Thursday, January 24, 2013

Allegory of Prudence (After Titian)


Is it possible to receive your own post as if for the first time, as if it were news about yourself originating from abroad? This prospect articulates the aporia, the no/way out or im/passe in the circuit of auto-affection. To subscribe to this channel one must use the good offices of an avatar, a go- between (a prosopon). That, then, really means recognizing your autobiography in the schtick of a Punch and Judy show. What is commonplace, even stereotyped, in the material world is obscure, indeterminate in the spiritual one. There there are no stock characters, no plot formulas, or rather, it is only we self-observers who continue to miss the point of our love for puppet shows. How pathetically scanty is my self-knowledge compared with, say, my knowledge of my home town. (Past). And so? Any observation of the inner world is accomplished through sketches of the outer world. At least expression is doubtless a form of improvisational theater, an abstract graphing of one’s own shape. The inner life may be figured, not narrated, described, or analyzed. Expression is the opening of a passage between the two sides of life (the im/material). Or, more correctly, the invention of an aesthetic effigy that neither resembles nor indexes either dimension of my nature, since, immersed as we are in spectacle, we only see programming wherever we turn.

1 comment:

  1. My pastiches (takes) of Titian and Kafka are more or less literal, accepting their fables as templates to fill in with my own materials. Part of the point is just to clarify what might be lost in the quantity of information in AE: that the motivation of the theorietical inquiry and the allegory exercises is to produce my own allegory of prudence acccording to the terms set by the paragons. The konsult poetics should use Ulmer's takes as a point of departure for further development (AE is the Theory of a new CATTt). There will be further posts discussing the konsult CATTt.

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