“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, August 31, 2012

Tom Ford ASLEC-ANZ (Liveblog)

Tom Ford, “The Scenery of Vapour”
landscape, scenery, picturesque, prospect: common grammar of vision
print capitalism <> Nature
naturalizing the social, dark side only for chiaroscuro
domesticating otherness
it naturalizes and it acculurates
the aesthetic at its most ideological
these symmetrical criticisms require the picturesque to work in opposite ways!

But what is doing the framing? Sometimes the world gets inside the form and erodes it away.
It makes form uncertain and framing indefinite and ambiguous

clouding the subject: one of Wordsworth's favorite strategies
blankness, disappointment, anticlimax
unfathered clouds, unremarkable; atmospheres of privative description
“Written with a Slate Pencil...” (1815): not a prospect poem

epigrams: 
Lessing: every circumstance is contained therein (in an epigram)
epigrams contain their own physical surface
a modern epigram is only about the disappearance of this surface
displacement into the title
classical epigrams were untitled; the modern one needs to tell you where and what it is
historical anxiety about poetry's destiny

Hartman: Wordsworth reinvented the inscription
a monument to spontaneity; a poem that coincides with the act and passion of its utterance
self reflection; the title as index of the poem's absent setting; but setting is now enlarged to include its moment of composition
identity of poem and its moment of creation is always incomplete or unachieved

text remains disrupted and discontinuous
to write with a slate pencil is to compose an erasable description

Freud: memory needs to contain permanent traces; but its medium also needs to remain receptive to the new; slate tablet
moment of act of writing <> stony medium; and the gap
what proves permanent is the loss of solidity itself

This means that one ends up talking to the atmosphere--“transparent clouds”

Gravestone inscription creates a geotext <>
vectors of deterritorialization; Akenside's invocation of transaparent flux
poem written on the still atmosphere it evokes

no news--what is conveyed instead is the pure medium in its absolute state
Wordsowrth's poem identifies a historical condition: we must past through this aerial negation
pass through this interspace in which writing becomes invisible, in which all description melts away
introduces difference into thinking and saying

WW's poem transmits the disappearance across 2 centuries

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