Close: The Destruction of the Individual

Scan of a Postcard. Linda by Chuck Close, Acrylic and Graphite on Gessoed Linen. 1976-76. Akron Art Museum.

Postcard Photograph by Anonymous, Copyright 1989, Akron Art Museum

Close: The Destruction of the Individual

The social atomism which over the past three centuries has served as the historical axiom of social analysis posits an elementary unit – the individual – on the basis of which groups are supposed to be formed and to which they are supposed to be always reducible. This axiom… has been challenged by more than a century of sociological, economic, anthropological, and psychoanalytic research… Analysis shows that a relation (always social) determines [this axiomatic individual’s] terms, and not the reverse, and that each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of such relational determinations interact.

Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life, xi.

For Chuck Close the whole face really does not exist outside of circumstance; there is no singular identity to be found, only rather agglomerates of myriad individual and circumstantial factors, or, forces. The face is summoned out of nothing as a conceptual framework for the circumstantial coalescence of this indeterminate number of factors or forces. All of these individual atoms of the face, of identity, hang together and form some semblance of a shape, but never really merge together into one coherent, individual thing.

Bloomington Bound!

Here, finally, is the link to "Bloomington Bound! Or, With Julio's Golden Children." This was my final project for Travel Writing ENG335 at Walsh University. This is my first travel piece and details a trip that I took to Bloomington, Indiana over spring break 2010. There was no way to reconcile the photo and the text for the last page (it looked odd with the photo on the last page alone and with text in one column on the last page alone). Any comments or criticisms are welcome. This is still a pretty rough draft (sorry Ron).

Bloomington Bound!

The Immaterial Good à la Capra:

The following is the first of a series of three essays that were written for an examination in a class titled Philosophy Through Film, in which specific philosophical texts were paired with specific films. The pairs that these essays concern are Books VI-VIII of Plato’s Republic with Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take it With You, selections from Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id with Victor Fleming’s 1941 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Comic with Jerry Lewis’s original The Nutty Professor, respectively.

The Immaterial Good à la Capra:

            Plato and Frank Capra, though separated by more than two millennia of history, espouse a deep concern for the state of the human spirit throughout the body of their works. They both trace the turmoil of the human condition to a fundamental delusion about the material world, namely, that it is all that there is. Capra investigates the human condition most explicitly in his 1938 classic film You Can’t Take It With You. Just in parsing the title of the film one can find inherent Platonic themes. The first implication of the title is that there is a you after death, and not only a you that has being, but also a you to which can be attached complex predicates like possession. From this it is easily gathered just from the title that Capra is positing the existence of a spirit, or immaterial dimension of man…something that provides for an existence post-mortem.

Kant's Negative Metaphysics:

Kant's Negative Metaphysics:
Or the Results of Kant’s Philosophizing With an Epistemological Hammer

The majority of all metaphysical claims are based solely on speculative reason and are epistemologically impossible. Our fallacious notions that the soul, the universe (world-whole), and God are things-in-themselves, about which we can obtain knowledge, are inevitable consequences of being human. But, with this in mind, there is much we can learn about how human beings fall into these inevitable errors based on universal illusion/delusion, and the consequences and implications of this inevitability for human practices.

Oh, Ineffable Sublimity!

            The sublime is, in itself, an ineffable concept, one that is ever elusive, and only escapes complete ineffability – the fate of lying in the belly of our deepest unconscious provoking feelings that would be of unknown origin – because of allusive images that summon up a percentage of its total power and serve as giant arrows pointing outside the realm of language. The closest we can ever get to discovering its true substance and form is in contemplation of the generalizations and categorizations of these allusive images of sublimity that spark a bit of that dread that soaks into our bones, thickens our saliva and tightens our throats, and leaves us wide-eyed and pale. But before one can begin to look at these indicators of the sublime – these images portraying a deeply rooted collectivized archetype in the depths of the unconscious – it is necessary to establish the sublime’s ineffability.

Arrested Development:

The Global South’s Ongoing Struggle for Economic Stability

It is a very clever common device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. . . . Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth.

– Friedrich List, 1885, The National System of Political Economy.

            Under the rhetorical banner of globalization, liberalization, and free trade, the advanced industrialized nations of the world have actually disguised their mercantilist aspirations to secure their place as the dominant economic powers in the world by denying developing countries all of the means by which they themselves industrialized. This pattern of international political and economic behavior is neither inevitable nor accidental. Power is the ability to influence others and realize one’s objectives even in the face of organized opposition. “The West imposed its own accounting practices, investment policies, and commitment to privatization upon the rest of the world despite the attempt at organized opposition by the South. International trade and investment have distributed gains in favor of those who control capital and against those who contribute human labor, especially in developing countries. The south is withering under the tyranny of the missing alternative. (Patterson 2005, 384)” The global South faces the challenges of overcoming human resources, poor infrastructure, traditional culture, inefficient bureaucracy and deeply embedded corruption and greed, inexperience, lack of scientific and technological resources, and crushing international debt, to name a few, all of which it must deal with while working in a system that is inherently prejudicial to its interests and constantly shrinking the amount of development space that it can work with (Patterson 2005, 380-1).