A Radical Cut In The Texture Of Reality.

Larry Summers nomination for president of the World Bank and how "Africa is vastly under-polluted."

2012-01-26T15:43:00.000-08:00

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I read this awhile ago on David Rylance's Facebook page and I can't quite shake it off. One of the most disturbing things I've read in a while. The memo is from 1991 but I missed it at the time:

So Obama's going to nominate Larry Summers to be president of the World Bank. Recall this passage from 1991 memo, actually written by Lant Pritchett but signed by Summers when he was the Bank's chief economist, on how "Africa is vastly under-polluted." The last paragraph is important, and should not be overlooked in fighting these mofos.

3. "Dirty" industries

Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less-developed countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurement of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change In the adds of prostrate [sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to got prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmospheric discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

[Just read on Wikipedia that Pritchett claims the memo was meant to be sarcastic. I read it over a few times and sometimes I believe the intention was sarcasm while other times I don't. It does read a bit like A Modest Proposal, but there is a big different between A Modest Proposal written by Twain and A Modest Proposal written by the very people constructing and enforcing economic policies that lead to atrocity. Whether or not the sarcasm angle is true, or simply post-leak spin, for me it somehow makes the memo even worse. That the World Bank has a culture of sarcastically suggesting we dump toxic waste in less developed countries, I suppose as a kind of joke, when in fact such practices are some of the harshest, cruelest economic realities of our current world. Heartbreaking.]

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It doesn’t matter if you’re old and ugly. Just be old and ugly and you’ll be fine.

2012-01-24T23:39:00.001-08:00

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The accordion is sometimes an obnoxious sounding instrument. So people will say, “Do you play that chanky-chank music, that old style music?” I took that and said, “Yeah, we do that, and we’re really proud that we do.” We don’t mind, like a friend of mine says, “It doesn’t matter if you’re old and ugly. Just be old and ugly and you’ll be fine.” Don’t try and be anything else. So, the chanky-chank, that’s what we call our music. That’s what we like. It’s not for everybody, but it’s definitely for us.

- Michael Doucet, Beusoliel

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Relay-Interview at Do Tank / Social Fictions in Munich

2012-01-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

Relay-Interview is a ridiculously simple game for having unexpected conversations. It involves asking and answering spontaneous questions that are loosely based around one or several themes chosen before the game starts. The way it works is: There are two chairs in the middle of the room. Person A and Person B sit in the chairs. A asks B a question. When B is finished answering the question he or she gets up, leaving the chair vacant. At that point anyone else in the room can sit down in the empty chair and ask A a question. When A is finished answering he or she stands up and leaves the chair vacant. The game goes on like this for any length of time and with any number of people. It is an attempt to have genuine, surprising exchanges within a performance situation. And to find out what we think, how we think about it and what we most want to know.

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Some of the Jacob Wren book reviews that can be found on the internet

2012-01-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

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Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed:
Jason Pettus at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
Drew Nelles at CBC Books
Carl Wilson at Back To The World
L. J. Moore at Porchlight
Plus Beth Follett interviews Jacob
Catherine Lacey at HTML Giant with ten sentences and a short interview
A bizarre mention on the Business News Network blog
And an excerpt

Families Are Formed Through Copulation:
Blake Butler at HTML Giant
Jacquelyn Davis at Bookslut
J. A. Tyler at Elimae
Matthew Gruman at matthewgruman.com
Chloé Savoie-Bernard at Baise Livres

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2012-01-09T10:26:00.001-08:00

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There is so much capitalism inside of me.

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Rich and Poor (possible beginning for a new book)

2011-12-27T10:23:00.000-08:00

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1.
There is the expression: you catch more flies with honey than you do with poison. But I have realized this is only partly true. Because unless your goal is to breed flies, you also need at least a little bit of poison to finish them off. Looking back on my life I now wonder: what was the honey and what was the poison? How often did I confuse the two and with what results? The standard rags to riches story is a tepid, sugary cliché, and the ways I have often used it to charm and increase my opportunities in life, and how I will continue to do so here, is one of the many poisons that harms me daily to a similar degree that I have damaged the many who have stumbled into my path. To make yourself a legend you tell your story one way, and to make yourself a martyr you tell it differently, with different emphasis. Both ways are of course corrupt but the results differ. I’ve never been good at introducing myself, one reason that I prefer everyone already know who I am before I arrive. It was never my intention to write a memoir. I’ve never understood why memoirs are so popular these days.

The Persian philosopher Tusi (1201 – 1274 AD) writes: “If men were equal, they would all perish.” We need differences between rich and poor, he insisted, just as much as we need differences between farmers and carpenters. I wasn’t born rich. It took me twenty years of panache and gradual calculation to build my fortune. And if I had children, which I do not, and if like me they had not been born rich, which is rather unlikely, it is even more unlikely they would be able to repeat my success. The world no longer contains such opportunities, and this generalized lack of opportunity is a condition me and my kind had some small part in creating. Or not. Perhaps we only rode the waves of our time, and, if none of us had been born, others would have done the same. But it was us and not others. Much like some people are rich and others are poor. We can say that some people are rich because others are poor but it changes nothing. The roulette wheel spins and the numbers that come up are the ones that win. If you were a left wing activist in Germany in the twenties or thirties there would be little you could do to stop Hitler. And yet it’s important to believe there is always something you can do, to lie to yourself a little, because then at least you have a shot. Miracles do happen but they are extremely rare. My situation was not a miracle. Just a great deal of charm and ambition, and being alive in an age when such things were still possible. Plus precisely the right degree of luck. But of course, like all of us in these positions, I don’t believe in luck. We all believe, like any good asshole, that success is nothing more or less than the result of our genius.

2.
I will kill him. It will solve nothing and help no one, but, for me at least, it will bring something to an end. The poor must kill the rich, one at a time, at every opportunity. One man kills another and the message is clear, your wealth is cruel and unnatural. You can put fences, guards and dogs around your home, so you are like a prisoner in your own life, but if you are rich you will live in fear. You will fear your servants. You will look out the window of your limousine and, at every traffic light, wonder if each and every passerby has a gun and bullet with your name on it. It is only that the killing must be completely random. The victims having nothing in common other than their wealth, the killers nothing in common other than their poverty. The message should be clear: if you are rich you can be killed at any time. The police would arrest millions but there would always be another poor man that could suddenly snap. We would only have to kill ten to start, to strike fear in the hearts of every billionaire in the world. And he will be the first. I will see to it.

On a social level, people have to look after each other, but on an ethical level, each of us has to look after ourselves. If you are a billionaire it is because you have done evil in the world. You have exploited and caused untold misery. You have bent laws and governments to your will. I don’t want to shoot him. I want to strangle him with piano wire. I don’t want to escape. I want to be caught and explain my idea to the world. I want to be executed. I now have nothing to lose. We will all be forgotten. But if ten of us manage to kill billionaires those ten will be remembered forever. Our poverty will become history. Wealth is impersonal but we will make it personal again.

1.
Violence has always been a last resort. So much is possible without violence, but so much more with just the threat of it, and even more if you occasionally go over the top. I am not a violent man. Therefore I must work with violent men. Violent men I can trust. There are two kinds of violence I have made use of in my work: violence connected to a government and violence that takes place without any government knowledge. Both have their very specific, but separate, strategic dangers. When you can convince the government to do your violence for you the benefits are obvious, but there are also clear pitfalls: the government might lose popularity, be voted out or overthrown, and your business, having been closely associated with that particular government, might have to go as well. This scenario has played out in my professional life several times. However, even if this were to happen all is not lost, because there is still the possibility to convince the new government to continue working with you. Violence without the use of government is considerably more costly, since all expenses are your own, but what you lose in the form of money you gain in agency and independence.

If all of this sounds too abstract, and perhaps heartless, one would be correct in assuming that I have seen very little violence first hand. I mention these facts because I believe something similar happens to all of us. You drive your car knowing it is disastrous for the environment, and yet continue to drive anyway. You drive your kids to school, knowing the very car you’re driving them in will make their future more environmentally precarious. You read the newspaper and feel the things within it that disturb you are completely disconnected from your daily actions, when of course they are not. If you completely dedicated your life to changing just one of them, something might budge. But you don’t because you don’t feel that strongly about it. You think it is terrible but not so terrible you are ready to drop everything and take action. Myself, I would of course prefer to run my business without any recourse to violence, but also, I have to admit, I don’t feel so strongly about it. And if I were to do so, it would be impossible to remain competitive. Profits would suffer. Like all of us, the assholes, I have a responsibility to my shareholders.

2.
There is of course a reason, an incident, behind my desire to kill him. I was not born poor. I became poor. Not as a direct result of his actions, but more indirectly, through grief. I experienced a grief so severe I could not work, think or exist. This period lasted for about ten years and I remember very little of it. But there is one thing I remember with absolute clarity. During the years of oblivion I stopped reading literature and stopped reading philosophy. I would occasionally read the newspaper but never managed to get very far. The news all seemed too far away. What I did start reading was corporate shareholder reports. By the end of ten years, just before I was evicted, my apartment was completely packed with them. I would go to business chat sites and post notices asking stockholders to send me their old ones, that I was collecting them, and literally hundreds started arriving in the mail. Clearly the stockholders had no idea what to do with them, were happy to see them go, forests and forests of the stuff. I would read them obsessively, against the text, as if every proudly announced profit concealed an environmental crime or worse. As if they were not documents of enrichment but of destruction. There was a great deal of truth to my analysis, but this activity was clearly not good for my mental health. It was a way to drive myself insane with anger and it worked. I spent god knows how many years driving myself mad in precisely this manner and might still be doing so today if I had not been forced to leave the apartment. Sometimes the things that harm us most are also our saviors.

With the eviction at the forefront of my mind I started piling up the reports in the alleyway behind my building. It took me an entire week to move them all, I couldn’t believe how many I had collected or how big the eventual pile was, like a mountain of pure greed. The night before they kicked me out I set fire to the mountain and watched it burn for five hours. I expected fire trucks and police but none came. I expected the whole city to burn but the flames kept to themselves, much like the neighbors who I suppose decided to mind their own business and not call the police. As I watched, I imagined it was the corporations themselves that were burning: their headquarters, the CEO’s, the private security companies hired to protect them. I imagined that for every forest that was clear-cut, one corporate headquarters building burst into flame as if by magic. For every mother forced to watch her infant starve to death on the third world wages her husband brought in, one CEO would spontaneously combust. I remember that fire. For five hours I fantasized until the last embers turned black at the brink of dawn. That night was the first step of my long journey back to sanity, towards a more coherent worldview, and also the first kernel, the very beginning, of my eventual plan.

1.
Capitalism is not the simple desire to make a profit. Capitalism is the fantasy that growth can continue at a consistent rate indefinitely. When a child is young it can not yet imagine being an adult, so it thinks it will keep growing forever. The fantasy that you can grow forever is exhilarating, one of the many aspects that make children seem so alive. We live in fantasy, all of us, all of the time, to a greater or lesser extent.

Business, on the other hand, is the simple desire to make a profit, along with, if you’re a lucky, a desire to produce something useful in the world. If you are running a business in this day and age, you are of course doing so within the framework of capitalism. Business is the yoke, capitalism the shell. You cannot write a business plan saying: we just want to make enough money to be comfortable and after that we have no particular desire to grow. (Or you can but it would be difficult to find investors.) You need to project annual growth, as much as possible.

When I was young I could not possibly imagine obtaining wealth. My parents never spoke of such things, and I believe they never thought much of them either. My father worked every day and took whatever money they gave him. It was enough to get by, most of the time. I would watch my parents carefully, full of childish suspicions, thinking, or was I only hoping, that there must be some easier way. Or perhaps I was hoping no such thing. There are so many details we fill in imaginatively when we tell stories from the distant past. My parents both died when I was still poor, and sometimes, in more reflective moments, I wonder what they would think of all this: the private planes, posh restaurants (where occasionally I spend more in one night than they would have spent in six months) and endless waves of work, meetings and then more work.

Allow me to get sentimental for a moment (as if it was possible to stop me.) I spent a great deal of time in the hospital with my father in the weeks leading up to his death. He was a quiet man, didn’t talk much, as was the fashion for men of his generation, but in the hospital we talked like we’d never talked before. He told me so many things and what I grew to understand, what I had never understood before, is that he had lived his life afraid. I didn’t want to be afraid, and in one of our last quiet moments together I told him so. I was wrong, he told me, carefully explaining, wanting to set the record straight before it was too late. From the outside it might look like fear, might have appeared that time and time again he had backed down, but inside he had always been content, always felt he had remained focused on the things that were important in life: his family, being relaxed, working efficiently and with integrity, enjoying the small pleasures that each day is kind enough to grant us. He seemed pleased to have explained all this and, not wanting to argue with a dying man, I agreed with him, thanked him for his words, told him they were beautiful and true.

But even then I thought he was lying, both to me and to himself, and that he had in fact lived his life in fear. (I still wonder today whether he knew he had failed to convince me or if I had managed to reassure him.) What’s more, it was then I realized that in our last intimate talks, by telling him I knew he was a coward, by seeing through him like that, I had somehow gained the upper hand. I was no longer only his child but also something else, someone who had something on him, who had some small power over him, and he was now afraid of me too. Saying what he did, that he had always been content, was just another way of backing down, like he had his entire life. Later that week he died. I cried when the doctor phoned me, in fact I cried a lot, but, nonetheless, I was never going to be like that. I was never going to back down.

2.
His book, his autobiography, is in my hands and fueling my rage. I saw it in the window as I was walking by a bookstore and the coincidence struck me like a hammer. I quickly shoplifted one, there’s no way I was giving that bastard more money, and am reading it now, still amongst the early pages. What strikes me most is his strange mix of pathos and showmanship. He has doubts, endless moments of doubt, but each and every time he overcomes them and finds his way towards doing exactly the most evil thing he can come up with. It is masterful the way he humanizes himself, since we can all relate to having little moments of struggle each and every day, only to turn it around, or inside out – always this constant rejection of basic human values in favor of his own endless egotism. He is honest, self-aware, constantly including himself among the avaricious assholes who have created a world that, if he is honest with himself, not even he wants to live in anymore. But, at the same time, he is strangely proud of having created this world. For him it was an act of will. I would read a few pages then violently throw the book across the room, do something else for awhile, or do nothing, before curiosity eventually gets the best of me and begrudgingly, like a chastened slave, I walk across the room to pick it up off the floor and continue reading. Even after twenty pages the book looks like it has been through a meat grinder. I was throwing it as hard as I possibly could. But then, after a few days, I start to feel stupid and put the book aside. I’m only half way through but it’s enough for now. There’s little in the book that would help me get closer to him, but much in it that might help me win his trust once I eventually do.

There are three private security companies he regularly signs contracts with and I have now applied for jobs at all of them. My resume is only partly forged so we will have to see how thoroughly they check. I have three chances but, for now, I am only waiting for a phone call. While I wait I read about security, about bodyguards, about bulletproof jackets and armored cars. For money I am washing dishes a few nights a week in whatever place will take me. I work quietly and efficiently, without incident. I don’t need much money so work as little as possible. I keep my phone turned on from nine to six, in case I am called in for an interview, then, in the evening keep it turned off. I talk to almost no one and, when I do, keep the topics light, making lighthearted jokes whenever possible. My heart is not light but, for short stretches, I believe I get away with it. I would find all this beyond boring if I was not so focused on a single goal, a goal that will end my freedom but, hopefully, start something much larger. Life without a goal, without a fulcrum, without a single point of intensity around which everything else can swirl, is not particularly worth living. My life, however dull, is.

Three months go by before I get the first interview and the time allows me to thoroughly prepare. On my way there I shoplift a second copy of his book to read while I wait. It is a careless risk, since if I was caught my entire plan would be sabotaged, but it is a risk I take because I believe my interest in him will serve me well with potential employers, and bringing my own destroyed copy would be out of the question. While in the waiting room I read from where I left off and, once again, have an unbelievable urge to hurl the book across the room. I restrain myself, but possibly the men sitting on either side of me can feel my anger, feel my body tense. From that point on I only pretend to read, instead using the time to eavesdrop.

The room is full, it seems they’re interviewing a lot. Many of them know each other, have worked together in the past, and their conversations are friendly yet empty. If I get the job I will also need to talk this way so I listen carefully: sports, porn, a few of them have traveled and they speak about deserts, sand and heat, about burqas and exotic prostitutes. There are many terms, mostly slang, that I don’t understand. From the context I believe its either about guns or vehicles. I make mental notes, planning to look things up later, still pretending to read. Once inside the interview is straightforward. I make a good impression but I’m not as experienced as many of the other candidates. From the way they explain this to me, I have the slight feeling it might even work to my advantage. Perhaps there are placements where they prefer to train people from scratch. I have a dishwashing gig that night and go directly from the interview to the kitchen, where they make fun of me for being dressed up. I tell them I just came from a wedding, make up a story about the bride mistakenly saying ‘do I?’ instead of ‘I do.’ Everyone laughs. I don’t know where this story came from, I pulled it straight out of thin air. I’m pleased it got a laugh, eased any suspicions arising from the way I was dressed. The story came from my need to defend myself, protect myself. I wonder how many stories in the world emerge in precisely this way.

1.
All of this is not to suggest, even for a moment, that I did not love and respect my father. While some friends might have advised me to edit the previous hospital scene out, it is my intention here to portray my life in all of its nuance and complexity. Of course, it is also true that we, all of us, are never quite as complex or clever as we think we are (or want to be.) In this respect I am not so different from anyone else.

The daily operations of a multinational corporation, one of the largest in the world, are understandably complex. How one deals with such astonishing daily complexity is the true test of ones character. If I compare myself to a few individuals in charge of rival corporations, I can see that my approach and style are almost completely contrary to the ruling wisdoms of the day. For example, while most companies aim for constant, year after year growth, I prefer periods of relative calm (that can sometimes last several years) followed by spectacular bursts of energy and expansion. It is within these sudden bursts, unexpectedly, that the entire world opens up. The impossible, for a brief window, feels possible again. It is important that within these bursts, as I like to call them, everything feels entirely unexpected, both for me and my many employees, that our daily reality is suffused with the purer elements of surprise.

Years of careful planning drain an endeavor of energy, while the sudden conquests I envision, in actual fact, cannot be planned. That is what we have learned. They rely on the irrational, on irrational decisions made by so many of the key players involved, myself included. Investors surging forth on violent waves of excitement or falling away when blindsided by off kilter fear. Rival CEO’s or executives having no idea how to react to an energy, and way of thinking, they have no interior experience with, panicking, signing up or caving in. When it all happens fast, the entire landscape can be rearranged before anyone realizes what has happened, in best case scenarios to my considerable advantage. Of course, all of these strategies, these desires, can easily backfire. Nonetheless, these are the risks, the challenges, the gambles, upon which my heart thrives.

I am scanning my memory for a suitable example, for the perfect instance that would accurately display my talents and proclivities. Or perhaps two examples, one during which we succeeded, the other leading to failure. In fact, I will start with the negative example. It is much more difficult to recall a negative instance, not because they have been so rare, but because I have a tendency to block them out, to remain focused on the present and future, where the action is. There was one memorable disaster that almost sent us spiraling into bankruptcy, but perhaps I will save that for later. It deserves a chapter of its own, since it was the time in my life during which I learned both the hardest, and most useful, lessons. And then again, I think to myself, why am I attempting to list examples like some mild, grade-desiring student. Examples are for peasants. When we remain within the realm of the abstract everything feels, becomes, possible. But when we descend towards the concrete our sense of possibility steadily narrows. Past unexpected takeovers, executed with panache, even takeovers of organizations that were somewhat larger than us at the time, maneuvers wildly lauded in the business press, no longer compel me. While the philosophies that made such actions possible remain present and alive, ready to tip the balance and throw everything back into chaos at any juncture.

A few weeks ago I was on the street and saw two children fighting. I like to watch children fight. One learns so much about human nature in the different ways each child enters the fray. Do they wait for an opening or charge forward without thought, take the punch as gasoline poured on the fire of their blind rage or dodge every blow as if not getting hit was the sole accomplishment possible. These children were younger than most, and they were laughing, they found their own pre-adolescent brutality almost ludic, so I assumed they must be friends. Nonetheless, their friendship didn’t prevent them from doing damage. One of them was bleeding from the face, so much blood I couldn’t spot the wound, and he was laughing, head-butting, working to get as much blood on his opponent as possible. Until the other one, the one not yet bleeding, grabbed the blood soaked jacket, managing to rip it straight up the seam, and they both stopped cold, stopped laughing, froze in tableau. “You ripped my jacket,” the bloody one said, as if not sure what his reaction should be, as if his opponent had broken some unspoken rule. It was a serious moment, unexpected. You never know what will happen, what might cause the dynamic to shift.

2.
I didn’t get the job but still have two chances. I’ve been fully immersed in my private security research and am confident I will do even better next time, at the next interview, that each one will be better than the last. At the same time I am considering other strategies. If I cannot work as his bodyguard there must be other ways to get close, as a servant in his home or waiter at some function he is scheduled to attend. Luck, the good luck that is involved in getting any sort of gainful employment within the current dreadful state of our economy, will be one thing, and I do hope that I have some. But careful planning, searching for every possible opening or opportunity to get close to him, to get the piano wire close enough to his throat, will be much more important.

[Unfinished.]

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Explanations are metaphors

2011-12-23T11:53:00.000-08:00

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Explanations are metaphors
we understand through approximation
experience short-circuits understanding
and we re-establish perspective through analogy
if one thing, or experience, is not like
another, what then is it like?
it is like itself but this explains nothing
we might say it is a question of
language, of wanting to explain
of wanting to understand
it is a question of desire
when you want
you want to know what and why
why and what happens next
requiring explanations
with no explanations there is nothing
therefore metaphors are the
engines of our heart
or the opposite
an empty heart can only be filled
therefore metaphors are the rusty armor
that paralyze experience
I’ve never used the word heart
in a poem before
and I’m realizing now
it is no coincidence it appears
among concerns of explanation
and metaphor
the technical heart pumps blood
but our own blood
is not what we crave

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It feels like being a loser

2011-12-19T21:37:00.000-08:00

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It feels like being a loser
everything, especially writing this poem
everything the same as nothing
(if you want something you can’t have,
and want it all the time, it’s equally
dissatisfying as wanting it never)
this feeling of being a loser
buys into a set of social values I am
completely against
but I feel it, the feelings we feel
reject and feel again
and accept, reject and feel again
with everything I am asked
to do, I ask myself: do I have a choice?
in what way do I have a choice?
I see the winners, the bullies
the assholes, and reject them
wondering if they are happier
and see myself, reject myself too
the world, what is the
world apart from this world
we have created
it is many, many things
it is everything and we
so rarely see it
it is everything, at least
for a few more hours
this feeling of being a loser
of everything, much like
the many things
already lost

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Performing, tradition and politics

2011-12-19T17:09:00.000-08:00

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To feel like a trained performing monkey
is normal enough in my profession
if one can say that it's normal to feel

when bad ideas become traditions
we call it modernity
in this time when traditions barely last

if art is a mirror to society, of politics
than it is no wonder all this art sucks
there is the painful sucking and the pleasurable kind

why not both? the constant search for a
third way, as every third is folded back into
the second or first, into one trivial substance

too tired to fight, the exhaustion keeps fighting without us
a discussion needs neither a beginning nor end
an aphorism requires little more than brevity

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Obsessing over the ramifications of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. (A moment in history.)

2011-12-17T22:36:00.000-08:00

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In the bright light of day, the United States becomes a lawful fascist state.

Finally American citizens can legally be treated in the same spirit that America treats everyone else, in the spirit of American foreign policy, as if they were part of the world they are destroying.

Evil rich people caught in moments of fake compassion.

When something exists it must be used. (Because nuclear weapons exist, sooner or later they must be used, to justify their existence.)

Obsessing over the ramifications. Feeling a paranoia that verges on perfection. McCarthyism times three trillion. So many lives ruined on a million of the flimsiest pretexts. Not tomorrow. Soon enough.

I wrote paranoid poems before and came to the conclusion there was no point. I wanted to write for the future, in that spirit: as if there was a future to write for.I wanted to say to the future: We saw it all happening. We knew it was terrible. We knew our culture was criminal. We felt powerless.

I want to ask the future how it feels but this might be the single stupidest thing I’ve ever written. Wanting solutions from the future is little more than a sign of despair. There is only now and we must find whatever small solutions we can within the present.

Wondering if – today, tomorrow, some time in the next twenty years – it’s possible for me to write something that will cause me to be arrested, whisked away, taken somewhere secret for an indefinite period, tortured. I know it is and at the same time know it isn’t. Wondering if anything might happen because I’m writing this now. Wondering about consequences.

It probably won’t be me. I'm too ineffective. It will be someone else. Again and again. Closer and closer. How much longer will it take before we feel it with every breath?

There have been so many turning points, each one turning towards the worst, spinning. We are dizzy from them.

I still like listening to music.

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2011-12-12T14:36:00.000-08:00

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The meta-questions play free bird.

I'm a failure here myself.

Bestseller on the topic of spectacular sexual failure.

Guitar solos of spectacular width and brevity.

The meta-questions play startled stallion.

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Debt is the perversion of a promise.

2011-12-11T16:38:00.001-08:00

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Debt is the perversion of a promise, a promise that has been perverted through mathematics and violence. I’m not saying mathematics is bad, but the combination of mathematics and violence is extremely bad. A debt is a promise to give a certain sum of money, in a certain amount of time, under certain conditions. It is a contract that is ultimately enforceable through the threat of force. The problem is that through a genuinely perverse historical alchemy, we’ve come to see such acts of violence as the very essence of morality.

- David Graeber

[The rest of the interview can be found here.]

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Fundamental to our understanding of making art is the fact one is frequently misunderstood.

2011-12-04T18:27:00.001-08:00

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Fundamental to our understanding of making art is the fact one is frequently misunderstood. /// But how misunderstood should one allow oneself to be? /// Comedy should not be mistaken for bitterness, yet mostly that is the well from which it springs. /// If one is understood too much it might also feel like a misunderstanding. /// Like an x-ray that sees us as we really are (by seeing straight through us.) /// Critical analysis can be like that x-ray, what it sees is not precisely what is there, both more and less. /// X-ray as a kind of misunderstanding, looking too specifically as a way of mis-seeing. /// But these are not the misunderstandings I meant. /// Anything can be said to concern anything. /// It is not assumed that the artist accurately knows what he or she means. /// There is always the desire to find the meaning behind the intention. /// The advertiser knows the exact intention of his or her work, but the artist does not. /// Yet the artist has an excess of intention. /// Within the very nature of this excess there is a gap, and it is this gap that interpretation seeks to fill. /// It is like a person where you wonder if you really get them, if there is in fact more to get, what they are holding back. /// They are a person but you are an x-ray. /// As if wandering through an airport, the person must submit. /// The artist is holding something back, cannot give you everything, but you will uncover the secret. /// The secret is that the artist cannot possibly know everything his or her work is doing in the world. /// (Or failing to do.) /// People are constantly telling me how great I am. /// Meanwhile, I am dying of loneliness.

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Evil is just bad choices vehemently pursued

2011-12-03T06:23:00.001-08:00

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Evil is just bad choices
vehemently pursued
like a course in doing the right thing
where they teach you: think of the wrong thing
than do the opposite
but forget to teach you to do the opposite
there are pains you can escape
and pains that will pursue you
crimes that change your life
and crimes that go unnoticed
when will the wrongs be set right?
right after the next wrong goesterribly wrong
I can be generous, but I can also
be small-minded and petty
does this make me like everyone else?

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Nothing that exists is going away any time soon

2011-11-30T17:43:00.001-08:00

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Nothing that exists is going away any time soon
not nuclear power nor sympathy
not the desire for a better world nor warlords nor
the unmanageable complexity of the industrial world
we are stuck with these things
there will be famine and plague but
nothing will go away
we still have the church and we still have cigarettes
there are still a few people who think the world is flat
and some day I might join them
what difference does it make to my life
if I think the world is flat or round
(and there is always a strange pleasure
to be part of some small, self-chosen group)

Nothing that exists is going away any time soon
not sexism nor emancipation, not art
nor the end of art nor television or drugs
or the war against drugs
and none of these things will be spread evenly
across the planet either
always some will have more, some less
(some will have more warlords while
others will have more diamonds)
not even going way will go away
there is only here
sickening and joyous
and everything in between
we can fight and we can lose or
we can make a little progress
we can lose hope or keep it
cherish small progress or let it go
there are good arguments on all sides
bad arguments too
not apocalypse nor utopia nor
happiness nor doom
let each of these things shake our
imagination and our actions
each in its turn

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Early

2011-11-30T17:39:00.001-08:00

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I am looking at young people and wondering if they always seemed so young

these particular young people are particularly inarticulate

also not speaking their first language

one says: this unambitious attitude is really important, that is why we took this opportunity to do what we want

normally one translates from another language into one's own

later I find out that the main one is famous, her father also famous, her unambitious attitude too

the cliches keep on giving

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Coment on a coment on teaching

2011-11-28T02:28:00.001-08:00

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I think if they had been talking about 'family, babies or a recipe they enjoyed' I would have been equally disgusted.

But if they had been talking about a new record I might have been interested.

This is all, of course, extremely unreasonable and arbitrary.I can be flexible but I'm also searching for the pleasure of writing things that are unreasonable.

It seems insane to me that I still have a romantic view of artists, since I see no evidence to support such a view, but it remains a desire. A desire for art to be something more (or violently less) than everything I see around me.

And, reading the comments again, I realize again that my humour is often too black, slight or dry, and people miss that the words I write are both meant and not, that I feel my views as painful but can also see them (and myself) as ridiculous. (I mean, I've never punched anyone in my life.)

I am flexible. Which means I know just how boring being flexible can sometimes be.

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München

2011-11-28T01:58:00.001-08:00

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I don’t think this is the kind of place I would go if I lived here, but since I don’t live here it is the best coffee I have found so far. If there’s money involved you admit to behaving differently, but maybe you don’t behave as differently as you think (or secretly hope.) Everything here reminds me of money, but this is only a shallow first impression, one it is unlikely I will get past. (In the end I did a little.) Today the coffee comes with a single pink rose petal on the saucer (or maybe a petal from some other flower, I’m not sure.) They meant it to be a ‘nice touch’ but it also reminds me of money. Strange it reminds me of money since a single petal doesn’t cost much, but of course the cost is somewhere else. (Perhaps in the privileged confidence of the flourish.) And the coffee is strong, rough, with some bite to it. I am here for one week and don’t imagine I’ll ever be back, but the people I meet here I might meet other places, since we all seem to travel (another privileged flourish.) I want to have some thoughts that are worth writing, that are worth putting down, but my thoughts only remind me of other, more consequent, thoughts I had, and wrote down, in the past. Today’s versions feel watered down but perhaps something might happen tomorrow that would spark them in some new direction. There is a strange pleasure to writing when it feels like there’s no point. For as long as I can remember I’ve sat in cafes to write. Sometimes, as one dull sentence ends, the next one starts in some way you never thoughts possible, a little surprise that comes from you but at the same time doesn’t. The radical potential of the unconscious is that it is impossible to completely know or predict. This is also what is frightening about it. Sometimes the next sentence surprises you but, so far, not today. Yesterday, as we were walking towards the metro through the too cold night, I made the joke that I would prefer to be in Brazil. I said something like ‘thanks so much for inviting me to your festival, but there’s one thing about your festival that feels really wrong to me and that’s the fact that it’s not in Brazil.” And we laughed for a moment but today it is pure gray sky and just as cold and I really would prefer to be in Brazil, even though I’ve never been there, my constant tendency to obsess over warm places I’ve never been as some sort of utopian escape from winter. And later this week, for the first time in fifteen years, I will publish poetry, a small booklet entitled Someone who doesn’t experience or understand pleasure. Fifteen years ago I promised myself I would stop publishing poetry, that I no longer wanted to be in that ghetto, but then this moment came when I sent in a manuscript on a whim, I saw an open call on Facebook, and suddenly here it is, twenty-four pages written over the past ten years. That is back in Montreal and I am here in Munich. I must really be lost of I’m publishing poetry again. I mean, I do think we need more poetry in our lives (for example: pretending, if only for a moment, that Munich is Brazil), but we also need less poetry in poetry. To be so marginal feels almost violent to me and yet I realize I will always be marginal. Real success is not for me, while at the same time people are constantly telling me how successful I am. I can only write on my blog when I imagine no one is reading it. The moment I imagine someone might be reading this, the writing immediately stops.

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...

2011-11-20T13:53:00.001-08:00

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Everyone is so reasonable and the results are so tepid.

Then everyone is so unreasonable and the results are equally tepid.

And occasionally, for no reason at all, the results are exhilarating.

Who wouldn’t love to be painfully bursting with life.

When you write the first line you don’t know the next and certainly don’t know the last.

If it lasts for a while, it might as well last forever.

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Addendum

2011-11-19T03:14:00.001-08:00

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How, when you speak, to mean not only what you say, but also to mean the opposite, at the same time. Because life, and each of us, are so full of contradictions.

Then again, why do I think the anti-spectacular always equals the humane. No shock and no awe.

The institution knows only one trick: to absorb things from outside itself, present them, in order to make them more safe. To save them from obscurity and bind them to history. But there are so many different ways to do this: good, bad and every shade between.

One trick is not so much, and yet, sometimes, years, decades, pass in which the institution cannot do even that. It still knows the trick but simply chooses not to. Is a little bit of spice better than nothing? And for who?

For me. I don’t know how to live.

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Strange gratitude

2011-11-06T01:37:00.000-07:00

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You said to me that I saved the institutions anniversary. (Of course only a joke.) But I don’t want to save the institution. I don’t want to save anything.

I think the institution is a factory for producing mediocrity and for maintaining the status quo (sometimes a little bit more adventurous, sometimes a little less, but never a compelling shift, never a hopeful curiosity, openness or break.)

I want to burn it to the ground but I’m too polite. And there would be no point since new institutions would quickly arise, the same or worse. And my burning to the ground skills aren’t up to the task.

I want things to change but the changes I desire are too much for reality. And the small shifts that do occur feel in not exactly the wrong (or right) direction.

Why must everything be pumped up with false energy and enthusiasm? Where is the vulnerability? If we are insecure, why must we front? Why can’t we walk on stage and perform in ways that show our insecurity? That are fragile? That show we are damaged, curious, unsure and therefore human? Why can’t our politicians do the same? (Because they would never win.)

Is it only because we are always auditioning, for everything: for love, work, friendship, value, meaning, time, hope? I no longer know how to sort the fantasies that matter from the ones that don’t.

What others find entertaining does not entertain me, but, then again, what does? If I feel that someone is trying to sell me something, especially themselves, I completely shut down.

And yet here they were trying to sell myself back to me at a reduced, yet more expensive, price. A commercialized, scrambled, overproduced version of myself I could barely recognize.

How to be if the world does not understand my aims, even when they try, and if equally I do not understand theirs? (And is their anything accurate in this sensation I had while watching, and later thinking about, what had occurred. Rarely am I accused of excessive gratitude.)

M. writes: “More problematic to me was to see them bursting from a kind of overconfidence that seemed to hide their own lack of self-assurance. While it gave an interesting look to the more political bits of your work, it also seemed to hinder the parts that are more revealing, full of self-doubt and honesty.”

But it’s easy to criticize. This, what I write here, is barely rational, not critique, an emotional language, a sad insanity, intensity.

Such insanity compels me to send this out into the world, fires me up to confess that watching that show, even once, made me feel completely suicidal, completely bereft. (But I’m always suicidal, so what is this sudden surge in intensity? Might there be something positive in it?)

I don’t even know how to live in the days following the premier, a night that feels like the complete betrayal of everything I have been trying to do for the past twenty-two years, of everything I desire, of everything I believe in. And I really don’t say this against the people who made it, since, in many ways, I believe they genuinely did the best they could. I say this only against myself, for agreeing to it, for saying yes in the first place. For saying yes to a scenario I knew from the start would have this precise result.

I fear my ‘yes’ came mainly for cheap reasons: to promote my name, expand my brand. I have no high horse to get up on. And yet I’m on this galloping horse nonetheless. Henri Michaux writes: “It is when you gallop that your parasites are most alive.”

And if, actually, against my better judgment, I do eventually post this, it will be little more than another passive-aggressive act in a lifetime of the same. I apologize and, as always, feel sad. Sadness, confusion and conflicted feelings.

From this position what constructive politics could possibly emerge?

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...

2011-11-01T23:44:00.001-07:00

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What I've learned through the comments on the post below, both here and on Facebook, is that, it seems, teachers generally like teaching. Strangely this was news to me.

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On teaching

2011-10-30T13:19:00.000-07:00

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There’s a joke I often make about teaching.

Something like: I hate teaching. I hate the students. I just want to punch them in their smug little faces over and over again. But I am led to believe that this is not within the boundaries of acceptable pedagogy.

It always gets a laugh. Its not particularly funny. People laugh because the sentiment is both inappropriate and (more than?) a little bit true. Here we arrive at our first lesson: teaching is not generally considered to be a matter of violence. Except when it is.

When I wonder about my own motivations: in teaching, in life, in art – I always find it most comforting to attribute my actions to the basest motives. That I do these things only for money, ego or (most gloriously) for absolutely no reason at all.

It feels better to think I am doing something for a bad reason than to say I would like to do something for a good reason. For me this is very close to the idea of pedagogy.

The honest desire that I want things to change, that I want my actions to effect the changes I desire, seems ridiculous to me.

I was at an art opening, standing around with a group of artists, all artists whose work I admire.

One of them started complaining about teaching, about the workload and the level of the students. About how draining it was. Everyone joined in, and suddenly I wasn’t standing around with a group of artists, I was standing around with a group of teachers.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I continue to have a fairly romantic view of artists, while I have a remarkably unromantic view of teachers. (My father was a teacher.) And in the moment when the switch happened, when the people I was surrounded by flipped from artists to teachers, it was a bit like the entire world unraveled.

If artists are teachers, then what are artists?

I felt certain that the motives of each of us in the circle, our motives for teaching, were mainly connected to money, to the desire to make a living. (I probably teach the least of the group, which sadly made me feel just a little superior.) I felt our teaching had nothing to do with the dissemination of knowledge or with any sort of genuine caring for the students. But why did I think this? What evidence did I have? Was I only projecting my cynicism onto those around me or could I actually say something in support of my theory?

When one is standing in from of a classroom there is an incredible pressure to perform.

[Unfinished.]

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Blaise Cendrars quote

2011-10-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

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I was a youngster in those days,
Hardly sixteen and already I couldn't remember my childhood.
I was sixteen thousand leagues away from the place I was born.
I was in Moscow, the city of a thousand and three belfries and seven railroad stations,
And the seven railroad stations and the thousand and three belfries weren’t enough for me
... For youth was so burning and so mad
That my heart smoldered like the temple of Ephesus or flared like the Red Square of Moscow
At sundown.
And my eyes were headlights on the old roads.I was already such a poor poet
That I never knew how to get to the end of things.

- Blaise Cendrars

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...

2011-10-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

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Perverse curating

Dressing up and acting normal

Boring lecture on a fascinating topic

Failures come alive

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Club music

2011-10-19T22:10:00.000-07:00

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Club music. A beat that doesn’t change or that shifts constantly, relentlessly, when you least expect it or at regular intervals. Squelching noises. Very low sounds against very high frequencies. A part where it escalates, getting more and more intense, faster like a panic attack. On a crowded dance floor, sweating, you twirl and brush against another dancer, against naked flesh, and suddenly it’s the most sexual experience of your life, sudden shuddering orgasm, almost epileptic, you come and collapse, half-conscious, curled up in a ball in the middle of the dance floor, thrusting and kicking feel surround you. If dancing is sex than what is sex. Sex is like a map, a series of memories, a series of sketches of your most intense and emotionally complex experiences. Where are the songs that find ways to be completely honest and accurate about emotions, because that’s not what songs are for. Love songs are lies to get the ball rolling and the right kind of lie is delicious. A blog is a very dead thing in comparison. Artists who can’t find the sea.

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And I noticed my poems were too staged

2011-10-18T17:26:00.001-07:00

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And I noticed my poems were too staged, too rational, reasonable – it was like they’d never fucked anyone – arching their way towards closure, conclusion. I wondered if they’d ever crack into confusion of jagged edges or if I would, and why I wanted this more chaotic so much, why psychotic equaled pleasure. Often when out with people I would find myself bored, disengaged. Why write poems that were only a diary of nothing happening and the resulting reflections, so others who also had no vital life could read them and relate. If my poems were fantasies on what ledge would they break, find defeat, elation, defeated elation falling in and out of love. Where is the sinister point of exaltation? Last night I gathered a few poems and sent them to a magazine run by young people wanting to get things done. When I was their age my life was even more dull. I have tried to outgrow my youth, tried to become younger, but the chastity of my twenties haunts me like a crime. If there is one way I would like to be normal I would travel back in time and be normal like that. Is sex the anarchy these poems lack? Is skydiving with no parachute? Will formal constraints save me, when everything else is lost?

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Song fragment (concerning the vagaries of aging)

2011-10-18T17:07:00.000-07:00

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I think there’s something you don’t understand
you won’t always be a hot young band
your hair will gray and your styles grow old
I’m not telling you this just to be cold

I think there’s something you don’t understand
your songs will age, so will your fans
your photographs will no longer seem bold
the songs that sell will have already sold

You had your rock, you had your run
hope you put a little something in the pension fund
but don’t give up, don’t think you’re through
just remember I’ll always be older than you

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Excerpt from Chamber of Public Secrets' subjective effort to explore the richness and specificity of collective curating

2011-10-15T16:04:00.000-07:00

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To begin with, there were a couple of questions from Viktor Misiano: ‘If not you, who? If not now, when?’ And a number of responses straight from thinking loud:

a) The idea of collective curating is a matter of being able to renounce what I already know in order to learn what I do not know – and someone else in the team does. How far can I embrace this attitude and renounce my individual knowledge? Collectives (should) resonate wider; it is not only a matter of adding knowledge and producing something that is bigger than the sum of its parts. It is a dynamic that works by detraction rather than addition and extends its reach precisely by renouncing the singular power position.

b) The above is also important in terms of building and enlarging audiences, be that an art public, a media audience or a peer community: besides renouncing or acquiring knowledge, it is a matter of giving up control and accept risk. Collective production can go awfully wrong or fantastically well for unforeseeable reasons because they involve a greater number of actors. In this context, I work within a territory that is (and remains) uncharted. Calculated risk is a chimera.

c) Furthermore, collective curating is interesting outside the field of art. While it is rather common to group-curate literature (editors) and cinema (programmers), it is less so to ‘curate’ science, journalism or architecture. How would it be for a group of scholars to curate a scientific endeavour or programme, how could it work out a journalistic platform curated collectively (deciding together what to cover and how, not merely producing in team), and what about an urban masterplan devised by a (small) community of inhabitants? (The fact I added ‘small’ is a clue of what can/cannot work within a collective effort.)

d) The crucial question, which exists independently from the activity of curating: why collectively? The first response would be that to work alone, I get bored – a good enough reason. There is something else. In a collective, the risk of overwhelming ideologies, blind faiths or devastating emotional responses is less. All is diluted both in relations, space and time. Of course group ideologies do exist and are no less effective than those imposed single-handedly. But even if the process is slower and sometimes unnerving, there is a good chance that thinking, working and deciding together may bring a less self-centred and more interesting outcome. If people stick around long enough, that is.

[The rest of this text can be found on the Chamber of Public Secrets website here. Their remarkable Immigrant Image Archive can be found here.]

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I had no other choice but to walk

2011-10-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

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So I began to think about how long I’ve been taking walks. Years, decades. And if I live significantly longer I could keep on adding, because one thing I’m sure of is that I’ll never stop. But despite this great amount of walking, however, no walk has provided me with any genuine revelation. In my case it’s not as it was in the past, when walkers felt reunited with something that was revealed only during the course of the walk, or believed they had discovered aspects of the world or relationships within nature that had been hidden until then. I never discovered anything, only a vague idea of what was new and different, and rather fleeting at that. I now think I went on walks to experience a specific type of anxiety, one that I’ll call nostalgic anxiety, or empty nostalgia. Nostalgic anxiety would be a state of deprivation in which one has no chance for genuine nostalgia. There may be various reasons for the block. If I’m going to explain it, I have to tell the story of my borrowed ideas, which I’m full of – I say “borrowed,” but I’m not suggesting I don’t have full rights to them, on the contrary…

One of these ideas, among the first I assimilated so thoroughly as to make it my own, was the idealization, initially during the Romantic Era, then the Modern, of the long walk. There must have been something wrong with me, because at the point at which I should have chosen a way of life for my future, I found nothing persuasive. From early on I’ve felt unequal to any kind of enthusiasm: incapable of believing in almost anything, or frankly, in anything at all; disappointed beforehand by politics; skeptical of youth culture despite being, at the time, young; an idle spectator at the collective race for money and so-called material success; suspicious of the benevolence of charity and self-improvement; oblivious of the benefits of procreation and the possibilities of biological continuity; oblivious as well of the idea of following sports or any variety of spectacle; unable to work up enthusiasm for any impracticable profession or scientific vocation; inept at arts or at crafts, at physical or manual labor, also intellectual; to sum up, useless for work in general; unfit for dreaming; with no belief in any religious alternative while longing to be initiated into that realm; too shy or incompetent for an enthusiastic sex life; in short, given such failings, I had no other choice but to walk, which most resembled the vacant and available mind.

- Sergio Chejfec, My Two Worlds

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It's hard (song fragment)

2011-10-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

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It’s hard to be an everyday habit
and it’s hard to be a tossed away stone
it’s hard to be an orgasm rabbit
and it’s hardest to leave it alone

[Unfinished]

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One week of Randnotizen

2011-09-30T08:25:00.000-07:00

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For the past week, I have been in Graz blogging for the festival Steirischer Herbst as part of their Randnotizen. My posts were as follows:

Cinema and Anxiety

The year when it disintegrates

In this photo the second moon was removed

The Night of Counting The Years

The blue and the gold could catch the light

Without a theme, under what other organizing principles might an exhibition be curated?

I’m here to make you feel. I’m not here to seduce you.

My lack of conviction in saying even the most obvious things, or the things I most believe in, works against me at times.

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...

2011-09-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

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Artists should, by definition, have a more bohemian life in which they work less than other people. This is apparently not the case.

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Trondheim > Malmö

2011-09-16T12:41:00.000-07:00

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In Trondheim we had one day of sun followed by three days of rain. And, staring at the strange juxtaposition of dark clouds against blue sky, I think of them as a mirror. In my artistic practice perhaps one day of sun is always followed by three days of rain. We’ve had especially good shows in Mannheim, Olso and, last night, here as well. There is a moment when the work takes over and it is as if you are thinking alongside it. You are not in control, if you ever were, and decisions occur in the space between your intentions and what you have made (and what continues to remake itself every time you perform it.) I feel the paradoxes piling up all around me. I am an ideologue, fighting for a certain, fairly specific, way of thinking about and enacting performance, a way that I feel is severely under-represented within the contemporary performance landscape and that many believe is a bit amateur (while I feel they do not see the critical subtlety and complexity. The humanity that speaks louder than skill.) And yet I am an ideologue against ideology, fighting for something that is relaxed, warm, intimate, flexible, spontaneous and open. I am fighting for a way of thinking about performance that refuses to fight for itself and is easily destroyed in combat. What I love is fragile and crumples under the weight of my own critical scrutiny. And yet I don’t want it to crumple, I want it to prevail. I want to fight but believe if we fight too much we lose everything. And yet I don’t know what to do with my anger, which most of the time feels unreal. I’m not exactly sure but it often seems like audiences see almost none of this. The fight occurs behind the scenes, though I am certain they can feel it. The differences between what is seen and what is felt. In which case the spectator is also presented with a paradox: a warm, welcoming space that barely conceals a world of almost infinite confusion and conflict. A fragile oasis in the eye of a tornado. Tomorrow we head to Malmö.

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It begins to feel normal.

2011-08-30T02:00:00.000-07:00

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It begins to feel normal. That one has no idea what to do with oneself. That everything feels tepid or worse. That life’s small pleasures feel misguided. That one fulfills one’s obligations to the best of one’s ability and with a great deal of uncertainty. That one feels ideas opposite to one’s own might well have merit but such merit doesn’t make them less inimical. I don’t want entertainment. I want to think about the world, about this situation of living in times with no feeling of future. I hope desperately it is still possible to think of it in new ways. I want to think about it slowly and without pretending that everything is all right. Think about moments of possibility in Iceland and Chile and wonder what might happen here, wherever I am at a given day or time. I am on a train. This morning I was in Groningen. Tonight I will be in Berlin. We showed a new performance in Groningen. I believe it divided the audience but I’m not sure. I used to love the idea of a divided audience, of inciting debate, of friends going out afterwards and arguing for or against, trying to define their positions, continue the never-ending process of figuring out what they think and why. I used to think the worst thing was for everyone to agree. And yet I don’t believe we incited debate. We divided the audience in milder ways, like all the mild divides that clutter our small conversations and sense of self. These small divides also resonate. I’m drifting into the world of small steps and minor epiphanies. It never ceases to amaze me how two people sitting beside one another can have such a different experience watching the exact same thing. How much of ourselves we throw into everything that is in front of us. When many like the work I almost dismiss them, their enthusiasm runs past me. When people are indifferent I use their indifference as a knife to stab myself. It’s sick how those who hate the show feel closest to my heart. Sometimes I think it is only a question of being too sensitive. It’s not that I don’t want to please, pleasure is as good in art as anything else. But why are so many artists trying to please so much? Why do I feel the market bearing down on me as I watch? Why does the person sitting beside me see and feel something completely different? And, if this is the case, where does the conversation start?

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...

2011-08-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

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I think Joyce and Kafka have said the last word on each of the two forms they developed. There's no one to follow them. They're like cats which have licked the plate clean. You've got to dream up another dish if you're to be a writer.

- Henry Green

[The rest of the interview can be found here.]

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...

2011-08-24T05:10:00.001-07:00

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It is when you gallop that your parasites are most alive.
- Henri Michaux

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Some Favourite Books

2011-08-20T07:28:00.001-07:00

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Fiction

Aliens & Anorexia – Chris Kraus
Artificial Respiration – Ricardo Piglia
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll – Alvaro Mutis
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa – Jan Potocki
Third Factory – Viktor Shklovsky
The Seven Madmen – Roberto Arlt
Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
Hopeful Monsters – Nicholas Mosley
Impossible Object – Nicholas Mosley
Readers Block – David Markson
Wittgenstein's Mistress – David Markson
The So-Called Utopia Of The Centre Beaubourg – Luca Frei
Gentlemen & Arseholes – Lene Berg
Ye Bright and Risen Angels – William T. Vollman
Death in Rome – Wolfgang Koeppen
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter – Cesar Aira
The Ogre – Michel Tournier
The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
Meeting at the Milestone – Sigurd Hoel
Volcano and Miracle – Gustaw Herling
Locos: A Comedy of Gestures – Felipe Alfau
Europeana: A Brief History Of The Twentieth Century – Patrik Ourednik
The Waste Books – Georg Christophe Lichtenberg
Monsieur Teste – Paul Valéry
Head in Flames - Lance Olsen
Voices from the Plains - Gianni Celati

Non-Fiction

Debt: The First 5000 Year - David Graeber
Ghostly Matters – Avery F. Gordon
Metaphysical Horror – Leszek Kolakowski
The Hedgehog and the Fox– Isaiah Berlin
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – Lawrence Weschler
Drugs Are Nice – Lisa Crystal Carver
Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art & Politics - David Levi Strauss
Critique of Cynical Reason – Peter Sloterjik
Tastes of Paradise – Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Political Crumbs – Hans Magnus Enzenberger
Fiction and the Figures of Life – William H. Gass
The Culture of the Copy – Hillel Scwartz
Chromophobia – David Batchelor
Secret Publicity – Sven Lütticken
Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory – Gene Ray
Art Power – Boris Groys

Poetry

A Fast Life - Tim Dlugos
It - Inger Christensen
A Night With Hamlet - Vladimir Holan
Poems 1959-2009 - Frederick Seidel
The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny

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...

2011-08-16T09:50:00.001-07:00

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Trying to shift reality closer to hopes that are still in the process of being defined. Always struggling with the emotional triage of defeat. When faced with insurmountable odds, the only real choice is to find some way to keep going, to cling tight to the truth that the way things are will not always be the case, the world is constantly changing, and our actions have consequences.

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Contrary to former times...

2011-08-11T08:22:00.001-07:00

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Contrary to former times, this is an age in which money begets money. Today it is the man of common ability with capital, rather than the man of rare ability with no capital, who gains profit.

– Ihara Saikaku, 1693

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A sign of autumn

2011-08-10T00:33:00.000-07:00

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For Arrighi, the history of global capitalism can be understood as a spiral, at once recursive and expansive. At the scale of the world and across long waves of global development, its cycles integrate the ebb and swell of states and markets and take on familiar and even predictable patterns; in the passage from cycle to cycle, however, uncertainty is the only emperor.

In his telling, there have been four “cycles of accumulation,” each with its own imperial leader. In each period of something more than 100 years, a leading nation is able to organize the larger sphere toward its own interests — sometimes via force, but in main because it serves the interests of other states and enterprises to align themselves with the leader, a kind of influence known variously as hegemony, soft power, or neo-imperialism.

The four “long centuries” have been led by Genoa, the Dutch, the British, and the United States. Some things about this grouping are surprising, including the earliest: We are more used to recalling the glory of Venice and Florence than we are the Ligurian republic of shipbuilders. Other commonalities are plain enough, such as the reminder that the British East and West Indian Companies were cover versions of the Dutch innovation.

Most striking and most dramatic is the discovery that each of these long centuries has itself been divided into three phases, choreographically consistent: a merchant phase based on trade, followed by a phase of industrial expansion, and finally a period of financialization, in which economic vitality moves to the banking sector. It is a febrile vitality indeed, burning hot and fading away; the shift to finance is always, in Braudel’s lovely phrase, “a sign of autumn.” And when the finance era runs its course, so does the empire.

This, finally, is the crux of the book: the discovery “that the financial expansion that came to characterize the global economy in the closing decades of the twentieth century was not a new phenomenon but a recurrent tendency of historical capitalism from its earliest beginnings.” It is this that grants us some purchase on the mercurial catastrophe of the last couple of years. We should not think of the rule and ruin of Wall Street as a novel historical fact; Genoa, after all, invented modern banking, and Amsterdam saw the first stock market. In the British Empire’s dotage, the City of London became financier to the world (in The Dial in 1922 the ever-grumpy T.S. Eliot described the cosmopole as “a little bookkeeper grown old”).

The schematic quality of Arrighi’s history, seductive as it is, has also summoned skepticism. Does it not promise a sort of eternal return, the same shape repeating irrevocably — in a manner that seems discordant, to say the least, with the shifting course and deeply variegated texture of history, its subjective influences and contingent character, and its essential unknowability?

Arrighi’s postscript to the new edition, written shortly before his death, addresses these doubts directly by pointing out that he had never in fact offered such a parade of the endless same. Yes, there is a three-staged cycle that keeps coming around. But each time, it recurs at a larger and more complex scale, internalizing new costs of protection or transaction, making a more efficient order of things. Each arises from a successively larger base, with more resources and more population: from the Italian city-state to the nation-state and eventually to the continental state of the US. And in turn the reach of each empire is broader, spiraling outward toward the only real spatial limit, the arc of the globe itself. This is what globalization means, after all; it has been in motion for quite some time, but has now perhaps reached some sort of limit. We recall the preceding cycles not to mutter about how there is nothing new under the sun. We reach back into the tradition so as to better reflect on our present predicament.

- Joshua Clover on Giovanni Arrighi. The rest of the article can be found here.

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...

2011-08-07T17:30:00.001-07:00

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Idea for a novel: kidnapping the richest men in the world, stripping them of their possessions, and abandoning them anonymously in the worlds poorest slums.

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...

2011-08-06T01:40:00.001-07:00

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I've been thinking of some of the inspiring and heartbreaking appeals I've read on line recently: Tom Lutz's letter when he stepped down as chair of MFA Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside, Tim DeChristopher's impassioned speech to the jury before he was unjustly sentenced to two years in prison for a beautiful act of civil resistance and Jerry White's accurate, tough-minded socialist reading of the debt crises. I am wondering what to do with this information. The writing on the wall is so large and vicious it is almost blinding. I am wondering if anything is left to say. And for one brief second it flashed through my mind, Churchhill's 'when you're going through hell, keep going.' Always the same question: how to offer an inspiring vision of what might come next?

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Subcultures

2011-08-03T20:19:00.000-07:00

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Subcultures are niche markets
but subcultures aren’t only niche markets
because of friendship
and because of being young
when friendships are more intense
and new meanings more easily generated
new niche markets must continually be generated
because where capital reigns
nothing remains still
blasting through this wind-tunnel
buying subcultural t-shirts
produced by someone, somewhere
for pennies a day

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...

2011-07-31T13:55:00.000-07:00

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The resistance of being to purity.

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Felisberto Hernández's Nobel Prize

2011-07-29T19:09:00.000-07:00

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In a 1954 letter to Reina Reyes, his fourth wife, Felisberto Hernández outlined a story he had just “discovered”: Someone has had the idea of changing the Nobel Prize so as to give the writer who wins it “a more authentic happiness,” and prevent the fame and money currently attendant upon it from disrupting his life and work. The new idea consists of not revealing the identity of the winner even to the winner himself, but using the prize money to assemble a group of people – psychologists for the most part – who instead would secretly study and promote the writer and his work for the duration of his life. The conferral of the prize would be publicly announced only after the winner’s death.

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Tim DeChristopher quote

2011-07-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

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But the speech was about empowerment. It was about recognizing our interconnectedness rather than viewing ourselves as isolated individuals. The message of the speech was that when people stand together, they no longer have to be exploited by powerful corporations. Alienation is perhaps the most effective tool of control in America, and every reminder of our real connectedness weakens that tool.

[Excerpt from a really amazing speech by imprisoned environmental activist Tim DeChristopher. You can read the rest of the text here.]

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...

2011-07-24T18:11:00.000-07:00

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Monsanto is the Lysenko of neoliberalism.

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...

2011-07-22T14:55:00.000-07:00

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Furthermore, I will ask you to interrupt your reading of this book as many times as possible, and perhaps – almost certainly – what you think during those intervals will be the best part of the book.

- Felisberto Hernández

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Michèle Montrelay quote

2011-07-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

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Play [le jeu] rules the world. Play is everywhere, even where things seem to be most serious. The power that makes you hold your breath in a stadium, that inspires a crowd at a race track or poker players gathered all night around a card table, that’s the power we think of when we talk about the kind of fascination play exercises. But here I’m talking about extreme cases, stereotypical images that intensify and dramatize the thrill of the game. They make us forget that in a less obvious way, this pleasure is an indispensable part of everyday life. Naturally the more banal forms of play vary from country to country. I suppose hunting – on foot, with a rifle – isn’t as popular in the United States as it is here. In France hundreds of thousands of men await the opening of hunting season at the end of every summer, totally fixated on this dreamed-of moment, feverishly making a million and one preparations. Not to mention the political and athletic jousting that is ardently followed on television.

But the best playing field – and I think it’s the same in the United States as in all industrialized countries – is the professional workplace, because what is essential in order to succeed there is this gratuitous pleasure you take in overcoming obstacles, wrestling with the unknown, outplaying the adversary, even laughing with him. There is no discussion in business, however implacable, that does not partake of the tacit rules of the game, rules that confirm a kind of complicity among the players. As you know, without this no agreement can be reached.

There are many playing fields, including the arena of thought. And no one really talks about it, nor accords to this phenomenon the considerable importance it has in reality. To explain this lack of interest, we have to look at the difference between men and women. In the case of women, it is just as difficult to perceive its importance, but for the opposite reason; it’s that this phenomenon has not been experienced and acknowledged as such. You will say: but women play, and in all sorts of ways! Women can show themselves to be clever and able players, more than even their male partners! I agree with you completely on that point. But – there’s a big “but” – they play because of desires that for them count much more than the game itself: love, the need to possess I was speaking about earlier, eroticism, seduction. In short, women play games, but without being particularly concerned with what, for men, is the foundation of the game, namely, gratuitous pleasure. Don’t think that I’m telling you that men are better than women, that they’re more generous. Not at all: they’re no more angels than we are, they can be very partial when playing; in their endeavors, money and power play a considerable role, just as you say. But what you do not emphasize enough is that the power and the money are there as stakes of the game; they function as the bid or the winnings, increasing the pleasure of risk-taking, of going for broke. And a moment comes when even the most greedy of men, the biggest cheater of them all, starts to play for the sake of playing, forgetting about his own interests, accepting that finally everything, even the impossible, even failure, could be the outcome. Thus, it isn’t that players as individuals are disinterested, but rather that the pleasure of the game, which is far stronger than they are, makes them forget themselves.

When we see men playing together, we often regard them with a kind of amused compassion: they are children, we think to ourselves, their amusements aren’t really serious. And we don’t understand that this “not really serious” aspect of the game – its masculine dimension of gratuitous play – is the key, the very foundation of social power, from which women are excluded. Why? Because the game is not what interests women the most; because women are not “real” players; they lack that sense of free play that is, in essence, the spirit of the game.

Perhaps certain feminists have come up with the same analysis I am elaborating here. I would be interested in meeting them and finding out what practical conclusions they have drawn from their analysis, how it has helped them to determine what actions to take.

Now, to be realistic, we have to go even a bit further. We have to recognize the way in which women are excluded. Certain men – the really ferocious misogynists – exclude us deliberately. But the most common form of exclusion is the result of an anonymous yet organized collective. If we take seriously the idea that power is always instigated, articulated and distributed in a kind of playing field, then this collective must be conceived of accordingly. We should state the problem in the following way: it is the playing field itself that is excluding us, more than any particular man or men; men are really just the subjects, the pawns, of the game. The next step would be to specify exactly what this playing field consists of, taking the word “playing field” not simply as the designation of a circumscribed space, an area, but as the sphere specific to the masculine game itself. We’d have to try to comprehend its raison d’etre – something I won’t try to do here and now. The book I’m writing on masculine sexuality [L’Appareillage] begins with a discourse on play similar to the one I’ve just been giving you. This discourse begs for further elaboration, but rest assured, I’m not going to take it any further today!

Well, maybe just one more brief comment. This sphere can be thought of as an organism that possesses its own laws, organs, economy, and libido. Like a living body, it has its own system of expulsion. And we – women who aren’t “real” players – we are the foreign bodies ejected by this organism, we are like organs that are supposed to be grafted onto the organism, but that it can’t help but reject. That’s how we’re shut out – as if spontaneously, out of neither good nor bad will.

I believe that all the women who share a little bit of the power pie with men, those who are out on the playing field, and who thus work most effectively for the feminist cause, these women have sized up the game and the masculine pleasure that is part of it, and have discovered, whether consciously or unconsciously, how to come to terms with it. How? You’ll have to ask them.

- Michèle Montrelay

[This quote is from the book Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France edited by By Alice A. Jardine and Anne M. Menke]

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...

2011-07-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

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After I kill myself, all the years of despair will suddenly become consequent.

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...

2011-07-10T20:14:00.000-07:00

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My love is eternal and my train leaves in fifteen minutes.

- Mina Loy

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A letter about The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information

2011-07-05T16:45:00.000-07:00

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Dear curious spectator,

I am currently reading the book Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 by Tim Lawrence. (It is essentially a history of disco.) In it, there was one particular anecdote that fascinated me. In 1965, when the New York club Shephard’s replaced its house band with a DJ, the American Federation of Musicians picketed in protest.

This story echo’s many of my questions and artistic concerns. Is there something fundamentally different between the experience of going to see a live band and listening to a recording? Are there some essential attributes that make a performance situation ‘live’, and if so how do they differ from attributes of recorded media? Is a live experience more intense? More real? More immediate? More unexpected? I don’t have precise answers for any of these questions, but it’s my hope that our work itself is a kind of an answer, or at the very least a way of making such questions more rich, more complicated, of making them resonate.

In the above anecdote the DJ is literally putting the musicians out of work. (In such matters I always side with the union, but can’t fail to admit I love, and perhaps even prefer, listening to records.) It also suggests a certain dynamic between the individual and the community: the musicians cooperate with each other, they work, play (and in this case picket) together, while the DJ spins alone.

As we now know, the future was in many ways on the DJ’s side. We live in a world in which we are constantly surrounded by mediated experiences: photographs, television, movies, music, internet, advertising of every kind. I have always wondered if making a live performance might offer alternative ways of watching and of being together, ways that differ significantly from watching a movie or being on the internet.

In our new show The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information we play records and tell stories about them. We tell every kind of story: about bands, things that happened to us, to our friends and to complete strangers, theories about the world, about love and about life. They are stories that suggest the songs we listen to also affect how we think, live and understand our daily lives. The alternation between telling (live) stories and listening to (recorded) music also feels important to me. We have records by Al Green, Broadcast, Burial, Caetano Veloso, De La Soul, Der Plan, Jacques Brel, Kronos Quartet, LCD Soundsystem, Omar Khorshid, Pavement, Prince, Public Enemy, Red Guitars, Robert Wyatt, Sister Nancy, The Ramones and so many more. (I think we have slightly over a hundred.)

I don’t think there’s anything particular you have to do to prepare yourself. For me this work is simply a place to relax, listen and enjoy. We don’t anticipate dancing but, then again, why not.

Hope to see you there.

Jacob Wren
Co-artistic Director
PME-ART

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...

2011-06-28T18:41:00.001-07:00

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The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. Having said this much, we have nevertheless still not addressed our question. Why should we be at all interested in perceiving the obscurity that emanates from the epoch? Is darkness not precisely an anonymous experience that is by definition impenetrable, something that is not directed at us and thus cannot concern us? On the contrary, the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him. Darkness is something that – more than any light – turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.

- Giorgio Agamben, What Is The Contemporary?

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The Children's Book Writer

2011-06-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

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He preferred to write drunk. His books were more successful when he wrote them drunk. His theory was that his drunk books were looser and more anarchic, and children loved anarchy, meaning they still believed they would be happier if they could just do whatever they want. He didn't think of children when he wrote, he thought of drinking. The book he was currently working on was called Tears. It was about a child who cries and cries until her tears form a puddle, then a river, then a lake, then an ocean, until finally the entire world is covered in salty water. It was the drunkest book he had ever written, and when he thought of it this way he felt a little bit proud. Often, when he was drunk enough, he cried as well. He drank and wrote and cried and the tears in his eyes an the tears on the page were more or less the same tears. His publisher would worry the book was too sad to publish but eventually published it anyway. His publisher worried about his drinking. Sometimes he went to see prostitutes. He told the prostitutes he wrote children's books because he thought this might make him seem kind. Sometimes when he was with a prostitute he would cry and then he would tell her about the little girl whose tears became a puddle, a river, a lake, an ocean and then the entire world. The prostitute would roll her eyes but he wouldn't notice. When Tears was finally finished, late at night, he would walk by the children's bookstore and see his book in the window. One night when he was standing in front of the window a family with two small children also stopped to look. He pointed to the cover of Tears. "I wrote that," he said. They might have not completely believed him, but nonetheless seemed mildly impressed.

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Book launch at the karaoke bar, a brief report

2011-06-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

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I stayed at the launch for approximately twenty-five minutes. I often go to events for a short amount of time. When Warhol was asked how he managed to be seen at all the parties on a given night, he replied it was simple: he walked in the front door, through the party, and directly out the back. I’m not especially like Warhol. At least I hope I’m more earnest, political and complex, plus I sometimes have a beard, but it’s difficult to generate an accurate assessment of one’s own practice or personality. During twenty-five minutes I bought the book but did not remove the shrink-wrap. I bought a vodka-tonic. The bartender gave me the vodka and tonic in separate glasses. When I poured the tonic into the vodka, the glass was still barely half full. I drank it quickly, out of nervousness but also because there wasn’t very much. I had short conversations with M and M-A. During the conversation with M he invited me to contribute to this zine. I had a slightly longer conversation with C during which she suggested we organize an event together, something really big. At the phrase ‘really big’ I must have turned unenthusiastic, because she said I looked afraid. It’s true I’m afraid of big gestures. With small things one can only have small failures. I love small failures. But with ‘really big’ you might actually burn down everything. Which I also like. Perhaps I’m afraid I like it too much. I’m afraid I like self-sabotage too much. C said that when I wasn’t afraid anymore we should talk, then went to say hello to other friends. For a split second I considered having another drink but was already out the door. Then I walked a route I’m not sure I’ve ever walked before, a shortcut: across the street, alongside a community garden, through an alley, alongside a playground. In the playground two small girls were in a spray of water jumping up and down over and over. I glanced at them and wondered if I had ever felt joy like that. I don’t believe I was a particularly joyous child. Moments later I was at Cagibi writing this report straight through in one go. I will have to remember that shortcut if I ever want to do karaoke. I love karaoke: the small failure par excellence.

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Unfinished and ridiculous poem tangentially about a certain view of Darwinism

2011-06-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

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Assholes are everywhere
in the trees and in the eaves
from summer skies to autumn leaves
telling lies and thwarting needs
they're everywhere

Assholes are everywhere
in governments and corner stores
from corporate law to dirty wars
they care who pays, count who scores
they're everywhere

Assholes are everywhere
getting worse, accruing power
from every bee to every flower
in hopeless sighs, endless tries
they're everywhere

Assholes are everywhere
in tanks and banks, in snakes and lakes
in violent shoves and on the make
for a quick buck, a quicker fuck
they're everywhere

Assholes are everywhere
in selfish genes, hipster scenes
the subtle ways that we come clean
when you say evolution it's not what you mean
they're everywhere

Assholes are everywhere
in hopeless bets, desperate wealth
when you won't help another but still help yourself
from savvy smiles, love defiled
they're everywhere

[Unfinished.]

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...

2011-06-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

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What to do with the desire? With the desire that cannot be sated. With the violence and anger that stems from this desire and with the violence and anger that blocks it out in equal parts. What to do with the lack of acceptable poetry in the world, with the utterly embarrassing and ridiculous nature of all poetic attempts? What to do with the unavoidable and sad and joyous everyday poetry that smacks against us like a violent storm? What to do with our paltry careers, that cannot satisfy and yet cannot be dismissed? It is criminal the way we live, with no hope or only false hope, and yet nothing we might call life is truly criminal. Stop being an artist in order to start. Different kinds of loneliness: in work, in crowds, alone, in love.

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...

2011-06-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

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A corporate executive, a union member and a Tea Party member are sitting at a table. On the table are 10 cookies. The CEO reaches out and takes nine cookies at once and then turns to the Tea Party member and says, “Look out! That union guy is trying to take your cookie!”

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All the YouTube videos I currently have on my Facebook wall

2011-06-12T07:05:00.000-07:00

...

2011-06-11T14:50:00.000-07:00

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In Thailand the ad “Come alive – you’re the Pepsi generation” was translated into their language. It became, “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.”

- Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

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From Of Ourselves and of Our Origins by Peter Schjeldahl

2011-06-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

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An abundance of good art is being made today. It’s just not good for a lot that matters, in the reality-altering way that great art seems to. This is even more the case with criticism. The present sheer quantity of smart art writing is unusual, in my lifetime. But, similarly, the writing is not smart about very much. Critics now are good at answers. We’re short of good questions. This is a matter of how the world is. The world isn’t raising questions in forms that individuals can very well lay hold of. We might conclude that the world hates individuals, but that would be to flatter ourselves. The world doesn’t care.

I would like to be proved wrong tomorrow, when I come across new writing that is brilliant in itself, compelling in its comprehension of our lives in common, and suggestive of fruitful attitudes and actions – a game-changer. But I won’t bet on it.

Our part of the world is droopy these days, isn’t it? Prevalent are moods of frustration, senses of insufficiency and piled-up disappointments. The worst thing about this is that it conduces to despair, which conduces to bullshit. Bullshit is a time-honoured way of disguising voids of meaning and of getting by in life by getting around people, because who cares? I would like to think that some of us care or, at least, might act as if we care and see where that goes. Call it moral make-believe. Make-believe has nothing in common with bullshit, by the way. It requires absolute honesty. Ask any little kid.

[And also this:]

I saw recently that Bob Dylan was buttonholed by a fan who enthused, ‘You changed my life!’ Dylan replied: ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do about it?’

That was bad manners. It wouldn’t kill Bob Dylan to say thank you, fake it a little. But his point is impeccable. If you’re an artist, you don’t start the morning by saying to yourself, ‘Hey, think I’ll change some idiot’s life today’. You work. To be really good at anything, assuming that you’re talented, is to work harder and longer, with more ruthless honesty and discipline, than other people could do without bursting into tears. Your secret is that, hard as it may be, it doesn’t feel like work to you. It feels normal, like eating and sleeping. You are not about to hand your own life over to anybody to change or to not change, though you might wish you could. And you positively do not accept responsibility for the lives of your audience. That’s not good for them, and it is a day-spoiling pain in the ass for you.

So as an artist you’re lonely. You know the fragility and vulnerability of your Great Good Place but you lean your whole weight into it anyhow. Along with wanting fame and money and sex, like everybody, you want to slip that place into the map of the world, to make the world a little less wretched to you. You will even go without the fame and money and sex parts, if necessary. You will be misunderstood, often enough by people – darling dumbbells – who praise you. (Be kind to them if you can.) That’s the deal. No one said you were an artist. You said you were an artist. You asked for it. No whining.

[The full text of the Peter Schjeldahl talk can be found here.]

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The Facebook-Orwell Letters

2011-06-03T05:59:00.000-07:00

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[The following letters were written as part of the project Big Brother where art thou?, a collaboration with Lene Berg. The project took place entirely on a Facebook page that you can find here.]

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Dear Big Brother,

Money seems important in our world. The philosophy that money is the only measure of value is perhaps the closest thing our moment has to Big Brother. I’ve been searching for slogans, words that might pry open our current situation, that might open a window and let in some air. I came up with this: neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital. But to call the enemy names, to cast the enemy in a totalitarian light, however true it might be, is also to distract from whatever it is that we are. And I believe we are lost. How to make a virtue from our lostness? How to make from it a weapon?

The weakest part of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the most unconvincing, is when O’Brien attempts to explain the motivations of the inner circle. (“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.”) No one seeks power for absolutely no reason. One always seeks power in order to do something with it. We don’t really understand the motivations of Big Brother. We don’t really understand the motivations of everything that is going terribly wrong all around us. And when you don’t understand you don’t know how to fight.

When I have success I believe it is because I am talented and clever. I am also willing to admit that pure luck is a factor. And that the cultural capital associated with my socio-economic background played a role. But my first thought, that I only begin to question moments later, is that it is because I am talented, that the main cause is something essential within me. I can dismiss this as ego but I also know that it is potent. Rulers, kings, dictators must also believe that their skill, strategy and guile have taken them to the top and will keep them there. Your power is irrefutable evidence of your genius. If your power is absolute, so must your genius be.

But every time I begin to understand my understanding falls short. Perhaps the true lesson of the twentieth century is that propaganda works. We might also say this about advertising. If you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, it becomes the truth. Or, as you, as Big Brother, might put it, if you tell the truth long enough and loud enough it becomes a lie.

Sincerely, A

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Dear George Orwell,

What would have happened if you had never become quite so famous? Repressive governments that distort the truth are now forever connected to your final work or, it sometimes seems, to a generalized sense of your posthumous celebrity in the form of the term ‘Orwellian.’

As is well known, Warhol once said ‘in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.’ (Ironically, perhaps the phrase he is most famous for.) A more recent cliché says: on Facebook everyone will be famous for fifteen people.

A book review I once read claimed that famous red-baiter Joseph McCarthy started the anti-communist witch-hunt not because he was a true ideologue, but because he wanted the fame that came along with it. I believe you also very much wanted the fame that came to you mainly after you were gone. This of course is not a sin. In fact, for an artist, it is most likely a normal, one might even say banal, condition.

One might also say that, within the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother is extremely famous. How much of the brutality in the world comes from this desire to be seen, to be known, and to be known to have done something important, to be known as someone who changed the world.

Sincerely, A

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Dear Facebook,

One might say one is addicted to a lover. But one has to be careful when using the same word to describe different things. I don’t know what an addiction to a lover feels like, but I will try my best to describe this addiction that I am experiencing here and now. Much like Ingsoc, in my day to day life Facebook replaces all other social interactions; with pokes, posts, notes and likes as it’s minimal, effective and acceptable Newspeak. Everything is allowed but gestures that are not allowed immediately receive censure from a spontaneous conglomeration of ‘friends’ who quickly comment to express their disapproval. However, censure is relatively rare. Far more often my behavior is shaped through positive reinforcement. I do something acceptable and, almost immediately, a number of friends ‘like’ it. This is a more satisfying and simplified form of positive reinforcement than one is able to achieve within other aspects of so called daily life. As well, there is a vague sense of simultaneous contact with a large number of people, contact with little danger of conflict. Does it need to be said that Facebook, much like Ingsoc, is an exceedingly lonely place? And yet the addiction stands.

Sincerely, A

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Dear users of Facebook,

There are millions and millions of you. If you wanted, you could start the revolution.

Sincerely, A

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Dear corporations buying statistical information from Facebook,

I am concerned. Is my information useful to you? Is it useful enough? You now know something about me. But what is it you know precisely? Do I fit within a category that makes it seemly or convenient for you to sell me something or am I momentarily outside of such categories? If neo-liberalism is the privatization of everything, the totalitarianism of capital, then are you – the anonymous, omnipresent purchasers of the statistical version of my interface with this device – in some sense the Big Brother of capital?

Sincerely, A

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Dear secret service agents using Facebook to spy on us,

I know your weakness. There are too many of us. There is no possible way for you to keep track of every last one. You scan for suspicious words but we avoid such words. You watch the YouTube videos we post, see what we had for breakfast. What precisely can you do with such information? There are millions and millions of videos, millions and millions of breakfasts. Do you really have the time or manpower to scroll through them all? All of this suggests that resistance is possible. And yet, secretly, we know it is not.

Sincerely, A

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Dear Facebook users using Facebook to spy on each other,

We can all understand the pleasure of spying on one’s neighbor. Also the ritual of the promenade. The internet is a place to find out information about things and people and to be entertained. A place to scan through a large quantity of disparate information very quickly. Your ‘friends’ on Facebook are a kind of information. They provide clues about themselves. On occasion someone will post something about themselves quickly, barely even realizing they have done so. This happens less and less. For you, within the private moment of spying, these posts are vicarious treasures. These are the moments one never clicks ‘like.’

Sincerely, A

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Dear readers and viewers of this project,

It’s a strange feeling attempting an art project on Facebook. One thought that recently occurred to me is that Facebook could take down this page at any time and for any reason. This would most likely occur if someone were to ‘report’ our project, like children in Nineteen Eighty-Four ratting out their parents. To report an offence to the authorities is an ambiguous act. If you see something you feel is wrong, it’s only natural to want to act on that feeling of wrongness. But who are the authorities you’re reporting to and to what degree do you trust them? How do we negotiate the things we think are wrong without appealing to some distant to authority?

Facebook is a culture of re-enforced positivity. You ‘accept’, ‘like’ and ‘comment’ (most often positively.) Negativity exists on Facebook, but it stands out. In this sense Facebook is far more like Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. But there are two sides to Facebook. The user’s side, and the way the user – in the form of information – is, can or might be used. (The Brave New World side and the Nineteen Eighty-Four side.) But this is all, of course, too simplistic.

The idea that this page could be pulled at any moment, could disappear, is what I keep coming back to. That working here, on Facebook, feels somehow less real, more contingent. But, then again, contingency is perhaps one of the more precious aspects of being alive.

Sincerely, A

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Dear Facebook equals Big Brother paradigm,

These things seem to me to be mainly a question of scale. Not of one person, or a group of people, imposing their will on others. But the scale upon which one person, or a group, is able to impose their will on others. The greater the scale the more difficult it is to fight, the more omnipotent it feels on a lived, day to day level. What is the scale of Facebook? It seems like everyone is on it and if you aren’t you would be reasonable in feeling left out. On the other hand it feels mainly like a toy.

Facebook isn't so frightening in the here and now. Facebook is mainly frightening if we consider how it might be used in the future. The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four also places its frightening situation in the future. This is always the most suspicious thing: to place the catastrophe in the future and not here in the present. Because the problems we can actually deal with are here and now. Both less and more disastrous than we currently feel them to be.

Canada is not Burma. Germany is not North Korea. But our lives – the richness and sense of possibility of contemporary life – are impoverished by the structures within which we currently live. What I don't know is if this has simply always been the case. Or will always be the case from now on. Something can only be bad in comparison to something else which is less bad. If everything is bad than everything is fine. But things only get better when you fight.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four there is no way to fight. On Facebook there is no way to fight. I hate it when I become didactic. And also hate it when I don't.

Sincerely, A

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Big Brother where art thou?

2011-05-28T22:54:00.000-07:00

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‘Facebook equals Big Brother’ is a common trope of our time. Big Brother where art thou? – a collaboration between Lene Berg and Jacob Wren that takes place entirely on Facebook – is an attempt to unravel the question of what Big Brother might mean today, examining the life and legacy of George Orwell by posting questions, dialogues, images, videos and whatever else they can create or find.

The project takes place entirely on a Facebook page that you can find here.

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Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings

2011-05-13T11:41:00.001-07:00

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I’ve been making art for my entire life and I’ve never felt more lost. In this, I believe I am not alone.

Do we care enough about art, meaning, the world to admit there is no obvious or effective way forward? That we’re going in circles with an ever-lessening effect? That we’re going in circles but are unwilling to admit it?

The grand excitements of art – the modernist breaks, the new movements, the cataclysms – are long behind us. More recent trends are fleeting at best. The belief in originality is utterly depleted and, more importantly, no longer feels like a worthy goal. All we have now is A LOT, far too much, of everything. A LOT of art, theatre, dance, performance, music, installation, painting, literature, cinema, internet: of every possible type and gradation of quality. More stuff than you could possibly experience even if you lived for several million years.

But we don’t live for even a million years. Our lives are brief and what it means to seize the day is by no means clear. Why must we pretend that we know what to do?

Politics have lost the plot – right wing governments and the ascendancy of the super-rich are the order of the day – and artists are of little assistance. On our current environmental trajectory we believe the planet will not survive. But, if we keep hurtling forward, in fact it is we who will not survive, as the planet steps in to take care of itself. (Then again, it is likely at least a few of us will survive to sort through the wreckage. But we can’t make art for them. They’re not born yet. We must make art for now.)

With this present, and this future, how can one feel that bold artistic moves have any real energy? Conflicted feelings rule the day. Daily confusions of every stripe. Ambivalence is king. Where is the art that strikingly knows it’s own futility but stumbles forward compellingly, anyway, because as an artist you have no choice?

To change anything you have to work together with other people. This is the essential logic behind an art movement, behind a manifesto. To work together with other people you need to line up behind a potent conviction, agree to all run in the same direction, at least until you score the first few goals. There is power in numbers, in clans, clubs and mafias. So why can’t all the artists in the world who feel as lost as I do come together, think about what is left to do and how? There may be no convictions to unite us, but why can’t we unite in the potency of our contemporary ambivalence? In the desire to be honest and vulnerable about where we actually stand?

(An artist who is little more than an advertisement for him or her self is so lost there might be no way back towards meaning. I live in constant fear that this is what I might become.)

I dream of energy, content, value, meaning. Effective left wing populism. The end, or reduction, of alienation, consumerism, war and stupidity. But when you dream you are asleep, and right now I would prefer to be as awake as possible. And to be awake means to admit I have almost no idea how to bring such dreams closer to reality. All roads seem blocked. I have no idea what strategies – in life, politics or art – might be genuinely useful or poetic. I want to be awake, while not losing touch with the knowledge that to stay sane one must continue to sleep and dream.

In fact, I wish to write a manifesto that will admit to everything: ambivalence, conflicted feelings, doing things only for money, humiliation, cynicism, confusion, not being able to tell my friends from my enemies. To admit to everything and find out if anyone agrees. If anyone out there is with me. If such honesty and confusion can mean anything in the current world. If there can be any integrity to it. If it can transform itself into a useful truth.

An artist doesn’t need conviction. An artist doesn’t need to know which way to go. An artist needs talent, naiveté, community and life experience. None of these things are incompatible with feeling lost.

(I would someday like to write another manifesto about how art that is not intrinsically connected to life is of no value. But I feel too lost to enter into life. I’m an extreme case. I can’t find the way in.)

Of course, about such things one doesn’t write manifestos. But perhaps we should find a way to start.

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Matt Bell on A Film That Will Make The Audeince Feel Pure Joy

2011-05-10T03:42:00.000-07:00

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As part of Short Story Month 2011, Matt Bell wrote a very nice text on my story A Film That Will Make The Audience Feel Pure Joy. You can find his text here.

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2011-05-10T03:31:00.001-07:00

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It’s incredibly difficult to write a novel with a lot of characters but no protagonist. A novel with a number of equally interesting, equally complex characters who are all working together towards a common goal. We experience every story as having a clear protagonist because the protagonist is oneself, you experience your life as a story with yourself at the centre.

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2011-05-05T04:23:00.000-07:00

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Overanalyzing something that is actually, in fact, pretty stupid, like an unwillingness to admit how basic and manipulative the factors at play are. There must be more to it, the mind compulsively brays. And yes, of course, there is always more. But the essential thing is also the most obvious. A sadness that our world is not as complex as we’d like it to be. And that the pathetic, nasty, desperate action is little more than that, little more than show.

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2011-05-03T23:49:00.001-07:00

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When I first heard the phrase ‘workfare’ (a kind of welfare where the recipient is forced to work) my knee jerk reaction was that it was a proposal for some kind of contemporary slavery. But I’ve been thinking a lot about left-wing populism lately. And it got me wondering if there was some ethical way to positively connect the welfare state with voluntary community service. So that when one was unemployed one became more connected with ones community instead of less. And how one could be unemployed and still be of service to others, since being useful generates self-worth. There is often a kind of paradox in our culture that when people have more free time they have less resources to make use of it. What kind of model might make a welfare-community service connection possible? How to prevent such an idea from devolving into something ugly?

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2011-05-02T14:42:00.001-07:00

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Anyone tried this joke yet, which only works if you tell it in the U.S.: "Who do you have to kill to get re-elected in this country."

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Some short quotes

2011-04-28T11:13:00.001-07:00

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My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don’t like.
~ Bruce Nauman

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.
~ Werner Herzog

What I’m interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.
~ Wolfgang Tillmans

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
~ Charles Darwin

Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.
~ Alain Badiou

I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at that moment.
~ Paul Thek

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
~ W.S.Burroughs

Sometimes I am such an unbeliever, I can’t even bring myself to believe that there are people who don’t believe.
~ Sarah Vanhee

Because experience shows that there is nothing easier to instrumentalize than yesterday’s subversion.
~ Brian Holmes

Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
~ Gilles Deleuze

Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.
~ Simone Weil

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
~ Stendhal

Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
~ Jean Genet

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
~ William Gaddis

I would like to dance with the people and with the things I’m working towards.
~ Avery F. Gordon

The art of the future is not connoisseurship, but labor itself transfigured.
~ Nikolai Tarabukin

The record, as usual, is not good. But on the other hand it is wonderful.
~ Caetano Veloso

The conflict between art and politics… cannot and must not be solved.
~ Hannah Arendt

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.
~ Paul Valéry

There is no force like guilt to create intense reality effects.
~ Jan Verwoert

I recommend paranoia, it generates a lot of creativity
~ Jeanne Randolph

I’m what happens after death, which is writing.
~ Kathy Acker

Wishes are premonitions of abilities.
~ Goethe

I am at war with the obvious.
~ William Eggleston

Awkwardness is collaborative.
~ James Guida

I accept the world.
~ Margaret Fuller

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The problem of immigration, through his body

2011-04-27T13:22:00.000-07:00

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Then I was reading about Jean-Luc Nancy, apparently he had a heart transplant 10 years ago, and when his body was rejecting the foreign body inside it, he found he finally could write the essay about immigration in France that Derrida had asked him to write years before - he understood the problem of immigration, through his body.

- Rosie, which I found here

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from The Strategic Efficacy of Infiltrators

2011-04-23T08:25:00.001-07:00

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Everyone loves me and I love no one. This is a feeling of power. It is what makes the job possible. The job is, in part, to make sure no one ever knows about the job. Like all things in life, it might end at any time, but that is not for me to decide. The only evidence of the job is that money is inserted into my account, in wildly differing amounts and at absolutely inexplicable intervals. Otherwise the job is invisible. Each time money is deposited into my account it comes from a different place, a different front. Each of these places, the names of these places, means nothing to me. But I secretly invent a story for each one, in case I am ever asked. Each of these stories must be simple and to the point. If they were complex I would never remember them.

The financial aspects of the job are relatively straightforward when compared to the rest. When you have money you don’t need love. Money makes things happen. But the job requires love or it all goes to hell. Love is connected to power. Or at least that is what I must continue to believe as long as I am consumed. For much of the time I am alone, reading the exact same books I would read if I was placed where I am but the job did not exist. There are things I need to know and to know them I must read the books that everyone here reads. I let my mind go blank to enjoy reading these books. The books do not need to be criticized (at least not by me.) My fellow activists do not need to be criticized.

When I am doing the job correctly it is almost as if I am doing nothing. Just the occasional, well-placed suggestion that sends things off along a slightly different path. What amazes me most is how little is required of me as long as I maintain their trust. When I am trusted, when I am loved, my suggestions are simply taken into consideration. If I time these suggestions effectively it is remarkable how quickly they can become the plan for the entire group. But, then again, it is a question of self-discipline. I must be careful, vigilant with myself, in order not to make suggestions too often. If it appears I am trying to control things then the game is lost.

When I am doing the job correctly it feels like I don’t exist. Something exists but it is not exactly me. Many of the core ideas of the group are based around notions of collectivity and when I feel that I don’t exist I also feel that I fit more neatly within this framework. A part of a machine does not go around thinking look at me, I am this very specific and important part. It thinks about the machine, which must function and will function best if all the parts are thinking about the machine. Of course, I am a part of two machines with different goals and different modalities. The machines overlap but the overlap is invisible. And yet, at times, in fact most of the time, I imagine there is only one. One machine pulling in two separate directions, with me as its only common part.

The group meets once a month. This is the main gathering, where everyone shares new ideas, talks about what actions we should plan for the future, talks over what was done in the past and how it might be done better. Recently at these meetings it has been suggested there might be an infiltrator among us. This has been the true test of my mettle. How to participate in the conversations about me as if I did not exist? How to participate without giving anything away? I have no tricks or strategy. It is simply a question of speaking genuinely while always leaving out the same key piece of information. I am always careful never to suggest there is not an infiltrator, to always leave the possibility open. So far no one has suggested it might be me, at least not in my presence, but when they do I must be careful. At that moment it will either end or reach a breaking point past which exposing me will prove impossible. The room where the meetings take place is Catherine’s apartment. Three weeks ago Catherine and I began sleeping together and she is now completely in love with me. This is another potentially dangerous situation I must monitor carefully.

At times we have all had the feeling of being double agents. We have all had two conflicting desires or goals that we have had to negotiate. For example, a boss that wants us to work all the time versus an husband or wife who wants us to spend more time at home. We tell the boss that we are willing to work and tell our loved one that we will find more time for them and continue to negotiate as long as possible.

Along with the main gathering there are also smaller gatherings between one, two or three members. These smaller meetings are where most of the concrete decisions are made, and present a complex difficulty for me in terms of the job. They are of course where I can have the greatest influence on the day to day reality of the group and its actions. But they also contain an intimacy that greatly increases the chance I will be found out, a proximity within which I am far more likely to slip up. As well, I must not attend too many of these smaller meetings because that in itself would be suspicious. It is difficult to ascertain the exact number of smaller meetings I should attend. Because also attending too few might raise suspicion, or at least call into question my level of commitment to the group. In general, I have decided to attend about half of the smaller meetings, careful to vary the exact number so my actions appear spontaneous.

It was at a meeting with Steve, Catherine and myself that the idea first came up. We were talking about corporations. How when you protest against government they have, at least in theory, a democratic responsibility to take your protest into consideration. But corporations have no such responsibility. They are accountable only to their shareholders. Steve commented that, under current policy, governments in fact felt more accountable to the corporations that paid for their campaigns then they did to the citizens that elected them. And there was a kind of consequent logic to this, since the party that spent the most campaigning was also the one most likely to win. Government is the shadow of business, Catherine said. It was a quote from Adam Smith. I hadn’t said anything for awhile and was therefore asked what I thought. I said there must be some way to get at the shareholders directly, since their opinions genuinely had the potential to impact the actions of the corporation. I don’t know why, in particular, I said this. It was one of the comments I made from time to time that, strictly speaking, could not be said to be part of the job, the logic being that if I were only to say things the job required my overall position would appear too imbalanced. I mainly had to say other, more normal, things that would serve to position me as a committed member of the movement.

So I brought up the idea of directly targeting the shareholders and it was an idea that really caught fire in the imaginations of Steve and Catherine. There followed a continuous stream of suggestions as to what the best way to do so might be. A shareholder makes an investment, Catherine said. He or she wants a return on that investment. A profit. This desire for profit is completely disconnected from the daily operations and injustices of the corporation. What we need to do is find a way to connect the investment and corporate crimes within the mind of the shareholder.

I prefer smaller meetings that have either Steve or Catherine in attendance. Or both. They’re younger, more suggestible, less jaded. At times, their enthusiasm can be contagious and I find myself forgetting about the job. But, if it doesn’t go too far, I believe this is also positive since it gives me a better idea of what it would feel like to fully believe in the cause. Erika is the most cynical and also the most suspicious of me. In general, I keep my distance but when it can’t be avoided I take her on earnestly, in as straightforward a manner as is possible. Erika hates the fact that I’m sleeping with Catherine, and I play on this dynamic, hinting at the possibility that what she has against me is only a kind of non-feminist jealously of the much younger Catherine. Since we both know this is not the case, I can only apply this strategy sparingly, just a taste of it in the air, keeping open the possibility that her suspicion might be unwarranted.

I decide to let the stockholder brainstorming run its course for a few days before trying to influence it one way or another. To be effective, my suggestions must come at the right time, and now is definitely not it. It is still only the beginning, when most suggestions will quickly be forgotten, replaced by new suggestions, each new idea distorting and confusing the last. Catherine suggests that we could set up an organization for concerned shareholders, get all the shareholders together who would like to see things change and help them organize. Maybe, she wonders, there are a lot of people with investments who would like to see things change but feel isolated, don’t realize there are others out there like them who could help make it happen.

Later that night, after Catherine and I have made love, we lie under the duvet, naked, curled up together, and I feel some tears well up in the corners of my eyes. Catherine notices and wipes them away.
– You’re crying.
– Yes.
– Why?
– I don’t know. The way the world is going, sometimes it makes me sad.
– Yes. That’s why we need to fight.

Only one of us knows I’m lying. Actually, I don’t know why I’m crying. Maybe these things have no reason. Catherine has been so kind and tender with me. And I have been completely dishonest. But I’m happy I’m crying and that I can tell Catherine it’s because of the current state of the world. It makes me appear sensitive, which within the political logic of the group I believe is important, and it tightens the bond between us, which will serve me well in the near future. Now Catherine is crying as well, not too much, just a little bit, like me. I mirror her action, wiping away her tears the same way she wiped away mine. She looks at me with genuine concern.
– Do you ever think that what we’re doing is pointless?
– Of course. It’s only natural to have doubts.
– Then what do you do? To keep going?
– I remind myself it’s always better to do something than nothing. If you do nothing than you assure that nothing will change. While if you do something at least you keep open the possibility that something might.

I had read this idea in a book a few weeks ago. I can’t remember which one, I’ll have to check my notes. When I first read it, it struck me as something that applied to the job as well, only reversed. If I do nothing something might change. And it’s only by doing something that things can stay the same. I like these kinds of paradoxes. They keep the job perverse. Without paradox, without perversity, it is impossible to do the job in a convincing way. Catherine is almost asleep now, and the warmth of her body next to mine feels comforting and good. I wonder what she will think of me if the whole thing blows up. Of course she’d feel betrayed. But in precisely what way would she feel betrayed?

Then there are the Rob’s. Rob One and Rob Two. Such different people that, at times, it is extremely comical they are both named Rob. Rob One often takes a leadership role (which is why I have called him Rob One.) But what’s impressive, and perhaps the reason he has become something of an unofficial leader, is his willingness to give power to others when the situation requires it. If someone has a good idea he encourages always them to run with it. However, over the course of these past ten weeks, studying him more closely, I now realize that when Rob One hands over power, when he’s encouraging, its because someone had what he considers a good idea. And I suspect someone Rob couldn’t stand wouldn’t last very long in the group. He’d find some way to push them out, preferably letting them think it was there own idea. I have to be extremely careful to stay on Rob One’s good side. So far he’s kept his distance.

Rob Two is harder to pin down, not around nearly as much and when he is he’s a bit of a loose cannon. One time, when we were all out together, we came around a corner and he had completely covered a police car in anti-capitalist posters. We all laughed, it was a genuinely joyous moment. Later at the weekly meeting everyone agreed that Rob Two had taken a huge, unnecessary risk. But, Catherine said, we laughed together all night. She couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed that much or so hard. And it was a joy we had experienced together, bringing us closer. So wasn’t it worth it?

Everyone agreed she had a point, but also agreed that Rob Two shouldn’t take this as encouragement to ‘do whatever he wanted whenever the fuck he felt like it’ (Steve’s words.) Rob Two just laughed it off and didn’t say much in his own defense. It was a joke, was basically all he said, he wanted to live in a world where people could still make jokes and life was fun. Implied was a critique of the group – that we were too serious, too earnest, too much against the miserable things we were against and not enough toward the beautiful things we were for (such as love, laughter and fun.) Looking around the room, you could tell this implied critique hit home, that people felt a bit ashamed of their seriousness. At the same time, no one wanted to go to jail for a prank. If I play it right, I believe Rob Two could be an effective ally for me in the future.

The next day I see Erika at the café and she invites me to join her. All of us go to the café. To read or talk. We’ve barely started and already Erika is telling me I can’t be trusted. That there’s something suspicious about me and the way I interact with the group. She suspects. But I know. And my certainty will always give me the upper hand. I tell her we’ve been through this before and I don’t know what to say to reassure her. What does she want me to do?
– Leave.
– But I don’t want to leave.
– Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want.
– Look, I’m just like you. I believe in collective decision making. Isn’t that one of the things we’re fighting for? So if you can convince the others that the best thing would be for me to go, I’ll respect the wishes of the group.

This is a risky move. Erika had been around much longer than me and her opinion carries more weight. But I believe I can count on Catherine’s support. And Rob Two might come down on side just to be contrary. In general, I don’t think it falls within the spirit of the group to kick someone out just for the hell of it.

Erika is taken back by my proposal and there is a moment of silence between us, silence filtered through the din of the café. I can see she’s pissed off. She doesn’t want all the difficulty and hassle of a democratic process. She just wants me out. I know that if she can convince Rob One she might very well get her way. But they also have a rocky history (the details of which are unclear to me.) As well, to do the rounds and convince everyone, one at a time, of my malicious nature might take her a few weeks, time that I can be using to work on other things. I see her formulating her thoughts, trying to dream up the single thing she could say that would be a knock out blow, force me to leave right here and now.
– Who do you work for?
– How do you mean?
– I’m almost sure of it. You’re being paid to come here and fuck with us.
– I don’t think it serves anyone if we start becoming paranoid.
– There’s no ‘we’ here. There’s ‘you’ and there’s ‘us.’
– I don’t understand why you’d say that. It hurts my feelings. I want to do good work. That’s why I came here. I believe we can do good work together.
– Why is it so hard to argue with a liar?
– I’m not lying.
– We both know you are.

I wonder what I did, or what it is about me, or about Erika, that allowed her to catch hold of my tail so quickly. She’s more experienced, maybe she’s encountered infiltrators before. I decide to try a direct approach.
– What makes you think that about me?
– It’s just… obvious. Anyone can see it.
– It’s only obvious to you. It’s certainly not obvious to the others.
– It will be soon.

I should be unnerved by the café encounter, which ended in a kind of stalemate, but strangely I am not. I’m sure I can take her. She’s respected but she’s certainly not loved, often seen as too critical or negative. I’m careful never to be negative at the meetings, always making suggestions positively and with a balanced enthusiasm. And to support other people’s suggestions, especially at that moment when the tide is turning and it’s clear the idea is going to happen anyway.

[Unfinished.]

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I have the feeling that affects don’t exist, that affects are just emotions viewed through the distorting lens of critical distance.

2011-04-18T18:08:00.001-07:00

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I have the feeling that affects don’t exist, that affects are just emotions viewed through the distorting lens of critical distance.

Every ten years I have a devastating life crisis which lasts for approximately ten years.

We are all tortured in our own way. My way is a lot.

The perfect revenge will be if someone is still reading our books long after all of the mediocre, but currently much more popular, writers are forgotten.

I don’t think it’s going to happen but, at the same time, I very much hope I’m wrong.

Glue awkwardness.

One potential fantasy among many.

An extreme and sometimes uncomfortable tenderness.

Against Virno's 'Post-Fordism is the communism of capital' we reply 'Neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital.' Searching for the rhetoric that will truly activate change.

Neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital.

Every country gets their thug.

Like wanting to have wild sex right after someone dies. – Lynne Tillman

There is no force like guilt to create intense reality effects. – Jan Verwoert

I recommend paranoia, it generates a lot of creativity – Jeanne Randolph

Okrent's Law: The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true."

Wren's law: Whatever you post on Facebook will come back to haunt you later.

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Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them.

2011-04-16T21:49:00.000-07:00

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I am really not trying to be cynical. Actually I think the dilemma to some degree flows from the very nature of politics. One thing the explosion of the avant garde did accomplish was to destroy the boundaries between art and politics, to make clear in fact that art was always, really, a form of politics (or at least that this was always one thing that it was.) As a result the art world has been faced with the same fundamental dilemma as any form of politics: the impossibility of establishing its own legitimacy.

Let me explain what I mean by this.

It is the peculiar feature of political life that within it, behavior that could only otherwise be considered insane is perfectly effective. If you managed to convince everyone on earth that you can breathe under water, it won't make any difference: if you try it, you will still drown. On the other hand, if you could convince everyone in the entire world that you were King of France, then you would actually be the King of France. (In fact, it would probably work just to convince a substantial portion of the French civil service and military.)

This is the essence of politics. Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge its essence. No king would openly admit he is king just because people think he is. Political power has to be constantly recreated by persuading others to recognize one's power; to do so, one pretty much invariably has to convince them that one's power has some basis other than their recognition. That basis may be almost anything— divine grace, character, genealogy, national destiny. But "make me your leader because if you do, I will be your leader" is not in itself a particularly compelling argument.

In this sense politics is very similar to magic, which in most times and places—as I discovered in Madagascar—is simultaneously recognized as something that works because people believe that it works; but also, that only works because people do not believe it works only because people believe it works. For this why magic, whether in ancient Thessaly or the contemporary Trobriand Islands, always seems to dwell in an uncertain territory somewhere between poetic expression and outright fraud. And of course the same can usually be said of politics.

- David Graeber, The Art World as a Form of Politics

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Two short passages from Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman

2011-04-16T17:45:00.000-07:00

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The time came for Bill and Grace to enact a kind of divestiture service in which Bill's virgin state would be renounced, shattered. His virginity existed differently from hers. His was a lack of experience, the sense that he was not really a man, that he was not aggressive enough, not daring, perhaps a coward, or a fag. He had not made a conquest. While hers, she reminded herself, had been a moral burden, something to worry about giving, indicating loss when given. And she was considered to have been a conquest for someone else. A passive gift, whether she moved or not. A given. Surrender and surrender again. But how could something physically surrendered mean that she, Grace, had really given in. She prided herself on her ability to separate neatly body from mind, self that was hers from self that she gave away. She was not given when she gave, she always held back and drew satisfaction from distance.

What did Christine want from her or want in general. Who is Christine, she wrote, and felt disgusted. The unexpected is stronger than the expressed, it must be, she thought. She looked up ineffable and wrote, My relationship with Christine skirts the ineffable. Except Emily didn't wear skirts and why should she write about women who did? Could she use that figure of speech when it represented another kind of woman? Or, which woman was she writing about? Anyway, the thing didn't have a plot, no drama, didn't build or go anywhere. Emily comforted herself with the idea that plots were like skirts, you either did or you didn't use things like that. Why do people want stories to go somewhere, she asked herself, and retired to bed.

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YouTube is not just video.

2011-04-15T09:42:00.000-07:00

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YouTube is not just video. YouTube exists somewhere between home movies, commercials, video art, diary, b-movies and cinema. Or something like that.

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Some thoughts while researching Orwell

2011-04-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

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What do we think of the sentiment ‘all art is propaganda’ when placed beside it’s apparent opposite, the idea of ‘art for arts sake.’ But, to paraphrase Boris Groys, art that claims to be apolitical is in fact propaganda for the market. In another sense, art for arts sake does not claim to be apolitical, it claims to be fighting for the cause, for the purity, of art itself. (Then there is the more pernicious dilemma that, political or not, everything can be recuperated.)

Many of the things that are most effective about Orwell are also the most politically specious. (And propaganda is nothing if it’s not about efficacy.) His lone-man-against-the-world stance is romantic and (I believe) compelling. It is also the exact opposite of what an effective socialism would actually look like. So he’s fighting for socialism with tools that undermine the cause. I am thinking of this as a kind of metaphor for political art. Because Orwell’s propaganda is also filled with all-too-human confusions and contradictions. (While at the same time claiming to be utterly consequent.) And yet the contradictions are always housed in a clear, forward-moving narrative.

In an interview the American artist Paul Chan once said that he attempts to keep his activism and his art separate, because in activism you need a common, somewhat simplified, goal that everyone can push towards together, moving in the same direction, while in art you need complexity, paradox, metaphor, poetry, etc. The ‘lone man’ that is Orwell’s central romantic myth is a metaphor that undermines a more general socialist solidarity, but as art it can be potent and resonant. Is it only potent because it re-affirms the Western, over-individualized mythology of the status quo? This must, in part, be the case. But, I think, it’s also potent because, as stupid as this sounds, he ‘really means it.’

I am trying to turn these questions around in my mind, with (irony of ironies) no one else to talk about them with. There is no solidarity without leadership. A leader is not an isolated romantic hero, in fact, almost the opposite: a leader has the wisdom to bring people together. What I admire most is someone who can effectively admit when they’ve made a mistake (and change accordingly), and what I am most afraid of is someone who purposely makes mistakes only to disingenuously admit to them later and get away with it.

The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan once said: ‘when you’re an artist you have to admit you want to be famous’, and this reality will always be at the heart of the problem with political art. At the same time, a contentious political cause also, in some sense, has to become ‘famous’ in order to be heard.

Solidarity is so difficult because we each want to see ourselves as the lone warrior against the world. But this is only one possible fantasy among many.

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A play list of 96 videos (with commentary.)

2011-04-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

About six monts ago I posted a YouTube play list of 83 videos. In the accompanying commentary I wrote that "what I realize in a way only now, is that my blog, my YouTube Favourites, my 8Tracks mixes and my Facebook page feel more to me like my real art practice then my actual art practice. They are more a part of my daily life, I am more deeply engaged with them, they are more intimate and more public, they are not labored over and overworked in the same way my professional artistic life is, they are not marred by grant-writing and publicity. It is the old dream of art as completely interwoven with life. It is simple, lonely, semi-public and locked to a larger corporate and social network. I hope in the future that I will understand it more."

In the past six months I fear this idea has become something of a self fulfilling prophesy. Many people, including my publisher, read this text and have begun to, at least partially, see my practice in these terms. I have begun to post videos on Facebook even more frequently and, some days, it seems to me it is the only thing I manage to accomplish. Well... an internet addiction is nothing particularly original and to call it an art practice doesn't add that much surplus value to the condition. But I was hoping to think over the question a bit more.

My last book, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, sold approximately four hundred copies last year, while my blog gets about one thousand hits every month. Such comparisons are a bit specious. To read a book is a much greater investment of time and attention than to glance at a blog for a few minutes. But I can't stop thinking about all of these questions and contradictions. What does it mean to be an artist in the age of the internet? The art galleries are still full of art, the theatres full of performances, clubs still full of bands - yet I can't help but feel the reality of art has moved, or is in the process of moving, elsewhere. Art as something you do, or share with, a few friends on line. And then every once in a while something goes viral.

Recently I wrote a text entitled Insincere YouTube Auteur. I've been wondering if there is a way to move my entire art practice onto YouTube. (YouTube is not just video. YouTube exists somewhere between home movies, commercials, video art, diary, b-movies and cinema. Or something like that.) I remember a student once telling me that she had a realization: more people would see a YouTube video of a baby eating a lemon in one hour than would see all of the work I make in my entire life. (I don't know if this is true but is it a startling idea nonetheless.) Yesterday I had the idea that I could take already successful YouTube videos, for example turtle humping a shoe, and put my own voice-over on top of them. Has someone already done this?

I mainly use YouTube for watching and listening to music. In this I believe I am not alone. The fact that music has plummeted from the extremely high audio quality of CD's to the almost pathetic audio quality of YouTube is also a fascinating turn of events, further proof that rock n' roll has never been about audiophiles. At a certain year in one's life, the perfect song sounds even more perfect when it sounds like shit. I think this phenomena is somehow a metaphor for art on the internet: the momentary excitement of ephemera. This has been the case for most pop culture over the course of the last hundred years. But on the internet we can all be making it. For now at least. For better or worse.

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Lust is reactionary.

2011-04-08T18:05:00.000-07:00

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Lust is reactionary.

It is not only that he smiles when he kills. It’s that only when he kills is his smile truly genuine.

I hate teaching. I hate the students. I just want to punch them in their smug little faces over and over again. But I am led to believe that this is not within the boundaries of acceptable pedagogy.

Of course, there are always a few good ones. The artist must be discouraged.

Time will tell.

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...

2011-04-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

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Against Virno's 'Post-Fordism is the communism of capital.' we reply 'Neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital.' Searching for the rhetoric that will truly activate change.

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...

2011-04-06T20:39:00.001-07:00

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Neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital.

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Marathon of Thinking Short Text

2011-04-05T11:04:00.001-07:00

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To me, capitalism feels like a pure evil corroding the surface of the planet. However, I realize that from this emotional-ideological position we will get nowhere. How to open things up, ask new kinds of questions, listen to power in an open yet still critical manner, view the situation from some slightly different angle? Benjamin writes about a Kabalistic myth: that the difference between earth and heaven is only the smallest millimeter, but within that millimeter everything changes. Where is the miniscule shift that allows us to picture the world differently, the fissure from which we can begin to pry? Zizek’s quip that it is ‘easier for us to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine an end to capitalism’ seems unbearable to me. Is our imagination really so depleted, so tepid? And then there is this quote from Kant: “Humanity is a crooked timber from which nothing straight can ever be built.” But are we looking for something straight? Where is the crooked, rickety, modicum of hope that allows us to begin thinking again, thinking honest and compelling thoughts, thinking that not everything is cruel or impossible, thinking that things might one again begin to move?

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Four Lists

2011-03-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

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1.
Sentences (some plagiarized, others not)

Most blues are subtitled either no sense of wonder or no sense of scale

It was like an emotion, and yet it had a cold quality, so perhaps it was not an emotion at all.

What I’m interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.

A novel about an actor who gets cast as the lead in a big-budget Hollywood action film, thinks the script is complete garbage, the premise reactionary, and hates every moment of shooting it.

What should I do with my violence?

The most effective lie is always the one closest to the truth.

A tsunami of conflicting paradoxes.

To live here you either have to be against everything or become a thief.

The subtlety and delicate brilliance of the questions you are currently asking.

There is no other poetry than real agency.

What you theatre people call your tradition is nothing more than what keeps you parasites comfortable.

Survival of the most caring and most cared for.

2.
I think those films are propaganda for violence, propaganda for fear and propaganda for a very violent view of human nature.

I’ve been having overwhelming feelings of complete failure lately. Then, the other day, my fortune cookie said: “Failure is the mother of success.”

You’re the devil, and like the actual devil, you sabotage yourself at every turn as well.

I want to be one of those writers who is discovered, and greatly recognized, long after they are dead.

Failure is the other of success.

3.
Pain, crime and sadness.
Tears, stupidity and failure.
Violence, light and charm.
Crime, wisdom and more crime.
Bitterness, love triangles and just getting by.
The peculiar, the odd and much, much more.
The polymath, the dictator and true love.
A good joke, a bad joke and a neutral joke.
Slim chances, great wealth and poverty.
Witch trials, public television and melancholy.
Permission, psychosis and the average.
Ambition, fame and regret.
Longing, talent and a lack of talent.
Sexual greed, average lust and plenitude.
Decision making, scarcity and whatever’s left.
The similar, the opposite and the word “yes”.
Again and again and again.

4.
At least five bands have used this name.

Wood is the fire that has not yet learned to burn.

Learning that power only corrupts when we fear losing it.

Time to try all the things that have been tried before but to try them NOW, with all the paradox, complexity, confusion and vitality such a statement implies.

Evolution is a loose, somehow inaccurate metaphor/creation myth that has very little to do with either improvement or survival. Evolution is also about all the species that die off.

Just because everyone is out to get you doesn't mean being paranoid is the most reasonable or effective position to take

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It is ourselves, as cultural producers, who are called upon to fill these screens with content.

2011-03-21T14:20:00.000-07:00

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The relation between fluctuating electronic signals and human attention has become a central component of social experience, from Wall Street and Times Square to the great Asian cityscapes, or from the flatscreen TV at the local bar to the cell phone in your ear and the laptop in your bed on Sunday morning. What’s at stake is a sound-and-pixel environment where informational objects unfold in time, exciting human desire and channeling it into mathematically ordered patterns understood by exploring the underlying techno-scientific principles of cybernetics, cognitive psychology and complexity theory. A clearer grasp of how these principles have been applied over the course of the last half-century is fundamental to autonomous practices, since it is ourselves, as cultural producers, who are called upon to fill these screens with content. And beyond these proliferating screens there is a constantly expanding universe of computerized recording, analysis and surveillance, gathering behavioral data in order to more effectively pattern the movements of populations and to produce effects of governance. So we’d better know how these processes work, and how they can be undermined – because experience shows that there is nothing easier to instrumentalize than yesterday’s subversion.

- Brian Holmes

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...

2011-03-14T21:23:00.001-07:00

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Evolution is a loose, somehow inaccurate metaphor/creation myth that has very little to do with either improvement or survival. Evolution is also about all the species that die off.

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Jodi Dean on hubs, notes, networks and the power-law.

2011-03-14T21:12:00.000-07:00

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Recent developments in network science demonstrate structure in seemingly random networks. On the web, for example, sites are not equally likely to have the same number of links. Nor are links randomly distributed among sites in a predictable, bell-curve fashion. Instead, there are clusters and hubs wherein some sites are nodes to which many sites link. These hubs serve as connectors for other nodes. In his path-breaking work on structure in complex networks, Albert-László Barabási finds hubs on the Web, in Hollywood, in citation networks, phone networks, food webs in ecosystems, and even cellular networks where some molecules, like water, do much more work than others.

Barabási explains that degree distribution in networks with hubs, most real networks, follows a power-law. He writes, “Power laws mathematically formulate the fact that in most real networks the majority of nodes have only a few links and that these numerous tiny nodes coexist with a few big hubs, nodes with an anomalously high number of links. The few links connecting the smaller nodes to each other are not sufficient to ensure that the network is fully connected. This function is secured by the relatively rare hubs that keep real networks from falling apart.” In most real networks, nodes don’t have an average number of links. Rather, a few have exponentially more links than others. Barabási describes the difference between random networks and networks that follow a power-law degree distribution with the term scale. In random networks, there is a limit to the number of links a node can have as well as an average number of links. Random networks thus have a characteristic of “scale.” In most real networks, however, “there is no such thing as a characteristic node. We see a continuous hierarchy of nodes, spanning from the rare hubs to the numerous tiny nodes.” These networks don’t scale. They are “scale free.”

Barabási notes that others have observed power-law degree distributions. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that 20 percent of his peapods produced 80 percent of the peas – nature doesn’t always follow a bell curve. He also found that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. In business management circles, Pareto’s law is known at the 80/20 rule (although he did not use the term) and is said to apply in a variety of instances: “80 percent of the profits are produced by only 20 percent of the employees, 80 percent of customer service problems are created by only 20 percent of customers, 80 percent of decisions are made during 20 percent of meeting time, and so on.” Further examples might be Hollywood’s “A list” or the “A list” that emerged among bloggers. Like scale-free networks, Pareto’s law alerts us to distributions that follow power-laws.

How can power-laws be explained? Is some kind of sovereign authority redirecting nature out of a more primordial equality? Barabási finds that power-laws appear in phase transitions from disorder to order (he draws here from the Nobel prize-winning work of the physicist Kenneth Wilson.) Power-laws “are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems.” Analyzing power-laws on the web, Barabási identifies several properties that account for the Web’s characteristics as a scale-free network. The first is growth. New sites or nodes are added at a dizzying pace. If new sites decide randomly to link to different old sites, old sites will always have an advantage. Just by arriving first, they will accumulate more links. But growth alone can’t account for the power-law degree distribution. A second property is necessary, preferential attachment. New sites have to prefer older, more senior sites. Differently put, new sites will want to link to those sites that already have a lot of links. They don’t link randomly but to the most popular sites which thereby become hubs. Barabási argues that insofar as network evolution is governed by preferential attachment, one has to abandon the assumption that the Web (or Hollywood or any citation network) is democratic: “In real networks linking is never random. Instead, popularity is attractive.” Nodes that have been around for awhile, that have to an extent proven themselves, have distinct advantages over newcomers. In networks characterized by growth and preferential attachment, then, hubs emerge.

The fantasy of abundance – anyone can build a website, create a blog, express their opinions on the internet – misdirects some critical media theorists away from the structure of real networks. Alexander R. Galloway, for example, emphasizes “distributed networks” that have “no central hubs and no radial nodes.” He claims that the internet is a distributed network like the U.S. interstate highway system, a random network that scales, to use Barabási’s terms. Embracing Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s image of the rhizome, Galloway notes that in a rhizome any point can be connected to any other; there are no intermediary hubs and no hierarchies. For him, the Web is best understood rhizomatically, as having a rhizomatic structure. Barabási’s work demonstrates, however, that on the Web, as in any scale-free network, there are hubs and hierarchies. Some sites are more equal than others. Imagining a rhizome might be nice, but rhizomes don’t describe the underlying structure of real networks. Hierarchies and hubs emerge out of growth and preferential attachment.

- Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

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Franco Berardi and Marco Jacquemet on The Italian Anomaly

2011-03-07T21:11:00.001-08:00

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In that long wave of social conflicts we find a constant and recurring element: the refusal of the subordination of life to work. This refusal was manifest in a manifold of different ways: first of all as a Mediterranean idleness, the privileging of sensuality and social life over productivity and the economy. In the 1970s this refusal flourished as a political act of insubordination and resistance against capitalist exploitation. So this concept could be inserted in the framework of progressive political strategy. Workers refused the effort and repetitiveness of mechanical labour, thus forcing companies to keep restructuring. Workers’ resistance was an element of human progress and freedom, as well as an accelerator of technological and organizational development. Contrary to the Protestant idea of progress as founded on work discipline, the autonomous, anti-work spirit claims that progress, namely technological progress, is based on the refusal of discipline. Progress consists of the application of intelligence to the reduction of effort and dependency, and the expansion of a sphere of idleness and individual freedom.

The refusal of capitalist exploitation was not peculiar to Italy, of course. All around the world workers demanded wage increases and more free time for their lives. However, in Italy this insubordination transformed the anarchic spirit of southern plebs into an explicit and politically relevant issue: autonomy of everyday life from capitalist discipline. Did young rebel workers who in the 1970s came from Naples and from Calabria to the northern factories embody the individualist and anti-modernist populism that characterizes the 1799 counterrevolution, and led Neapolitan people to oppose the enlightened bourgeoisie? Yes, in part. But they expressed also the realization that the society of industrial labour was nearing its end, and the consciousness that industrial labour was a remnant of the past, and that new technologies and social knowledge were opening up the possibility of the liberation of society from the burden of physical labour.

- Franco Berardi and Marco Jacquemet, The Italian Anomaly

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That we make our world is the time-full “truth” that “untruth” most wishes to silence.

2011-03-06T12:46:00.000-08:00

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Spirit’s “true concern is the negation of reification.” That we make our world is the time-full “truth” that “untruth” most wishes to silence. Reification is that hardening of historically produced conditions into “second nature” – a totalizing ideological and material environment experienced as timeless and unchangeable. It is an enforced forgetting of the political “truth” that structural barbarism is not necessary, not an invariable. Collectively constructed, the given world system can be collectively changed. The practical problem of how to change it, at this point, requires radically rethinking the categories of revolutionary theory. But that the world can be changed – and that both the desire for change and the negative utopian images that provisionally orient that desire can be found within the failures and contradictions of the system itself – remains the core of “truth.” To keep this negative dialectic moving, to resist its arrest and regression, is the work and play of critical thought.

- Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory

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...

2011-02-26T16:56:00.000-08:00

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Insincere YouTube Auteur.

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Rosi Braidotti on Affirmative Ethics

2011-02-25T12:33:00.000-08:00

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Negative passions are black holes. In affirmative ethics, the harm you do to others is immediately reflected on the harm you do to yourself in terms of loss of potentia, positivity, capacity to relate and hence freedom. Affirmative ethics is not about the avoidance of pain, but rather about transcending the resignation and passivity that ensue from being hurt, lost and dispossessed. One has to become ethical, as opposed to applying moral rules and protocols as a form of self-protection.

An adequate ethical relation is capable of sustaining the subject in his or her quest for more inter-relations with others i.e. more ‘Life’, motion, change and transformation. The adequate ethical question provides the subject with a frame for interaction and change, growth and movement. It affirms life as difference-at-work and as sustainable transformations. An ethical relation must confront the question of how much freedom of action we can endure. Affirmative ethics assumes that humanity does not stem out of freedom, but rather that freedom is extracted out of awareness of our multiple limitations. Affirmation is about freedom from the burden of negativity, through the understanding of these limitations.

- Rosi Braidotti, The New Activism, A Plea for Affirmative Ethics

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2011-02-22T17:20:00.000-08:00

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A review of Revenge Fantasies from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.

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Speaking About Politics

2011-02-21T11:13:00.000-08:00

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Sometimes when you’re in a room with a bull, and you’re holding a piece of red fabric, the only thing you can think to do is wave the fabric around.

Dog barking just to hear his own echo.

In Lisbon, where the sky and water are beautiful.

Thinking about everything again.

Wondering how people will speak of us, after we are gone.

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Notes from the Jacques Rancière / Pedro Costa round-table

2011-02-19T11:11:00.000-08:00

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[On Friday February 18th I attended the round-table between Jacques Rancière and Pedro Costa which was part of the conference Image in Science and Art. What follows are my notes. Most of the statements are approximations of things said by Pedro Costa, who I found enormously inspiring.]

I need cheap machines.

I want to push the machines into the past.

I can only think about yesterday, today, and I cannot think about tomorrow.

Everyone knows this, with digital machines, with computers, sometimes something happens and nobody knows why.

Digital problems: noise and squares and everything that happens.

Q: You think this image is not healthy enough? A: They [the images] need to be a little bit more alive.

Temperature.

We were talking completely about us and we had stopped talking about the machines.

Appear / disappear.

Work with natural light whenever possible.

I have to take them to the light, which means to the window.

We have a lot of doubts and we're not convinced that we're going to get there.

We have so little that it should be sufficient.

The problem is how to turn the doubt into something positive.

Classic Hollywood movies had a conscience.

There's no place for two at the window so one will be in the dark: a voice, a conscience.

Today there's a big problem.

It's a melange of what's happening today, trying to be a little bit documentary [and also towards something a bit classic like Mizoguchi.]

Images today hate to confront reality, to confront what is happening.

Films today are trying to avoid reality, to escape.

Here, without vanity, we tried to go somewhere and we got there.

Too many images of one kind.

An image that breaks consensus.

It's an effect, it's very effective.

Film is closely related to some kind of justice and even to revenge.

Cinema could be an avenger.

There is a profound social injustice today and there's a profound filmic injustice.

Confronting ourselves with some sort of reality.

I still think images and words can go together.

He was the one who could write the letters for the other workers. A lover letter, a money letter. There is a formula and he improvises a little bit.

He was more or less the prisoner and the guardian of the prison. "I died every night and the only thing keeping me alive was alcohol and writing these letters" [for other workers to send back home.]

When it slips completely out of control.

This letter that was only supposed to be one scene, three or four shots, became the whole film - that was a contradiction in the film.

This character who cannot learn the letter, in the end, just tells it like he knew it all his life.

I am very eager and interested to work with some people and not with other people. And I don't like to put my words in there mouths.

One of the lessons of Godard - everything is there for us to pick up and use when it is useful.

In the past there were films that had sounds that were much more powerful than any of the images.

Sometimes what seems most alien - Desnos, the surrealist poet - is in fact the perfect marriage for me.

It's terrible, sometimes, a documentary. It's terrible what you see and hear in a documentary.

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A short interview I did with Catherine Lacey for HTMLGIANT

2011-02-15T10:18:00.000-08:00

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Catherine Lacey: Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed has this backdrop of a disenfranchised political movement, which was so dead-on. Was this based working as an activist of some sort? If not, what spurred the decision to have a book set in this way?

Jacob Wren: I’ve had a little bit of experience with activism and in the anarchist community, mainly when I was much younger, but that wasn’t exactly what made me write about these things (though it most likely affected my take on it.) In some ways Revenge Fantasies, and my previous book Families Are Formed Through Copulation, are both responses to the shock of the Bush years, to my feeling that the world was sliding into some new kind of fascism (perhaps I was over-reacting but I’m still not sure, time will tell) and there seemed to be so little one could do. I kept reading the papers, wondering what was possible, how to fight against everything that was happening. I continue to feel so pathetically overwhelmed by the injustices that rule the world: the ever-growing chasm between rich and poor, the ways in which our daily consumer choices contribute to the evisceration of the natural world (of which we are in fact only a small part), more prisons and more profitable prisons, the pure evil that is Monsanto, wars being fought for corporate gain… all right, when I write such lists I basically feel like a fucking dreadful Marxist bore. Everyone knows and then what can you do? Well, the obvious solution is to get together with large numbers of other people and fight. But how to find the common purpose and solidarity, and how exactly to fight, is by no means easy or clear.

And then I started thinking about fidelity. The fight will be long, difficult and often painfully discouraging. It requires something like an infinite patience and overwhelming fidelity or conviction. Well, fidelity has never been my strong suit. In that respect I’m of my generation: a bit ADD. And I started comparing different kinds of fidelity: fidelity to a political cause versus fidelity within a romantic relationship. (I’ve never been called upon to test my fidelity to a political cause but I have experienced questions of fidelity in and around romance.) Somehow, along this path, I ended up with a love triangle, some strange kind of juxtaposition between a more political question (fidelity to a cause) and a classic soap-opera device (broken fidelity to a lover). What happens to the fidelity of the original relationship in a love triangle, how does it evolve, disintegrate, become more paradoxical? And how is this analogous, or completely different, from fidelity to a political cause? I wanted to write about these questions in ways I had never seen them written about before – full of doubt, confusion, curiosity, precision, cynicism and joy.

Catherine Lacey: While writing it, did the direction the book ended up going surprise you at all?

Jacob Wren: Yes, as I wrote, most of the time I never really knew where it was going (and even now that it’s done I’m still not quite sure I know what it is.) There were so many times when I was completely stuck. Most often the way it came unstuck was I would spontaneously write something so terrible and unexpected I couldn’t help but follow it a bit and see where it led. (I now think a lot of this ‘being stuck’ was simply being hampered by various unexamined notions of good writing and good taste.) Sometimes I felt the trick – like some sort of fucked up alchemist – was to magically transmute the bad taste into good taste, and that this alchemy had something to do with what it means to write about politics today, though I’m still not sure exactly what. I love it when I’m writing and something completely unexpected comes out. There are also a lot of things in the book I ripped off, but hopefully ripped off in such a perverse way they have also become something new.

Catherine Lacey: What’s next for you? I know you’re in Lisbon (and I’m jealous); what’s that all about? Are you working on something set there?

Jacob Wren: Over the past year I have had writing residencies in Denmark at Hald Hovedgaard, in Belgium at Passa Porta and currently here in Portugal hosted by the festival Alkantara. I have been trying to finish a new novel called Polyamorous Love Song. I am very excited about it, I think it is some of the best writing I’ve ever done, and yet, as I’ve been working on it steadily for the past four years, I was starting to worry I might never manage to finish it. I’m just starting to realize that my life is considerably busier than it’s ever been before and I needed to find a way to carve out some additional time to write. These writing residencies were my first attempt at a solution and I honestly can’t believe how helpful it’s been. The new book doesn’t have anything directly to do with Denmark, Belgium or Portugal, and yet, undeniably, all of these places, and the people I’ve met while there, have now influenced it. If you’re curious, here is my first attempt at a description:

Polyamorous Love Song is a novel concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, it is written within the strict logic of an absolute dream, a dream that is both the same and opposite to the world in which we live. It is a novel of many through-lines. For example: 1) A group of people who wear furry mascot costumes at all times fighting a revolutionary war for their right to wear furry mascot costumes at all times. 2) A movement known as the ‘New Filmmaking’ in which, instead of shooting and editing a film, one simply does all of the things that would have been in the film, but in real life. This movement has many adherents. 3) A group of ‘New Filmmakers’ who devise increasingly strange sexual scenarios with complete strangers. They invent a drug that allows them to intuit the cell phone number of anyone they see, allowing phone calls to be the first stage of their spontaneous, yet somehow scripted, seductions. 4) A secret society that concocts a virus that only infects those on the political right. They stage large-scale orgies, creating unexpected intimacies and connections between individuals who are otherwise savagely opposed to each other. 5) A radical leftist who catches this virus, forcing her to question the depth of her considerable leftist credentials. 6) A German barber in New York who, out of scorn for the stupidity of his American clients, gives them avant-garde haircuts, unintentionally achieving acclaim among the bohemian set. And yet such stories are only the beginning.

[The accompanying ten sentences I wrote can be found here.]

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2011-02-15T10:01:00.001-08:00

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Ten sentences I wrote for HTMLGIANT (followed by a short interview.)

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2011-02-09T14:43:00.001-08:00

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This desire to be smarter than the world.

No one is smarter than the world.

The world isn’t even smart.

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from The Spirit of the Gourd

2011-02-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

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A lamb eats a mouse: once inside, the mouse worms its way through the lamb's bowels to the end of its tail. Because the lamb suffers greatly from the mouse's biting, it asks a snake to cure it. The snake then eats the lamb's tail. The lamb then wants to eat the snake to avenge its tail.” As all of this chewing is slow – just imagine: the mouse eats the bowels, the snake eats the mouse and finally the lamb eats the snake, each chewing the body of the next - it would be no surprise if the lamb had become as tiny as a pea! There are those who call what cannot be seen the indiscernible and in this sequence in which man feeds off the world, representing and idealizing what surrounds him, he is also devoured by the sea monsters and by all the unknown faces glimpsing around the corner. The result is "digestive nihilation" and at the end of all this what can we expect to find that is smaller than the atom? Perhaps a spark, the final infinitesimal chimera placed before even the world itself and devoid of intent and will.

- João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva - O Espírito da Cabaça (The Spirit of the Gourd)

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I settled my bill rather than become the first against the wall.

2011-01-28T10:36:00.000-08:00

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A very strange mention of my book on the Business News Network Blog:

True story. I dropped the daughter off at dance class last night and, at my wife’s suggestion, set out for a “nice little wine bar just north of the school” she had enjoyed once with a famous classical pianist friend some years ago (that’s right, I said pianist). I knew I had the right place when the fedora-wearing guy next to me dropped a well-thumbed copy of Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia on the bar. Latin-inspired jazz played quietly and the barmaid told my drinking companion about a terrific novel she was reading about two people who were falling in love as they attended meetings to discuss the death of the “left.” I would have asked her the title but would have been revealed as an eavesdropper. Another man entered, ordered a beer and sat down in a care-worn chair, back to the wall, flipped open the New Yorker and appeared to focus on an article, not the cartoons. A woman with a beret walked in and was greeted by one and all. She ordered a glass of red wine. The air was bristling with intent. Thankfully I had changed out of my suit earlier and into a plaid flannel shirt. I recalled that this was Andy Bell’s neighbourhood, but the thought gave me no comfort at all. I was about to order another when I noticed the older gentleman on my left was reading something called Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. I settled my bill rather than become the first against the wall. “Unrest Spreading” hollers the Wall Street Journal this morning. You got that right. Cairo today, Cabbagetown tomorrow. You heard it here first.

- Martin Cej

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2011-01-24T04:20:00.001-08:00

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Wood is the fire that has not yet learned to burn.

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