In disguise : sublime visitations

A collection of writings shared at readings in Melbourne or Geelong.

Sublime : process and mediation

The research challenged traditional notions of the transcendental sublime by identifying the material basis of the experience through the practice of painting. Material interaction within the creative process revealed new insights, illuminated through the sublime experience. The sublime was indicated as a materially-based, generative experience mediating between subject and world.

Sublime Wong Kar-wai

In the films of Wong Kar-wai one finds a double or parallel sensing of the sublime. Numerous characters are seen to experience perceptual moments of unbounded terror, where they are faced with the weight, enormity or formlessness of objects, things, and natural phenomena that they cannot initially or fully comprehend. These ‘textual’ sublime moments are simultaneously rendered receptively, experientially sublime through the way Wong Kar-wai conjures up a series of refracted, defamiliarised images of heightened intensity, such as bejeweled juke boxes, incandescent lampshades, thick waterfalls, and wispy cigarette smoke rising. Such awesome images are of artifice and nature, conjoined, blurred, or delineated, so that the sublime moment is of the postmodern moment, irrational and irregular, and ‘monstrous’ because of it. In the films of Wong Kar-wai, character and viewer become aligned in a process of identification in which each recognizes their mortality, and inadequacy, in the face of such dazzling, incomprehensible moments that trace across the retina of the eye. The pleasure and the pain of this is something that I will explore in this paper, using such sublime films as Fallen Angels, Chungking Express, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, 2046, and Blueberry Nights, to illustrate my arguments.

Sublime: process and mediation

The Sublime: Process and Mediation expounds on the concept of a 'Material Sublime' as relevant to the development of artistic practice. The author maintains that the creative process is generative, highlighting the connection between nature, the body, and latent forms of knowledge as revealed through material interaction significant in the activity of painting.  She argues for a co-emergence maintaining the sublime experience traverses a liminal space wherein binary oppositions such as the distinction between mind and matter are negotiated.   

Spinoza/space/speed/sublime: Problems of philosophy and politics in the post-colonial fiction of Gerald Murnane

This article takes account of the ‘spontaneity’ of the post-colonial fiction of Gerald Murnane within the ‘dominating space’ of the philosophy of Spinoza. My use of Paul Carter’s terms here is strategic. The compact of fiction and philosophy in Murnane corresponds with the relationship of spontaneity to the dominating organization of desire in Carter’s rendering of an Aboriginal hunter. Carter’s phrase “‘a figure at once spontaneous and wholly dominated by the space of his desire’” worries Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, who suggest that it subjugates the formation of Aboriginal desire (incorporating spontaneity) to impulses of imperialism. The captivating immanence of Spinoza’s philosophy in Murnane’s fiction, which I will demonstrate with various examples, puts pressure on the fiction to occupy the same space as the space of the philosophy. Here is a clue to why Murnane’s post-colonial thematics have been little explored by critics with an interest in post-colonial politics. The desire of Spinoza’s philosophy creates a spatial textuality within which the spontaneity of Murnane’s fiction, to the degree that it maximizes or fills the philosophy, is minimized in its political effects. That is to say, the fiction shifts politics into an external space of what Roland Barthes calls “resistance or condemnation”. However, the different speeds (or timings) of Murnane and Spinoza, within the one space, mitigate this resistance of the outside, at least in respect of certain circumstances of post-coloniality. It is especially productive, I suggest, to engage Carter’s representation of an Aboriginal hunter through the compact of coincidental spaces and differential speeds created by Murnane’s fiction in Spinoza’s philosophy. This produces a ceaseless activation of desire and domination, evidenced in Murnane’s short story ‘Land Deal’, and indexed by a post-Romantic sublime. What limits the value of Murnane’s fiction in most contexts of post-colonial politics, is precisely what makes it useful in the matter of Carter’s Aboriginal hunter.

Eye tracking the sublime in spectacular moments of science fiction film

In this chapter I will explore science fiction film spectacle as a particular type of endangering sensorial experience. Employing eye-tracking technology to assess where a small group of viewers look, I will contend that through its spectacular set pieces, science fiction film creates two distinct gazing regimes. First, such spectacular scenes create an experience of sublime contemplation where the viewer is (haptically) lost in the wondrous images liquefying before them. These moments of sublime contemplation create the condition where the viewer feels as if they have had an outer-body experience; one that has been cut free from the borders of the linguistic-led self of everyday life. Second, I will argue that certain scenes of science fiction spectacle work to commodify the viewing experience, creating a gazing pattern that is ‘driven’ by the mechanics of the event moment, by the theme park ride aesthetic and the logic of late capitalism. Set in this sensible, empirical context, the sublime dangers of science fiction film can be considered in two distinct ways. On the one hand, when the viewer is caught gazing in a moment of sublime contemplation there is embodied transgression and transcendence: here I will postulate that the viewer exists purely as a carnal being, or are newly if momentarily constituted as post-human, in the impossible present or possible future world that has been spectacularly imagined for them. On the other hand, when the viewer is presented with a spectacle that demands attention to the mechanics and drivers of the scene as it unfolds, a viewing position is created where the very rhythms of the theme park ride is created, where capitalist life is simply being re-engineered. Sublime and spectacular science fiction endangerment, then, liberates and destroys, and it is the encounter between these two vexing poles that is of central concern in this chapter. My focus will predominately be on the eyes, on vision. Undertaking a small-scale empirical study that uniquely utilizes eye tracking technology, this chapter will concentrate on what viewers attend to, gaze at and ‘contemplate’ when viewing two differently constituted ‘spectacle’ sequences: the sun explodes scene from Sunshine (Boyle, 2007) and the Godzilla enters Manhattan scene from Godzilla (Emmerich, 1998).

O Sublime Nanotecnológico

The nano convergence is a historic event, similar to the advent of cyberspace, which has equal potential disruption. As well as the aesthetics of communication Mario Costa has a technological sublime mediated through imaging techniques, we propose in this work the emergence of an aesthetic of nanocomunicasio, which, in turn, proposes a nanotechnological sublime mediated through technological individuation. While the technological sublime Mario Costa is entirely based on the Kantian sublime, the sublime nanotechnology is inspired by the sublime transimanente Schopenhauer. If the technological sublime Mario Costa is connected to virtuality and reproducibility of digital imaging techniques, we have the sublime nanotechnology refers instead to the materiality and autorreprodutibilidade the principle of individuation.

The aesthetics of ideology, or 'the critique of ideological judgment' in Eagleton and Zizek

The notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘critique of ideology’ have been criticised in many ways. This essay examines the works of two contemporary theorists who defend this theoretical category. Interestingly, both do this through pivotal recourse to categories drawn from modern aesthetic theory, and in particular Kant's third Critique. In this way, they reanimate a theoretical concern with the intersection of politics and aesthetics that goes as far back as Plato. The essay's conclusion reflects on this "aesthetic turn" in the theory of ideology: what work it allows, and its limits.

Kant, or the crack in the universal : Slavoj Zizek's politicising the transcendental turn

This paper examines Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Immanuel Kant. Its undergirding argument is that Zizek’s work as a whole- up to and including his politically radical statements, which have become more and more prominent since 1997- is conceivable as a project in the rereading of the Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ via Lacanian psychoanalysis. Critics now agree that Zizek’s orienting aim is to write a philosophy of politics, as more recent texts, like The Ticklish Subject make clear. (Kay, 2003; Sharpe, 2004; Dean 2006) If Zizek’s philosophy is ultimately a philosophy of politics, however, Zizek’s political philosophy is grounded in a wider post or ‘neo’-Kantian philosophy of subjectivity.
The essay has three major parts. Part I gives Zizek’s reading of Kant on the subject of apperception. Part II recounts Zizek’s pivotal reading of Kant on the sublime, which he ties closely to the problematics of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of the first Critique. Part III then examines Zizek’s conception of subjectivity in terms of the faculties (and especially the faculty of imagination) that Kant argues are involved in the transcendental constitution of objects in the first half of The Critique of Pure Reason.
In the Conclusion, the force of the paper’s subtitle—‘Politicising the Transcendental Turn’—will become manifest. I lay out three principles of Zizek’s ‘neoKantian/Hegelian’ ontology. These also make clear how his philosophy of political agency is grounded in this apparently suprapolitical or solely philosophical reading of Kant.

Towering over all : the Italianate villa in the colonial landscape

The Picturesque aesthetic emerged in the later 18th century, uniting the Sublime and the Beautiful and had its roots in the paintings of Claude Lorrain. In Britain, and in Australia, it came to link art, literature and landscape with architecture. The Picturesque aesthetic informed much of colonial culture which was achieved, in part, through the production and dissemination of architectural pattern books catering for the aspirations of the rising middle classes. This was against a background of political change including democratic reform. The Italianate villa, codified and promoted in such pattern books, was a particularly successful synthesis of style, form and function. The first Italianate villa in England, Cronkhill (1803) by John Nash contains all the ingredients which were essential to the model and had a deeper meaning. Deepdene (from 1807) by Thomas Hope gave the model further impetus. The works of Charles Barry and others in a second generation confirmed the model's acceptability. In Britain, its public status peaked with Osborne House (from 1845), Queen Victoria's Italianate villa on the Isle of Wight, Robert Kerr used a vignette of Osborne House on the title page of his sophisticated and influential pattern book, The Gentleman's House (1864,1871). It was one of many books, including those of J.C, Loudon and AJ. Downing, current in colonial Victoria. The latter authors and horticulturists were themselves villa dwellers with libraries and orchards, two criteria for the true villa lifestyle. Situation and a sense of retreat were the two further criteria for the villa lifestyle. As the new colony of Victoria blossomed between 1851 and 1891, the Italianate villa, its garden setting and its landscape siting captured the tenor of the times. Melbourne, the capital was a rich manufacturing metropolis with a productive hinterland and international markets. The people enjoyed a prosperity and lifestyle which they wished to display. Those who had a position in society were keen to demonstrate and protect it. Those with aspirations attempted to provide the evidence necessary for such acceptance, The model matured and became ubiquitous. Its evolution can be traced through a series of increasingly complicated rural and suburban examples, a process which modernist historians have dismissed as a decadent decline. These villas, in fact, demonstrate an increasingly sophisticated retreat by merchants from ‘the Town’ and by graziers from ‘the Country’. In both town and country, the towers of villas mark territory newly acquired. The same claim was often made in humbler situations. Government House, Melbourne (from 1871), a splendid Italianate villa and arguably finer than Osborne House, was set in a cultivated landscape and towered above all It incorporated the four criteria and, in addition, claimed its domain, focused authority and established the colony's social status. It symbolised ancient notions of democracy and idealism but with a modem appreciation for the informal and domestic. Government House in Melbourne is the epitome of the Italianate villa in the colonial landscape and is the climax of the Picturesque aesthetic in Victoria.

The interpretation of nature as spiritual content in painting

Investigates the interpretation of spiritual content in painting. Pt. 1 defines aspects of spirituality and explores the authors concerns of despiritualization. Pt. 2 parallels concerns with the Romantic movement & explores the notion of the sublime in relation to spiritual interpretation. Pt. 3 links the documented research to the body of studio work. The printings and drawings explore the authors concerns through the visual expression of concepts which suggest nature as a spiritual source.

The spectre of grief...visualising ontological terror in performance

This thesis argues that ontological terror is a burgeoning condition ingrained within our collective human psyche which can only be artistically represented through carefully chosen veils, two of which can be made explicit through an analysis of the aesthetic conventions of the liminal uncanny and the traumatic sublime. Artistic depiction of terror is realisable only through the reflections that are cast from it, the sum of which, make up these veils. The experience of terror is intimately aligned with the threat inherent within an experience of trauma or grief and the visual performance outcome of the Masters research Aviary, produced at the Living Museum of the West in 2006 is best understood as a representation of the mournful and desolate reflections that shimmered off a central moment of unspeakable terror.