.
… I hope for poetic expressions that are aggressive, baroque and esoteric; I prefer ridiculous and embarrassing to perfection. On the literary market, which is dominated by the aesthetic and social ideals of the upper middleclass, it is unacceptable to be excessive in any way – one adjective too many and you’re out. There’s a stubborn cliché that the sober, quiet and elegant, the so-called “simple” is categorically more informative than the noisy. The fleshy, screamy and overdone, the vulgar, desperate and pathetic are so taboo in our culture that there must be dog buried in the phenomenon.*
- Aase Berg, from It’s Not Acceptable to be Fatso
* In Swedish, “a buried dog” has the same meaning as “a dead rat” in English.
.
February 27, 2010
Felix Guttari Quote
.
Or rather: either a revolutionary machine that can harness desire will take shape, or desire will go on being manipulated by the forces of oppression, or repression, and so threaten, even from within, any revolutionary machine.
– Felix Guttari
.
Or rather: either a revolutionary machine that can harness desire will take shape, or desire will go on being manipulated by the forces of oppression, or repression, and so threaten, even from within, any revolutionary machine.
– Felix Guttari
.
February 26, 2010
Response
.
[In the comments section, in response to the post below, Gabe wrote:]
------------------------------
I don't know if it would be possible to persuade you, but I think you over estimate the extent to which markets and capitalism are based on exploitation. Also the idea of turbo capitalism compared to earlier eras is overdone, and is somewhat a case of the left taking at face value the rhetoric of the business world.
Down to earth flexible markets have also been just as historically effective in degrading the environment, whatever their benefits in terms of reduced alienation.
I haven't watched this, but the relevant book is good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yYQqKxz8Tg
I don't know what it means for art if one no longer believes that the current moment is apocalyptic and that everyday social solidarity like well funded schools and childcare is where attention should be directed. High profits can be and are redirected for social good by being taxed, and they don't always or even usually depend on destroyed lives.
------------------------------
[It's true this is not really how it seems to me, but I want to remain open to the idea that I might, in general or just on specific points, be completely and utterly wrong. And I do feel apocalyptic thinking - which I am often guilty of - is always overly romantic, always contains more than a touch of wishful thinking: our times must be 'important' because we have come to 'the end'. And I remain in constant fear that I am simply becoming paranoid to the point of distraction. Still, the levels of global unequality do seem particularly savage to me. Not to mention the levels of inequality within any given society. Then again, what is this desire for the world to be fair.]
.
[In the comments section, in response to the post below, Gabe wrote:]
------------------------------
I don't know if it would be possible to persuade you, but I think you over estimate the extent to which markets and capitalism are based on exploitation. Also the idea of turbo capitalism compared to earlier eras is overdone, and is somewhat a case of the left taking at face value the rhetoric of the business world.
Down to earth flexible markets have also been just as historically effective in degrading the environment, whatever their benefits in terms of reduced alienation.
I haven't watched this, but the relevant book is good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yYQqKxz8Tg
I don't know what it means for art if one no longer believes that the current moment is apocalyptic and that everyday social solidarity like well funded schools and childcare is where attention should be directed. High profits can be and are redirected for social good by being taxed, and they don't always or even usually depend on destroyed lives.
------------------------------
[It's true this is not really how it seems to me, but I want to remain open to the idea that I might, in general or just on specific points, be completely and utterly wrong. And I do feel apocalyptic thinking - which I am often guilty of - is always overly romantic, always contains more than a touch of wishful thinking: our times must be 'important' because we have come to 'the end'. And I remain in constant fear that I am simply becoming paranoid to the point of distraction. Still, the levels of global unequality do seem particularly savage to me. Not to mention the levels of inequality within any given society. Then again, what is this desire for the world to be fair.]
.
February 25, 2010
Hospitality & Resistance
.
1.
The energy of the market-place, at times, possesses an astonishing versatility, diversity, creativity and inventiveness, in the realm of ideas as well as actions.
The neo-liberal, turbo-capitalism – in which we currently live – is the emptied out, apocalyptic perversion of this potential.
We are integrated into this system at the level of our desires. When I want something, or have a fantasy, this want or fantasy are shot through with capitalism.
I don’t know about you, but speaking for myself, I am totally fucking in it. I behave, not like a capitalist, but like capitalism itself. And I am against capitalism. So I am against myself.
The only accurate proof of how I feel will be my suicide. So perhaps there will be no proof. This is what one might call a generational break. Science requires proof, for everything else there is activism, wishes or prayer.
The greater the margin of economic profit, the more people’s lives are destroyed, the more completely people’s lives are destroyed. This is why I prefer only a little bit of profit. (While secretly hungering for larger conquests.) How can one honestly look at the world, have a good heart, and still not be didactic. The fear of empty words, or worse, of hypocritical gestures, is far greater than the fear of doing nothing. But there is no pleasure, no risk, in being only consequent.
I started writing this in Geneva. Now I am writing in Madrid.
There is an incredible electric charge, an overwhelming surge of perverse empowerment, in consciously or unconsciously doing something that one knows is wrong. Good deeds cannot match this pleasure, they have only a tepid narcissism with which to rally.
Acts of kindness are plentiful in the world, but most often take place on a modest scale. Acts of malice can be monumental. I don’t know if this is even true. And if true I don’t know why. But I wrote it and as I was writing could feel it resonate.
Monumental acts of malice often require a great deal of technology. What are the technologies of kindness? A genocide is a monumental, terrifying act of malice. What is the equivalent in the realm of kindness?
But perhaps kindness is beside the point. To witness a monumental act of malice (the French revolutions descent into terror, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.) is to experience a violent, equally out of proportion, sense of disillusionment.
Then again, perhaps freedom is always connected to disappointment. If one can do anything, what is the single, concrete thing that can match the potency of endless possibilities. Even building pyramids falls short.
A little bit of freedom is a thrill. A little bit of freedom equals a little bit of exploitation. A little bit of freedom equals a little bit of disappointment. A little bit of freedom creates the hunger for more.
This isn’t what most people think of when they hear the word poetry.
Cancer is to our times as lead poisoning was to the Romans. A clear sign that the empire is falling. Evidence of the ‘planned obsolescence’ of all current models of industrial production. (The previous two lines equal wishful thinking.)
People are an astonishing mix of complexity and non-complexity. Subjectivity is produced. What I think of as myself in fact doesn’t really come from me. It comes from advertising, television, pop songs, magazines, the odd book, half understood social conventions and taboos, the failures of my education and, I suppose, my parents. A hodge-podge, a bricolage.
This is the self with its endless patterns I can see myself repeating endlessly though it remains elusive just exactly where they came from or why. Of course there are answers, theories, therapy. But like all useful reductions, they fail to grapple with the fullness of the struggle. A struggle not only with myself but with the world. With the marketplace of the world.
What is the direct connection between the pauper and the billionaire? Does the billionaire own the company from which the pauper was downsized, from which he never managed to recover? Does the fact that there are billionaires, that we allow the existence of billionaires, also mean, at the level of our conception of the world, that there will never be enough to go around? Why when I write about these questions, which in fact affect our political lives more ferociously than any others, do I feel naïve and trivial?
Subjectivity is produced. Deep in our consciousness we are given a challenge: either you attempt to become rich or you will end up poor. This has nothing to do with Darwin. Nature is chock-a-block full of symbiotic relationships. Animals help each other survive. Neither the billionaire nor the pauper are animals. We invented this madness.
As I am writing this, the fact that I know I can write anything and it will have absolutely no effect on the larger social world is the most striking example of what I am speaking about. This is another kind of poverty.
As now I am writing in Montreal, the most charming city in Canada. (I dare you to tell me that its not.) I struggle to call it home.
A frenzy of dissatisfaction: in which one feels any attempts at improvement will only lead to further disappointment, yet the dissatisfaction is so intense that one must, nonetheless, continuously strive towards new frontiers. The self-aware hungry ghost.
The self-aware hungry ghost. But the hungry ghost is something within ourselves that can and must be overcome. While this self-awareness, for some reason, has nothing to do with change or wanting to change. It is self-awareness in service of everything remaining, more or less, the same.
This dissatisfaction has nothing to do with wanting to change and yet everything within it screams out that things must, that the situation cannot go on. Like a Chinese finger trap, the more it struggles towards change, the more fixed and rigid the trap becomes. The greater the knowledge that what one must actually do is relax, let go, let some things take their natural course, the more fierce and violent come the surges of futile resistance. Spitting in the face of your torturer when you are exhausted, chained down, and he has all the tools.
The entire model of opposition needs to be re-thought. Yes, fascism must be opposed and fought against in all instances. (The fascism of capital, the fascism within ourselves, the crypto-fascism of everyday life.) But perhaps it must be fought against using a model somehow other than opposition.
Opposition always leads to one of two things: to being absorbed or being destroyed. It is true that when ones ideas are absorbed one does – in some sense – alter the status quo. However, if the original model was less about attacking and more about something else, I am once again thinking along the lines of symbiotic relationships found in nature, than perhaps a greater degree of change might be possible, one that does not create the insidious distortions beneficial to power that absorption so often entails.
Fierce opposition always leads to something akin to a cycle of revenge: positions on both sides harden, become further ingrained, more rigid, the longer the antagonism continues to escalate. Both sides become less likely to soften, shift or change.
And yet the more I think about such questions, the more unclear I become as to what this other model might look or feel like. Might it be a model based on listening?
Listening to the enemy? Not dialogue, not some naïve belief in the power of communication. Simple listening as the first step before any move. But what if, as you are listening, all you hear are lies? What if, as you are listening, you receive three bullets in the back of the head (when one bullet would have been utterly sufficient.) How to transition from a state in which listening is dangerous and foolish towards a state in which it is, once again, constructive? Listening for the insecurity behind power. Thinking if there are other ways, less violent ways, to make it feel secure. And once again, as I write, I feel naïve.
Where is power in capital? In the things it makes us do? In the things it allows us to do (to ourselves, to others)? In the things it makes possible: the organization, hierarchy and destruction? The overwhelming imbalances of power that simply could not exist without it.
It seems misguided to attempt to make ‘power feel secure’, but if power is little more than a savage over-compensation for the most violent forms of insecurity, then perhaps there is no other way. But why do I think power is like that? Is it little more than projection. Or is it only because I don’t believe in evil. (No, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was just really, really, really insecure.)
Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.
Where is the power in capital? In the fact that nothing seems possible without it, without a bit of dosh, that even the homeless panhandle, and must feel they have no choice, that it seems nearly impossible to imagine our world organized in some other way? Capital is not omnipotent, but neither does it have to be in order to maintain a fairly consistent and spectacular control.
Now I am writing in Toronto, the city that instilled in me a deep, but cautious, antipathy towards business, sports and post-modernism.
Nature is not based on competition, it is organized through and around ecosystems. In some sense we could make an analogy between ecosystems and listening.
Competition isn’t natural. Competition is produced like everything else. In the natural world they don’t compete because of some implicit ideology that competition lends value. Animals hunt for food out of necessity. Where is the necessity in everything around us? Where is the necessity in writing overly-earnest, anti-capitalist very long poems that will change nothing and will likely not even compel the average reader to continue reading even up until this point? Where is the average reader?
The overwhelming disillusionment of the atrocities of recent history. The overwhelming disillusionment of reading the newspaper on an average Wednesday. And the concurrent knowledge that, no matter what, people continue to fight and to hope and fucking beautiful things continue to happen all the time.
How to imagine deep, structural change, happening slowing over decades, overcoming the continuous onslaught of insurmountable obstacles and continuing to push through. Beginning with subtle but ongoing shifts in our most basic understanding of ourselves and of the world. Is that a place to begin? What would it mean to listen to the insecurity behind the savagery of power abused? It is possible to begin a dialog with people who only want to fuck up your shit? A series of rhetorical questions is cheap writing but cheap writing must not be dismissed. How rigid our personalities, our understanding of the world, becomes over time.
At the door of Kafka’s castle you can’t haggle. At the Wall Mart and gas station you cannot haggle. But in the marketplace, the dirty marketplace of ‘early capitalism’, my romantic misconception of a marketplace before the hard shock of industrial production, there was still a certain one-to-one level of give-and-take. What would that marketplace look like without a king, without a church, growing out of some improvised combination of barter and local currencies?
If they can have the psychotic fantasy of a pure, unregulated free market, why can’t I have the idyllic fantasy of some future, down-to-earth, flexible, generous marketplace of necessities and ideas?
2.
They’re ideologues, and ideology is like an addiction to one’s own position. Ideologues don’t stop until someone stops them. But how to stop them without becoming equally, negatively tenacious and single-minded yourself.
We all have fixations, obsessions, things about which we are absolutely stubborn. But ideologues want everyone under the boot of their own infinite stubbornness, which they view as noble discipline, and they keep coming back.
Are these the ones I’m suggesting we listen to?
But it’s easy to call your enemy’s names, easy to demonize them, infinitely more difficult to find the miniscule point from which some degree of communication might begin.
Resistance is always unfinished, always a work-in-progress, because if you win then you’re in power, and somebody else has to resist against you. Might such an idea ease the inherent frustration involved in any act of sustained resistance?
.
1.
The energy of the market-place, at times, possesses an astonishing versatility, diversity, creativity and inventiveness, in the realm of ideas as well as actions.
The neo-liberal, turbo-capitalism – in which we currently live – is the emptied out, apocalyptic perversion of this potential.
We are integrated into this system at the level of our desires. When I want something, or have a fantasy, this want or fantasy are shot through with capitalism.
I don’t know about you, but speaking for myself, I am totally fucking in it. I behave, not like a capitalist, but like capitalism itself. And I am against capitalism. So I am against myself.
The only accurate proof of how I feel will be my suicide. So perhaps there will be no proof. This is what one might call a generational break. Science requires proof, for everything else there is activism, wishes or prayer.
The greater the margin of economic profit, the more people’s lives are destroyed, the more completely people’s lives are destroyed. This is why I prefer only a little bit of profit. (While secretly hungering for larger conquests.) How can one honestly look at the world, have a good heart, and still not be didactic. The fear of empty words, or worse, of hypocritical gestures, is far greater than the fear of doing nothing. But there is no pleasure, no risk, in being only consequent.
I started writing this in Geneva. Now I am writing in Madrid.
There is an incredible electric charge, an overwhelming surge of perverse empowerment, in consciously or unconsciously doing something that one knows is wrong. Good deeds cannot match this pleasure, they have only a tepid narcissism with which to rally.
Acts of kindness are plentiful in the world, but most often take place on a modest scale. Acts of malice can be monumental. I don’t know if this is even true. And if true I don’t know why. But I wrote it and as I was writing could feel it resonate.
Monumental acts of malice often require a great deal of technology. What are the technologies of kindness? A genocide is a monumental, terrifying act of malice. What is the equivalent in the realm of kindness?
But perhaps kindness is beside the point. To witness a monumental act of malice (the French revolutions descent into terror, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.) is to experience a violent, equally out of proportion, sense of disillusionment.
Then again, perhaps freedom is always connected to disappointment. If one can do anything, what is the single, concrete thing that can match the potency of endless possibilities. Even building pyramids falls short.
A little bit of freedom is a thrill. A little bit of freedom equals a little bit of exploitation. A little bit of freedom equals a little bit of disappointment. A little bit of freedom creates the hunger for more.
This isn’t what most people think of when they hear the word poetry.
Cancer is to our times as lead poisoning was to the Romans. A clear sign that the empire is falling. Evidence of the ‘planned obsolescence’ of all current models of industrial production. (The previous two lines equal wishful thinking.)
People are an astonishing mix of complexity and non-complexity. Subjectivity is produced. What I think of as myself in fact doesn’t really come from me. It comes from advertising, television, pop songs, magazines, the odd book, half understood social conventions and taboos, the failures of my education and, I suppose, my parents. A hodge-podge, a bricolage.
This is the self with its endless patterns I can see myself repeating endlessly though it remains elusive just exactly where they came from or why. Of course there are answers, theories, therapy. But like all useful reductions, they fail to grapple with the fullness of the struggle. A struggle not only with myself but with the world. With the marketplace of the world.
What is the direct connection between the pauper and the billionaire? Does the billionaire own the company from which the pauper was downsized, from which he never managed to recover? Does the fact that there are billionaires, that we allow the existence of billionaires, also mean, at the level of our conception of the world, that there will never be enough to go around? Why when I write about these questions, which in fact affect our political lives more ferociously than any others, do I feel naïve and trivial?
Subjectivity is produced. Deep in our consciousness we are given a challenge: either you attempt to become rich or you will end up poor. This has nothing to do with Darwin. Nature is chock-a-block full of symbiotic relationships. Animals help each other survive. Neither the billionaire nor the pauper are animals. We invented this madness.
As I am writing this, the fact that I know I can write anything and it will have absolutely no effect on the larger social world is the most striking example of what I am speaking about. This is another kind of poverty.
As now I am writing in Montreal, the most charming city in Canada. (I dare you to tell me that its not.) I struggle to call it home.
A frenzy of dissatisfaction: in which one feels any attempts at improvement will only lead to further disappointment, yet the dissatisfaction is so intense that one must, nonetheless, continuously strive towards new frontiers. The self-aware hungry ghost.
The self-aware hungry ghost. But the hungry ghost is something within ourselves that can and must be overcome. While this self-awareness, for some reason, has nothing to do with change or wanting to change. It is self-awareness in service of everything remaining, more or less, the same.
This dissatisfaction has nothing to do with wanting to change and yet everything within it screams out that things must, that the situation cannot go on. Like a Chinese finger trap, the more it struggles towards change, the more fixed and rigid the trap becomes. The greater the knowledge that what one must actually do is relax, let go, let some things take their natural course, the more fierce and violent come the surges of futile resistance. Spitting in the face of your torturer when you are exhausted, chained down, and he has all the tools.
The entire model of opposition needs to be re-thought. Yes, fascism must be opposed and fought against in all instances. (The fascism of capital, the fascism within ourselves, the crypto-fascism of everyday life.) But perhaps it must be fought against using a model somehow other than opposition.
Opposition always leads to one of two things: to being absorbed or being destroyed. It is true that when ones ideas are absorbed one does – in some sense – alter the status quo. However, if the original model was less about attacking and more about something else, I am once again thinking along the lines of symbiotic relationships found in nature, than perhaps a greater degree of change might be possible, one that does not create the insidious distortions beneficial to power that absorption so often entails.
Fierce opposition always leads to something akin to a cycle of revenge: positions on both sides harden, become further ingrained, more rigid, the longer the antagonism continues to escalate. Both sides become less likely to soften, shift or change.
And yet the more I think about such questions, the more unclear I become as to what this other model might look or feel like. Might it be a model based on listening?
Listening to the enemy? Not dialogue, not some naïve belief in the power of communication. Simple listening as the first step before any move. But what if, as you are listening, all you hear are lies? What if, as you are listening, you receive three bullets in the back of the head (when one bullet would have been utterly sufficient.) How to transition from a state in which listening is dangerous and foolish towards a state in which it is, once again, constructive? Listening for the insecurity behind power. Thinking if there are other ways, less violent ways, to make it feel secure. And once again, as I write, I feel naïve.
Where is power in capital? In the things it makes us do? In the things it allows us to do (to ourselves, to others)? In the things it makes possible: the organization, hierarchy and destruction? The overwhelming imbalances of power that simply could not exist without it.
It seems misguided to attempt to make ‘power feel secure’, but if power is little more than a savage over-compensation for the most violent forms of insecurity, then perhaps there is no other way. But why do I think power is like that? Is it little more than projection. Or is it only because I don’t believe in evil. (No, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was just really, really, really insecure.)
Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.
Where is the power in capital? In the fact that nothing seems possible without it, without a bit of dosh, that even the homeless panhandle, and must feel they have no choice, that it seems nearly impossible to imagine our world organized in some other way? Capital is not omnipotent, but neither does it have to be in order to maintain a fairly consistent and spectacular control.
Now I am writing in Toronto, the city that instilled in me a deep, but cautious, antipathy towards business, sports and post-modernism.
Nature is not based on competition, it is organized through and around ecosystems. In some sense we could make an analogy between ecosystems and listening.
Competition isn’t natural. Competition is produced like everything else. In the natural world they don’t compete because of some implicit ideology that competition lends value. Animals hunt for food out of necessity. Where is the necessity in everything around us? Where is the necessity in writing overly-earnest, anti-capitalist very long poems that will change nothing and will likely not even compel the average reader to continue reading even up until this point? Where is the average reader?
The overwhelming disillusionment of the atrocities of recent history. The overwhelming disillusionment of reading the newspaper on an average Wednesday. And the concurrent knowledge that, no matter what, people continue to fight and to hope and fucking beautiful things continue to happen all the time.
How to imagine deep, structural change, happening slowing over decades, overcoming the continuous onslaught of insurmountable obstacles and continuing to push through. Beginning with subtle but ongoing shifts in our most basic understanding of ourselves and of the world. Is that a place to begin? What would it mean to listen to the insecurity behind the savagery of power abused? It is possible to begin a dialog with people who only want to fuck up your shit? A series of rhetorical questions is cheap writing but cheap writing must not be dismissed. How rigid our personalities, our understanding of the world, becomes over time.
At the door of Kafka’s castle you can’t haggle. At the Wall Mart and gas station you cannot haggle. But in the marketplace, the dirty marketplace of ‘early capitalism’, my romantic misconception of a marketplace before the hard shock of industrial production, there was still a certain one-to-one level of give-and-take. What would that marketplace look like without a king, without a church, growing out of some improvised combination of barter and local currencies?
If they can have the psychotic fantasy of a pure, unregulated free market, why can’t I have the idyllic fantasy of some future, down-to-earth, flexible, generous marketplace of necessities and ideas?
2.
They’re ideologues, and ideology is like an addiction to one’s own position. Ideologues don’t stop until someone stops them. But how to stop them without becoming equally, negatively tenacious and single-minded yourself.
We all have fixations, obsessions, things about which we are absolutely stubborn. But ideologues want everyone under the boot of their own infinite stubbornness, which they view as noble discipline, and they keep coming back.
Are these the ones I’m suggesting we listen to?
But it’s easy to call your enemy’s names, easy to demonize them, infinitely more difficult to find the miniscule point from which some degree of communication might begin.
Resistance is always unfinished, always a work-in-progress, because if you win then you’re in power, and somebody else has to resist against you. Might such an idea ease the inherent frustration involved in any act of sustained resistance?
.
February 24, 2010
Evan Calder Williams Quote on NGOs
.
In this period, a new imperialism was taking shape, in which those being colonized were no longer designated as enemies. Instead of being classified as conflicts between sovereign powers, wars became clashes between “humanitarian interventions” and insurgents who refused to accept the “restructuring” of their state according to neoliberal conventions of international access to markets and resources. And with that came the false universality of an inclusion of those enemies who you don’t dare call as such: you are on our side, you just don’t know it yet. NGO’s, whose mission ran from hunger relief to debt “relief”, functioned as the humanizing face of these imperial projects, both laying a groundwork for larger organizations (such as states themselves) to get involved in these “troubled” areas and acting as a public relations band-aid on those areas already invaded or damaged from a century of exclusion from the global circuits of capital. In other words, beneath the “good intentions” of NGOs and the surface appearance of an under-funded group of “one world” humanitarians, ran a massive flow of money and military might largely responsible for the very problems addressed by the NGOs. They became, wittingly or not, an advanced tactic in the broader neoliberal program of privatization and new imperialism.
- Evan Calder Williams
.
In this period, a new imperialism was taking shape, in which those being colonized were no longer designated as enemies. Instead of being classified as conflicts between sovereign powers, wars became clashes between “humanitarian interventions” and insurgents who refused to accept the “restructuring” of their state according to neoliberal conventions of international access to markets and resources. And with that came the false universality of an inclusion of those enemies who you don’t dare call as such: you are on our side, you just don’t know it yet. NGO’s, whose mission ran from hunger relief to debt “relief”, functioned as the humanizing face of these imperial projects, both laying a groundwork for larger organizations (such as states themselves) to get involved in these “troubled” areas and acting as a public relations band-aid on those areas already invaded or damaged from a century of exclusion from the global circuits of capital. In other words, beneath the “good intentions” of NGOs and the surface appearance of an under-funded group of “one world” humanitarians, ran a massive flow of money and military might largely responsible for the very problems addressed by the NGOs. They became, wittingly or not, an advanced tactic in the broader neoliberal program of privatization and new imperialism.
- Evan Calder Williams
.
February 23, 2010
A little anguish over the instrumentalization of one’s own creativity, in order to produce a new niche product for the originality markets
.
The problem, however, is not only the gradual phasing-out of national cultural institutions, together with their outdated canons of beauty and elitist ideals of identity. The deeper problem is that in order to survive as exploratory and transformative practices, and in order to generate enough interest and involvement to reconstitute a socialized cultural sphere under fresh auspices, the contemporary arts have to throw off their blatant or subtle dependence on the new corporate-oriented institutions that promote an opportunistic and flexible subjectivity. This is easier said than done, as is shown by the ambiguous relations between cultural producers on the museum circuit and activists seeking forms of organization for precarious labor. Because it is easy to invest a little anguish over the biopolitical instrumentalization of one’s own creativity, in order to produce a new niche product for the originality markets – and it’s just as facile to criticize that investment. Indeed, hyperindividualization and the capitalization of everything seems to be the very formula for the breakdown of the solidarities and the emergence of liberal fascism. What’s more difficult – as those involved in the precarity movements are discovering – is to create lines of invention and critique that reinforce each other in their differences, across professional and class divides. In this respect, the role of knowledge producers in recreating an ability to say “we” is potentially decisive. By pursuing a new transvaluation of the old national values, it may be possible to arrive at what is now lacking: a sustainable constitution of multiplicity. But there is no assurance whatsoever that his potential will be realized.
- Brian Holmes
.
The problem, however, is not only the gradual phasing-out of national cultural institutions, together with their outdated canons of beauty and elitist ideals of identity. The deeper problem is that in order to survive as exploratory and transformative practices, and in order to generate enough interest and involvement to reconstitute a socialized cultural sphere under fresh auspices, the contemporary arts have to throw off their blatant or subtle dependence on the new corporate-oriented institutions that promote an opportunistic and flexible subjectivity. This is easier said than done, as is shown by the ambiguous relations between cultural producers on the museum circuit and activists seeking forms of organization for precarious labor. Because it is easy to invest a little anguish over the biopolitical instrumentalization of one’s own creativity, in order to produce a new niche product for the originality markets – and it’s just as facile to criticize that investment. Indeed, hyperindividualization and the capitalization of everything seems to be the very formula for the breakdown of the solidarities and the emergence of liberal fascism. What’s more difficult – as those involved in the precarity movements are discovering – is to create lines of invention and critique that reinforce each other in their differences, across professional and class divides. In this respect, the role of knowledge producers in recreating an ability to say “we” is potentially decisive. By pursuing a new transvaluation of the old national values, it may be possible to arrive at what is now lacking: a sustainable constitution of multiplicity. But there is no assurance whatsoever that his potential will be realized.
- Brian Holmes
.
HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY
.
Introduction
Begun in 2007, HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing project by PME-ART created collaboratively between Caroline Dubois, Claudia Fancello and Jacob Wren. It is a series of performances, workshops, interventions, events and conferences that take place in venues as varied as bars, theatres, art galleries, parks, record stores, international festivals and restaurants. While the precise nature of each edition can vary, all HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY activities focus on questions surrounding how friends and strangers alike can interact in a manner that is at the same time useful, critical, hospitable and surprising.
We are using the word hospitality in an old world sense: a stranger arrives at your door, and if you decide to let them in, in what way do you welcome them into your home? The hospitality you choose to show might determine whether they come to think of you as a friend, remain a stranger or become a future antagonist. We can think of the people who come to see a performance or work of art as strangers in an analogous sense. But also people on the street, who sit next to you on the train, anyone. Some of these people might hold views you don’t understand, or that you find repellant. Might hospitality be a way to begin to open a dialog? Without some way to open a dialog with people we don’t know, or don’t agree with, how can anything begin change?
Raised on a steady diet of television, recorded music and the internet, people today might sometimes feel more comfortable mesmerized by recordings, or interacting through the interface of a computer screen, than they do dealing directly with real human beings. HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY will not shy away from this discomfort (a discomfort often present at any live performance), rather it will honestly address it in order to deepen our understanding of what it might mean to share space with a group of people one doesn’t necessarily know, of how we can participate within a “community of strangers”.
Project Description
HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing project we plan to explore over many years. Some of the editions will be smaller projects while others will be considerably more elaborate, and yet all of the different editions will relate to, and greatly inform, one another. Material from one edition will fluidly leak into another, and in general the project should be treated as a whole, though, of course, each edition can also be experienced as a satisfying autonomous work. The first five editions are as follows:
HOSPITALITY 1:
THE TITLE IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING
Performance, between 15 and 30 minutes
Studio 303, Centre Clark & Cagibi (Montreal), Rhubarb! Festival (Toronto), all 2008
HOSPITALITY 1: The Title Is Constantly Changing is a performance created for a dance context. It will focus on the act of playing live music as a choreographic activity that has the potential to make the spectator feel both comfortable and unnerved. (Music will also feature in many of the other Hospitality events.)
In HOSPITALITY 1 we will play music and at the same time search for what other activities, what other ways of welcoming and addressing the spectator, we are able to perform simultaneously. The rules of the exercise are as follows:
1) Try to make it sound like music, preferably like a pop song.
2) Put yourself in as awkward relationship to your instrument and to the other performers as possible.
3) Maintain a constant relationship with the audience.
We are not exactly professional musicians but we all have some musical ability and will attack our own compositions in a manner that is both endearing and precise. The line-up will consist of drums, guitar, melodica, xylophone, singing (and who knows what else).
We have chosen playing music as the first Hospitality installment because, in light of the theme, we feel it is an honest and convivial way in which to begin our work together.
HOSPITALITY 2:
GRADUALLY THIS OVERVIEW
Installation/performance, during gallery hours
Articule (Montreal), 2010
You have an appointment. You don’t understand precisely what the appointment is but the person who randomly phoned you was extremely charming, their ideas in and around hospitality seemed intriguing, and you have a bit of free time so, what the hell, you decide to take a chance and attend. The appointment is at an artist-run centre so you suspect it will have something to do with art.
When you arrive at the gallery you are handed a pad of post-it notes and told you will be asked a series of six questions. You should answer these questions spontaneously. Your entire answer must fit on a single post-it. Your answers will be anonymous. The questions are:
- How do you enjoy being difficult?
- How do you know when you are part of a community?
- What is one rule you love to break?
- Where is the vulnerability in power?
- How do you alter the system?
- What song most shaped your personality?
As you write down each of your answers, the post-it note is taken from you and placed on the wall. The entire gallery is covered in rows and rows of post-it’s, each one containing a single answer.
Soon you to are taken to the wall, to a specific section of the post-it note array, and you watch as post-it notes are rapidly removed from the rows and placed in smaller groupings, each grouping representing a ‘category’. For example: answers that suggest ‘community is based on common ideals’ are placed in one group, answers that suggest ‘community is based more on personal friendship’ are placed in another, and answers suggesting that community is ‘mainly just an alienating experience’ are placed in a third. You watch as your own answers are placed into different groups and listen to the explanations. If you disagree with a category your answer is being placed within you can certainly say so, discuss these decisions and how they are being made.
And yet as soon as one series of categories are established they are just as quickly undone, the post-it notes placed back in their original rows as the process begins again, as a completely different set of categories are tentatively set out. For example: answers that suggest ‘power comes from the self’, answers that suggest ‘power comes from working together with other people’ and answers that suggest ‘power is something we are subject to, that comes from above’.
As this process of categorization and re-categorization is enacted, together the spectator and performers can think about how such processes are in many ways arbitrary, at the same time seeing whether or not they can also shed new light on the original questions, whether or not we can make interesting observations about the community of people who have agreed to partake in this experiment. Of course, as you watch, this process also makes you further consider your own approach to this very particular game.
This is just one of the ways people might experience PME-ART’s gallery-based project HOSPITALITY 2. We will also take the post-it notes out onto the streets, into cafes and restaurants, to parties, learning everything we can about the community of people willing to answer our questions. During the span of the exhibition there will be events and discussions that question and re-invent the project from different angles, culminating in a performance on the final evening in which we arrange and re-arrange the post-it notes in every possible combination, constantly explaining and re-imagining as we go.
HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview uses the simplest possible materials (post-it notes, pens) in order to examine certain intersections between community, audience, data and real life. But at the core of Gradually This Overview is a distinct paradox. On the one hand its questioning produces the widest possible range of responses, showing individuals in all of their personal eccentricity and diversity. On the other hand it attempts to categorize these answers into meaningful patterns, patterns that the extreme diversity of the answers constantly reject and defy. If we were simply to ask people ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions it would be very easy to turn their answers into data. We are definitely not choosing the easy route. Instead, we are much more interested in the paradox of seeing what happens when we allow the full diversity of human response to crash into our attempt to arrive at a meaningful overview of some kind of community.
HOSPITALITY 3:
INDIVIDUALISM WAS A MISTAKE
Performance, 90 minutes
Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Usine C (Montreal), 2008, Perfect Performance Festival (Stockholm), Inkonst (Malmö), BRUT (Vienna), FFT (Düsseldorf), 2009
HOSPITALITY 3: Individualism Was A Mistake represents an energizing new wave in the life of PME-ART. The remarkable openness of the structure – with every show uncannily different yet also loosely the same – allows for a performative freedom we have never before approached. Each and every time we perform HOSPITALITY 3 this freedom is further developed, engaged with and refined, challenging us with its natural disequilibrium.
In a broader sense, HOSPITALITY 3 asks if our culture’s over-emphasis on individualism prevents us from more effectively working together for political change. In positively demonstrating how the three performers collaborate (spontaneously, in real time) – each struggling with their own individualism but at times experiencing moments of pure synchronicity – the performance allows the spectator to reflect: where in their daily lives might they discover similar experiences of working together, and what might the political efficacy of such collaborative efforts eventually be?
Video excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yUVSiYJhg
HOSPITALITY 5:
THE DJ WHO GAVE TOO MUCH INFORMATION
Performance, between 20 minutes and 8 hours
It never ceases to amaze us how important and resonant songs can be in our personal and social lives. In one sense, the three-minute pop song is the perfect embodiment of capitalism, a three-minute commercial for itself that weaves deeply into the fabric of ones life and memories with startling intensity. Often connected with childhood and adolescence, it is difficult to imagine the modern world without the pop songs that form its continuous soundtrack.
The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (Hospitality 5) will explore the way popular music – and the stories that surround it – fully infiltrates our personal lives, affecting our ongoing understanding of love, work and how we think society should operate. It starts from a deep love of music, and takes us towards how the songs we love create our subjectivity, changing the way we understand the world in which we live.
Music feels like the purest art form and yet it is also the most loaded: with social and cultural baggage, with personal memories and aspirations, with imagery from album covers, publicity photographs and videos. In some sense its very purity, the way it slips past our defenses and heads straight for the emotional core, makes it a magnet for every kind of experience and reflection.
On stage is a pile of records and a record player. For each record we have one story at the ready. One after another, we put on the records and tell our stories about them, each story growing out of the last and into the next. These stories have come from hearsay, internet research, books, magazines, friends and from our personal lives. The stories each loosely fall into one of three categories:
1) Anecdotes and historical facts about a band or musician.
2) Personal stories (from us, from friends or told to us informally by audience members) about how music has affected our life and thinking.
3) Tangential stories that launch out from the music or album cover in completely unexpected directions.
Each time we perform The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information we will play the records in a different order, adding and taking away records from the pile, creating a loose, improvised, but still surprisingly effective, dramaturgy in real time.
Video excerpt: http://youtu.be/6m476iXUkCM
Conclusion
HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing endeavor that can continue to grow and morph within different settings. Clearly we are searching for forms that are not fixed, that are flexible enough to absorb new information and discoveries. It is our conviction that the work most effectively happens over time, through an extensive collaborative process, moving towards a vibrant, ever-changing form of performance and inter-relation that both mirrors and critiques the fast-paced, ever-changing world in which we live.
Clearly hospitality is an important theme for PME-ART. For us it is a way to open up both to the spectator and to the world (hospitality in the sense of welcoming complete strangers into your home), to build a thematic bridge between difficult artistic works and an audience that may or may not be ready for them. We believe strongly both in the necessity of politically and aesthetically challenging artistic propositions, and in the importance for such propositions to be heard. For us, hospitality is a concept that suggests starting up a dialogue, even though there is no way to know where such an opening might lead.
.
Introduction
Hospitality goes beyond invitation. With invitation we expect a guest to arrive without surprise. Hospitality requires absolute surprise. We are unprepared or prepared to be unprepared, for the unexpected arrival of any Other. Hospitality is the receiving or welcoming which has no power, protocol or law. It is an opening without the horizon of expectation where peace can be found beyond the confines of conflict.
– Marko Zlomislic
Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a ‘subject’ (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.
– Roland Barthes
Begun in 2007, HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing project by PME-ART created collaboratively between Caroline Dubois, Claudia Fancello and Jacob Wren. It is a series of performances, workshops, interventions, events and conferences that take place in venues as varied as bars, theatres, art galleries, parks, record stores, international festivals and restaurants. While the precise nature of each edition can vary, all HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY activities focus on questions surrounding how friends and strangers alike can interact in a manner that is at the same time useful, critical, hospitable and surprising.
We are using the word hospitality in an old world sense: a stranger arrives at your door, and if you decide to let them in, in what way do you welcome them into your home? The hospitality you choose to show might determine whether they come to think of you as a friend, remain a stranger or become a future antagonist. We can think of the people who come to see a performance or work of art as strangers in an analogous sense. But also people on the street, who sit next to you on the train, anyone. Some of these people might hold views you don’t understand, or that you find repellant. Might hospitality be a way to begin to open a dialog? Without some way to open a dialog with people we don’t know, or don’t agree with, how can anything begin change?
Raised on a steady diet of television, recorded music and the internet, people today might sometimes feel more comfortable mesmerized by recordings, or interacting through the interface of a computer screen, than they do dealing directly with real human beings. HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY will not shy away from this discomfort (a discomfort often present at any live performance), rather it will honestly address it in order to deepen our understanding of what it might mean to share space with a group of people one doesn’t necessarily know, of how we can participate within a “community of strangers”.
Project Description
HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing project we plan to explore over many years. Some of the editions will be smaller projects while others will be considerably more elaborate, and yet all of the different editions will relate to, and greatly inform, one another. Material from one edition will fluidly leak into another, and in general the project should be treated as a whole, though, of course, each edition can also be experienced as a satisfying autonomous work. The first five editions are as follows:
HOSPITALITY 1:
THE TITLE IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING
Performance, between 15 and 30 minutes
Studio 303, Centre Clark & Cagibi (Montreal), Rhubarb! Festival (Toronto), all 2008
HOSPITALITY 1: The Title Is Constantly Changing is a performance created for a dance context. It will focus on the act of playing live music as a choreographic activity that has the potential to make the spectator feel both comfortable and unnerved. (Music will also feature in many of the other Hospitality events.)
In HOSPITALITY 1 we will play music and at the same time search for what other activities, what other ways of welcoming and addressing the spectator, we are able to perform simultaneously. The rules of the exercise are as follows:
1) Try to make it sound like music, preferably like a pop song.
2) Put yourself in as awkward relationship to your instrument and to the other performers as possible.
3) Maintain a constant relationship with the audience.
We are not exactly professional musicians but we all have some musical ability and will attack our own compositions in a manner that is both endearing and precise. The line-up will consist of drums, guitar, melodica, xylophone, singing (and who knows what else).
We have chosen playing music as the first Hospitality installment because, in light of the theme, we feel it is an honest and convivial way in which to begin our work together.
HOSPITALITY 2:
GRADUALLY THIS OVERVIEW
Installation/performance, during gallery hours
Articule (Montreal), 2010
You have an appointment. You don’t understand precisely what the appointment is but the person who randomly phoned you was extremely charming, their ideas in and around hospitality seemed intriguing, and you have a bit of free time so, what the hell, you decide to take a chance and attend. The appointment is at an artist-run centre so you suspect it will have something to do with art.
When you arrive at the gallery you are handed a pad of post-it notes and told you will be asked a series of six questions. You should answer these questions spontaneously. Your entire answer must fit on a single post-it. Your answers will be anonymous. The questions are:
- How do you enjoy being difficult?
- How do you know when you are part of a community?
- What is one rule you love to break?
- Where is the vulnerability in power?
- How do you alter the system?
- What song most shaped your personality?
As you write down each of your answers, the post-it note is taken from you and placed on the wall. The entire gallery is covered in rows and rows of post-it’s, each one containing a single answer.
Soon you to are taken to the wall, to a specific section of the post-it note array, and you watch as post-it notes are rapidly removed from the rows and placed in smaller groupings, each grouping representing a ‘category’. For example: answers that suggest ‘community is based on common ideals’ are placed in one group, answers that suggest ‘community is based more on personal friendship’ are placed in another, and answers suggesting that community is ‘mainly just an alienating experience’ are placed in a third. You watch as your own answers are placed into different groups and listen to the explanations. If you disagree with a category your answer is being placed within you can certainly say so, discuss these decisions and how they are being made.
And yet as soon as one series of categories are established they are just as quickly undone, the post-it notes placed back in their original rows as the process begins again, as a completely different set of categories are tentatively set out. For example: answers that suggest ‘power comes from the self’, answers that suggest ‘power comes from working together with other people’ and answers that suggest ‘power is something we are subject to, that comes from above’.
As this process of categorization and re-categorization is enacted, together the spectator and performers can think about how such processes are in many ways arbitrary, at the same time seeing whether or not they can also shed new light on the original questions, whether or not we can make interesting observations about the community of people who have agreed to partake in this experiment. Of course, as you watch, this process also makes you further consider your own approach to this very particular game.
This is just one of the ways people might experience PME-ART’s gallery-based project HOSPITALITY 2. We will also take the post-it notes out onto the streets, into cafes and restaurants, to parties, learning everything we can about the community of people willing to answer our questions. During the span of the exhibition there will be events and discussions that question and re-invent the project from different angles, culminating in a performance on the final evening in which we arrange and re-arrange the post-it notes in every possible combination, constantly explaining and re-imagining as we go.
HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview uses the simplest possible materials (post-it notes, pens) in order to examine certain intersections between community, audience, data and real life. But at the core of Gradually This Overview is a distinct paradox. On the one hand its questioning produces the widest possible range of responses, showing individuals in all of their personal eccentricity and diversity. On the other hand it attempts to categorize these answers into meaningful patterns, patterns that the extreme diversity of the answers constantly reject and defy. If we were simply to ask people ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions it would be very easy to turn their answers into data. We are definitely not choosing the easy route. Instead, we are much more interested in the paradox of seeing what happens when we allow the full diversity of human response to crash into our attempt to arrive at a meaningful overview of some kind of community.
HOSPITALITY 3:
INDIVIDUALISM WAS A MISTAKE
Performance, 90 minutes
Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Usine C (Montreal), 2008, Perfect Performance Festival (Stockholm), Inkonst (Malmö), BRUT (Vienna), FFT (Düsseldorf), 2009
HOSPITALITY 3: Individualism Was A Mistake represents an energizing new wave in the life of PME-ART. The remarkable openness of the structure – with every show uncannily different yet also loosely the same – allows for a performative freedom we have never before approached. Each and every time we perform HOSPITALITY 3 this freedom is further developed, engaged with and refined, challenging us with its natural disequilibrium.
In a broader sense, HOSPITALITY 3 asks if our culture’s over-emphasis on individualism prevents us from more effectively working together for political change. In positively demonstrating how the three performers collaborate (spontaneously, in real time) – each struggling with their own individualism but at times experiencing moments of pure synchronicity – the performance allows the spectator to reflect: where in their daily lives might they discover similar experiences of working together, and what might the political efficacy of such collaborative efforts eventually be?
Video excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yUVSiYJhg
HOSPITALITY 5:
THE DJ WHO GAVE TOO MUCH INFORMATION
Performance, between 20 minutes and 8 hours
It never ceases to amaze us how important and resonant songs can be in our personal and social lives. In one sense, the three-minute pop song is the perfect embodiment of capitalism, a three-minute commercial for itself that weaves deeply into the fabric of ones life and memories with startling intensity. Often connected with childhood and adolescence, it is difficult to imagine the modern world without the pop songs that form its continuous soundtrack.
The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (Hospitality 5) will explore the way popular music – and the stories that surround it – fully infiltrates our personal lives, affecting our ongoing understanding of love, work and how we think society should operate. It starts from a deep love of music, and takes us towards how the songs we love create our subjectivity, changing the way we understand the world in which we live.
Music feels like the purest art form and yet it is also the most loaded: with social and cultural baggage, with personal memories and aspirations, with imagery from album covers, publicity photographs and videos. In some sense its very purity, the way it slips past our defenses and heads straight for the emotional core, makes it a magnet for every kind of experience and reflection.
On stage is a pile of records and a record player. For each record we have one story at the ready. One after another, we put on the records and tell our stories about them, each story growing out of the last and into the next. These stories have come from hearsay, internet research, books, magazines, friends and from our personal lives. The stories each loosely fall into one of three categories:
1) Anecdotes and historical facts about a band or musician.
2) Personal stories (from us, from friends or told to us informally by audience members) about how music has affected our life and thinking.
3) Tangential stories that launch out from the music or album cover in completely unexpected directions.
Each time we perform The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information we will play the records in a different order, adding and taking away records from the pile, creating a loose, improvised, but still surprisingly effective, dramaturgy in real time.
Video excerpt: http://youtu.be/6m476iXUkCM
Conclusion
HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing endeavor that can continue to grow and morph within different settings. Clearly we are searching for forms that are not fixed, that are flexible enough to absorb new information and discoveries. It is our conviction that the work most effectively happens over time, through an extensive collaborative process, moving towards a vibrant, ever-changing form of performance and inter-relation that both mirrors and critiques the fast-paced, ever-changing world in which we live.
Clearly hospitality is an important theme for PME-ART. For us it is a way to open up both to the spectator and to the world (hospitality in the sense of welcoming complete strangers into your home), to build a thematic bridge between difficult artistic works and an audience that may or may not be ready for them. We believe strongly both in the necessity of politically and aesthetically challenging artistic propositions, and in the importance for such propositions to be heard. For us, hospitality is a concept that suggests starting up a dialogue, even though there is no way to know where such an opening might lead.
.
February 18, 2010
They’re ideologues...
.
They’re ideologues, and ideology is like an addiction to one’s own position. Ideologues don’t stop until someone stops them. But how to stop them without becoming equally, negatively tenacious and single-minded yourself.
We all have fixations, obsessions, things about which we are absolutely stubborn. But ideologues want everyone under the boot of their own infinite stubbornness, which they view as noble discipline, and they keep coming back.
Are these the ones I’m suggesting we listen to?
But it’s easy to call your enemy’s names, easy to demonize them, infinitely more difficult to find the miniscule point from which some degree of communication might begin.
Resistance is always unfinished, always a work-in-progress, because if you win then you’re in power, and somebody else has to resist against you. Might such an idea ease the inherent frustration involved in any act of sustained resistance?
.
They’re ideologues, and ideology is like an addiction to one’s own position. Ideologues don’t stop until someone stops them. But how to stop them without becoming equally, negatively tenacious and single-minded yourself.
We all have fixations, obsessions, things about which we are absolutely stubborn. But ideologues want everyone under the boot of their own infinite stubbornness, which they view as noble discipline, and they keep coming back.
Are these the ones I’m suggesting we listen to?
But it’s easy to call your enemy’s names, easy to demonize them, infinitely more difficult to find the miniscule point from which some degree of communication might begin.
Resistance is always unfinished, always a work-in-progress, because if you win then you’re in power, and somebody else has to resist against you. Might such an idea ease the inherent frustration involved in any act of sustained resistance?
.
February 17, 2010
To blight the land, to exhaust and even kill the laborer, to ruin the value of the money through unchecked speculation...
.
What we managed to explore last year was above all a single thesis, drawn from Karl Polanyi’s notion of the “double movement.” This refers to the fundamental paradox of capitalism, which by commodifying everything, by bringing every aspect of human experience under the rules of profit and reinvestment, at the same time provokes a defensive reaction of breakup, of escape, whether through withdrawal and autarky, warlike aggression or the search for a better alternative. Polanyi, whose major work is called The Great Transformation, is really an ecological thinker. He shows how the notion of the self-regulating market, which is supposed to assign a proper price to everything and thereby secure the necessary resources for the continual production of an ever-expanding range of goods, fails tragically to account for all the factors involved in the reproduction of land, of labor, and of the very institution of exchange, money itself. What happens instead is that careless trading in these “fictitious commodities” tends to destroy them, to blight the land, to exhaust and even kill the laborer, to ruin the value of the money through unchecked speculation. Polanyi showed how these self-destructive processes operated up to the First World War, how they ultimately wiped out the international gold standard that had been built up by British liberalism and then brought on the Great Depression. What resulted was a division of the world into five rival currency-blocs, which went to deadly war against each other from 1938 to 1945. After the war, of course, the people of the world had to pick up the pieces; for better or worse, they had to establish new balances, new systems. Giving in to the history obsession, I tried to explain both the new basis of stability and the potential weakness of the postwar world-system that came together under the domination of the United States. With David Harvey’s help we analyzed the very shaky state of that system today, examining all the strains that neoliberal globalization is now placing on the world ecology, on the conditions of existence for the global labor force, and even on the hegemony of the US dollar, whose continuing status as the international reserve currency has never been so uncertain.
- Brian Holmes
.
What we managed to explore last year was above all a single thesis, drawn from Karl Polanyi’s notion of the “double movement.” This refers to the fundamental paradox of capitalism, which by commodifying everything, by bringing every aspect of human experience under the rules of profit and reinvestment, at the same time provokes a defensive reaction of breakup, of escape, whether through withdrawal and autarky, warlike aggression or the search for a better alternative. Polanyi, whose major work is called The Great Transformation, is really an ecological thinker. He shows how the notion of the self-regulating market, which is supposed to assign a proper price to everything and thereby secure the necessary resources for the continual production of an ever-expanding range of goods, fails tragically to account for all the factors involved in the reproduction of land, of labor, and of the very institution of exchange, money itself. What happens instead is that careless trading in these “fictitious commodities” tends to destroy them, to blight the land, to exhaust and even kill the laborer, to ruin the value of the money through unchecked speculation. Polanyi showed how these self-destructive processes operated up to the First World War, how they ultimately wiped out the international gold standard that had been built up by British liberalism and then brought on the Great Depression. What resulted was a division of the world into five rival currency-blocs, which went to deadly war against each other from 1938 to 1945. After the war, of course, the people of the world had to pick up the pieces; for better or worse, they had to establish new balances, new systems. Giving in to the history obsession, I tried to explain both the new basis of stability and the potential weakness of the postwar world-system that came together under the domination of the United States. With David Harvey’s help we analyzed the very shaky state of that system today, examining all the strains that neoliberal globalization is now placing on the world ecology, on the conditions of existence for the global labor force, and even on the hegemony of the US dollar, whose continuing status as the international reserve currency has never been so uncertain.
- Brian Holmes
.
February 11, 2010
Listening and Power
.
And yet the more I think about such questions, the more unclear I become as to what this other model might look or feel like. Might it be a model based on listening?
Listening to the enemy? Not dialogue, not some naïve belief in the power of communication. Simple listening as the first step before any move. But what if, as you are listening, all you hear are lies? What if, as you are listening, you receive three bullets in the back of the head (when one bullet would have been utterly sufficient.) How to transition from a state in which listening is dangerous and foolish towards a state in which it is, once again, constructive? Listening for the insecurity behind power. Thinking if there are other ways, less violent ways, to make it feel secure. And once again, as I write, I feel naïve.
Where is power in capital? In the things it makes us do? In the things it allows us to do (to ourselves, to others)? In the things it makes possible: the organization, hierarchy and destruction? The overwhelming imbalances of power that simply could not exist without it.
It seems misguided to attempt to make ‘power feel secure’, but if power is little more than a savage over-compensation for the most violent forms of insecurity, then perhaps there is no other way. But why do I think power is like that? Is it little more than projection. Or is it only because I don’t believe in evil. (No, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was just really, really, really insecure.)
Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.
Where is the power in capital? In the fact that nothing seems possible without it, without a bit of dosh, that even the homeless panhandle, and must feel they have no choice, that it seems nearly impossible to imagine our world organized in some other way? Capital is not omnipotent, but neither does it have to be in order to maintain a fairly consistent and spectacular control.
Now I am writing in Toronto, the city that instilled in me a deep, but cautious, antipathy towards business, sports and post-modernism.
Nature is not based on competition, it is organized through and around ecosystems. In some sense we could make an analogy between ecosystems and listening.
Competition isn’t natural. Competition is produced like everything else. In the natural world they don’t compete because of some implicit ideology that competition lends value. Animals hunt for food out of necessity. Where is the necessity in everything around us? Where is the necessity in writing overly-earnest, anti-capitalist very long poems that will change nothing and will likely not even compel the average reader to continue reading even up until this point? Where is the average reader?
The overwhelming disillusionment of the atrocities of recent history. The overwhelming disillusionment of reading the newspaper on an average Wednesday. And the concurrent knowledge that, no matter what, people continue to fight and to hope and fucking beautiful things continue to happen all the time.
How to imagine deep, structural change, happening slowing over decades, overcoming the continuous onslaught of insurmountable obstacles and continuing to push through. Beginning with subtle but ongoing shifts in our most basic understanding of ourselves and of the world. Is that a place to begin? What would it mean to listen to the insecurity behind the savagery of power abused? It is possible to begin a dialog with people who only want to fuck up your shit? A series of rhetorical questions is cheap writing but cheap writing must not be dismissed. How rigid our personalities, our understanding of the world, becomes over time.
At the door of Kafka’s castle you can’t haggle. At the Wall Mart and gas station you cannot haggle. But in the marketplace, the dirty marketplace of ‘early capitalism’, my romantic misconception of a marketplace before the hard shock of industrial production, there was still a certain one-to-one lever of give-and-take. What would that marketplace look like without a king, without a church, growing out of some improvised combination of barter and local currencies? If they can have the psychotic fantasy of a pure, unregulated free market, why can’t I have the idyllic fantasy of some, future, down-to-earth, flexible, generous marketplace of necessities and ideas?
[Unfinished.]
.
And yet the more I think about such questions, the more unclear I become as to what this other model might look or feel like. Might it be a model based on listening?
Listening to the enemy? Not dialogue, not some naïve belief in the power of communication. Simple listening as the first step before any move. But what if, as you are listening, all you hear are lies? What if, as you are listening, you receive three bullets in the back of the head (when one bullet would have been utterly sufficient.) How to transition from a state in which listening is dangerous and foolish towards a state in which it is, once again, constructive? Listening for the insecurity behind power. Thinking if there are other ways, less violent ways, to make it feel secure. And once again, as I write, I feel naïve.
Where is power in capital? In the things it makes us do? In the things it allows us to do (to ourselves, to others)? In the things it makes possible: the organization, hierarchy and destruction? The overwhelming imbalances of power that simply could not exist without it.
It seems misguided to attempt to make ‘power feel secure’, but if power is little more than a savage over-compensation for the most violent forms of insecurity, then perhaps there is no other way. But why do I think power is like that? Is it little more than projection. Or is it only because I don’t believe in evil. (No, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was just really, really, really insecure.)
Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.
Where is the power in capital? In the fact that nothing seems possible without it, without a bit of dosh, that even the homeless panhandle, and must feel they have no choice, that it seems nearly impossible to imagine our world organized in some other way? Capital is not omnipotent, but neither does it have to be in order to maintain a fairly consistent and spectacular control.
Now I am writing in Toronto, the city that instilled in me a deep, but cautious, antipathy towards business, sports and post-modernism.
Nature is not based on competition, it is organized through and around ecosystems. In some sense we could make an analogy between ecosystems and listening.
Competition isn’t natural. Competition is produced like everything else. In the natural world they don’t compete because of some implicit ideology that competition lends value. Animals hunt for food out of necessity. Where is the necessity in everything around us? Where is the necessity in writing overly-earnest, anti-capitalist very long poems that will change nothing and will likely not even compel the average reader to continue reading even up until this point? Where is the average reader?
The overwhelming disillusionment of the atrocities of recent history. The overwhelming disillusionment of reading the newspaper on an average Wednesday. And the concurrent knowledge that, no matter what, people continue to fight and to hope and fucking beautiful things continue to happen all the time.
How to imagine deep, structural change, happening slowing over decades, overcoming the continuous onslaught of insurmountable obstacles and continuing to push through. Beginning with subtle but ongoing shifts in our most basic understanding of ourselves and of the world. Is that a place to begin? What would it mean to listen to the insecurity behind the savagery of power abused? It is possible to begin a dialog with people who only want to fuck up your shit? A series of rhetorical questions is cheap writing but cheap writing must not be dismissed. How rigid our personalities, our understanding of the world, becomes over time.
At the door of Kafka’s castle you can’t haggle. At the Wall Mart and gas station you cannot haggle. But in the marketplace, the dirty marketplace of ‘early capitalism’, my romantic misconception of a marketplace before the hard shock of industrial production, there was still a certain one-to-one lever of give-and-take. What would that marketplace look like without a king, without a church, growing out of some improvised combination of barter and local currencies? If they can have the psychotic fantasy of a pure, unregulated free market, why can’t I have the idyllic fantasy of some, future, down-to-earth, flexible, generous marketplace of necessities and ideas?
[Unfinished.]
.
February 8, 2010
Sentimentality is cruelty by other means.
.
In Winnicott’s preferred developmental story it is only through hatred that relations between people move out of fantasy and into reality, into the possibility of actual exchange. And this is for a simple reason: hatred is what the child feels when he can let himself acknowledge that the parent (inevitably) frustrates him; that the parent is a real person (it is not the real mother who has limitations, it is the idealized mother who cannot actually nourish the child). It is only when we compare real people with the men and women of our dreams that they disappoint. In Winnicott’s view, once the child has felt and lived out his frustration with the real mother and father, and they have survived it – which might involve hating the child back, but without in any way abandoning him – he can resume his relationship with them more realistically; he has added to the stock of available reality. If he had turned away from them at this point – retreated from real engagement, stopped making demands – or they had turned away from him, they would have all gone on living a fantasy life together (ideal relations as an enraged retreat from real life). Real kindness, real fellow feeling, entails hating and being hated – that is, really feeling available frustrations – and through this coming to a more realistic relationship. This, one might say, is a more robust version of kindness, a kindness made possible through frustration and hatred rather than a kindness organized to repudiate (or to disown) such feelings. Kindness of this variety allows for ambivalence and conflict while false, or magical, kindness distorts our perceptions of other people, often by sentimentalizing them, to avoid conflict. Sentimentality is cruelty by other means.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
.
In Winnicott’s preferred developmental story it is only through hatred that relations between people move out of fantasy and into reality, into the possibility of actual exchange. And this is for a simple reason: hatred is what the child feels when he can let himself acknowledge that the parent (inevitably) frustrates him; that the parent is a real person (it is not the real mother who has limitations, it is the idealized mother who cannot actually nourish the child). It is only when we compare real people with the men and women of our dreams that they disappoint. In Winnicott’s view, once the child has felt and lived out his frustration with the real mother and father, and they have survived it – which might involve hating the child back, but without in any way abandoning him – he can resume his relationship with them more realistically; he has added to the stock of available reality. If he had turned away from them at this point – retreated from real engagement, stopped making demands – or they had turned away from him, they would have all gone on living a fantasy life together (ideal relations as an enraged retreat from real life). Real kindness, real fellow feeling, entails hating and being hated – that is, really feeling available frustrations – and through this coming to a more realistic relationship. This, one might say, is a more robust version of kindness, a kindness made possible through frustration and hatred rather than a kindness organized to repudiate (or to disown) such feelings. Kindness of this variety allows for ambivalence and conflict while false, or magical, kindness distorts our perceptions of other people, often by sentimentalizing them, to avoid conflict. Sentimentality is cruelty by other means.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
.
February 7, 2010
It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.
.
Ordinary kindness is not a manipulative bribe or a magical cure, but a simple exchange. In a parent-child relationship where no one is looking to the other to rescue him, each can enjoy the other without needing to transform him. The modern child is perceived as someone who is always running the risk of having to become a parent to her parents; someone whose concern for her parents’ well-being can be the very thing that waylays her developmental needs. In other words, modern stories about child development are like cries for help from the grown-ups, who sound strangely oppressed if not actually enslaved by their children. It is as if now parents are more dependant on their children than children are on their parents; that what we are left with after two hundred years of intensive study of children is a world in which parents are frightened of their children, of their vulnerability, their neediness, their frustration and their rage, and in which parents look to their children for so-called self-esteem, to give their lives point and purpose. In which, to put it as simply as possible, parents and children are unable to collaborate with each other in the ordinary business of growing up. Committed to an image of the child as a bundle of rapacious, fundamentally insatiable desires, growing up becomes little more than a type of profiteering. It is this predicament that psychoanalysis seeks to address: what happens to kindness and fellow feeling in the hothouse of the family? What, if anything, can be done to prevent kindness becoming the first casualty of family life?
Whatever else it is, psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What Freud called defenses are the ways we protect ourselves from our desires, which are also our relations with others. Indeed, the history of psychoanalysis after Freud reflects many of the dilemmas we have about kindness (it would be an interesting exercise to read ‘sexuality’ as Freud’s word for ‘fellow feeling’). Are we, Freud’s followers wondered, committed to our desires and their gratification, or to other people? And what, if anything, could such a distinction mean? Do we crave (sensuous) satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy and relationships? Do we want good company or good sex, if we have to choose? If kindness, in its anti-sentimental sense, is at the heart of human desiring, then these become merely false choices, the wrong way of talking about what goes on between people. Sex becomes one of the more complicated forms of fellow feeling (there is no sex without kindness or its refusal); and aggression becomes one of its more obscure, least articulated forms (there is not kindness without aggression or its refusal). It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
.
Ordinary kindness is not a manipulative bribe or a magical cure, but a simple exchange. In a parent-child relationship where no one is looking to the other to rescue him, each can enjoy the other without needing to transform him. The modern child is perceived as someone who is always running the risk of having to become a parent to her parents; someone whose concern for her parents’ well-being can be the very thing that waylays her developmental needs. In other words, modern stories about child development are like cries for help from the grown-ups, who sound strangely oppressed if not actually enslaved by their children. It is as if now parents are more dependant on their children than children are on their parents; that what we are left with after two hundred years of intensive study of children is a world in which parents are frightened of their children, of their vulnerability, their neediness, their frustration and their rage, and in which parents look to their children for so-called self-esteem, to give their lives point and purpose. In which, to put it as simply as possible, parents and children are unable to collaborate with each other in the ordinary business of growing up. Committed to an image of the child as a bundle of rapacious, fundamentally insatiable desires, growing up becomes little more than a type of profiteering. It is this predicament that psychoanalysis seeks to address: what happens to kindness and fellow feeling in the hothouse of the family? What, if anything, can be done to prevent kindness becoming the first casualty of family life?
Whatever else it is, psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What Freud called defenses are the ways we protect ourselves from our desires, which are also our relations with others. Indeed, the history of psychoanalysis after Freud reflects many of the dilemmas we have about kindness (it would be an interesting exercise to read ‘sexuality’ as Freud’s word for ‘fellow feeling’). Are we, Freud’s followers wondered, committed to our desires and their gratification, or to other people? And what, if anything, could such a distinction mean? Do we crave (sensuous) satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy and relationships? Do we want good company or good sex, if we have to choose? If kindness, in its anti-sentimental sense, is at the heart of human desiring, then these become merely false choices, the wrong way of talking about what goes on between people. Sex becomes one of the more complicated forms of fellow feeling (there is no sex without kindness or its refusal); and aggression becomes one of its more obscure, least articulated forms (there is not kindness without aggression or its refusal). It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
.
February 6, 2010
No key can unlock every door.
.
Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.
.
Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.
.
February 5, 2010
From On Kindness by Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor
.
The child’s first, formative trauma is his growing acknowledgement of his need for others (in actuality the mother is as vulnerable to her need for her baby as the baby is to his need for her; parents need their children not to worry about them too much). The needy child experiences a trauma of concern (‘How can I take care of my mother to ensure that she takes care of me?’) which calls up his natural kindness; but this concern – and the later forms of kindness that emerge from it – is too easily turned away from. This turning away we call ‘self-sufficiency’, and when we want to pathologize it we call it ‘narcissism’. The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call ‘failings’ when we are at our most frightened.) And vulnerability – and particularly the vulnerability we call ‘desire’ – is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we long for and dread. How can people, from childhood onwards, feel confident enough to take such risks?
People want safety, whatever the cost. Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization that if we no longer believe in God – in a Being who is himself invulnerable, and so capable of protecting us – we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other. If there is no invulnerability anywhere, suddenly there is too much vulnerability everywhere. How do we deal with this? In his novel Raw Youth (1875), Dostoyevsky describes a morning when people wake to find themselves alone in a godless universe. Instead of bewailing their loss, they turn to each other, substituting their own tenderness and concern for divine protection. Acknowledging human vulnerability, they respond to it positively. Kindness, for them, becomes a way of experiencing their vulnerability that tests the strengths and limits of their resources to deal with it. When God is dead, kindness is permitted. When God is dead, kindness is all people have.
So it is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. (The notion of ‘self-interest’ implies that we always know what we want, by knowing what the self is, and what its interests are. It forecloses discovery.) Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them. By involving us with strangers (even with ‘foreigners’ thousands of miles away), as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality. But as we shall see, the child needs the adult – and his wider society – to help him keep faith with his kindness, that is, to help him discover and enjoy the pleasures of caring for others. The child who is failed in this regard is robbed of one of the greatest sources of human happiness.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
.
The child’s first, formative trauma is his growing acknowledgement of his need for others (in actuality the mother is as vulnerable to her need for her baby as the baby is to his need for her; parents need their children not to worry about them too much). The needy child experiences a trauma of concern (‘How can I take care of my mother to ensure that she takes care of me?’) which calls up his natural kindness; but this concern – and the later forms of kindness that emerge from it – is too easily turned away from. This turning away we call ‘self-sufficiency’, and when we want to pathologize it we call it ‘narcissism’. The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call ‘failings’ when we are at our most frightened.) And vulnerability – and particularly the vulnerability we call ‘desire’ – is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we long for and dread. How can people, from childhood onwards, feel confident enough to take such risks?
People want safety, whatever the cost. Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization that if we no longer believe in God – in a Being who is himself invulnerable, and so capable of protecting us – we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other. If there is no invulnerability anywhere, suddenly there is too much vulnerability everywhere. How do we deal with this? In his novel Raw Youth (1875), Dostoyevsky describes a morning when people wake to find themselves alone in a godless universe. Instead of bewailing their loss, they turn to each other, substituting their own tenderness and concern for divine protection. Acknowledging human vulnerability, they respond to it positively. Kindness, for them, becomes a way of experiencing their vulnerability that tests the strengths and limits of their resources to deal with it. When God is dead, kindness is permitted. When God is dead, kindness is all people have.
So it is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. (The notion of ‘self-interest’ implies that we always know what we want, by knowing what the self is, and what its interests are. It forecloses discovery.) Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them. By involving us with strangers (even with ‘foreigners’ thousands of miles away), as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality. But as we shall see, the child needs the adult – and his wider society – to help him keep faith with his kindness, that is, to help him discover and enjoy the pleasures of caring for others. The child who is failed in this regard is robbed of one of the greatest sources of human happiness.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
.
February 2, 2010
Opposition and Listening
.
A frenzy of dissatisfaction: in which one feels any attempts at improvement will only lead to further disappointment, yet the dissatisfaction is so intense that one must, nonetheless, continuously strive towards new frontiers. The self-aware hungry ghost.
The self-aware hungry ghost. But the hungry ghost is something within ourselves that can and must be overcome. While this self-awareness, for some reason, has nothing to do with change or wanting to change. It is self-awareness in service of everything remaining, more or less, the same.
This dissatisfaction has nothing to do with wanting to change and yet everything within it screams out that things must, that the situation cannot go on. Like a Chinese finger trap, the more it struggles towards change, the more fixed and rigid the trap becomes. The greater the knowledge that what one must actually do is relax, let go, let some things take their natural course, the more fierce and violent come the surges of futile resistance. Spitting in the face of your torturer when you are exhausted, chained down, and he has all the tools.
The entire model of opposition needs to be re-thought. Yes, fascism must be opposed and fought against in all instances. (The fascism of capital, the fascism within ourselves, the crypto-fascism of everyday life.) But perhaps it must be fought against using a model somehow other than opposition.
Opposition always leads to one of two things: to being absorbed or being destroyed. It is true that when ones ideas are absorbed one does – in some sense – alter the status quo. However, if the original model was less about attacking and more about something else, I am once again thinking along the lines of symbiotic relationships found in nature, than perhaps a greater degree of change might be possible, one that does not create the insidious distortions beneficial to power that absorption so often entails.
Fierce opposition always leads to something akin to a cycle of revenge: positions on both sides harden, become further ingrained, more rigid, the longer the antagonism continues to escalate. Both sides become less likely to soften, shift or change.
And yet the more I think about such questions, the more unclear I become as to what this other model might look or feel like. Might it be a model based on listening?
Listening to the enemy? Not dialogue, not some naïve belief in the power of communication. Simple listening as the first step before any move. But what if, as you are listening, all you hear are lies? What if, as you are listening, you receive three bullets in the back of the head (when one bullet would have been utterly sufficient.) How to transition from a state in which listening is dangerous and foolish towards a state in which it is, once again, constructive? Listening for the insecurity behind power. Thinking if there are other ways, less violent ways, to make it feel secure. And once again, as I write, I feel naïve.
Where is power in capital? In the things it makes us do? In the things it allows us to do (to ourselves, to others)? In the things it makes possible: the organization, hierarchy and destruction? The overwhelming imbalances of power that simply could not exist without it.
It seems misguided to attempt to make ‘power feel secure’, but if power is little more than a savage over-compensation for the most violent forms of insecurity, then perhaps there is no other way. But why do I think power is like that? Is it little more than projection. Or is it only because I don’t believe in evil. (No, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was just really, really, really insecure.)
Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.
Where is the power in capital? In the fact that nothing seems possible without it, without a bit of dosh, that even the homeless panhandle, and must feel they have no choice, that it seems nearly impossible to imagine our world organized in some other way? Capital is not omnipotent, but neither does it have to be in order to maintain a fairly consistent and spectacular control.
Now I am writing in Toronto, the city that instilled in me a deep, but cautious, antipathy towards business, sports and post-modernism.
Nature is not based on competition, it is organized through and around ecosystems. In some sense we could make an analogy between ecosystems and listening.
[Unfinished.]
.
A frenzy of dissatisfaction: in which one feels any attempts at improvement will only lead to further disappointment, yet the dissatisfaction is so intense that one must, nonetheless, continuously strive towards new frontiers. The self-aware hungry ghost.
The self-aware hungry ghost. But the hungry ghost is something within ourselves that can and must be overcome. While this self-awareness, for some reason, has nothing to do with change or wanting to change. It is self-awareness in service of everything remaining, more or less, the same.
This dissatisfaction has nothing to do with wanting to change and yet everything within it screams out that things must, that the situation cannot go on. Like a Chinese finger trap, the more it struggles towards change, the more fixed and rigid the trap becomes. The greater the knowledge that what one must actually do is relax, let go, let some things take their natural course, the more fierce and violent come the surges of futile resistance. Spitting in the face of your torturer when you are exhausted, chained down, and he has all the tools.
The entire model of opposition needs to be re-thought. Yes, fascism must be opposed and fought against in all instances. (The fascism of capital, the fascism within ourselves, the crypto-fascism of everyday life.) But perhaps it must be fought against using a model somehow other than opposition.
Opposition always leads to one of two things: to being absorbed or being destroyed. It is true that when ones ideas are absorbed one does – in some sense – alter the status quo. However, if the original model was less about attacking and more about something else, I am once again thinking along the lines of symbiotic relationships found in nature, than perhaps a greater degree of change might be possible, one that does not create the insidious distortions beneficial to power that absorption so often entails.
Fierce opposition always leads to something akin to a cycle of revenge: positions on both sides harden, become further ingrained, more rigid, the longer the antagonism continues to escalate. Both sides become less likely to soften, shift or change.
And yet the more I think about such questions, the more unclear I become as to what this other model might look or feel like. Might it be a model based on listening?
Listening to the enemy? Not dialogue, not some naïve belief in the power of communication. Simple listening as the first step before any move. But what if, as you are listening, all you hear are lies? What if, as you are listening, you receive three bullets in the back of the head (when one bullet would have been utterly sufficient.) How to transition from a state in which listening is dangerous and foolish towards a state in which it is, once again, constructive? Listening for the insecurity behind power. Thinking if there are other ways, less violent ways, to make it feel secure. And once again, as I write, I feel naïve.
Where is power in capital? In the things it makes us do? In the things it allows us to do (to ourselves, to others)? In the things it makes possible: the organization, hierarchy and destruction? The overwhelming imbalances of power that simply could not exist without it.
It seems misguided to attempt to make ‘power feel secure’, but if power is little more than a savage over-compensation for the most violent forms of insecurity, then perhaps there is no other way. But why do I think power is like that? Is it little more than projection. Or is it only because I don’t believe in evil. (No, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was just really, really, really insecure.)
Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.
Where is the power in capital? In the fact that nothing seems possible without it, without a bit of dosh, that even the homeless panhandle, and must feel they have no choice, that it seems nearly impossible to imagine our world organized in some other way? Capital is not omnipotent, but neither does it have to be in order to maintain a fairly consistent and spectacular control.
Now I am writing in Toronto, the city that instilled in me a deep, but cautious, antipathy towards business, sports and post-modernism.
Nature is not based on competition, it is organized through and around ecosystems. In some sense we could make an analogy between ecosystems and listening.
[Unfinished.]
.
Tell Your Friends
.
I have called this book Tell Your Friends because I would like people to read it and then tell their friends about it. For example, you, if you are reading this book now, when you finish I would like you to recommend it to as many people as possible. It is not difficult to understand why I, the author, should request this of you. However, this book will have to be enormously persuasive if there is any hope of every single reader actively complying with the request of the title. In the past, I don’t believe anyone would have described me as particularly persuasive, therefore this book will ask the question to what extent can I transform myself into a considerably more persuasive writer.
[Unfinished.]
.
I have called this book Tell Your Friends because I would like people to read it and then tell their friends about it. For example, you, if you are reading this book now, when you finish I would like you to recommend it to as many people as possible. It is not difficult to understand why I, the author, should request this of you. However, this book will have to be enormously persuasive if there is any hope of every single reader actively complying with the request of the title. In the past, I don’t believe anyone would have described me as particularly persuasive, therefore this book will ask the question to what extent can I transform myself into a considerably more persuasive writer.
[Unfinished.]
.
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