VV(11): Outside the Pattern

[Mark David Tristan Brenchley]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2001, Dave Monroe wrote:

> "Stencil fell outside the pattern." (V., Ch. 8, Sec. iv, p. 225)
> 
> Okay ...
> 
> "I write four times here, around painting."
> 
> Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian 
> McLeod.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), p. 9 ...
> 
> 
> "Our understanding of ... the experience engendered by television 
> programming in general can be considerably expanded if we draw on Foucault's 
> notion of the heterotopia.  The best metaphor for the heterotopia is 
> provided by that complex and strange yet simple and familiar object, the 
> mirror: a 'virtual space' underneath the surface; a place that puts me 'over 
> there, where I am not,' in a kind of 'shadow that gives my own visibility to 
> myself.'  It is a place both of ultimate reality and ultimate unreality: 
> '{I]t makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in 
> the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that 
> surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has 
> to pass through this virtual point which is over there.'  And, finally, most 
> significantly, it is a place where 'all the other real sites that can be 
> found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and 
> inverted.  Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may 
> be possible to indicate their location in reality' (Foucault 1986, 24).  
> Quite obviously, our experience of television is heterotopic ...."
> 

	The old Plotonic chestnut of the Dionyssian mirror might be
significant here. The Baby Dionyssus wasgiven a mirror by the titans,
whilst captivated with the image of himself, he was subsequently torn to
fragments. Eventually, of course he was reborn as Dionyssus zagreb. In
Plotinus' work the mirror is that which prompts us to search out the
higher, non-material realm. We become aware of ourselves as something
else, as somehow fragmented and seek to reunify ourselves. 
There's an excellent article in a recent London Review of Books about
immigration in relation to the Dionyssian mirror. 

quotes will follow....
Mark

> Michael Thomas Carroll, Popular Modernity in America: Experience, 
> Technology, Mythohistory (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), p. 23, citing Michel 
> Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22-7 ...> 
> 
> "'I dream of a great glass sphere, hollow and very high and far
> away ... the colonists have learned to do without air, it's
> vacuum inside and out [....] Inside the colony, the handful of men have a 
> frosty appearance, hardly solid, no more alive than memories,
> nothing to touch ... only their remote images, black and white
> film-images, grained, broken year after hoarfrost year out in the
> white latitudes, in empty colony, with only infrequent visits from
> the accidental, like me ..." (GR, p. 723)
> 
> "The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent.  The film has 
> broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us old 
> fans who've always been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which before the 
> darkness swept in." (GR, p. 760)
> 
> Hm ...
> 
> "it's enough to say: abyss and satire of the abyss" (Derrida, The Truth in 
> Painting, p. 17)
> 
> Something like that ...
> 
> 
> 
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