Posted by Kristen Alvanson at Sunday, April 12, 2009
Lumpen Orientalism gathers the fragments of a lost civilization, the decaying parts of a breathing animal _ the Middle East. Named after a term suggested by China Miéville, Lumpen Orientalism captures an anomalous fascination with the Middle East and Asia in a similar way to the mongrel visions of Gilles Deleuze, H. P. Lovecraft, Gaëtan Clérambault and William Beckford in order to tackle this enigmatic monstrosity.
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"The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step. . . . One never sees from a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one see it from a distance . . . [orientations] are tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as 'monads' but are instead *nomads* entertaining tactile relations among themselves. . . . Where there is close vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, non optical function: no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance . . . Arab architecture constitutes a space that begins very near and low, placing the light and the airy below and the solid and heavy above . . . There exists a nomadic absolute, as a local integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absoute that is one with becoming itself, with process" (Deleuze & Guattari, Massumi trans., 493-4)
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