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There were 27 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Carnival'.
- "It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves 'Government!' The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy."
Source: The Hearing Trumpet, p. 126 - "The trouble is that when they have taken Peyote, they no longer obey us."
"It is the same with Peyote as it is with everything human. It is a marvelous magnetic and alchemical principle, provided one knows how to take it -- that is to say, in the proper doses and according to the proper gradations. And above all, provided one does not take it at the wrong time or in the wrong place. If after taking Peyote the Indians seem to go mad, it is because they are abusing it in order to reach that point of disorderly intoxication in which the soul is no longer subject to anything. In so doing, it is not you whom they are disobeying but Ciguri itself, for Ciguri is the God of the Prescience of the just, of equilibrium and of self-control. He who has truly imbibed Ciguri, the true meter and measure of Ciguri, MAN and not indeterminate PHANTOM, knows how things are made and he can no longer lose his reason, because it is God who is in his nerves and who guides them.
Source: The Peyote Dance, p. 28 - 'You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm.'
Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 91 - The victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings.
Source: The Accursed Share, p. 59 - Classical economy imagined the first exchanges in the form of barter. Why would it have thought that in the beginning a mode of acquisition such as exchange had not answered the need to acquire, but rather the contrary need to lose or squander? The classical conception is now questionable in a sense.
The "merchants" of Mexico practiced the paradoxical system of exchanges that I have described as a regular sequence of gifts; these customs, not barter, in fact constituted the archaic organization of exchange. Potlatch, still practiced by the Indians of the Northwest Coast of America, is its typical form...Potlatch is, like commerce, a means of circulating wealth, but it excludes bargaining. More often than not it is the solemn giving of considerable riches, offered by a chief to his rival for the purpose of humiliating, challenging and obligating him. The recipient has to erase the humiliation and take up the challenge; he must satisfy the obligation that was contracted by accepting. He can only reply, a short time later, by means of a new potlatch, more generous than the first: He must pay back with interest.
Source: The Accursed Share, p. 67-68 - Corporate anti-capitalism wouldn't matter if it could be differentiated from an authentic anti-capitalist movement. Yet, even before its momentum was stalled by the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, the so-called anti-capitalist movement seemed also to have conceded too much to capitalist realism. Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative political-economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn't expect to be met. Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism, and the anti-capitalist protests share rather too much with hyper-corporate events like 2005's Live 8, with their exorbitant demands that politicians legislate away poverty.
Source: Capitalist Realism, p. 14 - Gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: He regards his virtue, that which he had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses. he enriches himself with a contempt for riches, and what he proves to be miserly of is in fact his generosity.
But he would not be able by himself to acquire a power constituted by a relinquishment of power: IF he destroyed the object in solitude, in silence, no sort of power would result from the act; there would not be anything for the subject but a separation fro power without any compensation. But if he destroys the object in from of another person or if he gives it away, the one who gives has actually acquired, in the other's eyes, the power of giving or destroying...He is rich for having ostentatiously consumed what is wealth only if it is consumed.
Source: The Accursed Share, p. 69 - Gift-giving is not the only form of potlatch: A rival is challenged by a solemn destruction of riches. In principle, the destruction is offered to the mythical ancestors of the donee; it is little different from a sacrifice. As recently as the nineteenth century a Tlingit chieftain would sometimes go before a rival and cut the throats of slaves in his presence. At the proper time, the destruction was repaid by the killing of a large number of slaves. The Chukchee of the Siberian Northeast have related institutions. They slaughter highly valuable dog teams, for it is necessary for them to startle, to stifle the rival group. The Indians of the Northwest Coast would set fire to their villages or break their canoes to pieces. They have emblazoned copper bars possessing a fictive value (depending on how famous or how old the coppers are): Sometimes these bars are worth a fortune. They throw them into the sea or shatter them.
Source: The Accursed Share, p. 68 - I took Peyote in the mountains of Mexico, and I had a dose of it that lasted me two or three days with the Tarahumara, and at the time those three days seemed like the happiest days of my life.
I had stopped tormenting myself, trying to find a reason for my life, and I had stopped having to carry my body around.
I realized that I was inventing life, that that was my function and my raison d'être, and that I suffered when my imagination failed, and Peyote gave it to me.
A human being stepped forward and drew the Peyote out of me with a blow.
I made it into real shreds, and the cadaver of a man was torn to shreds and found torn to shreds, somewhere.
rai da kanka da kum
a kum da na kum vönoh
Granting that this world is not the reverse of the other and still less its half, this world is also a real machinery of which I have the controls, it is a true factory whose key is inborn humor.
sana tafan tana
tanaf tamafts bai
Source: The Peyote Dance, p. 82-83 - In our dream, revolution was a joyful jubilee.
Source: Dancin' in the Streets, p. 40 - In Western literary criticism, Northrop Frye is recognized as the ultimate authority on Menippean satire. In his influential study, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, he sketched the development of Menippean satire and stressed the difference between this genre and the traditional novelistic forms of romance and picaresque novel. The principal difference, according to Frye, involves the change of focus from the exploits of heroes and the structure of society to abstract ideas and theories, as well as the stylized representation of characters who appear as mouthpieces for the ideas they represent. Frye defined Menippean satire as a loose-jointed narrative which relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature. In its most concentrated form Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern and a structure based on violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative.
Source: Menippean Satire in Russian Postmodern Prose, p. 48 - It is necessary at this point to note a dual origin of moral judgments. In former times value was given to unproductive glory, whereas in our day it is measured in terms of production: Precedence is given to energy acquisition over energy expenditure. Glory itself is justified by the consequences of a glorious deed in the sphere of utility. But, dominated though it is by practical judgment and Christian morality, the archaic sensibility is still alive: In particular it reappears in the romantic protest against the bourgeois world; only in the classical conceptions of the economy does it lose its rights entirely.
Source: The Accursed Share, p. 29 - It is not with conscious ideology but with what I call implicit social knowledge that I am here concerned, with what moves people without their knowing quite why or quite how, with what makes the real real and the normal normal, and above al with what makes ethical distinctions politically powerful. And in stressing the implicitness of this knowledge, which is also part of its power in social life, I think we are directed away from obvious to what Roland Barthes called obtuse meaning in his analysis of images and their difference from signs...
It is with imagery in the constitution of power/knowledge that the Putumayo world I am looking t is much concerned. And it is very much this obtuse and not the obvious meanings of imagery that leap to the mind's eye -- as in the sliding stops and starts of the phantasmagoria of the yagé nights, no less than in the social relations embedded in sorcery and in the trances that wander through rulers' minds as they are being carried over mountains.
I take implicit social knowledge to be an essentially inarticulable and imageric non discursive knowing of social relationally, and in trying to understand the way that history and memory interact in the constituting of this knowledge, I wish to raise some questions about the way that certain historical events, notably political events of conquest and colonization, become objectified in the contemporary shamanic repertoire as magically empowered imagery capable of causing as well as relieving misfortune.
Source: Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, p. 366-367 - It was through the critical rejection of all existing political, social and moral codes that Fourier said he first caught a glimpse of the mechanisms of 'passionate attraction' -- natural impulses and cadences that occur on a level below the threshold of thought processes and which persist regardless of civilization's attempt to repress them through the artificial constructs of moralization, rationalization, guilt, fear and intolerance. If one were to recalibrate his or her life to that unified rhythmic pulse buried under the noise and tumult of modern life, and work toward building social formations that were similarly fine-tuned to these rhythms, then human life would evolve into a new, more natural harmonious order of cooperative unity, free passion, profound fulfillment and ludic pleasure.
From chapter: Attacks of the Fantastic, Donald LaCoss
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 273-274 - Maia didn't appear to be too upset by the objection and shrugged us off. "I mean the opposite of the eye of the storm or the minister who thunders. For example, Venice is the Amsterdam of the South, sometimes imagination exceeds reality, given that I'm a racist, hard drugs are the first step towards smoking joints, don't make yourself at home, let's stand on ceremony, those who pursue pleasure are always happy, I may be senile but I'm not old, Greek is all maths to me, success has gone to my head, Mussolini did a lot of bad after all, Paris is horrid though Parisians are nice, in Rimini everyone stays on the beach and never sets foot in the clubs."
"Yes, and a whole mushroom was poisoned by one family. Where do you get all this tripe?" asked Braggadocio.
Source: Numero Zero, p. 110-111 - Michail Bachtin is unquestionably the most important scholar to theorize Menippean satire. In his works on Francois Rabelais and the development of the novel, he traced the history and outlined some basic characteristics of Menippean satire, including its extraordinary philosophical universalism, juxtaposition of the serious and comic elements, bold use of the fantastic and slum naturalism, representation of unusual and abnormal states, scandal scenes, sharp contrasts, and multiplicity of divergent styles and discourses. He emphasized the deep organic unity of these seemingly heterogeneous factors, as well as its great flexibility to absorb into itself kindred small genres, and to penetrate as a component element into other larger genres.
Source: Menippean Satire in Russian Postmodern Prose, p. 48 - One might even say that potlatch is the specific manifestation, the meaningful form of luxury. Beyond the archaic forms, luxury has actually retained the functional value of potlatch, creative of rank. Luxury still determines the rank of the one who displays it, and there is no exalted rank that does not require a display. But the petty calculations of those who enjoy luxury are surpassed in every way. In wealth, what shines through the defects extends the brilliance of the sun and provokes passion. It is not what is imagined by those who have reduced it to their poverty; it is the return of life's immensity to the truth of exuberance. This truth destroys those who have taken it for what it is not; the least that one can say is that the present forms of wealth make a shambles and a human mockery of those who think they own it. In this respect, present-day society is huge counterfeit, where this truth of wealth has underhandedly slipped into extreme poverty. The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. Beyond a military exploitation, a religious mystification and a capitalist misappropriation, henceforth no one can rediscover the meaning of wealth, the explosiveness that it heralds, unless it is in the splendor of rags and the somber challenge of indifference. One might say, finally, that the lie destines life's exuberance to revolt.
Source: The Accursed Share, p. 76-77 - The Aztecs, about whom I will speak first, are poles apart from us morally. As a civilization is judged by its works, their civilization seems wretched to us. They used writings and were versed in astronomy, but all their important undertakings were useless: Their science of architecture enabled them to construct pyramids on top of which they immolated human beings.
Their world view is singularly and diametrically opposed to the activity-oriented perspective that we have. Consumption loomed just as large in their thinking as production does in ours. They were just as concerned about sacrificing as we are about working.
Source: The Accursed Share, p. 46 - The only valid excess was one that went beyond the bounds, and one whose consumption appeared worthy of the gods. This was the price men paid to escape their downfall and remove the weight introduced in them by the avarice and cold calculation of the real order.
Source: The Accursed Share, p. 61 - This anarchistic anti-campaign, typically ignored by the many historians of the Beat movement, was a scathing satire of Establishment politics and an assertion of the rising new radicalism's sweeping rejection of the entire military-industrial-political swindle.
Source: Dancin' in the Streets, p. 13 - What distinguished the Rebel Worker group from all the other groups that claimed to be against capitalism? What made us so different? The answers are obvious: humor, poetry, and breadth of vision -- which are a large part of what make a revolution revolutionary. Our critique focused not only on Capital, work and the workplace, but also and above all on everyday life. Our aim, as our Philadelphia correspondent Judy Kaplan put it, was "to be revolutionary in everything."
Source: Dancin' in the Streets, p. 38 - What we also see is that an illness of the body is a bodily attempt at inscribing a history of otherness within the body that is the self, a tentative yet life-saving historiography that finds the dead hand of the past never so terribly alive as in the attacks by the spirits of the restless dead, such as Rosario's fiancé, or as in the sorcery of the envious. Through misfortune and its changing definition with attempts at healing, this picturing of the bodily self as the locus of otherness ineluctably enters into the exchange of magical powers established between Indian shamans and the Church, an exchange that operates with the powerful medium of visual images. Hallucinogens and points of rupture in everyday life -- illness, accident, coincidence, dusk -- can make this image-realm manifest and manifestly empowering, and it was Rosario's task to tie the power of the pagan to the power of the Church, ensuring in this circulation of images their dialectical solidarity.
Source: Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, p. 168 - [A]fter ten years of seeing Europe crushed under the boots of fascist murderers and their self-serving political collaborators, the time had come for an even more revolutionary flavor of liberation that had exceeded the fantasies of Marx and Engels -- there was a need for a set of ideas that would totally reorder the very fabric of the universe in the service of freedom, and the Surrealists saw this as the best reason for a renaissance of Romantic socialism and Fourierist poetics. In a postwar political climate dominated by the viciously cynical Jesuit device of 'ends justify means', talk of Fourier introduced two things that were sorely lacking: a blackly humorous critical (and therefore revolutionary) spark and an unwavering dedication to the complete emancipation of human beings. 'Action, even in the rigorous and unquestioned form it takes today for those who fight in the name of liberty, will only be valuable so long as our interpretation of the world...will not have the brakes slammed on it', Breton thundered. The revolutionary poetry of Fourier's socialism was exactly the kind of critical extravagance that a truly free and freedom-respecting society should be able to tolerate and welcome.
From chapter: Attacks of the Fantastic, Donald LaCoss
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 279-280 - [E]very thought resembles play, with which Hegel no less than Nietzsche compared the work of the mind. The unbarbaric side of philosophy is its tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of thought, which forever escapes what it judges. Such license is resented by the positivistic spirit and put down to mental disorder.
Source: Minima Moralia, p. 127 - [Fourier's] Theory of the Four Movements offers detailed accounts of life following this cataclysmic transmogrification. The auroras of the northern and southern circumpolar regions become more active and more frequent, eventually expanding to link together like the rings of Saturn and filling the earth's skies with rippling curtains of colour, light and heat. Over time, the outer edge of the earth's aurora-ring will extend to the corona of the sun, and the ensuing radiation will trigger a magical change in the natural world -- animals will learn to play musical instruments, stars will copulate and spray us all with their sexual fluids, weather patterns will shift, new moons begin to revolve the earth, and the chemical composition of the world's oceans change to 'aigresel', a tart, potable liquid. Even the human body mutates under the rays of the 'northern crown' as human beings overcome the need for sleep and grow taller. Humans will also sprout an 'archibras' ('ancient arm'), a prehensile tail with a sensory organ at its tip that will act as a fifth limb and enable one 'to swim as fast as a fish', to 'reach a branch twelve feet high', to triple one's natural leaping velocity, and to form a revolving, conelike 'inverted parachute by means of which one can fall from a considerable height without risking more than a bruise'.
From chapter: Attacks of the Fantastic, Donald LaCoss
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 274-275 - [S]urrealism...brings about a free poetic release without subordinating it to anything and without assigning a superior end to it. It is true that this is an attitude that is as difficult to bear as it is decisive and virilely sovereign. Yes, it really is the decisive conquest. Poetic liberty is not new. Myths and the rituals connected to them -- for instance 'Hopi ceremonies of an exceptional variety, which necessitate the intervention of the greatest number of supernatural beings that could be invested with a face and distinct attributes by the imagination' -- make this fact clear enough: that human 'thought' is everywhere and always ready to break loose. But it was once necessary to give a superior end to this release, a usually rather gross pretext. For the Hopi it is a question of 'attracting every protection over cultivation...the most important of which is maize'. To the extent that more refined religions maintain an element of poetic invention, the pretext is given in a transcendent morality, associated with salvation as a superior end. In modes of thought in which the poetic and the rational remain confounded, the mind cannot elevate itself to the conception of poetic liberty; it subordinates the existence of each instant to some ulterior goal. It has no escape from this servitude.
It is the prerogative of surrealism to free the activity of the mind from such servitude. As it consigned this activity to the shadows, rationalism stressed the binding of deeds and all thought to the end pursued. In the same way, rationalism liberated poetic activity form this binding, leaving it suspended. But the difficulty which remained was to affirm the value of what was finally released within the shadow.
In this way, what has proved to be simultaneously attained and liberated is nothing other than the instant. This is true in that man has never before been able to give value to the instant.
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 65 - [T]he live 'hysteric' served as the perfect cipher for the Surrealist exhibition's provocation against both modernism and its most authority-weighted institutions. Remote from the productivist/rational/utopian concerns of what is now understood as high modernism, the Surrealists violently rejected, in particular, architectural modernism throughout the life of the movement. During the 1930s, Dali even conflated hysteria with the 'terrifying and edible beauty' of Art Nouveau -- that architecture whose asymmetry, undulating curves and 'perversity' offered a corrective, in the Spaniard's view, to the right angles and functionalism of the modernist architecture championed by Le Corbusier. An edifice as hysterical body, womb, psychic envelope or crumbling ruin emerged as the only possible counter for Surrealism to the repressive authority of Architecture.
From chapter: Elena Filipovic, Surrealism in 1938: The Exhibition at War
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 195-196
