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‘Brain images display the beauty and complexity of consciousness‘ proclaims the New Scientist. Except they don’t. The images might be beautiful and complex but they do not display consciousness. 

For a while I took images like this and asked people what they looked like.

a metallic vertebrae trapped in fine blue hair

a transparent fish

an aerial view of a dark island surrounded by currents of mercury and ice

clumps of fibres

the mane of a golden electric horse

swirls of opaque liquid amid fine grasses 

streetlights clumped at the edge of an illuminated park

the searchlights emitted by a deep sea vessel entering a phosphorescent reef

something mysterious travelling through the night

rainbow cauliflower

opalescent eggs clustered on the branches of tiny low hanging dead trees

petrol in water

I wrote something once about this kind of thing

http://www.linkartcenter.eu/public/editions/Torque1_Mind_language_and_technology_Link_Editions_2014.pdf

Sinewy stone figures wrestle in a state of petrified unrest, their heroic actions frozen in media res. The scene is ‘shattered into fragments’. ‘Yawning cracks’ cut once whole figures to pieces. Muscular stumps, bits of jaw, leg, ankle, and ‘tremendous and dismembered hands’ protrude from the hard marble. Hands without fingers, shoulders without arms, fists without swords. Mutilated bodies strangle, clamber and clutch at one another desperately. Torsos convulse in pain. Ligaments tear, sweat pours, blood congeals, arteries swell. Body parts intertwine, twist, stretch, gape, leap, flutter, fall, hang, loom and coil. The silence, occasionally broken by the soft echoes of tourists’ footsteps, seems to contain an ‘inaudible roaring’ that the young observers strain to hear:

We heard the thuds of the clubs, the shrilling whistles, the moans, the splashing of blood. We looked back at a prehistoric past, and for an instant the prospect of the future likewise filled up with a massacre impenetrable to the thought of liberation.

They gaze at the beaten and the dying. They stare at the stone and it is as though they can see their own future defeats unfold before their eyes, brutal defeats that the novel goes on to trace in similarly visceral detail. ‘The silence, the paralysis of those fated to be trampled into the ground continued to be palpable.’  But they perceive other struggles contained in the panorama of devastation. The scene is also a source of hope, confirming the necessity to keep on fighting.

The Aesthetics of Resistance itself stands as a scarred monument to past struggles. Weiss is unflinching in his portrayal of political defeats and the historical wreckage of 20th century Europe. But, as Fredric Jameson discusses, he is concerned with asking ‘how to draw energy from such endless images of horror.’  Forced to contemplate the novel’s corpse-strewn pages, Weiss places the reader in the position of his young protagonists at the Pergamon altar in order to provide ‘a lesson about the productive uses of a past and a history that is not simply represented or commemorated but also reappropriated by some new future of our own present.’ The novel ends by returning to the frieze, dwelling on the empty space on the altar where the paw of Hercules should be: ‘The empty space in the frieze, at the spot where the lion’s paw of Hercules would hang, designates precisely something absent, unrealised.’  The empty space is left open for future intervention. As Weiss himself stated, both the Pergamon and his novel are addressed to the present: ‘that turmoil, those figures tangled up in relentless, dreadful combat, figures strangling one another, lacerating one another with spears. It is the very same struggle that we are engaged in today.’

‘Long live the Commune!’