The Clock.

“The Clock was the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes; the whole thoery of the production of regular motion was developed through it”

Karl Marx - On Machinery

Letter to Engels 28 jan 1863

Karl Marx selected Writings

David McLellan 

Oxford University press.

pg 527

Introduction; TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information

‘My Topic my seem rather obscure at first, for common sense tells us that mysticism has no more in common with technology than the twilight cry of wild swans has with the clatter of Rock ‘em Sock’em robots. Historians and sociologists inform us that the west’s mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations and apocalyptic visions crashed on the shores of the modern age. According to this narrative, technology has helped disenchant the world, forcing the ancestral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular game plans of economic development, sceptical enquiry and material progress. But the old phantasms and metaphysical longings did not exactly disappear. In many cases, they disguised themselves and went underground, worming their way into the cultural, psychological, and mythological motivations that form the foundation of the modern world.’

pg 5

TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

Consuming images of the self

‘Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history, Bourguse families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sontag points out, posed for portraits in order to proclaim the families status, where as today the family album of photographs verifies the individuals existence; it’s documentary record of his record development from infancy onwards provides him with the only evidence of his life that he recognizes as altogether valid. Among the ‘many narcissistic uses’ that Sontag attributes to the camera ‘self servalence’ ranks among the most important, not only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self scrutiny, but because it renders the sense of self hood dependant upon the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the reality of the external world’

Pg 48
The Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch

W W Norton & Co Ltd; New edition edition (15 Jan 1979)

Indifference to the past

‘our culture’s indifference to the past – which easily shades over into active hostility and rejection – furnishes the most telling proof of that culture’s bankruptcy. The prevailing attitude, so cheerful and forward looking on the surface, derives from a narcissistic impoverishment of the psyche and also from an inability to ground our needs in the experience of satisfaction and contentment. Instead of drawing on our own experience we allow experts to define our needs for us and then wonder why those needs never seem to be satisfied. ‘as people become apt in learning how to need’

Preface xviii
The Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch

W W Norton & Co Ltd; New edition edition (15 Jan 1979)

Embalming Ritual – Transfiguration

”The Goal of the embalming ritual is a state of unity. ‘

‘Just as the magic of writing is able to capture a make visible a meaning, so to is the person captured and made visible as a symbolic form or hieroglyph in the mummy. ‘

‘A function of these transfiguring recitations is to collect, so to speak the limbs of the body, imagined as being scattered, into a text which it as a new. Such descriptions normally list the individual body parts from top to bottom, begining with the head and equate them with deities, we would like to look at a closer example of this form it is part of a liturgy for the dead of the middle kingdom (19th century B.C) entitled ‘Uniting the Limbs of a transfigured one for him in the Necropolis’.

It contains the following text.

you have taken shape by being the entirety of all the gods;

Your Head is Re 

Your face is Upeat

Your noise is Jackal (Anubis)

etc. ”

Pg: 54.
Remembering the Body.
By A. Assmann (Author), J. Assmann (Author), G. Brandstetter (Author, Editor), et al (Author), H. Volckers(Editor)

Publisher: Hatje Cantz (Jun 2000)

La Jette – Chris Marker

This is one of my favourite short films, it seems to get better each time I watch it.
Anyway one of the things that impresses me about La Jette, is that I find  new ways to interpret the film every time I watch it.
This makes for a quick and easy blog entry, since I don’t have to spend ages writing up a long winded de -construction, because if I did so I would just want to change almost everything later on.
The thing that is interesting about this work in relation to my previous entry about Martin Arnold is the notion of consciousness folding in upon itself, the narrative tells the story of a consciousness that implodes, leaving just images, not images but a mechanical residue of past moments and distant places, questions about perception and questions about history and questions about mechanical devices regulating experience and experience regulating consciousness and consciousness being a mechanical device and thus a loop of sorts, (not sure whos regulating the mechanical devices) in which a boy can witness his own death and someone can live and die in the past and in the future simulatanously. (this film will make you wish you were stoned even if you’re not). Anyway Don’t want to write to much about La-Jette, because I enjoy the enigmatic feel of it and don’t want to challenge this. Chris Marker is a very interesting charechter also, and equally if not more enigmatic than this film, (it has been remarked that he is a time traveller from the future perhaps) anyway doing some research on him at the moment (or trying to, doesn’t seem to be many sources). If anyone reads this and can direct me towards anything about or by Chris Marker I would be grateful, I have one book on him called ‘Remembering the Future’ and the only other work of his I can find is Sans Solei, which is also fantastic, though very different, maybe another blog later about this later.