You had to bring Lacan into it...

I feel bad replicating this unusually jargonish sentence from Caroline Jones' otherwise lucid book in Greenberg, but... On Greenberg's drawing, she writes:

"We can interpret this fragmented male body, bristling with prosthetic supplements (yet still so lacking), in relation to Spengler's all-too-German narrative of deliquescent historical cycles and problematic Jews. The 'pseudomorphosis' of Greek Jewish texts recalls the problems of Greenberg's ventriloquized poetry; both connect productively to Lacanian theories of language as paternal law that forms (sometimes traumatically) the subject."

--Caroline A Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. Chicago, 2005.

When formal analysis goes bad... or FABULOUS?


"As to composition and arrangement, it is singularly gratifying to see the entire freedom from the distressing shagginess and overcrowding that too often mar modern interiors that might be really excellent if those responsible for their execution would only hold themselves in check and, when they have done enough, refrain from adding a sickening
array of meaningless and, needless to say, useless fiddle-de-dees and fol-de-rols that give a room a fussy and effeminate air."

-Harold Donaldson Eberlein, Interiors, Fireplaces and Furniture of the

Italian Renaissance. New York, 1927

Sublime or Meaningless

It's probably my fault for not having read Deleuze, but given that I have not read Deleuze, I can't make much of this:

"The sensed aspect of intensity double the affect understood as pure capacity: we are back at self-multiplication. And we are back at emergence, because the sensation is the first glimmer of a determinate experience, in the act of registering itself as itself across its own event. A first glimpse of definable self-experience: back at incipient subjectivity. We have looped, taking an affective shortcut across many of the salient problems raised by the question fot eh body's passing power of 'concreteness.'"

-Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, p. 16

As always, I look forward to being enlightened by someone more adept than I am! (Notice the comment feature?)