360º Head

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem…. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural  figures of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures…. Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this “pleasure of seeing the whole,” of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts.

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of the New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. As Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinth far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was “possessed” into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive; the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.
– Michel de Certeau
from Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91-92.

“… Colouring the world is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should at this point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema). Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodied through the very glamour of the ‘images’, the Orient is ready for the spiriting away which the film [The Lost Continent] has in store for it. … our studio anthropologists will have no trouble postulating an Orient which is exotic in form, while being in reality profoundly similar to the Occident, at least the Occident of spiritualist thought. Orientals have religions of their own? Never mind, these variations matter very little compared to the basic unity of idealism. . . . “It is this same ‘all things are alike’ which is hinted at by our ethnographers: East and West, it is all the same, they are only different in hue, their essential core is identical. . . . If we are concerned with fishermen, it is not at all the type of fishing which I shown; but rather, drowned in a garish sunset and eternalized, a romantic essence of the fisherman, presented not as a workman dependent by his technique and his gains on a definite society, but rather as the theme of an eternal condition, in which man is far away and exposed to the perils of the sea, and woman weeping and praying at home. . . . All told, exoticism here shows well its fundamental justification, which is to deny any identification by History. By appending to Eastern realities a few positive signs which mean ‘native’, one reliably immunizes them against any responsible content. A little ‘situating’, as superficial as possible, supplies the necessary alibi and exempts one from accounting for the situation in depth. Faced with anything foreign, the Established Order knows only two types of behaviour, which are both mutilating: either to acknowledge it as a Punch and Judy show, or to defuse it as a pure reflection of the West. In any case, the main thing is to deprive it of its history. We see therefore that the ‘beautiful pictures’ of The Lost Continent cannot be innocent …. ”

From “The Lost Continent” in Roland Barthes, Mythologies [US ed. 1972], pp. 94-96.

This is the privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility of unhitching, which consists … in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with more learning than all our books; or in a brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

From Claude Lévi-Strauss. Tristes Tropique [1955]. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, trans. New York: 1974, pp. 414-415.

A new vaccine is being marketed, a new job description is offered, a new political movement is being created, a new planetary system is discovered, a new law is voted, a new catastrophe occurs. In each instance, we have to reshuffle our conceptions of what was associated together because the previous definition has been made somewhat irrelevant. We are no longer sure about what “we” means; we seem to be bound by “ties” that don’t look like regular social ties.

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 6.

Making Good Speed. Everyone tells us to deal with things quickly, but they also tell us to hold back - not to be impetuous, nor yet to wait too long. A missile linked with a sucking-fish can demonstrate this for you: the fish is slow, but arrows fly fast when they leave the shooter’s hand.

– From Andrea Alciato’s Livret des Emblemes (1536) in the French Emblems at Glasgow Collection

Our collective is woven together out of speaking subjects, perhaps, but subjects to which poor objects, our inferior brothers, are attached at all points. By opening up to include objects, the social bond would be less mysterious.

– Bruno Latour, Aramis, or, The Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. viii.

Demades, the Athenian, condemned a man of the city, whose trade was to sell such necessaries as belonged to burials, under the pretense that he asked too much profit for them, and that such profit could not accrue to him, without the death of many people. This judgment seems to be ill grounded, because no man profits but by the loss of others; and, by the same rule, he should condemn all manner of gain. The merchant thrives not but by the debauchery of youth, the husbandman only by dearth of grain, the architect but by the ruin of buildings, lawyers by the suits and contentions of men: Honour itself and the practice of religious Ministers are drawn from our death and vices. No physician delights in the health of his own friends, says the ancient Greek comic writer, nor no soldier is pleased with the peace of his city, and so of the rest. And, which is worse, let every man sound his own conscience, and he will find that his private wishes spring and his secret hopes grow at the pain and loss of others. When I considered this, I began to think how Nature as a whole does not contradict its general policy; for physicians hold, that The birth, nourishment, and increase of every thing is the alteration and corruption of another.

Whatever from its bounds does pass changed,

that strait is the death of that which it formerly was.

 —Lucretius, ii. 752.

– Michel de Montaigne, “The Profit of One Man is the Damage of Another” Chapter XXI of Book 1 of Volume of Essays. [You can find a different translation by Charles Cotton (1877) at Project Gutenberg).]

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and
place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed
in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came
upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed
they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in
solution,
I too had receiv’d identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should
be I knew I should be of my body.

– Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856) from Leaves of Grass (1886 ed.), pp. 57-64.

This tree’s leaf that from the East
To my garden’s been entrusted
Holds a secret sense, and grist
To a man intent on knowledge.

It is one, this thing alive,
By and in itself divided,
Or two beings who connive
That as one the world shall see them?

Fitly now I can reveal
What the pondered question taught me;
In my songs do you not feel
That at once I’m one and double?

J.W. von Goethe, “Gingo Bilboa” (1815) from The Parliament of West and East (Michael Hamburger, trans.)

… on the one hand, the need to fight against imperialist oppression — which may well require manufacture in the future of the national community as the subject of modernity — is far from diminished in the world today, and, on the other hand, the homogenization of that national community could too often lead to the tremendous victimization of those who are culturally and linguistically heterogeneous.

However, unbearable it may be … we have to live with this ambivalence.

– Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis Press, 1997), p. 39.