Foundational Observations

Preliminary Observations on Visual Media from Susan Sontag; Foucault on Commentary; Post-convinced observations of Biological -Chemistry Discourses from Dr. Cowan; News from Substack-Big and small.

First, the NEWS.

This past week, Substack.com sent a mail out, announcing that it will be taking applications from video producers.

Substack has created a mentorship program with which they will choose ten promising candidates from amongst the applicants…

…who will then receive opportunities, mentors, and education in how to use specialized technological applications, as part of a grooming program to produce market-leading moving-image-plus-audio, aka “video”,producers and content that….and this is my assumption….give Substack part of the market-share of the enormous income generated by a largely video-addicted population.

[ …I have not informed myself, or else I did not notice upon reading this mail, whether or not applicants can only be from already existing substack posters.]

Substack has moved far out and beyond the writing field.

Many presenters , newly in substack, post videos from the massively funded online sites they come from , sometimes with transcripts ( which are wonderful to have), that are not their original work, but rather compilations of news items, or of others’ (the editorial teams of their respective employers) presentations.

The “writing” consists of .comment and analysis based on mediated/media-presented content/topic. A functionary form of writing. Not literature, not art. Not inspirational. The action is to pin the tails to the donkeys within a limited and well-regulated “MAP” of discussions.

   Foucault discusses critique and commentary: 

"      It may well be that we belong to an age of criticism whose lack of

a primary philosophy reminds us at every moment of its reign and its

fatality: an age of intelligence that keeps us irremediably at a distance

from an original language………

in the innumerable words spoken by men—whether

they are reasonable or senseless, demonstrative or poetic—a meaning

has taken shape that hangs over us, leading us forward in our

blindness, but awaiting in the darkness for us to attain awareness

before emerging into the light of day and speaking. We are doomed

historically to history, to the patient construction of discourses about

discourses, and to the task of hearing what has already been said.

But is it inevitable that we should know of no other function for

speech (parole) than that of commentary?……..

Commentary questions discourse as to what it says and intended to say; 

it tries to uncover that deeper meaning of speech that enables it to achieve an identity with itself, supposedly nearer to its essential truth; 
in other words, 
in stating what has been said, one has to re-state what has never been said. 

In this activity known as commentary 
which tries to transmit an old, unyielding discourse seemingly silent to itself, into another, 
more prolix discourse that is both more archaic and more contemporary—is
concealed a strange attitude towards language:

 to comment is to
admit by definition an excess of the signified over the signifier;

 a necessary, unformulated remainder of thought that language has left in
the shade—a remainder that is the very essence of that thought,
driven outside its secret—but to comment also presupposes that this
unspoken element slumbers within speech (parole), and that, by a
super-abundance proper to the signifier, one may, in questioning it,
give voice to a content that was not explicitly signified.

 
By opening up the possibility of commentary, this double plethora dooms us to an
endless task that nothing can limit: 
there is always a certain amount
of signified remaining that must be allowed to speak, 

while the signifier is always offered to us in an abundance that questions us,
 in spite of ourselves, as to what it ‘means’ (veut dire). 

Signifier and signified thus assume a substantial autonomy that accords the treasure
of a virtual signification to each of them separately; one may even
exist without the other, and begin to speak of itself: "



Foucault, Michel;  from the Preface to “The Birth of The Clinic” ; 1976; page xvi.  ]

…..who will then receive opportunities, mentoring, and training in how to use specialized technological applications, as part of a program to produce market-leading moving-image-plus-audio content, aka “videos”, that….and this is my assumption….give Substack part of the market-share of the enormous income generated by a largely video-addicted population.

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On the small-kine substack news, I have been frozen out of my own stack three times , of varying lenghts, in the past…..two weeks.

No answers from substack yet as to what this is all about. Perhaps someone has given them cause to investigate each and every postsing and pass or fail it before I’m allowed another?

All I did that I had not done before was to unsub from one stack with some personal comments on why I was doing so, mailed personally from my personal email to the author’s personal email. I did not make my unsubbing nor reasons public, nor publicize any “names”. I simply refused to be publicly insulted, on that author’s stack, for no reason.

So, as far as what’s different in my ability to enter my own substack…which I’m not scared enough to “ban” or censor anyone from…I’m not into boring guessing games. I don’t need the attention, I have other work to do.

If I disappear from here, the Rahu realm of the internet. it’s most likely simply because I’ve proved myself to be too-fully embodied, and too-full of “material facts” which have no purchase in the north-node’s bodiless head-realm.

SPEAKING OF THE ANGER AND VIOLENCE PRONE MARS/RAHU CONJUNCTION ON MAY 18

As the Mars-Rahu meeting/conjunction comes upon us, notice , if you will….,

….the situations encountered which present Mars’ embodied material facts in conflict with Rahu’s disembodied, obsessive projections, proclamations, and illusions, magnified all out of reality. Rahu is Smoky, and seeks to disrupt. Rahu is always hungry hungry hungry for more and more and more, because Rahu has no body with which to digest anything it ingests.

Rahu can never be satisfied. “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” is the Song of Rahu.

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POST CONVINCED OBSERVATIONS OF THE BILOGICAL CHEMISTRY DISCOURSE:

For a fabulous discussion of such disembodied proclamations made by “biological scientists”, Dr. Tom Cowan’s recent broadcast discussing HORMONES is a real hoot.

I find Tom Cowan delightful, not only in his ability and willingness to fully think in all the ways a competent human with an open mind can think, but also his willingness to admit that until about six or eight years ago, what with all the books he had writ etc., he was basically talking and writing out of his “professionally-stuffed cloacal aperture”, which is my way of expressing his admissions here.

So, if you find it REFRESHING TO HEAR A “PROFESSIONAL” ADMIT HOW WRONG HE WAS/ AND MAY BE YET AGAIN…!!…do enjoy.

For me , it was a bundle of laughs. Fabulous stories from our fabulously imaginative “scientists”…

…. with cartoon illustrations. I kid you not.

https://rumble.com/v4u3ydu-hormone-replacement-therapy-may-8th-2024.html

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And now, the contribution that I’ve been wanting to post here, and wouldn’t you just know that it’s topic is timely.

Susan Sontag on Photography, 1971:

(from written notes I took years ago in Nepal;

in the same cafe where I found this book, I met a young woman…whom I blurted out the brilliance of what I was reading to, that’s how we met…. who had just completed her University degrees with a Master’s paper on this amazing early work. I hope I get to read it all someday.)

" The camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mode"

"To photograph means putting onerself into a ...relation to the world that feels like knowledge....and therefore....power. "

Paris, 1871, June - police use photos to round up communards

"This very passivity - and ubiquity - of the photographic record is photography's 'message', it's aggression."

"...recently...as widely practiced, an amusement...a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power. "

"...not to take pictures of one's children, particularly when they are small, is [interpreted as] a sign of parental indifference. "

"Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait chronicle of itself - a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness. It hardly matters what activities are  photographed,...so long as photographs get taken and are cherished. Photography becomes a rite of family life just when, in the industrializing countries of Europe and America, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery. As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled  continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life - those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of dispersed relatives. A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family - and often, is all that remains of it. "

"As photographs give people an imaginary [based upon images] possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure"

"Photos document sequences of consumption...outside the view of family, friends, etc. "

" A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it...gives shape to experience....method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic - Germans, Japanese, and Americans...something to do...imitation of work. "

"Photography...is essentially an act of non-intervention...where the photographer has the choice between a photograph...and a life,... to choose the photograph....the person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene. "

"The camera as phallus is, at most, a flimsy variant of the inescapable metaphor that everyone employs...it is named without subtlety.....'loading'...and 'aiming', and 'shooting' of film."

"....machine is all-knowing...as simple as turning the ignition or pulling the trigger."

"...fantasy machines whose use is addictive"....." a photo is ....both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. "