.
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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April 28, 2011
April 27, 2011
The problem of immigration, through his body
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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
.
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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April 18, 2011
I have the feeling that affects don’t exist, that affects are just emotions viewed through the distorting lens of critical distance.
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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.
.
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.
.
April 17, 2011
Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them.
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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 is 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 Sadness of Post-Workerism
.
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 is 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 Sadness of Post-Workerism
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April 16, 2011
Two short passages from Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman
Two short passages from Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman:
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.
.
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.
.
April 15, 2011
YouTube is not just video.
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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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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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April 10, 2011
Some thoughts while researching Orwell
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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.
.
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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April 9, 2011
A play list of 96 videos (with commentary.)
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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April 8, 2011
Lust is reactionary.
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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.
.
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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April 7, 2011
Against Virno's Post-Fordism is the communism of capital...
.
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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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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April 6, 2011
April 5, 2011
Marathon of Thinking Short Text
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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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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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March 23, 2011
Four Lists
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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
.
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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March 21, 2011
Brian Holmes: "It is ourselves, as cultural producers, who are called upon to fill these screens with content."
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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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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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March 15, 2011
Evolution is a loose...
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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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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.
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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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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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March 8, 2011
Franco Berardi and Marco Jacquemet on The Italian Anomaly
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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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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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March 6, 2011
That we make our world is the time-full “truth” that “untruth” most wishes to silence.
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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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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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February 26, 2011
Insincere YouTube Auteur
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I wanted, I desired, to become the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube. Could there actually be a Jean Luc Godard of YouTube? I was in Brussels. Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian conceptual artist from the sixties. He is very well regarded here in Belgium but I’m not sure how many people know about him back in Canada. There is a postcard of him staring out the back of a moving train, smiling and waving. Besides him is a small girl who is also smiling and waving. I used to have that postcard. I have no idea where it is now. But I kept thinking of that postcard and of these two Broodthaers quotes from 1964:
All my life I have been working with too much sincerity, trying to make works of art that would last forever, becoming quietly ridiculous in the attempt. I am 39. I too wondered if I couldn't sell something, or rather give something way for free, and therefore succeed in life. On YouTube I could be ephemeral, amateur, insincere in a way that simply felt impossible elsewhere in my life. Or so I hoped, desired. Could there be a Jean Luc Godard of YouTube? Is Lil B already the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube or is there room for me as well? Is Ryan Trecartin? I knew I meant something fairly specific with this idea, this desire, this phrase ‘YouTube auteur’, yet I still didn’t know exactly what. I knew I wanted to make video, or rather I didn’t want to make video at all, I wanted to make YouTube, perhaps make YouTube every day, seven days a week, have it watched by millions of people all around the world, and have those millions of people experience the work in a manner that effectively transcended how they had previously experienced the internet. I knew that by ‘YouTube’ I meant something both the same and radically different than what everyone else meant when they used the term, that my plan had absolutely nothing to do with videos of cats or babies eating lemons. But then again I didn’t know even that. Maybe there was room for cats, or at least kittens, somewhere within the labyrinthine vision of my daily YouTube making practice.
In 1960, with his debut film À bout de souffle, Godard invented the jump cut. He did so almost by accident. The conversation scenes he had shot were too long and boring, and he had no coverage, so he simply got rid of the boring parts, cutting from one highlight to the next. It was the simplest idea and yet apparently no one had tried it before. What has no one ever tried on YouTube and why do I feel certain someone else will think of it before me? And I don’t want them, those who are more clever, ingenious or simply much younger, to become the Jean Luc Godard’s of YouTube. I want it to be me, with my language, craft and insincerity. I want to think of the idea, the breakthrough, perhaps even tonight, purchase a video camera first thing tomorrow morning, start shooting. But not shooting just anything. Shooting something that will effortlessly manage to cut through, to shatter, the incessant chatter of the internet. Something that will accrue meaning with repeated viewings, inspire imitators, be critical towards the medium which it is simultaneously revolutionizing, change the fundamental ways in which YouTube videos are made and perceived. Clearly I do not know how to make this happen.
Godard invented the jump cut, emulated Hollywood while simultaneously disassembling it, was part of a zeitgeist that altered cinema forever. Broodthaters built his own museums long before such conceptual bait and switch was the art world norm. Where was the lever that could turn YouTube inside out, twist it around so it quietly, thrillingly, became new again? Why was I so certain this was possible and yet equally uncertain how? And why was I also certain that some strain of insincerity, of forcing the issue, lay at the heart of the project. Was it only that I had no idea how to proceed yet planed to blindly push forward regardless, marking any action I might take as insincere, motivated solely by the attempt to fill the empty husk of YouTube and not from any inner content or need? What was sincerity on the internet? Could it be anything other than a lure for endless anonymous ridicule? Did I want to be ridiculed? Ridiculed like a genius down into the grave?
I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to become the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube but instead wrote a 941 word text and published it on my blog, which is no more able to christen me the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube than I am able to christen it the Bible.
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I wanted, I desired, to become the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube. Could there actually be a Jean Luc Godard of YouTube? I was in Brussels. Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian conceptual artist from the sixties. He is very well regarded here in Belgium but I’m not sure how many people know about him back in Canada. There is a postcard of him staring out the back of a moving train, smiling and waving. Besides him is a small girl who is also smiling and waving. I used to have that postcard. I have no idea where it is now. But I kept thinking of that postcard and of these two Broodthaers quotes from 1964:
I too wondered if I couldn't sell something and succeed in life. I had for quite a little while been good for nothing. I am forty years old... the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work at once.
In art exhibitions I often mused... Finally I would try to change into an amateur. I would revel in my bad faith... Since I couldn’t build a collection of my own, for lack of even the minimum of financial means, I had to find another way of dealing with the bad faith that allowed me to indulge in so many strong emotions. So, I said to myself, I’ll be a creator.
All my life I have been working with too much sincerity, trying to make works of art that would last forever, becoming quietly ridiculous in the attempt. I am 39. I too wondered if I couldn't sell something, or rather give something way for free, and therefore succeed in life. On YouTube I could be ephemeral, amateur, insincere in a way that simply felt impossible elsewhere in my life. Or so I hoped, desired. Could there be a Jean Luc Godard of YouTube? Is Lil B already the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube or is there room for me as well? Is Ryan Trecartin? I knew I meant something fairly specific with this idea, this desire, this phrase ‘YouTube auteur’, yet I still didn’t know exactly what. I knew I wanted to make video, or rather I didn’t want to make video at all, I wanted to make YouTube, perhaps make YouTube every day, seven days a week, have it watched by millions of people all around the world, and have those millions of people experience the work in a manner that effectively transcended how they had previously experienced the internet. I knew that by ‘YouTube’ I meant something both the same and radically different than what everyone else meant when they used the term, that my plan had absolutely nothing to do with videos of cats or babies eating lemons. But then again I didn’t know even that. Maybe there was room for cats, or at least kittens, somewhere within the labyrinthine vision of my daily YouTube making practice.
In 1960, with his debut film À bout de souffle, Godard invented the jump cut. He did so almost by accident. The conversation scenes he had shot were too long and boring, and he had no coverage, so he simply got rid of the boring parts, cutting from one highlight to the next. It was the simplest idea and yet apparently no one had tried it before. What has no one ever tried on YouTube and why do I feel certain someone else will think of it before me? And I don’t want them, those who are more clever, ingenious or simply much younger, to become the Jean Luc Godard’s of YouTube. I want it to be me, with my language, craft and insincerity. I want to think of the idea, the breakthrough, perhaps even tonight, purchase a video camera first thing tomorrow morning, start shooting. But not shooting just anything. Shooting something that will effortlessly manage to cut through, to shatter, the incessant chatter of the internet. Something that will accrue meaning with repeated viewings, inspire imitators, be critical towards the medium which it is simultaneously revolutionizing, change the fundamental ways in which YouTube videos are made and perceived. Clearly I do not know how to make this happen.
Godard invented the jump cut, emulated Hollywood while simultaneously disassembling it, was part of a zeitgeist that altered cinema forever. Broodthaters built his own museums long before such conceptual bait and switch was the art world norm. Where was the lever that could turn YouTube inside out, twist it around so it quietly, thrillingly, became new again? Why was I so certain this was possible and yet equally uncertain how? And why was I also certain that some strain of insincerity, of forcing the issue, lay at the heart of the project. Was it only that I had no idea how to proceed yet planed to blindly push forward regardless, marking any action I might take as insincere, motivated solely by the attempt to fill the empty husk of YouTube and not from any inner content or need? What was sincerity on the internet? Could it be anything other than a lure for endless anonymous ridicule? Did I want to be ridiculed? Ridiculed like a genius down into the grave?
I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to become the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube but instead wrote a 941 word text and published it on my blog, which is no more able to christen me the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube than I am able to christen it the Bible.
.
February 25, 2011
Rosi Braidotti on Affirmative Ethics
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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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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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