.
Sad angry bookshop
world against world and
again world
who are the scumbags who
think they can hide all the
good books
a poem is a world without poetry
sexual fantasy about someone
I met for less than ten minutes
and who is quickly receding into the past
a poem is a world again
against the books that are read too much
towards secret worlds
and future hits
and future time
we are here
.
November 30, 2012
November 24, 2012
Paul Celan quote
.
Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.
- Paul Celan
.
Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.
- Paul Celan
.
November 23, 2012
Isabelle Stengers on diplomacy
.
And this is something that I link to the question of diplomacy – which is about the risks of war and peace. Diplomacy means that in such and such a situation war is the normal thing to do, but that it may be possible that peace has a chance. In other words, peace is possible not probable. When you have a police operation, peace is what you enforce. Today many wars are in fact police operations, pedagogical operations. ‘They’ will learn how to behave. It is easy to put yourself in the place of people having to face a zero-death war: stop fighting or you will be crushed. No place for diplomacy here, because diplomacy presupposes a peace to be invented, not the weak part bowing down in front of the strongest part. I think of the diplomat as a figure of inventing peace as an event. And a diplomat will never say to another diplomat, of the adverse camp, ‘In your place I would do this or that’. They know they cannot share their risks because those risks are related with what the population they belong to will be able to accept, the risks this population will accept to take. If there is a practice where hope is important it is diplomacy – hope and not faith, because it is a matter of becoming able, not of ‘seeing the truth’.
An important point here that makes diplomacy possible is the difference between sense and meaning. When you have a war situation, when ‘This means war’, there cannot logically be a place for peace – it is a matter of winning or being defeated. But the diplomats are the ones who can play between meaning and sense. You try and risk keeping the sense while a small modification of meaning may produce a possible articulation in the place of the contradiction from which war did follow, logically. But the population to which the diplomat belongs must accept this modification, must accept that sense has been preserved while meanings have been modified, and this is a risk for this population. If they refuse, the diplomat has failed; she can even be called a traitor. So the risks the diplomat is able to take depends on the trust she has in the population to which she belongs. Trust is always the condition of experimentation, of taking chance. Trust must be created for things to change.
- Isabelle Stengers, from an interview in Hope: New Philosophies For Change
.
And this is something that I link to the question of diplomacy – which is about the risks of war and peace. Diplomacy means that in such and such a situation war is the normal thing to do, but that it may be possible that peace has a chance. In other words, peace is possible not probable. When you have a police operation, peace is what you enforce. Today many wars are in fact police operations, pedagogical operations. ‘They’ will learn how to behave. It is easy to put yourself in the place of people having to face a zero-death war: stop fighting or you will be crushed. No place for diplomacy here, because diplomacy presupposes a peace to be invented, not the weak part bowing down in front of the strongest part. I think of the diplomat as a figure of inventing peace as an event. And a diplomat will never say to another diplomat, of the adverse camp, ‘In your place I would do this or that’. They know they cannot share their risks because those risks are related with what the population they belong to will be able to accept, the risks this population will accept to take. If there is a practice where hope is important it is diplomacy – hope and not faith, because it is a matter of becoming able, not of ‘seeing the truth’.
An important point here that makes diplomacy possible is the difference between sense and meaning. When you have a war situation, when ‘This means war’, there cannot logically be a place for peace – it is a matter of winning or being defeated. But the diplomats are the ones who can play between meaning and sense. You try and risk keeping the sense while a small modification of meaning may produce a possible articulation in the place of the contradiction from which war did follow, logically. But the population to which the diplomat belongs must accept this modification, must accept that sense has been preserved while meanings have been modified, and this is a risk for this population. If they refuse, the diplomat has failed; she can even be called a traitor. So the risks the diplomat is able to take depends on the trust she has in the population to which she belongs. Trust is always the condition of experimentation, of taking chance. Trust must be created for things to change.
- Isabelle Stengers, from an interview in Hope: New Philosophies For Change
.
November 20, 2012
Olivier Assayas on the two paths (for art today) that coexist, and are not mutually exclusive.
.
My point of view today, and this had determined a good deal of my relation to cinema and to fiction in general, is that when it comes to art, and particularly the relation of art to the world, two paths coexist, and are not mutually exclusive.
The first path would be the one that shaped the 20th century: that of avant-gardes and their constant interrogation of the relation between the arts – their role, their borders – and the world: also their interrogation of their own nature. One might say that the situationist moment is its final stage: there was formulated the answer that remains, of its kind, unsurpassable.
But the very nature of humanity is to survive the unsurpassable. There are novels after Proust and Joyce, there is poetry after Mallarmé – even if the aforementioned, each in his own way, through a transcendent oeuvre, defines a resolution of those questions that constituted the inaccessible horizon of their predecessors. I am describing this in a doubtlessly summary fashion; however, it seems to me that beyond supersession there lies not necessarily another supersession but, rather, access to a virgin terrain, a lunar landscape where everything remains to be built anew, sometimes even using the same tools as before.
Situationism identified precisely the path to supersession of art and proceeded to carry it out. From the vantage point of the plastic arts, let’s say that we are today in an after which is not only unable to find itself but has often given up even seeking itself, sparing an individual, fragmentary salvation only at the expense of a pretty remarkable reduction of its ambitions: a space nonetheless sufficient for the expression of specific genius in some great, entirely isolated artists.
The second path, which grows in the shadow of the first and often in ignorance of it, is that consisting in the simple representation of the world where humanity simply concerns itself with the human, with the timeless means that, in every era, have allowed it to reach these ends, always renewed, always the same.
What I mean to say is that beyond all theory, beyond any historical perspective on art, there resides within a contemporary artist the same question that posed itself to a gentleman of the Tang Dynasty: how to capture this moment, the face of a beloved, a country road in an autumn mist, the corner of the street where you live. Or, to pose in a more specifically contemporary context the same timeless question: how to seize the thoughts that traverse us while we are seated in a metro, rushing through the underground tunnels of the big city?
This is where to find the simple, limpid need for figuration as one of the immutable functions of being human. But does this idea actually distance me all that much from situationism?
Didn’t Debord write La Societé du spectacle while simultaneously making autobiographical films devoted to preserving from the ravages of time, to capture in a flash for all eternity, life as it offered itself to him at certain moments of grace? And did he not also make these films so that, in them, might radiate the glow of the faces of those he had loved? Isn’t that exactly where their poetry vibrates most dearly? All this I see clearly today, even if very few know how to articulate it, even among those who regard themselves as being closest to Debord’s ideas.
- Olivier Assayas, A Post-May Adolescence
.
My point of view today, and this had determined a good deal of my relation to cinema and to fiction in general, is that when it comes to art, and particularly the relation of art to the world, two paths coexist, and are not mutually exclusive.
The first path would be the one that shaped the 20th century: that of avant-gardes and their constant interrogation of the relation between the arts – their role, their borders – and the world: also their interrogation of their own nature. One might say that the situationist moment is its final stage: there was formulated the answer that remains, of its kind, unsurpassable.
But the very nature of humanity is to survive the unsurpassable. There are novels after Proust and Joyce, there is poetry after Mallarmé – even if the aforementioned, each in his own way, through a transcendent oeuvre, defines a resolution of those questions that constituted the inaccessible horizon of their predecessors. I am describing this in a doubtlessly summary fashion; however, it seems to me that beyond supersession there lies not necessarily another supersession but, rather, access to a virgin terrain, a lunar landscape where everything remains to be built anew, sometimes even using the same tools as before.
Situationism identified precisely the path to supersession of art and proceeded to carry it out. From the vantage point of the plastic arts, let’s say that we are today in an after which is not only unable to find itself but has often given up even seeking itself, sparing an individual, fragmentary salvation only at the expense of a pretty remarkable reduction of its ambitions: a space nonetheless sufficient for the expression of specific genius in some great, entirely isolated artists.
The second path, which grows in the shadow of the first and often in ignorance of it, is that consisting in the simple representation of the world where humanity simply concerns itself with the human, with the timeless means that, in every era, have allowed it to reach these ends, always renewed, always the same.
What I mean to say is that beyond all theory, beyond any historical perspective on art, there resides within a contemporary artist the same question that posed itself to a gentleman of the Tang Dynasty: how to capture this moment, the face of a beloved, a country road in an autumn mist, the corner of the street where you live. Or, to pose in a more specifically contemporary context the same timeless question: how to seize the thoughts that traverse us while we are seated in a metro, rushing through the underground tunnels of the big city?
This is where to find the simple, limpid need for figuration as one of the immutable functions of being human. But does this idea actually distance me all that much from situationism?
Didn’t Debord write La Societé du spectacle while simultaneously making autobiographical films devoted to preserving from the ravages of time, to capture in a flash for all eternity, life as it offered itself to him at certain moments of grace? And did he not also make these films so that, in them, might radiate the glow of the faces of those he had loved? Isn’t that exactly where their poetry vibrates most dearly? All this I see clearly today, even if very few know how to articulate it, even among those who regard themselves as being closest to Debord’s ideas.
- Olivier Assayas, A Post-May Adolescence
.
November 18, 2012
Success
.
I didn’t succeed
I failed
and will fail again
my work will be forgotten
no one will read it
it will all disappear
.
I didn’t succeed
I failed
and will fail again
my work will be forgotten
no one will read it
it will all disappear
.
November 17, 2012
November 14, 2012
Idea for a stage project: Three Old Movies
.
At a large German Schauspielhaus, three separate dramaturge’s are instructed to pick one old film each. The film must be feature length. They do not tell each other what old film they have chosen, and also do not tell anyone else. They each assemble a cast to perform the film, one actor for every roll. Each dramaturge works in isolation from the other two, yet employing the following, identical method: the film is projected onto the wall of the rehearsal hall and the actors are instructed to imitate it to the absolute best of their ability, imitating the timing as well as the performances. For the entire rehearsal period they simply imitate the film over and over again, until they have created a more or less precise stage facsimile of it. On the night of the premiere, on a large empty stage, all three casts simultaneously perform their films, on the same stage, at the same time. Each separate cast is instructed to perform their film as precisely as possible, while at the same time remaining aware of everything else happening on stage, avoiding collisions, etc. Many unexpected and fascinating things will occur as the three separate films overlap, as well and many moments of pure incomprehensibility. It will be a spectacle.
.
At a large German Schauspielhaus, three separate dramaturge’s are instructed to pick one old film each. The film must be feature length. They do not tell each other what old film they have chosen, and also do not tell anyone else. They each assemble a cast to perform the film, one actor for every roll. Each dramaturge works in isolation from the other two, yet employing the following, identical method: the film is projected onto the wall of the rehearsal hall and the actors are instructed to imitate it to the absolute best of their ability, imitating the timing as well as the performances. For the entire rehearsal period they simply imitate the film over and over again, until they have created a more or less precise stage facsimile of it. On the night of the premiere, on a large empty stage, all three casts simultaneously perform their films, on the same stage, at the same time. Each separate cast is instructed to perform their film as precisely as possible, while at the same time remaining aware of everything else happening on stage, avoiding collisions, etc. Many unexpected and fascinating things will occur as the three separate films overlap, as well and many moments of pure incomprehensibility. It will be a spectacle.
.
November 2, 2012
Harry Mathews quote
.
It’s true, as I’ve told others, that knowing one knows nothing is the best way to be, since life, minute after minute, is never more than being inspired to rediscover what one thought one already knew. I did know it, but… No, not “but”: and I’m about to know it again, right now.
– Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day
.
It’s true, as I’ve told others, that knowing one knows nothing is the best way to be, since life, minute after minute, is never more than being inspired to rediscover what one thought one already knew. I did know it, but… No, not “but”: and I’m about to know it again, right now.
– Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day
.
October 24, 2012
A note on Every Song I've Ever Written
.
From 1985 to 2004, PME-ART co-artistic director Jacob Wren wrote songs. Lots and lots of songs. Then he completely stopped. At the time not very many people heard them. In a way, because hardly anyone heard them, we might say that these songs don’t yet exist. Every Song I’ve Ever Written is a project about memory, history, things that may or may not exist, songwriting, the internet and pop culture.
Every Song I’ve Ever Written is a project with four parts:
1) A website (www.everysongiveeverwritten.com) on which you can listen to, and download, all the songs Jacob wrote between 1985 to 2004. You can also record your own versions, send them to us, and we will post them on the site.
2) Karaoké Nights where anyone can sing one of the songs Karaoké-style, with Jacob playing guitar behind them.
3) Solo Performances in which Jacob will perform all of the songs in chronological order (it takes about five hours.) When put all together these songs form a picture not just of Jacob’s life but also of the decades during which they were written.
4) Band Nights where five local bands (in different cities: Düsseldorf, Montreal, Mannheim, Helsinki, Malmö, etc.) will perform one song each. After they perform the song there will be an interview in which Jacob asks the band what it was like to cover the song and the band can ask Jacob what it was like to write it.
We are not doing this because we think these are the best songs ever (we hope at least a few of them are good.) We are doing this because hardly anyone heard them at the time, and we are wondering if there is some new, strange way to bring them out into the world. In doing so we hope to raise a few questions about what songs mean on the internet, about what songwriting is actually like today, and also take a sidelong glance back at the recent past.
(P.S. On the site, the songs are listed in chronological order starting when Jacob was 14, so some of the best songs are probably closer to the middle or end of the list.)
.
From 1985 to 2004, PME-ART co-artistic director Jacob Wren wrote songs. Lots and lots of songs. Then he completely stopped. At the time not very many people heard them. In a way, because hardly anyone heard them, we might say that these songs don’t yet exist. Every Song I’ve Ever Written is a project about memory, history, things that may or may not exist, songwriting, the internet and pop culture.
Every Song I’ve Ever Written is a project with four parts:
1) A website (www.everysongiveeverwritten.com) on which you can listen to, and download, all the songs Jacob wrote between 1985 to 2004. You can also record your own versions, send them to us, and we will post them on the site.
2) Karaoké Nights where anyone can sing one of the songs Karaoké-style, with Jacob playing guitar behind them.
3) Solo Performances in which Jacob will perform all of the songs in chronological order (it takes about five hours.) When put all together these songs form a picture not just of Jacob’s life but also of the decades during which they were written.
4) Band Nights where five local bands (in different cities: Düsseldorf, Montreal, Mannheim, Helsinki, Malmö, etc.) will perform one song each. After they perform the song there will be an interview in which Jacob asks the band what it was like to cover the song and the band can ask Jacob what it was like to write it.
We are not doing this because we think these are the best songs ever (we hope at least a few of them are good.) We are doing this because hardly anyone heard them at the time, and we are wondering if there is some new, strange way to bring them out into the world. In doing so we hope to raise a few questions about what songs mean on the internet, about what songwriting is actually like today, and also take a sidelong glance back at the recent past.
(P.S. On the site, the songs are listed in chronological order starting when Jacob was 14, so some of the best songs are probably closer to the middle or end of the list.)
.
October 19, 2012
Some brief thoughts on energy
.
I have been thinking so much about solar energy, about how much of what I read, especially from a mainstream perspective, seems misplaced. When I read that we will not be able to generate enough energy using solar and wind, I feel they are completely missing the point. The points are:
1) That these new, sustainable technologies will force us to use less, will demonstrate – on a real, lived, experiential basis – that resources are renewable but not infinite.
2) That there is more autonomy, and less greedy profit, in a decentralized power grid.
3) That the many exorbitant expenses of polluting the air and water are simply not being factored into the standard calculations. Environmental devastation is expensive on every level.
But it is mainly the first point I obsess over. Let’s say you have solar panels on the roof of your house. Each day, you will use only as much energy as these panels generate. When it runs out you go to sleep and wait for the sun to come up tomorrow. The energy is not infinite, not available twenty-four hours a day. There are limits and you learn, out of necessity, how to live within them.
This, for me, is the main lesson of sustainable technologies. They would force us to live differently, to be aware of daily limits, to find solutions that acknowledge real limitations. They do not make life easier in every way. They make life harder in some ways, ways that force a fundamental shift in how we see the world and our place within it. I also suspect that working within a series of concrete, reasonable limitations would bring along with it a kind of reality and even joy.
It is easy for me to write these things, since I am certainly not living them, and I am clearly not the first to suggest this. However, I definitely wish they were being said far more often.
.
I have been thinking so much about solar energy, about how much of what I read, especially from a mainstream perspective, seems misplaced. When I read that we will not be able to generate enough energy using solar and wind, I feel they are completely missing the point. The points are:
1) That these new, sustainable technologies will force us to use less, will demonstrate – on a real, lived, experiential basis – that resources are renewable but not infinite.
2) That there is more autonomy, and less greedy profit, in a decentralized power grid.
3) That the many exorbitant expenses of polluting the air and water are simply not being factored into the standard calculations. Environmental devastation is expensive on every level.
But it is mainly the first point I obsess over. Let’s say you have solar panels on the roof of your house. Each day, you will use only as much energy as these panels generate. When it runs out you go to sleep and wait for the sun to come up tomorrow. The energy is not infinite, not available twenty-four hours a day. There are limits and you learn, out of necessity, how to live within them.
This, for me, is the main lesson of sustainable technologies. They would force us to live differently, to be aware of daily limits, to find solutions that acknowledge real limitations. They do not make life easier in every way. They make life harder in some ways, ways that force a fundamental shift in how we see the world and our place within it. I also suspect that working within a series of concrete, reasonable limitations would bring along with it a kind of reality and even joy.
It is easy for me to write these things, since I am certainly not living them, and I am clearly not the first to suggest this. However, I definitely wish they were being said far more often.
.
Six Manifestos and/or Semi-manifestos
.
Over the past few years, I have written six manifestos (and/or semi-manifestos):
Notes on Literature (Unfinished Manifesto)
Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings
Songs Are Meant For Singing, a manifesto
Resistance as Paradox
Artist’s Pledge
A short history of anti-theatre, non-music, counter-philosophy, semi-specific art and unpolitics
I wonder if I will write more.
.
"I just read in an art column that the time for manifestos has passed. So I thought I’d write one…"
- R.B. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto (1989)
Over the past few years, I have written six manifestos (and/or semi-manifestos):
Notes on Literature (Unfinished Manifesto)
Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings
Songs Are Meant For Singing, a manifesto
Resistance as Paradox
Artist’s Pledge
A short history of anti-theatre, non-music, counter-philosophy, semi-specific art and unpolitics
I wonder if I will write more.
.
October 15, 2012
Jeremy M. Davies quote
.
It all comes back to our old friend the arbitrary constraint. (The following is a fairly familiar argument, I think, but come along anyhow, we’ll make a day of it.) One of the basic tenets of the Oulipo—founded in reaction, if not opposition, to Breton’s Surrealists—is that freedom, in writing (that is, “letting it flow,” and other such nauseating commonplaces), leads one to produce derivative offal. That is, when you free associate, it isn’t you talking, it’s the culture: we’re all plugged into the same calcified memes, cadences, and clichés; we’ve all got hearts, brothers and sisters, of bullshit. And yet—and yet!—we all still have to use the same words to communicate, all have to dip into the same language(s) to write “creatively,” all have to do our best to keep English (in this case) a worthwhile medium. The only way to circumvent the unclean spirit is to put pressure on our means of expression—and the best way isn’t to stop at naming your character “John McLane” rather than “Mr. M’Choakumchild” (though this is no less a constraint, and no less arbitrary, really, than not using the letter E), but to frustrate one’s compositional impulses at their root. Now everyone can type “Oulipo” into a search engine and choose their own example.
What this has to do with smut is that here, again, is a medium where one is restricted to a fairly finite number of effective tools. Sex as sex is not all that interesting, outside the context of our complex reactions to it in life, in art, in passing. Prudishness, then, is an arbitrary constraint on human interaction and expression. It makes smut more interesting and peculiar if it comes out of someone battling their own inability to be forthright about . . . whatever. Even if they succeed in writing something quite filthy, this filth is a different filth from the filth mongered by an author who feels they have nothing to hide. (Which reminds me: my favorite Oulipian constraint? The “Canada Dry”: Write something that reads as though it was written under a constraint, but was not.)
- Jeremy M. Davies, find the rest of the interview here
.
It all comes back to our old friend the arbitrary constraint. (The following is a fairly familiar argument, I think, but come along anyhow, we’ll make a day of it.) One of the basic tenets of the Oulipo—founded in reaction, if not opposition, to Breton’s Surrealists—is that freedom, in writing (that is, “letting it flow,” and other such nauseating commonplaces), leads one to produce derivative offal. That is, when you free associate, it isn’t you talking, it’s the culture: we’re all plugged into the same calcified memes, cadences, and clichés; we’ve all got hearts, brothers and sisters, of bullshit. And yet—and yet!—we all still have to use the same words to communicate, all have to dip into the same language(s) to write “creatively,” all have to do our best to keep English (in this case) a worthwhile medium. The only way to circumvent the unclean spirit is to put pressure on our means of expression—and the best way isn’t to stop at naming your character “John McLane” rather than “Mr. M’Choakumchild” (though this is no less a constraint, and no less arbitrary, really, than not using the letter E), but to frustrate one’s compositional impulses at their root. Now everyone can type “Oulipo” into a search engine and choose their own example.
What this has to do with smut is that here, again, is a medium where one is restricted to a fairly finite number of effective tools. Sex as sex is not all that interesting, outside the context of our complex reactions to it in life, in art, in passing. Prudishness, then, is an arbitrary constraint on human interaction and expression. It makes smut more interesting and peculiar if it comes out of someone battling their own inability to be forthright about . . . whatever. Even if they succeed in writing something quite filthy, this filth is a different filth from the filth mongered by an author who feels they have nothing to hide. (Which reminds me: my favorite Oulipian constraint? The “Canada Dry”: Write something that reads as though it was written under a constraint, but was not.)
- Jeremy M. Davies, find the rest of the interview here
.
October 13, 2012
Internet Feelings
.
[This text was originally published in Spike Art Quarterly #25.]
1.
As an artist I feel more or less irrelevant. It seems to me that I am one of approximately a billion artists on the planet, all making our little projects, hoping that someone will see them and, for a few moments, be interested. All of us trying to scrape by and whip up a modicum of success. In the grand scheme of things the work I make, and the work I see, barely feels like ephemera, as if it were vanishing as soon as it appeared. YouTube seems important. Facebook feels significant. I don’t play videogames, but I suspect there is something happening there as well. I cannot think of a single artist or group of artists today that can begin to match the society-changing force of these technological innovations. Maybe in the sixties, maybe even in the eighties, but not today.
All of this is, most likely, an unfair comparison: artists are artists and the Internet (and video games) are global technologies with military origins. Perhaps art simply isn’t, or is no longer, about changing the world. It is about enriching our lives within the moment, in our direct encounter and experience of it. Nonetheless, when I am working, attempting to make something, more and more such comparisons are never far from my mind. There was one paradigm shift with the invention of the printing press, another intense shift with the introduction of a television set into every Western home, and possibly, as we speak, another overhaul with the predominance of the internet. I can certainly not prove it, but I have a feeling, this suspicion: in terms of art, the internet changes everything. What makes this fact potentially negative is that we haven’t even begun to understand what these changes might be or mean. At least I haven’t.
(There are of course many artists today working on and about the internet. That is not quite what I mean. I am wondering about something larger, some more fundamental shift.)
When I was growing up there was a great deal of talk about post-modernism. You don’t hear nearly as much about it now. For me, what post-modernism most resembled was television. The juxtaposition of different positions and historical styles felt like different television channels, sitting side by side yet not particularly affecting one another. The idea that everything could be shoved together in every possible way, what did this resemble more than flipping channels: programs, commercials and music videos all blurring together into one never-ending flow.
When both radio and television were first invented, it was proposed that they could be revolutionarily democratic mediums, that everyone could broadcast from their homes, that new pathways of global communication were opening, but quickly monopolies developed and they became something quite different, much as we know them today. For the time being, the internet fulfills certain of the early democratic aspirations of radio and television. Anyone can post a YouTube video. Anyone can start a blog. It is quite likely that no one will watch my video or read my blog, but this reality is also somehow democratic. As Emily Vey Duke has concisely stated, YouTube replaces the one-to-many ratio of traditional media with a one-to-one ratio. I post a video and my friend watches it. Complete strangers might also watch it but it is unlikely there will be very many. And then every once in a while, like a hurricane, there is a rush, a meme, a million hits and it’s done. As an artist I can put my work on the internet, potentially have it seen everywhere in the world at once. But of course everyone else, artist or not, can do exactly the same thing.
The way radically different materials are juxtaposed on the Internet seems, to me, significantly different from the way in which different television channels, or television shows and their commercials, press against one another. On YouTube, when I am watching a video, there is a long list of related videos down the right hand side of the screen. This selection of related videos is generated by an algorithm. Often selections appear within this list that seem strange, make no sense, where I am unable to see the logic of the choice. This list is provided in order to be helpful, but within its helpfulness there are moments of pure dada (or data.) In a way, it is only an acceleration, an increase in the degree and quantity of simultaneity. But like any acceleration, it brings along with it qualitative changes as well.
The internet as collage-machine: where massive amounts of related and unrelated materials exist side by side, all at the same time, separated only by the same monotonous click. (Other loose examples: Having four or five browser windows open at the same time. Or a Wikipedia page in which a compendium of different authors and sources are formatted to appear as a single text.) And yet, considering the breadth and variety of material available, it is shocking to me how narrow and limited my use of it is. Most days I look at the same handful of sites, occasionally following a few loose threads but rarely following them very far. I have the strange feeling that, within me, the internet promotes an ever-increasing lack of curiosity. I can click forever and nothing will genuinely catch my interest. (Or at least I would be required to look at far too many things before stumbling upon something that eventually did.) Taken as a whole, it is more information than I could ever digest. An endless bricolage of the entire world: in all its crassness, banality, confusion, redundancy, interspersed with tiny yet electric sparks of interest, compassion, violence and difference.
I have suggested that the internet embodies a certain democratic potential. While this is my personal experience, it is also highly suspect, since when I am attempting to use the internet in a democratic manner, at the same time I am also generating data trails that subject me to new forms of social monitoring and control from corporations, advertisers and the state. A strong mix of (illusory) freedom and (potential) surveillance blankets the web. I don’t necessarily experience the informational trails I generate, or the surveillance I am subject to, and therefore will leave such Big Brother aspects, obviously troubling, aside (in the same manner I put them out of mind when I am surfing the web.) Yet the discomfort persists: that the collage I generate through my random curiosity (along with my email writing, profile constructing, etc.) may be used to monitor, manipulate, somehow control me.
The fact that Facebook, to this day, fails to make a profit: I hope this is a timid sign of what the future might still hold in store. And yet the possibility that Facebook is little more than Big Brother run by Deep Blue, this is the other, more pernicious, face of what might be to come.
2.
Perhaps, in a more ordered, coherent world (for example the 1920’s), avant-garde strategies of visual juxtaposition and bricolage might have felt jarring or provocative. Instead, we now live in a flow of anti-contextualizing visual and informational chaos. For the most part, we don’t experience this chaos as such. We select. We make our little stories that navigate us through the ambush (I am interested in this, this and this, considerably less interested in the rest.) We are not worried about missing out, since we know that everything outside of our little stories, everything else, is only, now and forever, just a click away.
I remember reading about how in the eleventh century (as least I think it was the eleventh century) people would go on a pilgrimage, walk for several weeks to see a painting, and how it might be the only reproduced image they would see in their natural lives. I try to imagine what it would be like to walk for three or four weeks simply in order to see an image, what the experience of viewing an image might mean after such a journey. I am unclear whether or not this anecdote is historically accurate, but nonetheless it is a way of thinking about an experience of the image, in this case a painting, that is radically different from our own, that we have no way of accessing, no reference points for or towards.
Feeling irrelevant, marginal, powerless, these are also lacks that fit very neatly within the guiding principles of capitalism and neo-liberalism. If I feel marginal I must work harder, network more efficiently, promote myself with greater panache. As I do so I might fail to notice many things: not only how, year by year, power is being further consolidated by corporations with an ever-expanding global reach (the corporations I in fact feel powerless in relation too), but also how in some small, tepid manner my own actions and motivations mirror the insatiable expansionism of the corporate world. There is a certain kind of artist that, suspecting it is impossible, still wants his or her work to have the impact of a Hollywood blockbuster (but of course with a much greater sense of integrity.)
This sense of lack is also (always) an excellent trait for a consumer to possess. I will try to fill this undefined sense of emptiness with purchases, career goals, with an endless variety of goals of every kind that I will select for myself as if from a market shelf. I will not necessarily realize that this sense of lack has been created within me in order to make me a more voracious consumer. Because, of course, of the massive amounts of images and information that are available to me, so many of them, in one way or another, have been put in place in order to sell me something. And I don’t want to sell anything. In fact, I don’t want to sell myself. But, also, I don’t want to sell myself short.
I believe art should fight the status quo. At the same time, it often seems to me that much, or most, art I see is actually doing the exact opposite, that it is barely a millimeter away from the ruling logics of our time, just a hairbreadth from power. Resistance is rare, often ineffective, but nonetheless must be cherished. As I write these things, I worry they are little more than empty platitudes. I want to write them anyways. I don’t hear such statements often and therefore crave to see them in print. And yet how do you resist within an ever-expanding field of informational chaos? What do you resist? Where is the solid ground from which to launch an attack, the runway along which one can effectively achieve liftoff?
The power of bricolage and collage lie in their ability to show us radically different materials side by side, to allow us to compare and contrast, see how things might be put together in ways we would have never previously expected, generate new possibilities. The internet also does this. In a work of visual or literary collage, it is the author or artist who decides what information is juxtaposed with what. On the internet, we ourselves (partially) decide with every click. However, this limited sense of autonomy is rarely invigorating. Through a lens of deep information-fatigue, it is difficult to view such juxtapositions crisply, for them to keep their critical edge in relation to one another. Everything blurs slightly (or not so slightly) around the edges. Radically disparate materials begin to feel increasingly the same.
Every difficulty, every strangeness, is also an opportunity. And I return to my earlier suspicion: that in terms of art, the Internet changes everything. I stare at this statement and realize that the problem, at least in part, might be that I was born too soon or too late. I have fallen in between, somewhere in the gap between television and internet. Perhaps the artists who will fully grasp this shift, which may be little more than a mirage, have not yet been born. But as Borges wrote: “Like all men, he was simply given bad times in which to live.”
.
[This text was originally published in Spike Art Quarterly #25.]
1.
As an artist I feel more or less irrelevant. It seems to me that I am one of approximately a billion artists on the planet, all making our little projects, hoping that someone will see them and, for a few moments, be interested. All of us trying to scrape by and whip up a modicum of success. In the grand scheme of things the work I make, and the work I see, barely feels like ephemera, as if it were vanishing as soon as it appeared. YouTube seems important. Facebook feels significant. I don’t play videogames, but I suspect there is something happening there as well. I cannot think of a single artist or group of artists today that can begin to match the society-changing force of these technological innovations. Maybe in the sixties, maybe even in the eighties, but not today.
All of this is, most likely, an unfair comparison: artists are artists and the Internet (and video games) are global technologies with military origins. Perhaps art simply isn’t, or is no longer, about changing the world. It is about enriching our lives within the moment, in our direct encounter and experience of it. Nonetheless, when I am working, attempting to make something, more and more such comparisons are never far from my mind. There was one paradigm shift with the invention of the printing press, another intense shift with the introduction of a television set into every Western home, and possibly, as we speak, another overhaul with the predominance of the internet. I can certainly not prove it, but I have a feeling, this suspicion: in terms of art, the internet changes everything. What makes this fact potentially negative is that we haven’t even begun to understand what these changes might be or mean. At least I haven’t.
(There are of course many artists today working on and about the internet. That is not quite what I mean. I am wondering about something larger, some more fundamental shift.)
When I was growing up there was a great deal of talk about post-modernism. You don’t hear nearly as much about it now. For me, what post-modernism most resembled was television. The juxtaposition of different positions and historical styles felt like different television channels, sitting side by side yet not particularly affecting one another. The idea that everything could be shoved together in every possible way, what did this resemble more than flipping channels: programs, commercials and music videos all blurring together into one never-ending flow.
When both radio and television were first invented, it was proposed that they could be revolutionarily democratic mediums, that everyone could broadcast from their homes, that new pathways of global communication were opening, but quickly monopolies developed and they became something quite different, much as we know them today. For the time being, the internet fulfills certain of the early democratic aspirations of radio and television. Anyone can post a YouTube video. Anyone can start a blog. It is quite likely that no one will watch my video or read my blog, but this reality is also somehow democratic. As Emily Vey Duke has concisely stated, YouTube replaces the one-to-many ratio of traditional media with a one-to-one ratio. I post a video and my friend watches it. Complete strangers might also watch it but it is unlikely there will be very many. And then every once in a while, like a hurricane, there is a rush, a meme, a million hits and it’s done. As an artist I can put my work on the internet, potentially have it seen everywhere in the world at once. But of course everyone else, artist or not, can do exactly the same thing.
The way radically different materials are juxtaposed on the Internet seems, to me, significantly different from the way in which different television channels, or television shows and their commercials, press against one another. On YouTube, when I am watching a video, there is a long list of related videos down the right hand side of the screen. This selection of related videos is generated by an algorithm. Often selections appear within this list that seem strange, make no sense, where I am unable to see the logic of the choice. This list is provided in order to be helpful, but within its helpfulness there are moments of pure dada (or data.) In a way, it is only an acceleration, an increase in the degree and quantity of simultaneity. But like any acceleration, it brings along with it qualitative changes as well.
The internet as collage-machine: where massive amounts of related and unrelated materials exist side by side, all at the same time, separated only by the same monotonous click. (Other loose examples: Having four or five browser windows open at the same time. Or a Wikipedia page in which a compendium of different authors and sources are formatted to appear as a single text.) And yet, considering the breadth and variety of material available, it is shocking to me how narrow and limited my use of it is. Most days I look at the same handful of sites, occasionally following a few loose threads but rarely following them very far. I have the strange feeling that, within me, the internet promotes an ever-increasing lack of curiosity. I can click forever and nothing will genuinely catch my interest. (Or at least I would be required to look at far too many things before stumbling upon something that eventually did.) Taken as a whole, it is more information than I could ever digest. An endless bricolage of the entire world: in all its crassness, banality, confusion, redundancy, interspersed with tiny yet electric sparks of interest, compassion, violence and difference.
I have suggested that the internet embodies a certain democratic potential. While this is my personal experience, it is also highly suspect, since when I am attempting to use the internet in a democratic manner, at the same time I am also generating data trails that subject me to new forms of social monitoring and control from corporations, advertisers and the state. A strong mix of (illusory) freedom and (potential) surveillance blankets the web. I don’t necessarily experience the informational trails I generate, or the surveillance I am subject to, and therefore will leave such Big Brother aspects, obviously troubling, aside (in the same manner I put them out of mind when I am surfing the web.) Yet the discomfort persists: that the collage I generate through my random curiosity (along with my email writing, profile constructing, etc.) may be used to monitor, manipulate, somehow control me.
The fact that Facebook, to this day, fails to make a profit: I hope this is a timid sign of what the future might still hold in store. And yet the possibility that Facebook is little more than Big Brother run by Deep Blue, this is the other, more pernicious, face of what might be to come.
2.
Perhaps, in a more ordered, coherent world (for example the 1920’s), avant-garde strategies of visual juxtaposition and bricolage might have felt jarring or provocative. Instead, we now live in a flow of anti-contextualizing visual and informational chaos. For the most part, we don’t experience this chaos as such. We select. We make our little stories that navigate us through the ambush (I am interested in this, this and this, considerably less interested in the rest.) We are not worried about missing out, since we know that everything outside of our little stories, everything else, is only, now and forever, just a click away.
I remember reading about how in the eleventh century (as least I think it was the eleventh century) people would go on a pilgrimage, walk for several weeks to see a painting, and how it might be the only reproduced image they would see in their natural lives. I try to imagine what it would be like to walk for three or four weeks simply in order to see an image, what the experience of viewing an image might mean after such a journey. I am unclear whether or not this anecdote is historically accurate, but nonetheless it is a way of thinking about an experience of the image, in this case a painting, that is radically different from our own, that we have no way of accessing, no reference points for or towards.
Feeling irrelevant, marginal, powerless, these are also lacks that fit very neatly within the guiding principles of capitalism and neo-liberalism. If I feel marginal I must work harder, network more efficiently, promote myself with greater panache. As I do so I might fail to notice many things: not only how, year by year, power is being further consolidated by corporations with an ever-expanding global reach (the corporations I in fact feel powerless in relation too), but also how in some small, tepid manner my own actions and motivations mirror the insatiable expansionism of the corporate world. There is a certain kind of artist that, suspecting it is impossible, still wants his or her work to have the impact of a Hollywood blockbuster (but of course with a much greater sense of integrity.)
This sense of lack is also (always) an excellent trait for a consumer to possess. I will try to fill this undefined sense of emptiness with purchases, career goals, with an endless variety of goals of every kind that I will select for myself as if from a market shelf. I will not necessarily realize that this sense of lack has been created within me in order to make me a more voracious consumer. Because, of course, of the massive amounts of images and information that are available to me, so many of them, in one way or another, have been put in place in order to sell me something. And I don’t want to sell anything. In fact, I don’t want to sell myself. But, also, I don’t want to sell myself short.
I believe art should fight the status quo. At the same time, it often seems to me that much, or most, art I see is actually doing the exact opposite, that it is barely a millimeter away from the ruling logics of our time, just a hairbreadth from power. Resistance is rare, often ineffective, but nonetheless must be cherished. As I write these things, I worry they are little more than empty platitudes. I want to write them anyways. I don’t hear such statements often and therefore crave to see them in print. And yet how do you resist within an ever-expanding field of informational chaos? What do you resist? Where is the solid ground from which to launch an attack, the runway along which one can effectively achieve liftoff?
The power of bricolage and collage lie in their ability to show us radically different materials side by side, to allow us to compare and contrast, see how things might be put together in ways we would have never previously expected, generate new possibilities. The internet also does this. In a work of visual or literary collage, it is the author or artist who decides what information is juxtaposed with what. On the internet, we ourselves (partially) decide with every click. However, this limited sense of autonomy is rarely invigorating. Through a lens of deep information-fatigue, it is difficult to view such juxtapositions crisply, for them to keep their critical edge in relation to one another. Everything blurs slightly (or not so slightly) around the edges. Radically disparate materials begin to feel increasingly the same.
Every difficulty, every strangeness, is also an opportunity. And I return to my earlier suspicion: that in terms of art, the Internet changes everything. I stare at this statement and realize that the problem, at least in part, might be that I was born too soon or too late. I have fallen in between, somewhere in the gap between television and internet. Perhaps the artists who will fully grasp this shift, which may be little more than a mirage, have not yet been born. But as Borges wrote: “Like all men, he was simply given bad times in which to live.”
.
October 12, 2012
Things in the world
.
I know I should be thinking about, or doing something, with feeling. I look at the things in the world, things I have thought about a great deal and others which leave me utterly blank, and they are like boats on the river in front of me, drifting past, carried by the wind. In fact, I am barely watching them, almost fully immersed in the book I am reading, and yet as soon as I turn each page I have almost no recollection of anything that happened, or that was said, on any of the pages already read, nor do I have any recollection of what I felt about any of it. And yet I know I read those pages, and that the boats did drift past. I know, am certain, yet don’t know anything else, for instance how any of it might concern me, or if there was any way I could have intervened, or if intervention on my part would have been useful or counterproductive. Feeling powerless is the most effective siphon. Last week I went to the launch for an art catalog I have a text in. The catalog is hardcover, about four hundred pages. It features many images and many texts. My text is about Quebec, about the fact I don’t speak or understand French, and about Japan. I don’t know how I feel about what I wrote, and also know that I will receive basically no feedback on it ever, will have no idea if anyone read it and, if they did, what they may or may not have thought. It is dropping a pebble into the void. A world with much noise but no echo. I started a Tumblr account a few days ago and quickly found myself following over two hundred other Tumblr accounts. The images scroll past and just keep scrolling. It is difficult to believe there are so many compelling images in the world and yet, for as long as I am able to sit here, they keep rolling past my eyes. Life is certainly not infinite but this scroll of images is, made by everyone and no one, for pleasure and out of boredom, an infinite confusion that cannot be grasped. Distraction is at war with politics. Infinity is at war with the finite. And all roads lead to either moderation or collapse.
.
I know I should be thinking about, or doing something, with feeling. I look at the things in the world, things I have thought about a great deal and others which leave me utterly blank, and they are like boats on the river in front of me, drifting past, carried by the wind. In fact, I am barely watching them, almost fully immersed in the book I am reading, and yet as soon as I turn each page I have almost no recollection of anything that happened, or that was said, on any of the pages already read, nor do I have any recollection of what I felt about any of it. And yet I know I read those pages, and that the boats did drift past. I know, am certain, yet don’t know anything else, for instance how any of it might concern me, or if there was any way I could have intervened, or if intervention on my part would have been useful or counterproductive. Feeling powerless is the most effective siphon. Last week I went to the launch for an art catalog I have a text in. The catalog is hardcover, about four hundred pages. It features many images and many texts. My text is about Quebec, about the fact I don’t speak or understand French, and about Japan. I don’t know how I feel about what I wrote, and also know that I will receive basically no feedback on it ever, will have no idea if anyone read it and, if they did, what they may or may not have thought. It is dropping a pebble into the void. A world with much noise but no echo. I started a Tumblr account a few days ago and quickly found myself following over two hundred other Tumblr accounts. The images scroll past and just keep scrolling. It is difficult to believe there are so many compelling images in the world and yet, for as long as I am able to sit here, they keep rolling past my eyes. Life is certainly not infinite but this scroll of images is, made by everyone and no one, for pleasure and out of boredom, an infinite confusion that cannot be grasped. Distraction is at war with politics. Infinity is at war with the finite. And all roads lead to either moderation or collapse.
.
October 11, 2012
Songs Are Meant For Singing, a manifesto
.
1. Not everyone can play violin or accordion (to give just two examples off the top of my head) but everyone can sing.
2. Singing is one of life’s great pleasures.
3. Listening to songs is great, but it will never be as much fun as singing them.
4. Singing alone is okay, but to get the real feeling one needs a group.
5. Nothing comes closer to a feeling of pure community than singing together with a group of friends. Or a group of friendly strangers.
6. Take the songs you love, get together with the people you love, and sing them.
7. When you sing a song, you more fully make it your own. It is no longer their song, it is now yours as well.
8. If some are better and some worse singers, when we all sing together it very quickly no longer matters. Especially if there are many of us and alcohol is involved.
9. Dancing is also great. But lots of people go out dancing. The invention of recorded music perhaps suppressed singing as a public activity. Lets bring it back.
10. When you sing you can also change the lyrics. It is a chance to say what you want to say. It is a chance to twist the world and make it your own.
.
1. Not everyone can play violin or accordion (to give just two examples off the top of my head) but everyone can sing.
2. Singing is one of life’s great pleasures.
3. Listening to songs is great, but it will never be as much fun as singing them.
4. Singing alone is okay, but to get the real feeling one needs a group.
5. Nothing comes closer to a feeling of pure community than singing together with a group of friends. Or a group of friendly strangers.
6. Take the songs you love, get together with the people you love, and sing them.
7. When you sing a song, you more fully make it your own. It is no longer their song, it is now yours as well.
8. If some are better and some worse singers, when we all sing together it very quickly no longer matters. Especially if there are many of us and alcohol is involved.
9. Dancing is also great. But lots of people go out dancing. The invention of recorded music perhaps suppressed singing as a public activity. Lets bring it back.
10. When you sing you can also change the lyrics. It is a chance to say what you want to say. It is a chance to twist the world and make it your own.
.
October 9, 2012
Found poem on the topic of singing in falsetto
.
desire is undiluted by an object
romance is undisturbed by love
tragedy is distilled from humanity
[Part of a line from the essay This Prince is No Pretender by Ariel Swartley.]
.
desire is undiluted by an object
romance is undisturbed by love
tragedy is distilled from humanity
[Part of a line from the essay This Prince is No Pretender by Ariel Swartley.]
.
September 27, 2012
The presentation
.
I don't think my proposal
was amazing, amazing, amazing
I saw what was strong about it
but also what was weak
how to fill five years and
make them feel like five years
I didn't quite know and still don't
the people we see who are
successful, we don't see all
their rejections
all the things they didn't get
that didn't work out
much like on Facebook everyone
seems happy and successful
all the time
I saw weaknesses in our proposal
but I like weakness
I could sense the winner wanted it
so much more than me
I felt that 'wanting it' at the first meeting
often the one who wants it the most wins
that hunger wins
often but not always
I had doubts
black holes of skepticism about
the overall endeavor
I had so many doubts
and in my ideas you can feel them
since the whole time I was wondering
what would be my better idea
where was it
why didn't it come
I wanted to provoke
express my disgust for all situations
including the one we were
competing for and in
but provocation is a delicate game
and often you lose
.
I don't think my proposal
was amazing, amazing, amazing
I saw what was strong about it
but also what was weak
how to fill five years and
make them feel like five years
I didn't quite know and still don't
the people we see who are
successful, we don't see all
their rejections
all the things they didn't get
that didn't work out
much like on Facebook everyone
seems happy and successful
all the time
I saw weaknesses in our proposal
but I like weakness
I could sense the winner wanted it
so much more than me
I felt that 'wanting it' at the first meeting
often the one who wants it the most wins
that hunger wins
often but not always
I had doubts
black holes of skepticism about
the overall endeavor
I had so many doubts
and in my ideas you can feel them
since the whole time I was wondering
what would be my better idea
where was it
why didn't it come
I wanted to provoke
express my disgust for all situations
including the one we were
competing for and in
but provocation is a delicate game
and often you lose
.
September 19, 2012
Excerpt from Families Are Formed Through Copulation
.
People, stop having children. You are not doing yourselves or the world any good. Take the energies you would have spent on child-rearing and use them instead to fight American imperialism. The world is not as it used to be. Before you know it your children will be taken from you and indoctrinated in the ways of bad cartoons, over-priced toys, short attention spans, violent video games, stupid television and the endless misinformation of the internet. Stop for a moment and think. There are too many people in the world already. There is too much of everything. Your children will learn nothing from you. Is what you know really so valuable or important? People, stop having children. You think you are being generous but really you are only being selfish. You are doing it only to add surplus, disingenuous meaning to your already basically meaningless lives or as an unwitting slave of primitive biology. Your children will not look after you when you are old. They will be too busy trying to fend for themselves within the unyieldingly harsh economic realities you have created for them. Don’t worry, the species will continue. Even if every single person who reads these words were to convince one hundred of their closest friends to stop having children still the species will continue. So people, stop having children. We must all stop and think. What are we actually doing? We are following a script. But is the script well written, does it serve the best interests of humanity? We have been following this script for thousands of years and look where we are today. Things are not going well. Well, I say lets change the script and stop having children. I am not simply trying to justify my own pathetic little life. This is a real question and each and every one of us must ask ourselves: Will the children I rear add anything to the world or will they only take up space? I’m not saying babies aren’t cute, aren’t adorable, aren’t desirable commodities, perhaps the most desirable commodity any young couple could possibly hope for. But we must look at the bigger picture. The planet is not infinite. In fact nothing is infinite. Infinity is a term we use to denote an impossible space. Infinity cannot be filled and yet we procreate as if it could be.
People, stop having children. Let me tell you a story. There is a first world and a third world. In the third world they have lots of children and in the first world we have few. So that’s all right you might think quietly to yourself. The few babies we do have do not contribute significantly to the problem. And yet every baby we create contributes directly to the already considerable misery of children and adults alike half way around the world. Everything we buy, every choice we make. Let me tell you another story. There was a young couple and they got married and had children. The couple were extremely liberal in both their thoughts and actions and thought that by raising their two children within the enlightenment tradition of their liberal ideas they could, in their own small and humane fashion, make the world a better place. But their children were rebellious and, perhaps only out of misguided spite, grew up to espouse the most pernicious of conservative, pseudo-right-wing doctrines. The parents were heartbroken but their heartbreak was merely the result of naiveté. Your children might also rebel, might also grow up to represent the antithesis of everything you stand for and believe in and what are you going to do about it. People, stop having children. The world we have created will not tolerate their still unformed humanity. The world we have created will destroy them and you will be at least partly responsible, or you will feel responsible, or you won’t feel responsible but you should. Fascists believe in having children. Nazis believe in having children. Peasants believe in having children and it is time for us to get beyond all of that. And I want to be perfectly clear on this next point: the problem is not children. The problem is adults. But without children there would be no adults. And without adults there would be no children. And the cycle must be broken. As often as possible. Let me now outline what I hope we can all agree is a common enough scenario. A woman of childbearing age attends her younger sister’s wedding during the course of which she is cornered by a distant relative she neither knows very well nor particularly likes. “So when’s your turn,” asks the relative, who is also perhaps more than a little bit drunk by this point in the late afternoon, meaning of course when will it be your turn to get married. The woman of childbearing age attempts to be polite, dodging the question, claiming she doesn’t really know, when the right man comes along, etc. But the drunk relative is insistent: “Of course you’re planning to have children,” she continues, “you must be planning to have children.” The woman of childbearing age has no immediate plans for children but doesn’t want to cause a scene. “Yeah, maybe some day,” she shrugs. Trying to be polite, trying to be evasive, wanting to leave this wedding and go back to a life in which human interaction is more familiar and ironic and benign. “No, not some day. You have to have them now, when you’re still young, while you still have the energy. If you wait, if you wait…” the drunken relative trails off. Perhaps she has no children of her own. Or perhaps her children are all grown up and not treating her with the love and respect she knows in her heart she deserves. “You have to have children,” the relative says, “you just have to.” But she’s wrong.
This text was written by a child who was never born. And you might think that because I was never born I’d be bitter or unhappy but you too would be wrong. Not having been born was the most perfect, wonderful, humane, enlightened thing to have ever happened to me. I am little more than a thought, a bit of whimsy, a pre-copulatory, never conceived twinkle in the eye of no one in particular and here is what I have learned. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything exists in relation to something else. If something is good it is only good in relation to something else that is less good. If we can all agree with this premise we can see that there exists a sort of sliding scale of human endeavours in which the best thing is never to have been born, the next best thing is to be born but live your life without doing any harm, and the next best thing is to be born, do some harm but never to reproduce. To be honest it gets a little fuzzy after that. Life can be so difficult. But never having been born is a piece of cake.
[The above is from my currently out-of-print book Families Are Formed Through Copulation published by Pedlar Press in 2007.
Earlier, in 2005, the entire first section of Families Are Formed Through Copulation was made into a performance by PME-ART.
And then, in 2008, it was translated into French by Christophe Bernard and published as La famille se crée en copulant by Le Quartanier.]
.
People, stop having children. You are not doing yourselves or the world any good. Take the energies you would have spent on child-rearing and use them instead to fight American imperialism. The world is not as it used to be. Before you know it your children will be taken from you and indoctrinated in the ways of bad cartoons, over-priced toys, short attention spans, violent video games, stupid television and the endless misinformation of the internet. Stop for a moment and think. There are too many people in the world already. There is too much of everything. Your children will learn nothing from you. Is what you know really so valuable or important? People, stop having children. You think you are being generous but really you are only being selfish. You are doing it only to add surplus, disingenuous meaning to your already basically meaningless lives or as an unwitting slave of primitive biology. Your children will not look after you when you are old. They will be too busy trying to fend for themselves within the unyieldingly harsh economic realities you have created for them. Don’t worry, the species will continue. Even if every single person who reads these words were to convince one hundred of their closest friends to stop having children still the species will continue. So people, stop having children. We must all stop and think. What are we actually doing? We are following a script. But is the script well written, does it serve the best interests of humanity? We have been following this script for thousands of years and look where we are today. Things are not going well. Well, I say lets change the script and stop having children. I am not simply trying to justify my own pathetic little life. This is a real question and each and every one of us must ask ourselves: Will the children I rear add anything to the world or will they only take up space? I’m not saying babies aren’t cute, aren’t adorable, aren’t desirable commodities, perhaps the most desirable commodity any young couple could possibly hope for. But we must look at the bigger picture. The planet is not infinite. In fact nothing is infinite. Infinity is a term we use to denote an impossible space. Infinity cannot be filled and yet we procreate as if it could be.
People, stop having children. Let me tell you a story. There is a first world and a third world. In the third world they have lots of children and in the first world we have few. So that’s all right you might think quietly to yourself. The few babies we do have do not contribute significantly to the problem. And yet every baby we create contributes directly to the already considerable misery of children and adults alike half way around the world. Everything we buy, every choice we make. Let me tell you another story. There was a young couple and they got married and had children. The couple were extremely liberal in both their thoughts and actions and thought that by raising their two children within the enlightenment tradition of their liberal ideas they could, in their own small and humane fashion, make the world a better place. But their children were rebellious and, perhaps only out of misguided spite, grew up to espouse the most pernicious of conservative, pseudo-right-wing doctrines. The parents were heartbroken but their heartbreak was merely the result of naiveté. Your children might also rebel, might also grow up to represent the antithesis of everything you stand for and believe in and what are you going to do about it. People, stop having children. The world we have created will not tolerate their still unformed humanity. The world we have created will destroy them and you will be at least partly responsible, or you will feel responsible, or you won’t feel responsible but you should. Fascists believe in having children. Nazis believe in having children. Peasants believe in having children and it is time for us to get beyond all of that. And I want to be perfectly clear on this next point: the problem is not children. The problem is adults. But without children there would be no adults. And without adults there would be no children. And the cycle must be broken. As often as possible. Let me now outline what I hope we can all agree is a common enough scenario. A woman of childbearing age attends her younger sister’s wedding during the course of which she is cornered by a distant relative she neither knows very well nor particularly likes. “So when’s your turn,” asks the relative, who is also perhaps more than a little bit drunk by this point in the late afternoon, meaning of course when will it be your turn to get married. The woman of childbearing age attempts to be polite, dodging the question, claiming she doesn’t really know, when the right man comes along, etc. But the drunk relative is insistent: “Of course you’re planning to have children,” she continues, “you must be planning to have children.” The woman of childbearing age has no immediate plans for children but doesn’t want to cause a scene. “Yeah, maybe some day,” she shrugs. Trying to be polite, trying to be evasive, wanting to leave this wedding and go back to a life in which human interaction is more familiar and ironic and benign. “No, not some day. You have to have them now, when you’re still young, while you still have the energy. If you wait, if you wait…” the drunken relative trails off. Perhaps she has no children of her own. Or perhaps her children are all grown up and not treating her with the love and respect she knows in her heart she deserves. “You have to have children,” the relative says, “you just have to.” But she’s wrong.
This text was written by a child who was never born. And you might think that because I was never born I’d be bitter or unhappy but you too would be wrong. Not having been born was the most perfect, wonderful, humane, enlightened thing to have ever happened to me. I am little more than a thought, a bit of whimsy, a pre-copulatory, never conceived twinkle in the eye of no one in particular and here is what I have learned. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything exists in relation to something else. If something is good it is only good in relation to something else that is less good. If we can all agree with this premise we can see that there exists a sort of sliding scale of human endeavours in which the best thing is never to have been born, the next best thing is to be born but live your life without doing any harm, and the next best thing is to be born, do some harm but never to reproduce. To be honest it gets a little fuzzy after that. Life can be so difficult. But never having been born is a piece of cake.
[The above is from my currently out-of-print book Families Are Formed Through Copulation published by Pedlar Press in 2007.
Earlier, in 2005, the entire first section of Families Are Formed Through Copulation was made into a performance by PME-ART.
And then, in 2008, it was translated into French by Christophe Bernard and published as La famille se crée en copulant by Le Quartanier.]
.
September 17, 2012
The neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and nevertheless is frustrated not to get it.
.
Clinical psychiatry no longer uses the term neurosis, but it remains a vivid word. As Freud summarized the condition: “The ego has come into conflict with the id in the service of the super-ego and of reality.” The neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and nevertheless is frustrated not to get it. Satisfaction having been foreclosed long ago, he becomes a kind of hesitant, recessive, bemused personality. You might think of Woody Allen but it would do just as well to picture Al Gore, John Kerry, or Barack Obama. We liberal or left-wing citizen–clinicians feel that these men are decent, intelligent, and somewhat principled—that their desires are basically the right ones, their intentions more or less good—but that in the service of reality they must ignore the desires latent in their (and our) political unconscious. In deference to a punitive public superego, they sweep under the rug their real urges—which we’d like to think are for truth and justice—and thus come across, in classic neurotic fashion, as more or less castrated. In a way, the citizen–clinicians of the GOP agree with us: they too suspect that Obama is a radical at heart. The difference is that we doubt whether Obama is in communication with his heart anymore.
[From the article Politico-psychopathology: Neurocrats vs. the Grand Old Psychosis by Bejamin Kunkel which can be found here.]
.
Clinical psychiatry no longer uses the term neurosis, but it remains a vivid word. As Freud summarized the condition: “The ego has come into conflict with the id in the service of the super-ego and of reality.” The neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and nevertheless is frustrated not to get it. Satisfaction having been foreclosed long ago, he becomes a kind of hesitant, recessive, bemused personality. You might think of Woody Allen but it would do just as well to picture Al Gore, John Kerry, or Barack Obama. We liberal or left-wing citizen–clinicians feel that these men are decent, intelligent, and somewhat principled—that their desires are basically the right ones, their intentions more or less good—but that in the service of reality they must ignore the desires latent in their (and our) political unconscious. In deference to a punitive public superego, they sweep under the rug their real urges—which we’d like to think are for truth and justice—and thus come across, in classic neurotic fashion, as more or less castrated. In a way, the citizen–clinicians of the GOP agree with us: they too suspect that Obama is a radical at heart. The difference is that we doubt whether Obama is in communication with his heart anymore.
[From the article Politico-psychopathology: Neurocrats vs. the Grand Old Psychosis by Bejamin Kunkel which can be found here.]
.
September 16, 2012
This confusion of writing and thinking with the internet...
.
I have now been doing this blog for about seven years. Lately, I have once again become a bit obsessed with it, wondering what it is and why. It receives between 1,000 and 2,000 hits a month. There are very few comments. (136 in seven years.) Many of those who click on it are, I believe, people I have met or know, but there must be at least a few strangers in the mix. I have been wondering, for someone who either barely or does not know me, what kind of impression I make through what I write here. If you were to know me only through this blog what, if anything, would you know. (I think about this far more here than I do with my books or art writing, since there is always something vaguely diaristic about blogging.) I basically never write about my personal life, or about everyday things. I’m not sure precisely why, but I find it almost impossible to get myself to write about daily things, I suppose because I have little interest. I write a little about politics, a little about literature, the occasional poem, a little about art. (Half my life is spent listening to music, but for some reason this particular obsession is barely represented here.) Quotes and aphorisms make up a great deal of it, and I am wondering if the reason I gravitate towards them is because, I believe, they provoke while at the same time giving little away.
I suspect many, if not all, of my posts are imbued with a certain sadness and negativity (or even worse ambivalence), since those are the qualities I feel most strongly in life, but at the same time I often delete posts if I later feel they are too negative. (A few times, when my writing was too depressing, strangers have written to me, worried I was going to kill myself. This always seemed so strange to me. I just can’t imagine my writing would seem suicidal to a stranger.) I am sad but don’t believe in being sad. I am depressed but don’t believe in being depressed. These are things I try to fight against, both within myself and in my writing, but most often I simply lose the battle. (If you don’t find my writing to be as negative as I am portraying it, perhaps that means I’ve won a few more battles than previously thought.) At the same time, so many people I know are depressed and hardly anyone talks about it. Maybe if we talked about it more we’d be less depressed. I don’t know. One part of me thinks depression is a reasonable reaction to the current state of the world, and the other part thinks it's only a disease or waste of time.
I hope there is also a certain anger, honesty, wisdom and energy to my posts. Sometimes I believe I write because I feel there is some way I can put things, some way of thinking about the world, that I don’t particularly see anywhere else. And other times I think it is only because it calms me and fills time when I don’t know what else to do. I also make performances, but hardly ever write about them here. In many ways these performances have been my main vocation over the past twenty years. But, more and more, I don’t know what to think or say about them. They are something else, something live, in the moment, out there in the world. Writing about them always feels strange. Like it would be better for you to see them in person, and reading about them will always be besides the point.
Then there is the fact, the irony of our age, that more people read this blog than my books, which I of course work much harder on, vainly hoping they will outlive me. (Of course, something could happen that might reverse this dynamic. At this particular moment it doesn’t seem likely.) And it is somehow misguided to compare books with blog posts. They are two different worlds, two different ways of reading, that perhaps don’t especially intersect. I don’t know. The past few months a number of people have written or spoken to me about this blog. I had the uncomfortable feeling that it was one of the main things I was doing in the world, my public face, and really wondered what it was all about: this confusion of writing and thinking with the internet. As I wonder, I stare at the following list of my most popular blog posts of all time. It really does give me an uncanny, even unnerving, picture of my life. (Perhaps in the same way that anything popular gives a distorted view of the culture from which it emerges.) It is true, music is featured more prominently on this final list:
Notes from the Jacques Rancière / Pedro Costa round-table - February 19, 2011 (957 hits)
Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings - May 13, 2011 (713 hits)
A play list of 83 videos (with commentary) - October 10, 2010 (447 hits)
A play list of 96 videos (with commentary) - April 9, 2011 (378 hits)
Excerpt from Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed - July 22, 2010 (351 hits)
Perverse curating - February 24, 2012 (343 hits)
Some Favourite Books - August 20, 2011 (304 hits)
Trying to shift reality closer to hopes that are still in the process of being defined - August 16, 2011 (292 hits)
That last one is perhaps worth quoting in full:
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.
.
I have now been doing this blog for about seven years. Lately, I have once again become a bit obsessed with it, wondering what it is and why. It receives between 1,000 and 2,000 hits a month. There are very few comments. (136 in seven years.) Many of those who click on it are, I believe, people I have met or know, but there must be at least a few strangers in the mix. I have been wondering, for someone who either barely or does not know me, what kind of impression I make through what I write here. If you were to know me only through this blog what, if anything, would you know. (I think about this far more here than I do with my books or art writing, since there is always something vaguely diaristic about blogging.) I basically never write about my personal life, or about everyday things. I’m not sure precisely why, but I find it almost impossible to get myself to write about daily things, I suppose because I have little interest. I write a little about politics, a little about literature, the occasional poem, a little about art. (Half my life is spent listening to music, but for some reason this particular obsession is barely represented here.) Quotes and aphorisms make up a great deal of it, and I am wondering if the reason I gravitate towards them is because, I believe, they provoke while at the same time giving little away.
I suspect many, if not all, of my posts are imbued with a certain sadness and negativity (or even worse ambivalence), since those are the qualities I feel most strongly in life, but at the same time I often delete posts if I later feel they are too negative. (A few times, when my writing was too depressing, strangers have written to me, worried I was going to kill myself. This always seemed so strange to me. I just can’t imagine my writing would seem suicidal to a stranger.) I am sad but don’t believe in being sad. I am depressed but don’t believe in being depressed. These are things I try to fight against, both within myself and in my writing, but most often I simply lose the battle. (If you don’t find my writing to be as negative as I am portraying it, perhaps that means I’ve won a few more battles than previously thought.) At the same time, so many people I know are depressed and hardly anyone talks about it. Maybe if we talked about it more we’d be less depressed. I don’t know. One part of me thinks depression is a reasonable reaction to the current state of the world, and the other part thinks it's only a disease or waste of time.
I hope there is also a certain anger, honesty, wisdom and energy to my posts. Sometimes I believe I write because I feel there is some way I can put things, some way of thinking about the world, that I don’t particularly see anywhere else. And other times I think it is only because it calms me and fills time when I don’t know what else to do. I also make performances, but hardly ever write about them here. In many ways these performances have been my main vocation over the past twenty years. But, more and more, I don’t know what to think or say about them. They are something else, something live, in the moment, out there in the world. Writing about them always feels strange. Like it would be better for you to see them in person, and reading about them will always be besides the point.
Then there is the fact, the irony of our age, that more people read this blog than my books, which I of course work much harder on, vainly hoping they will outlive me. (Of course, something could happen that might reverse this dynamic. At this particular moment it doesn’t seem likely.) And it is somehow misguided to compare books with blog posts. They are two different worlds, two different ways of reading, that perhaps don’t especially intersect. I don’t know. The past few months a number of people have written or spoken to me about this blog. I had the uncomfortable feeling that it was one of the main things I was doing in the world, my public face, and really wondered what it was all about: this confusion of writing and thinking with the internet. As I wonder, I stare at the following list of my most popular blog posts of all time. It really does give me an uncanny, even unnerving, picture of my life. (Perhaps in the same way that anything popular gives a distorted view of the culture from which it emerges.) It is true, music is featured more prominently on this final list:
Notes from the Jacques Rancière / Pedro Costa round-table - February 19, 2011 (957 hits)
Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings - May 13, 2011 (713 hits)
A play list of 83 videos (with commentary) - October 10, 2010 (447 hits)
A play list of 96 videos (with commentary) - April 9, 2011 (378 hits)
Excerpt from Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed - July 22, 2010 (351 hits)
Perverse curating - February 24, 2012 (343 hits)
Some Favourite Books - August 20, 2011 (304 hits)
Trying to shift reality closer to hopes that are still in the process of being defined - August 16, 2011 (292 hits)
That last one is perhaps worth quoting in full:
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.
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
