The most obfuscated 3 paragraphs you'll ever read: Art of future past

[thunder rising]

Art of future past

This essay is simply brilliant. Maybe, I'm just slow, but I studied these paragraphs for an hour, including some extra credit Google research to finally determine that these guys are the most brilliant scam artists ever. And, that seems to be what they were after. They are indeed famous.

For starters, let's make one thing very clear: the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion (sic), which was destroyed by a catastrophic fire in 1977 – a fire of suspicious origins, I might add – neither burned nor was it ever actually built – not seven years before its construction, or at any other time.

Which would seem to make the Art Gallery of York University's apparent reconstruction of it, which opened last week, a mind-bending exercise in virtual archaeology. Funny thing about that, though, is that's more or less what General Idea, the three-man artists' collective formed in 1967 by fresh-faced art school graduates AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, had been doing all along: excavating their own myths of greatness, long before they had been realized.

Care to read that again? Who could blame you, really? The mental contortions required to grasp General Idea's original, general idea – on the simplest level, self-actualizing, public proclamations of their own success, projected far into the future – could challenge even the most agile of minds. In their own words, from the 1975 "Glamour" issue of File magazine, which they founded in 1972:

I think next week I'm just going to get drunk so that at 1:00am I don't have to worry about even starting to understand what this would mean.

[cliffordu]

1. Mostly, It's about masturbating. Those guys, not you.

[thunder rising]

2. That's certainly not the expected first response I imagined; but,it fits perfectly with the last hr.

[On the Road]

3. I Don't Know, Man,

whenever I want pure, concentrated obfuscation, I head right over to Of Grammatology. Especially if it, you know, relates to temporality:

Without the difference between the sensory appearing and its lived appearing (“mental imprint”), the temporalising synthesis, which permits differences to appear in a chain of significations, could not operate. That the “imprint” is irreducible means also that speech is originarily passive, but in a sense of passivity that all intramundane metaphors would only betray. This passivity is also the relationship to a past, to an always-already-there that no reactivation of the origin could fully master and awaken to presence. This impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what authorised us to call trace that which does not let itself be summed up in the simplicity of a present. It could in fact have been objected that, in the indecomposable synthesis of temporalisation, protection is as indispensable as retention. And their two dimensions are not added up but the one implies the other in a strange fashion. To be sure, what is anticipated in protention does not sever the present any less from its self-identity than does that which is retained in the trace. But if anticipation were privileged, the irreducibility of the always-already-there and the fundamental passivity that is called time would risk effacement. On the other hand, if the trace refers to an absolute past, it is because it obliges us to think a past that can no longer be understood in the form of a modified presence, as a present-past. Since past has always signified present-past, the absolute past that is retained in the trace no longer rigorously merits the name “past.” Another name to erase, especially since the strange movement of the trace proclaims as much as it recalls: difference defers-differs . With the same precaution and under the same erasure, it may be said that its passivity is also its relationship with the “future.” The concepts of present, past, and future, everything in the concepts of time and history which implies evidence of them — the metaphysical concept of time in general — cannot adequately describe the structure of the trace. And deconstructing the simplicity of presence does not amount only to accounting for the horizons of potential presence, indeed of “dialectic of protention and retention that one would install in the heart of the present instead of surrounding it with it. It is not a matter of complicating the structure of time while conserving its homogeneity and its fundamental successivity, by demonstrating for example that the past present and the future present constitute originarily, by dividing it, the form of the living present. Such a complication, which is in effect the same that Husserl described, abides, in spite of an audacious phenomenological reduction, by the evidence and presence of a linear, objective, and mundane model. Now B would be as such constituted by the retention of Now A and the protention of Now C; in spite of all the play that would follow from it, from the fact that each one of the three Now-s reproduces that structure in itself, this model of successivity would prohibit a Now X from taking the place of Now A, for example, and would prohibit that, by a delay that is inadmissible to consciousness, an experience be determined, in its very present, by a present which would not have preceded it immediately but would be considerably “anterior” to it. It is the problem of the deferred effect (Nachträglichkeit) of ,which Freud speaks. The temporality to which he refers cannot be that which lends itself to a phenomenology of consciousness or of presence and one may indeed wonder by what right all that is in question here should still be called time, now, anterior present, delay, etc.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm

And that is only one paragraph out of hundreds of pages of this stuff.

[thunder rising]

4. That looks like something that used a software translator from English to German and Back

[On the Road]

12. I Will Have to Remember That Description

I like that. A lot of philosophy is like that. My ex loved that stuff, although her saving grace was that she was into some more pragmatic people like Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce. Even some non-philosophers like Wallace Stephens wrote some prose that is baffling even after many readings. And when Harold Bloom starts goin' on about tralatitions and the agon, forget about it.

[thunder rising]

5. What I find brilliant is that Murray Whyte wrote a canon in english that maps General Idea's Idea

perfectly.

[BlooInBloo]

6. Obviously you've never read Hegel.

[Cronus Protagonist]

7. Heidegger is much harder to understand

Although I think that's mostly because he's clearly clueless.

[snot]

8. K&R'd. I'm afraid you happened to encounter

a legit art undertaking.

[Fumesucker]

9. Meh, reminds me of this story, written in 1941

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_His_Bootstraps

[annabanana]

10. Like much of the 60's . . .

You had to be there. This fits perfectly.

[surrealAmerican]

11. It make sense if you're familiar with the work that it talks about.

[xchrom]

13. kick

[Liberal_in_LA]

14. When I come across crap like that I don't bother with it...just turn the page