestered in his studio, extracting from the uniqueness of his inner being the truth about the world.

...
After the breakdown of this critical project, two alternatives seem to remain open. The first alternative is to turn the edge of abstract-negative criticism against modernism itself. Which leads to either the nihilism of postmodernism – where finally the critical position itself is negated and all positions become equally valid or invalid – or to a “yes” that is as abstract as the “no” of modernism, that is to a relapse into a fundamentalism that until recently seemed to belong in the past. These two positions, fundamentalism and postmodernism, are in fact each other’s reflections. The second alternative consists in making the critique concrete (a classical move borrowed from Hegel’s toolbox) by seeing the history of modernism as a point of departure, as experience gained that needs to be worked through, assimilated and used – rather than as a platform for renewed exercises in abstract negationism. The experience embodied in modernism is hastening towards self-destruction – culturally into nihilism, politically into fundamentalism – and the necessary countermove is an anticritique that criticizes the failing ability of critique to comprehend pluralistic values and contexts, its forever escalating levels of abstraction and its generally hostile relation to the subject of critique.


...

It is time to develop a new identity model that can invest both art and activism with new meaning and better resonance. Modernism’s dualism, which makes possible the entrenched ego, is closer to fascism than to democracy in social contexts. It supports colonialist domination: to talk, to refuse to listen, to dominate. The task for this new identity model is nothing less than a defense of one of the late modernism’s most impossible ideals, namely democracy. It is the responsibility of art and political activism to create an identity model that both in terms of method and message articulates a democratic alternative.


A pragmatic model of identity must be based on concepts such as collaboration, conversation, mutable identities, and above all focus on encounters in social space where the democratic processes are conducted. All communication requires a sender, a receiver and a medium to convey information. Meaningful communication requires that the participators exchange not simply information but also identities – to be a listener as well as a speaker. A pragmatic cultural critique must focus on the art of disseminating information, on the role of the mass media, on the reclaiming and upgrading of the name of democracy. We need to find ways to demonstrate that democracy is a good idea, and methods that reveal how its name is being abused.

Being a fellow-citizen is not a profession. It is a responsibility that falls to amateurs.

http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/golltext.html

WE now listen to an impassioned appeal for sanity in nihilism.

The New Nihilism in Literary Studies:






But nihilism in this sense is only the philosophical background and ultimate consequence of their literary theory and criticism with which I am here concerned. Pronouncements such as Hillis Miller’s on the “underlying nothingness”4 of all existence or even Paul de Man’s deeply personal statement that “the human self has experienced the void within itself as pure nothingness, our nothingness stated and restated by a subject that is the agent of its own instability,”5 express the basic mood. They are only the ultimate justification of a radical theory of literature.



It starts with the “death of the author,” long ago formulated by Roland Barthes. “We know,” he tells us, “that the text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of an Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture.” Barthes blithely draws the consequences: “once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” He recognizes that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the Text. “Thus if there is no author, no originality, no personality, then Derrida can say “there is nothing outside the text,”7 a statement that denies the whole perceptual life of humanity. It is explained and defended by the theory that there is nothing but writing (écriture) and that writing precedes speaking. Any child before his years at school and any of the hundreds of civilizations that have no written literature refute this. The paradox can only be defended by a verbal trick. “Ecriture” means, in Derrida, not just writing but any system of signs, any institution, any sense of orientation (even the distinction between left and right) that thus precedes speech and what all others call and recognize as writing

The deconstructionists, who deny the author in theory, cannot help speaking of authors not only as necessary pointers to a body of texts, but as personalities whose psychology, life-experience, and social situation become relevant to the texts they analyze. The chapters on Rousseau and Proust in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979) are eloquent testimony to this concern. Nor is it possible for them to avoid singling out specific works of art. Hillis Miller discussed seven Victorian novels in Fiction and Repetition (1982) and Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) (though no other work of Goethe’s).’6 Paul de Man focuses on specific poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, on Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragedie, and on Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloise. While they over and over again assert the impossibility of a correct interpretation, they actually lay claim to the correctness or at least validity of their own readings. They get annoyed and upset when critics doubt their infallibility. In a single essay, “Narrative and History,”7 Hillis Miller complains of critics who have “misunderstood and misjudged” Middlemarch of George Eliot. A commentator on Walter Benjamin is accused of “an error of interpretation,” and a note to the English translation asserts, we are told, something “incorrectly.” Paul de Man complained frequently of “many aberrations in the interpretation of Rousseau.”8
...

Admitting the acumen of some of these readings, one cannot help reflect that a terrible impoverishment of literary study is being propagated. It is limited to a rhetorical analysis that does nothing else than to reveal over and over again that there is an irreconcilable contradiction in every text that leaves one in doubt, undecided, with the matter left for ever “undecidable”, their favorite catchword. Literary studies would become a specialty, a new anti-aesthetic ivory tower that would deprive literature of its human and social meaning as a representation of reality, as stimulation, admonition and simply enjoyment. It would scare off students who could not possibly see why they should devote their lives to such a negative and finally futile pursuit of dismantling, deconstructing. One can only hope that deconstruction is a passing fashion and that literary studies will continue to explore the riches of literature in the spirit of tolerance and positive appreciation. In recent decades the great variety of new, and not so new, methodologies has contributed to a deeper understanding of literature: psychoanalytical critics, students of sociology, Marxists, structuralists, semioticians, reader-response critics, feminist critics, comparatists, and others have in their different ways widened our horizons. Only deconstructionism is entirely negative.


http://www.the-rathouse.com/WellekNewNihilism.html

Further unimportant nihilistic nothings:

My Pet Jawa's Nihilistic Islam:


A practical Nihilist:


In the nihilist Ghetto:


The Nihilist at home:


The face of Nihilism:

Since it was a blank post I filled in my own impressions of nihilism.

Pierre Rehov's documentary finally opened this week.


Find the nihilist:




Find the nihilism: