Pate Duncan > Recent Status Updates

“… infinite, endlessly flowing in an as-yet-incomplete harmony yet permanent, immobile, echoing his own permanence and immobility, lying there, stretching, fixed as if by nails in his horizontal, immersed, practically submerged position, as if peace were a dish of dizzying sweetness and he the table, as if such peace and such sweetness really existed…”

Jung’s method of amplification is so radically aggressive towards linear progression, so profoundly associative, that the digressions become almost comical as Jung traces out an image. Magical stuff, obviously.

“Help me so that I do not choke on my own knowledge. The fullness of my knowledge threatens to fall in on me. My knowledge has a thousand voices, an army roaring like lions; the air trembles when they speak, and I am their defenseless sacrifice. Keep it far from me, science that clever knower, that bad prison master who binds the soul and imprisons it in a lifeless cell.”

“Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.”

Ditko’s shading in ST #131 is the kind of stuff that reminds me of why an artist as modernist as Alain Resnais loved comics. Beautiful stuff; I’m happy to be gaining a greater appreciation for this style.

“People like me probably don’t want anything to actually happen to them anyway…”

I really respect and appreciate the typography and layout of this book (like The Forms of the Affects, a gorgeous cover) as working for its argument itself. Brinkema insists on form’s stubborn refusal to be paraphrased, and her arguments interlock in a zig-zag path that is complicated by the book’s irregularities. Despite my own historicizing and emphasis on embodied spectators, I love this a lot.

🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

Reading the bit about Final Destination’s airplane crash while waiting to board a flight isn’t helping things for me.

Where I found The Forms of the Affects a bit frustrating in how quickly it leapt to disavow the embodied viewing subject, I think I have an easier time buying—even sharing!—the overall affective frustration with the way that anthropocentric reduction to psychology, embodiment, etc. seems to get us away from the aesthetic to instrumentalize it theoretically in excess of its necessary condition of perception.

The Greenaway chapter is the standout for me so far. I find it impossible to buy the displaced and deferred agency of the affect to itself via passive constructions that work to elide and disavow the embodied human subject as at the very least co-constructing the affect alongside the form (a far less radical but far more probably argument). Despite my qualms, it’s a dazzling thing to read.

The brief pages on “neo-formalism” [sic] and the extension of an all too literal and mimetic indexicality argument (attesting to the materiality of light while denying the materiality—and, crucially, mediating effect—of film stock, gauge, grain, color, etc.) with Barthes have me basically blacking out some of the margins in my copy with question marks and quibbles.

An engaging read, though!

I know this is kind of his thing, but the “Hysteria” chapter makes me feel like I’m going completely insane and I don’t mean that as a virtue of the text. Still working on my tolerance for Deleuze.

“publicly pleasing my parents while privately pulling my putz!”