Skip to main content

Elizabeth Taylor and JG Ballard

By


Simon Sellars has collated some Ballard Taylor quotes http://www.ballardian.com/rip-elizabeth-taylor-a-ballardian-primer

some of the quotes + comments below

"As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office." - Ballard (elizabeth taylor as media spinal nerve - her absence is not so much an option of mourning the foreign as it is an evisceration of posthuman dependance - the eniwetok Marshall Island h-bomb site (technical tragedy) is paired with the Paris fun fair luna park (technical banality) - likewise freud (representational tragedy) is paired with taylor (representational banality) - the saturated technical stimuli where technique and representation collapse together, as do the tragic and banal)

media death is no death at all - it is in fact a kind of catastrophist (re-evoking the pre-Darwinian evolutionary stance - rehashed in different garb by the likes of gould) intensification - a whole new and more pervasive form of life becomes instantaneously possible - mourning is not a function of memory and tradition, but of technical fetishism - the seeming exactitude of documents preclude present interpretation, replacing legend with subjective eliminativism ("actual" ontology becomes more object-associated)


"the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor."

"The presiding deity of their lives, the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness."

consciousness, or mind, here is located in the media and its images

"In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape."

"The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies."

"Query: at what point does the plane of intersection of two cones become sexually more stimulating than Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage?"

"Query: does the plane of intersection of the body of this woman in my room with the cleavage of Elizabeth Taylor generate a valid image of the glazed eyes of Chiang Kai Shek, an invasion plan of the offshore islands?"

geometry and battle plans are compared with an objectification of the starlet - the body is prepackaged in objectification, indistinguishable from other objects - in the equalisation of objectivity, the erotic (and war-violence) is universally substitutional

"the body of a screen actress like Elizabeth Taylor, which one sees on thousands of cinema hoardings, thousands of advertisements every day, and on the movie screen itself, her body is a real landscape. It is as much a real landscape of our lives as any system of mountains or lakes or hills or anything else."

a technical landscape has no fundamental differentiation of its forms - for ballard this so often seems to unify the field in the erotic (and violent) - taylor's body becoming a sort of any-landscape or generalized landscape for a given period - an image both severely objectified (fittingly for the screen image) and universalized in an inhuman manner (that is, landscapes do not necessarily have humans, nor are they dependant on them for their existence)




Popular posts from this blog

Pascal and Laplace: Probabilities of the Divine and Divine Probabilities

By
  Pascal's Wager is the opportunity for a mathematician turned theologian to justify their view of cosmic order in the mathematical ways they've come to know.  What's the pay off if you're right and what's the pay off if you're wrong.  If the pay off for being right far outweighs that for being wrong, should we out of principle take the wager? Ask Laplace and we have a different framing.  Now probability has replaced the divine role so the aspect of choice has been eliminated.  Probability no longer informs a bet on divine order, divine order is a subsidiary part of probability.  Laplace's famous demon is not an impossible gambit on an all-controlling deity as popularly assumed, but a thesis that cosmic order can be predicated by sheer mathematical analysis.  Pascal's world still contains Christian state law, but Laplace's does not.  How do we culturally bind people without such moral institutions? It turns out fairly easily.  We don't need to ge
Read more

Base Empiricism

By
The Greek empeiria translates generally to the Latin experientia which then relates to our word experience. The question arises that, if our epistemology is ostensibly "empiricist", just what sort of experience are we talking about? Are we talking about any experience at all, or is there is a difference between different kinds of experiences, and perhaps crucially, are there experiences which we must bracket out, which cannot count as grounds for empirical knowledge. Without articulating the idea in so many words, past forms of empiricism have the tendency to leave out large terrains of experience in favour of experiences which - paradoxically - are more easily rationalizable. The pretended opposition of empiricism and rationalism collapses together in the face of what could simply be termed experiences that are too intense for both their tendencies. Laboratory observation and having sex are both experiences, the latter can be said to be more intense. However in the forme
Read more

The Synthetic A Priori: Making Euclidean Geometry Subjective and Almost Dead

By
  From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Europeans are all about the geometric approach.  The approach from Euclid.  When Galileo says that the universe speaks in mathematics, he's thinking about geometry.  When Newton writes the Principia, he does so following a geometric method.  His fluxions, or calculus, would allow otherwise, but somehow it still seems proper to construct the concepts geometrically. Of course this is not really Euclid, but the European reimagining of Euclid.  And as algebras advance, so do new geometries.  Fast forward to the end of the 18th century.  Kant talks what we can know and what we can't.  A priori knowledge is innate, what we know before experience, what he also calls analytic.  Synthetic knowledge on the other hand comes from experience, what he calls a posteriori.  But mathematics and geometry are something different.  He calls them the synthetic a priori. Like a priori knowledge, math is constructed in the mind, like synthetic knowledge it
Read more