Amazing lyrics

As I Fall, Future Islands:

I can't touch you anymore, I can't tell you how I feel, as I fall, You would walk.
Heavy hearts do bury words. Under promises and "anything you wants," you'll have.
Like a body without warmth, Feels the blood arrest, and blackens from the cold, I'd cave. For kings and queens misunderstand, Heaven isn't held--but takes you by the hand, so I've found. I can't touch you anymore, I can't tell you how I feel, as I fall, You would walk.
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Tame your thoughts and let me in. Break your callous ways and press me to your skin, Save a rose.

Insulating Power of Water

Alright, so I admit it that I was wrong about the new Radiohead album. It sucks. Yet there has been some amazing new music this year. Not the least of which has been the rise of Future Islands. These guys sound like some direct link to the past and the days of progressive rock hybridized with New Order beats. Their latest album is filled with 80's style lyrics as well, with love and longing being a reoccurring theme. I must admit that it is refreshing to see the return of affect to music, emotion being something that has been missing in the cultural sphere for too long. I know that it feeds my romantic side, something that I have been attempting to destroy as a means to become stronger as a person, but I can't help but love this stuff. Lyrics such as the following from "Before the Bridge" touch on eternal concerns:

I hope you have what you need
I hope the moon is listening
I hope you have what you need
I gave you soul and body

And if things had changed
I would have buried you deep in my heart
And if things had stayed the same
I would have carried you as far as the sky

Who has not felt something along these lines? Even if love is not real and was always a figment of our imagination, the feelings are palpable and very real. I had someone in my life once, and it is songs like this that make me think back to how amazing our shared experiences were and to wonder how she is doing now. It is a shame that one of the realities of life is that good things will always leave one's life. Or worse, the people you loved may have never felt the same connection that you had been so sure was there. Why is it that one cannot feel whole again after such an experience? Will it ever get to a point where you do not think of them and long for their touch, to see into their eyes again and share an unspoken feeling just one more time?

I was lying in the bath today, and was bored so I pulled my head under the water. It is strange how lying there in that aquatic bubble has the effect of emphasizing one's isolated consciousness. You can hear your heart beat, you become aware of your thoughts, you become aware that you are truly alone. It is a strangely sad and exhilarating feeling, being so alone. It is what makes us feel lonely and yet what also causes us to seek out the company of others in the first place.

I was thinking of changing the name of this blog to "why can't I get laid?" It is weird, but ever since my last relationship I just can't bring myself to go all the way through with sexual intercourse with another person. Oh sure, I have had a few make out sessions here and there, but for some reason there is an unspeakable fear that washes over me and I always have to pull away. It is something that I am becoming so focused on, because my God do I miss sex. But at the same time I don't want to have to go through anything like what has happened in these past couple of years ever again. To lose something that created so much meaning in the world, and to have the world turned into this weird gray-scale place where nothing pops anymore, it is the most terrible thing that can happen to a hopeful, loving mind.

I finished my comprehensive exam yesterday and had everyone from my program over for a drunken barbecue. Thank God for friends, and for loneliness pushing us to extend our friendship in return.

HOOOOOWEEEEEEEEEE!

Yes, I just titled this entry with a non-word. But this is perhaps the best way to describe one's response to the new Radiohead album The King of Limbs. A work that sounds something like a cross between In Rainbows, Kid A and MGMT's Congratulations, the album is a real treat and welcome early birthday surprise. There is lots to enjoy here, the more upbeat tracks such as Morning Mr. Magpie fitting in well with the somewhat psychedelic atmosphere of the overall album. A new Radiohead album might mean a tour could be in the works, which would be the best news of all.

Any time a new album from this band comes out I always look at my life as entering a brand new phase. That is one of the good things about coming from my generation: from our late teens right to today there has been a parade of fantastic music coming from these modern minstrels of Oxford.

Spectacle and Experience

Just some notes on things I need to keep in mind.

Writers like Debord from the Situationist International and their theorizing of the society of spectacle, this seems to be of key importance for anyone interested in theorizing the conditions for the possibility of experience in an age of increasing technological mediation.

It seems that a key difference between reading an analogue book and reading its digital copy on some sort of device is that digital devices play a part in distributing spectacle in the postmodern world. They have a decisive role in "distancing" one from experience. Just as language fulfills the desire to mediate experience (Will to Mediate), technological prosthetics perform a similar function in that they act as sorts of hypnotic intercessors.

I will also have to consult some of Baudrillard's writings on the simulacrum. These ideas will likely provide some methodological insights for relating all of this to the tendency of late capitalist societies to project a "fake" reality (spectacle) that acts to distract a populace from experiencing the decline in actual standards of living. It may be the case that mediation in late capitalist societies experiences an intensification in relation to the need for such distraction of the populace.

The Will to Mediate

Writing about art is, in essence, a violent act. Whether it be in the form of attempted murder, as in Panofskyian modes of interpretation that seek to close off meaning by "setting a work in it's original context," or in the more drawn out, tortuous forms of interpretation that began with the proliferation of meaning in semiological and poststructuralist writings. The linguistic turn created a fantasy that all experience could be conceived of in terms of text. This has been the most violent act of all: at the expense of authentic experience we mediate what has happened by attempting to conceptualize all encounters with the phenomenological world. In doing so we are always in a process of looking back and in danger of never having actually felt what it was that occurred, what it was that we immediately feel the need to conceptualize into the awful tyranny of language.

Heidegger once spoke of the destructive act of translating Greek into Latin. It was destructive because translating Greek into Latin is not simply an exchange of one word for another. Something is lost in translation, to borrow from the common phrase, and that something is authentic Greek experience. It was this inability to translate Greek experience into Roman experience that led Heidegger to argue that this was the source of the "rootlessness" of the Western philosophical tradition. In exactly the same manner what occurs when one writes about art is always a loss. In our drive to understand, we have already moved beyond what is valuable in the work of art: namely the pure experience of engaging with the thing before us.

This whole process, the hermeneutical abuse of art, is indicative of a broader condition of human existence. It points to the Will to Mediate: an instinctive drive to, upon having experienced some "thing" in the world, make a conceptual move that leads immediately away from the ineffable qualities of authentic experience and to embark upon winding paths that act to veil purely sensual and bodily experience.

Perhaps we need to take Susan Sontag for what her words state, when in her influential essay of the mid-twentieth century she argued that "in place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art." This need not necessarily amount to a return to formalism as it has often been interpreted. Sontag's intuitions were correct, although I am not sure what we need is an erotics of art. This too seems to be part of the Will to Mediate. What I am advocating goes much further. We should not even attempt to conceptualize visual experience, with perhaps the exception of much twentieth century art which was designed for a particular kind of critical discourse, and which likely explains the phenomenological weakness of much of this art. The kind of twentieth century art I am referring to is often more interesting to talk about, rather than to experience. Perhaps that art is unsalvageable in phenomenological terms.

No words, though, can account for what it is like to stand in the Pantheon of Rome and witness a shower of hail stones pouring through the massive oculus at the dome's apex like a waterfall of diamonds. Even the words I have just used fail to capture or describe what was felt upon witnessing that moment, upon experiencing it. Such phrases could certainly be viewed as a return to aesthetic formalism, which again is something I do not wish to resuscitate. We should be content with silence in the face of experience.

The Will to Mediate is nothing new, although technological developments contribute to its expansion within the social sphere. We now live in an age where we can mediate most experiences in order to make them safer, more banal, and, in the worst cases, impossible. Online dating sites take the difficult aspects of meeting a potential partner out of the equation. Because one's experience of "meeting" others online is mediated through the all encompassing flatness of the screen, inhibitions are dropped and potential opportunities of exchange increase, making the practical outcome of increased numbers of potential dates simpler.

It may turn out, however, that what was enjoyable about one's life was not having our desired ends satisfied in ever more simpler fashions. It may turn out that struggle, failing, starting again, always striving, winning sometimes and losing others, will be what was most enjoyable about one's existence. We may find that it was always in the means that life is worth living, not in the ends. What amounts to the authentic means to our ends? Experience.

What is required now is a move away from writing about art. If we feel the need to turn the authentic experience of art into an object of study, perhaps we should be content with more contemporary anthropological approaches in our studies. Such methodological approaches tend to leave the nature of the experience to its own conditions, and instead perform a sort of "mapping" of the kinds of social activity which occur around art objects. If we must eventually give in to the Will to Mediate, this seems to be a less violent approach than critical and interpretive strategies.