.
[The following letters were written as part of the project Big Brother where art thou?, a collaboration with Lene Berg. The project took place entirely on a Facebook page that you can find here.]
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Dear Big Brother,
Money seems important in our world. The philosophy that money is the only measure of value is perhaps the closest thing our moment has to Big Brother. I’ve been searching for slogans, words that might pry open our current situation, that might open a window and let in some air. I came up with this: neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital. But to call the enemy names, to cast the enemy in a totalitarian light, however true it might be, is also to distract from whatever it is that we are. And I believe we are lost. How to make a virtue from our lostness? How to make from it a weapon?
The weakest part of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the most unconvincing, is when O’Brien attempts to explain the motivations of the inner circle. (“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.”) No one seeks power for absolutely no reason. One always seeks power in order to do something with it. We don’t really understand the motivations of Big Brother. We don’t really understand the motivations of everything that is going terribly wrong all around us. And when you don’t understand you don’t know how to fight.
When I have success I believe it is because I am talented and clever. I am also willing to admit that pure luck is a factor. And that the cultural capital associated with my socio-economic background played a role. But my first thought, that I only begin to question moments later, is that it is because I am talented, that the main cause is something essential within me. I can dismiss this as ego but I also know that it is potent. Rulers, kings, dictators must also believe that their skill, strategy and guile have taken them to the top and will keep them there. Your power is irrefutable evidence of your genius. If your power is absolute, so must your genius be.
But every time I begin to understand my understanding falls short. Perhaps the true lesson of the twentieth century is that propaganda works. We might also say this about advertising. If you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, it becomes the truth. Or, as you, as Big Brother, might put it, if you tell the truth long enough and loud enough it becomes a lie.
Sincerely, A
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Dear George Orwell,
What would have happened if you had never become quite so famous? Repressive governments that distort the truth are now forever connected to your final work or, it sometimes seems, to a generalized sense of your posthumous celebrity in the form of the term ‘Orwellian.’
As is well known, Warhol once said ‘in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.’ (Ironically, perhaps the phrase he is most famous for.) A more recent cliché says: on Facebook everyone will be famous for fifteen people.
A book review I once read claimed that famous red-baiter Joseph McCarthy started the anti-communist witch-hunt not because he was a true ideologue, but because he wanted the fame that came along with it. I believe you also very much wanted the fame that came to you mainly after you were gone. This of course is not a sin. In fact, for an artist, it is most likely a normal, one might even say banal, condition.
One might also say that, within the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother is extremely famous. How much of the brutality in the world comes from this desire to be seen, to be known, and to be known to have done something important, to be known as someone who changed the world.
Sincerely, A
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Dear Facebook,
One might say one is addicted to a lover. But one has to be careful when using the same word to describe different things. I don’t know what an addiction to a lover feels like, but I will try my best to describe this addiction that I am experiencing here and now. Much like Ingsoc, in my day to day life Facebook replaces all other social interactions; with pokes, posts, notes and likes as it’s minimal, effective and acceptable Newspeak. Everything is allowed but gestures that are not allowed immediately receive censure from a spontaneous conglomeration of ‘friends’ who quickly comment to express their disapproval. However, censure is relatively rare. Far more often my behavior is shaped through positive reinforcement. I do something acceptable and, almost immediately, a number of friends ‘like’ it. This is a more satisfying and simplified form of positive reinforcement than one is able to achieve within other aspects of so called daily life. As well, there is a vague sense of simultaneous contact with a large number of people, contact with little danger of conflict. Does it need to be said that Facebook, much like Ingsoc, is an exceedingly lonely place? And yet the addiction stands.
Sincerely, A
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Dear users of Facebook,
There are millions and millions of you. If you wanted, you could start the revolution.
Sincerely, A
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Dear corporations buying statistical information from Facebook,
I am concerned. Is my information useful to you? Is it useful enough? You now know something about me. But what is it you know precisely? Do I fit within a category that makes it seemly or convenient for you to sell me something or am I momentarily outside of such categories? If neo-liberalism is the privatization of everything, the totalitarianism of capital, then are you – the anonymous, omnipresent purchasers of the statistical version of my interface with this device – in some sense the Big Brother of capital?
Sincerely, A
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Dear secret service agents using Facebook to spy on us,
I know your weakness. There are too many of us. There is no possible way for you to keep track of every last one. You scan for suspicious words but we avoid such words. You watch the YouTube videos we post, see what we had for breakfast. What precisely can you do with such information? There are millions and millions of videos, millions and millions of breakfasts. Do you really have the time or manpower to scroll through them all? All of this suggests that resistance is possible. And yet, secretly, we know it is not.
Sincerely, A
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Dear Facebook users using Facebook to spy on each other,
We can all understand the pleasure of spying on one’s neighbor. Also the ritual of the promenade. The internet is a place to find out information about things and people and to be entertained. A place to scan through a large quantity of disparate information very quickly. Your ‘friends’ on Facebook are a kind of information. They provide clues about themselves. On occasion someone will post something about themselves quickly, barely even realizing they have done so. This happens less and less. For you, within the private moment of spying, these posts are vicarious treasures. These are the moments one never clicks ‘like.’
Sincerely, A
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Dear readers and viewers of this project,
It’s a strange feeling attempting an art project on Facebook. One thought that recently occurred to me is that Facebook could take down this page at any time and for any reason. This would most likely occur if someone were to ‘report’ our project, like children in Nineteen Eighty-Four ratting out their parents. To report an offence to the authorities is an ambiguous act. If you see something you feel is wrong, it’s only natural to want to act on that feeling of wrongness. But who are the authorities you’re reporting to and to what degree do you trust them? How do we negotiate the things we think are wrong without appealing to some distant to authority?
Facebook is a culture of re-enforced positivity. You ‘accept’, ‘like’ and ‘comment’ (most often positively.) Negativity exists on Facebook, but it stands out. In this sense Facebook is far more like Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. But there are two sides to Facebook. The user’s side, and the way the user – in the form of information – is, can or might be used. (The Brave New World side and the Nineteen Eighty-Four side.) But this is all, of course, too simplistic.
The idea that this page could be pulled at any moment, could disappear, is what I keep coming back to. That working here, on Facebook, feels somehow less real, more contingent. But, then again, contingency is perhaps one of the more precious aspects of being alive.
Sincerely, A
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Dear Facebook equals Big Brother paradigm,
These things seem to me to be mainly a question of scale. Not of one person, or a group of people, imposing their will on others. But the scale upon which one person, or a group, is able to impose their will on others. The greater the scale the more difficult it is to fight, the more omnipotent it feels on a lived, day to day level. What is the scale of Facebook? It seems like everyone is on it and if you aren’t you would be reasonable in feeling left out. On the other hand it feels mainly like a toy.
Facebook isn't so frightening in the here and now. Facebook is mainly frightening if we consider how it might be used in the future. The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four also places its frightening situation in the future. This is always the most suspicious thing: to place the catastrophe in the future and not here in the present. Because the problems we can actually deal with are here and now. Both less and more disastrous than we currently feel them to be.
Canada is not Burma. Germany is not North Korea. But our lives – the richness and sense of possibility of contemporary life – are impoverished by the structures within which we currently live. What I don't know is if this has simply always been the case. Or will always be the case from now on. Something can only be bad in comparison to something else which is less bad. If everything is bad than everything is fine. But things only get better when you fight.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four there is no way to fight. On Facebook there is no way to fight. I hate it when I become didactic. And also hate it when I don't.
Sincerely, A
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June 3, 2011
May 29, 2011
Big Brother where art thou?
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‘Facebook equals Big Brother’ is a common trope of our time. Big Brother where art thou? – a collaboration between Lene Berg and Jacob Wren that takes place entirely on Facebook – is an attempt to unravel the question of what Big Brother might mean today, examining the life and legacy of George Orwell by posting questions, dialogues, images, videos and whatever else they can create or find.
The project takes place entirely on a Facebook page that you can find here.
.
‘Facebook equals Big Brother’ is a common trope of our time. Big Brother where art thou? – a collaboration between Lene Berg and Jacob Wren that takes place entirely on Facebook – is an attempt to unravel the question of what Big Brother might mean today, examining the life and legacy of George Orwell by posting questions, dialogues, images, videos and whatever else they can create or find.
The project takes place entirely on a Facebook page that you can find here.
.
May 13, 2011
Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings
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I’ve been making art for my entire life and I’ve never felt more lost. In this, I believe I am not alone.
Do we care enough about art, meaning, the world to admit there is no obvious or effective way forward? That we’re going in circles with an ever-lessening effect? That we’re going in circles but are unwilling to admit it?
The grand excitements of art – the modernist breaks, the new movements, the cataclysms – are long behind us. More recent trends are fleeting at best. The belief in originality is utterly depleted and, more importantly, no longer feels like a worthy goal. All we have now is A LOT, far too much, of everything. A LOT of art, theatre, dance, performance, music, installation, painting, literature, cinema, internet: of every possible type and gradation of quality. More stuff than you could possibly experience even if you lived for several million years.
But we don’t live for even a million years. Our lives are brief and what it means to seize the day is by no means clear. Why must we pretend that we know what to do?
Politics have lost the plot – right wing governments and the ascendancy of the super-rich are the order of the day – and artists are of little assistance. On our current environmental trajectory we believe the planet will not survive. But, if we keep hurtling forward, in fact it is we who will not survive, as the planet steps in to take care of itself. (Then again, it is likely at least a few of us will survive to sort through the wreckage. But we can’t make art for them. They’re not born yet. We must make art for now.)
With this present, and this future, how can one feel that bold artistic moves have any real energy? Conflicted feelings rule the day. Daily confusions of every stripe. Ambivalence is king. Where is the art that strikingly knows it’s own futility but stumbles forward compellingly, anyway, because as an artist you have no choice?
To change anything you have to work together with other people. This is the essential logic behind an art movement, behind a manifesto. To work together with other people you need to line up behind a potent conviction, agree to all run in the same direction, at least until you score the first few goals. There is power in numbers, in clans, clubs and mafias. So why can’t all the artists in the world who feel as lost as I do come together, think about what is left to do and how? There may be no convictions to unite us, but why can’t we unite in the potency of our contemporary ambivalence? In the desire to be honest and vulnerable about where we actually stand?
(An artist who is little more than an advertisement for him or her self is so lost there might be no way back towards meaning. I live in constant fear that this is what I might become.)
I dream of energy, content, value, meaning. Effective left wing populism. The end, or reduction, of alienation, consumerism, war and stupidity. But when you dream you are asleep, and right now I would prefer to be as awake as possible. And to be awake means to admit I have almost no idea how to bring such dreams closer to reality. All roads seem blocked. I have no idea what strategies – in life, politics or art – might be genuinely useful or poetic. I want to be awake, while not losing touch with the knowledge that to stay sane one must continue to sleep and dream.
In fact, I wish to write a manifesto that will admit to everything: ambivalence, conflicted feelings, doing things only for money, humiliation, cynicism, confusion, not being able to tell my friends from my enemies. To admit to everything and find out if anyone agrees. If anyone out there is with me. If such honesty and confusion can mean anything in the current world. If there can be any integrity to it. If it can transform itself into a useful truth.
An artist doesn’t need conviction. An artist doesn’t need to know which way to go. An artist needs talent, naiveté, community and life experience. None of these things are incompatible with feeling lost.
(I would someday like to write another manifesto about how art that is not intrinsically connected to life is of no value. But I feel too lost to enter into life. I’m an extreme case. I can’t find the way in.)
Of course, about such things one doesn’t write manifestos. But perhaps we should find a way to start.
[ You can also read the French translation by Simon Brown here.]
.
I’ve been making art for my entire life and I’ve never felt more lost. In this, I believe I am not alone.
Do we care enough about art, meaning, the world to admit there is no obvious or effective way forward? That we’re going in circles with an ever-lessening effect? That we’re going in circles but are unwilling to admit it?
The grand excitements of art – the modernist breaks, the new movements, the cataclysms – are long behind us. More recent trends are fleeting at best. The belief in originality is utterly depleted and, more importantly, no longer feels like a worthy goal. All we have now is A LOT, far too much, of everything. A LOT of art, theatre, dance, performance, music, installation, painting, literature, cinema, internet: of every possible type and gradation of quality. More stuff than you could possibly experience even if you lived for several million years.
But we don’t live for even a million years. Our lives are brief and what it means to seize the day is by no means clear. Why must we pretend that we know what to do?
Politics have lost the plot – right wing governments and the ascendancy of the super-rich are the order of the day – and artists are of little assistance. On our current environmental trajectory we believe the planet will not survive. But, if we keep hurtling forward, in fact it is we who will not survive, as the planet steps in to take care of itself. (Then again, it is likely at least a few of us will survive to sort through the wreckage. But we can’t make art for them. They’re not born yet. We must make art for now.)
With this present, and this future, how can one feel that bold artistic moves have any real energy? Conflicted feelings rule the day. Daily confusions of every stripe. Ambivalence is king. Where is the art that strikingly knows it’s own futility but stumbles forward compellingly, anyway, because as an artist you have no choice?
To change anything you have to work together with other people. This is the essential logic behind an art movement, behind a manifesto. To work together with other people you need to line up behind a potent conviction, agree to all run in the same direction, at least until you score the first few goals. There is power in numbers, in clans, clubs and mafias. So why can’t all the artists in the world who feel as lost as I do come together, think about what is left to do and how? There may be no convictions to unite us, but why can’t we unite in the potency of our contemporary ambivalence? In the desire to be honest and vulnerable about where we actually stand?
(An artist who is little more than an advertisement for him or her self is so lost there might be no way back towards meaning. I live in constant fear that this is what I might become.)
I dream of energy, content, value, meaning. Effective left wing populism. The end, or reduction, of alienation, consumerism, war and stupidity. But when you dream you are asleep, and right now I would prefer to be as awake as possible. And to be awake means to admit I have almost no idea how to bring such dreams closer to reality. All roads seem blocked. I have no idea what strategies – in life, politics or art – might be genuinely useful or poetic. I want to be awake, while not losing touch with the knowledge that to stay sane one must continue to sleep and dream.
In fact, I wish to write a manifesto that will admit to everything: ambivalence, conflicted feelings, doing things only for money, humiliation, cynicism, confusion, not being able to tell my friends from my enemies. To admit to everything and find out if anyone agrees. If anyone out there is with me. If such honesty and confusion can mean anything in the current world. If there can be any integrity to it. If it can transform itself into a useful truth.
An artist doesn’t need conviction. An artist doesn’t need to know which way to go. An artist needs talent, naiveté, community and life experience. None of these things are incompatible with feeling lost.
(I would someday like to write another manifesto about how art that is not intrinsically connected to life is of no value. But I feel too lost to enter into life. I’m an extreme case. I can’t find the way in.)
Of course, about such things one doesn’t write manifestos. But perhaps we should find a way to start.
[ You can also read the French translation by Simon Brown here.]
.
May 10, 2011
A novel with a lot of characters but no protagonist...
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It’s incredibly difficult to write a novel with a lot of characters but no protagonist. A novel with a number of equally interesting, equally complex characters who are all working together towards a common goal. We experience every story as having a clear protagonist because the protagonist is oneself, you experience your life as a story with yourself at the centre.
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It’s incredibly difficult to write a novel with a lot of characters but no protagonist. A novel with a number of equally interesting, equally complex characters who are all working together towards a common goal. We experience every story as having a clear protagonist because the protagonist is oneself, you experience your life as a story with yourself at the centre.
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May 5, 2011
Overanalyzing something that is...
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Overanalyzing something that is actually, in fact, pretty stupid, like an unwillingness to admit how basic and manipulative the factors at play are. There must be more to it, the mind compulsively brays. And yes, of course, there is always more. But the essential thing is also the most obvious. A sadness that our world is not as complex as we’d like it to be. And that the pathetic, nasty, desperate action is little more than that, little more than show.
.
Overanalyzing something that is actually, in fact, pretty stupid, like an unwillingness to admit how basic and manipulative the factors at play are. There must be more to it, the mind compulsively brays. And yes, of course, there is always more. But the essential thing is also the most obvious. A sadness that our world is not as complex as we’d like it to be. And that the pathetic, nasty, desperate action is little more than that, little more than show.
.
May 4, 2011
When I first heard the phrase workfare...
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When I first heard the phrase ‘workfare’ (a kind of welfare where the recipient is forced to work) my knee jerk reaction was that it was a proposal for some kind of contemporary slavery. But I’ve been thinking a lot about left-wing populism lately. And it got me wondering if there was some ethical way to positively connect the welfare state with voluntary community service. So that when one was unemployed one became more connected with ones community instead of less. And how one could be unemployed and still be of service to others, since being useful generates self-worth. There is often a kind of paradox in our culture that when people have more free time they have less resources to make use of it. What kind of model might make a welfare-community service connection possible? How to prevent such an idea from devolving into something ugly?
.
When I first heard the phrase ‘workfare’ (a kind of welfare where the recipient is forced to work) my knee jerk reaction was that it was a proposal for some kind of contemporary slavery. But I’ve been thinking a lot about left-wing populism lately. And it got me wondering if there was some ethical way to positively connect the welfare state with voluntary community service. So that when one was unemployed one became more connected with ones community instead of less. And how one could be unemployed and still be of service to others, since being useful generates self-worth. There is often a kind of paradox in our culture that when people have more free time they have less resources to make use of it. What kind of model might make a welfare-community service connection possible? How to prevent such an idea from devolving into something ugly?
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May 2, 2011
Re-election joke
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Anyone tried this joke yet, which only works if you tell it in the U.S.: "Who do you have to kill to get re-elected in this country."
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Anyone tried this joke yet, which only works if you tell it in the U.S.: "Who do you have to kill to get re-elected in this country."
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April 28, 2011
Some short quotes
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My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don’t like.
~ Bruce Nauman
I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.
~ Werner Herzog
What I’m interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.
~ Wolfgang Tillmans
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
~ Charles Darwin
Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.
~ Alain Badiou
I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at that moment.
~ Paul Thek
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
~ W.S.Burroughs
Sometimes I am such an unbeliever, I can’t even bring myself to believe that there are people who don’t believe.
~ Sarah Vanhee
Because experience shows that there is nothing easier to instrumentalize than yesterday’s subversion.
~ Brian Holmes
Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
~ Gilles Deleuze
Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.
~ Simone Weil
Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
~ Stendhal
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
~ Jean Genet
It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
~ William Gaddis
I would like to dance with the people and with the things I’m working towards.
~ Avery F. Gordon
The art of the future is not connoisseurship, but labor itself transfigured.
~ Nikolai Tarabukin
The record, as usual, is not good. But on the other hand it is wonderful.
~ Caetano Veloso
The conflict between art and politics… cannot and must not be solved.
~ Hannah Arendt
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.
~ Paul Valéry
There is no force like guilt to create intense reality effects.
~ Jan Verwoert
I recommend paranoia, it generates a lot of creativity
~ Jeanne Randolph
I’m what happens after death, which is writing.
~ Kathy Acker
Wishes are premonitions of abilities.
~ Goethe
I am at war with the obvious.
~ William Eggleston
Awkwardness is collaborative.
~ James Guida
I accept the world.
~ Margaret Fuller
.
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
.
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.
.
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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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.
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The time came for Bill and Grace to enact a kind of divestiture service in which Bill's virgin state would be renounced, shattered. His virginity existed differently from hers. His was a lack of experience, the sense that he was not really a man, that he was not aggressive enough, not daring, perhaps a coward, or a fag. He had not made a conquest. While hers, she reminded herself, had been a moral burden, something to worry about giving, indicating loss when given. And she was considered to have been a conquest for someone else. A passive gift, whether she moved or not. A given. Surrender and surrender again. But how could something physically surrendered mean that she, Grace, had really given in. She prided herself on her ability to separate neatly body from mind, self that was hers from self that she gave away. She was not given when she gave, she always held back and drew satisfaction from distance.
What did Christine want from her or want in general. Who is Christine, she wrote, and felt disgusted. The unexpected is stronger than the expressed, it must be, she thought. She looked up ineffable and wrote, My relationship with Christine skirts the ineffable. Except Emily didn't wear skirts and why should she write about women who did? Could she use that figure of speech when it represented another kind of woman? Or, which woman was she writing about? Anyway, the thing didn't have a plot, no drama, didn't build or go anywhere. Emily comforted herself with the idea that plots were like skirts, you either did or you didn't use things like that. Why do people want stories to go somewhere, she asked herself, and retired to bed.
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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.
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What do we think of the sentiment ‘all art is propaganda’ when placed beside it’s apparent opposite, the idea of ‘art for arts sake.’ But, to paraphrase Boris Groys, art that claims to be apolitical is in fact propaganda for the market. In another sense, art for arts sake does not claim to be apolitical, it claims to be fighting for the cause, for the purity, of art itself. (Then there is the more pernicious dilemma that, political or not, everything can be recuperated.)
Many of the things that are most effective about Orwell are also the most politically specious. (And propaganda is nothing if it’s not about efficacy.) His lone-man-against-the-world stance is romantic and (I believe) compelling. It is also the exact opposite of what an effective socialism would actually look like. So he’s fighting for socialism with tools that undermine the cause. I am thinking of this as a kind of metaphor for political art. Because Orwell’s propaganda is also filled with all-too-human confusions and contradictions. (While at the same time claiming to be utterly consequent.) And yet the contradictions are always housed in a clear, forward-moving narrative.
In an interview the American artist Paul Chan once said that he attempts to keep his activism and his art separate, because in activism you need a common, somewhat simplified, goal that everyone can push towards together, moving in the same direction, while in art you need complexity, paradox, metaphor, poetry, etc. The ‘lone man’ that is Orwell’s central romantic myth is a metaphor that undermines a more general socialist solidarity, but as art it can be potent and resonant. Is it only potent because it re-affirms the Western, over-individualized mythology of the status quo? This must, in part, be the case. But, I think, it’s also potent because, as stupid as this sounds, he ‘really means it.’
I am trying to turn these questions around in my mind, with (irony of ironies) no one else to talk about them with. There is no solidarity without leadership. A leader is not an isolated romantic hero, in fact, almost the opposite: a leader has the wisdom to bring people together. What I admire most is someone who can effectively admit when they’ve made a mistake (and change accordingly), and what I am most afraid of is someone who purposely makes mistakes only to disingenuously admit to them later and get away with it.
The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan once said: ‘when you’re an artist you have to admit you want to be famous’, and this reality will always be at the heart of the problem with political art. At the same time, a contentious political cause also, in some sense, has to become ‘famous’ in order to be heard.
Solidarity is so difficult because we each want to see ourselves as the lone warrior against the world. But this is only one possible fantasy among many.
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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.
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Lust is reactionary.
It is not only that he smiles when he kills. It’s that only when he kills is his smile truly genuine.
I hate teaching. I hate the students. I just want to punch them in their smug little faces over and over again. But I am led to believe that this is not within the boundaries of acceptable pedagogy.
Of course, there are always a few good ones. The artist must be discouraged.
Time will tell.
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April 7, 2011
Against Virno's Post-Fordism is the communism of capital...
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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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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
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1.
Sentences (some plagiarized, others not)
Most blues are subtitled either no sense of wonder or no sense of scale
It was like an emotion, and yet it had a cold quality, so perhaps it was not an emotion at all.
What I’m interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.
A novel about an actor who gets cast as the lead in a big-budget Hollywood action film, thinks the script is complete garbage, the premise reactionary, and hates every moment of shooting it.
What should I do with my violence?
The most effective lie is always the one closest to the truth.
A tsunami of conflicting paradoxes.
To live here you either have to be against everything or become a thief.
The subtlety and delicate brilliance of the questions you are currently asking.
There is no other poetry than real agency.
What you theatre people call your tradition is nothing more than what keeps you parasites comfortable.
Survival of the most caring and most cared for.
2.
I think those films are propaganda for violence, propaganda for fear and propaganda for a very violent view of human nature.
I’ve been having overwhelming feelings of complete failure lately. Then, the other day, my fortune cookie said: “Failure is the mother of success.”
You’re the devil, and like the actual devil, you sabotage yourself at every turn as well.
I want to be one of those writers who is discovered, and greatly recognized, long after they are dead.
Failure is the other of success.
3.
Pain, crime and sadness.
Tears, stupidity and failure.
Violence, light and charm.
Crime, wisdom and more crime.
Bitterness, love triangles and just getting by.
The peculiar, the odd and much, much more.
The polymath, the dictator and true love.
A good joke, a bad joke and a neutral joke.
Slim chances, great wealth and poverty.
Witch trials, public television and melancholy.
Permission, psychosis and the average.
Ambition, fame and regret.
Longing, talent and a lack of talent.
Sexual greed, average lust and plenitude.
Decision making, scarcity and whatever’s left.
The similar, the opposite and the word “yes”.
Again and again and again.
4.
At least five bands have used this name.
Wood is the fire that has not yet learned to burn.
Learning that power only corrupts when we fear losing it.
Time to try all the things that have been tried before but to try them NOW, with all the paradox, complexity, confusion and vitality such a statement implies.
Evolution is a loose, somehow inaccurate metaphor/creation myth that has very little to do with either improvement or survival. Evolution is also about all the species that die off.
Just because everyone is out to get you doesn't mean being paranoid is the most reasonable or effective position to take
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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
.
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
.
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
.
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.
.
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
.
February 22, 2011
February 21, 2011
Speaking About Politics
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Sometimes when you’re in a room with a bull, and you’re holding a piece of red fabric, the only thing you can think to do is wave the fabric around.
Dog barking just to hear his own echo.
In Lisbon, where the sky and water are beautiful.
Thinking about everything again.
Wondering how people will speak of us, after we are gone.
.
Sometimes when you’re in a room with a bull, and you’re holding a piece of red fabric, the only thing you can think to do is wave the fabric around.
Dog barking just to hear his own echo.
In Lisbon, where the sky and water are beautiful.
Thinking about everything again.
Wondering how people will speak of us, after we are gone.
.
February 19, 2011
Notes from the Jacques Rancière / Pedro Costa round-table
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[On Friday February 18th I attended the round-table between Jacques Rancière and Pedro Costa which was part of the conference Image in Science and Art. What follows are my notes. Most of the statements are approximations of things said by Pedro Costa, who I found enormously inspiring.]
I need cheap machines.
I want to push the machines into the past.
I can only think about yesterday, today, and I cannot think about tomorrow.
Everyone knows this, with digital machines, with computers, sometimes something happens and nobody knows why.
Digital problems: noise and squares and everything that happens.
Q: You think this image is not healthy enough? A: They [the images] need to be a little bit more alive.
Temperature.
We were talking completely about us and we had stopped talking about the machines.
Appear / disappear.
Work with natural light whenever possible.
I have to take them to the light, which means to the window.
We have a lot of doubts and we're not convinced that we're going to get there.
We have so little that it should be sufficient.
The problem is how to turn the doubt into something positive.
Classic Hollywood movies had a conscience.
There's no place for two at the window so one will be in the dark: a voice, a conscience.
Today there's a big problem.
It's a melange of what's happening today, trying to be a little bit documentary [and also towards something a bit classic like Mizoguchi.]
Images today hate to confront reality, to confront what is happening.
Films today are trying to avoid reality, to escape.
Here, without vanity, we tried to go somewhere and we got there.
Too many images of one kind.
An image that breaks consensus.
It's an effect, it's very effective.
Film is closely related to some kind of justice and even to revenge.
Cinema could be an avenger.
There is a profound social injustice today and there's a profound filmic injustice.
Confronting ourselves with some sort of reality.
I still think images and words can go together.
He was the one who could write the letters for the other workers. A lover letter, a money letter. There is a formula and he improvises a little bit.
He was more or less the prisoner and the guardian of the prison. "I died every night and the only thing keeping me alive was alcohol and writing these letters" [for other workers to send back home.]
When it slips completely out of control.
This letter that was only supposed to be one scene, three or four shots, became the whole film - that was a contradiction in the film.
This character who cannot learn the letter, in the end, just tells it like he knew it all his life.
I am very eager and interested to work with some people and not with other people. And I don't like to put my words in their mouths.
One of the lessons of Godard - everything is there for us to pick up and use when it is useful.
In the past there were films that had sounds that were much more powerful than any of the images.
Sometimes what seems most alien - Desnos, the surrealist poet - is in fact the perfect marriage for me.
It's terrible, sometimes, a documentary. It's terrible what you see and hear in a documentary.
.
[On Friday February 18th I attended the round-table between Jacques Rancière and Pedro Costa which was part of the conference Image in Science and Art. What follows are my notes. Most of the statements are approximations of things said by Pedro Costa, who I found enormously inspiring.]
I need cheap machines.
I want to push the machines into the past.
I can only think about yesterday, today, and I cannot think about tomorrow.
Everyone knows this, with digital machines, with computers, sometimes something happens and nobody knows why.
Digital problems: noise and squares and everything that happens.
Q: You think this image is not healthy enough? A: They [the images] need to be a little bit more alive.
Temperature.
We were talking completely about us and we had stopped talking about the machines.
Appear / disappear.
Work with natural light whenever possible.
I have to take them to the light, which means to the window.
We have a lot of doubts and we're not convinced that we're going to get there.
We have so little that it should be sufficient.
The problem is how to turn the doubt into something positive.
Classic Hollywood movies had a conscience.
There's no place for two at the window so one will be in the dark: a voice, a conscience.
Today there's a big problem.
It's a melange of what's happening today, trying to be a little bit documentary [and also towards something a bit classic like Mizoguchi.]
Images today hate to confront reality, to confront what is happening.
Films today are trying to avoid reality, to escape.
Here, without vanity, we tried to go somewhere and we got there.
Too many images of one kind.
An image that breaks consensus.
It's an effect, it's very effective.
Film is closely related to some kind of justice and even to revenge.
Cinema could be an avenger.
There is a profound social injustice today and there's a profound filmic injustice.
Confronting ourselves with some sort of reality.
I still think images and words can go together.
He was the one who could write the letters for the other workers. A lover letter, a money letter. There is a formula and he improvises a little bit.
He was more or less the prisoner and the guardian of the prison. "I died every night and the only thing keeping me alive was alcohol and writing these letters" [for other workers to send back home.]
When it slips completely out of control.
This letter that was only supposed to be one scene, three or four shots, became the whole film - that was a contradiction in the film.
This character who cannot learn the letter, in the end, just tells it like he knew it all his life.
I am very eager and interested to work with some people and not with other people. And I don't like to put my words in their mouths.
One of the lessons of Godard - everything is there for us to pick up and use when it is useful.
In the past there were films that had sounds that were much more powerful than any of the images.
Sometimes what seems most alien - Desnos, the surrealist poet - is in fact the perfect marriage for me.
It's terrible, sometimes, a documentary. It's terrible what you see and hear in a documentary.
.
February 15, 2011
A short interview I did with Catherine Lacey for HTMLGIANT
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Catherine Lacey: Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed has this backdrop of a disenfranchised political movement, which was so dead-on. Was this based working as an activist of some sort? If not, what spurred the decision to have a book set in this way?
Jacob Wren: I’ve had a little bit of experience with activism and in the anarchist community, mainly when I was much younger, but that wasn’t exactly what made me write about these things (though it most likely affected my take on it.) In some ways Revenge Fantasies, and my previous book Families Are Formed Through Copulation, are both responses to the shock of the Bush years, to my feeling that the world was sliding into some new kind of fascism (perhaps I was over-reacting but I’m still not sure, time will tell) and there seemed to be so little one could do. I kept reading the papers, wondering what was possible, how to fight against everything that was happening. I continue to feel so pathetically overwhelmed by the injustices that rule the world: the ever-growing chasm between rich and poor, the ways in which our daily consumer choices contribute to the evisceration of the natural world (of which we are in fact only a small part), more prisons and more profitable prisons, the pure evil that is Monsanto, wars being fought for corporate gain… all right, when I write such lists I basically feel like a fucking dreadful Marxist bore. Everyone knows and then what can you do? Well, the obvious solution is to get together with large numbers of other people and fight. But how to find the common purpose and solidarity, and how exactly to fight, is by no means easy or clear.
And then I started thinking about fidelity. The fight will be long, difficult and often painfully discouraging. It requires something like an infinite patience and overwhelming fidelity or conviction. Well, fidelity has never been my strong suit. In that respect I’m of my generation: a bit ADD. And I started comparing different kinds of fidelity: fidelity to a political cause versus fidelity within a romantic relationship. (I’ve never been called upon to test my fidelity to a political cause but I have experienced questions of fidelity in and around romance.) Somehow, along this path, I ended up with a love triangle, some strange kind of juxtaposition between a more political question (fidelity to a cause) and a classic soap-opera device (broken fidelity to a lover). What happens to the fidelity of the original relationship in a love triangle, how does it evolve, disintegrate, become more paradoxical? And how is this analogous, or completely different, from fidelity to a political cause? I wanted to write about these questions in ways I had never seen them written about before – full of doubt, confusion, curiosity, precision, cynicism and joy.
Catherine Lacey: While writing it, did the direction the book ended up going surprise you at all?
Jacob Wren: Yes, as I wrote, most of the time I never really knew where it was going (and even now that it’s done I’m still not quite sure I know what it is.) There were so many times when I was completely stuck. Most often the way it came unstuck was I would spontaneously write something so terrible and unexpected I couldn’t help but follow it a bit and see where it led. (I now think a lot of this ‘being stuck’ was simply being hampered by various unexamined notions of good writing and good taste.) Sometimes I felt the trick – like some sort of fucked up alchemist – was to magically transmute the bad taste into good taste, and that this alchemy had something to do with what it means to write about politics today, though I’m still not sure exactly what. I love it when I’m writing and something completely unexpected comes out. There are also a lot of things in the book I ripped off, but hopefully ripped off in such a perverse way they have also become something new.
Catherine Lacey: What’s next for you? I know you’re in Lisbon (and I’m jealous); what’s that all about? Are you working on something set there?
Jacob Wren: Over the past year I have had writing residencies in Denmark at Hald Hovedgaard, in Belgium at Passa Porta and currently here in Portugal hosted by the festival Alkantara. I have been trying to finish a new novel called Polyamorous Love Song. I am very excited about it, I think it is some of the best writing I’ve ever done, and yet, as I’ve been working on it steadily for the past four years, I was starting to worry I might never manage to finish it. I’m just starting to realize that my life is considerably busier than it’s ever been before and I needed to find a way to carve out some additional time to write. These writing residencies were my first attempt at a solution and I honestly can’t believe how helpful it’s been. The new book doesn’t have anything directly to do with Denmark, Belgium or Portugal, and yet, undeniably, all of these places, and the people I’ve met while there, have now influenced it. If you’re curious, here is my first attempt at a description:
Polyamorous Love Song is a novel concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, it is written within the strict logic of an absolute dream, a dream that is both the same and opposite to the world in which we live. It is a novel of many through-lines. For example: 1) A group of people who wear furry mascot costumes at all times fighting a revolutionary war for their right to wear furry mascot costumes at all times. 2) A movement known as the ‘New Filmmaking’ in which, instead of shooting and editing a film, one simply does all of the things that would have been in the film, but in real life. This movement has many adherents. 3) A group of ‘New Filmmakers’ who devise increasingly strange sexual scenarios with complete strangers. They invent a drug that allows them to intuit the cell phone number of anyone they see, allowing phone calls to be the first stage of their spontaneous, yet somehow scripted, seductions. 4) A secret society that concocts a virus that only infects those on the political right. They stage large-scale orgies, creating unexpected intimacies and connections between individuals who are otherwise savagely opposed to each other. 5) A radical leftist who catches this virus, forcing her to question the depth of her considerable leftist credentials. 6) A German barber in New York who, out of scorn for the stupidity of his American clients, gives them avant-garde haircuts, unintentionally achieving acclaim among the bohemian set. And yet such stories are only the beginning.
[The accompanying ten sentences I wrote can be found here.]
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Catherine Lacey: Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed has this backdrop of a disenfranchised political movement, which was so dead-on. Was this based working as an activist of some sort? If not, what spurred the decision to have a book set in this way?
Jacob Wren: I’ve had a little bit of experience with activism and in the anarchist community, mainly when I was much younger, but that wasn’t exactly what made me write about these things (though it most likely affected my take on it.) In some ways Revenge Fantasies, and my previous book Families Are Formed Through Copulation, are both responses to the shock of the Bush years, to my feeling that the world was sliding into some new kind of fascism (perhaps I was over-reacting but I’m still not sure, time will tell) and there seemed to be so little one could do. I kept reading the papers, wondering what was possible, how to fight against everything that was happening. I continue to feel so pathetically overwhelmed by the injustices that rule the world: the ever-growing chasm between rich and poor, the ways in which our daily consumer choices contribute to the evisceration of the natural world (of which we are in fact only a small part), more prisons and more profitable prisons, the pure evil that is Monsanto, wars being fought for corporate gain… all right, when I write such lists I basically feel like a fucking dreadful Marxist bore. Everyone knows and then what can you do? Well, the obvious solution is to get together with large numbers of other people and fight. But how to find the common purpose and solidarity, and how exactly to fight, is by no means easy or clear.
And then I started thinking about fidelity. The fight will be long, difficult and often painfully discouraging. It requires something like an infinite patience and overwhelming fidelity or conviction. Well, fidelity has never been my strong suit. In that respect I’m of my generation: a bit ADD. And I started comparing different kinds of fidelity: fidelity to a political cause versus fidelity within a romantic relationship. (I’ve never been called upon to test my fidelity to a political cause but I have experienced questions of fidelity in and around romance.) Somehow, along this path, I ended up with a love triangle, some strange kind of juxtaposition between a more political question (fidelity to a cause) and a classic soap-opera device (broken fidelity to a lover). What happens to the fidelity of the original relationship in a love triangle, how does it evolve, disintegrate, become more paradoxical? And how is this analogous, or completely different, from fidelity to a political cause? I wanted to write about these questions in ways I had never seen them written about before – full of doubt, confusion, curiosity, precision, cynicism and joy.
Catherine Lacey: While writing it, did the direction the book ended up going surprise you at all?
Jacob Wren: Yes, as I wrote, most of the time I never really knew where it was going (and even now that it’s done I’m still not quite sure I know what it is.) There were so many times when I was completely stuck. Most often the way it came unstuck was I would spontaneously write something so terrible and unexpected I couldn’t help but follow it a bit and see where it led. (I now think a lot of this ‘being stuck’ was simply being hampered by various unexamined notions of good writing and good taste.) Sometimes I felt the trick – like some sort of fucked up alchemist – was to magically transmute the bad taste into good taste, and that this alchemy had something to do with what it means to write about politics today, though I’m still not sure exactly what. I love it when I’m writing and something completely unexpected comes out. There are also a lot of things in the book I ripped off, but hopefully ripped off in such a perverse way they have also become something new.
Catherine Lacey: What’s next for you? I know you’re in Lisbon (and I’m jealous); what’s that all about? Are you working on something set there?
Jacob Wren: Over the past year I have had writing residencies in Denmark at Hald Hovedgaard, in Belgium at Passa Porta and currently here in Portugal hosted by the festival Alkantara. I have been trying to finish a new novel called Polyamorous Love Song. I am very excited about it, I think it is some of the best writing I’ve ever done, and yet, as I’ve been working on it steadily for the past four years, I was starting to worry I might never manage to finish it. I’m just starting to realize that my life is considerably busier than it’s ever been before and I needed to find a way to carve out some additional time to write. These writing residencies were my first attempt at a solution and I honestly can’t believe how helpful it’s been. The new book doesn’t have anything directly to do with Denmark, Belgium or Portugal, and yet, undeniably, all of these places, and the people I’ve met while there, have now influenced it. If you’re curious, here is my first attempt at a description:
Polyamorous Love Song is a novel concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, it is written within the strict logic of an absolute dream, a dream that is both the same and opposite to the world in which we live. It is a novel of many through-lines. For example: 1) A group of people who wear furry mascot costumes at all times fighting a revolutionary war for their right to wear furry mascot costumes at all times. 2) A movement known as the ‘New Filmmaking’ in which, instead of shooting and editing a film, one simply does all of the things that would have been in the film, but in real life. This movement has many adherents. 3) A group of ‘New Filmmakers’ who devise increasingly strange sexual scenarios with complete strangers. They invent a drug that allows them to intuit the cell phone number of anyone they see, allowing phone calls to be the first stage of their spontaneous, yet somehow scripted, seductions. 4) A secret society that concocts a virus that only infects those on the political right. They stage large-scale orgies, creating unexpected intimacies and connections between individuals who are otherwise savagely opposed to each other. 5) A radical leftist who catches this virus, forcing her to question the depth of her considerable leftist credentials. 6) A German barber in New York who, out of scorn for the stupidity of his American clients, gives them avant-garde haircuts, unintentionally achieving acclaim among the bohemian set. And yet such stories are only the beginning.
[The accompanying ten sentences I wrote can be found here.]
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February 9, 2011
Smarter than the world
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This desire to be smarter than the world.
No one is smarter than the world.
The world isn’t even smart.
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This desire to be smarter than the world.
No one is smarter than the world.
The world isn’t even smart.
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February 3, 2011
from The Spirit of the Gourd
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A lamb eats a mouse: once inside, the mouse worms its way through the lamb's bowels to the end of its tail. Because the lamb suffers greatly from the mouse's biting, it asks a snake to cure it. The snake then eats the lamb's tail. The lamb then wants to eat the snake to avenge its tail. As all of this chewing is slow – just imagine: the mouse eats the bowels, the snake eats the mouse and finally the lamb eats the snake, each chewing the body of the next - it would be no surprise if the lamb had become as tiny as a pea! There are those who call what cannot be seen the indiscernible and in this sequence in which man feeds off the world, representing and idealizing what surrounds him, he is also devoured by the sea monsters and by all the unknown faces glimpsing around the corner. The result is "digestive nihilation" and at the end of all this what can we expect to find that is smaller than the atom? Perhaps a spark, the final infinitesimal chimera placed before even the world itself and devoid of intent and will.
- João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva - O Espírito da Cabaça (The Spirit of the Gourd)
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A lamb eats a mouse: once inside, the mouse worms its way through the lamb's bowels to the end of its tail. Because the lamb suffers greatly from the mouse's biting, it asks a snake to cure it. The snake then eats the lamb's tail. The lamb then wants to eat the snake to avenge its tail. As all of this chewing is slow – just imagine: the mouse eats the bowels, the snake eats the mouse and finally the lamb eats the snake, each chewing the body of the next - it would be no surprise if the lamb had become as tiny as a pea! There are those who call what cannot be seen the indiscernible and in this sequence in which man feeds off the world, representing and idealizing what surrounds him, he is also devoured by the sea monsters and by all the unknown faces glimpsing around the corner. The result is "digestive nihilation" and at the end of all this what can we expect to find that is smaller than the atom? Perhaps a spark, the final infinitesimal chimera placed before even the world itself and devoid of intent and will.
- João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva - O Espírito da Cabaça (The Spirit of the Gourd)
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January 28, 2011
I settled my bill rather than become the first against the wall.
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A very strange mention of my book on the Business News Network Blog:
True story. I dropped the daughter off at dance class last night and, at my wife’s suggestion, set out for a “nice little wine bar just north of the school” she had enjoyed once with a famous classical pianist friend some years ago (that’s right, I said pianist). I knew I had the right place when the fedora-wearing guy next to me dropped a well-thumbed copy of Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia on the bar. Latin-inspired jazz played quietly and the barmaid told my drinking companion about a terrific novel she was reading about two people who were falling in love as they attended meetings to discuss the death of the “left.” I would have asked her the title but would have been revealed as an eavesdropper. Another man entered, ordered a beer and sat down in a care-worn chair, back to the wall, flipped open the New Yorker and appeared to focus on an article, not the cartoons. A woman with a beret walked in and was greeted by one and all. She ordered a glass of red wine. The air was bristling with intent. Thankfully I had changed out of my suit earlier and into a plaid flannel shirt. I recalled that this was Andy Bell’s neighbourhood, but the thought gave me no comfort at all. I was about to order another when I noticed the older gentleman on my left was reading something called Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. I settled my bill rather than become the first against the wall. “Unrest Spreading” hollers the Wall Street Journal this morning. You got that right. Cairo today, Cabbagetown tomorrow. You heard it here first.
- Martin Cej
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A very strange mention of my book on the Business News Network Blog:
True story. I dropped the daughter off at dance class last night and, at my wife’s suggestion, set out for a “nice little wine bar just north of the school” she had enjoyed once with a famous classical pianist friend some years ago (that’s right, I said pianist). I knew I had the right place when the fedora-wearing guy next to me dropped a well-thumbed copy of Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia on the bar. Latin-inspired jazz played quietly and the barmaid told my drinking companion about a terrific novel she was reading about two people who were falling in love as they attended meetings to discuss the death of the “left.” I would have asked her the title but would have been revealed as an eavesdropper. Another man entered, ordered a beer and sat down in a care-worn chair, back to the wall, flipped open the New Yorker and appeared to focus on an article, not the cartoons. A woman with a beret walked in and was greeted by one and all. She ordered a glass of red wine. The air was bristling with intent. Thankfully I had changed out of my suit earlier and into a plaid flannel shirt. I recalled that this was Andy Bell’s neighbourhood, but the thought gave me no comfort at all. I was about to order another when I noticed the older gentleman on my left was reading something called Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. I settled my bill rather than become the first against the wall. “Unrest Spreading” hollers the Wall Street Journal this morning. You got that right. Cairo today, Cabbagetown tomorrow. You heard it here first.
- Martin Cej
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January 24, 2011
January 23, 2011
how to burn
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The baby says to the demon I am receiving telepathy from the fire, the fire is telling me that it is not just wood that has been chopped and burned, it is the future of the wood that does not yet know how to burn.
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The baby says to the demon I am receiving telepathy from the fire, the fire is telling me that it is not just wood that has been chopped and burned, it is the future of the wood that does not yet know how to burn.
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January 20, 2011
The forms of modern art are due solely to this self-imposed ascetic creation of taboos, restrictions and reductions.
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Modern art is often characterized as a series of broken taboos, as a constant expansion of the possibility of making art. In fact, the situation is precisely the reverse. New taboos and new reductions were constantly being introduced in modern art. For no obvious reason, artists imposed on themselves the obligation to use only abstract geometric figures, or only ready-mades, or only words. The forms of modern art are due solely to this self-imposed ascetic creation of taboos, restrictions and reductions. This example demonstrates that newness arises not from expansion but rather from reduction, from a new mode of asceticism.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
(At first I found this convincing, but upon further reflection I think the phrase “for no obvious reason” is simply incorrect. Artists imposed such restrictions on themselves because the alternatives – figuration, landscape, sculpting stone, etc. – felt painfully old-fashioned, out-of-date. And to be old-fashioned was the road to mediocrity and artistic death.)
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Modern art is often characterized as a series of broken taboos, as a constant expansion of the possibility of making art. In fact, the situation is precisely the reverse. New taboos and new reductions were constantly being introduced in modern art. For no obvious reason, artists imposed on themselves the obligation to use only abstract geometric figures, or only ready-mades, or only words. The forms of modern art are due solely to this self-imposed ascetic creation of taboos, restrictions and reductions. This example demonstrates that newness arises not from expansion but rather from reduction, from a new mode of asceticism.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
(At first I found this convincing, but upon further reflection I think the phrase “for no obvious reason” is simply incorrect. Artists imposed such restrictions on themselves because the alternatives – figuration, landscape, sculpting stone, etc. – felt painfully old-fashioned, out-of-date. And to be old-fashioned was the road to mediocrity and artistic death.)
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January 15, 2011
The sales potential of this critique is therefore potentially infinite.
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As it currently functions in the West, critical discourse thus proves to be astonishingly homogeneous. It is always the same things being criticized with the same arguments. The only difference consists in that the right tends to apply this critique to the non-West (communism and now Islam are principally criticized as ideologies that oppress the body and sexuality), while the left conversely practices this same critique as a self-critique of the West – and, from the middle, the same critique is applied in both directions, as a fair-minded ‘both… and also…’, albeit in moderated form.
The astounding and historically unparalleled homogeneity of Western critical discourse, which never changes its components but merely alters its direction now and then, certainly cannot be explained solely by the ideological pressure imposed on the Western public sphere during the Cold War period. Instead, this homogeneity can be attributed principally to the fact that critical discourse in the West circulates primarily as a commodity on the media market. It is a standardized and sophistical mode of speech available for employment by any political strategy whatsoever. After all, where is the body not suppressed? Where are people not traumatized? Where is the subject who is not seized by contradictory desires? Where is the human not threatened by the machine? The answer is that this is the case everywhere. The sales potential of this critique is therefore potentially infinite.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
.
As it currently functions in the West, critical discourse thus proves to be astonishingly homogeneous. It is always the same things being criticized with the same arguments. The only difference consists in that the right tends to apply this critique to the non-West (communism and now Islam are principally criticized as ideologies that oppress the body and sexuality), while the left conversely practices this same critique as a self-critique of the West – and, from the middle, the same critique is applied in both directions, as a fair-minded ‘both… and also…’, albeit in moderated form.
The astounding and historically unparalleled homogeneity of Western critical discourse, which never changes its components but merely alters its direction now and then, certainly cannot be explained solely by the ideological pressure imposed on the Western public sphere during the Cold War period. Instead, this homogeneity can be attributed principally to the fact that critical discourse in the West circulates primarily as a commodity on the media market. It is a standardized and sophistical mode of speech available for employment by any political strategy whatsoever. After all, where is the body not suppressed? Where are people not traumatized? Where is the subject who is not seized by contradictory desires? Where is the human not threatened by the machine? The answer is that this is the case everywhere. The sales potential of this critique is therefore potentially infinite.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
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January 14, 2011
The history of philosophy can be represented as a collection of iconic paradoxes.
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Throughout its entire history philosophy has constantly tried to discover or invent new paradoxes in order to gain the upper hand over one-sided scientific discourse. The history of philosophy can be represented as a collection of iconic paradoxes, in which each radiates its own evidence without contradicting each other. That is why the so-called theories of philosophy can coexist peacefully – so-called because they are not in fact theories at all – whereas scientific theories are in competition with one another. The will to paradox already played a decisive role when Descartes provided Western philosophy with a new foundation: thinking subjectivity was understood by Descartes to be the location and medium of doubt. With regard to self-contradictory opinions with which the listening or reading philosopher is constantly confronted, the Cartesian epoché means nothing other than the decision to live in paradox, to endure paradox, for the decision to suspend all opinions is logically just as paradoxical as the decision to affirm or to reject all opinions. The effulgence of evidence emanating from this paradox alone makes Descartes’ apparently coherent and methodologically correct expositions plausible – for on closer examination, the formal-logical evidence being presented is quite problematic. The evidence of the Cartesian method is borrowed evidence, borrowed from the paradox that this method takes as its point of departure.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
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Throughout its entire history philosophy has constantly tried to discover or invent new paradoxes in order to gain the upper hand over one-sided scientific discourse. The history of philosophy can be represented as a collection of iconic paradoxes, in which each radiates its own evidence without contradicting each other. That is why the so-called theories of philosophy can coexist peacefully – so-called because they are not in fact theories at all – whereas scientific theories are in competition with one another. The will to paradox already played a decisive role when Descartes provided Western philosophy with a new foundation: thinking subjectivity was understood by Descartes to be the location and medium of doubt. With regard to self-contradictory opinions with which the listening or reading philosopher is constantly confronted, the Cartesian epoché means nothing other than the decision to live in paradox, to endure paradox, for the decision to suspend all opinions is logically just as paradoxical as the decision to affirm or to reject all opinions. The effulgence of evidence emanating from this paradox alone makes Descartes’ apparently coherent and methodologically correct expositions plausible – for on closer examination, the formal-logical evidence being presented is quite problematic. The evidence of the Cartesian method is borrowed evidence, borrowed from the paradox that this method takes as its point of departure.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
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January 12, 2011
A compromise is a paradox that is paid not to reveal itself to be a paradox.
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Sophistical speech appears to be coherent only because it is one-sided, because it is cut off from the whole, and because it obscures its paradoxical relationship to the whole of language. The sophist continues to deliver his plea for a particular position even though he knows there is much to be said at the same time for the opposing position. In endeavouring to lend his utterance coherence and consistency, the sophist employs in his speech only those arguments that strengthen the position he represents, passing over all possible opposing arguments in silence. The sophist thereby replaces the whole of language with the whole of capital. The most important rule of formal logic, which all coherently constructed speech professes to follow, is terium non datur. This terium, however, which is excluded from coherently organized language, becomes money – and, as the obscure core of language, begins to rule over it both externally and internally, transforming it into a commodity. The conflict of positions, each of which represents a distinct, private, one-sided and particular interest in a coherent and consistent manner, leads ultimately to compromise. Compromise is indispensable in such arguments because it alone can bring peace between the conflicting parties, and thus preserve the unity of the whole society. Compromise simultaneously accepts and endorses two opposing assertions. A and not-A, and in consequence its form is actually that of a paradox. But in contrast to the paradox, compromise is formulated in the medium of money, not in the medium of language. In other words, compromise involves financially compensating both the advocates of A and the advocates of not-A for accepting the truth of the opposing position. The sophists, who have argued in favour of both sides, receive financial compensation in just this way. It could be said, therefore, that when paradox is replaced by compromise, power over the whole passes from language to money. A compromise is a paradox that is paid not to reveal itself to be a paradox.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
.
Sophistical speech appears to be coherent only because it is one-sided, because it is cut off from the whole, and because it obscures its paradoxical relationship to the whole of language. The sophist continues to deliver his plea for a particular position even though he knows there is much to be said at the same time for the opposing position. In endeavouring to lend his utterance coherence and consistency, the sophist employs in his speech only those arguments that strengthen the position he represents, passing over all possible opposing arguments in silence. The sophist thereby replaces the whole of language with the whole of capital. The most important rule of formal logic, which all coherently constructed speech professes to follow, is terium non datur. This terium, however, which is excluded from coherently organized language, becomes money – and, as the obscure core of language, begins to rule over it both externally and internally, transforming it into a commodity. The conflict of positions, each of which represents a distinct, private, one-sided and particular interest in a coherent and consistent manner, leads ultimately to compromise. Compromise is indispensable in such arguments because it alone can bring peace between the conflicting parties, and thus preserve the unity of the whole society. Compromise simultaneously accepts and endorses two opposing assertions. A and not-A, and in consequence its form is actually that of a paradox. But in contrast to the paradox, compromise is formulated in the medium of money, not in the medium of language. In other words, compromise involves financially compensating both the advocates of A and the advocates of not-A for accepting the truth of the opposing position. The sophists, who have argued in favour of both sides, receive financial compensation in just this way. It could be said, therefore, that when paradox is replaced by compromise, power over the whole passes from language to money. A compromise is a paradox that is paid not to reveal itself to be a paradox.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
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January 10, 2011
A paradox that conceals its paradoxical nature becomes a commodity.
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Whenever Socrates diagnoses an internal contradiction in a speaker, he immediately disqualifies that speech a non-evident, exposing the speaker as unfit for the just exercise of state power. Socrates’ questions break through the smooth, glittering surfaces of sophistical speech and uncover its contradictory, paradoxical core. It emerges that such speech only superficially appears to be well-knit and coherent. In its internal logical structure, however, it is obscure and dark because it is paradoxical. Hence, such speech cannot serve as a manifestation of clear and evident thinking but is good only as a commodity in the marketplace of ideas. The principle reproach directed against the sophists is that they compose their speeches solely for the sake of payment. This allows for an initial definition to be given for the functioning of paradox: a paradox that conceals its paradoxical nature becomes a commodity.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
.
Whenever Socrates diagnoses an internal contradiction in a speaker, he immediately disqualifies that speech a non-evident, exposing the speaker as unfit for the just exercise of state power. Socrates’ questions break through the smooth, glittering surfaces of sophistical speech and uncover its contradictory, paradoxical core. It emerges that such speech only superficially appears to be well-knit and coherent. In its internal logical structure, however, it is obscure and dark because it is paradoxical. Hence, such speech cannot serve as a manifestation of clear and evident thinking but is good only as a commodity in the marketplace of ideas. The principle reproach directed against the sophists is that they compose their speeches solely for the sake of payment. This allows for an initial definition to be given for the functioning of paradox: a paradox that conceals its paradoxical nature becomes a commodity.
- Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
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January 8, 2011
From The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons
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About Fr. Rolfe's lost novel Don Renato, or An Ideal Content, A.J.A. Symons writes:
“No writer ever set himself a more difficult task. He, or rather Dom Gheraldo in his entries, tells a story: he reveals by slow and feline touches the character of the priest from within; and at the same time he attempts to give an English equivalent for the verbal mix-up of the pretended original. And in all this he succeeds, though in retaining Dom Gheraldo's macaronics he almost makes the book unreadable. Fortunately, he provides a glossary, so that it is possible to understand, without a headache, the exact meaning that he meant to extract from such constructions or compounds or rarities as argute, deaurate, investite, lucktifick, excandescence, galbanate, lecertose, insulsity, hestern, macilent, effrenate, dicaculous, pavonine, and torose. Even so, Don Renato is not a book to read at a sitting, but rather one to be dipped into at odd hours when the mind can be stimulated by puzzles in verbal ingenuity.”
About his own life, writing back to a friend who accuses him of selfishness, Fr. Rolfe writes:
“Selfish? Yes, selfish. The selfishness of a square peg in a round hole.”
More about The Quest for Corvo here.
.
About Fr. Rolfe's lost novel Don Renato, or An Ideal Content, A.J.A. Symons writes:
“No writer ever set himself a more difficult task. He, or rather Dom Gheraldo in his entries, tells a story: he reveals by slow and feline touches the character of the priest from within; and at the same time he attempts to give an English equivalent for the verbal mix-up of the pretended original. And in all this he succeeds, though in retaining Dom Gheraldo's macaronics he almost makes the book unreadable. Fortunately, he provides a glossary, so that it is possible to understand, without a headache, the exact meaning that he meant to extract from such constructions or compounds or rarities as argute, deaurate, investite, lucktifick, excandescence, galbanate, lecertose, insulsity, hestern, macilent, effrenate, dicaculous, pavonine, and torose. Even so, Don Renato is not a book to read at a sitting, but rather one to be dipped into at odd hours when the mind can be stimulated by puzzles in verbal ingenuity.”
About his own life, writing back to a friend who accuses him of selfishness, Fr. Rolfe writes:
“Selfish? Yes, selfish. The selfishness of a square peg in a round hole.”
More about The Quest for Corvo here.
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January 4, 2011
It goes without saying that plot-oriented prose still exists and will continue to exist, but it has been consigned to the attic.
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I speak in a voice grown horse from silence and feuilletons. I’ll begin with a piece that has been lying around for a long time.
The way you assemble a film by attaching to the beginning either a piece of exposed negative or a strip from another film.
I am attaching a piece of theoretical work. The way a soldier crossing a stream holds his rifle high.
It will be completely dry. Dry as a cough.
During the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the nineteenth, to tell an anecdote meant to relate an interesting fact about something.
For instance, to relate that the Krupp factory is currently building a diesel engine with 2,000 horsepower in one cylinder would have been, from the viewpoint of that time, an anecdote. An anecdotal story, from the viewpoint of that time, was also a story consisting of separate facts tenuously connected. There were even such things as philosophical anecdotes.
Wit – the unexpected denouement, for instance – had no place in the anecdote of that time. Now we describe an anecdote as a short novella with a denouement. From our viewpoint, to ask after hearing an anecdote, “But what happened next?” is an absurdity, but then that is the viewpoint of our time.
In the old days, one anecdotal fact was normally followed by another. In the old anecdote, one responded above all to the attractiveness of the fact, to the material, whereas in the modern anecdote we respond mainly to the structure.
This conflict – or, rather, the alternation – of perception from one aspect of a work to another – can be traced easily.
I have no desire to be witty.
I have no desire to construct a plot.
I am going to write about things and thought.
To compile quotations.
The time has changed course once again and the word “anecdote,” once applied to a witty story, will soon be defined in terms of the various facts being printed in the this-and-that columns of the newspapers. Each separate moment of a play is becoming a separate, self-contained entity. Structure is usually missing. When it does creep into a piece of work, it is promptly killed; moreover the crime goes unnoticed by the public. And the crime is pointless: the victim is already dead. The interest in the adventure novel which we are now witnessing does not contradict the thought just expressed. What we have in the adventure novel is a type of “stringing” in which there is no orientation toward the connecting thread.
At the present time, we perceive memoirs as literature; we respond to them as something esthetic.
This is clearly not due to interest in the revolution, because people are avid to read even memoirs having nothing to do with the revolutionary epoch.
It goes without saying that plot-oriented prose still exists and will continue to exist, but it has been consigned to the attic.
- Viktor Shklovsky, Third Factory, 1926
.
I speak in a voice grown horse from silence and feuilletons. I’ll begin with a piece that has been lying around for a long time.
The way you assemble a film by attaching to the beginning either a piece of exposed negative or a strip from another film.
I am attaching a piece of theoretical work. The way a soldier crossing a stream holds his rifle high.
It will be completely dry. Dry as a cough.
During the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the nineteenth, to tell an anecdote meant to relate an interesting fact about something.
For instance, to relate that the Krupp factory is currently building a diesel engine with 2,000 horsepower in one cylinder would have been, from the viewpoint of that time, an anecdote. An anecdotal story, from the viewpoint of that time, was also a story consisting of separate facts tenuously connected. There were even such things as philosophical anecdotes.
Wit – the unexpected denouement, for instance – had no place in the anecdote of that time. Now we describe an anecdote as a short novella with a denouement. From our viewpoint, to ask after hearing an anecdote, “But what happened next?” is an absurdity, but then that is the viewpoint of our time.
In the old days, one anecdotal fact was normally followed by another. In the old anecdote, one responded above all to the attractiveness of the fact, to the material, whereas in the modern anecdote we respond mainly to the structure.
This conflict – or, rather, the alternation – of perception from one aspect of a work to another – can be traced easily.
I have no desire to be witty.
I have no desire to construct a plot.
I am going to write about things and thought.
To compile quotations.
The time has changed course once again and the word “anecdote,” once applied to a witty story, will soon be defined in terms of the various facts being printed in the this-and-that columns of the newspapers. Each separate moment of a play is becoming a separate, self-contained entity. Structure is usually missing. When it does creep into a piece of work, it is promptly killed; moreover the crime goes unnoticed by the public. And the crime is pointless: the victim is already dead. The interest in the adventure novel which we are now witnessing does not contradict the thought just expressed. What we have in the adventure novel is a type of “stringing” in which there is no orientation toward the connecting thread.
At the present time, we perceive memoirs as literature; we respond to them as something esthetic.
This is clearly not due to interest in the revolution, because people are avid to read even memoirs having nothing to do with the revolutionary epoch.
It goes without saying that plot-oriented prose still exists and will continue to exist, but it has been consigned to the attic.
- Viktor Shklovsky, Third Factory, 1926
.
December 31, 2010
Gianni Celati quote
.
By this time he was a man of some maturity, and a man who, that day, had combed his hair, shaved, put on a nice red tie, and come to a realization of what life is: a web of ceremonial relationships which hold together something that has no substance.
- Gianni Celati, Voices from the Plains
.
By this time he was a man of some maturity, and a man who, that day, had combed his hair, shaved, put on a nice red tie, and come to a realization of what life is: a web of ceremonial relationships which hold together something that has no substance.
- Gianni Celati, Voices from the Plains
.
December 20, 2010
Dreams and Lying
.
The most effective lie is always the one closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie. There are various approaches for understanding dreams: as evidence of some deeper psychological truth, as alternate realities, as subtle yet surreal mental reprocessings of our daily life, as experiences equally valid to those had while awake. Due to the acuity of their strangeness, dreams practically call out for interpretation. However, since we don’t accurately know what consciousness is, since we don’t know precisely what or how we experience being awake, why would we be able to know what happens when we dream? There are also various approaches one might use to understand a lie. But one aspect generally agreed upon is that to tell the complete truth, and only the complete truth, at all times, is a disaster. There are different ways of being honest.
.
The most effective lie is always the one closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie. There are various approaches for understanding dreams: as evidence of some deeper psychological truth, as alternate realities, as subtle yet surreal mental reprocessings of our daily life, as experiences equally valid to those had while awake. Due to the acuity of their strangeness, dreams practically call out for interpretation. However, since we don’t accurately know what consciousness is, since we don’t know precisely what or how we experience being awake, why would we be able to know what happens when we dream? There are also various approaches one might use to understand a lie. But one aspect generally agreed upon is that to tell the complete truth, and only the complete truth, at all times, is a disaster. There are different ways of being honest.
.
December 8, 2010
Albert Cossery on the government
.
“Number one is that the world we live in is governed by the most revolting bunch of crooks to ever defile the soil of this planet.”
“I couldn’t agree more. And number two?”
“Number two is that you must never take them seriously, for that is exactly what they want.”
- Albert Cossery
.
“Number one is that the world we live in is governed by the most revolting bunch of crooks to ever defile the soil of this planet.”
“I couldn’t agree more. And number two?”
“Number two is that you must never take them seriously, for that is exactly what they want.”
- Albert Cossery
.
December 7, 2010
César Aira on the unbuilt
.
The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires the remunerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an idea for a film, but then you need expertise, finance, personnel, and these obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it all – which technological advances have exacerbated if anything – isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since, paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie-making, in the form of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and the unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature.
- César Aira
.
The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires the remunerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an idea for a film, but then you need expertise, finance, personnel, and these obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it all – which technological advances have exacerbated if anything – isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since, paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie-making, in the form of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and the unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature.
- César Aira
.
December 2, 2010
Six Fernando Pessoa Quotes
.
There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.
Trying to revive tradition is like raising a ladder to climb up a wall that fell down. It’s interesting, because absurd, but only worth the bother because it’s not worth the bother.
The only basis for truth is self-contradiction. The universe contradicts itself, for it passes on. Life contradicts itself, for it dies. Paradox is nature’s norm. That’s why all truth has a paradoxical form.
My destiny belongs to another Law, whose existence you’re not even aware of, and it is ever more the slave of Masters who do not relent and do not forgive.
There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
One day, perhaps, they will understand that I carried out, as did no other, my inborn duty as interpreter of one particular period of our century; and when they do, they will write that I was misunderstood in my own times… and that it was a pity it should have been so. And the person writing, in whatever future epoch he or she may live, will be as mystified by my equivalent in that future time as are those around me now.
.
There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.
Trying to revive tradition is like raising a ladder to climb up a wall that fell down. It’s interesting, because absurd, but only worth the bother because it’s not worth the bother.
The only basis for truth is self-contradiction. The universe contradicts itself, for it passes on. Life contradicts itself, for it dies. Paradox is nature’s norm. That’s why all truth has a paradoxical form.
My destiny belongs to another Law, whose existence you’re not even aware of, and it is ever more the slave of Masters who do not relent and do not forgive.
There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
One day, perhaps, they will understand that I carried out, as did no other, my inborn duty as interpreter of one particular period of our century; and when they do, they will write that I was misunderstood in my own times… and that it was a pity it should have been so. And the person writing, in whatever future epoch he or she may live, will be as mystified by my equivalent in that future time as are those around me now.
.
November 24, 2010
The opening line of Sinners in the Summertime by Sigurd Hoel
.
You are a self-deceiver and as such belong to the last generation.
.
You are a self-deceiver and as such belong to the last generation.
.
November 19, 2010
Tears, stupidity and failure.
.
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.
.
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.
.
November 17, 2010
How can so many people do so much and generate so little meaning.
.
How can so many people do so much
and generate so little meaning.
It takes talent. Assholes have talent.
Sad, sad obdurate talent.
You are born and you must do
something whether you have something
to do or not. The worst is still to come.
Another solution: a redefinition of
meaning. Anything that means now means
a lot, a lot of the time, against itself
or towards happiness. Competition goes
away. Away to heaven. I don’t think that
suicide and war are the same thing.
But what I do not yet know is whether
they are opposites.
.
How can so many people do so much
and generate so little meaning.
It takes talent. Assholes have talent.
Sad, sad obdurate talent.
You are born and you must do
something whether you have something
to do or not. The worst is still to come.
Another solution: a redefinition of
meaning. Anything that means now means
a lot, a lot of the time, against itself
or towards happiness. Competition goes
away. Away to heaven. I don’t think that
suicide and war are the same thing.
But what I do not yet know is whether
they are opposites.
.
November 14, 2010
Polyamorous Love Song (Daily Music Column)
.
What follows is a column I wrote during the five days of Pop Montreal 2010 as part of the project Daily Print organized by Palimpsest Magazine in association with ArtPop and DHC-ART.
[Please note: this column should not be confused with my recent novel also entitled Polyamorous Love Song.]
#1
The title of this column is Polyamorous Love Song. I will try to write one of these every day. I am worried I might fail. Why such a title? Perhaps because this column will revolve around various gradations of music and speculation and one such speculation has something to do with love songs. That most love songs, mainstream or otherwise, are directed towards one person, the ultimate soul mate or new excitement, and maybe a polyamorous love song, a love song directed towards a few (or many) soul mates, might undermine some of the basic songwriting assumptions. Some such songs must exist in the world already but I’m not sure I know them (one exception: Two Are One by Dri. YouTube it, the video is quite good.) As well, if you are reading this (if anyone is reading this), and can think of further – better, more enticing – examples, please send them along.
Somewhere the American art critic Dave Hickey writes (I believe in the introduction to Air Guitar but my books are all in storage) that he was in Mexico, wondering why there are so many songs about love, about falling in love or being in love, and so few works of visual art or critical texts along the same lines. As he was pondering this question he saw the following scene: two dogs fucking in the middle of the street, and a mother with her young daughter plus her daughters fiancé trying to cross the street, to walk around the copulating animals. The young couple both seemed extremely interested in the dogs, while the mother was of course trying to rush the young couple along, divert their attention.
I believe Hickey draws a sort of lesson from this scene, though I can’t precisely remember what it is. Something like: the dogs don’t need love songs, they just go for it, but the people are in a state of avoidance or embarrassment which expresses itself as courtship and therefore they require a constant stream of love songs to keep the avoidance/courtship in play. I can’t remember, in Hickey’s analogy, if the dogs represented rock n’ roll and the mother plus young couple were the politeness of visual art, or vice versa, if the dogs were art, they didn’t need songs to hook up, and the mother/young couple were the necessity of love songs to deal with the reality of what they were avoiding. I will have to look it up. My memory no longer works nearly as well as I would like. I probably have it completely wrong.
#2
Pop music is the gasoline of monogamy. Love songs are propaganda for monogamy. Writing is another form of loneliness. These are all statements that feel relatively true to me, that feel true in their gestures of empty, highly personal, provocation. Statements whose truth-value is little more than an opening for debate. Songwriting is a strange kind of writing. I remember something I once heard Darren Hayman (from the band Hefner) say in an interview, that people often complimented him on his lyrics, and he was flattered by this, but he had always been more interested in writing tunes. Because a song could have bad lyrics and a great tune and still be a good song. But if a song had great lyrics and a terrible tune, the entire endeavor was kind of doomed. How would we experience love if pop culture did not exist?
Bands exist on the internet. The first time you hear a new band, or hear about a new band, now most often occurs on line. I find it difficult to even remember the experience of going to a record store, buying a record I had never heard and knew almost nothing about, taking it home, placing the needle on the vinyl, and hearing the first notes for the first time. There was a level of anticipation and curiosity that simply no longer exists. Love songs attempt to describe how we feel when we’re in love. But as they’re describing, they are also telling us how we should feel, creating norms we can compare with our own experiences, giving us language that helps us describe a realm of emotion that in some sense is always beyond language. Many of these songs were written in about five minutes.
I love to listen to music alone. When I am at home, there is almost always music playing, and with astonishing frequency I stop whatever I am doing and simply listen. I also love to go to a bar, to drink, to watch and listen to music in a room full of other people. I rarely think about the two experiences as having anything to do with one another. For me, listening to recorded music, alone, over and over again, is somehow the ‘real’ experience of music. Going out to a show is something else, a chance to see people, get a better idea of what the band is about, add some extra information to the very personal experience of listening to my favorite songs. However, if the band really sucks live sometimes it can totally ruin them for me. It can be years before I genuinely listen to them again.
#3
When did bands start playing along to backing tracks? Suddenly I’m seeing it all the time. I wonder if it has anything to do with hip hop, with being part of a generation that was raised on hip hop and how common it is to rap over pre-recorded beats. It is very strange for me to watch musicians struggle to remain in sync with a backing track, like they’re trying to ace an exam and rock out at the same time. What is the sexual equivalent to playing along with a backing track? Fucking with the assistance of sex toys? Hanging from a full body harness as you go at it? (I’m going for the cheap laughs here.) But music often reminds me of sex, and thinking about sex often makes me wonder if there’s any choice other than monogamy.
I often send songs to friends and lovers over the internet. I have a file of mp3’s on my desktop for that very purpose. But sometimes I get confused. I can’t remember which songs I’ve sent to which people, and worry that I’m going to send someone the same song twice. I wonder what it would feel like to receive a song you have already received from me, if you would sense my confusion, if it would make you feel less special. I believe this anecdote has something to do with being non-monogamous.
I am writing this at Club Social (where, in the past, I have regularly noticed the staff of Pop Montreal.) It is raining outside. Over the sound system I have just heard The Thompson Twins (Hold Me Now), Prince (Purple Rain) and M.J. (Beat It, really not his best song.) None of these artists have anything to do with any of the artists I will see, think about or write about during the five days of this column. (Well, maybe Prince.)
I am reading The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny. The book arrived in the mail two days ago. Blatny was a Czech poet who in 1948 defected to England and spent most of his life in various mental hospitals until his death in 1990. He also has (almost) nothing to do with anything. However, I particularly like these lines: “To carry the world around, / like the stone of Sisyphus, in my head, / this was all I knew how to do and that is very little, / just as in Chinese poetry / there is sometimes very little / nothing more than the sky and a bird flying across it, / a bird flying across it; a bird, but a real one.” When did bands start playing along to backing tracks?
#4
Yesterday, in a poem by Ivan Blatney, I read the following lines: “The number of ringlets on the wasp means the number of its marriages / they don’t have a queen they mate freely.” Reading these lines felt like a pleasurable coincidence. (See title of this column.) Coincidences are one of my favourite things. During the last song of the first band I saw (Tu Fawning), the chorus was “sex is all it is” over an over again. (At least I think that’s what she was singing, I might have it completely wrong.) But this heard, or mis-heard, lyric is only partly a coincidence, because Polyamorous Love Song isn’t about ‘sex being all it is,’ but about love, about love not having to be with just one person, and why are there no (or few) songs that try to explain what this feels like.
And then I’m somewhere completely different, from love to war, watching a documentary about the Tuareg – nomadic people of the Sahara desert – fighting a rebel war against a government hell-bent on protecting the uranium-rich areas being profitably exploited by various multi-nationals. The Tuareg continuously speak of wanting to be free, and theirs is a kind of freedom I find it difficult to imagine, what the physical experience of it would actually be (so far from the suggestive, innuendo-drenched freedom of rock n’ roll.) The footage that struck me most intensely was of uranium processing, the most artificial shade of yellow I’ve ever seen, the exact opposite of the desert from which the Tuareg eek out their existence. And a scene with the female-led group Tilwat, where a man reads out a text extolling how much they all desire peace and on his final words of peace the women are meant to begin their song, but instead get into an argument about who gets to start playing first.
Where else but in a pop song can one repeat the same phrase over and over again and not have it be completely annoying. A bunch of twenty year olds blasting through some fairly compelling power pop. But I can’t help imaging them as middle aged men, rolling through the exact same set twenty or thirty years down the line. As you might imagine, this image is not particularly inspiring, or inspiring only in its sadness and pathos. And yet later the same night Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens make middle age seem like the best fucking thing that ever happened to anyone. There’s no arguing with flair. Then again, maybe all there is to do is wait for middle age to pass. Aim for that second, exponential, level of nostalgia.
.
What follows is a column I wrote during the five days of Pop Montreal 2010 as part of the project Daily Print organized by Palimpsest Magazine in association with ArtPop and DHC-ART.
[Please note: this column should not be confused with my recent novel also entitled Polyamorous Love Song.]
#1
The title of this column is Polyamorous Love Song. I will try to write one of these every day. I am worried I might fail. Why such a title? Perhaps because this column will revolve around various gradations of music and speculation and one such speculation has something to do with love songs. That most love songs, mainstream or otherwise, are directed towards one person, the ultimate soul mate or new excitement, and maybe a polyamorous love song, a love song directed towards a few (or many) soul mates, might undermine some of the basic songwriting assumptions. Some such songs must exist in the world already but I’m not sure I know them (one exception: Two Are One by Dri. YouTube it, the video is quite good.) As well, if you are reading this (if anyone is reading this), and can think of further – better, more enticing – examples, please send them along.
Somewhere the American art critic Dave Hickey writes (I believe in the introduction to Air Guitar but my books are all in storage) that he was in Mexico, wondering why there are so many songs about love, about falling in love or being in love, and so few works of visual art or critical texts along the same lines. As he was pondering this question he saw the following scene: two dogs fucking in the middle of the street, and a mother with her young daughter plus her daughters fiancé trying to cross the street, to walk around the copulating animals. The young couple both seemed extremely interested in the dogs, while the mother was of course trying to rush the young couple along, divert their attention.
I believe Hickey draws a sort of lesson from this scene, though I can’t precisely remember what it is. Something like: the dogs don’t need love songs, they just go for it, but the people are in a state of avoidance or embarrassment which expresses itself as courtship and therefore they require a constant stream of love songs to keep the avoidance/courtship in play. I can’t remember, in Hickey’s analogy, if the dogs represented rock n’ roll and the mother plus young couple were the politeness of visual art, or vice versa, if the dogs were art, they didn’t need songs to hook up, and the mother/young couple were the necessity of love songs to deal with the reality of what they were avoiding. I will have to look it up. My memory no longer works nearly as well as I would like. I probably have it completely wrong.
#2
Pop music is the gasoline of monogamy. Love songs are propaganda for monogamy. Writing is another form of loneliness. These are all statements that feel relatively true to me, that feel true in their gestures of empty, highly personal, provocation. Statements whose truth-value is little more than an opening for debate. Songwriting is a strange kind of writing. I remember something I once heard Darren Hayman (from the band Hefner) say in an interview, that people often complimented him on his lyrics, and he was flattered by this, but he had always been more interested in writing tunes. Because a song could have bad lyrics and a great tune and still be a good song. But if a song had great lyrics and a terrible tune, the entire endeavor was kind of doomed. How would we experience love if pop culture did not exist?
Bands exist on the internet. The first time you hear a new band, or hear about a new band, now most often occurs on line. I find it difficult to even remember the experience of going to a record store, buying a record I had never heard and knew almost nothing about, taking it home, placing the needle on the vinyl, and hearing the first notes for the first time. There was a level of anticipation and curiosity that simply no longer exists. Love songs attempt to describe how we feel when we’re in love. But as they’re describing, they are also telling us how we should feel, creating norms we can compare with our own experiences, giving us language that helps us describe a realm of emotion that in some sense is always beyond language. Many of these songs were written in about five minutes.
I love to listen to music alone. When I am at home, there is almost always music playing, and with astonishing frequency I stop whatever I am doing and simply listen. I also love to go to a bar, to drink, to watch and listen to music in a room full of other people. I rarely think about the two experiences as having anything to do with one another. For me, listening to recorded music, alone, over and over again, is somehow the ‘real’ experience of music. Going out to a show is something else, a chance to see people, get a better idea of what the band is about, add some extra information to the very personal experience of listening to my favorite songs. However, if the band really sucks live sometimes it can totally ruin them for me. It can be years before I genuinely listen to them again.
#3
When did bands start playing along to backing tracks? Suddenly I’m seeing it all the time. I wonder if it has anything to do with hip hop, with being part of a generation that was raised on hip hop and how common it is to rap over pre-recorded beats. It is very strange for me to watch musicians struggle to remain in sync with a backing track, like they’re trying to ace an exam and rock out at the same time. What is the sexual equivalent to playing along with a backing track? Fucking with the assistance of sex toys? Hanging from a full body harness as you go at it? (I’m going for the cheap laughs here.) But music often reminds me of sex, and thinking about sex often makes me wonder if there’s any choice other than monogamy.
I often send songs to friends and lovers over the internet. I have a file of mp3’s on my desktop for that very purpose. But sometimes I get confused. I can’t remember which songs I’ve sent to which people, and worry that I’m going to send someone the same song twice. I wonder what it would feel like to receive a song you have already received from me, if you would sense my confusion, if it would make you feel less special. I believe this anecdote has something to do with being non-monogamous.
I am writing this at Club Social (where, in the past, I have regularly noticed the staff of Pop Montreal.) It is raining outside. Over the sound system I have just heard The Thompson Twins (Hold Me Now), Prince (Purple Rain) and M.J. (Beat It, really not his best song.) None of these artists have anything to do with any of the artists I will see, think about or write about during the five days of this column. (Well, maybe Prince.)
I am reading The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny. The book arrived in the mail two days ago. Blatny was a Czech poet who in 1948 defected to England and spent most of his life in various mental hospitals until his death in 1990. He also has (almost) nothing to do with anything. However, I particularly like these lines: “To carry the world around, / like the stone of Sisyphus, in my head, / this was all I knew how to do and that is very little, / just as in Chinese poetry / there is sometimes very little / nothing more than the sky and a bird flying across it, / a bird flying across it; a bird, but a real one.” When did bands start playing along to backing tracks?
#4
Yesterday, in a poem by Ivan Blatney, I read the following lines: “The number of ringlets on the wasp means the number of its marriages / they don’t have a queen they mate freely.” Reading these lines felt like a pleasurable coincidence. (See title of this column.) Coincidences are one of my favourite things. During the last song of the first band I saw (Tu Fawning), the chorus was “sex is all it is” over an over again. (At least I think that’s what she was singing, I might have it completely wrong.) But this heard, or mis-heard, lyric is only partly a coincidence, because Polyamorous Love Song isn’t about ‘sex being all it is,’ but about love, about love not having to be with just one person, and why are there no (or few) songs that try to explain what this feels like.
And then I’m somewhere completely different, from love to war, watching a documentary about the Tuareg – nomadic people of the Sahara desert – fighting a rebel war against a government hell-bent on protecting the uranium-rich areas being profitably exploited by various multi-nationals. The Tuareg continuously speak of wanting to be free, and theirs is a kind of freedom I find it difficult to imagine, what the physical experience of it would actually be (so far from the suggestive, innuendo-drenched freedom of rock n’ roll.) The footage that struck me most intensely was of uranium processing, the most artificial shade of yellow I’ve ever seen, the exact opposite of the desert from which the Tuareg eek out their existence. And a scene with the female-led group Tilwat, where a man reads out a text extolling how much they all desire peace and on his final words of peace the women are meant to begin their song, but instead get into an argument about who gets to start playing first.
Where else but in a pop song can one repeat the same phrase over and over again and not have it be completely annoying. A bunch of twenty year olds blasting through some fairly compelling power pop. But I can’t help imaging them as middle aged men, rolling through the exact same set twenty or thirty years down the line. As you might imagine, this image is not particularly inspiring, or inspiring only in its sadness and pathos. And yet later the same night Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens make middle age seem like the best fucking thing that ever happened to anyone. There’s no arguing with flair. Then again, maybe all there is to do is wait for middle age to pass. Aim for that second, exponential, level of nostalgia.
.
November 10, 2010
November 7, 2010
My flight from Dusseldorf was canceled...
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My flight from Dusseldorf was canceled. We all got on the plane, they announced that the second engine didn't work, and then we all got off again. By the time I got to Amsterdam I had already missed my connecting flight back to Montreal. I am now stranded at the Van Der Valk Hotel Schiphol A4 for one night. The fact that it has the letters "A4" at the end of the hotels name makes me feel like I'm staying on a sheet of paper. (A not altogether unpleasant sensation.) I am reading When Spring Comes: Awakenings In Clinical Psychoanalysis by M. Masud R. Khan. It is a book I stumbled upon in a book store back in Melbourne and bought because I suddenly remembered I had read another book by him when I was a teenager and was fascinated by the way he would directly interfere in the lives of his psychoanalytic patients. Before that I had no idea any such thing was possible. I remember finding his actions brilliantly surprising, maybe even leading to some of my own more unconventional choices in life, blurring the boundaries between living and work in ways that don't always feel socially acceptable. In his introduction, M. Masud R. Khan says the original title of his book was Transgression: Passions, Pain and Solitude but he changed it because he found "that the dominant theme was rather that of 'awakening' - the acknowledgement and acceptance of those acts of transgression which invariably arise, in all areas of relating, from any attempt to satisfy needs, desires and demands." When I read this earlier on the plane I suspected one of his considerations might have been that When Spring Comes feels considerably more upbeat and marketable than Passions, Pain and Solitude. I am also working on a new book and can't decide whether I should call it Artists Are Self-Absorbed or Polyamorous Love Song. The first title might be more accurate but I think the second one feels more energizing (at least to me.) I want my book to have an energizing title but I don't want to make decisions, or for that matter compromises, based on faulty logic or fears in and around the books eventual reception. I'm genuinely not sure how I will make up my mind.
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My flight from Dusseldorf was canceled. We all got on the plane, they announced that the second engine didn't work, and then we all got off again. By the time I got to Amsterdam I had already missed my connecting flight back to Montreal. I am now stranded at the Van Der Valk Hotel Schiphol A4 for one night. The fact that it has the letters "A4" at the end of the hotels name makes me feel like I'm staying on a sheet of paper. (A not altogether unpleasant sensation.) I am reading When Spring Comes: Awakenings In Clinical Psychoanalysis by M. Masud R. Khan. It is a book I stumbled upon in a book store back in Melbourne and bought because I suddenly remembered I had read another book by him when I was a teenager and was fascinated by the way he would directly interfere in the lives of his psychoanalytic patients. Before that I had no idea any such thing was possible. I remember finding his actions brilliantly surprising, maybe even leading to some of my own more unconventional choices in life, blurring the boundaries between living and work in ways that don't always feel socially acceptable. In his introduction, M. Masud R. Khan says the original title of his book was Transgression: Passions, Pain and Solitude but he changed it because he found "that the dominant theme was rather that of 'awakening' - the acknowledgement and acceptance of those acts of transgression which invariably arise, in all areas of relating, from any attempt to satisfy needs, desires and demands." When I read this earlier on the plane I suspected one of his considerations might have been that When Spring Comes feels considerably more upbeat and marketable than Passions, Pain and Solitude. I am also working on a new book and can't decide whether I should call it Artists Are Self-Absorbed or Polyamorous Love Song. The first title might be more accurate but I think the second one feels more energizing (at least to me.) I want my book to have an energizing title but I don't want to make decisions, or for that matter compromises, based on faulty logic or fears in and around the books eventual reception. I'm genuinely not sure how I will make up my mind.
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November 6, 2010
November 2, 2010
Some of the themes alluded to or avoided in the album Kaputt by Destroyer
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In other exciting news, Destroyer will release their ninth album, Kaputt, on CD, LP, and digital download on January 25.
Dan Bejar sent us some of the themes alluded to or avoided in the album Kaputt, in absolutely no linear order:
Kaputt by Malaparte, which Bejar has never read… Kara Walker, specifically the lyrics she contributed to the song "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker"… Chinatown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar's… Baby blue eyes… 80s Miles Davis… 90s Gil Evans… Last Tango in Paris… Nic Bragg, who played lead guitar on every song, again… Fretless bass… The hopelessness of the future of music… The pointlessness of writing songs for today… V-Drums… The superiority of poetry and plays… And what's to become of film?… The Cocaine Addict… American Communism… Downtown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar's… The LinnDrum… Avalon and, more specifically, Boys and Girls… The devastated mind of JC/DC, who recorded, produced and mixed this record from fall of 2008 to spring of 2010… The back-up vocals of certain Roy Ayers and Long John Baldry tours… Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence…
Track listing:
1. Chinatown
2. Blue Eyes
3. Savage Night at the Opera
4. Suicide Demo for Kara Walker
5. Poor in Love
6. Kaputt
7. Downtown
8. Song for America
9. Bay of Pigs (detail)
.
In other exciting news, Destroyer will release their ninth album, Kaputt, on CD, LP, and digital download on January 25.
Dan Bejar sent us some of the themes alluded to or avoided in the album Kaputt, in absolutely no linear order:
Kaputt by Malaparte, which Bejar has never read… Kara Walker, specifically the lyrics she contributed to the song "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker"… Chinatown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar's… Baby blue eyes… 80s Miles Davis… 90s Gil Evans… Last Tango in Paris… Nic Bragg, who played lead guitar on every song, again… Fretless bass… The hopelessness of the future of music… The pointlessness of writing songs for today… V-Drums… The superiority of poetry and plays… And what's to become of film?… The Cocaine Addict… American Communism… Downtown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar's… The LinnDrum… Avalon and, more specifically, Boys and Girls… The devastated mind of JC/DC, who recorded, produced and mixed this record from fall of 2008 to spring of 2010… The back-up vocals of certain Roy Ayers and Long John Baldry tours… Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence…
Track listing:
1. Chinatown
2. Blue Eyes
3. Savage Night at the Opera
4. Suicide Demo for Kara Walker
5. Poor in Love
6. Kaputt
7. Downtown
8. Song for America
9. Bay of Pigs (detail)
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