July 18, 2005
Of course, we are meat
A quote by Francis Bacon that I came across in Gilles Deleuze's, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation:
"Of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal."
Bacon, however, goes into the butcher's shop as if it were a church.
Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Muriel Belcher, 1966, Right Panel
Though Bacon understood planet earth as a slaughterhouse on the verge of annihilation at any moment, he also blurred the divide between humans and animals.
Bacon said:
"Nietzsche forecast our future for us--he was the Cassandra of the nineteenth century---he told us it's all so meaningless we might as well be extraordinary."
If life is so meaningless then suffering cannot be made sense of because it has no meaning.
Some unBaconian 1980s pop philosophy from William Gibson's Neuromancer;
"He'd [Case] operated on an almost permanent adreniline high, a by product of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A theif, he worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporeate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.
He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because - still smiling - they were going to make sure he never worked again.
They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
....
For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, if was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. the body was meat. Case fell into a prison of his own flesh."
Posted by: Cameron Riley on July 19, 2005 12:42 PMGary, Yes life and the entire universe is a slaughterhouse. A beginningless and endless play of changes and transformations---the dance of Shiva Nataraj with his foot on the ego golem.The dance being completely indifferent to any of the egos delusions.
One of the best Traditional understanding of this was the Hindu Goddess Kali who was/is a bloodthirsty bitch that eats her children, civilisation and the entire universe for breakfast.
Everything that appears gets eaten sooner or later, or perhaps moment by moment since everything is always changing.
But the other aspect of Kali was the inherent demand to be established in the asana of the primal transcendental consciousness or witness position (the place from where Primal Thought {Badiou} emerges is "done"). Such being the asana/dispostion of True Wisdom wherein that beginningless and endless play of changes (the klik klak machine) is merely witnessed dispassionately and allowed to do its thing/process.
As my favourite primal philosopher quipped. The Laughing Mama (from Coney Island) or Kali says that your objections to all of that dont mean shit!
John
Posted by: John on July 19, 2005 01:09 PMDo not Bacon's images with their diverse levels and multiplicities speak to us today?
They no longer need be interpreted in terms of the existential anguish of the 1950s.
The sensation caused by these artworks about becoming animal make us shudder in the body.
Can we say that?
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on July 19, 2005 04:27 PM