an aside on nomadology

on rereading jameson

1.

"History is always written from the sedentary point of view . . . even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history."

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus via @aliner

It just occurred to me: isn’t that what postmodernism is?

And another note:

      It'd be better not to say "truth" at all, but stick with "insights" & "methodologies"...

(An addiction is also a methodology.)

I was eager to find something said about Twombly, because for a long time I hadn’t known what to think. At first I said, he’s just an Anti-Abstract Expressionist, the way Still is abstract & expressionist but anti-Abstract Expressionist. But that isn’t it. Later, when I coined a word for ‘between a thread & not-a-thread’ I got closer to it¹. Twombly is between referential & not-referential…but that’s not where he winds up: it’s where he starts.

The nomad doesn’t bother with a global map—a Grand Narrative—because she doesn’t need to. She has her insights & her methodologies. What sets Twombly apart is his lack of grandiosity. He isn’t about triumph in the expanded present (lots of the distant past keeps showing through); yet his methodology is to exclude nothing, including defeat, which history is full of (or even, made of). And that’s actually quite rigorous (like trying not to swat a fly that lands on your bare hand).

His insight was that that point of view was going to become important.

2.

"Indeed, perhaps more than a maze of precepts about how to write, paint or compose, Symbolism was primarily a set of perspectives on reading and interpretation..." --Patrick McGuinness, intro to Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle (2000)

Vaporwave too. Methodologies that only seem to be movements (we call them “aesthetics”); exercises in as-if.

(Poliespo, & the archipelago after that, jboku’ile)

1.      heterocrania