iconisation.

[luka]

All these shit little pictures next to people's names

 

[luka]

The colours. It is partly the colours version. The fucking gerbil. It's genuinely an office. This is the modern office. It's this. But we don't get paid.

 

[luka]

I've allowed myself to have been domesticated into anoffice job. That I don't get paid for.

 

[luka]

Feel disgusted by the whole thing and how far standards have fallen

 

[luka]

Weird frumpy goth scene

 

[luka]

 

[sus]

"For a long time the magical implications of transfer in any shape must have given a muted and perhaps not initially debased sacrality to objects of currency-status, just as fish hooks and bullets become strongly magical objects in the societies formed around their use. But gradually the item-form becomes iconised, in transitions like that from aes rude (irregular bits of bronze), through aes signatum (cast ingots or bars) to aes grave (the circular stamped coin.)

JH Prynne. A Note On Metal.

Wonder if this is a Nietzsche ref

Truths are illu-
sions which we have forgotten are illusions—they are metaphors that have become worn out and have
been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal
and no longer as coins

 

[luka]

prynne repays reading

 

[luka]

read it

J.H. Prynne – Just So

How long they ask, we ask, it / is the question. So much time to / travel or stop and yet the heart / is so slow & reluctant / leave it, that's one / way- there, on the / ground. I

genius.com

 

[luka]

How long they ask, we ask, it
is the question. So much time to
travel or stop and yet the heart
is so slow & reluctant

leave it, that's one
way- there, on the
ground. I love you

so, here but how long again, the
history of what we allow, are per-
mitted to have. A life for this
branch, dividing in the headlights

waiting, the beam in
prism, play or the sound
in a great arc for the

world, it is an open fire, a hearth
stone for the condition of trust.
Don't ever wait for that. Twist it
out, in ply and then run, for

the door: we must
have the divine sense,
of entrance. The way

in as what it is, not which then, or
how long as the question. Such things
are, the world that is fire, it burns
along all the horizons. It is

the heart, Where we
are. I love you, so
much. As this, as

this, which is for even more than I
could tell. The night flickers and
the day comes; has, will come. That's
the question, the mark strapped to

the hands; not the
eyes. Trust them, the
fire of the mind, lust

of the pure citizen, on every path
of the earth. The soil, tarmac, grass,
remorse, the sea, love is in the air
we breathe. Fire on the hearth. The life

in what I now have
and listen to, just so
long, as we are.

 

[luka]

prynne wrote that. it is one of the best poems in the language.

 

[luka]

it is one of the ebay poems in the language

 

[catalog]

So I associated catalog with a dreary grunge green sixth form vomit

I was thinking I ought to customise my avatar

 

[vershy versh]

At a certain level of abstraction you leave the human behind and enter the realm of engineering.

There I was thinking about sound denoting an operation, a movement, and how a point is reached at which that movement, that operation, is rationalised into engineering, away from the exigencies of an individual human body, abstracted into an energy equation.

To hit a drum becomes a mechanised procedure of downward pressure, rationalised, a piston, without the complex rotational, hinged architecture of shoulder, elbow wrist, bicep, tricep, hand etc

A New Operational Field

Since the energy of objects is abstract, their functionality is limitless: just as there
is now scarcely any substance that has no plastic equivalent, so there is no gesture
that cannot be replaced by technology. The simplest of mechanisms is liable to
replace and subsume a whole set of gestures, concentrating their effectiveness and
becoming independent not only of the agent but also of the material acted upon.
Form and utility of the tool, raw material, energy applied - all these factors have
changed. Thus the matter dealt with has undergone infinite differentiation - even
to the point of disappearing altogether: that processed by a radio, for example, is
information. The transformation of energy has entailed that of both materials and
functions, for technology is not content merely to encapsulate earlier gestures, it
also invents new operations, and above all splits up the operational field into
completely different functions or sets of functions. Man's abstract relationship
to his (technical) objects, his 'spectacular alienation', is thus less a matter of his
gestures having been replaced than of the abstractness of the very way in which
functions have been split up, and the impossibility of any analogical apprehension
of this splitting-up by reference to earlier gestures. Only an abstract (never an
unmediated) intelligence can adapt to the new technical structures; meanwhile,
man himself has yet to adapt to the increasingly exclusive use of these higher
functions of intelligence and calculation. Resistance here has deep roots, and
creates an irreparable delay. Man has become less rational than his own objects,
which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus
appropriating his actions.

 

[vershy versh]

"For a long time the magical implications of transfer in any shape must have given a muted and perhaps not initially debased sacrality to objects of currency-status, just as fish hooks and bullets become strongly magical objects in the societies formed around their use. But gradually the item-form becomes iconised, in transitions like that from aes rude (irregular bits of bronze), through aes signatum (cast ingots or bars) to aes grave (the circular stamped coin.)

JH Prynne. A Note On Metal.

You can see this process at work in digital releases and Youtube videos where people do the artwork like a 12".

 

[vershy versh]

The emotion reduced to the emoji.

 

[other_life]

Buum's abortive "emoji meta" concept (something like 'trends in emoji usage map wider affective changes among twitter end-users'; 'using emojis otherwise than intended by their developers means you have arrived at an actually new compound emotion'; 'there is a meta-narrative connecting all unicode characters that expands as new ones are added, which maps to other narratives like it')

 

[luka]

The colours. It is partly the colours version. The fucking gerbil. It's genuinely an office. This is the modern office. It's this. But we don't get paid.

 

[vershy versh]

When a 'savage' grabs a watch or a fountain pen merely because it is a 'Western' object, we find this behaviour comical or absurd, for the object is not being given its true meaning but appropriated hungrily in accordance with an infantile type of relationship involving a power phantasy. Instead of having a function, the object has a virtue: it has become a sign. Yet is this not the very same procedure of impulsive acculturation and magical appropriation that drives 'civilized' people towards sixteenth-century woodcuts or icons? In both cases what is being acquired under the form of the object is a 'virtue': the 'savage' acquires modern technology, the 'civilized' person acquires ancestral significance.

 

[vershy versh]

All these shit little pictures next to people's names

Icons.