Food for Thought

The Sound Continuum - Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image: Ch 9 - The Components of the Image, Part 2:

We are sometimes reminded that there is not just one soundtrack, but at least three groups, words, noises, music. Perhaps an even greater number of sound components should be distinguished: noises (which isolate an object and are isolated from each other), sounds (which indicate relationships and are themselves in mutual relation), phonations (which cut into these relations, which can be shouts, but also genuine jargons', as in the talking burlesque of Chaplin or Jerry Lewis), words, music. It is clear that these different elements can enter into a rivalry, fight each other, supplement each other, overlap, transform each other: this was the object of thorough research from the outset of talking cinema by Rene Clair; it was one of the most important aspects of Tati'swork, where intrinsic relations of sounds are systematically deformed, but also where elementary noises become characters (the ping-pong ball, the car in Mr Hulot's Holiday), and where, conversely, characters enter into conversation through noises (the pfff conversation in Playtime).21l All this would be a sign, following a fundamental thesis of Fano, that there is already a single sound continuum, whose elements are separate only in terms of an ultimate referent or signified, but not ofa 'signifier'.21 The voice is not separable from noises, from the sounds which on occasion make it inaudible: this is indeed the second important difference between cinematographic and theatrical speech-acts. Fano cites the example of Mizoguchi's A Story from Chikmatsu, 'where Japanese phenomena, sound effects and punctuations by percussion weave a continuum whose mesh is so fine that it seems impossible to find its weft'. All of Mizoguchi's sound work goes in this direction. With Godard, not only can music hide the voice, as at the beginning of Week-end, but First Name Carmen uses musical movements, speech-acts, sounds of doors, sounds of the sea or the Metro, cries of seagulls, pluckings of strings, revolver-shots, slidings of bows and machine-gun bursts, the 'attack' of music and the 'attack' in the bank, the correspondences between these elements, and especially their displacements, their cuts, in such a way as to form the power of one and the same sound continuum. Rather than invoking the signifier and the signified, we might say that the sound components are separate only in the abstraction of their pure hearing. But, in so far as they are a specific dimension, a fourth dimension of the visual image (which does not mean that they merge with a referent or a signified), then they all form together one single component, a continuum. And so far as they rival, overlap, cross and cut into each other, they trace a path full of obstacles in visual space, and they do not make themselves heard without also being seen, for themselves, independently of their sources, at the same time as they make the image readable, a little like a musical score.

If the continuum (or the sound component) does not have separable elements, it is none the less differentiated at each moment into two diverging directions which express its relation to the visual image. This double relation passes through the out-of-field, even though the latter is fully part of the cinemato-graphic visual image. It is true that it is not sound that invents the out-of-field, but it is sound which dwells in it, and which fills the visual not-seen with a specific presence. From the outset, the problem of sound was: how could sound and speech be used so that they were not simply an unnecessary addition to what was seen? This problem was not a denial that sound and talking were a componen of the visual image; on the contrary: it was because it was a specific component that sound did not have to be unnecessary in relation to what was seen in the visual. The famous Soviet manifesto already proposed that sound referred to a source out-of-field, and would therefore be a visual counterpoint, and not the double of a seen point: the noise of boots is all the more interesting when they are not seen.22 We may recall Rene Clair's great successes in this area, like Under the Roofs of Paris, where the young man and the young girl pursue their conversation, lying in the dark, all the lights out. Bresson maintains this principle of non-redundancy, non-coincidence, very firmly: 'When a sound can suppress an image, suppress the image or neutralize it.'23 This is the third difference from theatre. In short, sound in all its forms comes to fill the out-of-field of the visual image, and realizes itself all the more in this sense as component of that image: at the level of the voice, it is what is called voice-off, whose source is not seen.

In Volume 1 we considered the two aspects ofthe out-of-field, the to-the-side and the elsewhere, the relative and the absolute. Sometimes the out-of-field is linked to a visual space, by right, which naturally extends the space seen in the image: in this case the sound-off prefigures what it comes from, something that will soon be seen, or which could be seen in a subsequent image. For instance, the noise of a lorry that is not yet visible, or the sounds of a conversation only one of whose participants is visible. This first relation is that of a given set with a larger set which extends or encompasses it, but which is of the same nature. Sometimes, in contrast, the out-of-field shows a power of a different kind, exceeding any space or set: it is connected in this case to the Whole which is expressed in sets, to the change which is expressed in movement, to the duration which is expressed in space, to the living concept which is expressed in the image, to the spirit which is expressed in matter. In this second case, the sound or voice-off consists rather of music, and of very particular speech-acts which are reflexive and not now interactive ones (the voice which evokes, comments, knows, endowed with an omnipotence or a strong power over the sequence of images). These two relations of the out-of-field, the actualizable relation with other sets, the virtual relation with the whole, are inversely proportional; but both of them are alike strictly inseparable from the visual image, and already appear in the silent film (for instance, Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc). When cinema acquires sound, when sound fills the out-of-field, it therefore does so in consequence of these two aspects, of their complementarity and inverse proportionality, even if it is destined to produce new effects. Pascal Bonitzer and then Michel Chion have called the unity of voice-off into question, by showing how it was necessarily divided according to the two relations.24 In effect it seems as if the sound continuum was constantly differentiated in two directions, one of which carries noises and interactive speech-acts, the other reflexive speech-acts and music. Godard once said that two soundtracks are needed because we have two hands, and cinema is a manual and tactile art. And it is true that sound has a special relation with touch, hitting on things, on bodies, as at the beginning of First Name Cannen. But even for a person with no arms, the sound continuum would continue to be differentiated in accordance with the two relations of the visual image, its actualizable relation with other possible images, realized or not, and its virtual relation with a totality of images which is unrealizable.

The differentiation of the aspects in the sound continuum is not a separation, but a communication, a circulation which constantly reconstitutes the continuum. Take, for example, The Testament of Dr Mabuse according to Michel Chion's exemplary analysis: the terrible voice seems to be always to the side, in accordance with the first aspect of the out-of-field, but, as soon as there is a move to the side, it is already elsewhere, omnipotent, in accordance with the second aspect, until it is localized, identified in the image seen (voice-in). None of these aspects, however, negates or reduces the others, and each survives in the others: there is no last word. This is also true of music: in Antonioni's Eclipse, the music that first surrounds the lovers in the park is discovered to come from a pianist whom we do not see, but who is to the side; the sound-off thus changes its status, passes from one out-of-field to the other, then goes back in the opposite direction, when it continues to make itself heard far from the park, following the lovers in the street. 25 But, because the out-of-field belongs to the visual image, the circuit passes equally through the sounds-in situated in the seen image (hence all the instances where the music's source is seen, as in the dances beloved of the French school). This is a network of sound communication and permutation, bearing noises, sounds, reflexive or interactive speech-acts and music, which enter the visual image, from outside and from inside, and make it all the more 'legible'. The prime example of such a cinematographic network is Mankiewicz, and especially People Will Talk where all the speech-acts intercommunicate but also both the visual image to which these speech-acts refer, and the music which harmonizes and goes beyond them, carrying away the image itself. Hence, we are moving towards a problem which does not now concern only the intercommunication of sound elements on the basis of the visual image, but the intercommunication of the latter: in all its forms of belonging, with something that goes beyond it, without being able to do without it, without ever being able to do without it. The circuit is not only that of sound elements, including musical elements, in relation to the visual image, but the relation of the visual image itself with the musical element par excellence which slips everywhere, in, off, noises, sounds, speeches.

Movement in space expresses a whole which changes, rather as the migration of birds expresses a seasonal variation. Everywhere that a movement is established between things and persons, a variation or a change is established in time, that is, in an open whole which includes them and into which they plunge. We saw this earlier: the movement-image is necessarily the expression of a whole; it forms in this sense an indirect representation of time. This is the very reason that the movement-image has two out-of-fields: the one relative, according to which movement concerning the set of an image is pursued or can be pursued in a larger set of the same nature; the other absolute, according to which movement, whatever the set which it is taken as part of, refers to a changing whole which it expresses. According to the first dimension, the visual image links up with other images. According to the other dimension the linked images are internalized in the whole, and the whole is externalized in the images, itself changing at the same time as the images move and link up. Of course, the movement-image does not only have extensive movements (space), but also intensive movements (light) and affective movements (the soul). Time as open and changing totality none the less goes beyond all the movements, even the personal changes of the soul or affective movements, even though it cannot do without them. It is thus caught in an indirect representation, because it cannot do without movement-images which express it, and yet goes beyond all relative movements forcing us to think an absolute of the movement of bodies, an infinity of the movement of light, a backgroundless [sans forufJ of the movement of souls: the sublime. From the movement-image to the living concept, and vice versa ... Now all this already applied to silent cinema. If we ask now what cinema music contributes, the elements of a reply appear. Silent cinema certainly included a music, improvised or programm.ed. But this music found itself subject to a certain obligation to correspond to the visual image, or to serve descriptive, illustrative and narrative ends, acting as a form of intertitle. When cinema develops sound and talking, music is in a sense emancipated, and can take flight. 26 But what does this flight and this emancipation consist of? Eisenstein gave a first response, in his analyses of Prokofiev's music for Alexander Nevsky: the image and the music had themselves to form a whole, revealing an element common to the visual and the sound, which would be movement or even vibration. There would be a certain way of reading the visual image, corresponding to the hearing of the music. But this thesis does not conceal its intention of assimilating the mixing, or 'audio-visual montage', to silent montage of which it would just be a special case; it fully preserves the idea of correspondence, and replaces external or illustrative correspondence by an internal correspondence; it believes that the whole should be formed by the visual and sound which go beyond themselves in a higher unity.27 But, since the silent visual image already expressed a whole, how can we ensure that the sound and visual whole is not the same, or, if it is the same, does not give rise to two redundant expressions? For Eisenstein, it is a matter of forming a whole with two expressions whose common measure would be discovered (always commensurability). Whilst the achievement of sound consisted rather in expressing the whole in two incommensurable, non-corresponding ways.

It is in fact in this direction that the problem of cinema music finds a Nietzschean solution, rather than Eisenstein's Hegelian one. According to Nietzsche, or at least according to the still Schopenhaurian Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, the visual image comes from Apollo, who causes it to move according to a measure, and makes it represent the whole indirectly, mediately, through the intermediary of lyric poetry or drama. But the whole is also capable of a direct presentation, of an 'immediate image' incommensurable with the first, and this time musical, dionysian: closer to an inexhaustible Will [Vouloir sans foruIJ than to a movement.2M In tragedy, the musical immediate image is like the core of fire which is surrounded by apollonian visual images, and cannot do without their procession. In the case of cinema, which is first of all a visual art, it will be music which will be thought to add the immediate image to mediate images which represented the whole indirectly. But the essential point has not changed, namely the difference in nature between indirect representation and direct presentation. According to musicians like, Pierre Jansen, or, to a lesser degree, Philippe Arthuys, cinema music must be abstract and autonomous, a true 'foreign body' in the visual image, rather like a speck of dust in the eye, and must accompany 'something that is in the film without being shown or suggested in it'.2!l There is certainly a relation, but it is not an external correspondence nor even an internal one which would lead us back to an imitation; it is a reaction between the musical foreign body and the completely different visual images, or rather an interaction independent of any common structure. Internal correspondence is no more valid than external, and a barcarole finds just as good a correlate in the movement of light and water as in the embrace of a Venetian couple. Hans Eisler demonstrated this, criticizing Eisenstein: there is no movement common to the visual and to sound, and music does not act as movement, but as 'stimulant to movement without being its double' (that is, as wilI).30 For movement-images, visual images in movement, express a whole that changes, but they express it indirectly, so that change as property of the whole does not regularly coincide with any relative movement of persons or things, not even with the affective movement internal to a character or a group: it is expressed directly in music, but as contrast or even in conflict, in disparity with the movement of the visual images. Pudovkin gave an instructive example: the failure of a proletarian demonstration should not be accompanied by melancholic or even violent music, but constitutes only the drama in interaction with the music, with the change of the whole as rising will of the proletariat. Eisler gives many examples of this 'pathetic distance' between music and images: an incisive fast music for a passive or depressing image, the tenderness or serenity of a barcarole as spirit of place in relation to violent events which are happening, a hymn to solidarity for images of oppression ... In short, sound cinema adds a direct, but musical and only musical, non-corresponding presentation to the indirect representation of time as changing whole. This is the living concept, which goes beyond the visual image, without being able to do without it.

It will be noticed that direct presentation, as Nietzsche said, is not identical to what it presents, to the changing whole or time. It may therefore have a very discontinuous, or rarefied, presence. Moreover, other sound elements may assume a function analogous to that of music: hence the voice-off in its absolute dimension as omnipotent and omniscient voice (Welles's modulation of the voice in The Magnificent Ambersons). Or again the voice-in: if Greta Garbo's voice stood out in the talkie, it is because, at a certain point in each of her films, it was capable not only of expressing the internal, personal change of the heroine as affective movement, but of bringing together to form a whole the past, the present and the future, crude intonations, amorous cooings, cold decisions in the present, reminders from memory, bursts of imagination (from her first talking film, Anna Christie).31 Delphine Seyrig perhaps achieves a similar effect in Resnais' Muriel, gathering together in her voice the changing whole, from one war to the other, from one Boulogne to the other. As a general rule, music itself becomes 'in'32' as soon as its source is seen in the visual image, but without losing its power. These permutations are better explained if an apparent contradiction between the two conceptions that we have discussed, of Fano's 'sound continuum', and of Jansen's 'foreign body', is cleared up. It is not enough that they are both opposed to the principle of correspondence. In fact, all the sound elements, including music, including silence, form a continuum as something which belongs to the visual image. Which does not prevent this continuum from being continually differentiated in accordance with the two aspects of the out-of-field which also belong to the visual image, one relative, and the other absolute. It is in so far as it presents or fills the absolute that music interacts as a foreign body. But the absolute, or the changing whole, does not merge with its direct presentation: this is why it continually reconstitutes the sound continuum, off and in, and relates it to the visual images which indirectly express it. Now this second movement does not cancel out the other, and preserves for music its autonomous, special power.33 At the present juncture, cinema remains a fundamentally visual art in relation to which the sound continuum is differentiated in two directions, two heterogeneous streams, but is also re-formed and reconstituted. This is the powerful movement by which, already in the silent film, visual images are internalized in a changing whole, but at the same time as the changing whole is externalized in visual images. With sound, speech and music, the circuit of the movement-image achieves a different figure, different dimensions or components; however, it maintains the communication between the image and a whole which has become increasingly rich and complex. It is in this sense that the talkie perfects the silent film. Silent or talkie, we have seen, cinema constitutes an immense 'internal monologue' which constantly internalizes and externalizes itself: not a language, but a visual materia1 which is the utterable of language (its 'signified of power' the linguist Gustave Guillaume would say), and which refers in one case to indirect utterances (intertitles), in the other case to direct enunciations (acts of speech and of music).

Difference and Repetition?

Zizek, The Hitchcockian Cut... "Looking Away"

Excerpt from above:

The Hitchcockian Cut

Montage: Montage is usually conceived as a way of producing, from fragments of the real pieces of film discontinuous individual shots, an effect of cinematic space, ie - a specific cinematic reality. That is to say, it is universally acknowledged that cinematic space is never a simple repetition or imitation of external effective reality, but an effect of Montage. What is often overlooked, however, is the way this transformation of fragments of the real into cinematic reality produces, through a kind of structural necessity, a certain leftover, a surplus that is radically heterogeneous to cinematic reality, but nonetheless, implied by it, part of it. That this surplus of the real is, in the last resort, precisely the "Gaze qua object," is best exemplified by the work of Hitchcock.

We have already pointed out that the fundamental constituent of the Hitchcockian Universe is the so-called spot, the stain upon which reality revolves, passes over into the real. The mysterious detail that sticks out, that does not fit into the symbolic network of reality, and that as such, indicates that something is amiss. The fact that this spot ultimately coincides with the threatening gaze of the other is confirmed in an almost to obvious way by the famous tennis court scene from "Strangers on a Train" in which Guy watches the crowd watching the game. The camera first gives us a long shot of the crowd, all heads turn alternately left and right following the path of the ball, all except one, which stares with a fixed gaze into the camera, ie, at Guy. The camera then quickly approaches this motionless head. It is Bruno, linked to Guy by a murderous pact. Here we have, in pure distilled form, the stiff motionless gaze, sticking out like a strange body and thus disturbing the harmony of the image by introducing a threatening dimension.

The function of the famous Hitchcockian tracking shot is precisely to produce a spot. In the tracking shot, the camera moves from an establishing shot, to a closeup of a detail that remains a blurred spot, the true form of which is accessible only to an anamorphic view from a side. The shot slowly isolates from its surroundings the element that cannot be integrated into the symbolic reality, that must remain a strange body if the depicted reality is to retain its consistency. But what interests us here is the fact that under certain conditions, Montage does intervene in the tracking shot, ie- The continuous approach of the camera is interrupted by Cuts.

What, more precisely, are these conditions? Briefly, the tracking shot must be interrupted when it is subjective, when the camera shows us the subjective view of a person approaching the object spot. That is to say, whenever, in a Hitchcock film a hero, a person around whom the scene is structured approaches an object, a thing, another person, anything that can become uncanny, unheimlich, in the Freudian sense.

Hitchcock as a rule alternates the objective shot of this person in motion, his/ her approach toward The Uncanny thing, with a subjective shot of what this person sees, ie-  with a subjective view of the thing. This is, so to speak, the elementary procedure, the zero degree of Hitchcockian Montage.

Did the Universe Just Get Clumpier?

A Cringey Post

Inter-Cultural Jouissance Run Amuck

Slavoj Zizek, "In Russia and Israel, national derangement runs wild." (9/4/23)

Whenever a country's social contract unravels, conditions become ripe for rumours and absurdities to circulate. Even when these are outrageous and obviously nonsensical, they can give expression to a people's deepest fears and prejudices.

Such is the case in Russia today, where Sergei Markov, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin, has warned that Ukraine is creating "gay super-soldiers" to wage war against his country: "Military theorists and historians know which army in Greece was the strongest, remember? The Spartans. They were united by a homosexual brotherhood. They were all homos. These were the politics of their leadership. I think they are planning the same for Ukraine's Armed Forces."

Of course, this mixture of homophobia, fake history, and Marvel comic-inspired ideas of super-soldiers indicates that Markov is not interested in encouraging critical thinking and reasoned analysis. No matter: such idiotic statements apparently resonate with at least some important segments of Russian society.

The same derangement also increasingly applies to Russian historical memories of major national traumas and crimes. At a recent ceremony in Velikiye Luki, in Russia's Pskov region, a priest known as "Father Anthony" doused holy water on a 26-foot statue of Stalin. Though "the Church suffered" during Stalin's long reign of terror, he observed, Russians today should be grateful that they have so many "new Russian martyrs and confessors to whom we now pray and are helping us in our Motherland's resurgence."

Such perverse reasoning is just a step away from arguing that Jews should be grateful to Hitler for opening the way for the State of Israel. In fact, precisely that has already effectively happened. According to a 2019 investigation by Channel 13 news in Israel, future Israeli army officers at the state-funded Bnei David military prep school are taught, by rabbis, that:

"The Holocaust was not about killing the Jews. Nonsense. And that it was systematic and ideological makes it more moral than random murder. Humanism, secular culture – that is the Holocaust. The real Holocaust is pluralism. The Nazi logic was internally consistent. Hitler said that a certain group in society is the cause of all the evil in the world and therefore it must be exterminated. … For years, God has been screaming that the Diaspora is over but Jews aren't obeying. That is their disease that the Holocaust must cure. … Hitler was the most righteous. Of course, he was right in every word he said. His ideology was correct. … [The Nazis'] only error was who was on which side."

The lesson does not end there. Students also learn that:

"With the help of God, slavery will return. The non-Jews will want to be our slaves. These people around us have genetic problems. Ask an average Arab what he wants to be. He wants to be under occupation. … They don't know how to run a country or anything. … Yes, we are racists. We believe in racism. Races have genetic characteristics. So we must consider how to help them."

To be sure, this extreme rhetoric is openly endorsed by only a tiny, fanatical religious minority. And yet, it hints at the underlying premise behind the current far-right government's policies in the West Bank. To compare the situation in Israel and its occupied territories to Nazi Germany may appear a ridiculous exaggeration, and if a non-Jew makes this comparison, he is instantly dismissed as anti-Semitic; but if leading Jewish figures do so, they ought to be listened to. When a society has wrapped itself in layers of tendentious self-justification, it takes insiders to pull back the shroud.

Consider the case of Amiram Levin, the former head of the Israel Defense Forces' Northern Command. Speaking recently to Israel's public broadcasting station about the situation in the West Bank, he contends that "there hasn't been a democracy there in 57 years, there is total apartheid. … the IDF, which is forced to exert sovereignty there, is rotting from the inside. It's standing by, looking at the settler rioters and is beginning to be a partner to war crimes.

When asked to elaborate, Levin invoked Nazi Germany: "It's hard for us to say it, but it's the truth. Walk around Hebron, look at the streets. Streets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews. That's exactly what happened there, in that dark country."

That a retired IDF general could come to such a conclusion attests not only to his extraordinary ethical stance, but also to just how bad things have gotten there. But as long as there are Israelis like Levin, there is hope, because it is only with the solidarity and support of people like him that the West Bank Palestinians have a chance.

In both Russia and Israel today, the social pact is fracturing under the weight of colonialism and fundamental disagreements about foundational principles. These conditions lend themselves to increasingly absurd and extreme forms of rationalisation. But just because you can come up with a reason for doing something does not mean that you should do it. When societies fragment, resisting wrong reasons often requires more strength than following right reasons.

Democrats & Republicans - Rejecting Common Knowledge

Me: Biden's taking bribes

D: No he's not

Me: Here's the check receipt

D: The note says its' a loan repayment

Me ; Where's the loan paperwork?

D:  It was a verbal arrangement

Me:  So where's the interest payment?

D:  It was a no interest loan

...etc. etc. etc.

Common Knowledge avoidance.

The Propulsion & Trip Duration Problems...

Metamorphosis of a Monarch?

Jonathan Jones, "Jonathan Yeo’s portrait of Charles III review – a formulaic bit of facile flattery"

A psychedelic sea of lurid reds and a clunking monarch butterfly cannot save this superficially observed and carelessly executed bland banality

t’s hard to be objective about an artist you like as a person. I recently met the painter Jonathan Yeo – whose portrait of King Charles has been unveiled in a storm of crimson hype – on a radio show and was instantly charmed. It’s easy to see why famous people enjoy being portrayed by Yeo. He’s intelligent, relaxed, unassuming. We talked about a studio visit. But then I had a look at his works online and cringed. And that was before I saw this right royal banality.

Yeo’s portrait of the king is replete with all his vices. It is technically superficial and unfelt. There’s no insight into the king’s personality here, just a weird allegory about a monarch butterfly that Yeo says is a symbol of his metamorphosis from prince to king.

Nice flattery. So it’s no surprise King Charles is said to be pleased with his first official portrait since being crowned. As he courageously copes with cancer, who’d begrudge any pleasure this glowing red homage gives good old King Charles? But the pleasing effect of joy and uplift as Charles’s red military uniform melds with a pinkish psychedelic splurge is bought at the price of any genuine artistic perceptiveness or purpose.

Yeo’s art is formulaic and this one follows the formula. He does a pedantic study of someone’s features then – daringly! – collides this staid depiction with a free burst of lurid abstract wallpaper. He did Cara Delevingne in a vague subaqua setting and Taron Egerton in purple and pink rain. To me this is an evasion of actual portraiture which is based on acute, hard observation.

Royalists are never going to want portraits that look at their idols too astutely. Only one great artist in recent times has been allowed near a royal head: Lucian Freud’s searching, cruelly honest portrait of Queen Elizabeth II will never be loved by sentimentalists because it dares to treat the regal personage as just another person. And to be fair, Yeo too has seen Charles in the same way he sees everyone – blandly. I would say his portrayal of that kindly face adds nothing to what we see of Charles in photos and TV images, except that isn’t fair to photographers and camera people who often capture awkward, complex moments in the royal interaction with reality. Even the deferential coverage of the accession gave us those less than jolly glimpses of Charles infuriated by a pen.

It’s tempting to laugh at this painting, but if you care about art it’s a bit sad too. Yeo seems to be saying that painting itself is just a cheery bit of fakery and razzle dazzle. Who cares about truth when you can beautify? A serious portrait would look hard and long at Charles (or anyone), not combine facile pseudo-portraiture with the cheery serotonin of random colour. We all know the king is more complex than this. The king knows he is more complex than this. It is a masterpiece of shallowness by an artist so ludicrously upbeat he should be called Jonathan Yo! 

Get thee to a tattoo parlour, Charles.  Buterflies?  Really? 

Charles wants to be "seen" as a "person" with "helping hands", and NOT as a king!  He's a 100% Virtue Signal....@@

Lucian Freud, Queen Eleizabeth II

See the Crown Charles?  Now THAT's a Monarch!

Segmentation - Enabling Time's Walk Around the Whole

Glueballs?

...with no String's attached???

The Alpha & Omega of Painting as Art

 Gustav Courbet, "L'Origine du Monde" (1866)

Kazimir Malevich, "Black Square" (1915)

Inspiration

Dale Berning Sawa, "Hurrah for the Courbet vandals: defacing the vulva painting is basic feminism"

The performer who wrote ‘MeToo’ on Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World is right to think the painting is misogynistic: the model doesn’t even have a face!

On Monday afternoon, a group of feminist artist-activists tagged “MeToo” in red paint on Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. Currently on loan to the Centre Pompidou-Metz for an exhibition dedicated to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the painting is a notoriously tight close-up of an unnamed woman’s vulva. It has never not been startling. It operates as a kind of social lightning conductor, consistently illuminating the invisibility women too often experience – in art as in life.

Luxembourgeois artist Deborah de Robertis, who is also exhibiting in the show, has claimed authorship of the action. Its title, she’s said, is On Ne Sépare Pas La Femme de l’Artiste, which translates as “You do not separate the woman from the artist.”

The response, from both the political and the artistic establishments, has been hostile. The museum condemned it as an act of vandalism, the mayor as a criminal attack perpetrated by fanatical feminists. Two women have been arrested.

This comes after several actions by Just Stop Oil at which famous paintings were attacked. Yet to me there is a difference between throwing tomato soup at a famous painting of sunflowers and a feminist artist tagging the anti-misogyny battle cry of the 21st century on to a painting famous for reducing the woman it depicts to her sexual organ. She doesn’t even have a face.

The woman in the painting never lost her head. She was there all along – all of her. Saying so really matters

In 2013, when a male Courbet expert “confirmed” that a newly discovered painting of a head was actually that of this model (it wasn’t), he reportedly said that making the woman whole essentially devalued Courbet’s work. “The Origin of the World loses that kind of marvellous mystery and symbolism from the moment you stick a head on it – that’s why Courbet took it off.”

By contrast, when an art writer once commented to the art historian and altogether more feminist Courbet expert Linda Nochlin, that, given the angle Courbet had chosen, it shouldn’t be possible to see the woman’s left breast, Nochlin lay on the floor (with her clothes on) to demonstrate, with her whole own female body that, actually, it really is.

Lacan owned the painting for three decades but hid it behind a custom-made wooden screen. Until the late 1980s, even experts doubted it still existed. All anyone knew of it were historic accounts by pundits who’d seen it and been revulsed (not by Courbet’s skill but by the body part on display) and reproductions in black and white. These were so grainy that Nochlin highlighted how indistinguishable this made the work from basic newsstand porn.

Before she finally secured the loan of the painting for the Brooklyn Museum’s seminal Courbet Reconsidered show in 1988, Nochlin wrote a whole paper about the efforts to locate it. She noted the Freudian import of both the title and of her quest to find the original Origin. She described how prehistoric depictions of vulvas have been said to be at the origin of art itself. She concluded that the search for lost origins leads to blindness.

De Robertis’s work homes in on an altogether more urgent blindness. You could say that her point, with this performance, is that the woman in the painting never lost her head or her name. She was there all along – all of her. And that saying so really matters.

The artist’s detractors on social media have been piling on the insults: she’s a degenerate, an idiot. But among the other works the performance targeted is a work of her own. A photograph titled Miroir de l’Origine du Monde (Mirror of the Origin of the World), documents a performance she did in 2014, wherein she sat beneath Courbet’s painting, in situ at the Musée d’Orsay, and exhibited her own vulva until the police intervened.

It’s a considered, confronting gesture that she has repeated in other charged locations (in front of the Mona Lisa; at the Grotto of Apparitions in Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared in 1858). And each time, just as activist group Femen do with their topless actions, it is a great big shout to not look away, not deny women their wholeness, their right just to be.

In 2016 Swedish graphic artist Liv Strömquist’s best selling comic, Fruit of Knowledge: the Vulva vs the Patriarchy, was translated into French, under the title, you guessed it, L’Origine du Monde. The Courbetian reference was apt. Riffing on the idea that too many men throughout history have spent way too much time obsessing over female genitalia but not seeing the women it’s appended to, the comic is a bracing look, as one commenter put it, at just how far we haven’t come. Another rightly called it a public health manual.

De Robertis’s performance comes within days of the French parliament approving the creation of an enquiry into sexual violence within the arts. It comes less than a month of arguably the most famous #MeToo conviction being overturned. If the question, “Would you rather find yourself alone in the woods with a bear or a man?” has been trending on social media, it’s because sometimes you need to ask bonkers questions – or do bonkers actions – to get a point across. As gender violence expert Lisa Sugiura has put it: “This continuum of misogyny is women’s everyday reality – and at no point do bears feature.”

Gaza, Gaza, Gaza - Reflexivity's "Current Thing"

One can always rely on the US to miss an opportunity to deploy its remaining imperial power for a good cause. Photo via Project Syndicate

Slavoj Žižek, "Protests of Despair"

These are crazy times. Biblical disturbances in nature, such as the repeated torrential rain in Dubai or the mass fish die-off in Vietnam’s overheated reservoir, seem to mirror our overheated politics and social environment.

At such moments, it is crucial to keep a cool head and analyze all the weird phenomena as closely, objectively, and dispassionately as possible. And few phenomena nowadays are weirder than the protests surrounding Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’s terrorist attack last October.

We should acknowledge the rhetoric from some politicized Muslims, such as those who recently demonstrated in Hamburg, Germany, chanting “Kalifat ist die Lösung” (“Caliphate is the solution”). And we should concede that, despite the massive presence of Jews among the protesters, there are at least a few true anti-Semites among them (just as there are some genocidal maniacs in Israel).

While many commentators have noted the parallel between today’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations and the 1968 student protests against the Vietnam War, the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi points to an important difference. Rhetorically, at least, the 1968 protesters explicitly identified with the anti-imperialist Viet Cong position and a broader, positive socialist project, whereas today’s protesters very rarely identify with Hamas, and instead are “identifying with despair.”

As Berardi puts it: “Despair is the psychological and also cultural trait that explains the wide identification of young people with the Palestinians. I think that the majority of the students today are consciously or unconsciously expecting the irreversible worsening of the conditions of life, irreversible climate change, a long-lasting period of war, and the looming danger of a nuclear precipitation of the conflicts that are underway in many points of the geopolitical map.”

It would be difficult to explain the situation any better than that. The authorities’ obscenely repressive response to the protests supports Berardi’s hypothesis. The harsh crackdowns are not motivated by any fear that the protests will launch a new political movement; rather, they are expressions of panic – a futile refusal to confront the despair that pervades our societies.

Signs of this panic are everywhere, so allow me to offer just two examples. First, late last month, 12 US senators sent a letter to the International Criminal Court threatening it with sanctions should it decide to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Although this was strictly a Republican undertaking, President Joe Biden’s administration also has pressured the ICC not to charge Israeli officials over war crimes committed in Gaza. Such threats signal nothing less than the demise of shared global values. Though this ideal was always somewhat hypocritical (the United States, for example, has refused to join the ICC), governments at least upheld it in spirit.

The second recent example supports the same conclusion. On May 4, France (complying with a German-issued visa ban) denied entry to Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon who was scheduled to provide testimony to the French Senate on what he had witnessed while treating victims of the war in Gaza. With such crude acts of censorship and marginalization happening before our eyes, it is no longer an exaggeration to say that our democracies are crumbling.

Everyone knows that the situation in Gaza is unacceptable. But a great deal of energy has been devoted to postponing the kind of intervention that the crisis requires.

One way to help break the impasse is to offer public support for the student protests. As US Senator Bernie Sanders put it on April 28, “What Netanyahu’s right-wing, extremist, and racist government is doing is unprecedented in the modern history of warfare … Right now, we are looking at the possibility of mass starvation and famine in Gaza. When you make those charges, that is not anti-Semitic. That is a reality.”

After the October 7 attacks, Israel emphasized the raw realities of what Hamas had done. Let the images speak for themselves, Israeli authorities said. The brutal killings and rapes had been recorded by the perpetrators and were there for everyone to see. There was no need for complex contextualization.

Can we not now say the same about the Palestinian suffering in Gaza? Let the images speak for themselves. See the starving people in packed improvised tents, the children slowly dying as Israeli missile and drone strikes continue to reduce buildings to ruins, then to rubble, and then to dust.

I am reminded of what Michael Ignatieff (then a journalist) wrote in 2003 about the US invasion of Iraq: “For me, the key issue is what would be the best result for the Iraqi people – what is most likely to improve the human rights of 26 million Iraqis? What always drove me crazy about the opposition [to war] was that it was never about Iraq. It was a referendum on American power.”

The same point does not apply to today’s anti-war protests. Far from a referendum on Palestinian, Israeli, or American power, they are driven primarily by a desperate plea simply to stop the killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

So, what should the Biden administration do (aside from replacing Vice President Kamala Harris with Taylor Swift on this year’s ticket)? For starters, the US can join the global initiative to recognize Palestine as a state. Far from being an obstacle to peace in the Middle East, Palestinian statehood is a precondition for any serious negotiations between the two sides. By contrast, rejecting (or endlessly postponing) such recognition will inevitably support the fatalistic conclusion that war is the only option.

Strange as it may sound, we are witnessing one of the downsides of America’s loss of hegemonic power (as was also the case with the US withdrawal from northern Syria and then Afghanistan). Ideally, the US would simply invade Gaza from the sea, re-establish peace and order, and provide the population with humanitarian assistance. But don’t count on it. One can always rely on the US to miss an opportunity to deploy its remaining imperial power for a good cause.

If You're a Quantum Physicist...

...EVERYTHING is Quantum!

If ONLY consciousness had a means of Physically re-integrating Brain Waves... cepi corpus through Microtubules.

Dedicated to Georgia's Anti-Foreign Agent Registry Resistors...

Slavoj Again...

Slavoj Zizek, "My Britney Spears Theory of Action"

Every week I check the weather in Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Svalbard. It’s about as close as you can get to a gulag with a human face – a heap of wooden houses where around 2,000 people live. It has a couple of stores and restaurants, and even a very small university. Outside the two streets, there’s much open space in which to walk. You don’t have to go far before being greeted with warning signs: ‘Don’t walk beyond this line without a gun! Danger of polar bears!’ At the door to all the cafés there is another sign: ‘Please leave your guns at the entrance!’ How can you not love a settlement like this? I can imagine living here. My life would be simultaneously a holiday and hard work – as I always imagined communism.

That said, I don’t hate Ljubljana, where I reside. My memories of a youth under communism are much better. In the early 1970s, we got the last Indian summer of more hard-line communism, so that, after finishing my studies, I wasn’t able to get a job. Even this proved to be a blessing in disguise. After a couple of years of unemployment, I got a post at a small research institute which gave me time to travel around, study abroad and establish professional links. The supreme irony is that, without the ‘Stalinist oppression’ of the mid-1970s, I would have been given a post at the university. I’d now be a little-known professor in Ljubljana, losing time with noisy and inquisitive students.

Britney Spears has reached a settlement with her estranged father more than two years after the court-ordered termination of a conservatorship that had given him control of her life. I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn that, when she finally achieved the long-desired freedom, her personal life went into freefall. To explain, one has to go back to an interview she gave to MTV in 2003 when she was asked about the second Gulf War. ‘I don’t quite understand it,’ she said. ‘All I know is that, at a certain point, we ordinary people should simply trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, and be faithful in what happens.’ Obviously, she applied the same rule in her dealings with her father, trusting him in every decision she made. She’s paying the price for it.

At the time I coined this the ‘Britney Spears Theory of Action’. The lesson to be drawn from her mishap is that, in our political life, the era in which we could trust those in power is over. If we don’t regain a truly critical attitude, not just a cynical distance towards those in power, we all may end up like Spears did. Does anyone really think we can trust our leaders today in every decision they make?

With some delay, I saw the Japanese-German film Perfect Days. Koji Yakusho plays Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, who is content with his simple life. From dawn, he follows a ritualised daily rhythm. His free time is dedicated to his passion for music, listening to records in his van to and from work, and reading books every night before bed. He would be an ideal listener of Taylor Swift. Her music ideally fits today’s predominant mode of subjectivity: it avoids both extremes of neoconservative populism and of left-liberal politically correct stiffness, focusing instead on the apolitical sphere of broken love affairs and similar daily traumas or small pleasures. This is why her anti-Trump stance provokes fury and even conspiracy theories. The US elections will be won by the party who attracts the majority of the apolitical youth.

We have been bombarded by news about how criminal gangs have taken over the public space in Haiti. This decay of public power is not limited to third-world countries like Haiti. Western focus should be on Israel as a first-world failed state. Away from Gaza, Israelis continue to menace Palestinians in the West Bank. They are doing this while the Israeli army and police stand idly by. Is this not another case of illegal gangs openly violating the law?

Recently, I have been obsessively listening to podcasts about Tristan da Cunha, the 98 sq km island in the middle of nowhere in the South Atlantic. On 10 October 1961, a volcanic eruption forced the evacuation of all 264 people to the UK. In 1963 almost all of them returned, withstanding the temptation of developed capitalism. The island has a unique social and economic structure based on solidarity, not competition. All the resident families farm and all land is communally owned… in short, it is a communist island. So much more than Bhutan with its ridiculous ‘dictatorship of happiness’, Tristan da Cunha should serve as a model for all of us.

Recruiting PsyOps for Present Ops

Di-Di Mau!

The Under-Achiever's Lament...?

Zizek on Freud, SuperEgo, and Gender Identity

A Fade to Black

Ideological Cures for Hysteria

Slavoj Žižek, "Fear of God = Transmission Joy" (Google translated from Turkish)

Dear Abner, I fear God and no one else.

The effect of this word transforms Abner. While he is an impatient, zealous, anxious and indecisive person, when he hears these words, he finds peace in his faith, and at that moment he trusts both himself and the power of the Almighty God. How does the 'fear of God' talk achieve this miraculous 'conversion to religion'?

Before his transformation, according to Abner, worldly life was full of dangers that made him tremble with fear, and he was waiting for God and his representatives, whom he considered to be on his side, to lend a helping hand and enable him to overcome the difficulties in the world.

When the worrying uncertainty of the realm of earthly dangers is pitted against the reassuringly peaceful love of the realm of theology, Joad is not content with trying to convince Abner that the divine forces are strong enough to overcome earthly turmoil.

He allays Abner's fears in a very different way: He presents God, the opposite of the world, as a being more frightening than all earthly dangers. And – this is the 'miracle' of the seam – this 'one more fear', this fear of God, retroactively changes the character of all other fears.

Notes:

From the Supreme Hysteric

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

Slavoj Žižek, ‘Variations of the mØther—The Two Sides of Perversion’

Slavoj Žižek, ‘Modalities of the Absolute’

Flashback 48 Years...

Linguistics and Intelligence

The Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis:

Long Term vs Working Memory?  Bytes vs. Bits

from Wikipedia

The cognitive tradeoff hypothesis argues that in the cognitive evolution of humans, there was an evolutionary tradeoff between short-term working memory and complex language skills. Specifically, early hominids sacrificed the robust working memory seen in chimpanzees for more complex representations and hierarchical organization used in language. The theory was first brought forth by Japanese primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a former director of the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University (KUPRI).

Matsuzawa suggests that at a certain point in evolution, because of limitations in brain capacity, the human brain may have acquired new functions in parallel with losing others – such as acquiring language while losing visuospatial temporal storage ability.

Prophets from the Edge of the Inside - Stephen Kotkin

Stephen Kotkin, "The Five Futures of Russia"

Jack Watling, "American Aid Alone Won’t Save Ukraine"

To Survive, Kyiv Must Build New Brigades—and Force Moscow to Negotiate

After months of delay, Congress’s passage of a nearly $61 billion U.S. aid bill to Ukraine has provided a vital lifeline to Kyiv. But the aid package alone will not solve Ukraine’s larger problems in its war with Russia. Ukrainian forces are defending frontlines that span some 600 miles of the south and east of the country, and prolonged inaction in Washington has left them severely stretched. The influx of U.S. weapons and ammunition should significantly raise the cost to Russia of its impending summer offensive. The aid also offers Ukrainian forces enough materiel to support more systematic military planning for the summer and fall.

Yet ending the war on terms favorable to Ukraine will require far more than a new pipeline of equipment. More than two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its objective in the war remains unchanged: the Kremlin seeks to subjugate Kyiv. Inconstant support and political delays among Ukraine’s international partners have left that outcome all too plausible. If Ukraine is to prevent Russian victory in the longer term, it will need a comprehensive strategy. This means training, equipping, and mobilizing new forces. It means convincing the Kremlin that continuing the war will become increasingly risky to Russia over time. And it means establishing a position of sufficient strength to be able to set forth, on Ukraine’s own terms, the parameters of a lasting peace.

None of these tasks will be straightforward, and none can happen overnight. Nor can Ukraine and its international partners afford to fritter away months formulating a way forward. The United States and its NATO allies will need to make explicit long-term commitments; compelling Russia to negotiate will be especially difficult. But the alternatives are far worse. In the absence of such an overall strategy, the duration of the conflict may be extended, but its trajectory will not.

GRIMACING AT GLIDE BOMBS

Since the fall of 2023, Ukraine’s battlefield situation has steadily worsened. Largely because of ammunition shortages, Ukrainian forces have had to cede territory to Russian forces, often after sustaining significant casualties. Russia has amassed approximately 470,000 troops in Ukraine and seems intent on using them to try to complete the conquest of Donbas over the remainder of 2024. Russian forces have been focusing their attacks on key eastern towns that, once taken, will allow them to threaten Ukraine’s main logistics hubs in and around the Donetsk region.

Talk of a new Russian offensive may conjure up images of tank units assaulting Ukrainian lines, breaking through, and then trying to exploit those gains deep into Ukrainian-held territory in order to cut off Ukrainian units. But Russia’s forces are not currently able to carry out these kinds of operations, nor do they intend to. After more than two years of war, Russia’s army has suffered heavy losses among its officer core, and its ability to plan and synchronize large-scale attacks is limited. Russian attacks mainly consist of successive assaults at platoon and company scale, resulting in slow advances with heavy losses.

Still, Russia currently enjoys a more than ten-to-one advantage over Ukraine in available artillery. With the passage of the new U.S. aid package, that advantage will likely shrink to three to one in some regions, which will increase the rate of Russian casualties. But Russia has several ways of pulling Ukrainian forces into fights that are also costly to Ukraine. For example, Russian forces have been using converted glide bombs to devastating effect. These are Soviet-designed FAB-500s—large half-ton bombs—that have been outfitted with wings and guidance kits and that are lobbed by Russian aircraft from behind the Russian lines. With an approximately 40-mile range, they can easily strike Ukrainian towns, collapsing buildings and driving out local populations.

As a result, Ukrainian forces have often been forced to expend significant resources defending costly single positions, simply to shield civilian settlements from coming into Russian glide-bomb range. Take Chasiv Yar, a small town on a key ridge line in the eastern Donetsk region. If it falls, Russian forces will gain a commanding position from which to bombard towns in Donbas and key Ukrainian supply routes. Thus, Ukrainian forces are desperately trying to hold on to it, even as the tactical situation becomes less favorable. The challenge has been amplified by Ukraine’s overstretched air defenses, a situation that now permits Russian planes to come close to the frontlines, increasing the accuracy of their bombing. Unfortunately, the more Ukraine needs its surface-to-air missile systems to protect its cities, the greater it puts at risk its ground forces at the front.

The solution to this challenge would usually be what military strategists call an “active defense,” using small-scale counterattacks to disrupt the attacker’s efforts to consolidate its advances. If, say, Russian forces seized a key position in Chasiv Yar, the Ukrainians could use counterattacks to isolate the position so that the Russians were unable to dig in and keep moving forward. But Ukraine has few reserves and has lost many of the tactical vehicles needed to exploit Russian vulnerabilities soon after they take positions. Lacking the reserves to counterattack, Ukraine must settle for maximizing Russia’s losses for each position it takes, thereby slowing down its rate of advance.

Under these conditions, even the passage of the U.S. aid bill can do only so much to change the battlefield calculus. The long delay in Washington means that it will take time to repair much of the damage to Ukrainian capabilities. Ukraine will lose ground to Russia this summer. The question is how much, and how high a price Ukrainian forces can make the Russians pay for their gains.

FRESH BLOOD, NOT MORE BLOOD

Other than the immediate provision of ammunition, the greatest effect of the new U.S. aid package is the certainty it offers. After months in which the timing and amount of U.S. support was in doubt, Ukraine will now have enough clarity about military resources for the next six months to allow for broader strategic planning.

Paramount is the need to generate new forces. To do so, Ukraine will need to mobilize more people, improve its training pipeline to maintain a qualitative advantage over Russian units, and adequately equip those new troops. Until now this has been impossible. Lacking equipment and weapons, and unable to predict if and when more might arrive, Ukraine’s military leadership was forced to prioritize all materiel for troops already at the front. The size of the U.S. aid package—and the further support of European partners—means that Ukraine’s military leadership can now implement a deliberate plan to train and equip more troops. Contrary to widespread assumptions, Ukraine does not lack people to mobilize. (According to one recent analysis, there could be several million additional Ukrainians who are able to serve.) What it has lacked is an effective recruitment and training system to bring available people into the force and equipment to provision them. These problems can and must be resolved.

Ukrainian commanders must form new brigades rather than simply bringing their existing formations back up to strength. The army currently lacks enough brigades to rotate them as a whole off the frontline. Instead, individual brigades have been rotating exhausted battalions just off the line of contact for brief respites—a strategy that provides rest but does not allow for collective training of the brigade, since brigade staff and enabling equipment remain at the front. Thus, it is crucial for Ukraine to build and train additional brigades now, so that it can mount an active defense in the fall. Over time, these new units will greatly enhance its ability to counterattack.

The military must therefore pursue mobilization in three stages. First, it must immediately raise battlefield replacements for the existing force. But then it must regenerate reserves to allow existing units to rotate and, after that, build new units able to conduct offensive action. The first is the easiest to solve. Equipment is the limiting factor for the second. For the third, the most limiting factor is officer training. This can be addressed, but it must be done imminently if Ukraine is to generate the needed forces by fall.

Russia will likely be most dangerous in the final months of 2024. By that point, having weathered months of Russian offensive operations, Ukrainian forces will be stretched thin, their air defenses depleted. Russia will likely have enough troops to rotate its units to allow for successive offensives in the fall.

But Russian capabilities are not unlimited. Moscow has made some industrial and military choices that are likely to restrict its offensive potential over the course of 2025. For one, it has decided not to expand production of artillery barrels, with the result that fewer new guns will be available next year. Based on the current loss rate, Russian stockpiles of armored vehicles will also likely be depleted by the second half of 2025. This means that Russian forces will be entirely dependent on newly produced equipment rather than refurbished equipment from existing stock, severely constraining their ability to replenish weapons systems lost in battle. At the same time, beginning in late 2024, European armaments production will begin to climb steadily as investments made last year and in the first months of this year begin to bear fruit. By 2025, then, supply problems should be less acute for Ukraine and more acute for Russia—if Ukraine can hold on until then.

With this longer-term perspective in view, the challenge facing Ukraine and its allies becomes clear. The top priorities must be to ensure not only that Russia’s summer offensive culminates at a high cost to Moscow but also that newly raised Ukrainian troops are in place to blunt further offensives in the autumn—and, ideally, to establish a stable frontline by early 2025. It is only from such a position that Ukraine can regain the initiative. Achieving that objective will depend to a significant degree on how rapidly Ukraine can mobilize and equip its forces. The one commodity it desperately lacks is time.

BRINGING MOSCOW TO THE TABLE

Even if Ukraine is able to blunt Russian gains by rapidly training, equipping, and deploying new forces, these steps will not in themselves produce a pathway to ending the conflict. Ultimately, this is because Kyiv’s international partners have built their case for support on the simpler objective of preserving Ukraine in the fight rather than on compelling Russia to negotiate on favorable terms.

The United States and its European allies need to recognize that helping Ukraine negate Russian attacks is not the same as putting Ukraine in a strong negotiating position. The Kremlin is keen for negotiations based on the war’s current dynamics: it believes that once talks are underway, Ukraine’s Western backers will agree to nearly anything, seeing any settlement that can be reached as successful, even if it fails to protect Ukraine in the long term. And Russia’s demand would remain what it has been throughout: a surrender in all but name. For Moscow to truly negotiate, it must be confronted with a situation in which extending the conflict further will present an unacceptable threat to itself. It is only then that Ukraine will be able to extract meaningful concessions.

Russia already faces several pressure points. First, Russia’s battlefield losses of critical systems—such as air defenses—matter, because they form the bulwark of Russia’s conventional deterrence of NATO. Equipping Ukraine to be able to damage or destroy prestige Russian assets is strongly in NATO’s interest. Second, Russia will be unable to fund the war indefinitely. Western sanctions are only one of the tools for damaging the regime’s financial liquidity, and they are less effective than other options. Damage to Russia’s oil infrastructure is likely to have a much greater impact. Although there are good reasons for the West to avoid directly aiding such attacks, that does not mean that Ukraine shouldn’t undertake them.

Third, although the Russian public largely supports the war, there are deep frustrations with the Russian government that can be exploited. So far, Western governments have not aggressively pursued information operations against the Russian government, partly because they are perceived as escalatory and partly because they are not expected to have immediate effect. By contrast, Russia has been conducting active information operations across Europe with the intent of destabilizing the West.

This asymmetry needs to be remedied. Western concerns that information warfare could provoke escalation are unconvincing: the Kremlin is as determined as the White House to avoid a direct confrontation over Ukraine. Moreover, the Kremlin has long assumed that the West has pursued extensive information operations against it since 2011, even though this is not the case. Any potential escalation risk of such operations is therefore already baked in. Moreover, most of the Kremlin’s routes to escalation do not actually involve countering such activities. Given this situation, there is much more that the West can do. Over the longer term, more and better information operations could heighten Moscow’s awareness of the domestic risks that its costly war has stirred up.

THE FIREPOWER FIX

Given the extent to which it is currently outgunned, Ukraine doesn’t yet have the ability to set forth favorable negotiating terms to end the war. A cease-fire would likely see Russia reconstitute its military power, while Ukraine would not be able to maintain its own forces at their current size. Moreover, Kyiv would likely receive waning support for reconstruction if renewed Russian hostilities were anticipated in the near future. Rebuilding Ukraine will depend critically on investment from the private sector, and the threat of a new conflict will make any such financing risky. To ensure that Ukraine can negotiate in the confidence that it can secure a lasting peace, Kyiv’s international partners will have to offer security guarantees that it trusts. Because Ukraine cannot propose those guarantees, it will be up to its international partners to make the first move.

Ultimately, any successful end to the war will depend on NATO’s ability to convincingly deter Russia. That posture requires the alliance not only to field sufficient forces to counter a threat from Russia but also to establish sufficient production capacity among its members to sustain a steady flow of munitions in the event of another war. Establishing this supply will be necessary regardless of how the war ends. In the short term, expanded production of munitions will be essential to Ukraine’s ability to degrade the Russian military. If Ukraine manages to protract the conflict and the war is terminated in its favor, its partners will need munitions to bolster the credibility of their security guarantees. If, on the other hand, Russia achieves its objectives, then these munitions will be needed to underwrite the future security of NATO.

The U.S. military aid package was passed just in time to stave off a Ukrainian collapse. But to truly shift the direction of the war, it will need to be accompanied by a far more comprehensive strategy to successfully end it. And that must come from Washington, its NATO allies, and Kyiv itself.

Dopamine and Surplus Jouissance

Source

A rough way of defining surplus jouissance would be to think of it, on analogy with Marx’s surplus value, as jouissance that is lost to the subject and recuperated by the Other.

- Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg, "Introduction to: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis"

 

object a is constitutive of the parlêtre in two respects. It is constitutive of him as what he is missing (Lacan, 2001b , p. 573) – that is, as the object “that is no longer there.” But it is also the pathway or rail by which the “ plus-de-jouirs ” come to desire. (...) In other words, object a is what is missing and what all the objects that are not missing from reality seek to make us forget. In everyday discourse – in which the master signifier, S1 , organizes both psychical and everyday reality – the subject is a complete subject who does not conceptualize his lack, for the plus-de-jouirs that are proposed – combined with the more intimate plus-de-jouirs found in fantasy – act so as to fill in the gap. Without this filling-in activity, we would be hard-pressed to understand why the universal nature of castration could have been so thoroughly misrecognized prior to Freud’s time; nor would we be able to understand how certain contemporary authors, who are no dumber than others, can ridicule Lacan’s reference to lack and believe that they are truly in sync with our times when they claim, on the contrary, that we are now in what a certain film has called “the land of plenty.” 

Colette Soler," Lacanian Affects"

 

the very ambiguity of Lacan’s concept plus-de-jouir: it can be read as surplus enjoyment, but at the same time it can also mean no more enjoyment; it has the contours of an imperative, something like “Stop enjoying!” or “Cut it off!” So the very same gesture that prohibits, inhibits, and stops enjoyment produces a surplus, something one gets in place of the cut-off enjoyment. All ascetic practices testify to this, most notably those described by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit under the heading of the unhappy consciousness, which is consciousness that is ultimately prepared to give up all its worldly possessions and corporeal enjoyment, all its autonomy, and treat itself like a thing. However, the more the subject does this, the more there emerges a residue, a bit of the substance that cannot be quite turned into the subject, and which is precisely the bit of enjoyment, the surplus enjoyment that has unexpectedly emerged in the operation—and the subject, the subject of self-consciousness, emerges precisely as correlative to that bit.  

Mladen Dolar, "Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis"

 

the loss of the object, the loss of satisfaction, and the emergence of a surplus satisfaction or surplus enjoyment are situated, topologically speaking, in one and the same point: in the intervention of the signifier (...)According to Freud, in the event of the loss of the object the investment is transferred to the unary trait that marks this loss; the identification with a unary trait thus occupies the (structural) place of the lost object. Yet, at the same time, this identification (and with it the repeating and reenacting of that trait) becomes itself the source of a supplementary satisfaction(...) He links the Freudian unary trait to what he writes as S1. Furthermore, he delinearizes and condenses the moments of loss and supplementary satisfaction or enjoyment into one single moment, moving away from the notion of an original loss (of an object), to a notion of loss which is closer to the notion of waste, of a useless surplus or remainder, which is inherent in and essential to jouissance as such... So, jouissance is waste (or loss); it incarnates the very entropy produced by the working of the apparatus of the signifiers. However, precisely as waste, this loss is not simply a lack, an absence, something missing. It is very much there (as waste always is), something to be added to the signifying operations and equations, and to be reckoned with as such. 

Alenka Zupančič, "When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value"

In this Seminar, the emphasis is placed both on the signifier as a mark of jouissance - he can say that the master-signifier commemorates an irruption of jouissance - and, at the same time, it introduces a loss of jouissance and produces a supplement of jouissance. By an analogy that makes him borrow the term entropy from thermodynamics, he says: Entropy makes the plus-de-jouir to be recovered take shape. And, elsewhere in the Seminar:The plus-de-jouir takes shape from a loss. From then on, access to jouissance is not essentially through transgression, but through entropy, through the loss produced by the signifier This is how Lacan can say that knowledge is a means to jouissance (...) The autonomy of the symbolic order could not be better renounced. It is a means of jouissance in a double sense, insofar as it has the effect of lack and produces the supplement, the plus-de-jouir. 

Jacques-Alain Miller," Six Paradigmes de Jouissance" (Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator)

Start @ 4:18 for a great surplus Jouissance example (a baby with a pacifier)

“The trouble with jouissance is not that it is unattainable, that it always eludes our grasp, but, rather, that one can never get rid of it, that its stain drags along for ever.Therein resides the point of Lacan’s concept of surplus-enjoyment: the very renunciation of jouissance brings about a remainder, a surplus of jouissance.”

- Slavoj Žižek," The Indivisible Remainder"