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| The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones |
I love aphorisms. Nietzsche is particularly good to read as a collection of isolated aphorisms, most especially at The Nietzsche Family Circus. I also took some inspiration from Liza's cut-outs from The Believer article on the writing style of Roland Barthes. (Wow, that had a lot of subordinate phrases, but that's the reality—frames within frames!)
I've begun to think that it might be fun to do a bunch of aphorisms that are ostensibly taken from a full-fledged text that doesn't exist, such as The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas, or the seemingly more pamphlet-like “What is Knology?” I am especially proud of “Joseph Lazarus is not only the most complete guitarist of his generation, but also the most complete human being,” which is a rip off of Sartre's comments on Che Guevara. How would that have ever come up in the pamphlet (or treatise or interview or feature article) on Knology?
I would love some of the more philosophically trained among you (Allison? Joe?) to start trying to “connect the dots” as to what this philosophy actually is, kind of like what some have tried to do with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which is to try to systematize aspects of their philosophies after the fact due to the often oblique and evasive styles of writing.
Will, your “tons of likes” statement brings me back to an original strategy for the project. We've talked extensively about the significance and importance of likes, favorites, retweets, reposts, embeds, but, as we well know, we get nearly none of those things. And I understand the reason for that, namely, that the posts are too confusing to inspire anyone to mouse over and give us a thumbs up on anything. Not to say that what all of you have contributed hasn't been incredible—it has—it's just the way we frame it makes it hard to contextualize. Plus, we have so little actual existence in the “real” world.
Still, in accepting any of this as an excuse, we've lost sight of the critical aspect of the project, its fundamental and essential donnée.
The project is supposed to show how in our current age, the frame is more important than its contents, the proscenium is more important than the scenium, the smoke is more important than the fire, the echo is more important than the utterance. In fact, the project attempts to take this to the degree where those former things—the antecedents or referents—no longer exist. So many reasons for this that have been discussed ad nauseam and I don't want to get into it all over again.
Will, in addition to a central contributor to the project, you've been pretty much its only groupie. My main point in this email is that we may need more people willing to be groupies, to be frames, to be echo chambers. And I'm going to argue that this groupie-hood should not be based on any quality inherent in the content. It should be groupie-hood for the sake of groupie-hood. Call it groupidity. This is a central precept of Knology. Gotta get that on an inspirational meme soon.
I'm not saying that this should be any of you by the way. Honestly, I appreciate any likes you can give, but I don't want you to give them unless it makes any kind of sense to you. Perhaps, you have some better ideas of how we can cause this to flourish without attempting to endow any further reality to the original, which should remain shrouded in doubt.
Once this dynamic is established, I believe we begin to harness the power of infinite regress, the infinite series of receding images produced by two facing mirrors. I understand the argument that we should strive to make the primary as meaningful, sincere, relevant, interesting, entertaining, engaging, helpful, good, true, or beautiful as possible. But I also argue that's just what they'll be expecting us to do. More importantly, that's missing the whole point—the whole dynamism of the Female King, the Symbolism of Ophelia, the Wisdom of Silenus, the Tunnels within Tunnels, the Restaurant within a Restaurant, and so many others.
It goes back to the idea hinted at throughout Tennyson's Idylls of the King: that of Arthur and Camelot's nonexistence. It is this absence of historicity that makes Arthur—not Richard the Lionhearted—England's enduring image of king.
In other words, anyone looking for an underlying principle in any of this will be disappointed. There is no principle; there's only what comes after. That's why we're always dodging, refusing to go on record, why every narrator is untrustworthy, etc. We're hinting at an absence, a lack. We're trying to get people to stumble across the event horizon of a black hole.
This isn't to say that I don't love all the ideas. I love Liza's zine idea. (I wish we could somehow mass produce “Cartography of the Mind”!) I love Will's podcast idea. I love Nick's journalistic idea. I love the recording idea. I'd love to do as many of those things as possible. That said, I also love Joe's documentary-footage-on-a-dead-computer idea.
Because historicity destroys legend!
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